“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.

“The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver – a green and insightful page turner

Marietta has grown up in dead-end small-town Kentucky where her single mother makes ends meet as a cleaner. Determined to avoid the fate of her classmates who tend to fall pregnant soon after leaving school, if not before, she gains employment as a hospital lab assisant, and saves enough money to buy an old banger with a view to travelling west, although with no clear aim in mind.

In all this, her confidence and resilience may owe a good deal to her mother’s unconditional love and uncritical encouragement. So it is ironical that almost immediately, motherhood is foisted upon her when, stopping off near the Cherokee Nation reservation in Oklahoma, which her “full-blooded” Indian great-grandfather had avoided being marched into, she is too tired and decent to resist taking on the care of a small girl, thrust into her car.

This is not a “spoiler”, since it occurs in the opening chapter of the mainly quite fast-paced tale. Recounted in the first person, apart from one chapter, by “Taylor” as Marietta has decided to rename herself, this shows how she manages to survive and build relationships with a diverse range of people, including the child, nicknamed Turtle.

The novel avoids being overly sentimental or schmaltzy, through Taylor’s dry wit and entertaining turn of phrase, with perceptive observation of the varied people she meets. The dialogues are convincing, conveying their different personalities. There is a vivid sense of place, with the focus on the natural environment, in particular plants, which is the theme running through Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction. I have read most of it, starting with “The Poisonwood Bible” and inadvertently including “Pigs in Heaven”, the sequel to “The Bean Trees” which one should really read first.

“The Bean Trees” is her debut novel, written in the 1980s, and fascinating in portraying both the evidence of climate change, and the harsh treatment of refugees, albeit on a smaller scale than the present (January 2026), but making the reading of the book seem very relevant. Having visited the States a few times, I could relate to the descriptions, also learning quite a lot in the process. For instance, the bean trees of the novel are the wisteria, which turns out to be a form of “legume” and grows rampant over my garage wall in England.

Possibly because she describes it as being partly autobiographical, but also through being her first novel, it has the authentic freshness and vitality of writing for the sheer pleasure and urge to do so, without any expectation of success, nor the burden of a literary reputation to maintain. I like the tight, if finally perhaps contrived, structure of it, and the relative brevity of about 230 pages, leaving one wanting more, in contrast to the sometime rambling and excessive length of her later novels.

I agree with the reviewer who felt that the final plot twist is somewhat implausible, while being necessary to achieve the desired ending, but most novels have a few flaws and I recommend it, to read individually, on different levels, or for a book group, as a basis for a wide-ranging discussion.

“The Land in Winter” by Andrew Mitchell: “Keeping it weird” with a mixture of the banal and the surreal

Novels shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize should be a sound basis for choosing what to read. I was also drawn to Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter” by my admiration for the originality and quality of his earlier work, “Pure”, despite its macabre theme on the real-life removal of the 18c Parisian cemetery “Les Innocents”, which had become insanitary.

The theme seemed promising: the relationship between two couples with little in common except that both wives are pregnant for the first time, and they have recently moved to a rural community near Bristol, where they find themselves isolated and trapped in the harsh winter of 1962-63. Living near Bristol and being able to recall that time period also drew me to the novel. Yet despite the largely positive reviews which it has received, I was left dissatified.

I have nothing against slow-paced novels, but was soon bored by the short, verging on “Basic English” sentences spelling out in great detail the mundane details of the characters’ lives. particularly the women’s. GP Eric Parry braves the elements to show more empathy for his patients than he does for his underoccupied upper middle class wife Irene who dutifully continues her domestic chores. Across the fields live the improbable pair of Cambridge drop-out, neighbour Bill Simmons playing at being a farmer, as his former showgirl Rita fritters away the days, managing to conceal the times when the troubling voices came to haunt her. Perhaps this style was intentional to heighten the claustrophobic, even surreal sense of being snowed in as supplies of fuel dwindle.

The indications of possible future crises are not always developed. Apart from aiming to hook the reader, I still cannot quite understand why Miller starts with a scene in a local asylum, where a young man on the point of being discharged is found dead, and it soon becomes apparent that Eric may be held culpable for giving him too large a supply of potentially lethal medication to take with him. Yet the dramatic potential of this situation is allowed to drift away. Eric’s unwise affair with a glamorous married woman, half-hearted but somehow to hard to finish, seems likely to cause more trouble.

Two-thirds of the way through, the novel changes gear to the extent of seeming like a different book, with some dramatic events as three of the main characters independently leave their snowy prison for a while: the style alters and we begin to learn more fragments of past events which have formed them. Although Miller succeeds in arousing sympathy at some point for these flawed characters, I rarely felt engaged with them. Probably the least likeable of the four, Eric is perhaps the most convincing as a competent, practical man who has “made it” into the professional world while feeling an outsider in the very class-ridden world still dominated by the aftermath of WW2, on the brink of the social revolution of the Swinging Sixties.

If the plot seems wanting, it may be because the author is more interested in what has shaped four very different people brought together by chance. It is as if, using the harsh winter as a device and a context, he intends to focus on the impact of their past experiences and the culture of the period (including a total lack of concern about drink driving or smoking heavily when pregnant), which he has clearly researched quite thoroughly.

Apparently keen to follow his agent’s advice to “keep it weird”, he tends to break his plain prose with lapses into distracting surreal images e.g.

  • speaking of Bill in the cowshed or “shippon”: “He checked the water. The tap (it sat there like a small god) was stiff but turned and the water flowed”.
  • or of Eric: “In here, in the basement, the outer world might be doing anything. It might be on fire, the four horsemen cantering around College Green, slicing off the head of policeman”.

The novel’s ending, which to many will appear too abrupt, is one of the most surreal episodes, leaving the reader with an ambiguity in which some may enjoy the freedom to speculate as to what happens next, or even exactly what the author was trying to achieve.

“Les Couleurs de l’incendie! (All Human Wisdom) by Pierre Lemaitre: overblown – un peu surfait?

Pierre Lemaitre made his name as the author of macabre, ingeniously plotted psychological crime thrillers. He then switched to historical fiction in the form of an ambitious trilogy, covering France from the First to the Second World Wars. I was impressed by the originality of the first novel, “Au revoir là-haut” or “The Great Swindle” translated into English, which follows the fortunes of two young men from very different backgrounds who survive the trenches, despite the murderous intentions of their commanding officer which leave one of them badly disfigured. In the aftermath of the conflict, they see an opportunity to embark on a swindle as a way of making a living.

The sequel, “Couleurs de l’incendie” (“All Human Wisdom”) proved a disappointment. Although a couple of the main characters appear in the previous book, this can be read as a standalone novel, covering the period of the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, with their impact on French society forming the background to personal dramas.

Marcel Péricourt is a sufficiently important banker for his funeral in 1927 to be attended by the President of France. The event is disrupted by the tragedy of his seven-year-old grandson Paul apparently throwing himself out of a first floor window to land on the coffin, leaving him wheelchair-bound for life. This leaves his mother Madeleine with a dual burden: the care of her son and the inheritance of a banking empire which she is totally unprepared to manage. Finding herself deceived and exploited by those whom she should be able to trust, Madeleine devises a convoluted long-term plan to exact her revenge, in a plot which has intentional parallels with Victor Hugo’s “The Count of Monte Cristo”. There are also parallels between the corruption, greed, and disfunction of the period and the present day – plus ça change.

This theme and background have great potential, but apart from leavening the bleak theme with touches of black humour, Lemaitre does not make the most of this. There are some moving scenes, mostly involving Paul, and some intriguing ones portraying some of Madeleine’s ruthless schemes.

However, the first part, essentially setting the scene, is too often longwinded, “telling” rather than “showing”. The latter part speeds up, juggling Madeleine’s various ploys in a way that often seems disjointed, even confusing when, to create more suspense, the reader is left unclear as to the identity of some new character and what is going on. There is a slightly sordid, sexist, male chauvinist undertone running through the tale which made me uneasy, although it could of course have been true to the attitudes of the day.

Too many characters seem to be stereotypes, too exaggerated, or underdeveloped for one to engage with them. Most of the plot twists are implausible, leading some reviewers to describe the novel as “burlesque” or a “racy romp” which only serves to make it harder to engage with it on a more thoughtful level. It may not be essential for a novel to fit a particular “genre”, but it feels unsatisfactory to have a historical background portrayed for the most part in dry descriptions, while the drama plays out in the far-fetched incidents of what is effectively a very long (more than 500 pages), over-complicated crime thriller.

Like some other reviewers, I was at some points tempted to abandon it after one ludicrous step too many, but kept going as a way of improving my French since Lemaitre uses a wide vocabulary with plenty of idioms. Had it been in the English translation, I might not have bothered to finish it.

The Shepherd’s Tale by James Rebanks: hefted to the land

This is titled both to link it to and distinguish it from W.H. Hudson’s 1910 classic “A Shepherd’s Life”, relating the tales of Caleb Bawcombe in C19 Wiltshire. Obliged to read this modern take as a book group choice, I was expecting a bland memoir, overhyped by a publisher as a sentimental portrayal of an arduous, largely vanished occupation.

In fact, it provides a fascinating explanation of why successful modern sheepfarming iin upland areas involves a mixture of hard labour and decisions which are in their way at least as complex as aspects of the history degree at Oxford which the author eventually obtained as a mature student.

A Herdwick ram

For instance, to breed sheep best-suited to the harsh Lake District environment requires ongoing study of the features of the rams or “tups” best suited to mate with specific ewes. The value of one’s stock is raised by winning prizes at local shows in a tightknit community where there is a high demand for tups which will increase the quality of one’s lambs.

The degree of cooperation and equality which has existed in the rural community for centuries is impressive. The common land on the upland fell is shared by a system of grazing rights based on “stints”, pieces of land which can be bought or rented between “commoners”. The sheep are herded up there in the summer, to enable the grass on the lower land to grow sufficiently to produce the hay needed for the winter feed. When it’s necessary to drive them back down to be dipped, all the commoners involved are expected to lend a hand, with the vital assistance of their generally very skilful sheep dogs.

James Rebanks has also altered my perception of the Lake District as simply a unique area of great beauty to be protected but also enjoyed as much as possible by visitors from other regions. Poets like Wordsworth and writers of acclaimed travel guides like Wainwright discovered the Lake District for themselves, as an idyll in which to escape, and promoted this limited view. Rebanks has made me aware how this disregards the existence and therefore the needs of the local rural population, and their contribution to preserving the landscape.

This matters, if teenagers, particularly boys already involved in working the land with their families, are obliged to pass exams which they regard as irrelevant to their expected future, by teachers who through their own form of ignorance seem to disparage their way of life.

So bright boys like Rebanks wasted their time at school – he only gained GCSEs in woodwork and RE, leading to the family joke that he could become a coffinmaker! None of his teachers respected the role of being a farmworker enough to convince him of the need for a certain level of education just to have more choice to do what one wants in later life. In Rebanks’ case, this was to earn money from professional employment, ultimately perhaps unexpectedly, success as a bestselling author, in order to earn the money to establish himself more firmly as a farmer..

Having found this much more gripping and thought-provoking than expected (if a bit repetitive in places), I recommend this as a read that is both informative and by turns humorous and moving in portraying a generally unfamiliar way of life. This also provides the evidence to question modern values and too ready acceptance of the way we live now. I shall definitely read the sequel to this, “An English Pastoral”.

“Les Innocents” by Georges Simenon: “to undestand, but not judge”

Numbers differ according to which source one reads, but “Les Innocents” was the last of the 117 “romans durs” which Georges Simenon wrote in addition to the 75 books and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Maigret. In these “hard novels”, Simenon wished to create stand-alone stories with psychological depth, entering the minds of his main characters, exploring what factors had shaped them, how they behaved in extreme situations, how they reflected on their lives in terms of success, failure, and the point of it all. Although his “romans durs” were admired by writers like Gide or Mauriac, other critics questioned the quality of novels produced at such speed and frequency.

In “Les Innocents”, based in Paris, Georges Célerin is a successful jeweller, a skilled goldsmith with a flair for design, who at times can hardly believe the intense happiness of twenty years of marriage to Annette. Dedicated to his work, he accepts her insistence on continuing her social work, caring for the aged poor, because she wishes to maintain her independence. Their two teenage children give no cause for concern, and the burden of domestic tasks is shouldered by their former live-in nanny, now housekeeper, Nathalie. This idyllic life is shattered when a policeman appears in his workshop, with news that Annette has been killed – running across the road, she slipped and was crushed by a lorry.

Grief-striken, Célerin is forced to reflect on his marriage. Gradually, he comes to realise that he did not know his wife, but it is clear that he loved her far more than vice versa, while in his obsessive focus on his wife, he did not pay his children sufficient attention. In short, this is an example of the lack of communication between a man and a woman, which was so often a theme of Simenon’s work. How will Célerin react when by chance he is driven to find out for himself what on earth she was doing in the locality where she met her death, and so confront the truth?

Simenon was a gifted storyteller, weaving insights and a strong sense of place into the often banal events of ordinary lives. He is good at building up tension, and if he sometimes disappoints one by diffusing it, this may prove plausible, as in real life. Perhaps assisted by his early employment as a journalist, including as a crime reporter, he made a conscious effort to write in a clear, concise style to engage the reader. This is most evident if read in French, by comparison with the flowery phrases often found in this language. My only criticism is that in dialogues it can be hard to be sure who is talking.

The most fascinating aspect in all this is Simenon’s own personal life, so much more complex and intriguing than, for instance, this plot. In reality, he had not only affairs, but a chain of much younger mistresses, living with him and his wife for long periods (not to mention bearing his children), or holidaying with him and each other at the same time. In his novels, he clearly took particular situations from his own life and developed them. His stated aim was to understand without judging, but it is hard either to understand or fail to judge the convoluted transgressions of his life.

Gainsborough – A Portrait by James Hamilton

“I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the very End of Life in quietness and ease.”

Thomas Gainsborough claimed to prefer painting landscapes, but is best known as a leading and very prolific C18 portrait painter. After moving to London in later life, and famous enough to be invited to paint George III and Queen Charlotte, he became quite well off.

Hamilton’s opening chapter portrays Gainsborough as sociable, charming and generous, but also subject to mood swings, and bursts of rage, as when he slashed a canvas which a client had rejected. His friend the actor Garrick’s description of his mind as like a “steam engine overcharged” with genius implies a manic quality. As a young man, he was more harshly criticised as “very dissolute…inordinately fond of women”, which eventually seems to have led to an attack of venereal disease which nearly killed him. He was also often in debt, despite his high work rate, painting “upon his feet….during five or six hours every day”, and a wife who came with a useful annual annuity, the result of being the illegitimate daughter of a prince. Hamilton suggests that the cost of keeping his wife and daughters as well-dressed “advertisements” for his work was initially more than he could afford!

In later life, Gainsborough could chat informally to the king with ease, but was too unorthodox to “play the game” as a member of The Royal Academy, to the extent that when he complained about the way his pictures were being hung at the 1784 Academy Exhibition, he was simply ordered to take them down!

Although at pains to write a biography, Hamilton’s expertise as an art historian has led him to analyse in some detail the painter’s work, with coloured plates usefully provided for many of the examples, but often too small in the paperback edition to appreciate sufficiently. So it is worth looking up images of them online. Gainsborough’s portraits of the gentry and aristocrats are often rather stiff, and the backgrounds may be of greater interest, as in the famous painting of Mr. and Mrs Andrews crammed one side of arable fields clearly depicted the husband’s new farming methods. Beautiful, elaborate dresses, displaying skill in painting silks and velvets, were often added afterwards, neither belonging to or ever worn by the sitters. Some of the most striking portraits, with a photographic quality of realism, focus on the faces of friends, who often had to wait months to receive them as gifts, since they were painted in between more lucrative commissions.

One of the most fascinating aspects, although we have to wait to Chapter 25 to discover it, is Gainsborough’s unusual approach to painting. He liked to work in darkened rooms, lit only by flickering candlelight, with a large canvas tied loosely to a frame so that it billowed slightly like a sail, while the sitter’s head was positioned only inches away from the painting of it. Gainsborough worked with great physical energy, continually stepping backwards and forwards. Most extraordinary of all, he is reputed to have painted at times with long-handled, six foot brushes, which must have been larger, ordinary brushes tied to flexible handles of say, willow or hazel.

Another intriguing fact is that, whereas from boyhood, growing up in Suffolk he painted landscapes from observation of nature, later on he would construct landscapes to copy, using heads of brocolli for trees. Endlessly experimental, he would use his fingers, bits of sponge, even on an impulse sugar-tongs to apply paint.

Hamilton creates a strong sense of place as regards where Gainsborough spent most of his life. As a boy, it was Sudbury in Suffolk, where the once prosperous wool and cloth weaving trade had declined, leaving a politically corrupt sytem and discontented population. It was only the small inheritance from an uncle who had made money from property ownership in the depressed town which enabled Gainsborough, aged only 13, to escape to London as an apprenticed engraver – “some light, handy craft trade”.

The descriptions of Bath are fascinating, particularly if one happens to live there. There is the irony of the unhealthy nature of a spa town with the smoke from coal fires trapped in the valley, “set so deep …air was apt to stagnate”. In summer, “the air was thick with the chalk and dust thrown up by traffic….which in the wet and cold of winter became a deep mire”. Those who came to take the waters would have been better off staying at home in view of the sedan chairs used to transport the gouty and rheumatic, which were reduced to boxes of sodden leather in the frequent rainy days.

Apart from the sensitive, appealing portraits of his two daughters when little girls, and one of his wife as an older woman, with a direct, quizzical gaze, Gainsborough’s immediate family members remain two-dimensional. He is described as hen-pecked, but perhaps his wife had good reason to control his income from portraits. It is unclear why Hamilton calls the daughters “troublesome”. The elder daughter may have inherited a more extreme form of the painter’s possibly somewhat manic personality. For her to be considered “mad” may have led to her short-lived marriage being a failure, with her younger sister being forced into the role of a spinster carer. Probably, there is simply a lack of information to explore these family dynamics further. Yet there is a vivid image of Thomas wondering how best to dispose of his deceased brother Humphey’s invention of a by then rotting steam engine. Clearly, they were talented members of an “ordinary” family.

Similarly, I would have liked Gainsborugh’s uneasy relationship with Joshua Reynolds to have been presented more fully and clearly. Was it more than the case of an orthodox President of the Royal Academy criticising Gainsborough, even after his death, for “a want of precision and finishing” which Hamilton sees as “brave, flamboyant exuberance”?

Overall, the biography is meticulously researched and a mine of information. Yet reading it proves a laborious task at times, largely through a lack of rigorous editing to remove the frequent repetition, tedious lists of, say, lients or paintings, and long-winded digressions. I found Gainsborough’s chequered relationship with The Royal Academy too fragmented and hard to follow. The tendency to speculate in the absence of evidence or impossibilty of knowing how Gainsborough could have reacted to the present could also be quite irritating.

Despite these reservations, I recommend this biography, having gleaned a great deal from it.

Germinal by Zola: a marathon read worth running

When Zola died in 1902, crowds of workers hailed his funeral cortège with cries of « Germinal », the best-selling novel which is probably his most famous work. This was based on the meticulous research conducted in 1884 when, formally dressed in frock coat, high collar and top hat, pen and notebook in hand, he descended into a coalmine belonging to the Anzin company in the Pas-de-Calais region of France, in order to assess the working conditions which led to a prolonged and unsuccessful strike.

A journalist before achieving sufficient success to support himself as an author, Zola had known great poverty as a child, after his father’s premature death, and as an unemployed young man who had twice failed his baccalauréat. Perhaps the experience of inequality triggered his strong social conscience. This was combined with a firm conviction that people’s lives are determined by a mixture of heredity and their environment. We see this in the principal character in Germinal, Étienne, the idealistic but naive newcomer who is carried away by his inherited impulsive, addictive personality to become the leader of a doomed strike. While conveying vividly the hardship and injustice suffered by the mining families, Zola continually shows how they have been brutalised by this: casually promiscuous, quick to take advantage of each other and capable of cruel acts of vengeance.

The novel opens with a dramatic description of the mine at night as first seen by Étienne. Zola portrays it as a kind of monster, literally swallowing up the miners as they descend for their shift. The descriptions of the working conditions are truly appalling : long, dangerous trudges and climbs deep underground to the coal seams, drenched with water as they hew the coal, risk of fire damp explosions, unfair pay cuts when they fail to meet impossible targets to both install the pit props to protect themselves and bring enough truckloads of coal to the pithead. The food is so scanty and poor, the exhaustion so intense, the patronising support available so inadequate and unreliable, hardships and misfortunes for some pile up to such a weight that one wonders how the mining community can survive at all. The comparisons with the pampered lives of the families of the mines shareholders and senior staff are shocking.

There is a powerful metaphor in the huge percheron, the draught horse brought down as a foal to drag containers filled with coal along tunnels to the pithead, which becomes blind through lack of light, can only dream of the sunlight, and eventually dies underground, to be buried there.

Events often seem exaggerated or far-fetched, and many characters, particularly the wealthy, highly stereotyped. The frequent detailed descriptions filled with technical terms for the mining operations are hard to follow, especially in the original French if not one’s first language. So reading all five hundred and forty odd pages of it (or even more in some editions) requires a marathon effort. One can grow inured to so much intense suffering, and the touches of ironic humour cannot compensate for this.

Produced originally in instalments for a magazine over a period of about four months, now the novel seems too long, at times repetitive, and in need of a firm edit, reflecting the lack of alternative media at the time to distract people from reading it. Yet, it is the kind of classic novel which lingers in the mind, provoking thought. If possible, it is best to read the novel in its original langage to experience the full impact.

The novel ends on the optimistic note, that the miners, forced back to work but their spirits unbroken, will, like seeds, produce future generations who are able to rise up and claim their rights – a belief , yet to be realised, which has inspired the causes of socialism and reform. Hence the title, for Germinal was the seventh month of the French Revolution’s revised calendar, intended to evoke the idea of seeds of equality growing in fertile ground.

“The Glass-Blowers” by Daphne du Maurier: blown away

It is many years since I devoured the swashbuckling yarn, “Jamaica Inn”, and the slow-burning psychological dramas, “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel”, but Daphne du Maurier’s “The Glass-Blowers” is in a different vein. Thoroughly researched, this is a fictionalised account of the lives of her French ancestors, the Bussons, skilled craftsmen who prospered in the late C18 producing finely engraved glassware for the aristocracy – on one occasion even the King paid a visit – in the forested land of what became Sarthe, in the Pays de la Loire.

Judging by reviews, I was not alone in finding the opening chapters quite tedious, overburdened with description, while it was hard to engage with the two-dimensional characters or keep track of the locations of the various glassworks. Admittedly, this served to “set the scene” for a stable, contented, self-contained community, run in an orderly, caring fashion by Sophie’s parents, with no awareness this was about to be disrupted by the French Revolution.

The narrative becomes more absorbing as the personalities of Sophie’s three brothers become more distinct. Robert, the eldest is talented, charismatic but at times shockingly self-centred, utterly seduced by the world of the aristocrats which he is determined to enter. François, who has no interest in glass-blowing, falls under the influence of Rousseau’s writing, and dedicates himself to creating a more free and equal world by helping the poor, leaving the youngest Michel, hampered by an acute stammer and underestimated by his father, to be the one most likely to keep the family business going.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the portrayal of the French Revolution, through its stages of initial optimism, descent into a reign of terror, and ultimate restoration of the monarchy, as viewed from the different perspective of the countryside some hundred miles from the action in Paris. There is the initial fear of marauding bands, since communication is so unreliable. Being in a social limbo partway between the workers and the aristocracy mainly in flight, Michel and Sophie’s husband gain in status from marshalling their workers to join the National Guard, but the author pulls no punches in showing how the pair rapidly become domineering, abusing their new-found power in the process, at the price of losing the goodwill of their employees.

Although I thought I knew a good deal about the French Revolution, du Maurier prompted me to reflect for the first time what it must have been like to be living some way from the capital with patchy and inaccurate information, the threats from the various factions which formed, and the ultimate realisation that successive groups had replaced each other at the top, leaving the workers at the bottom of the system feeling no better off. Once the old way of life had broken down, there were some powerful descriptions of how people think and behave in violent situations, and the portrayal of how attitudes and behaviour change over time in the light of experience was also convincing.

Despite my reservations, this is probably more worth reading than, say, the escapism into “Jamaica Inn”.

“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard

I was curious to discover why “The Transit of Venus” has been regarded by some critics as a modern classic, one of the most outstanding novels of the C20.

Growing up in Australia in the years leading up to World War II, Caro and Grace are orphaned when a ferry, the Benbow, capsizes in Sydney harbour, leaving them to be raised by their difficult, manipulative cousin Dora, apparently based on the author’s own mother: “a destroyer who sees herself as a perpetual victim”.

The Transit of Venus across the Sun in 2012

An Australian herself, born in 1931, Shirley Hazzard was well-placed to describe life in a distant Dominion where children are taught British history and culture as being somehow more important and interesting than their own. For the sisters, “going to Europe” is “about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage”.

Once in England, pretty, passive Grace is quickly married off to the stuffy, pompous bureaucrat Christian. Less conventional and more of a risk-taker, Caro is caught in a triangle of “doomed love” between on one hand, the charismatic, egotistical playwright Paul Ivory, to whom she is physically attracted, and on the other, scientist Ted Tice with whom she has a strong rapport, in a meeting of minds. The narrative takes us through several decades into their late middle age, focusing on certain key events. So in its disjointed, wide-ranging scenes, it is a kind of literary soap opera.

I was initially puzzled by the style of a book which, first published in 1995, seemed to date from an earlier age, until I read that Hazzard had greatly admired Henry James. By coincidence, I read it immediately after Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, a ground-breaking “stream of consciousness” novel. There are parallels with this style in “The Transit of Venus”, which although generally written in carefully crafted sentences, often breaks off to leave them hanging, unfinished. They drift in and out of direct speech, and wander as thoughts do. The reader has to concentrate continuously to pick up allusions to past events, not to mention the clues required to understand the novel’s ending. Although I have only read it once, this is one of those novels which needs to be reread slowly, to grasp its meaning and appreciate it more fully.

Hazzard was clearly a talented writer, but perhaps because every chapter went through many (it has been suggested twenty-seven) drafts, the result often seems contrived. Although some of the dialogue is very realistic, at other times it appears artificial and pretentious, like the opening comment in a hotel bedroom scene: “I like this eclecticness. Most eclecticness is too dark”. I did not find the characters particularly convincing or engaging. Yet perhaps they were inspired by people met in Shirley Hazzard’s unusual life: she travelled a good deal as the daughter of a diplomat, through her employment in offices of the United Nations, and her marriage to a respected “Flaubert scholar”. In other words, how many “ordinary” people did she meet?

At times the novel is a page-turner, with interesting anecdotes, thought-provoking observations, striking and original descriptions, and beautiful prose. At others, sentences become incomprehensible, passages seem overwrought, and attempts to introduce a sense of the societal changes or politics of the time appear clunky. Chapter 31, located in a New York television studio where Caro overhears a conversation which has something to do with the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs, is probably based on an incident which the author experienced, but makes little sense and jars in being so misplaced and overlong.

What will Gen Z and those who come afterwards make of all this?