The Page Count

Tag: Fiction

  • 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

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • The Bloody Chamber

    Angela Carter, 1979 

    Vintage, 2006, 149 pages 

    Read 2011, re-read February–March 2026 

    Fiction, short stories, feminist literature, literary fiction 

    *Spoilers*

    I was going to introduce this collection of ten short stories as feminist rewritings of fairy tales. However, Helen Simpson’s introduction instantly states ‘The Bloody Chamber is often – wrongly – described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist.’ 

    Fine, I thought. Suit yourself. I won’t.  

    (Whispers) But actually, I will. Just a little bit.

    In The Bloody Chamber, fairy tales generally of the more macabre variety become the points of departure in Angela Carter’s process of writing new ones. In the eponymous first tale, a young French woman gets married to a murderous member of the nobility, only to be rescued by her mother. In The Tiger’s Bride, the protagonist is gambled away by her father to a man disguised as a big cat, in the end becoming a tiger herself. Puss-in-Boots is the story of a rake and his feline companion, who are only ever rewarded for their ways. The Erl-King is a sylvian story of possession and revenge. The Company of Wolves is a young girl taking on a wolf in a universe akin to The Northman, in which ‘Children do not stay young for long in this savage country.’ Wolf-Alice combines a vampire with a protagonist reared by wolves. Simpson is partially right in that these tales are evolutions rather than adaptations, but you can see the overlaps, as brief as they are. 

    Despite an almost-universal familiarity* with the stories that are used as launchpads (in respect to their providence, maybe they should be referred to as ‘tales’ rather than stories), it’s not always immediately apparent where these tales are going and what each element signifies. However, this sense of mystery, combined with Carter’s creativity, makes for compelling reading. This is a multilayered, densely symbolic and, despite its complexity, fun collection of short tales. Sometimes set in days of yore, sometimes rewritten into the twentieth century, most stories are from a female perspective, and that preserve of the short story, the ambiguous ending, recurs. Analysing all of them, and what I think they mean, would make this review 1) very long 2) something closer to academia (such as the Lacanian psychology in Wolf-Alice), but Carter creates the option of a close, deep read (and re-reads), or just marvelling at them in a less analytical, although not necessarily less appreciative, manner. Indeed, Carter really plumbs the content of these tales, with some of them based on the same origin story, two drawing from Beauty and the Beast and two (arguably three) from Little Red Riding Hood. 

    And if the ideas are bold, the writing matches it. Ian McEwan’s frontpage pull quote describes these as ‘Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality’.** Ian, I just so happen to agree. Check this out: 

    And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. 

    Besides beauty, Carter’s continuation of these tales retains their darkness, with brutality present within each of the worlds created. However, here, the conservative bent of the traditional fairy tale is subverted into an embracing of danger. Yes, the protagonists must be vigilant, but also bold; they possess agency and learn to take action. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes, particularly if you want to get into the subtext(s). 

    * At least in Europe. 

    **While studying this as a student, at some point I ended up just circling a single word of this front-cover quote: ‘sensuality’ (see the above photo). 

    You might like this if you enjoyed: 

    The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman 

    American Gods, Neil Gaiman 

  • The Unconsoled

    Kazuo Ishiguro, 1995 

    Read: March–April 2026 

    Edition read: Faber and Faber, 2013, 535 pages 

    Fiction, Literary fiction, Post-modernism, Surrealism 

    *Spoilers* 

    A classical piano player, only ever referred to by his surname of ‘Ryder’, arrives in an unspecified, somewhat Germanic city, to give a performance. Between arrival and said performance, errands unfold one after the other into a chain of Kafka-esque side-missions, with the kind of incongruous logic only found in dreams. Time stretches, locations move about (the copy-editor must have had their own nightmares over this one), and otherwise repressed people bring their various crises and make unsolicited confessions to Ryder, in which they assume he is up to speed with whatever they are divulging. This assumed information – which we share Ryder’s ignorance and sometimes bemusement of – remains unexplained to both him and us as readers (for example, Ryder having his picture taken in front of The Sattler Building is hugely controversial – we just never get to know why).  

    This air of mystery is coupled with nearly every character’s excessively polite and precise and utterly verbose dialogue, which occasionally results in paragraphs several pages long. As such, the action and the plot unfold slowly. Although tense, it’s nowhere near ominous enough to be considered a thriller or horror novel (nor does it have the pay-off).   

    Rather, the novel lends itself to interpretation rather than explanation. Mine is that, in this dream-like state, the city is Ryder; maybe his self-perception, maybe his unconsciousness, and that he is trying to resolve some traumatic event – or maybe just overwhelming disappointment (one of the major themes) – with this trauma/disappointment simultaneously embodied and split into multiple characters, with each of these representing something that Ryder feels about himself. 

    A few examples: Stephan believes that his childhood inability to commit to his piano lessons caused his parents’ marriage to break down. And much as how Stephan’s parents ultimately never do watch him perform, nor do Ryder’s parents visit. Brodsky, once a conductor and now an alcoholic, is psychologically hung up on his wound (the nature of which is hinted at but never specified), with both of these issues estranging his wife. Despite a late resurgence, his conducting of the orchestra goes badly askew. Miss Collins, the said estranged wife, finally loses her patience, telling him ‘You’ll always go back to your one true love. To that wound!’ We are repeatedly told that the whole city – i.e., Ryder – and its reputation is dependent upon its ability to produce a genius musician, for which it turns to an outsider, Ryder, for help (unsuccessfully). Ryder, although clearly talented, is displaced even in his own dream/mind/sense of selfhood/sense of being, staying in a hotel (rather than at home) as he struggles to fulfil these expectations. 

    The variation upon this a couple of characters who it slowly becomes apparent are drawn from Ryder’s life and not just his mind, but his memory of which has been repressed. The most tragic of these are Sophie and Boris, to whom he appears respectively to be a husband and father figure. 

    Despite their symbolic prevalence, these characters are well-rounded and relatable. Taken together, the nature of these characters, with their combination of deep-seated unhappiness and repression, has a clear significance as symbolic elements. Despite the many unsolicited, detailed divulgences that Ryder is exposed to, nearly every character has an otherwise subdued, inhibited personality. Little in the way of obvious resolution is delivered and whatever has placed our protagonist in this position – or mental state – remains concealed. As such, The Unconsoled is a melancholic read; how we thwart the promises and expectations of our talent without even realising it, until only hindsight is left (‘Oh dear, Mr Ryder, I’m much too old to be standing at any crossroad […] If this had all happened even just seven or eight years ago […]This is hardly the time to be starting out with a whole new set of hopes and fears and dream.’) Ryder’s parents never arrive; Stephan recites his piece as support act, but the whole point, that his parents witness his talent, is thwarted; Brodsky’s conducting of the orchestra falls apart; Ryder’s performance never happens. Yes, this is a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. 

    If you enjoyed, or rather, enjoyed how sad Never Let Me Go, The Remains of The Day or Nocturnes made you, you’ll like remaining unconsoled to this one too. 

    Worth reading? Yes. Don’t be daunted by its length or its deliberate wordiness, it’s a compelling read. 

     Worth re-reading? Yes. This could even illuminate some interesting foreshadowing. 

    You might like this if you enjoyed: 

    The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien 

    A New Name: Septology VI-VII, Jon Fosse

    Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 

    The Remains of The Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

    Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro. 

  • Sword Song

    Rosemary Sutcliff, 1997 

    Red Fox Classics, 2001 

    272 pages 

    Read December 2023 

    Historical fiction, YA fiction 

    *Spoilers* 

    Bjarni, exiled from his settlement for five years for breaking an oath (and only indirectly for committing manslaughter), proceeds to make his way through the Viking world as a mercenary and sailor. What with being a solid Norse lad, this entails the expected abundance of seafaring and feuds. However, Sword Song was not entirely the picture of Viking life that I expected; Scandinavia is eschewed in favour of Viking settlements in the Celtic nations, and the non-martial aspects of Viking life, whilst not foregrounded, are given more space than I anticipated. 

    The slightly old-timey dialogue (‘Is it well with the bairn?’) and the use of placenames of yesterday (‘the Outer Isles’ for the Outer Hebrides and ‘Sutherland’ for the Highlands) lends it a feel of a time before lore, when homes were considered in a more fluid manner and certainly before the concept of a united kingdom. It is not always initially exactly clear where the story is taking place and I enjoyed this defamiliarisation, placing us in our protagonist’s calf-skin boots through five years of adventuring. 

    Its emphasis on adventure makes it a YA book (I mean, look at that front cover), although, while the violence is not gratuitous, nor is it shirked from. In Bjarni’s universe, whilst not a given, death by violent means is readily accepted. In other ways, the richness of details, especially on nature and boats, makes it a gratifying read as an adult: ‘Just where moorland fell away to machair a stream came down from the higher ground, pushing its way through a narrow glen suddenly and unexpectedly choked with trees-a-tangle, birch and rowan and willow and thorn’. This appeal to more considered tastes tempers the pace and prevents it from devolving into the monotony of just being sword fight after sword fight, which, conversely, is what I found hard work when I first bought this when I was 11 or 12 (RRP: £4.99) and sword fighting was a lot more important to me than bucolic vistas. Upon picking it up (20 years-plus later) I half-expected to DNF it again. Instead, I very much found the opposite: the break-up of the sword fighting is what helps make it a compelling read. The abundant descriptions of nature and place-setting that Sutcliff incorporates into her descriptions, without being overwrought, emphasises how these were peoples of the land and of the sea, and in a way, nation builders.  

    It feels well-researched, or at the least, convincingly researched, and both Norse and Christian mythology are touched upon, although they are not central to Bjarni’s worldview. These religions coexist, but primitive, brutal and tribalistic traditions abound in all wheres; feuds, funerals, how animals are treated, going into battle. With all of that said, the underlying zeitgeist is of an incremental shift from paganism to Christianity – the bigger picture paired with the individual experiences of Bjarni. Sutcliff also doesn’t shy away from incoporating the Vikings’ penchant for taking thralls – or slaves – and how some people did not have a chance to make their own way through the world. 

    I would have liked it if there had been a bit more introspection on Bjarni’s part: earlier on in the book ‘he was well enough content, though still there was an ache in him somewhere like the ache of an old wound when the wind is from the east’, but this is pretty much it. He seems to take five years of what seems to be regularly scheduled drama in stride, and is apparently content to wander with rarely a trace of homesickness.  

    Towards the end, he reflects upon how his people call home wherever they lay their head: 

    And suddenly, he was realising something that he had not realised before; that while he come of a people who could uproot easily, whose home was as much the sea as the land [Anghared] was of another kind […] She was flung out into a strange world that held nothing familiar, a cold place; he could feel the cold in her. 

    But there is little talk of how this strange, cold world has affected him. How has he changed by the end? I’ve not read any of Sutcliff’s other books, but as this was published post-humously (I don’t know if that included any of the writing and editing process), I suspect that this may have contributed to this slight sense of underdevelopment. 

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. 

  • The Honourable Schoolboy

    John le Carré, 1977 

    Edition read: Penguin Modern Classics, 664 pages 

    Read: August – October 2025 

    Spy fiction 

    Part II of the Karla Trilogy.  

    *Spoilers* 

    The sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the plot is set in motion by the dissemination of Bill Haydon’s act(s) of betrayal.* It’s now 1974 and George Smiley and Peter Guillam are rebuilding the secret service, here always referred to rather archly as The Circus. The reinstated intelligence analyst Connie Sachs revisits investigations that Haydon had suppressed and finds what looks to be a money-laundering operation centred in Hong Kong. 

    Jerry Westerby is called back to London from rural Italy (where he had bolted to when he found out that Haydon had possibly betrayed him to the Soviets), where he is writing a novel (‘me neither’), ostensibly on leave from his journalistic duties, in which capacity he is sent to Hong Kong to follow this lead. 

    And just this much of the plot, comprising just the set-up of the premise, is complicated enough. As with his characters, le Carré’s plotting and dialogue is sophisticated and worldly.** I will be honest and say that I couldn’t follow the plot through every single juncture; the amount of exposition is limited, people talk in jargon (or not at all), and the amount of trail covering and switching and deliberate wrongfooting by spies and their handlers is byzantine. Guillam’s perspective is the closest that there is to the reader’s, with Smiley even gently mocking him at one point for not being able to piece together just what the hell everyone is up to and what it all means. However, despite this density and length (I found it useful to keep a dramatis personae), it’s a page turner. Besides the human element (why do all of these clever, erudite people seem so wretched?), the reader has to find out the answers and to see where it’s all heading at the same pace (if not a bit behind) as the – oft highly resourceful – characters. It does wander into James Bond territory just a bit when it turns out that Westerby, besides being a journalist and spy, is an expert on racehorses.  Thankfully, Westerby – the titular honourable schoolboy – doesn’t turn out to be a winning jockey. By and large, instead of stunts, this is a world dominated by suspicion and sadness and full of fittingly distrustful and unhappy characters.   

    Worth reading? Yes. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes. Read the Smiley novels in sequence.** 

    ‘Not allowed a past in this game. Can’t have a future either.’

     

     

    *In an uncharacteristic bit of narrative leniency from le Carré, the first page provides all the exposition you need to bring you up to speed. However, I still recommend reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy beforehand. 

    **‘“The case has firmed up a little, so perhaps it would be sensible to fix a date. Give us the batting order and we’ll circulate the document in advance.” 

    “A batting order? Firmed up? Where ever do you people learn your English?”’ 

  • 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.