Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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 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.