Month: September 2026

War – Sebastian Faulks

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I mentioned on last weeks blog that the Agatha Christie didn’t last the week in Belgium however I did have a backup, although it turned out not to be as expected. I spotted War by Sebastian Faulks in a bookshop just before I left and thought it would be appropriate as I was based in Ypres for the week so surrounded by battlefields and cemeteries for the war dead of, mainly, combatants of World War One. I’ve been meaning to read something by Faulks for some time as his reputation led me to expect great things and I wasn’t to be disappointed in that regard. But if I had looked more closely I probably wouldn’t have bought this book as it turned out to be extracts from three of his novels, ‘Birdsong’, ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ and ‘A Week in December’ but at least it gave me a chance to try his works, which is presumably the idea. The books cover three different periods, ‘Birdsong’ is set during World War One, ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ is World War Two and ‘A Week in December’ is modern times Muslim jihad terrorism in London.

Let’s start with ‘Birdsong’, the extract is forty five pages of an over five hundred page work first published in 1994 and whilst the novel focuses on, Stephen Wraysford, a young officer in the Great War, the extract in ‘War’ deals largely with Private Jack Firebrace, an ex miner who is tunnelling out from the trenches through no man’s land to undermine or bomb the German positions. This is of course extremely dangerous, not just from possible collapse of the damp soil but from enemy shelling and the ever present possibilities of meeting German’s coming the other way. The book is wonderfully written, it’s no surprise to discover that it is probably Faulk’s best known work as the extract drew me in to the claustrophobic existence of the tunnellers and the awful conditions in the trenches. The first paragraph of the extract gives a feel for the novel:

JACK FIREBRACE lay forty-five feet underground, with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing towards the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quantities of soil into a bag which he passed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to shore up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.

After a hard days digging Jack was expecting a rest but was put on guard duty instead due to shortage of men. However exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep where he was discovered and condemned to be shot at dawn for desertion of duty such was the black and white horror of World War One.

The extract that follows from ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’ is fifty eight pages from three hundred and fifty so more representative and roughly a sixth of the entire original book, which first appeared in 2016. The action in the extract takes a first person narrative of a newly commissioned officer during World War Two who is part of the British Expeditionary Force, that strange time before it was known as the British army in WWII and is forced to retreat to Dunkirk for the great small boats rescue. On his way specifically mentioning passing through Poperinge, just a few miles from where I was sitting in Ypres reading the book and where we had been the day before. This sudden intrusion into my modern experience was remarkably evocative as I imagined the hardship of the troops passing through the now lovely fields in this part of Flanders. Again it is beautifully written and when the unit are back in combat, this time fighting their way through Italy to Monte Cassino in the push to get the Germans out of Italy you really feel you are alongside the men as you are totally pulled into the narrative.

The third extract from ‘A Week in December’ is just twenty eight pages out of four hundred and the book was first published in 2009 but set in December 2007. The book itself is a satirical dealing with the money men of the City of London that were about to pull everything down in the great financial crash of 2008 and focuses on seven characters with the main one being the hedge fund manager John Veals. However the extract doesn’t mention him of five of the others being instead the story of Hassan al-Rashid whose Muslim faith has got him involved in extremism to the point that he agrees to be part of a bombing of a London hospital. I’m intrigued how this fits into the entire work so I’ll almost certainly have to read the full book at some point but of the three ‘Birdsong’ is top of my list to search out closely followed by ‘Where My Heart Used to Beat’, I definitely need to read more Sebastian Faulks.

Death in the Clouds – Agatha Christie

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I’ve just returned from a week long holiday in Belgium and looking around on my shelves for something to read whilst there I decided on the most famous fictional Belgian of all, Hercule Poirot. Oddly despite loving detective fiction I’ve never read much Christie before starting this blog and this book is one that was new to me, but I chose it on the basis that a crime mystery is always good holiday reading and so it proved. The mystery concerns a flight from Le Bourget which at the time was the airport for Paris to Croydon which was its London equivalent, this being the days before Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and Heathrow for London. Planes back in 1935 were also much smaller and slower but considerably more luxurious for all passengers than is the case today. Poirot (seat 9) is one of the passengers in the rear compartment, which was then the better section, this had eighteen passenger seats and on this flight only eleven were occupied one of which would be for the victim (seat 2) and one the murderer (seat ?, oh I’m not going to tell you that). The plot is carefully written with plenty of clues but not until Poirot unmasks the killer and their method from page 216 of 223 did I see who it was although it obviously had to be a passenger, or possibly one of the two stewards.

On the way to the solution Christie has a little fun with her profession as one of the passengers is Daniel Clancy, described as a well known mystery writer but she is clearly sending up the art of writing crime thrillers as Clancy is depicted just totally obsessed with his next novel that he fails to notice what is going on around him. He is also picked on by Inspector Japp as an obvious suspect although it is Poirot who arises the suspicion of the inquest jury as the murder weapon is found jammed down the back of his seat on the plane. So we not only have a mystery writer as a character but also the most famous of Christie’s detectives as prime suspects. The book was first published in 1935 so five years after Christie had married Max Mallowan, the noted archaeologist who specialised in the near East, and who should be occupying seats seats five and six but a father and son who are archaeologists whose primary interest were Persian artefacts. Christie also has fun with references to dull pottery fragments and digs in out of the way places and these two are also obsessed with their finds to a point of not noticing what is going on around them other than the son, Jean Dupont, killing a wasp that was flying around them which turns out to be significant.

The plot revolves around the victim, Madame Giselle, who has made a fortune lending money to wealthy but temporarily short of cash individuals and carefully holding information regarding them that would be damaging if released to ensure the repayments. More than one passenger has the potential to be one of Giselle’s clients and therefore has a motive and investigating this leads Poirot hopping between London and Paris working with both Scotland Yard and the Sûreté whilst following up leads. It was interesting to have Poirot dashing from one place to another rather than using his ‘little grey cells’ during quiet contemplation of the facts. It made a great read and needless to say it didn’t last the anticipated week as I needed to know what was going on so putting the book down became increasingly difficult.

A little bit about this well known cover, by artist Tom Adams, which stayed on the Fontana edition here in the UK for many years from June 1969 and was instantly recognisable from its ubiquity on bookshop shelves. It was clearly the inspiration for the 2008 Doctor Who episode ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’ where the Doctor meets Agatha Christie at a house party and the various guests are attacked by a giant wasp which is how it looks in the cover art. Because I hadn’t read the book before, although it’s been sitting on my shelves for many years, I hadn’t previously noticed the glaring error on the cover where the name painted on the fuselage of the plane is Hengist but the aircraft in the book is called Prometheus.

For Art & For Life – Vincent van Gogh

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This book consists of a collection of letters from van Gogh, mainly to his brother Theo, although there are other correspondents. I was at once struck by how van Gogh writes as he paints, with descriptions of people and landscapes as though he was actively setting them down on paper or canvas. Take for example a letter from November 1885 written in Antwerp, where he had recently moved and he is trying to get a feel for the surroundings that are so different from the countryside he has just left.

… with the city behind one at the end of the landing stages where the Harwich and Havre steamers lie, there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be seen in front except for an infinite expanse of flat, half flooded pasture, immensely melancholy and wet, with undulating dry reeds and mud – the river with a single small black boat, water in the foreground grey, sky misty and cold grey – still as the desert.
As to the overall impression of the harbour, or of one of the docks – at one moment it is more tangled and fantastic that a thorn hedge, so chaotic that one finds no rest for the eye, grows giddy, and is forced by the papillot-ering colours and lines, to look first here, and there, unable to distinguish one thing from another – even after looking at the same point for a long time. but if one moves on to a certain spot with an undefined stretch of land in the foreground, then one again encounters the most beautiful, most peaceful lines and those effect which Mols, for instance, so often achieves.

The artist Mols referred to above is either Florent or Robert Mols, probably Robert as his works seem to fit the description better. This extract is from the happier early times whilst van Gogh was still learning his trade and numerous letters describe studies he is making of the peasants around his countryside home and the only significant painting he describes working on is ‘The Potato Eaters’ shown below. Note the book doesn’t contain any images but I found it helpful to refer to his pictures when reading the letters that describe them.

I think the best way to review the book is to use van Gogh’s own words as I so enjoyed the letters that I’m amazed that I hadn’t come across them before. The book is an excellent replacement for the autobiography he never wrote, and would never have regarded himself as an appropriate subject for, as you get the see how he is thinking and reacting to his surroundings and ever present money troubles as paint and canvases are so expensive especially when he isn’t successfully selling any of his works. After the first section ‘Becoming an artist’ we move on to ‘The best days’ when he is at his most productive and he describes furnishing his home and hanging a series of paintings of sunflowers there, these were simply decoration to the house but now of course are some of his most valuable works. But the painting from this period I want to highlight is described below.

In my picture of The Night Cafe, I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit a crime. In short I have tried, by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red, soft Louis XV green and Veronese green with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens all this in an atmosphere of an infernal furnace in pale sulphur, to express the powers of darkness in a common tavern. And yet under an outward show of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.
But what would Mr Tersteeg say about this picture, a man, who faced with a Sisley, Sisley mind you, the most unassuming and sensitive of the impressionists said “I can’t help thinking that the artist who painted this was a little tipsy”. Faced with my picture he’d say it was a raging case of delerium tremens.

The picture he is describing so wonderfully, I love that last line, is ‘Night Cafe in Arles’ and wow has he leapt forward with his use of colour. With ‘The Potato Eaters’ he describes that it should be hung with a gold background to lift the darkness of the image but here you would need a more subdued wall colour to get the best result. In contrast Alfred Sisley is positively restrained.

The final section of the book is entitled ‘Towards the end’ and begins after van Gogh had threatened his friend Gauguin with a razor and was found the next day having severed one of his own earlobes, clearly the mental issues that would result in his suicide are starting to make themselves apparent. Gauguin sensibly left van Gogh’s house in Arles soon afterwards but this left van Gogh on a downward spiral and considering either entering an asylum or joining the Foreign Legion. The former would cost him money, which he didn’t have, whilst at least he would earn something in the army, unfortunately whilst in hospital recovering from his injury his house and studio was ruined in a flood so he would have to move at the very least. It turns out that he did move but to an asylum at his brothers expense and here he starts to understand his mental condition through contact with the other inmates and he still paints as explained in this letter to Theo dated September 1889

Aha! The Reaper is finished. I think it’ll be one of those you’ll keep at home – it’s an image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it – but the effect I’ve been looking for is – ‘on the point of smiling’. It’s all yellow except for a line of purple hills. A pale and golden yellow. I find it odd that I saw it like that through the iron bars of a cell.

The Reaper painted in the asylum in 1889, just ten months later he was dead

9th & 13th – Jonathan Coe

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I needed something short this week, the last eight books have averaged 335 pages each, which is a lot to read and write about every week. This slim volume is the complete collection of short stories by British novelist Jonathan Coe and even then it is so short he still had to add a piece of journalism to get the book to much more than a pamphlet. There are three short stories and as Coe explains in the introduction this is mainly due to how difficult he finds writing “over a short distance” and finds that even if he starts out to write a short story he gets involved in the various possibilities and ends up with a novel instead. I’m glad he included the extra article especially as it is the first time it had appeared in English, it was written for the French film periodical ‘Cahiers du Cinéma‘ (Notebooks on cinema), as I really enjoyed it. Knowing that there wasn’t much material to work with Coe originally considered making the entire volume a collection of pieces of journalism from the seven or eight years he worked in that field before the novels took over, but rejected that idea:

it provided a perfect moment to rescue some lost journalistic gems from undeserved obscurity. Having trawled through my hard disk, however, I’ve reached the conclusion that obscurity is exactly what most of that writing does deserve.

Ivy and Her Nonsense

The first story is a fictionalised version of Coe’s memories of a childhood Christmas spent at his grandparents home in Shropshire when he was seven years old, he grew up in the south west corner of Birmingham so Shropshire was only just over the border. It is clearly a happy time and the book is dedicated to his grandfather in tribute even though he did advise Coe to give up writing and get a job in teaching, but that was before he started to become successful and sadly his grandfather didn’t live to see him published. The story is told from the young boy’s perspective, so not really understanding what is going on around him, his grandmother had been on the jury of a murder trial just a week or so earlier and the adults were trying not to discuss the case in front of Jonathan and his sister whilst the children were fascinated by anything they could glean.

9th & 13th

With story two we leap across the Atlantic to New York with a piano player telling the story of how he met a young woman, new into town and what might have happened if things had gone as he wishes they had. Wonderfully this story is available in a recording where the explanation of the chord described is played, which helped me a lot as I can’t play so was struggling with the imagery. You can hear the story here.

V.O.

The title stands for Voice-over and it only becomes clear why near the end of this quite poignant love story set at a horror and fantasy film festival which William is attending as part of the panel of judges, in his case specifically with regard to the soundtrack as he has made a career as a composer. The films however are rather mediocre and not to his taste, being rather more gore spattered than his normal viewing. Coe clearly had fun coming up with unpromising film ideas, my favourite being the “hilarious necrophiliac comedy called One Corpse at a Time, Please!”, although like William I’m quite sure I don’t want to see it. We start with William being interviewed by Pascale although the interview is soon forgotten and morphs into something more serious without either of them apparently realising where it is going, the denouement is beautifully written and perfectly ends the tale.

Diary of an Obsession

Finally we reach the piece of journalism and it explores a fascination that Coe developed from childhood with an obscure film by Billy Wilder called ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’. It follows his rising interest from first seeing a novelisation of the film for sale in a Cornish bookshop in 1972 whilst aged eleven during a family holiday, and frankly the cover design with Sherlock Holmes framing a half naked woman horrified him as he loved the Holmes stories and this clearly wasn’t an appropriate interpretation. Three years later the film was broadcast on the television and he watched it, somewhat confused by the story line which seemed to jump around rather a lot but drawn in by the music soundtrack by a composer he had never heard of. Eventually over the years Coe would grow up and marry but still was drawn back to the film much to the bemusement of his wife especially after he bought a copy of the book and whilst reading it discovered that a lot was missing from the film. It turned out that studio executives had made Wilder heavily chop the film he had made to the point that it barely made any sense to the viewer and Coe then became obsessed by finding out if any of the edited out parts still exist. He wrote the article that this part of the book features in 1998, but there is a postscript as in 2004 he sent the article to Wilder himself, now aged ninety four, and asked if he could do a follow up interview. Wilder was delighted that somebody was still interested in this largely bowdlerised work but declined the interview. The article is really well written as you follow Coe finding out more and more about the film and its music over the years so I would very much like to see more of his journalism rescued from obscurity.

William Blake: Dante’s Divine Comedy – Maria Antonietta Terzoli & Sebastian Schütze

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First things first, this isn’t a review of Dante’s Italian masterpiece The Divine Comedy, rather it is a book of a whole collection of works of art by the English artist and poet William Blake. I have the Folio Society edition of Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, illustrated by Blake and when I saw this profusely illustrated volume from Taschen of all 102 of the illustrations he produced for the three sections I had to have it. Blake died in 1827 before completing the series of works and some are little more than sketches but the ones that are completed give a feel for how the complete collection would have looked like. In total he produced seventy two works for part one of Dante’s great poem, Inferno, twenty for part two, Purgatorio, and just ten for the concluding section Paradiso.

This book is split into four main sections, the first is by the head of the department of Italian Studies at the University of Basel, Maria Antonietta Terzoli, and summarises the poem along with putting it in historical context. The second is by professor of early modern art history at Vienna University,Sebastian Schütze, and looks at earlier artists works influenced by Dante including famously Michelangelo and Gustave Dore and how these could have influenced Blake in his re imagining of the work. Both of these sections are profusely illustrated by works from other artists to give context and Schütze also looks at other works by Blake. The third section is also by Schütze and consists of all 102 plates each in a double page spread, where they are compete enough, or single page where just a sketch or even just a plan as to what would be there exists set against the quote from the poem that inspired the work and a brief analysis of what is depicted. The final section deals with the handful of works where Blake completed the line engravings that would have been used if the works had been completed and printed.

The poem starts with Dante, dressed in red, walking through a wood when he is pursued by three wild animals. He meets the ghost of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, dressed in blue, who explains that Dante has been chosen to explore Heaven and Hell and that Virgil will be his guide and protector. The image above is the first of the plates by Blake and represents this encounter with the leopard, lion and she-wolf with Virgil pointing out the route to safety even if it is on a hazardous journey. The originals of the art are in seven museums and galleries around the world, this one is in The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and what I like about this book is the fact that Taschen have obtained wonderful reproductions of all the works regardless of where they are now situated so the reader can fully appreciate the skill of the artist.

The next painting I have chosen to give a feel for the remarkable art produced by Blake for this project is of Minos the judge of Hell which Dante and Virgil encounter on entering the second of the nine circles of Hell in canto V of Inferno. Minos determines in which of the nine circles a sinner should be placed. This is only part of the full work by Blake, many of the works published in the book also have full page details of them included so you can greater appreciate the skill of the artistry. Dante and Virgil are climbing up to him through a pit of flames in the bottom left of the full image, the upraised fingers of Virgil’s hand can just be seen in the selection. This example is executed in pencil, pen and ink, chalk and watercolour, whatever medium or combination of mediums Blake thought would give the effect he required, again it is in the National Gallery of Victoria

The next double page spread I have chosen is from canto 14 of Inferno by which time Dante and Virgil have reached the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell, this depicts Capaneus the Blasphemer who was killed by Jupiter for his pride that placed him above the gods. This is one of several examples in the poem where classical mythology intersects with the more basic telling of Christian belief of Hell ruled by Lucifer, who they also meet, and a heaven with Christ and angels. Virgil addresses him:

O, Capaneus, because your pride remains unquenched
you suffer greater punishment.
In your own anger lies your agony
a fitting torment for your rage.

Capaneus seems unmoved by the torment however at least in Blake’s interpretation. Yet again the original is in The National Gallery of Victoria.

As an example of one of the pictures that is not finished, although others are considerably more sketch like than this, is a depiction of the final circle of Hell, the Circle of the Traitors where in the ultimate irony they are locked in ice. The extreme right shows two figures, their hair entwined, these are the Alberti brothers who killed each other in a dispute over their inheritance. Dante includes numerous people that would be familiar to his readers at the time, around 1320. This work is in the Fogg Art Museum, one of the Harvard University Art Museums.

I’d like to go back to the cover which depicts the giant Antaeus setting down Dante and Virgil in this final circle so that they could cross the cavern surrounding this circle of Hell. The book is wonderful and whether you are interested in Dante’s great work or the art of William Blake, or indeed both as I am, there is so much to get from this volume. The production is of the highest level as you would expect from Taschen and the whole book consists of 464 lavishly illustrated pages on fine quality art paper and as such is very heavy weighing 1.59kg.