This is my review of Vile Bodies (Penguin Modern Classics) by Evelyn Waugh.

Does the classic which brought him fame and fortune show why Evelyn Waugh was described in his lifetime as the most important British writer of his day? Certainly, his style is very articulate and witty, although at times a little too silly and dated for modern tastes. This is a darker version of P.G. Wodehouse, with a failure driven to sudden suicide, and a young woman who implies sex by talking about the pain it gives her.

Readers will differ as to which passages they find the funniest. For me, apart from those I cannot give away, it was the exaggerated but telling description of the motor race to which the "hero" Adam and his friends are invited. "The real cars that become masters of men, those creations of metal who exist only for their own propulsion through space, for which the drivers clinging precariously at the steering wheel are as important as his stenographer to a stock-broker."

In the loosely structured plot which seems to be a staccato succession of incidents not necessarily "going anywhere" we are introduced to the "bright young things" of the 1920s. They are hedonistic, selfish, lacking in direction, engaged in a haze of party-going – "Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties…parties where one had to dress as somebody else…..tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and smoked crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London, and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.. Those vile bodies."

But beneath all the frivolity there is the sad undercurrent that these young people reject the values of the older generation who sent their children to die in the First World War, but have nothing in which to believe instead. Since this book was published in 1929, Waugh is quite prescient in foreseeing the next world war which is the "Bright young things'" fate. As the Jesuit Father Rothschild observes – the author never having met a Jesuit at the time – "…there is a radical instability in our world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions."

Waugh was quite critical of the book, one cannot know how sincerely. The more sombre nature of the second half and Adam's brittle relationship with Nina may reflect the fact that Waugh's first wife, "She-Evelyn", left him for a so-called friend whilst he was writing "Vile Bodies", a blow from which he found it hard to recover. It is interesting to speculate just how autobiographical some of his books were, with many of the characters modelled on people he knew.

What troubles me a little about "Vile Bodies" is not being sure just how ironical Waugh intended to be. He was himself a heavy drinker, a socialite and a snob who looked down on "the masses". Perhaps he was a creature of his times, but one cannot help feeling that he was a clever man who, as in this case, frittered his talent on fairly lightweight themes.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer.

Having admired years ago Nadine Gordimer's anti-apartheid novels which won her the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was impressed to find that, approaching ninety, she is still writing, dissecting the state of "free" South Africa.

This is the tale of a mixed-race couple adjusting to a world in which they no longer need to conceal their relationship, but also find that the freedom to make choices and lead a "normal" life often highlights cultural differences they did not notice when plotting undercover dissidence, plus there is the growing realisation that their new black leaders succeeding Mandela are often deeply flawed and corrupt, to such an extent that it might even be preferable to emigrate, the supreme irony in view of what Steve and Jabu have sacrificed for their country.

Although I wanted to like this book, to learn from Gordimer's deep knowledge and insights into South Africa, the stream of consciousness style proved a barrier that soon became insuperable. When I managed to tune into the fragmented phrases alternating with garrulous paragraphs, I could see that I was being enabled to sense the characters' diverse, fleeting thoughts as directly as if they were my own. However, the reading process becomes an exhausting labour rather than a stimulating pleasure, with the too frequent distraction of phrases that are oddly convoluted to no purpose, and dizzy-making switches from one heavy subject allusion to another.

Gordimer's style seems to have evolved over the decades, so one has to assume the current phase is deliberate. The prose reads as if written or typed "as it comes" without any attempt at honing or editing. In the end, I decided with great reluctance to abandon the effort for the time being – a great pity since there is a need for thought-provoking novels on the new South Africa based on first hand observation and understanding.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan.

This opens with Grace Winter on trial for some unspecified crime on board a lifeboat after the sinking of a luxury liner en route from England to the States in 1914. We expect murder at least and possibly cannibalism. Since a plea of insanity may be the best option, Grace is asked by her lawyers to write a detailed account of events on Lifeboat 14. This is a good literary device, although it requires the reader to suspend disbelief that a recent survivor of a prolonged trauma would be capable of producing such a coherent and analytical record – Grace may of course be an unreliable narrator.

Charlotte Rogan is very ambitious in her decision to interweave Grace’s recollections of events on Lifeboat 14 with those of her earlier life, aboard the ship before it sank, and details of the trial afterwards. This courts the risk of defusing moments of high drama and the effects of the oppressive hardship on the lifeboat, day after day, as well as that of confusing the reader. In the event, I found the gradual revelation of events intriguing, even if it was disappointing to find some threads unresolved rather than somehow woven into the denouement.

I agree with reviewers who feel that the full horror of the experience is at times underplayed, but the author succeeds in showing the changing relationships between the passengers, the shifting power play, the way gossip morphs into facts which can be used to depose a failing leader. Although these issues could have been developed more fully, Rogan prompts us to reflect on what makes a survivor, the extent to which the normal codes by which we live are a veneer, the situations in which killing some people to save a large number overall could ever be justified.

I found this book a page turner, despite reservations that at the most dramatic points, or when discussing complex philosophical points, the prose, although clear and accessible, does not seem quite equal to the task, if you set the bar at a high level. I did not mind Grace’s rather pragmatic, analytical approach nor the lack of the kind of crazy, poetical fantasy one finds in the lifeboat of “Jamrach’s Menagerie” since Grace’s thinking represents that of a “born survivor”. This is intimated by her honest admission that, after the financial ruin of her husband, she planned the seduction of the wealthy Henry Winter away from his long-term fiancée to marry her instead.

I felt that the quality of the writing tails off a little in the final chapters which seem a little too disjointed. The book might have benefited from being longer to give more scope to develop its complex themes, or perhaps it would have been enough to work more on the prose in some key chapters.

As a first novel, this is very impressive. For plot and insight, this book scores highly and the prose is just adequate to sustain these.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.

"My name is Serena Frome….and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn't return safely. Within eighteen months…I was sacked having disgraced myself and ruined my lover."

These opening sentences hooked me, although I might have preferred not to know all this information in advance. Then, I found myself trying to engage with Serena as I waded through page after page of dense description of the "telling" variety, in the voice of a sixty-something, upper middle-class woman looking back to her early life with a somewhat cold objectivity as if writing about someone else – a voice which I did not find quite convincing (an interesting point to debate when you have finished the book). Small things bothered me, such as the way Serena always referred to her father as "the Bishop", or did not bother to go to one of his services during a visit home at Christmas. Surely even an atheist daughter would make it to a carol service for old times' sake? Or her parents would have had something to say?

I kept reading only because the writer is the celebrated Ian McEwan, and being about the same age as him and Serena it was interesting to be reminded of the political and social ferment of the `70s which I did not fully appreciate at the time, so I wonder how much Serena's lists of events and comments on them mean to younger readers.

This novel seems to fall between three stools. Presented as some kind of spy thriller, it proves somewhat low key and unexciting. This could be realistic in that a young woman in the MI5 of the 70s was likely to be given only mundane tasks, but does not make for a great read. As a sometimes polemical take on the life and times of the 1970s, this novel might have made more impact as a series of Jonathan Raban type essays. It may succeed best as being in fact another sort of novel altogether about the art of writing. In this respect, Serena's analysis of her lover's ingenious short stories provides one of the most interesting aspects of the novel, although I felt no doubt unintentionally patronised by the suggestion that someone like Serena who loves reading but has never studied English may be impeded by not knowing how to "read" a challenging text.

The final twist may redeem the book a little, but I did not find "Sweet Tooth" as original as say "Enduring Love" nor as well-constructed as " The Innocent".

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Lighthouse (SALT MODERN FICTION) by Alison Moore.

In an attempt to take his mind off his failed marriage, the oddly named Futh (this appears to be both a German surname and urban slang) leaves England for a short walking holiday along the Rhine, but this only gives him too much time to brood on his sad childhood, dominated by his mother leaving home when he was about twelve. On his first evening at the ominous-sounding Hellhaus – literally "light house" – Hotel, Futh meets Ester with a parallel tale of an unhappy marriage and the price of passive acceptance of life.

In deceptively simple, plain and painstaking, unpretentious prose, Alison Moore dissects Futh's appearance, his thoughts, motivations, the events which have shaped him. All this is conveyed through his memories, behaviour, conversations with others, so we may come to different conclusions since the author never tells us what to think. Even the dramatic climax is ambiguous.

I believe the author has had success writing short stories, and this is very evident in the way that most incidents are like small, self-contained stories in their own right. In what is still a relatively short first novel, Moore has managed to produce what proves to be a tightly-structured overarching narrative, even if Futh seems to be bumbling around, often lost, much of the time.

Some readers have found Futh intolerably dull and the novel too mundane, but you could argue that the whole point is to make a very ordinary and in some ways unappealing man the subject of a story which may have all the pathos and ironical chain of cause and effect of a more flamboyant tragedy. Moore displays the power of an understated story, on a par with a first-rate minimalist painting or musical score.

There is perhaps a little too much symbolism e.g. the heavy use made of Muriel Spark's description of "the tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks" or the Venus flytraps. I admit this is not a page-turner, except towards the end when I knew that the "something bad" indicated at the beginning was about to occur. If you like action-packed thrillers or romance, this is not the book for you. It is also deeply sad, definitely not "feel-good", although Futh's continual failures – even the ducks don't want to eat his bread- is just about saved from becoming unendurable through the narrator's frequent flashes of wry humour. At times, I was reminded of Mr. Bean.

I agree that it is hard to believe that Angela would marry a man like Futh, but since she is seen through his eyes, we know he is too damaged himself to be capable of empathising with her or grasping the complexity of the emotions which drove her to marry him. In the same way, his perception of his relationship with Kenny is clouded by his own emotional stunting. All this may demonstrate the subtlety of Moore's writing, when you pause to think about it.

I admire this novel without much liking it, and suggest it as a good choice for a book group if you are interested in discussing the craft of writing, debating what makes a good ending, and understanding polarised viewpoints.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Swimming Home by Deborah Levy.

A beautiful, mentally sick young woman is caught swimming naked in the pool of a French villa rented by a famous poet, his dysfunctional little family, his wife's old school friend and her unappealing husband. Why is the young woman invited to stay when this is so clearly unwise? Just what form will the inevitable resultant tragedy take? Or will it simply prove to be a lightweight farce?

Although this may not be an entirely original scenario, there is plenty of scope for a compelling drama for which the author creates a cast of potentially interesting characters. The plot is revealed obliquely, in short chapters with continually changing viewpoints, disjointed scenes like fragments of glass which are often quite surreal. This approach may be what led to the Man Booker shortlisting, but combined with a style that flits in a sometimes jarring fashion between parody and caricature, psychological drama and even a touch of magic realism, the result left me feeling unengaged with and unmoved by the main characters, although I thought the adolescent Nina and the lonely old doctor observing them all from her balcony were well drawn.

At first, I was annoyed by the author's habit of telling the reader too soon and too baldly what is going to happen. I later realised that she is often setting red herrings in our path, which could be quite clever, except that the climax proves too abrupt and inadequately foreshadowed and explained. Then the final chapter seems too much of a sentimental footnote.

I think the book may improve on a second reading, but it was seriously marred for me by a lack of subtlety in the development and some surprisingly gauche prose, which read as if the author wrote what first came into her head without any reflection and redrafting. These factors would have caused me to give up midway if the novel had not been so short and Booker-listed. I believe that Deborah Levy has achieved success as a playwright and perhaps this story would work well on the stage, although it would be hard to create the sets for some of the locations which add flavour to the story.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif.

Lonely and at a loose end after her return to Cairo, Amal assists the thirty-something American Isabel Parkman to translate some of the papers left by her great-grandmother Lady Anna Winterbourne who married an Egyptian nationalist a century before at a time of great political unrest when Egypt was still "under the yoke" of the British Empire. Fascinated by Anna, Amal begins to reconstruct her story, although it is often hard to know where fantasy ends and real scenes from the past begin. To a lesser extent, she applies the same approach to Isabel's meetings with Amal's suave elder brother with whom she is becoming infatuated.

The prospect of gaining a perspective on Egyptian history and politics seen through the eyes of an Egyptian woman, the author Ahdaf Soueif, is what drew me to this book, although I agree that the combination of somewhat soft-centred romance with serious historical and political comment may cause it to fall between two stools. The theme of examining love affairs between different cultures across generations against a complex political background is very ambitious, and perhaps the price paid is that the reader's attention is stretched over too many people, rather than engaged with a few fully developed central characters.

The author's style may be typically middle eastern and therefore all part of the experience to be gained, but I found my growing impatience with it a real barrier to reading the book. Despite my strong desire to like this novel, I felt smothered by its embroidered wordiness, the often banal dialogues and overdetailed descriptions as a substitute for dramatic action, the convoluted structure clanking back and forth in time. At one point Soueif goes off at a tangent on the nature of colour and the impossibility of defining the point at which, say, blue becomes green. Why not simply express this fascinating idea in a few pithy words on the lines of, "How strange that one cannot see exactly when blue turns into green"?

This is, as a reviewer described another of her books, an acquired taste. If you enjoy long, slow, rambling, gentle even in the midst of violence, reflective family sagas with frequent little digressions this may well appeal. Also, apart from its length, this could be a good choice for a book group as it provides scope for discussion of both plot and style, and is likely to divide opinion.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of A New Life (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Bernard Malamud.

I owe my discovery of Bernard Malamud to Jonathan Raban's quotations in "Driving Home" from "A New Life" to capture vivid impressions of the landscape in the area round Seattle, such as the wide skies in which the clouds are "a clash of horses and volcanoes".

Drawing on his own experience of working in Oregon Community College, Malamud introduces us to city bred Levin, who tries to escape from New York, where a sense of failure drove him to drink, by seeking a new life teaching English in the parochial world of a vocational college in the mythical state of Cascadia. Malamud describes with wry humour Levin's frustration over being forced to teach grammar from the soul-destroying primer which has enriched the ageing head of department who is so dime-pinching with his staff.

After a halting and wimpish start, Levin begins to gain confidence, but it is not until events begin to unravel that he realises that he has lost the sense of "being in control" which he briefly enjoyed. We sense from the outset that things are unlikely to work out well for the accident-prone, awkward Levin. Acute loneliness will drive him to unwise liaisons, and his desire to achieve something in his life will cause him to stand out from the herd at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Yet, by describing Levin's personality and thoughts in such detail, Malamud brings him alive as a man for whom we can often feel sympathy, even respect.

"Flight flew in him. He wasn't fleeing yet fled, unable to determine whom he was running from, himself or X. He blamed the flight, paradoxically a pursuit of feeling, on the fact that too much had happened in too short a time."

Published in 1961, the writing is on the cusp between an older style of presenting events in strict order, with detailed explanations, and a more modern directness about e.g. sex, and passages of near poetry, with a touch of "stream of consciousness". Malamud has a knack for comical situations, all the more so for being unexpected, his dialogues are realistic, and his observation of people razor sharp.

In the well-constructed plot, incidents along the way return to haunt Levin, creating at times a real sense of tension. You know that the most you can hope for is a bittersweet ending, but you care about Levin and want him to achieve a new life, even if not what he had planned.

This is a true classic, one of the novels worth keeping to reread and extract all Malamud's wisdom. I think he may be one of the greatest C20 American writers, yet one of those most at risk of being forgotten.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont: A Virago Modern Classic (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor.

This well-structured tale of an elderly widow seeing out her days in the 1960s as one of a group of lonely and under-occupied paying guests at a London Hotel may not sound a very engaging theme. Everything hinges on Elizabeth Taylor's renowned skill as a novelist. From the outset I was struck by examples of her original, acerbic wit, and strong sense of the humour of the incongruous. We are told that our heroine Mrs Palfrey "would have made a distinguished-looking man and sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag." She had a "magnificent calm" and was "unruffled" to find her first home as a young bride "more than damp" from the floods "with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her".

Depressed but stoical in the company of the small-minded, gossipy group of paying guests, who tend to use cruelty, alcohol or eavesdrop "with ears sharpened by malice" to assuage their own loneliness, Mrs Palfrey is saved by a chance meeting with Ludo, a charming and essentially decent young penniless writer. For all her conventional past, Mrs Palfrey is attracted by the young man's natural sense of mischief and vitality, without losing her commonsense. United by a surprising and unexpected friendship, they do each other good turns, although would Mrs Palfrey be quite so well-disposed to Ludo if she knew she was a source of notes for his first novel based on her own comment on the Claremont Hotel, "We aren't allowed to die here"?

The book is inevitably a little dated in reflecting the prejudices of early sixties Britain, but any real weakness lies in scenes like the fraught drinks party which descends into pure farce. Although witty, this lacks the subtle observations and real insights into the mixture of small joys, sorrows and missed opportunities of ordinary life which mark most of the novel.

Despite the room for optimism in an ending which leaves something to your imagination, this is a sad book. It is not only a portrayal of old age as a time when one feels useless, superfluous and often in pain, but also a comment on how an exaggerated concern with convention and respectability can limit one's life unduly. Elizabeth Taylor died comparatively young in her early sixties, and was perhaps glad to escape the darker or drearier aspects of ageing.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The Rum Diary (Bloomsbury Classic Reads) by Hunter S. Thompson.

Written when the author was little more than twenty and based on personal experience, this is the tale of Paul Kemp, cynical, hard-drinking journalist who takes up a post on the San Juan Daily News, a rag produced on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

At first I was reluctant to read this book group choice, imagining it would be a prolonged drunken rant. Although said to be an example of "gonzo" journalism – "bizarre, crazy, exaggerated, subjective and fictionalized style" to use a dictionary definition, from the outset I was struck by Hunter Thompson's remarkably spare and lucid, razor-sharp style ( for one who is rarely sober) and the sense of anticipation that something interesting is going to happen. In fact, the book is short enough for one not to feel let down by the slightness of the plot which is not really the point.

As you might hope for a reporter, Thompson is very strong on creating a sense of place : "old Spanish Puerto Rico..where one part of the city looked like Tampa (Florida) and the other ….like part of a medieval asylum". The whole paragraph is much better than this but too long to quote. Or there is the description of his drive to a friend's house during which he encounters for the first time the native Puerto Rico: "I was not prepared for the sand road.. I went the whole way in low gear, running over land crabs, creeping… through deep stagnant puddles, bumping and jolting in ruts and chuckholes…"

This is a backwater that attracts conmen, petty crooks, failures and drifters, like Kemp – all at times subjected to his remarkably perceptive analysis for such a young man. The author describes very effectively the kind of disillusion with small town America that drives a man to travel the world, uncertain what he is seeking, often making astute observations, but always a rootless outsider.

At times I grew tired of the drunkenness, which led to some unsavoury if realistic incidents: the looting of a liquor store during a carnival, which reminded me of the UK city riots of 2011, or a man casually beating up his girlfriend. I could not work out whether the chauvinism displayed to some extent by Kemp and even more so by his wild colleague Yeamon was an unconscious product of the 1950s or meant to be a parody of male insensitivity.

I could not say that I liked this book, but the quality of the writing impressed me. I could have wished he had applied this talent to a less drink-sodden world. He would probably have said that the rum helped him to write. Yet he was all too aware of the "quiet deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing" and perhaps being wasted, but he lacked the will power to avoid this.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars