The Page Count

Author: gregmbrooks

  • Led Zeppelin: When Giants Walked the Earth 

    Mick Wall, 2008

    Orion, 2009, 534 pages

    Read June–July 2026 

    Non-fiction, Music, Biography 

    A more journalistic, less bombastic biography of Led Zeppelin than the recently reviewed Hammer of the Gods. There is less of the latter’s ‘Apollian versus Dionysiac’ stuff, and although Hammer of the Gods possessed detail (with Mick Wall even crediting it here), where When Giants Walked the Earth distinguishes itself is in its better structured documentation of the rise and fall of the band. 

    Rock journalist Wall gives a good sense of how the giddy heights that they attained made it seem that they were a monolith which would never come off the rails – but also that the reality was that they were four highly talented, very well-guided musicians who ended up seduced by the power that they attained. 

    Manager Peter Grant is credited as enabling guitarist and band leader Jimmy Page’s vision, and Led Zep’s consequent success, through his refusal to accept industry norms (particularly when it came to splitting money) and his ability to harness them as workhorses (four North America tours in 1969 alone, slotted between UK and European dates). It’s made clear that Led Zeppelin was a carefully managed business set up, and that this was what allowed them to become the biggest band in the world – as well as their ability to combine light and dark, ‘synthesise’ (read: sometimes steal) ideas and work very quickly when they needed to (although the mixing and mastering of each album always ended up rushed). 

    Wall also makes it clear that this was aided and abetted, of course, by the singular luck of all great bands: the right musicians finding each other. This is complemented by fictional first-person interludes from the perspectives of the band members and Grant. Jumping from a narrative about the biggest band in the world to these assumed first-person perspectives, delving into the minds of five singular people, made for interesting counterpoints. Page, in particular, retained a great deal of control over their music (it was also interesting to read how there was always some distance between Page and vocalist Robert Plant).  

    Where these first-person interludes fall short is that even as their story progresses and Messrs. Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones develop from jobbing musicians to the biggest band in the world, they continue to take place in their pre- or initial Led Zep days. By the time it reaches the 1979 writing sessions for In Through the Out Door, it feels odd to jump back to moments like John Paul Jones’ perspective of his first meeting and practice with John Bonham in 1968. 

    Wall also arguably spends a bit too much time on Page’s Satanism, with a whole chapter (29 pages) on black magic(k) and Alastair Crowley, even entertaining the idea that Kenneth Anger placed a curse on Jimmy Page in 1976. 

    However, as stated, Wall maps out the rise and fall of the band clearly, and that the second half of their career went from disaster to disaster. They reached their pinnacle circa 1974: 

    If the first four years in the life of Led Zeppelin had been about empire-building, the next four – from 1972 to ‘75 – would find them overseeing their kingdom with all the splendid pomp and inherent arrogance of Pharaohs.

    He goes into the drugs problems that plagued the band towards the end – in particular, how Page’s heroin addiction caught up with his playing, Bonham’s behaviour made him dangerous to be around (‘La Bête Noire’), how their 1979 Knebworth shows, set up as their big UK comeback, were a disaster, with manager Peter Grant devolving from a sharp-elbowed, astute businessman into a paranoid bully. Wall also contends that the second of these two shows – which undersold to the point of financial disaster – signalled that rock music had moved on while Led Zep had been recuperating from various issues during the latter half of the 1970s. He even goes to the extent of arguing that the band was figuratively dying for a long time before Bonham literally did. Wall also makes it clearer than Davis that the band had their off nights, and has very little time for In Through the Out Door  in particular.

    He spends a fair bit of time on the 2007 reunion (verdict: good but safe) and why it didn’t last past that one show: post-1980, Led Zeppelin very much remained Page’s baby, with Plant having moved on into a solid solo career and Jonesy having become a friar. 

    In comparison to Hammer of the Gods, Wall is better at holding the band to account: he rightly goes into the ugly details of the Grant, Bonham, Bindon and Cole assault on a security guard, is critical of Led Zeppelin’s failure to credit the original songwriters (I particularly enjoyed the interview with Bert Jansch) and how the band let Bonham get away with his Jekyll and Hyde act (additional acts of assault and attempted rape) because it didn’t affect his drumming and allowed him to bear the commitments of touring and living away from his family. Whilst fittingly critical of Bonham’s errant behaviour, I would have appreciated Wall taking a more strident approach to Page’s relationship with a fourteen-year old. 

    Worth reading? Yes.

    Worth re-reading? Yes – a good story told well. 

    If you are interested, you might like…

    Hammer of the Gods –  Stephen Davis

    Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin

  • Last Rites

    Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres, 2025 

    Sphere, 2025, 351 pages 

    Read July – August 2026 

    Non-fiction, Autobiography, Music 

    Black Sabbath’s (first) vocalist; the animal-chomping rock star; the ageing media personality: Ozzy Osbourne had several looks over the years.1 

    Last Rites is the ageing media personality looking back on his animal-chomping rock-star days, and bits of being a forming member of Sabbath, while dealing with a litany of concurrent health issues. The book hinges upon these maladies and moves back and forth from there. The tone is conversational and it certainly sounds like Ozzy.2 Besides the erraticism of the shifting chronology, it also jumps from subject matter to subject matter (often concluding with ‘Anyway, [proceeds to get back to the original point]), rather than forming a chronological account of his life. Initially this feels a bit haphazard and clunky (as does his phonetic spelling-out of riffs), especially if you aren’t familiar with Ozzy’s mannerisms. However, he was nothing if not entertaining, and this comes across in the writing style (on surviving consecutive surgeries and health scares: ‘I celebrated by getting pneumonia again’). Not only does this carry the non-sequiturs, but given Ozzy’s characterful manner, with time it even comes to feel fitting.3

    With that said, Last Rites is at its most interesting when covering Black Sabbath’s music, Ozzy’s upbringing and his post-Sabbath musical career. Fair enough, drink, drugs and the attendant mishaps are part of the Ozzy story, and he recounts them in an entertaining manner, but these are common to many a rockstar’s autobiography/biography, so these sections are OK, but nothing you won’t have read elsewhere about flights of self-destruction (‘Lemmy was the one guy I just could not keep up with’). 

    Although geriatric complaints don’t sound like particularly compelling reading, the health issues – Parkinsons, staph infections, a backbone seemingly consisting of apple crumble (there’s a lot of back surgery) – form an interesting counterpart to a lifetime of hard living – as well as a look into the more mundane, poignant reality of just getting old. The No More Tours II, er, tour, endlessly delayed because of these issues, becomes Ozzy’s white whale, and in his pursuit of this, what really comes across is his love of performing and singing. For all of the above set-up of Ozzy as a larger-than-life personality first and a musician second, he really comes alive when talking about music and his love of performing, as well as his love of the fans.4

    It is called Last Rites, and it does cover his last gig, only 17 days before his death. This must have left co-writer Chris Ayres with a careful decision to make – acknowledge this, or write as though he’s still alive and cursing away? In the end, the only acknowledgement, besides the title, is on the dust jacket. Otherwise, the tone (and that it’s told in the first person) means that, should you not know of Ozzy, you wouldn’t know that this is posthumous. While he often talks of having well and truly used up his nine lives and how he could head off to the great gig in the sky tomorrow, he also talks about all of the things he still wanted to do and the people he wanted to see. This makes for several poignant moments as the end approaches.

    I would have liked more on his time in Black Sabbath, album by album. He does remark upon Sabbath wanting to be heavier than anything that had come before, Geezer Butler’s lyrics, the influence of jazz on Bill’s Ward’s drumming, and the songwriting process, or lack thereof. He admits that Tony Iommi was the unofficial leader and does touch upon the sound of Black Sabbath and what they set out to create. There is some mention of Sabbath’s fractious nature, and how Bill Ward was left behind in the making of their reunion album 13, but again, I would have liked more detail on this – was it always the case; did it develop with time; did the mountains of cocaine have anything to do with it? Likewise, I would have liked more on songwriting post-Black Sabbath; he worked with an array of great guitarists, but the songwriting process isn’t covered in any detail.5

    However, the discursive nature of the writing does allow for many a digression into unrelated subjects – driving in the UK versus the US, modern dating, social media, how Birmingham has changed, modern recording techniques, addiction, the legalisation of weed, guns, the Blitz, the Concorde, Guinness (‘I dream about Guinness almost every night. I fucking love the stuff, it’s like drinking a glass of pudding.’) Normally this wouldn’t be that interesting, but as stated, Ozzy’s voice is inimitable and entertaining (on eating up to 12 apples a day: ‘It’s a wonder I didn’t wake up one day with an apple tree sprouting out of my arse’.)

     

    That first note of ‘Iron Man’ gets me every time, man. You feel it in your bowels. Your teeth. Our bones. It’s like the gates of hell grinding open. Like the groan of Heinkel bombers as they dipped below the clouds to try to take out the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory, night after night. Like the thunder of the heavy machinery out fathers used to operate. And their fathers before them.

    Worth reading? If you are already interested in Ozzy, yes. 

    Worth re-reading? No. I think this time would be better spent reading a Black Sabbath biography or a more comprehensive Ozzy biography.

    If you are interested, also read listen to: 

    Black Sabbath – hear heavy metal being created. 

    Paranoid – their best album.  

    The Blizzard of Oz – Ozzy’s first solo album. It has a very different, more modern sound than Sabbath, arguably closer to rock than metal, aided and abetted by Randy Rhoads’ shredding. 

     

    1. Shortly after Lemmy died, I observed on my music blog that ‘Motörhead + past tense = strange’. Same here.

    2. I normally refer to authors and their characters by surname only upon subsequent mentions, but Ozzy has earned his demonym and will be referred to as such.

    3. A personal favourite is Ozzy recording a promo for the Radio 1 Rock Show, in which he mispronounces his own name as ‘Blozzy Osbourne’. Apparently, no one thought he had a better take in him and that’s how it stayed. 

    4. Lest we forget, he also helped to invent heavy metal.

    5. There are at least two Ozzy autobiographies: I’m not sure what the difference is between this and I Am Ozzy, published in 2010. Or maybe the latter covers the subject areas I thought lacking herein. Maybe they form a series?

  • In Cold Blood

    Truman Capote, 1965

    Penguin Modern Classics, 2000, 336 pages 

    Non-fiction, Murder Mystery, Police Procedural  

    Read August 2026 

    *Spoilers* 

    The crux of In Cold Blood is that an unprovoked, violent crime is committed, investigated and judged. But this story is much more than just that; starting with the Kansan village of Holcomb, it establishes the character of the town, the townsfolk, the victims, the perpetrators, the crime and those who must look into it. Rather than just the details of the event, it details the life of the victims and the life of the murderers. 

    Highly detailed and meticulous, this book is in part journalistic and in part a police procedural. Besides its deliberately broad scope, which made me think of journalistic long reads like Into the Wild and The Fight, a point of interest is the combination of non-fictional content with a narrative form closer to fiction, such as including dialogue between the perpetrators to which no one else would have been present. It is structured so that the details of the murder as it happened aren’t revealed to the reader before they revealed to the inhabitants of the book. 

    Truman Capote gives the personalities of the perpetrators a lot of time, fleshing them out and showing how one of them, in addition to many poor choices, was dealt a poor hand in life. The murderers aren’t accustomed killers – if anything, they are banal. 

    That said, it’s not really a murder mystery, as it is very strongly implied who did it (a ‘suspicion’ which is later confirmed). Whether Capote meant to or not, this touches upon how authorial choices can choose to privilege readers with information unbeknownst to the inhabitants of that universe. 

    Worth reading? Yes – an interesting story. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes – an interesting way of telling the story. 

    If you liked this, you might like…

    The Sixteenth Round, Ruben ‘Hurricane’ Carter 

    We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver 

    Into the Wild, Jon Krakuer 

    The Fight, Norman Mailer 

  • Hammer of the Gods

    Stephen Davis, 1985 

    Pan Books, 1995, 350 pages 

    Non-fiction, Music, Biography 

    Read: 2004, re-read April–May 2026 

    It is telling that the introduction (or ‘Overture’, as author Stephen Davis would have it) of Hammer of the Gods starts with allegations of the band’s sexual exploits, then moves straight onto Satanism. Circling back to Led Zeppelin’s bread and butter – y’know, music – the problem with this strong focus on their mythos is that, again, circling back to that primary means of assessing a band – y’know, listening to their music – some of their songs but certainly not all of them support this. This sets the over-the-top tone and an understanding that this is music fandom as much as music journalist (on one Led Zep concert: ‘Gradually Zeppelin’s avowed Apollian intent reverted to a Dionysiac bawdiness’). Hammer of the Gods is at its best when it does discuss their music, mythos-driven or not. 

    Starting with the four members’ backgrounds, and how half of the band were middle-class, experienced session musicians, and the other half labouring, working-class white bluesmen, with each album Davis provides a song-by-song breakdown. These are some of the best sections of the book and his observations are astute. 

    Besides Jimmy Page as the session guitarist, it also examines him as the producer and as the businessman. Davis also spends a good deal of time on the importance of Led Zep live: the details of their hectic touring schedules; how much they improvised live, particularly on their big US tours in the early ’70s; what the live experience was like; and how their early choice to focus on the US was driven by the hostile British press (and later on, the tax breaks).

    Hammer of the Gods is also strong when referring to quantifiable achievements – ticket sales, number of shows, records sold, records charted. What could have been just a list of numbers is written in a way that shows just how big they became and how they, with the help of manager Peter Grant, upended (disrupted?) the music industry. It also provides a good sense of how the band did most of their work in the first half of their 12-year career, and were less active after 1975, with fewer tours, and a decline to match their rise, somewhat of a squander fuelled by drink and drugs. 

    A bit more insight into the band hierarchy would have been interesting. Although it makes it clear that Page was the leader, internal power struggles within the band are referred to but not properly explored. Page is the visionary; Robert Plant is the coolest; John Bonham, when away from a drum kit, has to be carefully managed; bassist John Paul Jones remains in the background as the band’s the secret weapon.* We are left none the wiser as to whether there were there ever any creative differences. 

    The narrative does sometimes read as a list of events, mostly so when they are debauched tales from tours of the US. Sure, this is part of the Led Zeppelin story, but what does it all mean?  A bigger problem is that, although he mentions them, Davis doesn’t give the band’s most problematic aspects the insight that they merit. It would have been nice, for lack of a better word, if Davis expressed stronger feelings about the predatory behaviour that Page practised towards girls. Page’s alleged Satanism is brought up and discussed plenty enough, but the coverage of his relationship (read: grooming and kidnapping) of a fourteen year-old feel cursory. 

    Additionally, when drunk, John Bonham was truly awful. In separate incidents, he attempted to sexually assault the journalist Ellen Saunder (who states that another unspecified band associate was also involved), rape an air stewardess, punched a woman in the face for no reason, and assaulted (read: tortured) a security guard. Besides tour manager Richard Cole and Grant enabling great success, they also enabled some of this unforgivable behaviour. Frequently depicting them with pirate imagery, at one point Davis describes them as ‘gangsterish’, but otherwise leaves it there. 

    Also problematic is the band’s (which translates to Page’s and Plant’s) penchant, particularly in their early days, to lift vocal lines and other melodies from other artists, particularly blues artists, freely and without credit. Having listened to a lot of these originals, they are adaptions and launching points rather than covers, but the lifting of ideas is still clear (Davis also drops the n-word out of nowhere when discussing one of Zeppelin’s bluesy intros – there’s no other signs of racism, but whatever point he was trying to make, it’s highly jarring.) 

    Some of this book is just bullshit – such as the front row of a crowd headbanging against the edge of the stage – and more broadly has been reported to be an unreliable source. As the title states, this biography is unauthorised and the band have stated that Davis spent a very limited amount of time with them. Cole, who had his own disputes with the band and Grant, is a primary source. 

    Wow. This has been a bit of a negative review. Did I enjoy reading it? Well, Led Zeppelin were my favourite band growing up, and this was essential reading for me as I got into them. Re-reading Hammer of the Gods – and in particular, Davis’s great descriptions of their music and the power therein – did encourage me to relisten, rewatch (to The Song Remains the Same and the self-titled 2003 live DVD), but also to read around (the 2018 self-titled photo book) and to reappraise them. On the merit of his music and his drumming, Bonham’s death is a sad ending – a talent enabled by success to act without compunction. 

    So yes, I enjoyed it. It’s just that it read as a piece of musical fandom, rather than a piece of journalism upon music and musicians. 

    This review is a compare and contrast with Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth: A biography of Led Zeppelin, soon to be reviewed. 

    *Yes, I play bass. 

    If you liked this, you might like…

    When Giants Walked the Earth, Mick Wall

    Led Zeppelin (photo book), Led Zeppelin

  • The Gospel Singer 

    Harry Crews, 1968 

    Penguin Books, 2022, 210 pages

    Read February 2024, re-read March 2026 

    Fiction, Southern Gothic

    *Spoilers* 

    The eponymous Gospel Singer returns to his hometown of Enigma, Georgia, where his talent quickly proves to be a poisoned chalice in the company of some deeply flawed characters – including himself. The idolatry of the townspeople (and those from further afield) creates a twisted burden of expectation, elevating the Gospel Singer to healer status, when in fact, he just found that he was good at singing and used it to escape a life of hog farming in a swamp. Christianity is nothing more than a persistent black cloud to him: ‘[…] his superstition of God opened in him like an old wound […] What had God to do with him? Who was he, The Gospel Singer, anyway, for God to be concerned with?’ His followers project their hopes onto him, hoping that he can cure them of their various maladies, with the ‘Dark Man’ embodying the desires of the crowds for the Gospel Singer to be their panacea: 

    For the Gospel Singer, [the man] became, in that moment, the symbol not only of the rest of the audience but of every person who had ever heard him sing. The man was asking, as plainly as if he had shouted it at the top of his lungs, for an impossible benediction, for an intercession between the world and the flesh that the Gospel Singer could not make.

    The only people who don’t want something from him are his mother (except for him to stop touring and come home) and Foot, the leader of a touring freakshow – who does, nonetheless, correctly identify him as a business opportunity, following the Gospel Singer’s act around the country with his own. Likewise, his manager, Didymus (a Biblical name meaning ‘twin’ and another name for Thomas the Apostle) has a twisted utilitarian vision, in which if an act of evil leads to an act of countering good, evil is therefore goodness. Faith, business and entertainment are presented as flipsides to each other here, the Evangelical businessman Woody Pea as nakedly representing this intertwining of religion and entertainment and money as anything or anyone else. Even when the Gospel Singer, who remains unnamed throughout, even by his friends and family, does do what he can to help – giving his family money to build a new house and buying them a new car – this is met with inconsideration, his family letting pigs live in the house and leaving the new car broken.

    Compounding the Gospel Singer very much not being a healer is him very much being a sex addict (‘Lust rose in him like a live thing, and it swept everything before it: altars, lynchings, churches and revivals’), which develops into a love/hate relationship with his hometown sweetheart, MaryBell Carter. Enigma collectively assumes that they are a couple, but they have a loveless relationship driven only by physical lust – a basis which the Gospel Singer established and which she weaponised when he refused to commit to her. As such, neither the Gospel Singer nor MaryBell Carter are what Enigma thinks they are.

    As with Crews’s A Feast of Snakes, mindless crowds are a recurring feature (‘The street was a jammed mass of faces turned up like masks with black open mouths sucking and expelling a collective breath’) and when he finally tells them the truth, a congregation, awash in one of the Bible’s most famous acts of destruction, a flood, turns into a lynch mob. Willalee Bookatee, the murderer with whom the story beings, kills MaryBell for the same reason – because she tells him that the basis of his faith is corrupted. Despite the town’s professed hatred for Bookatee, there’s not much difference between them in the end, both senselessly killing someone they love as they reveal their true nature.  

    As much as he is exploited, the Gospel Singer is complicit in that he, in turn, exploits people – specifically, young women – to feed his addiction. While it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him as the story progresses and the depth of this particular flaw become apparent, what also becomes clear is that he is never seen as a person in his own right, as the lack of a name would suggest. It is no coincidence on Crews’s part that the most well-adjusted person in the whole book is the leader of the freakshow, Foot (in contrast to Enigma, the ‘freak fair’ is neat and orderly), who tells the Gospel Singer that he is not as attractive in the flesh, a comment that the Gospel Singer actually seems to appreciate.

    The plot’s simplicity emphasises its quick pace and character-driven nature. Crew’s first novel is often referred to as ‘Grit Lit’ or ‘Southern Grotesque’, but for my money, it’s just a Southern Gothic and a satire on evangelism, and a macabre, darkly humorous, excellent one at that. Despite the wonderfully freakish characters (the preacher who butchers a woman with an ice pick, a sheriff with one lung, a brother who has an aversion to the heat à la Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, his two other siblings’ awful musical act, Woody Pea the Evangelical businessman – not to forget the sex-addicted gospel singer), Crews has an ability to make them human.

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes.

    ‘“There’s work and there’s work,” said Didymus. “My work is souls.” 

    “Mine’s pigs,” said his father.’ 

    If you liked this, you might like:

    The Gospel Singer, Harry Crews

    The Long Home, William Gay

    Provinces of Night, William Gay

    Child of God, Cormac McCarthy

  • It Can’t Happen Here

    Sinclair Lewis, 1935 

    Edition read: Penguin Classics, 2017, 376 pages 

    Read April–May 2026

    Fiction: Literary fiction, dystopian fiction 

    *Spoilers* 

    The rise and rule of a populist leader in 1930s America. As a candidate, Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip promises everything to everyone (‘he was all against the banks but all for the bankers’). Upon victory, he tacks hard to starboard, establishes a vice-like grip on the country and proceeds to deliver for cronies new and old while immiserating everyone else. Contemporaneously written with the rise of dictatorships in Europe, this initially very much comes across as a cautionary tale for American readers. However, despite the folksy setting (Vermont) and language, this is a universal warning: it can’t happen here (page 142) – until it does (page 241). 

    Starting at a small-town Rotary Club, the self-appointed local movers and shakers are risible – the portentous language, the names (‘Roscoe Conkling Crowley’ was a favourite), the self-important attitudes – but the things that they call for, and the cognitive dissonance that they couch them in, foreshadows the nature of the forthcoming regime. 

    Given that dictatorships of this exact nature were a new phenomenon* when this was written, Lewis depicts a lot of their defining elements accurately: the importance of propaganda (chapters are prefaced by passages from Windrip’s polemic novel, Zero Hour), the removal of checks and balances, the morphing of economic redistribution into a corporatism (the grassroots ‘League of Forgotten Man’ movement is forcibly disbanded once Buzz is in power), the persecution of intellectuals, the state assuming complete control of education, the onset of (eventually open) corruption, the intertwining of fascism with Christianity (until the former no longer needs the latter), demagogues’ use of militias, economic mismanagement, the weaponisation of courts, the censoring of news, purges, the formation of labour and concentration camps: it’s all here.  

    Initially, the basic premise is liberalism versus fascism. Our protagonist is the avowedly liberal everyman, Doremus Jessup, who sees Buzz for what he is. Fascism is the means of the antagonist here, but socialism (here represented by John Pollikop) and communism (by Karl Pascal) also receive regular criticism and mocking from the narrative perspective.  

    Given that it is liberalism that precedes the tyranny, this initial smugness comes to be seen as misplaced. However, as much as the communists are not represented as the antidote to Windrip’s fascist government, as the story progresses, liberalism is also becomes subject to criticism; Lewis deftly shows what happens when people think they can stay below the storm. However, there is valid criticism of left-wing infighting and its inability to form a united form. As much as this story ends with a message of hope and resilience, this seam of cynicism remains. 

    Both despite and because of its complexity, the writing style is enjoyable. Sometimes it’s old-timey to the point of amusement: 

     

    ‘“Say, boss, you don’t honest t’God think we’re going to set this up, do you?’ 

    ‘I certainly do!’ 

    ‘Well, I don’t! Rattlesnake poison! It’s alright your getting thrown in the hoosegow and probably shot at dawn, if you like that kind of sport, but we’ve held a meeting of this chapel, and we all say, damned if we’ll risk our necks too!’”

    The tone is decorous even as events increasingly take a turn towards the uncivilised, creating a dissonance which works on a symbolic level: Buzz speaks in one way, but acts in another. The sentences and paragraphs are oft long and complex, the clauses (and subclauses) are many, and it presupposes an understanding of American archetypes circa 1930, a cultural shorthand that inevitably doesn’t always carry through to 90 years later. As such, it sometimes reads as though written by Mr Burns.  

    However, what does successfully transmit is the warning against the exceptionalist belief that it – i.e., fascism – couldn’t happen in America – and in a continuation of this logic, anywhere else. It was interesting that our antagonist, Buzz, is built up and made bigger than life, despite (or perhaps because of) never making an in-person appearance (except for at a distance, at a stadium rally). Arguably, Lewis misses a trick by having Buzz eventually removed from power (as is also the case with his successor, Lee Sarason, the Steve Bannon of his cabinet).** This felt like a missed opportunity to examine the cult of personality which underwrites so many dictatorships, without really either leaning the other way to examine the concept of ideas outlasting their founder.  

    It’s not subtle, and arguably, the steps towards dictatorship happen a little too soon: as soon as he is elected into power, Buzz bears fruit on his threats of fascism and fully dismantles democracy. Furthermore, for a book that presents liberalism as perhaps the best thing that we have, women and ethnic minorities don’t get much of a look in (although the persecution of Jews does). Despite its work as a vehicle for ideas being perhaps a bit heavy when compared to the human element, it remains a compelling story, partially because of how prophetic it has proven to be. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes and yes. 

    ‘“More and more, as I think about history,” [Doremus] pondered, ‘I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”’ 

    * Were there any precursors to the dictatorships seen in Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain that were similar in nature? Sparta, perhaps? (I think Imperial Japan had been going for a while?) 

    ** Sales of It Can’t Happen Here spiked in the months following November 2016. 

  • The Walking Dead

    Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, published 2003–19 

    Image Comics, 2003–19, 32 volumes at around 156 pages each 

    Read from 2013 to June 2026 

    Fiction: graphic-novel series, horror, thriller

    *Spoilers* 

    Much like the zombies that populate this apocalyptic franchise, we’ve shuffled a long way, and now after 13 years of reading and surviving, the end is nigh. As such, all 32 volumes are here reviewed together. 

    Starting with our protagonist – Sheriff Rick Grimes – waking from a coma in an abandoned hospital to a freshly arrived apocalypse, zombies are the primary antagonist, but other humans quickly take over as the main threat with the collapse of civilisation.* This is zombies as a backdrop to a social experiment. Initially, this keeps the premise interesting as multiple attempts to restart civilisation, which generally consists of our heroes trying to evolve from hunter-gatherers into a stationary society which has specialised classes, fall afoul of other people’s designs. Sometimes these antagonists are sinister; sometimes they’re just competing to survive. With the upending of the status quo comes a perpetual unease and danger. No explanation is given as to the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of this apocalypse – the dead now come back to life and the toothpaste won’t be going back into the tube as we are plunged into this new world alongside Rick and his family.  

    The main themes are leadership, power, justice, trust, betrayal, whether the enemy of my enemy is my friend and divided we fall. The old system versus new ones is a recurring theme; besides their own group dynamics and struggles (Rick is the reluctant leader), the other groups they encounter all have different social systems and they struggle with the quandary whether to push for change or to accept something good but flawed for what it is, with its undemocratic imperfections.

    The biggest symbolic advantage of the zombie as a trope is sometimes used effectively, sometimes not so much. Zombies as a mirror of humans is really stressed early on, then they just become more of a background nuisance.** They end up forming herds, and the symbolism of this could have been exploited more so. 

    Besides the corruption of youth and innocence (via Rick’s son, Carl), as Rick (our everyman) battles the world, heroes stray into villainous territory and it becomes a cautionary tale of he who fights with monsters might take care. With that said, some of the characters – both our heroes and our antagonists – are flat, such as the Governor, who is depicted at a consistent level of wickedness. Such personalities would arguably flourish in an apocalyptic scenario, but a little more justification for some of the behaviour would have been appreciated. On this point, although it is packed in towards the end, Negan has a more interesting arc, developing from villain to enemy-of-my-enemy to distrusted ally, acting as a foil to Rick along the way. (The quality of his dialogue, defined by his constant imprecations, never improves, however.***) We are invited to consider what makes Rick different to Negan, but for too much of the story he remains too much of a shark for this point to really land.  The diversity of the characters is also interesting.

    As per the above comment about the symbolism, there’s also not too much in the way of subtext, and some of the dialogue can veer from a bit clunky to downright awful (two characters discussing zombies: ‘What happened to these people is a sad thing.’) There are lots of speeches in which either a new hope is established or all hope is lost, and the matters of the day tend to be stated quite baldly – ‘WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD!’, etc. 

    Despite the zombies being a bit plodding, the danger of this world and the horrors that it produces are not to be underestimated. There is some strong stuff here – murder (including of children and babies), rape, torture, dismemberment, cannibalism and people disguising themselves by wearing the skins of the dead (arguably the symbolism is just a tiny bit heavy-handed here). Reader beware – main characters will be killed off and mutilations abound.  

    After an enthusiastic start, that it took me 13 years to finish this series is indicative. Apparently, the writing of the series was wrapped up suddenly, but it’s still definitely too long (there are numerous declarations of ‘It’s time to end this’), and it became hard to care about (and thus subsequently keep up with) the proliferating secondary characters, even as the original cast were killed off and with a late injection of intrigue surrounding Michonne. 

    With all of this said, the relief of reaching the end was mingled with sadness – there is a flashforward to the world of the next generation, in which the world has changed once again and Carl must continue to adapt. At one point, in what I can only describe as a very Lynyrd Skynyrd gesture, a flock of birds flies overheard, signifying the rebirth of a nation. An interesting point is when a character disputes the legacy of Rick, but nothing is made further of this ‘founding-father’ revisionism. There is a weird bit where Michonne, now a judge, makes a speech in which she reads out the blurb of the book (which is the same for every issue). Besides suddenly going a bit meta, the blurb is actually quite misleading, positing a ‘now we are surrounded by death, we must learn to truly live’ premise, which is not the tone of the series (the only characters who seem pleased that the world has reverted to a Darwinist state are clearly those we are not invited to empathise with). What does work a bit better is the end, in which Carl’s bedtime story to his daughter, becomes an epilogue: ‘But this is not a scary story. This is a story about hope.’ 

    In terms of the drawing style, this changes between volumes 1 and 2 and then 12 and 13, simplifying slightly.  It’s in black and white, and I also wondered, given the abundant scenes of gore and rot, colour would have been better (although colourised editions have been produced since I started reading). It’s certainly not minimalist in any other way. 

    Worth reading? …up to around issue 21. I advise reading the compendiums rather than the individual issues.****  

    Worth re-reading? After issue 21, no; the storylines start to recycle.  

    You might like this if you enjoyed:    

    Watership Down by Richard Adams 

    Lord of the Flies by William Golding 

    The Road by Cormac McCarthy 

    *Not to be confused with Cillian Murphy’s misadventures 

    **They are of the old-school, George Romero mould – slow, grumbly, hostile in quite a sullen way. 

    ***Much like in The Midnight Gospel, in a whimsical moment he considers whether maybe zombies are living their best lives.   

    ****Also available at your local bookstore. 

  • In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way – A Graphic Novel 

    Marcel Proust, adapted by Stéphane Heuet, 2013, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 2015  

    Gallic Books, 2016, 224 pages 

    Re-read: December 2025 – May 2026 

    Fiction: graphic novel, modernism

    *Spoilers*

    The original is a canonical piece of modernist literature, a masterpiece focusing on the themes of memory and experience, an idiosyncratic tour de force. The plot, revolving around fin de siècle upper-class French society, complex enough in its own right before the ornate writing style is even taken into consideration, is only as important as the lengthy discursions into experience and memory. The sentences are long, the descriptions are rich and the digressions often. It’s also very long. In fact, it’s the longest book ever; In Search of Lost Time consists of 1.3 million words (novels are typically 70–100,000 words). Compounding this, as mentioned, like much modernist literature (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, etc.), it’s an intricate, dense read. So I’ve not actually read it.*  

    Can I review an adaptation with knowing the original? Partially and partially only. Obviously, I can merely review this adaptation on its own merits rather than against those of the original or on those of it as a success as an adaptation. However, I do think that reading this graphic-novel adaptation is a pragmatic alternative, and having opted for this choice, I am a younger (or just less old?) reader for it. It’s also worth noting that Swann’s Way is actually just part one of the original seven.** As such, even without having read it, I know that this is must have been a challenging book to adapt. 

    Although it starts off with the surreal vision of a pair of giant eyes drifting across the nighttime waking vision of Proust the narrator, Stéphane Heuet quickly curtails this in favour of a generally more true-to-life, subdued approach. It is drawn in ‘Ligne claire’, which translates to clean lines and little hatching. Think of as a slightly softer, more pastel-ly version of TinTin. 

    In contrast to this psychedelic opening, the drawing style doesn’t draw attention to itself, but this suits the text. Rather than pushing at the boundaries of consciousness, such as Charles Burns’ Black Hole and Last Look, it’s about memory. 

    Despite Proust starting this story as the narrator, a precociously observant young boy (and later on, a precociously observant middle-aged man), this is a framing device for the story of Charles Swann, a rakehell, albeit quite a mild one. I initially found the section about the narrator more interesting than the sections focusing on Swann, the former being more sensory and the latter being more about people (and in particular, some very self-absorbed people), but Swann becomes more interesting when he becomes more melancholic as he comes to understand the role of sensations and memories – fleeting in nature – in determining his perception of love. I don’t know if Proust intended this to be a satire, but after a while, the fripperies of upper-class life come to be a bit tedious. Regardless, Proust is astute at showing rampant pettiness. 

    As with how the famous*** dipping of the madeleine into tea triggers the story, a passage of music takes Swann back to his lost love and the small details of their courtship, with  Proust connecting memory to epiphany. Besides memory, this also touches upon the theme of pain begetting art, with Vinteuil, the composer of that particular piece of music, drawing from his suffering. 

    Even in graphic-novel form, it’s still text-heavy: it is still a read that demands attention, with short sections of the novel text lifted directly into captions and speech bubbles. No doubt this is an easier read than the original, but there is a lot of dialogue and it is easy to miss details. Proust focused on complex themes and ideas and, as such, every word and panel matters. 

    It’s also a melancholic read. The themes of memory and experience most often translate into disappointment, regret and a disassociated sense of having ossified via living through memories. Swann realises that he has wasted years of his life, too late, and the narrator realises that there is no recreating the feelings conjured by memories. Proust expresses an understanding of how there is often a tension between how we remember things – most poignantly, our zeniths – and how that moment actually was, and how we felt at that time, rather than how we came to feel about it. 

    Initially, I was going to contrast this against Blood Meridian, which I started re-reading around the same time. In Search of Lost Time felt petty when compared to the latter and its strong focus on human nature and death. Upon further reflection, this contrast should instead be a comparison: this is also about life and death, but from a non-violent perspective (body count: one).**** In Search of Lost Time is too complex to be reduced, but my main takeaway is that it is about what we do with our lives, with an understanding that time only ever moves forward, creating an ever-moving canvas upon which create memories both good and bad, and that one day we will die. It’s not a wild ride, but it is true to the life that most people will live. 

    Worth reading? I would read this before attempting the original. 

    Worth re-reading? Given its complexity, with time, yes. 

    If you liked this, you might like: 

    Kingdom, Jon McNaught 

    The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro 

    The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. 

    *For a while I tried to read a page a day at breakfast (tea, but no madeleines). 

    **Normally, I review serialised graphic novels altogether (The Walking Dead coming soon), but as far as I can tell, only parts one and two (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) have been adapted into graphic novels. 

    ***More so in some circles than others, I suppose.

    ****An old lady who dies of natural causes. 

  • The Secret Commonwealth 

    Philip Pullman 

    David Fickling Books, 2019, 687 pages 

    Read January 2020, re-read December 2025–May 2026 

    Fiction, adventure, steampunk 

    *Spoilers* 

    A return to the universe of His Dark Materials. Whereas La Belle Savage was a prequel to His Dark Materials, this – part two of The Book of Dust trilogy – is a sequel, continuing around ten years after the heartbreak of The Amber Spyglass. 

    Lyra is now a young adult, studying (and sinking pints) in her hometown of Oxford. The shadow of her past is not yet fully diminished, with her lost love, Roger, referred to a few times, and her and Pan now able to separate (in this universe, a huge taboo). Maybe as a way of coping with this, she’s really into the newly in-vogue philosophy of hyper-rationalism, which Pan – her manifested, pine marten-shaped soul – is understandably not too pleased about. This is against a backdrop of the Magisterium, an international religious institute, expanding and consolidating its powers. 

    From the inciting incident of Pan witnessing a murder, we have the elements of a mystery and the ingredients for a quest. There are two main driving factors, combining the global and the personal; Malcolm Polstead trying to find out why ‘men from the mountain’ are destroying vital rose fields in Central Asia; and the separation of Lyra and Pan, and Lyra’s subsequent hunt for Pan. The former is interesting, the latter is vital. Our Hero’s Path has been established. 

    The addition of new characters builds upon the existing universe, with established characters, beside Malcolm, returning, such as the gyptians and Hannah Relf.* There are a couple of difference perspectives – Lyra, Pan, Malcolm, Marcel Delamare (Lyra’s mental religious uncle), Olivier Bonneville (a fellow alethiometer** reader) – but it is Lyra who remains our (flawed) heroine. 

    However, in contrast to the preceding trilogy, this is not a story about or for children. Pantalaimon’s decision to separate from Lyra, partially due her being an insufferable student type, leaves her simultaneously untouchable and highly vulnerable. She finds herself having to travel through a world where she is constantly at risk, and is sexually assaulted and nearly raped at one point. Despite these adult concepts, the writing style reads as though for children at points, and this could be quite jarring; it sometimes moves from a very simple sentence to something very adult. 

    Whilst still critical of organised (and corrupt) religion, Pullman also rejects binary assessments. After the ‘God is dead’ schtick of His Dark Materials,*** he seems to be saying a) it’s OK to be supernatural (this is where the ‘secret commonwealth’ comes in) b) don’t be a hyper-rational dick who is so in thrall to sophists that even your manifested soul doesn’t want to hang out with you. 

    It’s long, and although it does have touches of the epic about it, it doesn’t quite justify its length. The plot is complex, with a lot of characters moving about geographically, and at times this made it feel like the transition piece in a series. While the finalé of the trilogy, The Rose Field, will determine whether this pays off, judged on its own merits, not everything in The Secret Commonwealth worked well, such as the sequence with the alchemist Agrippa, which felt a bit like a connecting device. Malcolm’s hitherto unmentioned feelings for Lyra seem unfounded, and the religious villains, while possessing a clear motivation (it’s power. It’s always power) are a bit flat, with Olivier reading as a bit of a plot device. It would have been tighter if a few perspectives or characters were dropped: what if Pan’s whereabouts were left a mystery, and Olivier’s perspective was not direct but instead reported by Malcolm where it added something?  

    Worth reading? Yes. Keep a character map. 

    Worth re-reading? No, unless you need to as a reminder.  

    You might like this if you enjoyed:  

    His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman 

    Duncton Wood, William Horwood 

    American Gods, Neil Gaiman 

    Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman 

    Kraken, China Miéville 

     

    *Unfortunately, the panserbjørne, the armoured, brawling polar bears, do not return to stare into souls and kick ass. 

    **Alethiometer: looks like a compass, acts like tarot cards. 

    *** In The Amber Spyglass, there is a scene where Lyra and Will do actually see God die. He seemed OK with it, all things considered. 

  • Hard Rain Falling

    Don Carpenter, 1966 

    Penguin Modern Classics, 346 pages 

    Read April 2026, re-read May 2026

    Fiction, Noir, Crime 

    *Spoilers* 

    I picked this up because of the Bob Dylan song and assumed, both being products of the 1960s, one must have been named after the other. However, whereas Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall feels broadly prophetic, in Don Carpenter’s first novel, Hard Rain Falling, the hard rain in question isn’t prophetic – it is already happening, and the hard rain is life itself. 

    The lives of two men – one white, one black – become intertwined in post-Second World War America.* Jack and Billy, both from poor backgrounds, one shaped by the orphanage system and the other by racism, meet both each other and various highs and lows in poolhalls and prisons. 

    Jack has no sense of a future, making choices without consideration for their consequences. Raised in the Darwinian environment of an orphanage, he fights, drinks and steals his way into his first stint in prison. Billy, in contrast, is talented and does have a sense of a future that he wants, but is also black in 1940s and 1950s America. They go on to endeavour to escape their poor origins, but only with partial success, reuniting in a prison cell. 

    There’s social commentary: Jack hates the lack of humanity applied to the marginalised; as an orphan, he learns that the struggle is against a system, not an individual; he despises those who assume authority while also understanding that he would be the same should he be in charge; and he is shrewd enough to see through the prevalent racism. When an authority figure finally does ask Jack what he wants, he is stunned into silence. And from Billy’s perspective, even at the novel’s instigation he is already so ground down that he rarely allows himself to be anything other than pragmatic, bitterly reflecting later on in the book that one day his children will have to learn what racism is and sarcastically asking another black man when racial injustice will end. 

    Nonetheless, this is less a novel of social protest than one of the human condition, framed through the perspective of the marginalised. Jack and Billy live on the edge of society, but their struggle is against themselves as well as against the system. If they had more normal childhoods – i.e., if they were born as the rich character Bronson, rather than as themselves – they would still have a lot of the same questions (as Bronson does at the end, ‘sometimes wak[ing] up at night and feel[ing] it all [slip] through his fingers.’) 

    This is where Hard Rain Falling becomes something more than poolhalls, fighting and pulling; an idiosyncratic combination of the big ideas and a streetwise sensibility emerges over the course of the book, elevating it above being just a walk on the wrong side of the tracks. With a re-read, this seemed more like a book about everything: society, isolation, money, racism, love, parenthood, a sense of purpose. It’s all in there – except for the answers. 

    Even with the inclusion of these big ideas, it is still narrative-driven and a quick read. Initially, the structure, consisting of a couple of acts, seems slightly unusual, but this book is better understood as really being Jack’s story, rather than that of Jack and Billy. Although the story is set up to represent them as joint protagonists, as the story goes on, Billy becomes a kind of deuteragonist. 

    Although Jack is never an unintelligent character, he very much starts his character arc as an insensitive soul leading a dissolute life. When we are introduced to him, all he wants are temporary things – food, drink, a woman, clothes, a fast car. Likewise, when we meet Billy, he is already street – or rather, poolhall – smart. These dubious origins develop into Jack and Billy’s search for meaning. Billy starts off the story as the more naturally philosophical soul, already full of existential dreads and fears of insignificance, whereas Jack’s story involves him becoming more feeling, more aware, in large part due to Billy. The scene on the beach marks this change, with the last third of the book consisting of Jack having enough freedom to realise his constraints and that he is still missing something. 

    Carpenter’s fantastic insights into the human condition are aided and abetted some great writing: ‘How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.’ He pulls off the unenviable task of being both expansive and insightful while making it believable that two guys from the street would think and talk this way. A weakness is that he pens better male than female characters, with the women written in a far less sympathetic manner; Sally is impatient, patronising, easily bored, inconsiderate and self-centred. Given that Jack is not supposed to be a great guy, a better-rounded character would have been more sympathetic here. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes – the depth of the novel really emerges on a second read. 

    You might like this if you enjoyed: 

    Suttree by Cormac McCarthy 

    On the Road  by Jack Kerouac 

    The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

    *It was interesting to compare these characters and settings to Jack Kerouac’s, with their very different perspectives on post-war America. Whereas Kerouac’s search generated writing (initially) full of life, Jack struggles to enjoy anything on his path to meaning.