The Page Count

Category: Fiction

  • The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

    Alan Sillitoe, 1959 

    Read: September-October 2025

    Edition read: Pan Books, 1961 (original price: two and a half shillings), 189 pages 

    Short-story collection, Realism

    *Spoilers*

    The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was recommended as an accompanying text whilst I studied Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I didn’t get around to it before graduating, or that decade, or before a young angry man phase myself,* but that wasn’t for lack of enjoyment of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; besides its snapshot of a (sometimes) angry and (quite often) rebellious character, I enjoyed its complexity and how it tested my assumptions about working-class literature. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a series of short stories by Alan Sillitoe that cover the similar grounds of disillusion within and rebellion against post-World War Two Nottingham society – which here, is urban, poor, oft violent and subject to officious authority.

    These characters – who are men, generally young, but not always angry – have enough to scrape by. Some of them have even attained a degree of economic security. But they never have enough to have become aspirational. Very much aware of their place in society, they are cynical enough to be rebellious rather than revolutionary, typified by the climatic action of the protagonist of the eponymous story. The one mention of socialism comes from a factory worker’s middle-class wife, while the factory worker himself is too tired after a day of work to engage in any talk of politics. 

    Socially alienated and with bleak prospects, there is lots of petty crime (mostly theft) – but also some more measured slices of life, such as Mr Raynor the Schoolteacher, The Fishingboat Picture and Noah’s Ark. Nothing terrible happens (at least, not in the foreground of the stories), but neither does anything wonderful. This is a lot in life which the characters, except for the more rebellious ones, accept stoically. In Noah’s Ark the naughty children sneak their way into having a free go on a fairground ride. Even at this young age, they have already figured out that deception alone will get them ahead, and even then, fleetingly, in an otherwise hardknock life. 

    Sillitoe is a deft and observational writer, capturing unusual events in unremarkable environments. Besides capturing the Nottingham accent (‘“We’ve spent all our dough,” he said, “and don’t have owt left to go on Noah’s Ark wi”’) there are some clever premises for stories – such as the lack of agency in life bleeding over into a failed suicide attempt (On Saturday Afternoon), and how the protagonist ‘disappears’ and reappears during his telling of The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale. The quizzical nature of The Fishingboat Picture means that it doesn’t initially seem to have a point of entry, whether on a literal and subtextual level.  Whilst it wasn’t my favourite, a couple of reads revealed it to be a commentary on the untidiness and complexity of relationships and how compromise sometimes gets us by. 

    The closing story, The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller (actually followed by a long poem, The Rats) is the protagonist’s childhood memory of playing soldiers with a local man of around 20 who has learning difficulties. The social dynamics of the angry young man movement are absent; this is just a scrappy childhood memory, with a poignant open-endedness to it: 

    ‘I watched him. He ignored the traffic lights, walked diagonally across the wide wet road, then ran after a bus and leapt safely on to its empty platform. 

    And I with my books have not seen him since. It was like saying goodbye to a big part of me, for ever.’ 

     

    *More cross than angry, really. Here’s to austerity – we did more with less and we were all in it together! 

  • Coming Up For Air

    George Orwell, 1939 

    Read: September 2025 

    Edition read: Penguin Classics, 2020, 276 pages 

    Inter-war Literature

    *Spoilers* 

    Flashbacks from a lower-middle class, middle-aged Englishman, on the eve of World War Two, to his childhood, World War One, his marriage, his working life, working his way up to his present day and an impulsive return to his hometown of Lower Binfield, inspired by a trip down memory lane (thankfully, Orwell kept it to 270 pages. Take note, Proust.) 

    An inter-war novel, the main themes are concurrent nostalgia and anxiety about the threat of forthcoming war. Written in the first person, what drives protagonist George Bowling is his oft-self-centred pursuit of happiness; he shows – and openly describes – his life since childhood as having been a dreary trudge. While recovering from an injury in the trenches, he is sent to a redundant, absurdist job posting for the remainder of the war. He got married and had children very much out of a sense of that was just what people do. He sees his family and house as a chore at best, taking no satisfaction in them. He dreads what he sees as another forthcoming war – primarily due to the shortages it will impose. He is overweight, middle-aged, newly equipped with false teeth, has already cheated on his wife and very much intends to continue doing so. 

    Even in what could be more considered his principled moments, such as when he attends a local Left Book Club meeting, he leaves both utterly apathetic and lamenting what he perceives to be the violence of contemporary politics, before visiting a friend who is stuck in the past (and not even his own past – in the age of antiquity). He is scathing about his wife and her penny-pinching ways. He goes on holiday with gambling wins he hides from his family. 

    This leads Bowling to become nostalgic about elements of a childhood that he knows he is misremembering: ‘I don’t idealise my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no wish to be young again […] in a manner of speaking I am sentimental about my childhood – not my own particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick.’ He has no qualms in detailing how he saw unfettered capitalism slowly kill off his father’s small businesses or how his ne’er-do-well brother suddenly disappeared. He constantly offsets his existence and his perception of society against his memories of fishing – one of those wonderful childhood memories which he knows he is misremembering (‘My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught. That’s usual enough, I suppose’). As such, fishing comes to serve as a metaphor for either the promises of life – or, in a slightly different reading, for the age in general.

    Whilst he doesn’t think particularly kindly of anyone, women get a decidedly harsh treatment. Even taking his wider observations as largely true to life, this is a reflection of Bowling’s character more so than anything else. This is at its most evident when his ex-girlfriend doesn’t recognise him and, in his ensuing critique of her appearance, fails to realise that this might have something to do with his own condition. 

    Whilst I’m not sure if it’s possible for Orwell to have any obscure books, this is one of his lesser-known ones. As such, whilst not quite a sleeper hit, it is well worth reading in addition to his heavyweights. He is remembered for the ideas he expressed in his writing, but what seems to sometimes go forgotten is how quietly impressive his actual writing is; he makes the semi-nostalgic reflections of a middle-aged insurance salesman a page turner. 

    ‘[…] in this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’d time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about […] calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.’ 

    Worth reading? Yes – big ideas expressed through deceptively good writing.

    Worth re-reading? Yes – and I suspect a second reading will reveal further riches.

  • 300

    Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, 1999 

    Read March 2023 and re-read September 2025 

    Published by Dark Horse Books, 1999

    Page count: not sure. It’s around a one-hour read. 

    Graphic novel, historical fiction 

    The blood-and-guts film adaption of this inspired every 17 year-old boy circa 2006 to actually believe that they would have held the Hot Gates. Since then, however, I’ve had the chance to mend my ways and reapproach this historic event via Tom Holland’s Persian Fire. Combined with a now fuller, not quite so heroic-mythical, less mental worldview and actually quite glad I am not a Spartan Hoplite*, let’s just say, Miller took certain liberties. 

    A Greek alliance (not Sparta alone) consisting of 7,000 troops, held the pass for most of the battle – not the titular 300 (which 300 does partially acknowledge). The 300 were the holding force left behind when the Spartan king and commander, Leonidis, realised they were about to be outflanked – well, plus the 700 Thespians who were written out of the story by Herodotus, the primary source for this period.** The Greek army was betrayed, but more likely by a shepherd who wanted his fields back from the logjammed Persian army (what’s Greek for ‘get off my lawn?’), than by a deformed pariah of Sparta, jilted at birth for being the weak link in the phalanx. 

    Now that the question of revisionism has been answered – is this a good read? Spartans, what say you?***

    Well, citizen, the format of the book was well chosen, is the first thing they would say. Sized halfway between A4 and A3 landscape, it depicts the fighting and the landscapes of Greece in large scale. There is a lot of use of darkness, with features half-drawn with the other half blacked out – bodies, faces, cloaks, shields, rocks, piles of bodies – all the things you might expect to find at the Hot Gates. It’s a singular style and it’s easy to see Miller’s Sin City and The Dark Knight Returns in here and vice versa. It also gives an idea of the confusion of hand-to-hand fighting, with some panes take a couple of seconds to visually comprehend. 

    Starting in media res, the story moves along at a good pace and is well balanced, providing context about Sparta and why it was the way it was, complimenting the swords and sandals. The perspective is entirely Spartan – the Persians are given short shrift, depicted as the conscripted, decadent, undisciplined invading force of a foppish emperor, who ultimately can only win via underhand tactics. (The limited democracy of Sparta is underplayed and its subjugated neighbours go unmentioned.) 

    Read as a piece of fiction, it’s fine. Besides playing fast and loose with the facts of the event, it somewhat idealises Sparta, although any consideration that goes deeper than ‘those guys sure did kick ass’ should make it clear that it wasn’t a particularly fun place to live. The form of the hero’s journey is told in a way that feels like a story around a campfire, which, as a story drawn from the earliest history book, is fitting.**** It’s a bit short, at around an hours’ read, but this does serve to make it quite a punchy read. THIS WAS SPARTA (KINDA)!

    Worth reading? Yes.

    Worth re-reading? Yes – but now to hold the Hot Gates! 

     

    *Obviously Sparta of antiquity predates fascism as a philosophy, but there is a big overlap in ideas and practices between the two. 

    **Miller does include the Thespians in his telling, but rather than being part of the last stand, they surrender and are then immediately cut down. 

    ***Go on. Make the noise.  

    ****The Battle of Thermopylae was later set down in history by Herodotus (one of those ancient Greeks whose street cred eschews the need for a surname) in Histories, which is widely considered to be the first history book. 

  • The 39 Steps

    John Buchan, 1915 

    Read: August 2025

    Edition read: Penguin Classics, 2004, 149 pages  

    Thriller

    *Spoilers* 

    An early thriller novel full of decent chaps and rotten blighters. Whilst reading this I found myself trying to decide on the best semi-archaic synonym for ‘thrilling’, like ‘swashbuckler’, ‘humdinger’ or ‘snortripper’ (I may have invented that one). 

    The protagonist, Richard Hannay, bored with life in London, is framed for murder. Now a man on the run and not so bored, he proves to be a resourceful fellow, getting to try on lots of new disguises at a relentless pace. With a turn of pace, competence and luck which at times verge on the improbable, he MacGyver’s his way up and down the country, even getting to blow himself up and out of a jail cell at one point.   

    Hannay is also a fantastic judge of character and doesn’t mind letting you know. The predominance of rural folk and city bigwigs does result in a fair few flat characters, but the Scottish Highlands, however, are wonderfully described (‘Behind me was the road climbing though a long cleft in the hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was a fat space of maybe a mile. All pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose blue dimness melted into the distance.’) Circling back to the decent chaps and rotten blighters, the latter – what with this being set pre-WW1 and published in 1915 – are of course ruthless Germans, conspiring to bring about war (not to forget an unsolicited rant about Jews). 

    A fun read, the ten chapters set a rapid – although somewhat uniform – pace. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? No, just as there’s not much in the way of subtext. However, the descriptions of the Highlands are great. 

  • Reverse Engineering II

    Various authors, 2022

    Read: November 2023–April 2025 (stuck in the bookshelf traffic jam for a while)

    Edition read: Scratch Books, 2022, 173 pages

    Contemporary short-story anthology

    I read this alongside John Grisham’s The Firm whilst on holiday (St Ives, thanks for asking – yes, the surf was up). Let’s say these were contrasting reads.  

    This contemporary short-story anthology is made up of seven stories, each with an author interview at the end. I read the first collection* (also consisting of seven stories) in February 2023 and found a lot to pick apart in the interviews, which enhanced a second readthrough. 

    Whilst I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as the first, I was reminded of how interesting the form of the short story can be. Often, the form is, what is this story? What is it that’s actually happening? Some of these stories are quite hard to parse and further analyse, with a lot between the lines, such as in Bad Dreams, when the mother blames her husband for a nocturnal disarray – actually created by her child – in a kind of misunderstood epiphany. 

    However, by and large these stories avoid the mistake of having more between the lines than what is actually in them (a now-ceased subscription to Granta impressed upon me that something needs to happen in your stories, not just the idea of something). They are often slice-of-life accounts (All Will Be Well), and/or bring disparate elements brought together (Path Lights and Maintenance). 

    The interviews with the authors show as much; they are all very learned and sophisticated, combining clever and interesting concepts with carefully considered, sophisticated themes. So why didn’t I enjoy this collection as much as I did the first? A story can be clever, but something still needs to grab you – this was present in the closer, To All Their Dues, but sometimes I was left scratching my head (and not in the sense of being intrigued). 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes, although the first volume was better. 

    * I particularly enjoyed Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague by Jessie Greengrass. 

     

  • Wise Blood

    Flannery O’Connor, 1952 

    Read: June 2025

    Edition read: Faber and Faber, 2008, 160 pages 

    Southern Gothic 

    *Spoilers* 

    The demobbed Hazel Motes returns to the Deep South to set up his own church, ‘The Church Without Christ’ circa late 1940s, relocating to the big (fictional) city of Taulkinham from his now-abandoned rural hometown after finding that his family has all died or moved away.   

    Set on becoming a preacher until conscripted at 18, Mote set himself on becoming an atheist – or anti-religion – preacher, seemingly out of a sense of nihilism. However, it’s not the ordeal of war, and his resulting injury, cause this crisis of faith; he’s just told that he doesn’t have a soul by a fellow GI.  

    There is a certain class of purportedly ‘classic’ novels that I am not struck by, and the common factor behind my lack of comprehension seems to be, why are these people doing these things? 

    This was my first problem with Wise Blood; the protagonist is told that he doesn’t have a soul and he switches from knowing ‘by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher’ to wanting to ‘be converted to nothing instead of to evil’. 

    It was this inscrutable nihilism which reminded me of The Outsider. I generally go in for Southern Gothics (William Gay, Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy are favourites of mine), but I was underwhelmed in a way that reminded me of Albert Camus’s The Outsider, where the weight of expectations brought too much baggage. That’s not to say Wise Blood didn’t have both good and great scenes (in particular, the ending), just that there were elements and sections which didn’t land, such as when Enoch Emery, whose role as a character seems to be a metonym for the (religious) masses, finishes his part in the story out in the woods dressed up as an ape. Given that it is he who is of the ‘wise blood’, following it to make his decisions, is this just a critique of idolatry?  

    It’s certainly misanthropic, with few characters coming out of this looking good; the blind preacher Asa Hawkes turns out to be a fraud and as soon as Motes sets up his religion, the conman Hoover Shoats duplicates it in order to make money. Emery certainly introduces an element of the grotesque – dressing as an ape, stealing a preserved corpse – as well as comedy (such as his mispronunciation of ‘museum’). 

    Another element that I couldn’t work out was Asa Hawkes’s daughter, Sabbath Lily; I think she is supposed to be predatory, but Motes never seems particularly victimised by her. What was interesting was how it ended with Motes’ landlady trying to find meaning in his – now blind – eyes, at the moment of his death, searching hard and finding nothing – or maybe just whatever she wants to find. Overall, however, if this is a parable on organised religion, I’m not sure what the lesson is. 

    Worth reading? Yes, but I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to. 

    Worth re-reading? No – with the caveat that it is hard to fully understand on a first read. A short and quick read at 160 pages, I think a second read would bring more out of it. 

  • All Along the Echo

    Danny Denton, 2022

    Read: April–June

    Edition read: Atlantic Books 2022, 309 pages.

    Modern/Experimental fiction

    *Spoilers*

    DJ Tony and Producer Lou take a road trip across Ireland running a call-in competition for the Mazda 2 they are driving. In an inversion of the Troubles, London is under a swathe of terrorist attacks and Irish expats are returning home; the Mazda is to be given to whichever recently returned emigrant wins the competition.

    All Along the Echo takes an experimental form, with pages of radio static and graffiti, and there is a plenitude of voices, both over the radio and in person as it moves between perspectives. Despite the thought-provoking premise of the transposition of The Troubles, it all feels a bit low stakes: DJ Tony’s marriage is struggling (but it seems OK in the end?); Lou feels guilty about a time she cheated on her girlfriend (but this doesn’t come to anything?) and is worried about her missing cat (who her girlfriend eventually finds in – improbably – a sewer); there is teenage angst from a vulnerably housed graffiti artist (which feels a bit more real, but just ends when she makes some friends?); and there is a completely disconnected murder scene (everyone else is a recurring character – why not the ones in this?)

    I was sold on the blurb’s declaration that ‘All Along the Echo asks us whether our lives ever add up to more than the stories we tell ourselves’. I was left unconvinced of this; whilst it is skilfully written, for the most part the character arcs were flat and ultimately it all felt a bit scattered, leaving me unsure of what it was building towards.   

    Reading this review back, it feels a bit severe – the characters come across as real and the dialogue is convincing, and I was interested in seeing how the themes of a road trip, returning home and telling stories came together. It’s just that the story doesn’t add up to what it seems like it could have been. Whilst on a meta level that seems like it could be very clever – the narrative standing in for our lives – the execution has to match the ideas.  Given the interesting form, I am interested in seeing what else Denton has written.  

    Worth reading? No.

    Worth re-reading? No, but I am interested in Denton’s other books to see if the execution matches the ideas.

  • We Need to Talk About Kevin

    Lionel Shriver, 2003 

    July 2025  

    Edition read: Serpent’s Tail, 2011, 468 pages 

    Epistolary novel 

    A bracing take on motherhood from the perspective of the mother of a mass shooter.  

    The prose is intense and clever. I had to read this in short bursts, not just because at points it was uncomfortable (Shriver has created a chilling nemesis in Kevin), but because she writes so articulately and incisively that therein lays a tension between reading about Kevin’s next atrocity (he is adept with cruelty and violence) and soaking up the details of his mother’s life and perspective (a good problem to have as a reader – I can imagine creative-writing courses loving this). 

    The novel takes an epistolary form, the protagonist Eva Katchadourian writing to her estranged husband after what she refers to as ‘Thursday’ to finally express many an uncomfortable truth. That she refers to the mass murder perpetrated by her son as ‘Thursday’ suggests she is more OK with some of these uncomfortable truths than others; enter the unreliable narrator. 

    This narrator is clearly highly intelligent and slightly superior, with the narrative perspective completely hers – neither her husband nor Kevin get a word in directly. The epistolary form is an astute choice of form, allowing for this subjectivity,  a credible intimacy and a plot twist. A more predictable choice would have been letters to the titular inmate. Here, instead, it is how a husband and wife are left to communicate after a ruinous event. 

    Kevin is an intriguing villain and the defining question of the book shapes up to be, why did he do it –  what was wrong with him? And, as secondary questions, what if the only thing that someone likes is hurting others, and (don’t forgot that bit about the unreliable narrator?) what if, whatever you do, the child you raise is not a nice person? 

    Although his character is written as being perennially pitted against his mother, the answers to these questions are ultimately left to our interpretation. This lack of a clear ‘why’ makes Kevin’s villainy that more compelling. 

    Worth reading? Yes. Bring your sick bucket. 

    Worth re-reading? If you can take it. 

  • Sea of Tranquility

    Emily St. John Mandel, 2022 

    Edition read: Picador, 2022, 255 pages

    Fiction – (lo-fi) sci-fi

    I enjoyed Mandel’s previous titles The Lola Quartet and Station Eleven and their themes of escape, isolation and reinvention, as well as the subtlety of her writing. What at first appears to be a series of vignettes develops into a single story. Initially, it is not apparent how – and why – these stories are connected, but the success of Sea of Tranquility, and what makes it stand out, lies in that it takes an element of sci-fi – a genre new to Mandel’s writing, albeit in lo-fi form here – and uses it to focus on the human desires and failings of her range of characters. Mandel’s characters routinely paint themselves into corners, and in Sea of Tranquility the sci-fi aspect brings a literal element to the past revisiting the present. These characters – who here, can travel through time and change planets – still yearn, are still uneasy, live normal lives, oft to the point of numbness, all stressed by Mandel’s understated writing style. 

    Worth reading? Yes.

    Worth re-reading? Yes.

  • The Offing

    Benjamin Myers, 2019  

    Read: September 2024 – April 2025 (stuck in the book traffic jam) 

    Edition read: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 260 pages 

    Fiction – Bildungsroman 

    The plotline of The Offing is slightly more pedestrian than Myer’s more typical ‘Northern Gothic’ novels; working-class boy (Robert) from post-WW2 English mining town meets eccentric upper-class woman (Dulcie), who has retreated from society due to long-lost love, where they experience mild culture clash and she exposes him to the better things in life. 

    Told in the first person, the story takes an analeptic form, which somewhat explains the rich vocabulary, but for a narrator introduced as painfully ancient, he has a remarkable memory for details. Read this deliberately rich vocabulary with patience and the five senses get a workout; the colours, smells, feelings, sights and sounds of nature all feature regularly and prominently and there are some great turns of phrase (‘The ashen sea roared in the distance like a football stadium witnessing an extra-time injustice’). However, the plentitude of what I came to feel were overly frequent and verbose descriptions of nature did get monotonous. 

    There are two main sections – Robert by himself, which if anything is slightly more interesting, capturing the landscape(s) of northern England as he walks across it, and then when he encounters Dulcie. There is a subplot about poetry, which seems slightly meta – is Myers talking about how Northern working-class people aren’t supposed to like poetry, but if you take them out the pits, they do? 

    If there had been something else happen, it could have had a more compelling sense of drive; unfortunately, besides the over-the-top descriptions, the stakes just feel a bit low. 

    Worth reading? No, even though I came into this wanting to like it – Myers has written some brilliant books. 

    Worth re-reading? No. Myer’s other books – The Gallows Pole and These Darkening Days – however, are well worth a read.