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.

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.

Published a century ago in 1925, “Mrs Dalloway” may sound too dated and trivial, in describing a day in the life of Clarissa, a privileged, upper class woman who is preparing for an evening party. With an army of servants to do the actual work, she has time to wander round Bond St. and St. James’s Park, observing with fascination the world recently restored to peace after the ravages of the First World War, yet feeling invisible, continually drifting into nostalgic flashbacks. When young, should she have married Peter Walsh, who challenged her to think and take risks in life, or was she right to become the wife of conventional, materially successful Richard? Had her intense early friendship with a charismatic girl called Sally Seton really been her only experience of true love?

Virginia Woolf has attracted interest as one of the pioneers of “the modern novel”. Certainly, her writing is experimental, varied and original, run through with a common thread of “stream of consciousness” or what she called “free indirect discourse”. Written through a third person narrator, this is the attempt to capture a person’s often unexpected and confused train of thought, the sudden leaps, blank spaces and interruptions. Reading Woolf requires continuous concentration to avoid spinning out of mental control, a passenger clinging on without a seatbelt only to land back unexpectedly on a track of clear, down-to-earth prose. One striking example of this is where Peter Walsh hears a “bubbling, burbling song…. like water spouting…. from a shape like a rusty pump” which turns out to be an old beggar woman to whom he gives a coin – yet this small incident is expanded over several pages to trigger, no doubt, a great variety of responses in different readers.

Woolf liked to complicate the issue by switching the point of view without warning, which serves to supply different interpretations of the same situation. So, partly during a chance visit from Peter Walsh, we see him and Clarissa observing each other, on the verge of regretting what might have been, yet probably indulging in self-delusion. It seems that Woolf was critical of writers like James Joyce, whom she studied carefully, but found wanting, too “confined to the short-term”, in his focus on the thoughts of a single character.

Plot seems incidental, apart from Woolf’s introduction of another, on the face of it very different, character in the form of Septimus Smith, about whom Clarissa is made aware without ever meeting him. He is a bright young working-class clerk who has survived the First World War physically, but is severely shell-shocked. This was a condition little understood at the time, which aroused her concern, perhaps because of the mental problems which enabled her to portray a psychotic state of mind so acutely. Her experiences fed a strong dislike of authoritarian, opinionated medical men, like the oppressive Dr. Bradshaw. Some of the most moving passages are the relationship between Septimus and his sweet young Italians wife Rezia, uncomprehending but empathetic, whom Bradshaw views as an impediment to the young man’s recovery, when the reverse is the case.

Virginia Woolf wrote later that Septimus was Clarissa’s “double”, and she vacillated as to which one of them would finally give up a life which was both loved and an intolerable burden. While able to understand why what we would now call PTSD might drive Septimus to suicide, I could not identify with Clarissa feeling “glad” that he possessed the courage which she lacked to commit an act of “defiance”, and “embrace” death. I’ve simplified her reaction, but it still seems confused when analysed in greater depth. Yet perhaps the mixture of clarity and misperception in her thought processes is the main point.

The novel culminates in a lengthy account of the party, in which Woolf applies her barbed wit, no doubt parodying many of her well-heeled acquaintances: “She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife)….” This, together with the inconclusive and rather bland ending, further obscure the nature of the connection between Clarissa and Septimus. I would judge this a major shortcoming in the novel, if it did not appear arrogant to criticise such an admired work.

“This is the way the world ends”

British author Nevile Shute’s classic novel “On the Beach” was published in 1957, the year in which the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched, both reflecting the growing public alarm over the risk of a Third World War likely to involve atomic bombs, as the Cold War came to a head. Having emigrated to Australia, Shute set the novel largely around Melbourne on the far southern coast.

In the opening pages, we may wonder why naval officer Peter Holmes has been unemployed for months, can no longer drive his prized Morris Minor and uses a bicycle with a trailer of his own design to collect milk from a local farm. It soon becomes apparent that during a violent and ill-judged chain reaction in  the previous year of 1962, so many countries  north of the Equator launched nuclear  “cobalt” bombs that virtually no one can have survived in  the entire northern hemisphere. Now there is evidence that massive quantities of deadly radioactive dust are being carried inexorably southwards by the winds – it is only a matter of time before they reach the Melbourne area.

Shute’s style is plain and direct, even plodding, with a focus on minute detail, perhaps a product of his training as an engineer. All of this can combine to create quite a banal effect. However, although perhaps not intentionally, this adds to the sense of people subjected to a threat which often seems unreal and hard to believe.

The novel is essentially about how people react to this type of situation. Peter’s wife Mary lives in a domestic bubble, ever more preoccupied with planning and replanting her garden even when told that everyone in the area has only as a matter of weeks to live. From the outset, her feisty friend Moira seeks refuge in parties and alcohol. Moira’s father continues to spread muck on his farm to make the grass grow evenly and labours to construct a new fence on his land. Peter’s American boss Dwight speaks of his wife and children back home as if they are still alive, buying them presents. Overall, most people seem remarkably passive, perhaps because fatalistic. One could of course argue that to carry on regardless is the best course if there is no alternative. It is only when they actually see others falling ill and dying that some opt to risk their lives in the dangerous sport of motor racing, and the system of law and order finally crumbles

This potentially powerful theme is weakened by being somewhat repetitive, with the lengthy descriptions of the submarine Scorpion travelling thousands of miles under Dwight’s command, tasked with reporting on the scale of visible damage, together with any evidence of human life. Owing to the fear of contamination, only coastal settlements can be viewed through a periscope from a “safe” distance, with shouted messages through a megaphone the sole means of attempted communication.

The sometimes corny dialogue and dated attitudes may be an accurate reflection of life at the time, and inaccuracies over the nature of a nuclear calamity on such a scale are excusable. We may find it implausible that, for months, life in and around the small town of Falmouth seems to carry on much as usual despite a lack of petrol – a shortage of socks being one of the first signs of economic collapse to cause concern.  Yet we need to remember the problems of obtaining information and maintaining communications only a few decades before the largescale development of the internet and mobile phone.

Also, perhaps Nevile Shute’s main concern was to shake readers out of their complacency in ignoring the writing on the wall before it was too late. “On the Beach” has renewed relevance now, when increased instability in the Middle East, and Ukraine and growing tensions between superpowers feed fears of a Third World War and spark concerns over a nuclear calamity.

Despite moments of humour, I found this a depressing read, since from the outset the outcome seems inescapable. It lacks the quality of writing and insights of, for instance, “The Plague” (La peste)  by Camus to which I could relate strongly during Covid, but of course involves a less apocalyptic situation, and concludes on a slightly more hopeful and positive note.

It’s worth knowing that the book’s title was a Royal Navy term to mean “retirement from service”.  It also appears in T.S.Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men” which includes the lines:

“In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.                                                                                                                                                                                                     This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”.

Although still in print, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor seems to be generally overlooked, and perhaps on the brink of being forgotten unless some director is inspired to make a film of one of her books, as was the late Dan Ireland for “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont” in 2006, establishing this as perhaps her best-known work. Taylor was probably resigned to be eclipsed from the outset by the coincidence of sharing her name with the film star who shot to fame in “National Velvet” in 1944, shortly before the publication of the first of the author’s twelve novels, “At Mrs. Lippincote’s”.

Despite having been described as “her most sex-infused work”, Taylor’s eighth novel, “In a Summer Season”, published in 1961, reminds me of Jane Austen as she might have written if living in the 1930s-1950s. Although the tale switches between arguably too many points of view, Taylor’s heroine is wealthy forty-something Kate Heron, recently widowed after a happy marriage, who has set tongues wagging in the local community by marrying Dermot, handsome and charming, but ten years her junior, and unable to hold down a job.

The main characters are not quite as aristocratic as Austen’s, although some casually count the odd titled friend, and Kate’s former father-in-law, the crusty Sir Alfred, has been knighted for his rags-to-riches success as a factory owner. They tend to fall into two groups: well-heeled and living on unearned income on one hand, on the other, like retired teacher Aunt Ethel, or Kate’s new husband Dermot, ruefully or resentfully aware of being obliged to trade on the good will of richer relatives.

While Austen’s focus is on young women’s attempts to find suitable husbands in the confined world of country houses and the Bath Assembly Rooms, Kate occupies a spacious house with a telescope providing a view of Windsor Castle, a live-in cook, daughter at boarding school and son moodily learning the ropes in the factory he is expected to inherit. The main issue is whether everyone is correct in assuming that her marriage to Dermot is doomed to fail, the question being when and how. Combined with sub-plots, this may all sound too trivial and dated to be worth reading. Yet, as with Austen, what raises this novel above unendurable banality is Taylor’s skill in combining comedy, acerbic wit and poignancy, although her acute observations are expressed through the thoughts and dialogues of her characters rather than the explanations of an older-style, sometimes intrusive narrator.

Another difference is that Taylor is more experimental in deliberately playing down plot narration , preferring to focus on particular scenes. So it is that, for instance, the two major events in the plot are only referred to, or inferred – in fact never fully explained – after they occur. Instead, the detail lies in apparently minor scenes, like Kate’s visits to the hairdresser “Elbaire”, the uncharitable atmosphere at the sorting of clothes for the village church jumble sale, or the accepted ritual of “seeing off” the children at Waterloo Station for the autumn term return to boarding school, with the firmly repressed fleeting doubts as to the justification for sending one’s offspring away in this fashion.

From this approach, we learn a good deal about the characters’ thoughts, the degree of self-delusion, and their views on each other – generally, they are more clear-sighted about the latter than themselves. Taylor also conveys the behaviour and outlook of people living in the 1950s very vividly, although she confines herself to a narrow and privileged section of society. Of course, the world has changed so much since then, that it may be difficult for readers under say forty to feel engaged.

I am particularly intrigued by the fact that this book was published in 1961 at a time of sea change, when the author could have gone either way between a “genteel” novel which formed a natural progression on from Jane Austen, and the “kitchen sink realism” of working class drama, with the abandonment of conventions. Elizabeth Taylor chose to “play safe” and stay “in line” with writers like Barbara Pym, rather than join the ranks of the “ground-breaking” works like John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1956), Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste of Honey”, or Lynne Reid Banks’ “The L-shaped Room” (1960). Admittedly, the acute sexual desire which is what attracts Kate to Dermot is described, but she remains essentially conformist, expecting to live as an appendage to a husband, accommodating his wants, rather than seeking independent self-fulfilment. The only somewhat caricatured “modern” touch is provided by Araminta, a neighbour’s uninhibited daughter who is training to be a model in London.

Although she lived into the 1970s, perhaps “The Swinging Sixties”, the pill and certainly the Sexual Discrimination Act, to name a few changes, came a little too late for Taylor to make the adjustment to an edgier style. However, it seems that in fact she was quietly radical in her thinking. It comes as a surprise to learn that, as a young woman, she belonged to the Communist Party, and she remained an atheist and a Labour voter in later life. So, it must have been a conscious choice to omit any evidence of this from the novel, apart from Kate’s atheism which did not prevent her from making wedding “vows before the God she does not believe in, without the slightest hesitation”, to quote Aunt Ethel.

It is a fair observation that a psychological study of privileged people can be as moving and insightful as one about those struggling in poverty, and Taylor does not shy away from displaying a capacity for ruthlessness when it comes to achieving her chosen (if somewhat abrupt and contrived) ending.

What is certain is that, if alive today, Elizabeth Taylor could have written some gripping soap operas.