Category: Reviews

Strata – Terry Pratchett

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I have done several blogs about Pratchett but always tried to emphasise some of the less well known aspects of his work and this time I’m going back to his third novel, and the last before he created Discworld, which was to make him rightly famous. My copy is a signed first edition published by Colin Smythe Limited on the 15th June 1981 in a print run of just 1,001 copies, 850 of which were sold to Reader’s Union, and it is in this book that Terry first explored the concept of a flat world although not in this case borne on the back of a giant turtle; as he wrote at the time:

I am also working on another ‘discworld’ theme, since I don’t think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in one book! 

That theme would result in ‘The Colour of Magic’ first published on 24th November 1983 and it, along with the subsequent forty plus books, proved that he definitely hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities. But back to Strata which I must admit I hadn’t reread for at least thirty years, the story starts with a fake quote from an equally fake book that sets up the premise for the beginning of the plot:

Whilst it would undoubtedly fun to have developed more on this idea, instead Pratchett abandons the dubious fossil record concept quite quickly after explaining it was done via a huge device called a strata machine. This was invented to form fake sedimentary layers and their accompanying embedded fossils on newly created planets by a race known as the Spindle Kings who predated mankind by several million years and had also built Earth. A small number of these machines had been found buried on other planets and humans were now using them to terraform new planets for ongoing colonisation. There has been other galaxy wide races before the Spindle Kings such as The Wheelers and these had died out in turn leaving the present day to Humanity along with a few other sentient and space travelling races, specifically for this book, Kung and Shand. The main human character in the story is Kin Arad who had written a book called ‘Continuous Creation’ giving the history of the various galaxy creating races and this had made her famous so that she was approached by a man who claimed to have found a flat Earth out in a largely unvisited part of the galaxy and wanted to put together a small crew to explore it, this crew would consist of Kin Arad, Marco a representative of the Kung along with Silver a Shand. I can explain all this because it is dealt with in the first forty pages of the book and gives away nothing of the main story.

Anyone who has read Pratchett’s Discworld books will keep seeing references throughout the book, for example our three protagonists first meet in a bar called The Broken Drum and when we get to the flat world there is a rimfall, a continuous flow of the oceans off the edge, amongst other similarities. However the flat planet is recognisably the Earth with much the same continental pattern unlike Discworld and it works using technology, such as matter transference to replenish the seas, rather than magic which drives The Disc in the later books. Anyone who has read Discworld and wants to get an inkling of Pratchett’s ideas in creating it should probably read Strata, it is by no means as an accomplished work as certainly the Discworld novels from the fourth one onwards where Pratchett had more fully developed his skill as a storyteller but it is definitely worth a go and the twist at the end is a good one. It is definitely a science fiction story rather than a fantasy and is probably closer to Larry Niven’s Ringworld than to Pratchett’s Discworld series.

The Ring of the Nibelung – Richard Wagner

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Back in March 2021 I reviewed a book about the trials and tribulations of staging the magnificent four opera series of the Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner, see here. Soon after that I purchased this magnificent cloth bound volume from The Folio Society, which is the full libretto in parallel text with Wagner’s original German alongside the superb translation by Stewart Spencer. This was first published by Thames and Hudson back in 1993 as ‘Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung; A Companion’, but the Folio version, published in 2020, is much larger at 289 × 205 × 41 mm, and has added illustrations by John Vernon Lord. As can be imagined as the four operas in the 1991 Barenboim recording I have play for a grand total of 15 hours and 5 minutes the libretto runs for well over three hundred pages with an extra seventy pages of authoritative essays on the development of the opera cycle at the beginning along with extensive notes at the end making a total of over four hundred pages of text with seventeen unnumbered leaves of plates. All in all a comprehensive guide to this greatest of Wagner’s operatic works. It should be pointed out that whilst the words sung are all in both languages the stage directions are only in English, this didn’t bother me but if you were looking for a ‘full’ parallel text then bear in mind that these parts are missing.

Wagner is unusual in writing his own libretto, it is much more common to either set an existing work or work with a librettist. For the most part he combined Norse with Old German mythologies in developing his story, these are closely related anyway with much the same characters only with different names, Odin becomes Wotan and Thor becomes Donner for example, but there are also echoes of the ancient Greek especially Homer’s Iliad. Occasionally he merges two characters from different origins into one such as Freia (this is how Wagner spells her name, more usually Freya or Freyja) a Norse goddess of fertility and in this version also the one who looks after the golden apples that confer everlasting life to the gods; she is also referred to as Holde, a similar but different character from German folk tales. Wagner also adds to the mythology with his own concepts such as carving important contracts in runes on Wotan’s staff, the staff exists in the mythologies but not the binding contracts. This melding of the various myths and new ideas make the reading of the libretto so fascinating, especially if you have a reasonable knowledge of the original mythologies, and whilst I have picked up some of this whilst listening to the operas it was only when reading the text at my own pace rather than moving rapidly on as you do in a performance that I more deeply appreciated the complex weaving of stories that Wagner achieved. Certainly the librettos can be read as a long poem without any deeper knowledge of the operas but I found myself adding the music in my mind as I read the words especially in parts I knew well.

The book is really lovely to read, as can be seen above in this section of the third opera ‘Siegfried’ shown with an engraving of the sword Northung being repaired by Siegfried. The sword had belonged to his father Siegmund but was shattered by Wotan during Siegmund’s fight with Hunding in the previous opera ‘Die Walkure’ (The Valkyrie) as Wotan’s wife, Fricka, had demanded that he die as punishment for his incestuous relationship with his sister Sieglinde which had left her pregnant with Siegfried. The illustrations deliberately do not include any of the characters but are rather of important objects within the opera cycle, which I think is an interesting choice as John Vernon Lord explains in his note on the illustrations:

I thought that the words and music together would be best for conveying the ‘appearance’ of the various characters. At the outset, I felt that the inclusion of people would detract from the symbolic nature of what I wanted to express.

It is later in this opera, in fact in the final scene, that we get one of the few ‘humorous’ lines although this was not intended as such by Wagner but I always smile when we reach the ‘This is not a man’ line when Siegfried discovers and wakes the Valkyrie Brunnhilde from where she has been left in a magical trance by Wotan.

It should be realised that Siegfried has never seen a woman before, being brought up by Mime in a secluded location away from all others, but even so ‘Das ist kein Mann!’ is not Wagner’s finest hour.

I have really enjoyed having a deeper dive into the text of the operas and will have a much greater understanding the next time I listen to or watch them, being able to look back over previous sections to refresh my memory has proved to be well worth the cost of purchasing the book especially as it is such a fine edition.

Guerrilla Warfare – Che Guevara

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I have known of the existence of this book for many years and was somewhat confused that a book first published in the USA in 1961 and then in the UK by Pelican Books in 1969 was so elusive. I wanted it because I thought it would be a logical follow up of ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ which I reviewed back in June 2022 and which very entertainingly covered a trip around South America by Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado whilst Guevara was studying to become a doctor. This book I assumed would cover his time as part of the Cuban revolution leading to his promotion as second in command below Fidel Castro and the ultimate overthrow of the Batista regime, But no I have since found out that a book I hadn’t previously heard of ‘Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War’, also written by Guevara and published in Pelican along with this book in 1969, performs that function. So what is ‘Guerrilla Warfare’ about? Well here we are probably coming to the reason it is so difficult to find, as it is basically a handbook on how to run a popular insurgency, from recruiting fighters to how to actually run a guerrilla band, feeding and clothing them, obtaining arms and proposed combat methodology. A look at the contents list gives an idea as to what to expect.

Despite not being what I expected the book is fascinating and gives an insight into the way a guerrilla band operates with some of the problems which come from operating in a secret way and some things that are different with a regular army. For example the chapters on warfare on favourable and unfavourable ground are diametrically opposite to a ‘normal’ army in that favourable ground for the guerrilla is the mountains and jungle where they can easily melt away or establish defensible positions whilst a regular army likes more open country where their heavy vehicles can move easily and this is precisely what a guerrilla army counts as unfavourable. Likewise armaments for a guerrilla fighter is largely restricted to rifles, preferably not fully automatic, and hand guns with homemade grenades or Molotov cocktails. The army on the other hand can utilise aircraft, tanks and tripod mounted machine guns which are too heavy to be easily moved by hand, which is usually how a guerrilla band would need to move them and quickly use far too much ammunition, which is always in short supply until they manage to capture more. Guevara explains that should a heavy machine gun be captured by all means use it but be prepared to abandon it if pressed as it is simply not worth the effort of carrying it away during combat. Guevara also says that a bazooka is an excellent guerrilla weapon let down by its size and the fact than a man can only just carry three shells any distance due to their weight and even then someone else has to carry the shoulder mounted launcher.

The need to capture ammunition also applies to most of the guns and rifles used by a guerrilla band, it is far easier to obtain these from the enemy than try to smuggle armaments in from outside, it also means that the ammunition is the same thus largely getting round the difficulties of supply. The section I have included below makes the distinction between a revolutionary and a terrorist in that a terrorist is indiscriminate in his targets unlike the more focused revolutionary. In another section Guevara also dismisses gangs of bandits as preying on the poor population whilst the revolutionary is there to support them, although he admits that the guerrillas will need food and clothing which the peasant agrarian economy must provide as they are the only practical source. But he explains that whenever possible this should be paid for either with cash or promissory notes which should be honoured as soon as possible. How likely this is to actually happen isn’t explained.

It should be pointed out that Guevara had a reputation as a ruthless fighter and unforgiving disciplinarian, executing deserters from his troops. But none of this is mentioned in this work which, whilst not glorifying Guevara as he isn’t mentioned by name, is more a guide on how to operate a revolutionary force at least in the context of 1950’s/60’s South American environment, which is almost certainly why it is no longer in print and copies are so difficult to come by. It was an unexpectedly interesting read and I have deliberately not included some of the more specific sections on armaments and tactics in this review.

I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman

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This deeply disturbing novel has a group of women held in an underground bunker, none of whom knew one another before they arrived there and who don’t have any memory as to how they got there. Our narrator is the youngest, all the others were adult when put in the cage and have memories of life before, working, having children, living normal lives, but the unnamed narrator was a small child when incarcerated and this is all she knows.

There were forty of us living in that big underground room where no one could hide from the others. At five-metre intervals, columns supported the vaulted ceiling and bars separated our living area from the walls, leaving a wide passage all around for the guards’ relentless pacing up and down. No one ever escaped scrutiny and we were used to answering the call of nature in front of one another. At first – so they told me, my memories didn’t go back that far – the women were most put out, they thought of forming a human wall to screen the woman relieving herself, but the guards prohibited it, because no woman was to be shielded from view.

Other things were also forbidden such as physical contact, the women may not touch each other, suicide or self-harming were also banned, any attempt at escaping from the relentless monotony of their existence in the cage by killing or injuring themselves would instantly cause the guards to crack their whips close to the prisoners. The guards never entered the cage or spoke to the women even in the early days when they would cry out to try to find out what had happened to them and why they were there. Apart from constantly watching the women, the guards delivered the food, meat and vegetables with occasional pasta, which had to be boiled as that was the only means of cooking available. The knives the women needed to prepare the vegetables were blunted, they were not allowed to sharpen them in case they were used to injure and they had to be returned after use. The cage is large enough for the tables for food preparation, two toilets, a water supply and on the remaining floor just enough room to spread out forty mattresses for the women to sleep on, these would then be stacked to make something to sit on during the ‘day’. It is clearly costing somebody a lot of money to supply electricity and food and sometimes scraps of material to repair or fashion rudimentary tunics for clothing and pay for the constant guards over the dozen or so years the women have been held here but why?

Around a third of the way through the book everything changes. During the time of food serving a siren suddenly goes off and the guards simply run away leaving the keys in the serving hatch lock in their panic to get away. When the women realise they are alone the narrator, known only as ‘the child’ although by now she is probably fifteen years old, retrieves the keys and manages to unlock the main door to the cage. Exploring the rest of the bunker reveals a vast food store, enough for many years, but no guards or indeed much in the way of indication that they had ever been there. A staircase rises to a cabin and then to the outside. It has taken eleven minutes from the siren to the first women setting foot on the surface but there is no sign of the guards, where are they and how have they vanished from a vast open plain so quickly?

They decide to explore to find anyone else who might be there and eventually after four weeks they discover another cabin with stairs down. This also has the same layout as their prison with a cage but this time with forty corpses as these women had not been so fortunate when the guards left them. Eventually they come across hundreds of similar bunkers all with forty or maybe slightly fewer dead prisoners always unisex sometimes female sometimes male, a huge store of food and no guards. Just what was going on and where are they, is this even Earth?

The development of the relationships between the women is one of the driving themes of the book along with the increasing authority of ‘the child’ as she ages and develops useful skills. There is also the mystery as to what is going on. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Belgium in 1929 and as part of a Jewish family escaped to Morocco when the Nazis invaded at the start of WWII and the isolation of that time possibly influenced the isolation of the women. Returning to Belgium after the war she eventually trained as a psychoanalyst and this knowledge of how the mind works can be seen throughout the novel. ‘Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes’ published in 1995 was her tenth novel and the first to be translated into English, although it didn’t achieve major success in English until being reprinted in 2022 with a literal translation of its title rather than ‘Mistress of Silence’ which it was called in 1997. I loved this short book and cannot recommend it enough.

12 Books that Changed the World – Melvyn Bragg

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This is the 400th post on my blog so I have chosen this book to mark the occasion. It was written to accompany the 2006 ITV television series of the same name that was presented by Bragg and consisted of twelve hour long episodes looking at each work in depth, I have the first edition of the book published by Hodder and Stoughton also in 2006 but I do feel that Bragg cheated a little as he admits in the introduction.

From the beginning I wanted to enjoy a range. Leisure and literature would, if I could make it work, figure alongside science and the constitution; changes in society as well as changes in technology would be addressed. This has meant taking a risk and, now and then, elasticating the strict meaning of the word ‘book’.

Bragg certainly stretched the definition as can be seen from the list of books and documents he chose:

  • Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton – 1687
  • Married Love by Marie Stopes – 1918
  • Magna Carta – 1213
  • The Rule Book of Association Football by a group of former English Public School men – 1863
  • The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin – 1859
  • On the Abolition of the Slave Trade by William Wilberforce – 1789
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft – 1792
  • Experimental Researches in Electricity by Michael Faraday – 1839, 1844 & 1855 (3 volumes)
  • Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine by Richard Arkwright – 1769
  • The King James Bible by William Tyndale and others – 1611
  • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith – 1776
  • First Folio by William Shakespeare – 1623

Of these Magna Carta is definitely not a book but I can see why he included it as eight hundred years later parts of this remarkable document are still in place in the legal systems of not just the UK but America and large parts of the British Commonwealth. The Rule Book of Association Football is also barely a book, more of a pamphlet, as there are just thirteen rules and these would comfortably fit on a sheet of A4 paper. There is presumably a quantity of text surrounding these few bare lines but that isn’t made clear in Bragg’s write up. I enjoyed this choice immensely though, even though I have little interest in football, mainly for the history of the game and how the rules came to be codified combining the various versions that existed at the different public schools where the game was mainly played. I would particularly like the re-introduction of rule three which states that the the teams should change ends after each goal rather than at half time, what do football fans think of this idea? The third ‘book’ that isn’t really a book is Arkwright’s patent as it is just three pages long and as Arkwright wasn’t the actual inventor just the man who got the patent passed and then made millions (in today’s money) from other peoples ingenuity I struggle with it’s inclusion here amongst writers who did genuinely change the world.

Beyond those niggles, apart from Arkwright and the Marie Stopes book, which I must admit I have never read and therefore hadn’t thought of as a ground breaking publication, these are works I could have largely come up with myself if asked to list 12 Books that Changed the World. although like Bragg I would probably have listed far more and then had to trim the list. I think Bragg makes a good case for ‘Married Love’ though, but far less for the intellectual property theft embodied in Arkwright, you can sort of admire him as one of the first major industrialists, although his working conditions were horrific by today’s standards, but definitely not for the patent which he used to gain a monopoly for years.

But let’s look at the books that stand out in this list initially examining how Bragg has presented each one. You get a well thought out essay stating not only his case for the books’ consideration but also the history as to how it came to be written, it’s reception at the time, and the impact of the work from then until now. This is followed by a two or three page timeline of major events up to the present day associated with the ideas within the book. As an example Principia Mathematica, in which Newton not only sets out major advances in mathematics but also in the first volume created calculus and what it could do and how to do it. The book is intended for the intellectual elite of the time and as implied by the title is written in Latin so that it could be read around Europe as anyone sufficiently educated to follow what Newton was writing about could read Latin, it wasn’t translated into English until 1729, two years after Newton died. We get a summary as to how Newton worked pretty well in isolation from others and the slow appreciation that Principia had when it was published, largely due to its subject matter rather than the way it was written which was excellent for such a massive leap in mathematical study. Bragg then looks at how the modern wolrd depends on Newtons three laws of motion and the powerful mathematical tools that he defined in Principia. Then the timeline includes such momentous events as the discovery of infrared and ultraviolet light although these are more related to Newtons work on optics published in 1704 rather than the Newtonian physics of Principia.

As I write this Melvyn Bragg is still very much writing and broadcasting at the age of eighty five and is a member of the Upper House of Parliament, The House of Lords, where he sits as a Labour peer. Until he retired from the show at the beginning of September 2025 his regular broadcasting slot was the excellent radio show and podcast In Our Time which he had presented since 1998, The show picks a wildly different subject each week and discusses it with a panel of experts, it is currently on its summer break and due to start again on 18th September 2025 with a new presenter, there are over a thousand episodes available online.

Madame Claire – Susan Ertz

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Although the author is probably rarely read nowadays, this novel by Susan Ertz is still in print although I think only by Zinc Read, a publishing house that specialises in printing books that would otherwise be no longer available. Other than that example I can’t find any other books by Ertz that are still in print, which is a pity as I have enjoyed this quite charming novel, I do have a copy of her book ‘Now East, Now West’ and will definitely look for others. Madame Claire is the eighty year old widowed matriarch of three children and three adult grandchildren, all from her eldest daughter Millicent. Her two other children are Eric, the eldest, now a prominent Member of Parliament and unhappily married to Louise, and Constance who is referred to as Connie throughout the book and is definitely the black sheep of the family having run off with a Russian concert pianist and then being abandoned by him. Millicent is married to John who is a well to do barrister and their three children are Gordon who is dating Helen, the daughter of Lord Ottway, Noel, currently unemployed due to losing an arm during WWI and Judy who doesn’t really know what she wants to do but feels trapped into the cycle of marrying well and settling down which frankly she doesn’t want to do. It took me a couple of chapters to get everyone sorted out in my head along with Stephen de Lisle, ex Home Secretary who was deeply in love with Claire, so much so that he asked her to marry him a couple of decades ago when her husband Richard died. Refused he took off for the continent and hasn’t been heard from since. However the book starts with Claire receiving a letter from Stephen…

That letter from Stephen was the first of many in the book and I like this way of pushing the story forward, Ertz uses them for exposition of the various relationships which would otherwise involve many more pages of scene setting and dialogue, instead she can simply have one character explain things to another in their letters. There is no doubt that Claire runs the family but without obvious interventions, rather she suggests options that help push things along such as getting Judy sent to Cannes ostensibly to see how Stephen was recovering from his minor stroke which was stopping his return to London and the resumption of a sadly extended break in relations with Claire. Yes this was partly the reason but Claire also recognised that Judy needed a break from the suffocating situation at her family home to think through what she was going to do regarding Major Crosby aka Chip whom she had fallen for after the car she has a passenger in had hit him crossing a foggy road. Unfortunately Chip had no money, wasn’t from a ‘known family’ and didn’t have a job so Judy’s parents didn’t regard him as marriage material for their daughter, Claire however liked him so was keen to help. Beyond Madame Claire Noel is the most interactive of the other characters, always willing to help his sister and most like Claire in his ability to make the best of a situation such as being able to deal with Connie when she re-appears, again at the instigation of Claire.

The various interactions between the assorted characters are well done and whilst Ertz does go a little flowery with her prose occasionally that is probably more to do with a hundred year old writing style than any real issue with the book, which to my surprise I have greatly enjoyed. I am usually wary of works by authors who have vanished to the degree that Susan Ertz has but I think she is greatly in need of a rehabilitation of her literary reputation and I’m surprised that Persephone Books hasn’t reprinted her works as I think she would fit well with their house style.

As can be seen from the full list below with their original UK publishers and publishing years, the first ten Penguin Books were an eclectic mix of titles and whilst several authors are still well known and widely read today a few have largely fallen by the wayside. They had mainly first come out in hard back in the previous decade so were very much current material in 1935 and Penguin was for the most part their first appearance in paper back. After the first printing dates I have added a number in brackets which gives the number of UK printings each book had had before being printed by Penguin, as you can see most of these books were very much in demand. The relatively low reprint numbers for the two crime novels are probably more due to the larger numbers printed for each edition for these than other genres.

  • Maurois – Ariel – The Bodley Head Ltd. – 1924 (8)
  • Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1929 (9)
  • Linklater – Poet’s Pub – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1929 (10)
  • Ertz – Madame Claire – Ernest Benn Ltd. – 1923 (14)
  • Sayers – The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Victor Gollancz Ltd. – 1928 (3)
  • Christie – The Mysterious Affair at Styles – John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. – 1920 (6)
  • Nichols – Twenty-five – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1926 (3)
  • Young – William – Jonathan Cape Ltd. – 1925 (2)
  • Webb – Gone to Earth – Constable and Co. – 1917 (21)
  • Mackenzie – Carnival – Macdonald and Co. – 1912 (11)

I’ve enjoyed reading the first four Penguin books over the last few weeks, and more books from the original ten will be featured on this blog over the coming months with the aim to have read them all by July 2026 so within their ninetieth birthday year. By the end of their first year Penguin had published fifty titles but were still an imprint of The Bodley Head and would not be a separate business until the beginning of 1937.

Poet’s Pub – Eric Linklater

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Of the four books that I am reading to mark the ninetieth birthday of Penguin Books this was probably the one I was looking forward to most. Eric Linklater was an established novelist by 1935 when Penguin began, with six of his twenty three novels published by then and a seventh coming out that year. Poet’s Pub was his second work (1929) and would be adapted into a film in 1949 although that version bears little relation to the original novel. I was already familiar with Linklater’s work from probably his best known novel ‘Private Angelo’ a comic satire of war based in late WWII Italy and published in 1946, which I first read and enjoyed a decade or so ago and probably should get off the shelves and re-read at some point. However I wasn’t disappointed with this also comedic book which at times, such as the extended car chase from the fictional village of Downish, north west of London, to Scotland and the aftermath of the Elizabethan dinner which provides the opportunities for the two thefts that push the plot forward, descends into near farce.

Saturday Keith, named as such by his father as he was the seventh son and they had all been born on different days of the week is the eponymous poet and the Pelican Inn in Downish owned by the mother of Quentin, an old friend of his from university days, is the public house. Or more accurately the inn/hotel as the regular guests staying there along with the staff provide Linklater with his much varied cast of characters and few patrons of the public bar are even mentioned. It’s a setting that has attracted many authors over the decades from E M Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ to Anita Brookner’s ‘Hotel du Lac’ and even Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ along with numerous crime classics, where else could you believably have such a diverse group of people in one place with no need to explain who they are and why they are there?

Keith took the job as landlord with the hope that along with a regular income, something definitely lacking for the vast majority of poets, he would have a quiet space to work on his magnum opus, the poem that would finally mark his breakthrough onto the public consciousness. The work running a surprisingly successful inn once it become known it is run by a literary gentleman, and thereby attracts a more upmarket clientele, means he struggles to find time to work on his epic and the assorted distractions both from Quentin and Joan Benbow, the daughter of one of the guests whom Keith has fallen madly in love with add to the comic possibilities. Quentin has likewise fallen in love only he is smitten by Nelly Bly who is working there as a maid but in reality is a part time journalist for a national newspaper that is hoping to get some interesting stories. Amongst other guests there is an American by the name of Mr van Buren who has invented a new method for processing crude oil and if I say that his paper describing the technique is in an identical folder to that used by Keith for his poem I’m sure you can see where confusion lies later on in the book. Throw in some industrial espionage, a missing secret recipe for a blue cocktail available in light and dark shades to represent Oxford and Cambridge along with a few other quirks of the people staying there and the story positively bowls along dragged down only by the overlong car chase but even that has its redeeming and indeed ridiculous features.

Poet’s Pub is still in print by Penguin, although it now comes under Penguin Classics which I think is only fitting for this excellent novel that has stood the test of time remarkably well.

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

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Book number two from Penguin Books’ first ten titles which I’m reading in the quite fragile first edition copies to mark their ninetieth anniversary is A Farewell to Arms. As mentioned in last week’s blog about Ariel all the original rear covers for these books refer to this book as Farewell to Arms but this was quickly noticed and corrected and after the initial distributed batch the ‘A’ was reinstated. I’ve never been a particular fan of Hemingway, but I have enjoyed this, his second novel, which is based quite heavily on his own experiences in Italy during WWI although with fictional military units and characters some of which are based on real people. It was first published in 1929 and was sandwiched between his first novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and a non fiction book ‘Death in the Afternoon’ both of which are concerned with bullfighting which was a passion of his and probably negatively coloured my original impression of Hemingway.

The book follows American volunteer Frederic Henry who is serving as a Lieutenant in an ambulance corps for the Italian army before the Americans actually joined WWI. He meets an English nurse named Catherine Barkley but is rebuffed when he tries to kiss her. Later Henry gets badly injured in one knee during a mortar attack on the front line, getting decorated for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and ends up being looked after for months in a hospital in Milan where he is treated by Catherine and a relationship develops. I don’t know why but I wasn’t expecting a romantic story from Hemingway and this it definitely is as the deepening love between Frank and Catherine during his recovery supersedes the war driven plot in the first section of the book. Only for the war to come back into the story as Frank recovers sufficiently to be posted back to the front just in time for the Italian army to retreat in the face of German onslaught. Later whilst hiding as a civilian he joins up again with the now pregnant Catherine and they make an escape to Switzerland.

Hemingway on the other hand arrived in Italy in June 1918, aged just eighteen, as a Second Lieutenant working as an ambulance driver. In July he was injured in a mortar attack and got decorated and promoted to Lieutenant for his bravery in assisting fellow soldiers and then ended up spending six months recuperating in a hospital in Milan where he met an American nurse named Agnes Von Kurowsky and fell in love with her. Rather than go to Switzerland to escape the war in reality the conflict finished whilst he was being treated and he went back to America in early 1919 expecting Agnes to join him later. Instead she got engaged to an Italian officer and the two never met again.

That Hemingway had first hand experiences of the scenarios depicted in the novel is obvious in the vivid descriptions both of the conflict and the life in Milan during Frank’s recuperation, which at times seems so far away from the realities at the end of the First World War. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of Frank and I was particularly drawn in by the later sections covering the retreat from the north where Frank and his crew were as likely to be shot by jumpy and trigger happy Italians as the advancing Germans. The text is accurate enough for me to follow their movements on a map of northern Italy and then his escape from actually being shot by a group of disaffected Italian lower ranks and Carabinieri because he is an officer leading to his abandonment of his uniform to avoid reprisals through to the ultimate night time row across the Swiss border.

Below is a photo of my first edition copies of the first ten Penguin titles issued together on 30th July 1935.

Ariel – André Maurois

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30th July 1935 was a very important date in the history of publishing, as that is when the first ten Penguin books made their appearance. Ninety years later these books in their first editions are somewhat fragile and definitely difficult to find, especially the crime titles. I do have all ten and seven of them still have their elusive dust wrappers as can be seen below, the wrappers have the 6d (six pence) price on the front cover. For August I’m going to be reading the first four, one a week, and the plan is to read five of the remaining six during the rest of the year, one has already been a subject of a blog so this will be linked to when its turn comes, I will probably re-read this one as well just to say I’ve read the set in a run. As the books are so delicate, and valuable, this is not something I have done before but it only seems appropriate as a means to celebrate Penguin’s 90th birthday. The books are colour coded with blue indicating biography, orange fiction and green crime, other colours would be introduced as time goes on. This was a concept started by Albatross Press in Germany, see my blog on those books for more details and the similarities between them and Penguin.

Before talking about ‘Ariel’ the book there is one other thing that needs to be mentioned regarding these first ten books and that is an error on the back of the very first versions of all of them. Book two, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, is missing its first word in the list of titles on the rear. This was noticed quite quickly but not in time to prevent the first batch of titles going out with this incorrect list. Subsequent batches of books from the first editions of all ten books were corrected and the full title appears, however another error happened with ‘Ariel’and this is clear on the front cover at the top of this log entry. The authors first name is André not Andre and this led to a third cover being produced for the remainder of the first edition run of this title, not a great start to a new publishing enterprise. The first edition is therefore available in three variants:

  • Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and André on the front

All three versions are shown below, the first book being the rear of the one used at the top of the page with the missing accent, the second book is also missing the accent on the front cover.

Another thing to add, as it is clearer at the base of the rear covers above, is that Penguin Books when it began was simply a paperback imprint of the publisher John Lane The Bodley Head which explains why all the books say THE BODLEY HEAD on their front covers. This would be the case for over a year with Penguin Books finally becoming a separate entity and references to The Bodley Head no longer appearing from the batch of books numbered 81 to 90 published in March 1937.

When reading ‘Ariel’ it becomes clear that its subtitle ‘A Shelley Romance’ is particularly appropriate, as whilst it reads as a biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley it is at least partially a novel with a lot of clearly invented dialogue with no documentary evidence behind it, rather than what we would regard as a properly researched scholarly work today. That said the general thrust of the book and the sequence of events is accurate and it is impossible to examine the extent of Maurois’ actual research due to the lack of notes, citations or even an index in the book. Maurois is clearly more interested in getting a feel for his subject and portraying him in a way that gives an impression of what it would have been like to know him rather than providing a definitive biography, but it is very readable and still in print, both in this translation by Ella D’Arcy and other more modern versions.

We follow Shelley from his time being badly bullied at Eton, going on to Oxford where he lasted just a few months before being expelled from the university along with his friend and fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg over the authorship of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ which he had mailed to the bishops in the area and the heads of all the Colleges. Whilst at Oxford he had met Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old school friend of his sisters whom shortly after his nineteenth birthday he eloped to Edinburgh with. This led to their considerable financial difficulties as both sets of parents were outraged and stopped their allowances. Shelley had two children with Harriet, the second born after he had run away to France with the sixteen year old daughter of William Godwin and her sister whilst believing Harriet had begun an affair. Mary of course became famous as the author of Frankenstein which was published and went on to write several other novels after Shelley’s death but Maurois completely ignores this side of her portraying her as a dedicated wife, they married just days after after Harriet’s suicide, but also covering domestic arguments mainly between her and whichever other people (usually other women) were living with them at the time. The lack of acknowledgement of Mary’s literary talents is possibly the greatest failure of this biography. During the coverage of Shelley’s extended time in Italy, until his death there at just twenty nine, the quality of the biography improves markedly with letters included and far more evidence provided for what Maurois states happened.

Sadly Shelley never enjoyed the fruits of his poetic labours, as at his death he was still barely read and his life too coloured by his socialist and atheist reputation to make him acceptable reading for anyone likely to see his works in print, which is ironic bearing in mind his status as one of the great Romantic Poets nowadays. By all means read this book by Maurois as a general overview of the life of Shelley, but if you are really interested in the poet I have to recommend ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’ by Richard Holmes, first published in 1974 but still the definitive work.

The Game-Players of Titan – Philip K Dick

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The book is set sometime in the 22nd century, we know this as the year 2095 is mentioned as occurring in the past. Earth has been involved in a terrible war which has led to massive depopulation to between one and two million people over the entire globe, and due to radiation poisoning a significant reduction in fertility of the survivors. The planet is now administered by the Vugs, a race of telepathic beings from Saturn’s largest moon Titan who ended the conflict and whilst not seen as occupiers of Earth they are always around. Amongst the survivors are the maybe a couple of hundred thousand Bindmen, owners of huge swathes of cities and states and their non-B residents. The Bindmen play The Game putting title deeds to their properties and even their wives as stakes in the game which is encouraged by the Vugs who both love gambling and recognise that constant swapping of partners enhances the chances of a fertile couple meeting. The story starts with Pete Garden loosing not only his favourite property, the city of Berkeley in California, but also his wife Freya and to top it off has failed to throw a three which would allow him to take another wife. To make things more on edge Pete is already a drug addict and known suicide risk having attempted to take his own life on four previous occasions.

When Pete recovers from his latest low after losing the game he visits the winner and asks to buy back Berkeley only to find it has already been traded to an American East coast player called Jerome Luckman, a man who having won most of that side of the country was looking for a way in to play on the west coast and Berkeley was to be his opening stake. Pete meanwhile moves to another of his properties where he meets a telepathic non-B female resident who has been surprisingly lucky and has three offspring and he hopes to seduce her or possibly her prettier eighteen year old daughter. That evening though Pete throws a three and is immediately married to another partner just before Luckman arrives to play the game with Pretty Blue Fox as the game group in California is known and wins so consolidating his position.

But then there is a murder and The Game is going to completely change with everything you know, or think you know drastically altered…

Voyager Classics was a relatively short lived series of science fiction and fantasy books from Harper Collins all with the same blue and silver cover design, with French flaps and a different small, but sort of appropriate, image in the box on the front along with the spine. In this case the ace of spades even though the game they play in the book, Bluff, is clearly a board game. At the time of writing Harper Collins still list two titles in this series on their website, however only one of these has this rather attractive cover design. The Game-Players of Titan is book ten of the thirty six listed titles at the start of the book and they must have all been released, or at least announced, simultaneously in 2001 as this is the first edition. The initial set includes the three Lord of the Rings novels along with The Silmarillion making Tolkien the most represented author, but Ray Bradbury, Stephen Donaldson, David Eddings and Kim Stanley Robinson each appear three times. Philip K Dick has one other titles in the first thirty six, ‘Counter-Clock World’.

As you can see from the title image the cover is rather glossy and difficult to photograph so I did a search on Google to see if I could find another image of the Voyager Classics edition. I did, but the title is subtly different, missing the ‘The’ and also the hyphen in Game-Players. I have no idea if this is a later erroneous edition or what but it is an interesting oddity.