Category: Book Club

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‘Until recently it could be safely assumed that Mary Anning was the most famous person many of us had never heard of’ writes Tom Sharpe in the introduction to this authoritative biography. Yet in August 2020 one of her letters was auctioned at Sotheby’s for over £100,000. And she is now part of the British primary school curriculum. In The Fossil Woman, Sharpe offers us the best explanation to date for Mary’s changing fortunes.

Mary Anning was born into a poor working-class family in Lyme Regis, on the southwest coast of England, in 1799. Despite the rigid social structure of the time, and her lack of any but the most basic education, she became a respected authority on the fossil remains of the Dorset coast before she was thirty. Many of the key scientists whose work paved the way for Darwin’s theory of evolution came regularly to Lyme to meet with her and discuss her discoveries. What drove this young woman to scour the dangerous cliffs of Dorset for evidence of primordial life whilst most of her contemporaries toiled in the local mills?

At the turn of the 19^th Century the science of the earth was in its infancy. A few geological pioneers – mainly God-fearing Churchmen or the independently wealthy – picked over the rocks of Britain and Europe trying to piece together how the earth’s land masses had come into existence. At the same time the Industrial Revolution had created a demand for coal, limestone, ironstones and other useful deposits. The search for these resources added impetus to the study of the earth, as fortunes were to be made by those who could lay claim to them. These geological investigations unveiled a landscape that was not simply a random accumulation of rock, but was built from many individual layers with a clear underlying order. Such layers could be mapped and their distribution beneath the surface predicted. Crucial to the identification of individual strata were the distinctive fossils they contained.  

Whilst entrepreneurs got rich from their new mineral discoveries some geologists began to fret about the implications of their work. How did they fit in with their religious beliefs? What were they to make of the fossils they were discovering that had no living counterparts? How could their discoveries be reconciled with the Biblical account of Creation to which most of them subscribed?    

Others ignored these theoretical speculations and busied themselves assembling collections of the newly fashionable fossils. Some rich collectors would pay handsomely for exceptional specimens. This in turn sparked a mania for fossil collecting amongst the public. Enterprising locals in towns such as Lyme Regis were quick to realise that they could supplement their income by selling good specimens to wealthy visitors. This was a potential lifeline at a time when many families lived on a few pennies per day and money was always short.

One of the first to spot the commercial opportunity was Richard Anning, Mary’s father. Though a cabinet maker by trade, he took every opportunity to explore the rocky foreshore around Lyme, often taking young Mary and her elder brother Joseph with him. Richard died in 1810 when Mary was only 11 but by then she was already hooked. Within a year she and Joseph had discovered the first great fossil that would make Lyme the focus of the new science of palaeontology. A seventeen feet monster with a head four feet long and packed with sharp teeth, was unearthed from the rocks just east of Lyme. 

This fossil was at first thought to be a type of crocodile, but was later shown to be an extinct carnivorous marine reptile christened Ichthyosaurus. It was purchased from Mary by the local bigwig Henry Hoste Henley for £23 – the equivalent of perhaps £1,000 today, a fabulous sum to the teenaged collector. Henley generously gifted the specimen to a new museum in London, the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly. There it came to the attention of Sir Everard Home, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. He published the first description of the new creature in 1814 which sent many of the leading scientists of the day scurrying to Lyme Regis.

Early visitors to Lyme soon encountered Mary who always had specimens for sale. At first she was regarded as little more than a saleswoman – the real work on these fossil animals would take place under the eyes of the experts in London. So much so that as early as 1819 when her ichthyosaur was purchased by the British Museum her status as the discoverer had already been forgotten. But Mary would not be so easily overlooked. A series of further spectacular discoveries followed over the next decade – first the plesiosaur, a marine reptile that to Buckland resembled a combination of lizard, crocodile, snake, tortoise, chameleon and whale. Then came the pterosaur, a nightmarish winged reptile. As the discoveries continued, Mary’s understanding of her discoveries developed rapidly and she impressed many of her visitors with her technical acumen.

In recognition of her contributions, some of the more (relatively) enlightened geologists who bought specimens from Mary were careful to give her credit when describing her specimens. Chief amongst these were William Buckland, eccentric first Professor of Geology at Oxford and Henry de la Beche who would become the first director of the Geological Survey. They were impressed by her scientific reasoning which led to a number of breakthroughs in the interpretation of fossil remains. She demonstrated, for example, that the odd brown-black lumps found in certain layers of rock near Lyme were the fossil ink-sacs of extinct squid like animals. She even managed to extract some of the ink with which her friend Elizabeth Philpott drew one of Mary’s fossils. On another occasion she showed that the dark twisted lumps of rock called ‘bezoar’ stones commonly found in the rocks around Lyme were actually ichthyosaur droppings. That may sound rather off-putting but these stones, subsequently renamed coprolites (Greek for ‘dung stone’) by Buckland allowed palaeontologists to understand the predation habits of ichthyosaurs by examining the fragments of bone and shell which they contained. It turns out that amongst the prey of ichthyosaurs were – smaller ichthyosaurs!

But despite her obvious talent there were simply no professional or academic opportunities for a working class woman such as Mary. Her gender and social status condemned her to remain, however accomplished, a seller of fossils to the great men of the Universities and Royal Societies. So she persevered at her precarious and trade in order to make ends meet. But years could go by without a valuable find, money was often tight – and danger was ever-present around the unstable cliffs of Lyme. Mary had several narrow escapes including one rockfall which killed her beloved dog Tray. And, as the century wore on the craze for fossils waned and prices dropped. Penury threatened on numerous occasions.    

Several of her male colleagues interceded financially at various times. In 1820 Colonel Thomas Birch, a frequent visitor to the Anning shop sold his collection at auction, raising £400 for the family. The previous year he had arrived in Lyme to find the Anning’s on the point of selling their furniture to pay their bills. Later, in 1835 Buckland and others lobbied the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to provide her with a small pension. With additional contributions from Buckland’s circle this provide an income of about £25 per year. More than a maid earned but hardly luxury.

At times Mary seemed resentful at her lot and expressed frustration at her isolation in Lyme, far removed from the scientific breakthroughs that her discoveries had made possible. And she was an exile even in her home town – her singular vocation distancing her from her more conventional neighbours. But for the most part she seems to have accepted her lot stoically and despite this solitary existence she worked tirelessly for the poor and infirm of Lyme. Then in 1842 her mother died and Mary seemed to become increasingly morose, to judge by the verses she copied out of various books:

It is that I am all alone..

Yet in my dreams a form I view

That thinks on me and loves me, too;

I start and when the vision’s flown

I weep that I am all alone 

(Henry Kirk White, Solitude)

Not long after her mother’s death Mary developed breast cancer from which she died on March 9^th 1947. Fittingly she is buried in St Michael’s Churchyard in Lyme, close to where many of her discoveries were made.  As Sharpe notes ‘Her death did not pass unnoticed’ but neither did it unite the country in grief at the passing of a great mind. She was, however, appropriately commemorated by the Geological Society of London which had made her an Honorary Member a year earlier. In his Anniversary Address to the Society Henry de la Beche paid tribute to her, noting that she ‘contributed by her talents and untiring researches in no small degree to our knowledge of the great Enalio-saurians and other forms of organic life in the vicinity of Lyme Regis’.

However, in the years following her death Mary’s legacy began to fade; her role in in these seminal fossil discoveries was largely forgotten, her old fossil shop was demolished and all but one of her notebooks were lost. With these material testaments to her life and work gone, she receded into the background as just another minor character in the history of science. 

To what then do we owe the resurgence of interest in Mary Anning? The main elements of her story had been known for 150 years when she finally found popular esteem around the turn of this century. Sharpe is surely right in suggesting that the struggle for female equality must be a factor. Mary’s story bears powerful witness to the stultifying effects of socially and sexually stratified society in which working class women were at the very bottom.  Once women had gained a foothold in the workplace a more determined search began to identify their unjustly neglected predecessors – and there was Mary patiently awaiting acknowledgement. 

There is also the subject matter itself. Lyme Regis was the epicentre of the exciting new science of palaeontology when Mary was making her discoveries. But major breakthroughs in other fields, particularly physics and biology shifted the focus of public attention, leaving palaeontology as something of a backwater. In recent years however, animatronics and CGI have brought the prehistoric world dramatically to life in films such as Jurassic Park. This combined with the dramatic discoveries of beautifully preserved feathered dinosaurs from China led to a resurgence in interest in fossil animals.

Finally, for those for whom the science is not enough, there is the life. Survivor of a lightning strike at the age of fifteen months; one of only two children to reach adulthood out of a family of nine; dead at forty-seven of an illness essentially untreatable at that time – Mary’s story is brim-full of tragedy, suffering and triumph over seemingly insuperable odds.

Tom Sharpe tells this story in clear no-nonsense prose. Unlike Mary’s previous biographers such as Patricia Pierce¹ or Shelley Emling², he is himself a geologist and thus well placed to evaluate Mary’s achievements. Thus he points out that whilst her discoveries were important in themselves, it is in her careful studies of these fossils that her scientific originality is best demonstrated. For example those analyses of ink sacs and coprolites showed Mary pioneering the use of comparative anatomy and palaeoecology – fields that would prove central to understanding the history of life.

Sharpe’s careful scholarship also clears away some of the mythologizing that has inevitably gathered around Anning’s name. This is important at a time when filmmakers and writers are adapting her legacy for their own agendas. He shows for example that there is simply no evidence for the supposed love affair with Charlotte Murchison that features in the recent film Ammonite. The well chosen illustrations also help bring the story to life.

If I were pressed to find something missing in Sharpe’s account I would perhaps suggest that he could have made more of the tension between religion and science that Mary’s discoveries intensified. As noted earlier many of the fossil hunters were devout Christians. Yet the science they were pioneering posed an unavoidable challenge to the Biblical account of Creation. Buckland and others attempted at first to explain the fossil record by relating it to the Universal Flood. As this became increasingly untenable they reinterpreted the seven days of creation as seven geological epochs that culminated in the creation of mankind. But none of these ingenious formulations convinced for long and they were swept away when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859.

What did Mary think of all this? To what extent was she aware of Buckland’s ingenious arguments? Was she aware of the various evolutionary theories that were ‘in the air’ long before Darwin’s definitive account appeared twelve years after her death? She remained an active Church-goer all her life but surely someone who had peered unflinchingly into the abyss of time must have felt that tension between her religion and her science? Perhaps we will never know; or perhaps those missing notebooks will be rediscovered and cast new light on this intriguing woman. Until then Sharpe’s book can be heartily recommended as the best introduction to her life and work. 

1. Jurassic Mary – Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters. Patricia Pierce 2006. The History Press.
2. The Fossil Hunter. Shelley Emling. 2009. St. Martin’s Griffin, New York. 

So I finally managed to finish The Heart’s Invisible Furies after months of struggle. I loved the first couple of chapters but gradually lost patience with the story-line. This is my attempt to explain why.

This is an ambitious book that follows the life of a gay man from conception to terminal illness in old age. It is by turns brilliantly funny, tragic, annoying and overly sentimental. It tells the story of Cyril Avery against a background of a bigoted hypocritical Ireland dominated by the Catholic Church; a liberated Amsterdam with a sleazy underbelly; and a New York fearful of the 1980’s AIDS epidemic. It ends full circle in a modern Ireland somewhat less bigoted than half a century earlier.

The first few chapters describe how Cyril was conceived and given up for adoption by a teenage single mum who was ostracised by her family and community. For me this was the best part of the book. Despite the tragic storyline the text is littered with brilliantly funny dialogue and great characters in an Ireland seemingly run by lecherous Catholic Priests. Cyril’s birth during a violent assault in which a man murders his gay son is quite terrifying.

Cyril’s early life with his eccentric adoptive parentis also endearingly told as is his crush on, and adventures with, the dazzling Julian Woodbead. But somewhere around here I began to fret over the profusion of outlandish characters, the reliance on coincidence as a plot shaping device and the number of impossibly handsome men in Ireland. The frequent appearances of real historical politicians and writers is also somewhat double-edged. Many younger readers will probably have little recollection often such major figures such as Charles Haughey or Brendan Behan far less the more obscure figures who make an occasional appearance.

The core of the book revolves around Cyril’s attempts to find some sort of fulfilment as a gay man in a country where homosexuality is illegal. The convoluted attempts to connect with other gay men and the sometimes rather sordid nature of his ‘relationships’ convey convincingly the desolation and desperation of Cyril’s struggle to find sexual and emotional release.Ultimately Cyril moves to Amsterdam and meets Bastien. His quest for a meaningful relationship ends triumphantly…until another shocking hate-crime ends Bastien’s life.

If the story had ended hereabouts it would have been a heart-felt portrayal of a young gay man’s search for acceptance in a bigoted and hostile world. But there is still an awful long way to go. I for one found the story after Bastien’s murder in Central Park increasingly implausible. Several episodes just did not ring true or seemed completely superfluous to the story. A couple of examples: Cyril, in his pre-Amsterdam days, unable to admit his homosexuality to Julian’s sister Alice, succumbs to her advances and marries her only to run away as soon as the vows are exchanged. As this was the second time that Alice was dumped at the altar it is not hard to imagine the damage to her self-esteem – and her attitude to Cyril. And yet, when they meet again years later the tone quickly becomes one of offended jocularity which simply fails to convey the emotional chasm that should separate them. Or, there is the chapter where Cyril reluctantly goes on a date with a young, thrusting (and married) Irish MP. Other than to make a trite point about the venality of politicians of every era the point of this chapter entirely eluded me.

I won’t say anything about the ending other than I found it somewhat bizarre. So – my overall impression is of a book full of great ideas but where the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps overambitious is the word. In short a very good book let down by too many peripheral episodes.

It is difficult to review a book if you are not sure what happened in it. This is where I stand with Janice Hallett’s whodunnit concerning the murder of Samantha Greenwood. The Appeal is not so much a story as a very long puzzle. As such it would have helped if the answer, as in those puzzles in the Sunday papers, was printed on the final page. Anyway, unsure if my guess is correct, I find myself rather frustrated after four hundred odd pages of careful (although clearly not careful enough) reading. So instead of a review this is a request for clues from those who are sure they have figured it all out.  First, let me explain where I was left at the end – then hopefully someone nudge me towards what I missed.

I assumed that somewhere in all these texts and e-mails there would be proof-positive of the guilty party. But if it’s there I didn’t find it. I saw quite a few clues that to me pointed to one person. Nothing though that would stand up in a court of law. Part of the problem is, as QC Roderick Tanner himself noted, that what is written in all this correspondence need not necessarily be the truth. Are we actually meant to be able to come up with one culprit or is ambiguity part of the game ?

So, I think the justice system got it wrong – an innocent person is in jail. I won’t say exactly why because I don’t want to give too much away until I hear some other ideas. But the only real clue, it seemed to me, comes down to two texts which contain the same phrase ‘sixth sense’. There is also an exchange of messages between James Hayward (eventually jailed as the guilty party) and Isabel Beck on July 5 (after the murder but before the body is discovered) that seems to me to prove he is innocent. Or am I mis-reading this?

One other thing that bothered me but that I never resolved. James’ announcement of the birth of his twins spells his name wrong – Haywood not Hayward.  Meaning ???

Anyway can people first post up what they think are the key clues to see if we can all get to the right answer ? Once we are agreed on that we can add comments.

Reading a book about an epidemic in the midst of a supposed pandemic cannot but influence one’s take on the story. Nemesis recounts an (actually fictitious) outbreak of polio in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944. At that time the virus that causes polio had been identified but the discovery of an effective vaccine was still more than a decade away. Polio epidemics were therefore greatly feared, the more-so because the disease saved its worst attacks for children and adolescents. Roth immerses us in the atmosphere of fear and anger wrought by this invisible assassin. Old prejudices are reinforced as anything and everything – Jews, Italians, hot-dog parlours or the mentally retarded are blamed for the epidemic. This visceral fear and suspicion feels a long way from Britain 2020 where fights over toilet rolls in supermarkets, or police arresting pensioners for protesting, contribute to the unreal atmosphere of a ‘pandemic’ where the average victim is over 80 years of age. 

But if the polio epidemic provides the backdrop to this story, it gradually becomes clear that Roth’s real interest lies elsewhere. The ‘hero’ is a young sports instructor called Bucky Cantor. Bucky’s mother died in childbirth and his wastrel, thieving father took no role in his upbringing. Instead Bucky was raised by his grandparents, God-fearing, hard working Jews who raised Bucky to be a ‘real man’. In Bucky’s eyes that meant standing up, and if necessary fighting, for what was right. 

When we first meet Bucky his self-esteem has already taken a battering because he flunked his army medical due to his chronic short-sightedness. So whilst his school buddies are now off fighting the Germans, Bucky is left in Newark teaching sports to the local kids during the summer holidays.  He is idolised by the kids because of his athleticism and friendly nature. His reputation increases still further when he single-handedly faces down a group of Italian youths who come to his sports field to make trouble at the outset of the epidemic. But Bucky is not able to bask in hero-worship as an outbreak of polio soon begins to target his youngsters.

Within days of the outbreak one of his kids is dead and another is in critical condition. Bucky is badly shaken by these events and cannot comprehend how they can happen in a God-fearing world. Nevertheless he continues to do the right thing, visiting the relatives of the stricken children and continuing with his classes in the face of the polio threat. But his equanimity takes a further pounding when the mother of one of the stricken children shrieks at him that it is all his fault. Although understanding that this is just grief talking, this nevertheless causes the devil of guilt to start gnawing at Bucky’s conscience.

Whilst all this is happening, Bucky’s girlfriend Marcia is working at a summer camp in the Pennsylvanian hills – an idyllic spot far from the overheated cities where the epidemic is raging. She naturally wants Bucky to leave the city and come and join her at the camp, but Bucky feels it his duty to show solidarity with his kids by staying in New Jersey.

Anybody who has read Philip Roth’s earlier enfant-terrible stuff (e.g. Portnoy’s Complaint) will surely find this plot a bit staid. Both Bucky and Marcia are good, upstanding young people who embrace the values and standards of the society they were born into. Bucky is frankly a bit dull and his excessive sense of duty a touch exasperating. In fact one begins to feel that Roth has rather let down his characters in his eagerness to preach to us through them. The message, put into the mouth of Bucky’s prospective father-in-law, a folksy-wise doctor, seems to be that ‘a misplaced sense of responsibility cab be a debilitating thing’.

So it is eminently predictable that Bucky will abandon his responsibility to his city kids and run off to Marcia – and equally predictable that he will suffer for it (why else is the book called Nemesis). And so it comes to pass – after a mainly idyllic first week at the camp (dampened somewhat by episodic outpourings of guilt), polio arrives and the innocence of the summer camp is destroyed. Worse, Bucky is himself struck down with polio and comes to believe that it was he who brought it to the camp. He doesn’t quite say that it is pay-back for abandoning his kids but you get the picture.

The rest of the story is told in retrospect 27 years after the events. This again makes the story feel like a little morality tale where the key ‘take-aways’ are now highlighted for us. Bucky could not face being the vector of the polio outbreaks and so sentenced himself to life without happiness. He abandoned Marcia, despite her protestations, and spent the rest of his life alone enveloped in his guilt. It is true that Bucky suffered physical deformity from his bout of polio – the disease attacked both his left arm and his legs, as well as twisting his spine. But the real deformity was in his mind.

We find this all out during conversations with one of his former charges, Arnie Mesnikoff, who chances upon him in the street all those years later. Arnie too has been disfigured by polio but he has still managed to carve out a good life for himself, running a successful business, marrying and having children. But even he cannot convince Bucky that there is life after tragedy if only you will embrace it.

In this final retrospective section Roth’s writing is more literary and powerful than in the bulk of the book. Deliberate or not, this only emphasises how bland much of the writing is. Roth was in his late seventies when the book came out (2010) and it may be that he was just too distant from those young people to bring them to life. And what of all the nudges to the Greek classics – Nemesis, hubris, Odysseus, Hercules? I must say they didn’t really cast any particular light on the story for me. I get it that Bucky was brought down by a combination of misfortune and his ‘exacerbated sense of duty’. Bucky discovered that the world was chaotic, indifferent and beyond his control. That is something we all have to learn eventually – it’s called life. The real cause of Bucky’s demise was not fate. Rather like a Shakespearean hero he was destroyed by a fatal flaw – not greed, or ambition or suspiciousness but simple stubbornness. But if Shakespeare’s heroes are tragic Bucky is merely pathetic. And therein lies the real failure of this story.

Who has not thought about what it would be like to be immortal? To wield supreme power over humanity and shape the fates of men. To be able to turn those who would harm you into pigs! For good or ill such powers are the preserve of gods not mortals. Madeline Miller oonders these themes amongst many others in a beautiful reworking of the Greek myths in her second novel, Circe.

Circe is a minor deity who features in Homer’s Odyssey as a foil for the Greek hero Odysseus on his ill-fated journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan war. But here she takes centre-stage and casts a new light on Odysseus and many others from Homer’s cast-list. Many reviewers have characterised Circe  as a modern feminist take on Homer but to see it through that narrow prism is to diminish the originality of the book.  The power of the story hinges on the fact that Circe is a god who feels compassion for her fellow beings – she is empathic where most gods are indifferent or avaricious. 

Her unusual nature inevitably creates friction with her fellow immortals, especially her father Helios. Her first act of rebellion is to console the Titan Prometheus who has been condemned to perpetual punishment for sharing the secret of fire with humans. But it is when she discovers she has rare powers, and uses them to change her love-rival, Scylla, into a monster that she brings Helios’s wrath down upon her.

Fearful of offending Zeus who is alarmed by Circe’s (and her siblings) strange new powers, Helios banishes her to a remote uninhabited island, Aiaia. There she learns from bitter experience that men can be as callous as gods. She offers hospitality to exhausted sailors who chance upon her island – but in return they assault her. Taken off guard at first, she gets her revenge by turning her assailants into pigs.

Her faith in humanity is maintained by encounters with several remarkable men. Amongst these are Daedelus, Jason and Odysseus. Daedelus is the most admirable of these men but her relationship with Odysseus is perhaps the most interesting. Homer portrayed Odysseus as a great hero –flawed yes but on the whole a force for good. Miller emphasises his more ambiguous, dark side – making it obvious that Odysseus could not have survived his many ordeals without immense stores of cunning and ruthlessness. She compounds this with a darker ending to his story, based on the Telegony, a lost epic of unknown origin. This tale culminates with Odysseus’ fateful encounter with Telegonus – his son, albeit unknown to him, by Circe.

Her brushes with mankind work great changes upon Circe. At first she views humans as we view fireflies –  fleeting creatures, no sooner born than returned to dust. When she falls in love with one (the poor fisherman Glaucus) she thinks that making him immortal will bring her happiness. Sadly Glaucus proves no more constant than the other gods. 

Later, now exiled, she still frets that the men she befriends will soon die. It is not until she bears a son – Telegonus – by Odysseus that she begins to think there may be more to life than immortality. When the powerful goddess Athena demands Telegonus’ life Circe defends him with every last ounce of her strength and wit. Suddenly the short life of her son seems more important than an eternity in Helios’s palace. Later when she meets and falls in love with Telemachus, Odysseus’ elder son, she finds more reasons to value the short and messy lives of mortals. 

By ending her story with the Telegony, Miller gives a new twist to Homer’s tales  of war and warriors. Her Odysseus, having returned to Ithaca and been reunited with his wife and son, finds little satisfaction at the end of his journey. Unable to reassume his former way of life, or connect with Telemachus, he spends much of his time away from Ithaca fighting other battles to – battles in which he often acts with extreme brutality. A modern reader might diagnose post traumatic stress disorder. So much for heroes.  

Long before, Odysseus had refused the goddess Calypso’s offer of immortality. This was his truly heroic act. Circe, in falling in love with Odysseus’ son, also came down on the side of mortals. Given the choice, who among us could resist the temptations of Olympus?

 Patricia Highsmith is the doyenne of a certain type of ‘noir fiction’ where her protagonists (it is not really possible to call them heroes) although not gangsters, nevertheless operate outside the normal social and moral standards of their society. The epitome of this type of misanthropist is Ripley, memorably brought to the big screen by Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich and Matt Damon amongst others. But before Ripley, Highsmith tried her hand at a prototype in her very first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), itself made into a film by Hitchcock.

The proto-Ripley in this tale of unravelling murder, is a feckless young alcoholic called Charles Bruno. The spoiled offspring of  rich but unloving  parents, he resents his father who does not splash out the family cash to him quickly enough. On the other hand he is overly close to his mother who indulges his self-destructive behaviour whilst making half-hearted attempts to get him to clean up his act. Charles is also obsessed with murder stories, another unhealthy trait that his parents do little to eliminate. He is especially drawn to those murders where the perpetrator has managed to evade capture, or even suspicion. He sees that a critical element of these ‘successful’ murders is often the apparent lack of motive. His interest is driven, at least in part, by his wish that his father were dead, so that he could get on and help his mother spend the family fortune. Obviously Highsmith was an eager student of Freud.

Charles’s Oedipal hatred takes concrete form when he meets another young man, Guy Haines, on a long train journey to Texas. Guy is initially reluctant to get drawn into conversation with Charles, who he suspects (rightly) is quite drunk. But he lacks the will power to resist Charles’ insistent overtures of friendship. Reluctant at first to engage, he eventually reveals rather too much about his precarious marital situation.

His tongue loosened by drink Guy tells Charles that he is on his way to see Miriam, from whom he is currently trying to get divorced. Miriam, it appears, is a rather shallow young woman who likes to play around and whom Guy has come to hate. However, Guy is worried that some unforeseen complication may postpone the divorce and hinder his pursuit of happiness with his new love Anne. This fateful conversation sets in motion a plot that will consume them both.

For whilst to Guy his criticism of Miriam may have been no more than drink-fuelled bar-room talk, to Charles it was the answer to his prayer: how to get rid of his father. Charles suggests that they each murder the person who is in the way of the other’s happiness. Since Charles has no connection to Miriam and Guy none to Charles’s family neither will ever be suspected of involvement in the crimes. Guy of course thinks this is nothing but drunken bravado on Charles’s part and when they part at the end of the journey he never expects to see or hear from Charles again….

From here the story proceeds with grizzly inevitability. Whilst Hitchcock insisted on presenting Guy Haines as a good man pushed to the brink by the psychotic Bruno, Highsmith’s original is much darker and more complex. Partly through guilt and partly through weakness Guy is pulled further and further into Bruno’s  scheme. He has multiple opportunities to bring the saga to an end but he fails to take any of them. The interesting question for me is – why?

Guy is portrayed as a text-book example of a successful American in the post-war years. He is a celebrated architect and, even if his first marriage has been a failure, he has a wonderful future to look forward to with the rich and cultivated Anne. So why does he allow all this to slip away? The answer, it seems to me, is that despite having easy access to conventional wealth and success there is an emptiness at the heart of Guy: he doesn’t seem to believe in anything. You see this in the casual way he initially turns down a job that many architects would kill to obtain – or the way in which repeatedly considers ending his apparently happy relationship with Anne.

On the surface Guy is simply a conventional, if talented, man brought down by contact with evil. But if he was susceptible to being corrupted by a pathetic drunk like Bruno it was because of that emptiness at his core. Where did that come from? Was it perhaps that the American Dream itself was rotten? That there was simply no moral centre to a society where success was measured exclusively in dollars? So that when someone comes along with a compelling if repulsive proposition Guy simply has no convincing reasons for saying no?

Whether you buy this interpretation or not, the book is a compulsive read about a man who is powerless to prevent his moral disintegration. In her later books Highsmith choose to concentrate on the Bruno’s of this world, mainly in the form of Tom Ripley. But whilst these sociopathic monsters undoubtedly have a macabre appeal, it is the rest of us, the people like Guy, who hold society together. He shows us just how tenuous modern society really is.

So I finally got round to reading ‘The Color Purple’ but I’m not really sure what I think of it. The story of a young black girl, Celie, in the American south in the first half of the twentieth century, it concentrates on her domestic and personal life with little consideration of the larger, segregated America still coming to terms with the abolition of slavery.

Celie’s early life is for the most part wretched. If blacks were at the bottom of the American social ladder, then black women were its lowest rung.  It was a world in which violence, rape and even incest were an ever-present feature of women’s lives. Most of the men portrayed are ignorant, feckless bullies. Marriage is for the convenience of the man with most women contracted essentially into a life of drudgery. They are worn down by constant pregnancies and old before their time.

Celie suffers all these indignities, including being raped and made pregnant by the  man, Alphonso, she believes to be her father. Worse, the resulting two children are casually disposed of by Alphonso. She is then married off to a man who doesn’t love her and regularly beats her. Celie could easily be forgiven, then, for simply giving up on life..but that is not what she does.

She is sustained by the love for her absent sister Nettie who she never gives up expecting to see again – despite the fact that for many years there is no evidence that she is still alive. She is equally sustained by her relationship with a flamboyant  singer, Shug, who shows her there can be more to life than the daily drudgery she is used to. With Shug’s support she starts a little business of her own making trousers (‘pants’ as the Americans like to call them). The business is a success and gives Celie a degree of both self-worth and independence.

Meanwhile we are given an insight into Nettie’s life through the letters she continually writes to her sister, even though there is no evidence that any ever arrive. Nettie finds work with a missionary couple who have adopted Celie’s two discarded children. She ends up in Africa trying to convert a native tribe – the natives are hospitable but see the missionaries as an irrelevance to their lives.  This view is borne out when the villagers’ land is destroyed by white colonists over whom the missionaries have no sway. 

Over the years Celie becomes reconciled to her husband who comes to recognize his failures as a husband and father and belatedly starts to reform, so enabling bittersweet reconciliation. Despite reports that she had been drowned, when German U-boats torpedoed the ship bringing her home, Nettie appears at the end, complete with Celie’s adopted children, to provide us with a happy ending.

What to make of all of this? In some ways it is an uplifting story. Celie’s journey from downtrodden poverty to contented independence is obviously a story that many readers find inspiring. It is consoling to know that even under the direst of situations the human spirit can still triumph. But it rather seems to me to be a small victory in a big bad world. The younger generation at the end of the book seems no better than the one that made Celie’s early life such a misery. And no one in Celie’s world directs their rage against the unjust society in which they live.

Perhaps we can get a glimpse of Walker’s attitude to societal change from Nettie’s story. Her life as part of a missionary family is a frustrating failure. The Olinka tribe are set in their ways and resent the missionaries attempts to change their culture. They are particularly resistant to the attempts to educate their girls. In the Olinka world women have a tightly defined but clearly subservient role – but even the grown women cleave to this role and simply want their daughters to follow in their footsteps. Conformity is the watchword of this society – as it is of many others.

Change only comes to the Olinka when external forces in the form of colonialism sweep away their way of life. Future generations will live a marginalised existence, either retreating further into the forest or making a precarious living in a white-man’s world. So much for progress.

Most of us, I suppose, are more like Celie than Nettie – we find ourselves in a world we didn’t ask to be born into and simply get on with it. We recognise social injustice but it is too big a problem to solve. And there are many more immediate concerns. The world is full of quietly heroic people  for whom making life bearable on a daily basis is enough. Perhaps it is their recognition, in Celie, of  a fellow-spirit that made this book such a success. 

Last month’s book was supposed to be The Colour Purple but I have to confess that I have not yet read it, so cannot yet offer a review. I will try to do so in the next week.  My excuse is that I was overcome by the coronavirus – not infected for those of you who might be concerned; rather obsessed by how the virus has been spreading and how countries and governments have been reacting to it. So I ended up reading a bunch of books about epidemics and plagues rather than the one I should have been reading. But for those of you who would like a different perspective on global pandemics some of these books might be quite useful, so I thought I’d briefly write them up.

What is most interesting in all the books discussed below is not so much the plagues themselves as how humanity reacts to them. Many of the themes that dominate these works are already apparent in how we are dealing with coronavirus because they deal in eternal human characteristics. From incompetent or blundering leaders to fraudsters and spivs who try to use the situation to exploit the vulnerable – from heavy handed policing to people snitching on their neighbours – it has all been seen before. And so these books might offer you a clue as to how society will evolve in the coming weeks if we come anywhere close to the worse-case scenarios.

The first and oldest book is Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal  of the Plague Year’.    Published in 1722 this is written as a first-hand account of the  ‘Great Plague of London’ which occurred in 1665, the year before the Great Fire. A largely factual account of one of the greatest tragedies ever to befall London (it seems to me much worse than The Blitz), it spares no detail in its descriptions of the sufferings of the London poor.

Defoe castigates the many villains who added to the misery of the people. The city was awash with fraudsters offering quack-remedies that prised the last pennies from the fingers of the poor and wretched. Miserable men, supposedly, of god denounced the suffering for bringing retribution on their heads in payment for their sins. Gravediggers and neighbours stripped the clothes and jewellery from the dead.  Meanwhile those with money and resources fled the city, taking the plague with them.

But Defoe is also at pains to emphasise the heroic work of both the authorities and the people in facing up to the catastrophe. Simply digging enough graves to bury the dead was a titanic achievement. Some measures were terribly cruel but necessary – houses with known cases of ‘distemper’ as it was sometimes known were shut up with the residents inside and guards on the doors. In many cases of course this was a death sentence even if it benefitted the larger population. Compare the suffering of your ancestors with the inconvenience you are currently experiencing as you sit comfortably on your sofa watching Netflix!

The most celebrated of all novels about pandemics is Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ (La Peste in the French original). Set in French Algeria in the early 1940’s, the story is an allegory on Nazism but, more than that, it is a meditation on mankind confronting existential threats.  As in Defoe, Camus considers the range of human reactions from those stoically doing their duty to others who exploit the situation to make money by smuggling, and those who simply want to run away. 

One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Father Paneloux, the Jesuit priest. At first he reacts like the clergymen in Defoe and denounces his congregation for bringing the plague on them by their wickedness. But his own faith is sorely tested by the pestilence, notably when he has to watch an innocent child die of the plague.

Another fascinating character is Jean Tarrou whose father was a prosecuting attorney in the days when France still had the death penalty. Tarrou was haunted by the day that he accompanied his father to court and watched him demand ‘the head’ of the accused man – ‘the head’ being literal rather than metaphorical as the man was subsequently guillotined. Camus puts some of the most memorable words in defense of human compassion in Tarrou’s mouth. Disgusted by the death of this wretched convict in the name of justice, Tarrou  outlines his philosophy to the ‘hero’ of the novel, Doctor Bernard Rieux, as follows:

“All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence”.

Another French novel which unfolds during a pandemic is ‘The Horseman on the Roof’ by Jean Giono. This is set in 1832 in Provence which was one of the areas worst hit by the cholera pandemic of 1826-37. Like Camus, Giono uses the pandemic as a metaphor – he views fear of the pandemic as worse than the pandemic itself. Thus the brave hero, the hussar Angelo, appears to be immune because he is unafraid…but I will gave more to say about this when I have finished the book.

There are countless dystopian films and books set in a future ravaged by plague and disease. I tried a couple of these as an antidote to the novels already discussed which were based on real events in the past. The first of these was ‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel. Set in a near-future in which 99% of the human race has been wiped out by a devastating flu epidemic, the novel takes a look at the lot of the survivors. With so few people left there in no way to maintain any of the basic processes which kept the modern world working. Gradually everything that represented civilisation comes to a stop. No more prepared food, no mobile phone network, no petrol, no electricity, no heating, no air-conditioning. This is a future as envisaged by Extinction Rebellion! 

Seriously, although rather uneven and with too many flashbacks to the pre-pandemic world, this novel generates some genuine queasiness about what it would be like to find that everything that we all take for granted suddenly stopped functioning. Naturally there are the usual armed bands wandering everywhere as what is left of society collapses into an ‘every man for himself’ nightmare. But it is the adjustment to a world in which a flick of a switch no longer produces light  that gives most pause for thought.

Finally I realised if I were ever going to read a Stephen King story it was now or never. So I started with his monstrous (in size 1300 pages!) ‘The Stand’. Again set in the present or near-future this tells of a humanity largely wiped out by the escape of a virus from a US army lab…but as I still have a thousand pages to go I’ll say more about this one another time.

What all of these books have in common is a catastrophe that is infinitely worse than the epidemic we are currently enduring. Read one of the books as an antidote for feeling sorry for yourself.

There is an implicit suggestion in the title of this novel that we all face the same predicament as that of the hero, Richard Novak. Living a sterile existence in the hills above Los Angeles, his succesful pursuit of mammon has severed him from almost all human contact and estranged him from his family. Aren’t we all to some degree guilty of putting material success before happiness to the detriment of our quality of life?

The scales fall from Richard’s eyes after a mysterious attack of severe pain leads him to think he could die at any moment. The pain passes but Richard’s epiphany endures. His response is to act in a kinder and more generous way to the people who he encounters in his daily life. Through a series of improbable adventures he begins to reconnect with a world that he had unthinkingly left.

This is an entertaining and wildly inventive story but it does suggest that Los Angeles really is another planet. I don’t think I’ll visit. Some of the episodes that Richard gets involved in stretch credulity to breaking point – a car chase where he rescues a naked kidnapped girl; or a violent confontation with his son that threatens to end in quasi-Oedipal sexual assault.

The Los Angeles that Richard, as the new Everyman, encounters is a wild assortment of rapacious salesmen, workmen and phoney lifestyle gurus – contrasted with eccentric but fundamentally good, immigrants, put-upon mothers and artists. In trying to help those who deserve it, Richard appears to spend a vast amount of money whilst being wildly generous with the use of his car, his house and himself. Even a stray dog gets the run of the house as no deserving case can be turned down.

Inevitably Richard had lost all contact with wife, son and extended family – more inevitably the son is on a road trip that will bring him and his father into violent collision, where years of neglect need to be atoned for by acts of superhuman understanding.

Through this ordeal by benevolence Richard emerges a better, though presumably poorer person. The story is not neatly concluded though as several loose ends are left deliberately untied. And LA too gets its just desserts, though I won’t spoil the ending by telling you how. 

Did this book save my life? Not exactly, perhaps I’ll contact Richard and ask for a refund.

Why do some books make a profound impression on you whilst others leave you cold? A Perfect Spy is well written, competently plotted and full of well-observed characters. It deals with profound human issues – can one ever really know another human heart? Why are we loyal to spouses, friends, countries or ideologies? How will we react under extreme conditions? If someone had given me a potted summary before reading the book I would have expected to enjoy it. And yet..I reached the end of this book entirely indifferent to the fate of the nominal (anti-) hero Magnus Pym.  The question is why?

Part of the answer, I think, is the sheer length of the book. I remember at about page 300 wondering when le Carré intended to get to the meat of the story. No doubt he felt that the long account of the picaresque life of his con-man father, Rick, was critical to how Magnus turned out. But it felt to me that le Carré had written two separate tales which never truly came together; the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Another problem is the relentless detail, which seems to pour out of le Carré’s pen (or laptop) like water flowing over Niagara. At first it feels exhilarating but soon the thrill of all this verbal fecundity becomes frankly tedious. To take but one example at random, did we really need to know of Rick’s Ascot mansion that it had ‘white fencing running down the drive and a row of tweed suits louder than the admiral’s, and a pair of mad red setters, and a pair of two-toned country shoes for walking them, and’…so on for page after page. I had to keep reminding myself that this story was being written by Magnus in hiding, expecting at any point to be found and probably killed by one side or the other.

The core of the story revolves around how and why Magnus agrees to become a double agent. I couldn’t see any evidence that he found the other side (the Czechs, as if it mattered) morally superior to his own. Morality didn’t seem to come into it. Or perhaps there was an element of personal morality, or at least guilt, as the agent who recruited him was a German whom he had betrayed as a young man. Whatever the reason, Magnus chose a path that required him to deceive and betray everyone he knew until the inevitable day when his defection would be discovered.

Perhaps it’s the Cold War setting that is part of the problem. All that spying, what did it really achieve? Did it have any role in bringing down the Berlin Wall or was it all just a ridiculous, if occasionally deadly, side-show?  After reading this book I have to conclude that I don’t really care.