Tag: novel

They Came From SW19 – Nigel Williams

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I had completely forgotten I owned this book, it was only when looking for another title that I found it tucked away at the back of a double stacked shelf. In fact I don’t even remember reading it or indeed ever buying it, it is the 1993 first paperback edition with no indication that I picked it up secondhand so presumably I bought it when it came out, but it gives all the impression of being new and unread despite being over thirty years old. For people unfamiliar with British postcodes SW19 is Wimbledon and this is the second book of Williams’ Wimbledon trilogy, so called because they are all set there, but unlike most trilogies they have nothing else in common, no characters appearing in more than one book or linked plot lines etc. This means that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the others, but maybe I spotted it was the second book and put it on one side intending to get volume one, ‘The Wimbledon Poisoner’, but never did.

The title, and indeed the cover, imply that this is probably going to have something about UFO’s, and it does, although to a much smaller extent than expected. Williams develops the characters of Mr. Marr, Purkiss and Walbeck in the first few chapters as Wimbledons self appointed extra-terrestrial vanguard only to have Marr apparently abducted and then forgets all about the other two less than half way through the novel as they never appear again, it’s as though he completely changed his mind regarding the plot but couldn’t be bothered to go back and tidy up loose ends. Instead the book is mainly a parody of a cult like Christian community, the fictional ‘The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist’ whose one and only place of worship is in an out of the way part of Wimbledon. We see the shambolic church through the eyes of fourteen year old Simon Britton, whose parents were both members of the congregation, although at first he isn’t that interested, being more concerned with UFO spotting out on the common at night with Marr, Purkiss and Walbeck. Indeed, unlike his mother, his father seems equally unsure about his adherence to the pretty odd ways of the church but we don’t get to explore this for long as he dies of a heart attack during chapter one and for most of the book he only exists as reminiscences from Simon and in a couple of probable sightings of his ghost. The church is after all called Christ the Spiritualist and they are big on talking to and experiencing the dead. Members of the church are round the Britton’s house as soon as the news breaks, not to offer condolences, but to organise a seance to contact the recently departed Norman.

As I said this is a parody of a cult style church, although parishioners see it as another Christian community with some extra rules and traditions which can mainly be traced back to its founders who communicated with the dead on a regular basis. Apparently getting most of the tunes for the hymns used from John Wesley who dictated them directly to Rose Fox. The fact that most of them differ only by a few notes from Methodist classics suggest more plagiarism rather than spiritual intervention but that would be denying the faith. Not all can be traced back to Wesley though…

This is from the service where the awful Quigley family are doing their best to convince Simon to become closer to the church, for reasons that will become clearer later in the book, instead he uses the opportunity to spread the word himself, but about alien visitations rather than Christ’s resurrection, which the church believes is happening soon. Like quite a lot of similar groups in the 1990’s they see the two thousandth anniversary of Christ’s birth, and or death, as highly significant and that is probably the most sensible of their beliefs beyond that of mainstream Christianity. Indeed the odd doings of the church and Simon’s desperate desire to keep them from ever interacting with his school friends are far better written and funnier than the alien spotting part at the beginning of the book which only really continues after Simon’s alien inspired schism in the church which possibly explains the change in direction of the novel. I quite enjoyed it and most of the plot lines get tidied up at the end in a mainly satisfying way, with the obvious exception of Purkiss and Walbeck. I wasn’t expecting a parody of a niche Christian community or indeed of spiritualism, from the cover ut it works quite well. I’m not sure I will hunt out the other two books of the trilogy, it was good for a quite read but doesn’t inspire further investigation of Williams’ output

Count On Me – Ann Cavlovic

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This, the first novel by Canadian author Ann Cavlovic, is something I’ve been reading as effectively a book proof although it doesn’t have any indication that it is a copy from before the official release date printed within it. The book was published on 1st October last year in its native Canada and I’ve had a copy since September, but most of us here in the UK have to wait until the 8th January 2026 to be able to get a copy. Originally I planned to write this blog before the book was released in Canada but as that would have been four months before its availability in the UK it has been delayed until now, a few days before its release here.

I initially struggled to get into the book, probably as the scenario is so far from my own experience but as the story developed I came to enjoy the book more and more. Without giving too much away we learn of brother and sister Tia and Tristan whose mother really needs to go into a care home and their father isn’t far off being incapable of looking after himself. Tia has problems of her own, recently divorced and with a one year old daughter she is struggling to look after her child and hold down her job and dealing with her parents problems as well just becomes too much. Tristan in the guise of caring for their parents is actually pushing their father out of the family home so that he and his partner can take over and is financially abusing the joint bank account which he has access to via power of attorney. He has also taken and/or sold various items from the family home along with his mothers jewellery which had been promised to Tia and taken out a $20,000 loan against their security. How Tia confronts him about this and starts to put things right whilst still managing to look after her daughter as a single mother and all the issues that position alone puts her into is the plot of the book. Reading that back it sounds like a dark nightmare but the book has enough lightness and humour to make the plot still enjoyable as you watch Tia struggle and ultimately get legal and personal assistance to counteract her brother’s attempt to grab everything including the house.

The book is written in the first person from Tia’s perspective as she tries to make sense of what is going on and protect their parents from Tristan and his girlfriend, who seem determined to gain as much a possible and get the parents out of the way into homes as soon as he can without regard for the best outcome for them, only the way that suits him the most. After initially having problems getting into the book I’m glad I persevered and by mid way I was cheering Tia on as she fought for the best resolution for her parents and to stop Tristan riding roughshod over not only their wishes but the rest of their lives as he tried to get them into the cheapest possible home regardless of the awful reviews the place had received and the general manipulation that he has imposed over them. It is Cavlovic’s first novel, although not by any means her first piece of fiction, you can find more about her at her website.

Many thanks to River Street Writing for supplying my review copy.

Keepers of the House – Lisa St Aubin de Terán

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Lisa St Aubin de Terán gained her exotic sounding name from a mix of her mothers maiden name (St Aubin) and her first husband’s surname (Terán) of which more later. Born in London she was just twenty nine in 1982 when she wrote this, her first novel, but had already by then amassed life events enough for any aspiring writer to draw on. The novel tells the story of Londoner Lydia Sinclair who at the age of seventeen marries thirty five year old Venezuelan Don Diego Beltrán and goes to South America to live with him on his vast but declining estate. The book starts with a prologue which is set in the present day and tells how Lydia ended up in Venezuela before diving back over the two centuries of the rise and fall of the Beltrán family and estate until Don Diego is virtually the last of the family, and even he has a stroke several years into the marriage and is paralysed.

But the story of the early years of the Beltrán’s is of strong and powerful men rising to senior political and military ranks backed by the wealth from their estate. It is only after a horrific massacre of the family a century ago, men, women and children gunned down by soldiers goaded by members of a rival dynasty and a plague of locusts that destroyed all the crops in the valley leaving the villagers starving and almost as importantly the sugar cane that was the source of the money. The years of drought during Lydia’s time was the final straw, nothing is left, it is time to go. It sounds like a depressing read and in places it is but there is still some lightness to provide succour to the reader and it is certainly well worth reading. I also have her second novel ‘The Slow Train to Milan’ which is also based on her life with Jaime from after their marriage but before they finally moved to Venezuela and were instead travelling around Europe with increasingly bizarre experiences

Keepers of the House gets its title from a quote in the bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 12, and won the British literary prize The Somerset Maugham Award in 1983, which ironically is “to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries.” whilst St Aubin de Terán had already had seven years of experiences in Venezuela, which was used as the basis of the novel, and was now safely back in England. I have written about one of her other autobiographical books in another blog back in 2020 ‘A Valley in Italy‘ and up until now have largely read her non-fiction works but have recently purchased a couple of her novels, this one included. I was struck particularly by the similarities between the stories of fictional Lydia and real life Lisa when comparing this book to ‘The Hacienda’, her memoir of her time in Venezuela published in 1997. If you thought that the plot of the novel was somewhat far fetched then the real story of Lisa is definitely worth reading as in ‘The Hacienda’ she tell of how she married at the age of sixteen to an exiled Venezuelan man more than twice her age who is wanted in his home country for bank robbery but who nevertheless takes her back to South America to live on his estate. She eventually comes back to England with her daughter Iseult to avoid the planned suicide pact intended by her husband Jaime as he realises that the marriage is falling apart.

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.

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.

Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck

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Towards the end of his life Steinbeck felt the need for one last adventure, this was 1960 and he would die of heart failure in 1968 aged just 66. His wife had long been concerned about his health and his heart condition, brought on by his heavy smoking had flared up several times in the preceding years and she was worried about his plans to travel right round the country in a converted camper van with his standard poodle, Charley, as theoretically his only companion. But Steinbeck wanted to reconnect with America, as he says at the beginning of the book:

The plan was to drive up from New York into Maine and explore the back roads of that sparsely populated state before heading along the Canadian border and into Canada by Niagara Falls, before coming back into the USA and travelling up through Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota then along the northernmost border to the coast, trying to stay off interstate freeways as much as possible. The first stumbling block was going into Canada with Charley, the Canadians were fine but, as is still the case, the USA border patrol were not, so Canada was dropped from the route. The less busy roads were also too slow so freeways appear more and more as the journey went on, but those kept him away from the people he wanted to talk to to see how their lives were changing so a sort of compromise was decided on where open countryside was driven through as often as practical.

The book when it came out in 1962 was a hit although it soon became clear that although Steinbeck had genuinely driven around the USA the text was less a travelogue than a carefully created artifice. That’s not to denigrate the book or the stories it tells, which are funny and at times distressing and provide considerable insights into how America had changed over the decades since Steinbeck had left his native California for the east coast and New York State. But it should be taken into consideration that Steinbeck was a great novelist, he was to win the Nobel prize for Literature just after this book came out, and probably couldn’t resist moving stories around and inventing dialogue to make his point. Also the actual trip was considerably more luxurious, and less lonely, than made out in the book, of the seventy five days he was away from home he spent forty five in hotels with his wife, Elaine, and on more than half of the remaining thirty days he either stayed in motels or trailer parks or parked the camper van at the home of friends. Steinbeck’s son, also called John, said that his father invented almost all of the dialogue whilst writing the book but frankly I don’t care, it’s a fun read and you do learn a lot about America on the turn of the 1950’s into the 1960’s.

It is a very uneven travelogue anyway, by page 160 of the Folio Society edition I have we are in Seattle having left New York State and travelled along the US/Canadian border, so just one side of the rough rectangle planned for the journey. On that basis we should be looking at a four or five hundred page epic but instead it is only 241 pages in total, so over two thirds of the mileage is covered in a quarter of the pages and the detail in the first three quarters is lost in the remainder. That said I actually think the last quarter is the most important, as we have Steinbeck returning to search for his roots in California and finding that they are irretrievably lost. Cannery Row has been gentrified and he barely recognises the places of his childhood. Charley is also confused but that is mainly down to the visit to the giant redwoods which are so huge that he doesn’t seem to see them as trees and finds a small bush to mark instead.

But it is pretty well the last section that is the most important of this ‘almost’ documentary and drives home Steinbeck’s dislike of some of what he found on his journey when he goes to New Orleans in search of ‘the Cheerleaders’. These frankly repellent middle aged white women gathered each day to scream abuse at six or seven year old children going or leaving school who just happened to be a different colour than they were. Steinbeck was appalled by them and the crowds they pulled together which meant the children needed police support just to go to school.

I’m going to leave it there.

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford

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This truly remarkable novel makes use of the ‘unreliable narrator’ literary style and is probably the best version of this particular method of slowly revealing the true aspects of the story I have read. Not for nothing did it come as high as thirteenth in the BBC poll of literary critics for the one hundred greatest English novels. But first let’s address the title, which is not the original given to it by Ford. The book was due to be first published by John Lane: The Bodley Head in 1915, in his later dedication appended to the book in 1927 Ford explains what happened:

The book was originally called by me The Saddest Story, but since it did not appear until the darkest days of the war were upon us Mr. Lane importuned me with letters and telegrams – I was by that time engaged in other pursuits! – to change the title which he said would at that date render the book unsaleable. One day, whilst I was on parade, I received a final wire of appeal from Mr. Lane and the telegraph being reply paid I seized the reply form and wrote in hasty irony ‘Dear Lane, why not The Good Soldier’… To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title.

That the new title was ironic certainly becomes obvious the more you read the book, although initially it appears to be highly suitable. The original title does make its appearance in a few places with Ford having his narrator say several times similar phrases to ‘I call this The Saddest Story’, which is actually the opening line of the final part or ‘THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard’ which is the books’ first sentence. When you start reading however there is no hint of the tragedies still to come as John Dowell, our unreliable narrator, starts off painting a happy friendship between the English couple Edward and Leonora Ashburnham and the Americans John and Florence Dowell set over nine years largely in the German spa resort of Bad Nauheim where the couples regularly meet. Captain Edward Ashburnham is the good soldier of the title and is apparently there for treatment of his heart condition that has effectively invalided him out of his regiment. Florence is also there for treatment of a heart condition, fear of which has prevented her from having sexual relations with John since their marriage began. Apart from that the couples seem ideal, independently wealthy so they can choose to live where they want and largely do what they want all is happiness in this small group of friends.

But that is what John initially wants you to think and it may be what he believes at least at the start of the narrative but gradually he reveals more, almost inadvertently, recalling details that turn the situation on its head and this is where reviewing this book becomes tricky because I really want to encourage you to read the book and discussing what happens is almost impossible without revealing too much. Suffice to say that almost nothing you are told in the first part of the book turns out to be true, instead there is a complex inter-relationship between the characters which is nothing like it first seems and even the reasons for them being in Germany at all is based on a tissue of lies.

The slow reveal of the various facts and of the other tragic characters associated with the ‘good’ Captain show a superb skill in the writing of the book as revelation after revelation come after the barest of hints that all is not right but remain believable and despite John’s bewildered insistence that he is the one steady rock in the narrative the fact that he keeps changing his story leaves the reader wondering just how much of what you come to understand by the end is really what happened and what is still John’s reinterpretation of the story. There is a good reason why this book has remained in print for almost 110 years so far so even if you have never heard of Ford Madox Ford I recommend that you get hold of a copy and read it.

Zulaikha – Niloufar-Lily Soltani

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Canadian author Soltani’s first novel takes us to her Iranian heritage with a powerful story exploring the life of the fictional Zulaikha (pronounced Zuli-ka), born in 1945 and therefore exposed to the various changes that have overtaken Iran in the last seventy plus years including the suppression of female rights since the Islamic Revolution at the end of the 1970’s. Not that Zulaikha’s life had been particularly rosy even before the revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. From being pulled out of school in 1958 at the age of thirteen because as her mother, Madineh, saw it “no man would marry a girl with an education”, her role was to get married and her wishes were seen as unimportant. The book however starts in December 2007 and in Amsterdam rather than Iran. Sixty two year old Zulaikha has been visiting her son, who now lives in The Netherlands and at Schiphol airport on the way back to Tehran she meets Kia, a man she hasn’t seen since the 1960’s. There is no hint as to the relationship between them other than he used to know her missing brother Hessam, in this opening chapter, we slowly find out more as the book progresses but the two of them meeting triggers a postponement of their flight and security take Zulaikha away for questioning. Who is this man and why should their chance meeting be seen as a cause of concern? We find out the who eventually but we are left in suspense as to what will happen to Zulaikha when she returns to Iran the next day as the book leaps backward to 1958 and begins a chronological narrative until we eventually get back to the plane landing.

Soltani gives her protagonist a difficult time, from being a child bride as the second wife of a merchant in Bahrain whom she only meets just before the wedding, to becoming a widow whilst still only seventeen and returning to Iran where she ends up having an abortion after a doomed illicit relationship. Zulaikha grows up in Abadan, home to what was at one time the largest oil refinery in the world and crucially close to the border with Iraq which made it a prime target in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war, so much so that the population plummeted from around 300,000 in 1980 to just 6 in 1985 and Zulaikha along with her family and most of the population of the city became refugees in Tehran and it is in 1985 that Hessam vanishes, presumed killed on the front line. She also spends time in the notorious Evin prison but despite the hardships piled onto Zulaikha the narrative drive of the story keeps you reading, indeed it’s a difficult book to put down you just want to know more of her story. It is also a book that is clearly well researched with many real events explored, such as the Abadan Cinema Rex fire in 1978 which killed over four hundred people and became one of the turning points in the overthrow of the Shah with rumours blaming his secret police force despite the barring of the doors and subsequent arson actually being perpetrated by Islamic militants. I learnt so much more Iranian history through reading this novel.

The book first came out at the end of 2023 in Canada although it is now available more widely and it is definitely worth seeking out, it is beautifully written and the story of the ups and downs of Zulaikha’s life is engrossing with the various threads largely tied up by the end but you still want to know more about Zulaikha which is a good place to leave her story. This blog is being published on Tuesday 19th March and the Iranian new year is marked on the first day of Spring, this Thursday 21st March so Happy New Year to any of my readers whom are celebrating this, or in Farsi Nowruz Mobarak.