“Les Saules” (The Willows) by Mathilde Beaussault: a bleak tale

The setting is a rural community in Brittany during the 1980s. The body of Marie, a lovely but promiscuous seventeen-year-old is found on a riverbank under the willows of the title. When Eugène, owner of the nearby pig farm, realises that his daughter Marguerite must have been the first to come across the body, he orders her to say nothing, to avoid trouble. This is not hard for her to do, as she is remarkably quiet and withdrawn, bullied at school for seeming simple-minded, addicted to sucking the frayed cuffs of her jumpers. In fact, she is probably just neglected by her parents, working long hours to scrape a living from their stony piece of land.

The work of a prize-winning novelist born of Breton farmers, it must have been inspired by her past personal experience, although hopefully her neighbours and acquaintances were not so generally unlikeable. It proves more of a psychological drama than a crime thriller, as the short chapters gradually reveal the character and behaviour of an inward-looking, socially divided community. So we have a majority of gossipy, hard up locals who, while shocked by the murder, feel that Marie “had it coming”, while sympathy for her parents is tempered by resentment of their wealth, largely inherited by the mother from the past profits of quarryng, and of the father’s ill-founded air of superiority. Despite the fact that his pharmacy depends on local custom, he antagonises his farming neighbours by persisting in trying to enforce the environmental controls which add to their difficulties in making a living.

When local people are invited in turn to the police station for interview, the chapters consist almost entirely of their answers (printed in italics) from which we have to infer the questions. However, this begins to pall as a device to explain the characters and background situation to the reader, rather than help to identify the murderer. In fact, we are given a strong motive for Marie’s strangling in the prologue.

The hapless Marguerite is central to many chapters, since the prologue also suggests that she knows who the killer is. The constant examples of how she irritates and disgusts everyone grow rather tedious, and although she arouses our sympathy, there is the nagging thought that she may be nicer than most of the other characters since she is too stupid to be otherwise. There are a few moving moments, as when we sense brief moments of connection between Marguerite, starved of affection, and her overworked mother Chantal, herself no doubt damaged through childhood abuse. There is also the excruciating scene where the male head teacher clumsily tells Marguerite’s mother, in the girl’s presence, that her daughter must improve her hygiene and is likely to be placed in a special needs class.

As this suggests, despite flashes of wry humour, and possible beauty of the riverside willows (les saules), this is a bleak novel in which the trees overhang grim past events, and most imaginable human vices and failings get a mention. A large number of characters appear, some only briefly, but one needs to keep note of them in case they reappear later in the plot. They are all highly stereotyped to the point of caricature, portrayed in cliché-ridden incidents. Reading this with French as a second language, I was struck by the amount of slang and colloquial idioms I encountered, making it more challenging to read than a more “literary” novel.

The denouement which succeeds in being somewhat unexpected, also felt too contrived and somewhat rushed. I was left considering how the ingredients of a potentially memorable crime thriller could have been better handled. It could have been more powerful, subtle and moving if from the outset there had been a stronger development of certain characters. This would have been with a view to developing what perhaps the author wished to convey, which I have also heard expressed by others growing up in remoter French rural areas like the Vosges. This is how, in certain close-knit communities resistant to change, men may retain strong mutual bonds based on the past, even while occasionally disputing with each other; how they mistrust external institutions, and may follow their own code of justice, untroubled by any sense of guilt.

“A Flat Place” by Noreen Masud: falling a little flat…

This unusual memoir basically interweaves the contrasting descriptions of flatlands in Britain for which the author feels a particular affinity, with her memories of a troubled childhood in Lahore and its long-term effects on her.

The five areas which Noreen Masud visited are: the fens around Ely and Welney;Orford Ness in Suffolk; Morecambe Bay; the least remote Newcastle Moor and some of the Orkney islands. A chapter is devoted to each one, with descriptions which are closely observed, vivid and poetic with interesting snippets of local history and relevant literary quotations culled from her store of knowledge as an English literature graduate and university lecturer. However, the obsession with “flatness” begins to seem contrived, its value, as compared with mountains and valleys, almost ludicrously overrated, although one realises that it is being used as a means of assisting or understanding better a particular mental state.

The author’s father was a flamboyant, controlling Pakistani doctor who took his British wife to Lahore where they produced four daughters. Perhaps protesting too much, he liked to declare “My girls are my boys”, insisting they should have a good education and careers, but also confining them to the upper floor of a house with chicken wire across the windows, and often subjecting them to insensitive, even violent treatment. She describes him as a fantasist, but reports taking part in incidents which are hard to credit, such as when he used the dining room table to operate on his own father who had just suffered a heart attack, and summoned his young children to assist, with Noreen holding out a white dinner plate to catch “the cut ribbons of my grandfather’s meat”.

Two flat surfaces triggered a lasting desire to be in flat places where Masood could feel at peace and able to reflect calmly and make sense of life. One was the cool flat stone floors of the family home. The other was the empty green space of the park passed on the way to school, improbably existing “in the middle of crowded, parched, shouting Lahore”.

When, aged 16, Masud found herself “disowned” along with her mother and sisters by her irrational, maverick father, she actually benefitted from the move to Britain which provided the freedom to graduate in the English literature which she loved, and opportunities to study at Oxbridge, obtain grants for creative writing and quickly win praise and awards for her published work. This makes her outbursts on, for instance, British racism and ongoing exploitation of other nations, which began under the Empire, seem somewhat ungracious and lacking in insight. After all, many white British people also suffered in the past and continue to do so, while dominant powers the world over have always exploited weaker or less developed countries, while also providing some benefits in the process.

We are told at the end that this book began as “solely, a study of encounters with flat landscapes” and it was only through discussion with her agent that Masud came to realise that “the complex trauma.. sustained… in early life was an element which could not be omitted”. No doubt, books about neurodivergence sell well these days, but the continual references to cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) lead to excessive repetition, a tendency to woolliness and self-absorption which evaporate one’s sympathy. Her portrayal of personal awkwardness and attempts to relate “normally” to people when she really prefers objects like stones or bones, do not tally with the frequent references to “my friends” and her ability to analyse the people she observes. All this assumes, of course, that she is writing a form of autobiography rather than a fictionalised account.

To quote:
“cPTSD describes traumatic experience which extends over a length of time – there’s no single traumatic experience such as childhood neglect and prolonged captivity.”
“Imagine if you’re looking out (at) a landscape, it’s an experience where there is no single landmark, nothing to point to and say ‘that’s when things changed’.”
“I write that cPTSD is like a flat landscape in the sense that there is no single event to point to, there is nothing to look at or focus on and yet there’s something about not being able to look away either.”

This book is memorable, may encourage one to visit some of the places covered, and would provoke a good deal of not entirely uncritical discussion for a reading group.

Photos of Orford Ness and The Orkneys respectively.

“Crooked Cross” by Sally Carson: Remarkably Prescient and still a Relevant Warning

It is Christmas 1932, and the Krugers are an ordinary German family, joyfully celebrating a traditional Christmas in a small Bavarian market town near Munich beneath the “first shoulders of the Alps”. With the wisdom of hindsight, there are already ominous signs. One son, Helmy, has never succeeded in finding a job while Erich, the other, only has part-time seasonal work. A photo of Hitler, about to be appointed Chancellor, lurks on the piano.

One can still express a mixture of irritation and amusement that the church clock had been repaired to chime the Horst-Wessel-Lied Nazi anthem. Yet the mood swiftly changes, as daughter Lexa learns that her fiancé Moritz, a popular and competent young doctor, has been sacked from a clinic, ostensibly for displaying too much interest in communism by giving first aid lectures at a Munich Workers’ Guild. The real reason is that he has a Jewish name. Lexa is clearly under pressure to break her engagement, particularly since her brothers have joined the Nazi Party as a means of gaining status and employment. This is particularly painful since she has always been close to Helmy.

Published as early as 1934, this novel is remarkable in its prescience,and in being not the work of some German historian, but of an observant young English woman who happened to visit Bavaria on holidays as the Nazis gained a foothold. She was able to fictionalise real situations and comments experienced firsthand to explain how basically decent people, impoverished and resentful after losing a war, could have been so ripe for manipulation by a demogogue and ready to blame minority groups for its ills. This theme seems to have become all too relevant again today!

Although Moritz is the one at greater risk, Lexa is cast as the central character. Having resolved to remain true to Moritz, she is forced to lead a double life, deceiving even her family in the attempt to appear to carry on “as normal”. So she still manages to enjoy the beauty of the countryside in the spring, the pleasure of skiing on the upper slopes of the Nagelspitze mountain, and taking her young cousins to the swimming pool. These lighter moments make the situation for the reader more poignant, yet also more bearable. Carson also brings in a young Englishman, Michael Reader, to fill her role of the outsider, already influenced by an more critical British press and trying to understand what is going on.

I was startled by the reference to the Dachau concentration camp, to which Carson was already able to observe in 1933 that. “People had a way of suddenly disappearing, no trial, no explanation…. prisoners were half-starved, bullied, inhumanly treated”. So, the excuse of “not knowing what was going on” does not hold water…..

Admiration for Carson’s insight and effort combined with the sensitive subject matter may make us reluctant to find fault with the style of writing, but bogged down in some of the middle chapters and already quite well-informed about what led to the holocaust, I was tempted to abandon the book. Too often wordy, clunky paragraphs in need of further editing prevent this from being an unequivocal page-turner. There is a tendency to tell the reader what to think rather than be left to form one’s own conclusions. The development of some minor characters, like Lexa’s friends Hermann and Thea, is too thin.

On the other hand, the banality of some scenes is justifiable, in reflecting real family and social life. The stilted manner of speech at times is typical of British films and plays up to the 1960s, and Carson was British. The Bavarian market town of “Kranach” with its valley and the nearby Alps are portayed with a vivid sense of place. It is worth persevering to an ending which proves strong, yet subtle and not entirely predictable.

Crooked Cross was produced as a successful stage play in 1937, and Carson went on to produce two more novels to form a trilogy which has recently been rediscovered for republication. Sadly, her work was soon overshadowed, not by her tragic early death in 1941, but by competition from a more established writer, Phyllis Bottome, who by coincidence had also lived in Munich and written the bestselling novel “Mortal Storm” on a similar theme in 1937. This would seem worth reading for comparison.

Overall, the fact that Crooked Cross could have been published in 1934 is very striking.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – “Wanting to feel something strongly”.

Published in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in some six centuries’ time must have been influenced by the impact of World War One and the 1929 financial crash, as well as the principles of newly established Russian communism. He imagined a highly managed global system based on the motto “Community, Identity, Stability” which has evolved a society free of disease, pain and physical ageing, in which everyone is happy and gainfully employed – but at what cost?

Human eggs are fertilised and embryos processed in the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” to suit the roles needed, from a minority of Alphas destined to be managers, to Epsilon Semi-morons content to perform the most boring tasks: “Everyone works for everyone else. Even Epsilons are useful”. Mass consumption ensures work for all: “Ending is better than mending”. Women no longer need to endure pregnancy and birth, and children are reared communally, with the concept of “father” or “mother” regarded with horror.

To encourage the pursuit of happiness, young children are encouraged to take part in “erotic play”and go on to have sex with as many people as often as they wish – to avoid the mental pain of sexual jealousy or unrequited love. A drug called “soma” is freely available – in fact handed out to Epsilons at the end of a shift – to provide an escape into happy dreams, and keep depression at bay. The most popular form of entertainment is the “feelies”, undemanding tales of heroism or romance accompanied by suitable sound effects and perfumed air (this reflected Huxley’s contempt for 1930s Hollywood films). More fortunate Alphas and Betas can be transported rapidly by rocket plane to any part of the globe which catches their fancy. This still includes a few reservations inhabited by savages considered not worth civilising. The odd Alpha who may begin to question the status quo is likely to be exiled to a remote island – Iceland or The Falklands.

By chance, young John Savage, an inhabitant of one of these reservations, is introduced to this “utopian” civilisation. He is accustomed to being a misfit, being the result of an Alpha/Beta liaison in which the woman bungles her contraception and through a further mishap ends up stranded in a reservation. Self-taught through reading a battered complete works of Shakespeare, John is excited by his mother’s tales of the marvellous way of life that she has lost, which he names a “brave new world”, quoting from “The Tempest”. His experiences and reactions when he actually finds himself there build up to the novel’s climax. In Chapters 16-17 he debates the values of the “brave new world” with the pragmatic cynical Resident Controller for Western Europe, Mustapha Mond, skilled in justifying the all-embracing system. This no longer has any need for a god to punish sin or bring salvation through faith. He has been replaced by Henry Ford, pioneer of the mass production of the model T Ford car: hence the novel’s setting in A.F. 632.

Although I found the opening pages rather dry and tedious, the extent to which Huxley thought out the details of his dystopian future is impressive, with a wry sense of farce which leavens somewhat its depressing nature. The technology of his brave new world now seems dated in many respects, and he later acknowledged a “ failure of foresight” in not mentioning nuclear power, both as a source of deadly weaponry and fuel.

Yet his vision still seems very prescient in a world: driven by the need for growth via consumerism; with young people brainwashed by social media and influencers and claiming poor mental health; with the implications of AI in the hands of a few ego-driven entrepreneurs whose wealth exceeds the GDP of some countries; with the major powers dominated by autocrats employing fake news and only supporting free speech if it is in line with their views….

In the western world, we still have individuality, some freedom of choice and expression, some cultural variety and creativity, but also the threat of war, climate change and either excessive migration or too few people to sustain society. So in the possible move to a more authoritarian, undemocratic future to control all this, Huxley’s novel is a salutary warning.

“Histoire du fils” by Marie-Hélène Lafon – Family Affairs

Most family sagas covering three generations require at least a trilogy of novels, or a thousand page door-stopper volume, but Marie-Hélène Lafon has managed to cover this in less than two hundred pages. She has achieved it by selecting a dozen dates spanning the century from 1908 to 2008, each with a chapter focusing on a specific family member and a significant incident, but not in chronological order.

The most dramatic events may not be revealed until the last few lines, like a shocking accident which befalls a small boy in the first chapter, or much later, a young man learning on his wedding day the identity of the father he has never met. Some chapters are largely a flow of thoughts, as when an independent-minded woman revels in her pregnancy in the full knowledge that her much younger lover is unready and unsuited to being a father. Years later, her sweet-tempered married sister who has willingly absorbed the child into her family, reflects on the past as she knits socks for her grandson. As is probably the case with most families, there is a lot of banal detail, laced with the poignancy of situations which cast a long shadow, or are unexpectedly revealed years later.

The author grew up on a farm in the department of Cantal and subsequently studied and worked in Paris. These locations feature in the novel, giving a sense of place to some extent, particularly for the Auvergne.

Marie-Hélène Lafon is a prize-winning author and this novel has attracted mostly positive reviews. Since French is my second language, I may not be qualified to appreciate it fully, but I only persisted with this novel because it was a book group choice. I found the total lack of paragraphs with a complete lack of dialogue very off-putting. This feeling was compounded by frequent extremely long sentences, often ten, even fourteen lines in length, packed with disparate, densely packed information. As a student and later teacher of classical Latin and Greek, her “streams of consciousness” are generally expressed in formal, grammatically correct French. One has to concentrate to glean the key points and work out who the characters are, how they are connected, whether they are important. One could have done with the family tree scribbled on an envelope which is mentioned in passing near the end! At times, one feels as if buttonholed by a stranger on a train journey who pours out a life history with a stream of indistinguishable characters.

With a plot which could be summarised in a few lines, it all hangs on how the tale is revealed. The approach is completely one of “telling” the reader what to think, albeit in a rather tortuous way, repetitious but with frustrating gaps, such as the fact that we know the central character André was active in the French resistance as a very young man, but know nothing more than this. Also, what amounts to the parallel lives of two families, linked by André, proves an underdeveloped aspect – perhaps this is intentional since a much-repeated point is that he knows little about his father’s family, but perhaps fears the consequences of making a real effort to find out more.

For me, the book would have worked better as a series of short stories involving the characters over time.

“Land of Marvels” by Barry Unsworth – the price of ambition.

It is 1914, scene of a dig in Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq. Somerville is an archaeologist obsessed with the need to make a significant find before German engineers drive the railway from Baghdad through the site, as is likely. He is probably aware that the power of the Ottoman empire is crumbling, but cannot know, as we do, that the First World War is about to break out, while fierce competition to find and drill oil is gaining pace.

This slow-paced tale puts the pieces in place to reach a sudden, dramatic climax. Switching between points of view as he gradually develops the strands of the plot, Unsworth creates a cast of varied, interesting if not always likeable characters. He arouses some sympathy for Somerville, even for Jehar, the worker with a criminal past who sells him false local information, as a way of obtaining the money he needs to get permission to marry a girl who has caught his eye. Will the various devious characters involved get their just deserts?

Unsworth must have done a good deal of research to create such a strong sense of place, some awareness of ancient Assyrian history, ruled by kings with unpronounceable names – Ashurnasirpal and Sîn-shar-iskun – not to mention a grasp of the geology of oil-bearing rocks. Although he succeeds here in his aim of capturing “the spirit of the age”, his instructive descriptions can be dry and quite hard to follow. A few maps and diagrams or photos would have been helpful, but perhaps out of place in the literary work of an author who won the Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger”, and was also short- or longlisted for four of his seventeen novels.

Although he taught creative writing, Unsworth did not employ any of the now frequent devices of, say, a dramatic prologue to hook the reader, or short punchy chapters which alternate between two main threads. He expects the reader to make an effort and concentrate, which may make him appear a slightly old-fashioned writer in a world of sound bites, short attention spans and expectations of instant gratification. Although I found some of the scenes too wordy and long-drawn-out, the plot is interesting and well-constructed. It reminds us of the background to the current state of the Middle East, and encourages us to draw parallels between past and current events.

I would also recommend “Sacred Hunger,” its sequel “The Quality of Mercy”, “Pascali’s Island” which was Unsworth’s first foray into historical fiction, and “Morality Play.” I hope he is not being underestimated nor fated to fade from memory too soon.

“Un homme sans titre” (A man with no title) par Xavier Le Clerc

The troubled relations between France and Algeria, its former colony, have inspired a number of novels including, “Un homme sans titre” in 2022, translated as “A man with no title”. In this, Xavier Le Clerc pays homage to his father, Mohand-Saïd, an illiterate but resilient man, by tracing his course from desperate poverty in Algeria, to a dead-end job as an immigrant in a Normandy metal factory, still barely earning enough to feed his large family.

Perhaps because Mohand-Saïd was so uncommunicative, Le Clerc had to resort to quoting Albert Camus to give a fuller sense of the depth of deprivation suffered by his father in early life, living on “weeds and roots”. Camus himself had written a powerful novel on a similar theme, “Le premier homme” (The First Man), unfortunately unfinished because of his early death. This is a fictionalised autobiography of an apparently slightly less grim childhood, which provides vivid images of Algeria and observations on the social and political situation there in the first half of the C20, to which Le Clerc has little to add.

The early chapters make harrowing reading, but give pause for thought. As Mohand-Saïd’s mother waited in vain for the return of a husband who probably came to grief on the way to or from work rather than be guilty of abandoning her, the eight-year old boy had to work. This included driving a donkey laden with charcoal which would be confiscated if he were caught, because it had been produced without a permit. This was probably the only illegal act in which Mohand-Saïd ever took part, unlike some of his own children and their friends who were tempted into crime by the lack of opportunities. This is assuming that he did not collaborate with the rebel movements against France which sprang up in the 1950s. Nearly fifty years later, he confided to his son that he was tortured by French soldiers, but for reasons which remain unclear.

Independence, when it came, did not bring employment, so Mohand-Saïd responded to a recruitment campaign and boarded a boat to Marseilles, with no choice as to type of work, or where it would be located. In due course he made an arranged marriage to a much younger cousin, brought over to France only in 1978 when the French government permitted such immigrants “the right to lead a normal family life”. Occasional trips back to Algeria by his wife and children, loaded with gifts and tales to impress relatives, masked what was just a different form of poverty. Mohand-Saïd endured the situation since he lacked the capacity to change, but his frustration would burst out in occasional violence against his children.

The last forty pages or so of this short novel take a sudden change in tack, with a focus on Le Clerc himself. An early love of reading set him on an academic path to professional employment and success as a novelist and poet. At the same time, his desire to live as a gay man created a rupture with his family, whose culture made them feel “dishonoured” by this. It is only in the final chapter that the author explains what should have puzzled the reader: the very French-sounding name “Xavier Le Clerc” which he has chosen to adopt formally.

Le Clerc ends with a lengthy letter, addressed to his father. Written after his death, it brings together the strands of their lives to express a final understanding of the silence, punctuated by rage, of the man he once thought mad.

“L’Écume des jours” by Boris Vian – also known as “Mood Indigo”, “Froth on the Daydream” and”Foam of the Daze”.

When Boris Vian’s “L’Écume des jours” was published in France in the aftermath of WW2, it did not attract the hoped-for success, perhaps because of its extreme surrealist and absurdist nature. Yet since then, it has been made into a film and widely translated, with several English titles: “Froth on the Daydream”, Foam of the Daze” and “Mood Indigo”, the latter reflecting its frequent references to the music of Duke Ellington. It’s also become a staple of the French education system – I find it hard to imagine most teenagers enjoying it, but have been assured that it goes down well with them, and adult French acquaintances recall with pleasure the “pianocktail”, one of the many words Vian loved to make up – an imaginary invention of his, having trained as an engineer, for a piano which could produce cocktails to match the jazz music played on it.

While intrigued by the surrealism in the paintings of say, Magritte or Dali, in fiction it can be irritating. In the opening pages, we encounter Colin, a wealthy “Bertie Wooster”-type young man, with Jeeves in the form of his faithful chef Nicolas. As he checks his face in the mirror, his blackheads rapidly disappear back under his skin. As he enters the kitchen, the resident mice are dancing to the sound of the sun’s rays as they hit the brass taps. Nicolas is making pâté from the eels which have been lured from these taps by bananas, enabling him to cut off their heads and pull them out.

Somewhat jealous of his impecunious friend Chick’s relationship with his girlfriend Alise, whom Colin rather fancies, he sets out to remedy the situation by falling immediately in love with a beautiful, feminine but rather two-dimensional girl called Chloé, after Duke Ellington’s arrangement of “Chloé-Song of the Swamp”. Vian’s obsession with American jazz gets rather repetitive….

The main thread of the novel turns out to be a love story, set against an initially idyllic background, which, as Colin begins to lose his money and therefore freedom of action, sinks rapidly into a sombre and depressing world, filled with sickness, death and murder. As a symbol of this, his apartment contracts dramatically in size over time.

There are some striking scenes, and intriguing new words like “doublezon” for a unit of money, “biglemoi” for a type of dance and “arrache-coeur” for a particulary horrible weapon. (I’m not sure how translators deal with these!)

I disliked the incidents of excessive casual violence, particularly when involving the characters apparently intended to be “the good guys”. For instance, when Colin is anxious to leave a skating rink quickly because he believes that Chloé has fallen ill, he kills an assistant by striking him with his skate. The victim falls onto a switch, causing a power cut, and Colin leaves with no compunction or punishment.

Apart from the fact that I could learn some French from reading this quirky twaddle, what kept me reading was the fact that by chance I had bought a text designed for French students. This included an interesting biography of Vian in the context of the intellectual environment in post-war France, including the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre who is pilloried in the novel as Jean Sol-Partre, probably in revenge because Vian’s wife had an affair with him, thus destroying their marriage. There were also a lot of footnotes to help with otherwise obscure allusions. But I could not agree that the dominant theme was “l’humour”.

Opinion in my book group was evenly divided. On one hand were those who delighted in the originality of Vian’s ideas, which perhaps is one reason for making French teenagers study the novel, along with the issues it raises over the effects of the negative “norms” of society such as excessive consumerism, religious corruption and hypocrisy, repression by those in power, and the alienating effects of some forms of labour. On the other side were those like me who found the absurdism excessive, to the extent of detracting from the book’s intended messages. For instance, Vian portrays the tedium of some forms of labour by describing how Colin is reduced to lying for hours on earth which has become sterile, so that his human warmth is required to germinate and grow a dozen cylinders into guns…..he will only be paid if they have no deformity, like crooked barrels….!

I remain an admirer of Vian’s trumpet-playing, particularly when combined with his powerful anti-war poem “Le Déserteur”.

See YouTube Le Déserteur (Remastered)

“The Black Prince” by Iris Murdoch: when philosophers write novels….

Both obsessed by the need to write, Bradley Pearson and Arnold Baffin have been friends for years, but while Arnold is a successful author, churning out a novel each year, Bradley is “blocked” in his desire to produce a masterpiece. His plan to travel abroad to a quiet place where he can focus on this is derailed by a series of events: his ex-wife who has returned from the US as a wealthy widow wants to contact him; his needy sister Priscilla descends on him, having left her husband, Arnold arrives in a state, convinced he has acccidentally killed his wife in a violent row; having agreed to tutor the Baffins’ daughter Julian about Hamlet, Bradley falls passionately in love with her, despite the forty-year age gap. This “erotic obsession” comes to dominate the novel, setting it apart from her earlier books. As the convoluted plot develops to an unexpected climax, a clearly over-sensitive and chronically indecisive Bradley appears increasingly unhinged. His exposure as an unreliable narrator seems confirmed by the “postscripts” supplied by the other main characters, but we are left with an intriguing ambiguity as to whether they are concealing, or ignorant of the truth.

An Oxford-educated philosopher, Iris Murdoch produced a number of academic works, but chose to express her ideas on philosophy mainly through twenty-six novels published over four decades (1954-1995). Winning a number of prestigious prizes, including the Booker, she was a prominent author in her lifetime, but her reputation is probably fading in a world of shortened attention spans and preference for a quick “easy read”.

In fact, this novel is a curious mixture of genres. I found the dialogues very engaging, like an often farcical play. They are interspersed with Bradley’s narratives, which often prove hard going with paragraphs of dense prose, often more than a page long, with minute descriptions and frequent repetition. One is tempted to skip, except that they contain occasional striking insights or beautiful passages like the portrayal of the coast where Bradley and Julian share a briefly idyllic retreat. I assume that Bradley’s often tedious musings are meant to reveal his personality combined with Murdoch’s take on philosophy, but it makes for a heavy-handed psychological drama. The overall structure is rather old-fashioned, the main story being book-ended between dry forewords (Bradley’s preoccupation with producing high art risks putting the reader off continuing, unless bound to read it for a book group) and the device of the postscripts. Designed to create final twists to confuse the reader, they form part of the tendency to “tell” too much (possibly unreliably), rather than “show” what might be the case.

Iris Murdoch was concerned with “moral philosophy”, how people perceive one another, and the nature of reality. If she thought living involves a good deal of illusion, the novel illustrates this. I find it hard to relate to her world in which people fall so abruptly in and out of love, not always mutually. It seems that, while married to the same man for decades, she had numerous relationships, rather like her characters, so one wonders to what extent she was writing from experiences which she took to be the norm. Her expressed concern with the nature of goodness and leading a “moral life” is not very apparent in the lives of her frequently fickle and inconsistent characters. I found myself unable to engage with, and therefore believe in, or have much time for, these caricatured or capricious individuals.

Some regard “The Black Prince” as the culmination of her work for its “richly layered structure and compelling realistic comic imagination”. Murdoch’s undeniable talent for pouring out streams of prose was marred for me by its density and complexity. I felt battered by the barrage of contradictions and digressions. At times, the failure to winnow out the excess verbiage seemed self-indulgent.

Overall, the novel is original if at times implausible, with a potentially interesting plot, and some flashes of brilliance, but also flawed, for instance in the lack of editing of Bradley’s overwritten, pretentious style, which becomes intolerable.

“Akenfield” by Ronald Blythe – capturing a lost world

The son of an impoverished Suffolk labourer, leaving school aged fourteen with no qualifications, how did Ronald Blythe come to be a writer and editor, remembered mainly for his classic “Akenfield- Portrait of an English Village”? It was his love of reading, acquired from his mother, which enabled him to be self-taught, to the extent of obtaining employment at Colchester Library, where a chance meeting gave him an opening to the world of East Anglian artists.

I finished reading “Akenfield” for a book group before discovering that it is in fact an imaginary village, based on the experiences of the inhabitants of Charsfield and Debach, near his Suffolk home, and named after the oaks which grew near former home, “acen” being Old English for “oak”. I could easily have missed reading a book which for years I had dismissed as probably rather boring, with a nostalgic, romanticised vision of village life. I could not have been more wrong, because in recording his interviews with about fifty local people, with very varied occupations and social positions across three generations, Blythe enters into their minds, capturing their reflections on their own lives and their world in general.

It’s possible to dip into this book at random, although reading the interviews sequentially I found it a mesmerising page-turner. Yet, only a few weeks later, the details had merged into an impression of lives of great poverty, exploitation and stoical acceptance on the part of farm labourers in the early decades of the last century. The opening interview with Leonard Thompson, described as “a survivor” provides a vivid account of this, which is to be repeated many times, but always with some fresh insight. Perhaps this interview is particularly compelling since I believe it was actually conducted with the author’s own father.

Leonard’s father had to support seven children with his weekly wages of thirteen shillings (an astonishing sixty-five pence in modern currency, although there has of course been huge inflation) reduced to ten on a whim when his boss was feeling the pinch. A man could be sacked for poaching a rabbit or two, and no other farmer would employ him out of “solidarity”. Presumably there was no rent required for a tied house, but food was basically apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, with no milk. Children were taken out of school aged only eight to work for a few more pence. Stone-picking for use in repairing the local roads was a common way of earning this. As a boy, after catching his fingers in a cattle-cake machine, Leonard had the tops of three fingers amputated without an anaesthetic – no evidence of any safety measures or compensation. Long hours of hard labour, with only a short break on Sundays made men look old at fifty, if they survived that long. As a young man, like others of his age, Leonard saw the Great War as an escape route in 1914. One of the few to return, he became politically active, working to set up the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. Wages rose to 38 shillings and 6 pence a week, but then “the slump set in during the great hot summer of 1921”…..

It is interesting to see how rural Suffolk was viewed by outsiders– a Scot drawn to “the best corn area of England” in the 1930s is shocked by the lack of initiative in restoring farms which had been allowed to decline “into dereliction”, and also by the “fancy feudalism” which made such a distinction between farmers and their workers. In the 1960s, an assistant teacher is depressed by the local children’s polite refusal to “take in” what she is trying to get across, because from an early age they perceive that it has no relevance to their insular lives.

The more privileged members of the village tend to be shown in a less favourable light: the vicar who tells an eleven-year- old girl that she can leave school to earn a penny a day looking after a blind lady, or more recently, the Chair of the Women’s Institute who is convinced that girls “used to love” being servants.

Ronald Blythe passed away in 2023, aged 100, but hopefully this absorbing and thought-provoking social history, the best-known of his many books, will continue to be read.