Category: Reviews

The Phantom Atlas – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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Edward Brooke-Hitching is one of the researchers for the very popular and long running BBC quiz programme QI also known as the QI Elves and turned his love of unusual trivia into his first book ‘Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports’. The Phantom Atlas was his second publication, coming out in November 2016 and very much draws on his love of maps and his own incredible collection of them. Since then he has done three more atlases, one of which ‘The Golden Atlas’ which illustrates famous explorers routes with contemporary maps, I also have in my library. This book however is particularly fascinating as it deals with places that don’t exist yet made it onto maps either in error or in some cases as deliberate fakes. The first of these I want to highlight from the book was one I already knew about and that is The Mountains of Kong.

As can be seen from the map above there is an apparently unbroken line of mountains running across the entire African continent and variations of these appeared on over forty maps by various different cartographers probably starting with James Rennell in 1798. The map illustrated here is by John Cary from 1805 and shows the Mountains of Kong running right across from almost the west coast to eastern Africa and the equally fictitious Mountains of the Moon which were believed to be the source of the River Nile. It was not until 1889 when Louis Gustave Binger gave a talk in Paris and explained that he had been to the site of the Mountains of Kong and not only were there no mountains but there wasn’t even a decent sized hill in sight. However of the over fifty places described and illustrated in detail in the book this is the only one I already knew about, a 6,000km range of mountains that were regularly mapped for almost a century without actually existing being possibly the largest geographical error you can get.

Most of the errors with islands that simply don’t exist is down to faulty navigation and the rediscovery of islands already mapped in their correct location but some are simply works of fiction including at least three islands ‘discovered’ by Benjamin Morrell, one of which he named after himself.

Morrell’s Island along with another of his fakes, Byers’s Island survived on charts for well over a century and both even made it through the British Admiralty’s 1875 cull of 123 islands from their charts that they didn’t believe existed although three of these turned out to exist after all. It is details like this that make Brooke-Hitching’s book so fascinating, he also has sections of the fabulous beasts included on various ancient maps such as Blemmyes a race of headless people with their faces in their chests that appear on the Nuremberg Chronicle map or the Sea Pig from The Carta Marina. It is the vast array of old maps illustrated in the book that are its prime interest to myself, I have a few old maps but nothing like the collection that Brooke-Hitching has to hand. One final example from the book shows just how far back this false history goes with the Cassiterides which the ancient Greeks believed were where the Phoenicians sourced their tin.

The map above is from 1694 and includes the Tin Islands as they became known as a somewhat enlarged and moved version of the Isles of Scilly which was pretty close to reality as the actual source was Cornwall, the English mainland county just to the east of these islands.

There are lots more examples of dodgy geography in the book which is well worth acquiring if you have any interest at all in maps, at over 250 pages it superbly covers its subject and from the acknowledgements at the back it is clear that Brooke-Hitching does indeed own a lot of the maps featured in his work. The book was published by Simon & Schuster who have also published Brooke-Hitching’s other works.

The Time Machine – H G Wells

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First published in 1895 The Time Machine largely created a whole new genre of fiction, for this was the first use of the phrase ‘time machine’ applied to a device to enable time travel and the first time such a machine was described. I bought my edition new in 1975 and because the title story is basically a novella, being just under one hundred pages long, the book also includes another of Wells’ short stories ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, more of which later on in this review.

Throughout the book the main protagonist and inventor of the machine, is simply referred to as ‘The Time Traveller’, no other name is given and indeed only one of the characters we meet at the start and end of the story, which is set in what was then the present day, i.e. late Victorian London, is named, if we get anything for the others it is simply their professions. The story starts with ‘The Time Traveller’ hosting his weekly dinner club of friends and producing an intricate model of what he claims, to pretty well universal disbelief, is a time machine, placing it on a table he adjusts a lever and it vanishes. He then leads the incredulous small party into his laboratory and shows them the almost complete full size version. He explains that he will complete it in the next few days and will tell them all about his adventures at the following weekly gathering. He arrives late for this meal and is clearly dirty, injured and limping so he apologises, goes to wash and change and then after ravenously eating his fill heads off to the smoking room to tell his tale.

The story he tells of a journey into the far future to the year 802701 where he meets a race of small people called the Eloi who appear to have an idyllic lifestyle, eating the abundant fruit growing all around them, living in huge partially ruined buildings and having no need to work or otherwise stress themselves. It soon becomes clear however that they are terribly afraid of the dark. The Time Traveller however has a very specific and different fear, which is that in the morning when he goes back to his machine he finds that it has disappeared and he is therefore trapped in the future. The descriptions of how The Time Traveller gradually works out what the true and terrifying situation that the Eloi are in and the dangers posed by the subterranean Morlocks who had taken his machine is wonderfully done. You can see him slowly working out the real relationship, after several false starts, between the two races that have descended from man as he knew it and the disgust he feels at his conclusions until eventually he manages to retrieve his machine and escape.

The various radio, TV and film dramatisations of the book have varied wildly in their use of the original material so I recommend reading the story as Wells intended. It’s an extremely good tale and as I wrote at the start of this review it gave birth to a whole genre of travellers in time using a machine of some sort to do so.

The illustration on the cover is by Alan Lee now best known for his work as conceptual designer, with John Howe, on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films but is a book illustrator par excellence see the Folio Society limited edition of The Wanderer I reviewed back in early 2020. As I would expect from an artist with his attention to detail the machine and indeed the attacking Morlocks are exactly as described in the book.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles

Also set in late Victorian England, this story was first published in 1898, we have if anything a more amazing tale than ‘The Time Machine’ as we follow the misadventures of a man who unexpectedly finds he has developed miraculous powers. Mr Fotheringay starts the tale in a bar where an argument was unfolding regarding the impossibility of miracles to demonstrate his point he gets agreement that the oil lamp in front of them would not be able to continue functioning normally if it was upside down and then says “Turn upsy-down without breaking, and go on burning steady”. To everyone’s amazement, including his own, the lamp does exactly that, but he finds that he has to expend considerable mental effort to hold it like that so it soon crashes to the ground. This was his first miracle but would definitely not be his last.

Fotheringay experiments with his power when he returns home and in the morning continues outside with ever wilder attempts which he sometimes gets wrong by not wording exactly what he wants to happen precisely. Until when surprised by a policeman whom he had accidentally hit with his stick he sends him to Hades and then repents and decides to move him to San Francisco presumably because it is far away and marginally better than Hell. Ultimately, again whilst not considering his words fully, he causes massive death and destruction and realising his mistake for his last miracle returns everyone and everything back to the bar just before he upturned the lamp and also removes his ability to perform miracles. It’s a really fun story and again Wells is experimental in his style with a fantasy story set in his present day,

I always associate Wells with late Victorian times, possibly because of books like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds both of which were written in the 1890’s but he wrote throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, dying in 1946 at the age of 79. Until writing earned him enough money to give up he mainly worked as a teacher, indeed he was A A Milne’s first science teacher. The Time Machine was his first novel but he had been writing short stories and journalistic articles for several years before that honing his skills that would make him a world famous author.

Confessions of a Bookseller & Remainders of the Day – Shaun Bythell

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Shaun Bythell’s first book, ‘The Diary of a Bookseller‘, was one of the very first books I reviewed on this blog back in January 2018. Since then he has written three more books, two of which continue his diary of owning the largest secondhand book shop in Scotland, which is in Wigtown and it is these two books I have read this week. The diaries cover the following periods:

  • The Diary of a Bookseller – Published 2017 – covers Wednesday 5th February 2014 to Wednesday 4th February 2015.
  • Confessions of a Bookseller – Published 2019 – covers Thursday 1st January 2015 to Thursday 31st December 2015
  • Remainders of the Day – Published 2022 – covers Friday 5th February 2016 to Saturday 4th February 2017

It was only as I typed the list above that I realised that there is a five week overlap between the first two books so had to get ‘The Diary of a Bookseller’ off the shelf to compare the entries. They are completely different even down to the number of orders, customers and shop takings.

Wednesday 21st January – Diary of a Bookseller

Wednesday 21st January – Confessions of a Bookseller

As the third book, like the first, starts on the 5th of February I’m left wondering if the 1st January to 4th February in Confessions and which are clearly labelled 2015 are actually entries for 2016 transposed to the start by an overzealous editor who assumed that a diary should be for a calendar year.

The books are quite long, 328 pages for Confessions and 377 for Remainders but reading them just flies by and I finished both books inside four days. As I mentioned in my review of his first book I also own and run an independent specialist shop so the interactions with customers he details are frighteningly familiar and all the funnier for that. He has also noticed that anyone who comes through the door and says out loud “Oh I’m in heaven, this is just the sort of shop I love”, or words to that effect never buy anything, but will inevitably spend a lot a lot of time wandering round the shop and moving stock from shelf to shelf whilst not doing so. This means that you then have to spend even more time putting things back where they should be so that actual customers have a chance of finding them. I’m going to lend the books to my staff as I’m sure they will appreciate them as well and I’m thankful I don’t have staff as mad as Shaun seems to.

A few months after writing my review of The Diary of a Bookseller in 2018 I met Shaun in Hay on Wye, the Welsh book town that Wigtown has modelled itself on, lots of book shops all in one small place may sound like overkill but it really works by making the town a specific destination for collectors and there are few things I love more than wandering round book shops. Shaun was being interviewed by Jasper Fforde as part of a book collectors Instagram event which the owner of my local secondhand bookshop and I had also given a talk at a couple of days earlier on the subject of collecting Penguin books. Shaun came over as a really nice person but then again I wasn’t trying to buy a book off him at the time, I still haven’t made it to Wigtown but I’m determined to get there, in fact I just checked and it’s 285 miles from where I live and would take just over five hours to get there, the Google maps picture of the shop is from this month and shows a copy of Remainders of the Day in the right hand window along with the inevitable large number of boxes of more stock just inside the door and by the other window.

Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell

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I was introduced to Orwell in my first year at Grammar School, so aged eleven, when we studied Animal Farm and I’ve read a lot of his works since but somehow not included Down and Out in Paris and London which was his first book. I have no idea how I missed it especially as reading it now I loved the detailed descriptive narrative of his times in poverty in Paris and living amongst tramps around London. The writing is totally immersive and you feel with him as he lives hand to mouth, sometimes not eating for days at a time because he simply has no money left especially after all his meagre savings were stolen leaving him with just the few francs in his pocket. It is after this financial disaster that he seeks out an old friend Boris, who is a Russian émigré, and had often told him of the easy money to be made in tips as a waiter, but Boris had also fallen on hard times and together they scour the city looking for work and not finding it until after many days surviving by pawning their dwindling clothes supply they drop ‘lucky’ and get jobs in the hell of a kitchen of a hotel that Orwell leaves unnamed, just calling it X.

I was at work from seven in the morning till a quarter past nine at night; first at washing crockery, then at scrubbing the tables and floors of the employees’ dining-room, then at polishing glasses and knives, then at fetching meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching more meals and washing more crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it except when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and plongeurs clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously, ‘Ça marche deux oeufs brouillés! Ça marche un Chateaubriand aux pommes sautées!‘

Chapter X – Orwell was a plongeur, the lowest of the low in the kitchen hierarchy

Orwell was initially amazed at the squalor behind the baize doors that separated the patrons of the hotel from the kitchen staff, what absolutely had to be cleaned was but if it didn’t then rubbish and scraps simply built up in corners or hard to clean places. But this was nothing to the hideous conditions in the new start restaurant that Boris persuaded him to leave hotel X and join. Raw food was simply left on the bare floor as they had no larder and wiped down and cooked as needed. Cats and rats helped themselves to whatever they wanted and again what was left was served to the customers. He also went from working fourteen hours a day for six days to seventeen hours a day every day. Plates weren’t cleaned as they had no hot water just wiped down either with newspaper or on the clothes of the staff and yet the restaurant drew in customers and succeeded despite the filth in the kitchen. Orwell gives the impression that this was perfectly normal in Parisian restaurants, and it quite probably was, but he couldn’t cope with the excessive hours and after a couple of weeks quit and headed back to London after being told by a friend that there was a job for him looking after a congenital imbecile.

The second part of the book dealing with life in and around London was added after Orwell initially tried and failed to get a publisher for the Parisian part on its own under the title of “A Scullion’s Diary”. Adding the English section took the work from around 38,700 words to 66,400, which in this edition is 180 pages and a much more normal size for a book.

Needless to say the job when he got there didn’t exist, both the potential employers and the patient having gone abroad so Orwell is back to no money, nowhere to live and no job, so Orwell took to the streets living hand to mouth as a tramp. This section is very different to the first sixty percent of the book as it is less like a journal of his experiences, although you certainly get his experiences of homelessness in the London area, and more a diatribe against the Vagrancy Act of 1824 and the strict interpretations imposed which meant that not only was homelessness effectively criminalised but all forms of begging were not permitted and rough hostels introduced across the country known as spikes. These, mainly unsanitary, hostels did not allow anyone to stay for more than one night and you couldn’t return inside a month, in London you couldn’t go to more than two spikes inside a month. These rules meant that vagrancy was effectively enforced as the men, and it was nearly always men Orwell met only one female tramp in his time on the road, had to keep moving ten to twenty miles a day in search of a bed if they couldn’t afford even the worst bunkhouses to sleep in and it was a criminal offence to sleep in the open air. Astonishingly whilst looking up this act to write the blog I discovered that parts of the Act are still in force in England and Wales almost two hundred years after it was first passed, I feel every Member of Parliament should be made to read this book.

The book is notable for being the first appearance of the name George Orwell in print, up until then he had used his real name, Eric Blair, for the small number of articles he had published but he wanted to be ‘anonymous’ due to the poor conditions that he had endured in both Paris and outer London and didn’t want his family linked to this book. From then on however he wrote as Orwell, rarely using Eric Blair again. As for the veracity of the stories he tells here, he wrote in the introduction for the 1935 French edition “I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting. I did not feel that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.” The most obvious time distortion is that the times as a tramp around London occur after returning from France in the book whereas in reality this time was before he went to Paris in Spring 1928, as when he returned to London from Paris in December 1929 he went to live at his parents house.

My copy is the first Penguin Books edition from December 1940 and is in remarkably good condition for a wartime paperback printed on very poor quality paper yet it is still perfectly intact. This was the edition that really started interest in the book, as before then it was not a great seller. However despite 55,000 copies being printed in this edition it is a very scarce book and at the time of writing I cannot find any examples for sale on abebooks or biblio which are the two main international websites for secondhand books. Down and Out in Paris and London is of course easy to obtain, it is this first edition, possibly the first time it came out in paperback, that is so rare.

Into Iraq – Michael Palin

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Michael Palin’s latest travel adventure took place March 2022 and consisted of a short (two week) trip to Iraq, he was after all seventy eight when he made the journey and the epic trips from the 1980’s and 90’s are probably behind him now but this was still a fascinating read. This was his first documentary travelogue since visiting North Korea in 2018 which was equally short and it is now eleven years since his last trip lasting multiple months which saw him explore Brasil. The book is beautifully illustrated and written in Palin’s easy to read diary format which he has honed over decades of doing such series for television although now they are for ITN and Channel 5 here in the UK rather than the earlier, and higher budget, trips for the BBC.

The book covers eighteen days travelling, although days one to four are in Turkey as he travels down to the Iraq border finally crossing over on the evening of the fourth day and day eighteen has him getting up at 5am to dash to the airport to leave so that doesn’t really count. On the way through Iraq following the River Tigris he gets to places I read about as a child, the ancient city of Ur and its famous ziggurat, Babylon and the astonishing minaret in Samarra which can be seen top right on the cover of the book. Like Palin I have wanted to visit these places for decades, and nearly went soon after returning from Iran in 1997 but various other destinations called to me more urgently and later it became too dangerous to go. From the descriptions in this book it looks like it may be becoming possible to be a relatively safe tourist in Iraq again, however he explains that major destinations such as Ur’s ziggurat and the site of Babylon were largely reconstructed over their original ruins during the time of Saddam Hussain. That doesn’t make them less impressive and the lower parts, certainly of the ziggurat, are genuinely thousands of years old so still worth a visit. It would be the endless waits at random checkpoints that they endured for seemingly little point other than to justify the existence of the checkpoint and the guards manning it, I doubt I have the patience for nowadays.

The book is quite short, just 171 pages and a lot of those have half and half text and photographs of the trip, I therefore read it in about two and a half hours. I would have liked more details especially on the life of the people coming out of decades of conflict. Palin was always good interacting with locals in previous documentaries and whilst I haven’t yet seen the TV series that this book accompanies, that is only three sixty minute episodes and those include adverts so I doubt you get much more insight. Having said that I really enjoyed the book and when I started it was difficult to put down, the urge to just read another chapter was always there and as each chapter was a days journey it felt even more like a diary and you felt you were progressing down Iraq along with the small team making the films.

Unlike his previous expeditions where he planned a lot of the journey himself and was very much an independent traveller, albeit with a TV crew in tow, this time Palin travelled with a company called Untamed Borders which means that a large part of his itinerary can be booked direct with them if you too fancy a trip to Iraq.

The State of Poetry – Roger McGough

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I first came across McGough in the late 1960’s as part of The Scaffold, a ‘band’ which was made up of him, John Gorman and Mike McGear and the first record I ever bought with my own money was their 1968 number one hit ‘Lily The Pink’. Only McGear was a musician having taken up the guitar at a young age like his brother Paul McCartney who was also in a bit of a band in the 1960’s. This meant that they usually appeared with session musicians, such as Reg Dwight (aka Elton John), Keith Moon, Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix making up the numbers for the recorded and occasional live performances, whilst Roger McGough read his poems and comedian John Gorman did various comic sketches as well as playing the piano. I wonder what happened to those various session musicians? McGough wrote almost all the lyrics for The Scaffold with McGear (who changed his name so as not to be seen to be riding on the coat tails of his elder brother) writing the music. Although the band broke up in 1977 they occasionally appear together, although all the members are well past retirement age. At 85 years old McGough is still the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s programme Poetry Please and is very much active on the British poetry scene.

This collection of some of McGough’s short poems, some of which are very short indeed, is part of a huge body of his works published in well over thirty volumes, with one, a collaboration with two other Liverpool poets entitled ‘The Mersey Sound’ not being out of print since it first appeared in 1967. Whilst he writes poems on all sorts of subjects it is probably for his comic verse that he is most known.

Writer’s Block

The excitement I felt
as I started the poem.
Disappeared on reaching
the end of the fourth line.

McGough’s poetry is invariable upbeat and his distinctive accent makes his live performances a real pleasure, this is one of my favourites from his 2016 collection Poetry Pie just so that if you haven’t come across McGough before you can hear him in full flow. But I’m here to review this short book so back to the poems in here and one that starts off dark but still manages to have a happy ending.

Another Mid-Life Crisis

3am. Feeling like death
and wanting to end it all
I reach for the paracetamol
will there be enough?

One by one I count them out. 72?
Need more to be on the safe side.
Rummaging around I add another 30.
That should do it.

Take the first two with a glass of water.
Feel better. Go back to bed. Fall asleep.

McGough has been a fixture on British TV and radio ever since the days of The Scaffold so I’ve grown up, and started growing old, with his poetry and I find myself hearing his voice as I read the book. It was a real joy to read the 79 short works in this volume and I love the cover illustration with famous poets as geographical features. I feel the need to end this review the same way as the book ends with a simple one liner based on President Truman’s famous desktop sign.

The book stops here

Tuffer’s Alternative Guide to The Ashes – Phil Tuffnell

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The 2023 Ashes Series is starting on Friday 16th June, for those of you who don’t follow cricket this is one of the oldest bilateral sports tournaments in the world, starting in 1877 and pits Australia versus England at cricket in a series of five day matches. It’s worth noting that it didn’t gain the name of ‘The Ashes’ until the ninth test match between the two sides, which took place in England in 1882 and which England somehow managed to lose from what should have been a winning position. This led to a mock obituary appearing in The Sporting Times on 2nd September 1882.

The urn containing ‘the ashes’ was presented to the captain of the touring England team in Australia that Christmas and is now kept at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London as it is extremely fragile, only rarely being removed from its glass display case for ceremonial occasions, and has only actually travelled to Australia twice in the intervening years. It isn’t the official trophy for the tournament but symbolises the rivalry between the two countries but replicas and images of this tiny, 6 inch (15cm), vase are to be seen whenever the two teams play each other and its silhouette can be seen on the front cover of this book between the words ‘The’ and ‘Ashes’.

This year there are five games to be played in June and July at various venues across England, five games is the most common number of matches but it does sometimes alter. Phil Tufnell played in five of these series and both his first and last test matches for England were against Australia. It should be noted that at the time the England team were pretty weak and the Australians very good so he never got near to being on the winning side in an Ashes series. Tufnell retired from playing serious cricket in 2003 and gained a job as a summariser on The BBC Test Match Special which he still does and he continued to play cricket for celebrity teams for many years after his official retirement.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book, but thought it would probably be descriptions of his experiences and whilst those do appear, the book is a whole lot more than that. In fact it is a highly entertaining look over the entire existence of the tournament from the first matches and includes the origin story of the Ashes urn but also lots of stories of players and games over the entire, almost 150 years, that England and Australia have faced each other on the cricket grounds in both countries. These range from when in 1903, back before aeroplanes existed and it would take three weeks by boat each way to get to the tour, the England team on their way out managed to lose a game of deck cricket against a team of female passengers. In 2001 The Australians hosted a charity function in Manchester and the first auction item was a chance to train with the team, bidding was slow as the room hadn’t really got going when they started this so a couple of Australian players decided to bounce the bids on a bit, which was fine until Steve Waugh ended up winning the auction and paying £500 to train with his own team-mates.

Scattered through the book are lists of ten players in various categories including, ten fast bowlers Tuffers was happy to have never faced, ten Ashes blockers and ten Ashes bashers amongst other selections. These are fun as it’s not just a list but reasons why. Chris Tavare is probably the best of the blockers that I have seen and he once spent ninety minutes at the crease without scoring anything at all and had on a different occasion taken two hours to score nine, not entertaining but incredibly frustrating for the Australian bowlers and winding them up led to mistakes.

My copy is the first edition hardback from 2013 published by Headline and I have to wonder why it has languished on my shelves for ten years its been a really fun read and here’s hoping for an equally fun summer of cricket.

Ten Minute Alibi – Anthony Armstrong and Herbert Shaw

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First published as a novel in 1934 ‘Ten Minute Alibi’ is based on the play of the same name by Anthony Armstrong and has presumably been adapted as a novel some time during its run in London by Herbert Shaw. I have to say presumably because there is nothing in the book to say what role Herbert Shaw had in writing it, or indeed any biographical details for him. The play was very successful playing across America and on Broadway it had 89 performances (from 17th October 1933 to January 1934) whilst in London’s West End, it had 857 performances (from 2nd January 1933 to 23rd February 1935) but having read it I can definitely say that the novel is less than riveting so not a good transformation by Shaw, I think I would have preferred to read the original play.

The plot however is interesting, Philip Sevilla appears to be a well to do club owner in London but he has a much more lucrative sideline in people trafficking, specifically innocent English women with few remaining family members whom he seduces before packing them off to South America to be forced to work as prostitutes. The way his operation works is spelled out with an example at the start of the book where we witness the downfall of Muriel Cartney. Having established that she has only a small number of people that would be particularly concerned if she disappeared Sevilla works his charms on her telling her that he is married but that his wife is in an insane asylum so he is desperately lonely and would marry her if he could get a divorce but that is unlikely due to his wife’s medical condition. Finally he persuades her to give up her job and rented apartment to join him in Paris where they can live, apparently as man and wife, without any of their London acquaintances being around to spot the lie and ruin her reputation.

Once in Paris he then appears to ‘accidentally’ run into his ‘friend’, in reality his business partner in the trafficking operation Jose Garcia, and starts to arrange the handover of Muriel. At first all is well and they stay in a lovely hotel in Paris apparently whilst he looks for something more permanent, this he would normally do for two to four weeks enjoying the nights with his victim before claiming that pressing business issues with the club means that he has to return to London to sort these out, Assuring Muriel that he would be back in a few days and that Garcia would look after her whilst he was away he would leave and never return just sending increasing worrying, and false, messages that the people he had put in charge of the club had ruined him and she was on her own but he had no money left to support her. Unwilling to return to England as a woman who had been living in sin Garcia then suggests that he has contacts in Buenos Aires where Muriel could get a new career on the stage and effectively start again and he would willingly accompany her there to see her settled in. Once in Argentina she would be handed over to the gangsters and pimps that would then keep her prisoner and force her into sex work. Sevilla meanwhile would pocket at least a thousand pounds for delivery of another victim.

This sounds all too modern, although nowadays it is women from poorer nations falsely promised legitimate work in the West only to arrive and be told that they need to pay back the enormously inflated cost of transporting them by working in the sex industry. I was surprised to see roughly the same process in a book written in the 1930’s, I’ve never seen it as a plot line in any other contemporary work and I can see why the shocking nature of the story would have generated publicity for the original play. Having spent the first twenty or so pages detailing the story of Muriel and through that Sevilla’s real means of earning big money we then move on to his planned next victim, Betty Findon and this is where the book really starts as Betty has a man who secretly loves her, trainee barrister Colin Derwent, and he will do anything to thwart Sevilla’s plans.

However this is also where the book started to lose my interest, the ongoing scenes between Betty and Sevilla, Sevilla and Colin, Sevilla and his manservant and other two handers would clearly work well on a stage but it’s all too bitty for a book. The dream sequence after Sevilla drugs Colin to prevent him seeing Betty to try to warn her again feels odd, and the means of how to kill Sevilla and still have an alibi by altering clocks so that he could be seen to be elsewhere at the same time revealed to Colin in his dream is all too complicated to work as it needs split second timing involving people who don’t know it involves split second timing. The plan involves Colin catching Sevilla at home and alone before taking Betty to Paris to replicate his previous modus operandi. However when Sevilla needs to be home for the first part of Colin’s alibi to work he’s out and when he does return it’s with Betty and the manservant is also there, both of which are not visible when Colin finally arrives to carry out his plan which involves claiming to have £1,500 to pay off Sevilla but in reality shooting him and staging it as a suicide.

I’m not going to go further into what happens in this review in case anyone fancies braving the rather clunky text for what is actually quite an unusual plotted story especially for the period. Maybe however see if you can find the play script rather than the novel. My copy is the 1938 Penguin first edition and whilst there may have been a reprint in the 1940’s this appears to be the last time the novel was published in English, which I think speaks volumes for its popularity. The play is actually easier, and cheaper, to find in various 1930’s anthologies.

Summer in Algiers – Albert Camus

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This collection of three of Albert Camus’ essays was published by Penguin Books as part of their seventieth anniversary in 2005 and is a fascinating description of two cities and a town in Algeria, the country which was the birthplace of Camus. It is always interesting to read a locals perspective on places that you really want to visit especially if it is by a writer of the quality of Camus, and Algeria is the only country on the north African coast that I haven’t yet been to and this book moved it higher up the list of places to visit. This is the second book I have reviewed that is set in Algeria though, after Tartarin of Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet so clearly I need to go there sooner rather than later. As mentioned this has descriptions of a couple of cities, Algiers and Oran along with the archaeologically important town of Tipasa with its wonderful Roman ruins, the first essay concerns Algiers.

Summer in Algiers

Unlike the other two essays in this book, this is not a description of the place but the people of Algiers and especially the youth. He explains that here people start work and marry young and raise their children so that by their thirties men have largely done all that they have to do and it is a steady decline of their vigour that is all they have to look forward to. Summer in Algiers is a time of unrelenting heat so only the poor are left there, the rich decamp to more salubrious climes until the September rains bring relief. The young poor however gather on the beaches, for it is the culture of the body that reigns supreme and as Camus explains “Here intelligence has no place as in Italy” instead the men display their muscles and the girls their shapely legs in one fast summer before work, drudgery and motherhood claim them all far too early. It’s not a happy essay.

The Minotaur, or a stop in Oran

The longest, at 31 pages, of the three essays is possibly the most interesting, partly as I’d never heard of Oran despite it being the second largest city in Algeria, but mainly for the wonderful description of not just the town but also the people and what they do for work and fun, Camus worked here as a teacher for a while before ill health (tuberculosis) forced him to leave. The title’s reference to the Minotaur is an allusion to the labyrinthine network of streets in the city where it is easy to get lost and the walls of the old city which cut the centre off from both the desert behind but also the sea to the front. But everywhere there is the dust which seems to be the defining element for Camus whenever he thinks of Oran along with the odd collections of merchandise in the shops.

Here, presented in a casket of dust, is the contents of a shop window: frightful plaster models of deformed feet: a group of Rembrandt drawings ‘sacrificed at 150 francs each’, practical jokes, tricoloured wallets, an eighteenth century pastel, a mechanical donkey made of plush, bottles of Provence water for preserving green olives, and a wretched wooden virgin with an indecent smile. (So that no one can go away ignorant the ‘management’ has propped at its base a card saying ‘wooden virgin’).

There is also a detailed description of a boxing tournament, not just of the boxers but the crowd and building as well and a section on the construction of the new harbour walls which will eventually pull the city to face the sea, if not embrace it. It’s s great piece of closely observed travel writing although unlike the next essay it doesn’t make me want to go there.

Return to Tipasa

Tipasa is about seventy km from Algiers and had clearly been a regular destination when Camus was a child. He doesn’t care much for the modern town, it is the ancient Roman ruins that call to him and having looked up the town online I can see why, just follow the link here to Atlas Obscura. To his dismay on returning to the ruins as an adult decades later he finds them surrounded by barbed wire with a small number of designated entry points rather than the open site he remembered as a youth but once inside the magic returned and he revels in walking through the ‘bread-coloured stones’ feeling peace again and escape from the modern world as he does so.

I’d always been a bit wary of Camus, mainly because of his reputation as an existentialist writer, and having studied the works of his friend Jean Paul Satre at school that put me off that particular group of authors, but this short collection has made me want to read more Camus. He has a real gift for a phrase and an ability to take the reader to where he is writing about. I’ve explored several of the ruined Roman cities along the north African coast in both Tunisia and Libya and Return to Tipasa took me right back to those magical trips. There is a monument to Camus in amongst the ruins of ancient Tipasa which includes a quote from another of his essays set there ‘Wedding in Tipasa’

Je comprends ici ce qu’on appelle gloire : le droit d’aimer sans mesure.

I understand here what is called glory: the right to love without measure.

Albert Camus memorial in Tipasa

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

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A long time ago I read Ulysses by James Joyce and for decades considered that was enough Joyce to last a lifetime; but I also had this book, and at 199 pages it was a lot shorter, maybe it was time for another go? Well I finished it this morning and if anything it was the tougher read of the two books. A series of disjointed episodes with several characters appearing seemingly at random but treated as though they had been there all the time however lacking context to place them within the tale, such as it is. It was also, to my considerable surprise, a book about Stephen Dedalus, the main character for the first third of Ulysses and here more clearly as a fictional representative of James Joyce himself. The book starts with the earliest memories of Stephen as a very small child and finishes with him deciding to leave Ireland just as Joyce did, and on the way Stephen attends the same schools and university as the author and his family has the money problems not helped by his father’s alcoholism. So is it a work of fiction or is it a disguised autobiography? It’s a bit of both, a fictionalised autobiography and with no way to separate the two parts, it also has several issues which made it a more difficult read even than the famously difficult Ulysses; the biggest of which is the twenty odd pages in the middle of the book that is basically a religious screed on life, death, heaven and hell which in places reads like a sermon from the more hellfire branch of the Catholic church and in others like an interminable list of confusing arguments, see below for a random sample of this section.

What you eventually get from this huge section is Stephen Dedalus’s slow retreat from the Catholic doctrine that he has been immersed in from childhood, first at home and then at the Jesuit boarding school of Clongowes Wood College and after a year there, when his father ran out of money to pay the fees for that place, on to the Christian Brothers O’Connell School in Dublin. This was exactly as Joyce himself did. By the end of the book as he is graduating from university Dedalus admits to his friend that he doesn’t want to take holy communion as his mother wishes because he has largely lost his faith “I will not serve that which I no longer believe”. Joyce himself had a somewhat more complicated relationship with Catholicism, certainly by the time he left Ireland he was not a practising Catholic but he attended church services during his self imposed exile on the continent, largely in Paris and Trieste, which lasted from 1904 until his death in 1941.

My other problem with the book is the regular use of Latin in the text, which I have never studied, and in this version of the book is not translated in footnotes which I suspect more modern editions do. My copy is from May 1948 during the crossover from Penguin Books in America to them going independent as Signet which explains the somewhat confusing references to Penguin, Signet and even New American Library (NAL) on the front cover. There is also Irish slang and several words that I didn’t recognise so that much like the Dean in the passage below I found myself putting the book down to look up a word.

A tundish by the way is nowadays a plumbing term for a device placed close to the pressure release valve that allows people to see if water has escaped the system due to excessive water pressure rather than a means of getting liquid into something but a century ago when ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ was written it was more usually a funnel used in the brewing industry.

All in all you are left with the impression that Joyce was more concerned with showing off his own perceived brilliance than telling a coherent story and at times I was tempted to give up but by then I was half way through so kept on going. Fortunately the final chapter, of the five, did read more like the book I was expecting so it was worth ploughing on. Will I read more Joyce? Probably not; but then again I said that after finishing Ulysses. I don’t have any more of his works on the shelves though so it would have to be a new purchase.