Fiction

“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.

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?

“Persuasion” by Jane Austen: standing the test of time

Jane Austen’s heroines tend to be very young and destined for love and marriage, Anne differs in being twenty-seven, so considered “on the shelf”, her youthful beauty faded by regrets and resignation, and only the prospect of a dull life, undervalued by her vain, snobbish father and elder sister, and exploited as a convenient companion and childminder by her self-centred younger sibling. Aged nineteen, Anne allowed herself to be persuaded by an older friend to reject the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer whom she truly loved, because he was penniless and socially inferior to her, a baronet’s daughter. His subsequent success in the navy, returning to England with wealth gained from capturing vessels from the French during the Napoleonic wars, causes her to regret this decision.

Perhaps more able to empathise with Anne than with her younger heroines, Austen provides a subtle psychological study of Anne’s various emotional stages as she realises that her path is like to cross with Wentworth’s, since he is related to the naval couple who rent the hall which her father is forced to let, as the least embarrassing or inconvenient way of paying the debts he has accrued through extravagance. We see her apprehension that others will know of her past relationship with Wentworth, her feelings when she hears what Wentworth thinks of her – that she has changed beyond recognition, which is hardly a compliment – and how the two manage to maintain a cool politeness in the company of others – and so on. Austen is probably expressing her own views, when she has Anne argue that women are more constant than men in being true to another’s memory.

“We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined and our feelings play upon us. You are forced on exertion. You always have a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back in the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”

In this example of quite a deep conversation with a man, showing mutual respect, when he observes,
“Songs and proverbs all talk of women’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men,”

she replies, “….Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything!”

This sounds remarkably modern.

It is a world of stifling social conventions, underlain by prurient gossip, and frequent scheming for personal gain. There are fascinating insights into Regency life. On the whim of a headstrong daughter, moderately wealthy characters who do not need to work for a living can drop everything for a trip to Lyme (Regis). The journey of 17 miles takes so long that it is worth staying there overnight. The ridiculously vain Sir Walter Elliott looks down on Admiral Croft, his tenant, for his ruddy seafaring complexion, while the latter cannot abide the large mirrors which dominate Sir Walter’s former bedchamber. Two of Jane Austen’s brothers were Admirals, so she had a good understanding of life at sea, if only hearsay, and of the position of naval wives – both in being left alone for months, unsure their husbands would return in times of war, and in making the choice to join a voyage as the only woman on board, in order to spend more time with their husbands.

Despite its rather contrived plot, this novel has more depth than I had remembered, and deserves to be more widely read.

Howards End by EM Forster: accepting our differences

In what was to prove the end of an idyllic period for the leisured English middle classes just before the outbreak of World War One, E. M. Forster captures the tensions and lack of “meeting of minds” between two middle class families with very different roots and attitudes: the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The intellectual Schlegels get away with appearing a bit unorthodox since they are half-German, that is “foreigners”. They are idealistic within their cocoon of privilege, living comfortably on inherited money. The much wealthier, pragmatic, materialistic Wilcoxes have built a fortune “in trade” and have no compunction about “keeping the workers in their place”. As Henry Wilcox observes,
“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years…the hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom”.

Through a fateful meeting of the Schlegel siblings with the bookish, music-loving clerk Leonard Bast, Forster portrays the rigid class divide of the early 1900s. Too poor even to afford a decent umbrella, too decent to abandon the ageing, former prostitute lover who has latched on to him, unable to regain a foothold on the ladder of respectability when he loses his job through no fault of his own, it proves too hard for him to win acceptance and pursue his interests.

Howards End seems an unlikely place for the Wilcoxes to live, being a somewhat unfashionable place in the depths of the countryside, based on Forster’s own childhood home, “Rooks Nest House”. It turns out that this belongs to Mrs Wilcox, a rather unsatisfactorily vague, two-dimensional character, dismissed as “uninteresting” by Margaret Schlegel’s chatterati friends. She exerts a calming influence on her family, but is not the woman one would expect Mr. Wilcox to have chosen for a wife. It seems that she is the “guardian” of a house which is the almost mystical symbol of an idealised way of English life that is fast disappearing at the turn of the C19 century. Knowing that she is terminally ill, she appears to hold, but never clearly expresses, the belief that Margaret Schlegel is more suited to own the house than the soulless, capitalist family into which Mrs Wilcox has married. The implications of her decision form an important part of the plot.

It may be surprising that, when widowed, the patriarch Mr. Wilcox falls for Margaret, the plain, serious-minded elder sister who has devoted herself to her orphaned siblings to the point of risking becoming an old maid. It is understandable that she seeks “a real man” in the form of Mr Wilcox, even though the two are clearly fundamentally different in their attitude to life.

The main characters, at least on the “middle class” side, are well developed. Margaret’s younger sister Helen, impetuous with a hint of instability, plays the role of the character prepared to challenge the system, but ill-equipped to cope unaided when “it comes to the crunch”. Brother Tibby provides a further contrast as the hypochondriac, wimpish bookworm cosseted by his sisters, who do not seem to resent the fact that, being the male child, he is the one to go Oxford.

Written at the end of a prolonged period of social stability and convention, but foreshadowing some dramatic changes, this stands out as one of the first “modern” novels, quite radical and original in certain respects. The story proceeds with some unexpectedly humorous moments and a sense of real connection between the characters in the form of conversations to which one can relate. Forster focuses on the relevant scenes, confidently omitting any superfluous “linking” chapters. Perhaps he can be forgiven for drifting occasionally into overblown Victorian-style philosophising.

This is an engaging family drama, with some profound insights which repay rereading. It can be read at two levels: either an Edwardian soap opera, or a quite complex amalgam of Forster’s deep reflections on the nature and future of English society, the differences between people and the ultimate need for tolerance. Although the characters may be a little wiser at the end, the wry truth remains that in any crisis the poor and the underdogs will tend to be the ones who lose out, but hints of the approaching war suggest that the escapist paradise of Howard’s End may not last.

Le Serpent majuscule (The Grand Serpent) by Pierre Lemaître – Should fictional cruelty be kept within certain limits? Discuss!

Pierre Lemaître became an internationally bestselling author on the basis of his ingenious if far-fetched, macabre, “romans noirs” crime fiction. So his switch to historical novels via “Au revoir là-haut” (The Great Swindle) did not please all his fans. The decision to publish in 2021 Le Serpent majuscule (The Great Serpent), his first novel, written in the nineteen eighties, is apparently an attempt to make amends.

With only minimal editing, this “rings true” for its period. It’s a world without mobile phones, social networks, surveillance cameras, centralised computer records and advanced use of DNA: in short all the sophisticated technology now available to trap a serial killer.

The interest in psychology which runs through Lemaître’s work is already evident in this first novel, focused on the two main characters, Mathilde and Henri. These are psychopaths who applied their skills to a noble cause in the French Resistance, but whose ruthlessness in peacetime is channelled into contract killing for financial gain. For some, the suspense lies in whether and how Mathilde, with her alternating periods of mental astuteness and signs of dementia which make her an increasing liability for Henri to employ, will emerge triumphantly, escaping her just deserts.

Promoters of the book have no trouble in culling phrases from reviewers, like Le Figaro’s, “Délicieusement immoral”, but as his “Avant-propos” or foreword shows, Lemaître is keenly aware of many readers’ reservations over his casual erasure of characters to whom they have become attached, and he seems perhaps surprisingly anxious to defend himself. I take his point that misfortune and bad luck are “what happens in life”, so why fight shy of including them in a novel? He also argues that since it’s predictable that crime novels will contain bloodshed, perhaps sensitive readers should simply avoid them.

Overall, Le Serpent majuscule repelled me with the sheer degree of its clinically described gratuitous violence, wreaked not only on fellow-villains but also on the few decent and potentially interesting characters. The dispatch of individuals by shooting or bludgeoning, be it for unexplained reasons, in error, or as “collateral damage” in the course of pursuing another target, became tedious. Mathilde’s confused and contradictory thoughts became repetitive. Between the bursts of brutality, the narrative drive often seems plodding.

Apart from the obligations of a French book group deadline, what kept me going was the chance to learn some more of the idioms and ”argot” with which this novel is peppered in the French version.

I may persist with the historical trilogy, “Les enfants du désastre” which starts with “Au revoir là-haut” set in the First World War and its aftermath in France. This would seem a less unedifying use of one’s time, also displaying better Lemaître’s development as a writer.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: provoking thought

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.

“On the Beach” by Nevil Shute

“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”.

“The Stolen Heart” – The Kyiv Mysteries by Andrey Kurkov: “Why the heart is not meat”

The Stolen Heart” is the second novel in “The Kiev Mysteries” series, set in 1919 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Samson Kolechko is a young detective, tasked with his older colleague, renegade priest Kholodny, to gather evidence of a normal activity which it appears has suddenly been declared a crime: “the illicit slaughter of livestock and violation of the decree of the ExProfFooCom banning private trade in meat.” It seems that Kurkov, with his preference for black humour and farce as a way of debunking authoritarian regimes could not resist using an actual example from the period.

As is often the case with crime novels, the questioning of those who have bought meat from the agent Briskin, held on remand, grows repetitively tedious, yet perhaps this serves to add to the flavour of senseless times, with Kiev increasingly under the control of the Red Army, and sinister Soviet secret police organisation, the “Cheka”, dedicated to combating “counter-revolution and speculation”.

One of the strengths of “The Silver Bone”, which contributed to its longlisting for the International Booker Prize, was its portrayal of life in an atmospheric old city which has been suddenly overturned by uncertainty, arbitrary violence and acute shortages of substances as basic as salt. A scene in “The Stolen Heart” portrays an enraged cabby whose vehicle has just been rammed by a village cart, abruptly withdrawing his complaint in return for a few pounds of the cart’s load of salt. However, by this stage, the reader has “got the picture” and wants something more.

Although “The Stolen Heart” has received some good reviews, I was left with three main reservations. One is the heightened surreal aspect which first appeared in the previous novel: Samson’s severed ear, which mysteriously shows no signs of decay, is kept in a Monpensier (luxury sweets) box which can be hidden in convenient places for eavesdropping on useful conversations audible to Samson despite being some distance away.

Secondly, there are too many incidents which remain unresolved, and it was only on reaching the last page, to “The end. But to be continued”, that I realised that each book in the series is like a long episode, rather than a freestanding tale in its own right. The result of this is that the “denouement” tends to be underwhelming, and aspects remain irritatingly unclear if one has forgotten some detail in the previous novel.

I also found many of the dialogues quite unconvincing, and the descriptions overloaded with banal minor details – while the major ones too often remain obscure, and written in a distracting style which reads like a too literal translation – yet the translator has won prizes for his work, also writes reviews, his own fiction and teaches in university English departments. So perhaps he is retaining the style of the original Russian. The effect of the frequent odd or ill-chosen turns of phrase is that one does not engage so strongly with the characters. But is it meant to be a kind of Eastern European “absurdist” style intended to be part and parcel of the satire?

Just occasionally, there are moments which ring true, generally involving Samson, as when he reflects at a very inopportune moment,

“Could it be said then, that Samson loved Nadezhda in German? Reliably, calmly?

Samson considered this. The idea of loving in German did not appeal to him. The world war that had ended the previous year gave it a cruel, bloody connotation.

No, he decided. He loved Natasha respectfully rather than calmly. While she loved him pityingly”.

Is it a printing error that the map of Samson’s Kyiv, 1919, bears not a single place name apart from the River Dnipro? I would like to have been able to locate the streets and squares named so precisely – perhaps they were too long to fit legibly on the page.

Kurkov’s success as a writer appears to have been enhanced by his courage, albeit through the medium of satire, in exposing the corruption of post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. My admiration for his debut novel, “Death and the Penguin”, inspired me to embark on the current series. I plan to try “Grey Bees”, the tale of a beekeeper living in Ukraine’s Grey Zone between rival forces in the current conflict.

But I don’t think I shall return to find how life works out for Samson and Nadezdha, although their names suggest that it will be well.