Category Archives: Book Club

Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits at the Book Club

Posted on 16 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree 2024)

Before the Book Club meeting: I’ve recently been reading a lot by Irish writers who travel beyond their native shores. What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is set in Vermont. The Narrow Land of Christine Dwyer Hickey’s novel is Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the 1950s. Sean Whiteside’s eminently readable translation made Wolfram Eilenbecker’s The Visionaries available to English readers from 1930s Germany. Now Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits goes even further afield in space and time. It’s set in Sicily in the fifth century BCE, during the Peloponnesian War.

Athens has invaded Sicily and been soundly defeated. A large number of Athenians are imprisoned in a quarry outside the city of Syracuse (this really happened). Some of the prisoners are given slightly better conditions if they can quote lines from Euripides (this also really happened). Two unemployed potters, Lampo and Gelon, stage a double bill of two Euripides tragedies, Medea and The Trojan Women, performed in the quarry by Athenian prisoners (this is made up). The Syracusans, including Lampo the natrrator, have Irish accents (why not?).

The novel, Ferdia Lennon’s first, has been a big success. You can read the Observer review here, and Kirkus Reviews here. Apart from saying that I enjoyed it, laughed out loud a number of times, was shocked at the shocking moments and came to like and care about the characters, I’ll stick to page 78*, whose action is neither at the quarry with the Athenian actor-prisoners, nor at the pub with the Syracusans, but at the docks.

On this page Lampo meets the collector, a man of great wealth that is almost certainly ill-gotten. Gelon has gone alone to the collector’s ship to negotiate a deal on a pile of armour stripped from Athenian corpses. At the start of page 78 Lampo has told the collector’s piratical crew that he’s there to see his friend, and that he’s unarmed.

They pat me down all the same, and the bastards are rough and thorough. Still, it’s true what I said. I’ve got nothing on me, and, satisfied, the fella nods, goes to a hatch on the floor with an iron ring, and pulls it open.
‘Down there,’ he says. ‘Your mate’s down there. I’ll show you.’
Straight away, there’s a whiffy heft to the air. Sickly sweet, but with something sour beneath it. Your man walks on ahead.

There’s no attempt at faux-antique or heroic-Greek prose here. It’s straight into the ‘bastards’, ‘fellas’, ‘mates’ and ‘your mans’ of contemporary Irish vernacular. And, as everywhere in this novel, there’s a lot to smell. I don’t know if a specific source of the smell is being suggested, but there’s a clear metaphor: the collector, as we are about to see, is urbane and courteous, but with something ominous beneath the urbanity. At the end of the page, his teeth provide another metaphor:

The collector looks over at me and smiles. His teeth are ridiculously white and arrow-straight, yet there’s an animal feel to them. Like they belong in the maw of something larger in the woods, and not a merchant nibbling grapes.

If I’d set out to write a plot summary, I might easily not have mentioned the collector. He has a function in the plot – I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that he provides financial backing for the production, and later a potential means of escape for some characters. But there are at least two other things to notice.

First, he has a sadistic, ghoulish quality. There’s the bloodstained armour he’s buying from our heroes. Then on this page Lampo recognises him as ‘the fella who tried to buy the homeless bastard’s rope’ – referring back to a homeless man’s story of a threadbare length of rope he treasures as his only memento of childhood, which he refuses to sell it a vast sum to a stranger we now know to be the collector. (The rope later turns up on the collector’s wall, leaving the reader to deduce that it was taken from its owner by force.) So his involvement highlights the macabre dimension of Gelon and Lampo’s project. Gelon’s desire to stage plays by the great Euripides is surely a good thing, fuelled by his passionate love of high Greek culture, and the potters and their performers develop relationships of mutual respect and even affection. Their art gives them respite from the horrors of their situation. But for the other Athenian prisoners that situation is unchanged, and even for the performers there is only the briefest respite.

There’s another thing. The collector’s name is later revealed to be Tuireann, a name he shares with a figure from Celtic mythology. At a literal level this might suggest that he has come to Sicily from far-off Ireland. But I think it’s a little authorial joke. If the language of the book is Irish, why not give one of the characters an Irish name?

I had to do a web search on “Tuireann” to get that joke (if it is one). It’s the kind of book where there are plenty of things to look up if the spirit moves you. The Peloponnesian War and the two plays by Euripides are the big ones. Did it add to my enjoyment that I saw an amateur production of The Trojan Women in Darlinghurst four decades ago? Probably. Would I have felt the lack if I hadn’t? I doubt it.

After the meeting: We discussed this book alongside Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and apart from the person who had read only 10 percent of it, we all enjoyed it a lot more. The ten-percenter said she had stopped reading because of time constraints, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers put the book aside after the terrible brutality that comes in the first couple of pages.

One of us had been to Syracuse and visited the quarry, though the guide didn’t talk about the imprisoned Athenians. None of us had felt the need to read up on Ancient History – the book doesn’t depend on specialist background knowledge. Two of us had heard Ferdia Lennon speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, so could add a little bit of news about him and what went into the making of the book.

I can’t talk about the way the book ends, but it’s probably OK to say that it’s with a kind of coda. When someone said she loved the ending, two of us thought she meant the bitter-sweet, though mostly bitter, conclusion of the main narrative. Once we were reminded of the actual final moments of the book, we agreed. The other person who had got that far disagreed. She thought it was unnecessary and a bit of a stretch. ‘The whole book is a stretch’, three of us replied in unison.

The Book Club met in Gadigal land, close to the great harbour Warrane. I wrote this blog post beneath a cloudless sky on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia. I welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

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We Do Not Part with Han Kang at the Book Club

Posted on 15 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Han Kang, We Do Not Part (2021, translated e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, Hamish Hamilton 2025)

Before the Book Club meeting: Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, so her most recent book to be translated into English seemed a good choice for the Book Club.

The book falls into at least three parts. (Spoilers ahead.)

Part One: The narrator, who is experiencing suicidal depression, receives an urgent request from a friend, Inseon, to come to her in hospital. When she arrives, she finds Inseon has done a terrible injury to her hand and is receiving frequent, excruciatingly painful treatment, graphic descriptions of which are interspersed with a history of their friendship and their artistic collaborations. Inseon asks the narrator to go to her house on the remote island of P– and feed her pet bird, who will otherwise die.

Pat Two: The narrator makes the arduous journey to Inseon’s house, the final stage of it on foot through a blizzard. When she arrives, the bird is dead. Though she herself has barely survived her ordeal, she immediately buries the bird out in the snow.

Part Three: While the ghost of the bird casts flittering shadows around the walls, Inseon turns up, with an uninjured hand. Evidently she is some kind of supernatural projection of the living person still back there in the hospital, though the narrator suspects at one stage that both she and Inseon are actually dead. Anyhow, Inseon guides the narrator through a number of documents that record a terrible massacre committed during the Korean War, apparently with US connivance, and the decades-long attempt by surviving relatives to have the massacre acknowledged.

At the level of narrative, I didn’t understand the book. When the exhausted narrator goes back out into the snow to bury the bird without even putting on warm clothes, I nearly stopped reading, and from then on my disbelief remained unsuspended. But as the story of the massacres emerged from the piles of documents, I was glad to be learning about a part of history I’d been completely ignorant of. On the other hand, given that the information is embedded in an unabashedly unrealistic narrative, I’m left not knowing how much of the massacre story is itself fiction. In effect, then, the book is a signpost pointing its readers to the need for further research.

WIkipedia has a minimalist entry about the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre of 7 February 1951, in which 705 civilians were killed, 85% of them women, children and elderly people. The files concerning the massacre, Wikipedia confirms, were not found until February 2006. That is the emotional heart of this novel: I have no idea how the story of the injury, the blizzard and the dead bird fit together with it.

The meeting:

I wasn’t the only one perplexed by this book. We were pretty well unanimous that we wouldn’t recommend it to friends, even though there is some beautiful writing in it. We were divided on the question of whether we would want to read anything else by Han Kang,

The narrator’s ordeal in the blizzard, we all agreed, is compelling.

One valiant soul found rich metaphor in the account of Inseon’s injury and treatment: her severed fingers represent the divided state of Korea and the painful injection every three minutes suggests that the process of reunion will involve sustained, painful work. My literal-mindedness at first rebelled at such a reading, but maybe it’s there for readers with a Korean cultural background, who I expect are also better equipped for the ghost-not-ghost parts of the narrative.

I wasn’t the only one who had done some research into the history that is the subject of the book’s final movement. Whereas I had looked up a single Wikipedia entry, S– had read a number of articles on the Korean War – but, she said, she ended up more confused than when she started

We discussed this book along with Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. Both books build fictions around historical events, but no one felt compelled by Glorious Exploits to study up on the Peloponnesian War.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land where just now the sun is shining from a cloudless sky and the wind has died down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool at the Book Club

Posted on 28 Apr 2025 | 4 comments

Richard Russo, Everybody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2017)

Before the meeting: This is the second book in Richard Russo’s trilogy set in the dead-end town of North Bath in rural New York: it was preceded by Nobody’s Fool (1993) and followed by Somebody’s Fool (2023). I read it as a stand-alone. At about page 80 I went to Wikipedia for a synopsis of Nobody’s Fool, and really I needn’t have. (I also watched a trailer for Robert Benton’s 1994 movie, which was probably a mistake, as the image of Paul Newman as the character Sully was seriously different from the one I’d built up for myself, even allowing for the fact that Sully has aged 20 years since the first book.)

All the same, even for those who haven’t read about the characters’ earlier lives, it’s clear that they are living in various aftermaths. It begins with a burial and returns to the cemetery again and again. One man has been given a year to live, another is stuck in grief for his wife who died in the act of leaving him, a third has been released from jail and proclaims unconvincingly that he has turned over a new leaf. One couple remain affectionate though their affair is long since over, another deal with a long history of mental illness. Friendships endure in spite of mutual irritation, enmities are maintained in spite of deep-seated fellow-feeling. It’s complex, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wretchedly painful, abounding in situational ironies. There are two violent deaths that we don’t witness, and one shockingly violent scene that we do. There are two villains, three if you count the out-of-town dealer in snakes and drugs. There’s a disgustingly incontinent dog. A couple of characters from the first book make cameo appearances, for no obvious reason apart from letting longterm readers know what they’re up to.

Class is ever-present. Most of the book’s characters know they have been excluded from the good things of life. They’re rough with each other, but there’s also kindness and integrity and a strong sense of belonging. At one point Sully, who has the strongest claim to be the main character, reflects that he has made sure ‘that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise’ (page 448). It’s an attitude that elsewhere might be called quiet despair, but here it includes an assertion of connection.

I enjoyed it a lot. It deals with serious themes, but it’s a lot of fun in all sorts of ways.

On page 78*, nobody is being nice to anyone, but nobody’s going anywhere. The scene is Harriet’s diner, one of the three eating and drinking establishments in the town. The characters are Ruth, owner of Harriet’s; her daughter Janey who has just come in complaining about a scene in her bathroom; Carl, a failing developer whose post-prostate-surgery incontinence (which everyone knows about) is responsibe for the bathroom scene; Roy, Janey’s violent ex-husband, fresh out of jail and claiming to have turned over a new leaf, who has just left; and Sully, one-time lover of Ruth, who now hangs around every day to be generally helpful and has just picked a fight with Roy. Ruth is speaking to Janey:

‘Sorry about the bathroom,’ she said, ‘but Carl had an accident.’ She emphasised the name ever so slightly. Remember? she seemed to be saying. What I told you about Carl?
‘Oh, right.’ Janey shrugged. ‘I guess that makes it okay.’
‘That was my thought,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m glad you agree.’
Janey rolled her eyes to show that she most certainly did not agree but wasn’t going to go to the mat over it, either. ‘Was that my idiot ex-husband’s voice I heard earlier?’ Ruth apparently took this to be a rhetorical question, because she didn’t bother answering. ‘He’s taking that restraining order real serious.’
… ‘He hasn’t caused any trouble so far, or even tried to,’ Ruth said, glancing at Sully. ‘Unlike some people.’
‘That’s the thing about Roy,’ Janey said, putting her now-empty mug into a plastic busing tub. ‘He won’t, until he does. But when he does, it’ll be my jaw that gets broke, like always.’
‘He breaks your jaw because you’re always mouthing off.’
‘No, he breaks it because he enjoys breaking it.’
‘Like you enjoy mouthing off,’ Ruth said as Janey brushed past her.
‘Well, jeez,’ Janey mused, pausing in the doorway to her apartment. ‘Let’s think a minute. Where the fuck do I get that from?’

I could probably have picked any page in the book and found similarly alive dialogue, and a similar complexity of relationships. Notice that Sully doesn’t say a word. Ruth’s glance in his direction comes from a woman you don’t want to cross. Likewise, we know that Janey is right about her ‘idiot ex-husband’, but Ruth isn’t gong to back down meekly. It’s no spoiler to say that Ruth’s attributing Roy’s violence to Janey’s mouthiness is rich with narrative irony: what she says in the heat of mother-daughter irritation is a standard blame-shifting rationale used by perpetrators of family violence. That irony goes deep in the light of events yet to come, but my lips are sealed.

After the meeting: We read this along with Christine Dwyer Hicks’s The Narrow Land (yesterday’s blog post here).

They’re very different books, and though I tried in my post on The Narrow Land to note things they had in common, no one else was much interested in such attempts. I’d say that a couple of us enjoyed this book much more than the other, but others not so much. One got to about 20 percent (this is how Kindle readers talk) and then went no further, another read about four percent. The first, probably being polite to those of us who enjoyed it, said that while she could see that the writing was very good, she had no desire to spend any more time in the depressing world of the novel.

Two of us talked about the human warmth and humour. I fond myself laughing helplessly as I recounted one of the more macabre episodes. Others remained stony-faced. The other person who found the book funny said it was like Carl Hiaasen’s work (‘Without alligators,’ I agreed). She also made a cogent argument for the book’s acknowledgement of class in a way that isn’t common in novels from the USA. Similarly civil but unconvinced response.

When I said I could imagine a movie adaptation directed by the Cohen brothers that seemed to bridge the chasm a little.

As I’m about to hit ‘Publish’, I realise that nowhere in my ‘Before the meeting’ section did I mention the wonderful comedic energy of the writing: the book opens with a bravura description of the North Bar cemetery; the town doesn’t have alligators, but it is terrorised by a king cobra; there are terrible smells; a building collapses like something out of a Buster Keaton movie. All of this seems to have passed most of the other club members by. Maybe you have to have to temporarily suspend solemn empathy as well as disbelief.

The Book Club on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as rain poured down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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The Book Club at Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Narrow Land

Posted on 27 Apr 2025 | 10 comments

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land (Atlantic 2019)

The cover of The Narrow Land features Edward Hopper’s painting Sea Watchers (1952). The back cover tells us the book is about a ten-year-old boy who forms an unlikely friendship with ‘the artists Jo and Edward Hopper’. But nowhere in the narrative itself are we told the names of the two artists, even though many of the man’s paintings are lovingly described and even a reader as ignorant about US art as I am could recognise some of them (admittedly with help from Duck Duck Go) as Hoppers. Nor is there an afterword or acknowledgement to clarify the story’s relationship to historical fact.

I don’t know what to make of that, since it looks as if a significant dimension of the book is a fictional depiction of Hopper’s practice and the Hopper marriage. In particular, to judge from Josephine Hopper’s Wikipedia entry, it’s likely that the narrative draws on her copious journals recording her bitterness and their stormy quarrels. The character’s journals are mentioned, but Josephine Hopper’s are not.

The Hoppers-not-Hoppers, she in her sixties and he quite a bit older, have a terrible relationship. They are at their Cape Cod house for the summer in the early 1950s. He is stuck, searching for inspiration. She lives in his shadow, resents his failure to support her work, nags at him to get on with his own, is hyper-alert to possibilities that he will be attracted to other women, and relentlessly picks fights with him. He is relentless right back at her. They’re not people you want to be around.

Ten-year-old Michael comes into their lives. He is a German war orphan, possibly Jewish, brought to the US and adopted by a working-class couple in New York, spending the summer with a benefactor who is the artists’ neighbour.

Relationships develop among these characters, including Michael’s complex host family. The narrow land of the title refers literally to Cape Cod, as in this map. It also refers, I think, to the narrowness of a non-combatant USer’s world-view: Michael’s hosts are unable to imagine the magnitude of what he has endured (which he experiences now as nightmarish flashes of memory). The narrowness is also there in the constrictions that society places on the artist, and the claustrophobia that ‘Mrs Aitch’ rails against in her marriage. Perhaps it refers also to the limits imposed on people’s lives in the wake of the Second World War – partners, parents and siblings are still being mourned, and returned soldiers wander through the narrative like wraiths.

For the most part, this isn’t a pleasant read. I found Mrs Aitch especially painful – like Pansy in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, her bitterness is unremitting, but she lacks Pansy’s biting wit. Unlike Pansy though, she finds temporary relief in connection with children – Michael and his obnoxious host Richie – where we get to see her in a more positive light. Also unlike Pansy, she has a moment when her intolerant discontent saves the day.

Having just described Richie as obnoxious, I feel obliged to say that even though almost all of the characters are unlikeable, most of them have moments when we see an underlying pain. We come to see Richie in particular as tragic.

Page 78* turns out to be a good example of my pervasive frustration. It’s near the start of the novel’s second section, titled ‘Venus’, in which we realise that ‘he’ – Hopper-not-Hopper – is searching for a woman he glimpsed the previous summer, as he feels that she will inspire him now. (Spoilerish note: he does find her, but it doesn’t work.) On this page he remembers the day that he found her:

She was standing in the doorway of a house, a man standing on the threshold, maybe leaving or maybe hoping to get inside.
He’d driven by and pulled in further along the street. Then he walked back past the house. There had been a bush by the gate, tangled and dried up from the heat, a lawn, yellowed by neglect and the ravages of a long summer.

There’s a description of her clothes and a snippet of overheard conversation, then:

He had walked on for a couple of minutes. then crossed the road to return on the opposite side, his head tilted as if he were searching for the number of a door. As he came closer to the house, he saw her lift her hands and put them under her hair, which was a whiter shade of blonde. Then she flipped it all up, holding it for a few seconds to the back of her head. He could see the damp patches of sweat stamped into her armpits and the outline of her long neck, the soft curve where it joined her shoulders. She dropped her hair and her face lifted upwards. The blue blouse. The light on her face. He couldn’t figure out if it was pouring into her or pouring out of her. He thought she looked sanctified. Then he thought she looked the opposite.

He rushes home and drags out his easel:

He laid it down: the street, the house, the figure of the girl in the doorway, the figure of the man alongside it with one foot on the step, the lawn, the gate, the tangled bush.

This is emphatically an account of a particular artist’s creative process. It’s as if the novelist sets out to imagine for us how Edward Hopper created one of his paintings, but then – for legal reasons, perhaps, or from simple respect for the unknowability of the real man – pulls back from acknowledging that that’s what she’s doing. The understated eroticism here plays nicely into the portrait of the artist’s marriage: his wife (never named) realises that she is not the model for the woman in the painting, and is furious.

On the way to the meeting: We read The Narrow Land along with Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool. Just before the meeting I’m noting some things the books have in common:

  • they both have dogs that make a mess of cars – the disgustingly incontinent Rub in Everybody’s Fool, and Buster in this book who leaves a car ‘looking like a feathered nest’
  • characters read books: Sully in Everybody’s Fool remembers as a boy reading the beginning of a book we recognise as David Copperfield (Dickens), and discarding it; Michael in this book reads The Red Pony (Steinbeck) and Tom Sawyer (Twain) and takes them in his stride
  • Class looms large: when Michael’s working-class foster parents turn up we suddenly feel grounded in honest relationships; when Sully’s son turns up in the other book, we’re away with the abstractions of middle-class life.

After the meeting: The books had to compete with the pope’s funeral on the TV, but we still had an interesting conversation.

I think we were all a bit perplexed by A Narrow Land – not quite sure where its focus is. The person who had first proposed it, an artist herself, kicked the conversation off by saying that she was disappointed the book had so little to say about Hopper’s process, and in a way we circled around that central absence for the rest of our conversation.

One other person shared my unease about the relationship between the fictional characters and the historical persons. Others had no problem with it, and I still find it hard to say precisely what my problem is. Our host produced a hefty volume of Hopper’s work and we tried to pin down the paintings he works on in the book. No one claimed to have enjoyed the book unreservedly, though I think we all found some joy, or at least pleasure, in it. No one was much interested in trying to compare the two books.

We met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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The Book Club, Alan Hollinghurst and Our Evenings

Posted on 23 Feb 2025 | 9 comments

Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings (Picador 2024)

Before the meeting: About five decades ago I had to write an Eng Lit essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’. It’s a poem that cries out to be read aloud, and on a weekend away at a beach house with friends, I found an out-of-the-way spot where I could perform the poem over and over for my own ears. It turned out that my secluded corner was actually an amplifying booth, and my sonorous renditions were heard by everyone in the house. Someone finally came and pleaded with me to stop. Embarrassment aside, I still love the poem.

So I took it as a personal gift to me when the poem is being recited, unannounced and unexplained, at the start of Chapter 15 of Our Evenings:

‘Earnest,’ I said, ‘earthless … equal … attuneable …’ Stella peered at me, tongue on lip, daring me.
‘… vaulty …’ she said.
… vaulty, voluminous … stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vast –’ (now we chanted it together) ‘womb-of-all – home-of-all – hearse-of-all NIGHT!’
‘I bet you can’t go on.’

If I hadn’t been loving the book before then, I would have been hooked.

As it happens, I was enjoying the book. The hero-narrator David Win, son of an English mother and a Burmese father he has never known, was given a scholarship to attend a prestigious boarding school, and at the start of Chapter 15 he’s studying at Oxford. The novel traces his development into a successful actor, his crushes, affairs and finally marriage with men, and his arrival at a reasonably contented late middle age (as we in our late 70s refer to the 60s).

The phrase that gives the novel its title occurs when David is in his last year at the boarding school. He is taken under the wing of Mr Hudson, his English teacher. They listen to classical music together late in the evening. These quiet times have an intimate, erotic charge, but though other boys leap to crude conclusions, ‘nothing ever “happened”, as they say’. Among the pieces they listen to is the first movement of Janáček’s ‘On an Overgrown Path’, which has its own title, ‘Our Evenings’. (You can hear it played by Rudolf Firkusny in 1986 at this link.)

The piece seemed simple and songlike, but the modulations in it made you wonder, and an agitated figure broke in higher up and then, like the scratch on the record, disappeared and left you with the song in a further change of mood, which didn’t quite replace the first one but seemed to cast the shadow of experience over it – what, I couldn’t say, but I felt it. I had no idea what we were listening to or how long it was going on – there was a very quiet passage when the agitated figure came back, but subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty, and soon after that the piece ended without any fuss. I glanced at Mr Hudson, but he was staring at the fire too, and then he jumped up and said, ‘Shall we hear it again?’

Apart from being an instance of the way other works – plays, poems, pieces of music – move the narrative along, this passage is a nice example of the way David as narrator shows rather than tells. ‘I couldn’t say, but I felt it.’ He never says in so many words that he has a crush on Mr Hudson, or that he believes it to be reciprocated, but in little moments like this – in Mr Hudson jumping up and suggesting a replay – readers can draw their own conclusions.

The description of Janáček’s music could be applied to the novel itself: ‘subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty’ occasionally interrupted by an ‘agitated figure’. The prose is elegant and unruffled, and most of the terrible things that happen – AIDS, Brexit, Covid – are offstage. David as boy, adolescent and man is unfailingly polite and helpful – we are usually left to imagine what feelings he is covering up, even perhaps from himself. He regularly encounters ‘agitated figures’ in the form of racism, but mostly it’s of the raised eyebrow or muttered phrase, micro-aggressive variety. An African-heritage lover says, ‘You’re not even Black!’ Likewise the homophobia he encounters is subtle – when he comes out to his mother and her female friend, their response is more or less, ‘Well, that’s been obvious for a long time!’ Class plays a role –  David’s patrons, whom he loves to the end – are like Proust’s aristocrats in their unfailing graciousness and generosity, and the sense that nothing really touches them. The mystery of his father remains a mystery, though late in life he receives some vague information. As in real life, many mysteries remain mysterious.

I suppose sex itself might count as an ‘agitated figure’. There’s quite a lot of it but, though it’s not coy, very little is explicit. I remember only two moments when sexual body parts are named, one involving a kind rejection, the other the beginning of a solid relationship. Neither is the slightest bit prurient.

The last 10 pages depart from the mainly ‘subdued and dreamlike’ narrative in a way that came as a surprise to me, and casts a brilliant light back over the preceding pages.

After the meeting: At the Book Club, we usually have two books under discussion at each meeting. This time, there was just the one, but everyone had to report on the book they’d scored in our Kris Kringle at last meeting. So our discussion, which followed and preceded convivial conversation about other things, began with enticing rundowns of books by Bernhard Schlink, Jock Serong, Robbie Arnott and Niamh Mulvey, and an unenticing rundown of one other.

Of Our Evenings, we had a very interesting discussion. I probably liked the book most, but no one hated it. The only strong difference was about the last ten pages, which I felt gave shape and significance to the whole thing and most others experienced as a lame and unnecessary framing device. It would be too spoilerish to present the arguments here. I’ll just state the obvious: they’re entitled to their opinions, but they’re wrong.

One person had an interesting take on the title. It captured the way the book, for her, is like a series of conversations you might have in a quiet evening at home: meandering, pleasant, amiable recollections and reflections, without drama or much significance. (If that’s so, I hope I said at the time, there’s always an awareness of terrible things happening in the outside world, of which many of the tiny things that come up in those conversations are micro-effects.)

David Win as narrator and hero provoked interesting conversation, which I’ll try to summarise. He is an outsider because of racism, class and sexuality, not necessarily in that order. As an outsider, his main way of being in the world is to aim to fill other people’s expectations – to act out the scripts he is given. It’s not insignificant that he’s an actor. He rarely takes the initiative, and there’s a way he doesn’t seem to know who he is. Not just as narrator, but also as character, he doesn’t have access to his own inner life. The narrative restraint about sex, which is not so in Hollinghurst’s other books that people had read, may be part of this. I read out the only passage in the book that mentions hard-ons, and people laughed (but not at all derisively). It’s as if in this book explicit sex is a relief from always having to decode what is being communicated in tight-lipped upper-class British dialogue (see Mr Hudson’s ‘Shall we hear it again?’ above).

We discussed other characters that I didn’t mention in the first part of this blog, especially a Boris Johnsonesque blustering bully, .

Less centrally, some took an almost anthropological interest in the portrayal of Gay male relationships – and it’s true that Hollinghurst gives meticulous detail on how people make their desires known. One person felt that (minor spoiler alert) having the David’s mother become a Lesbian was just laying on the Gayness too thick. Another, on the contrary, was impressed and delighted by the nuanced portrayal of middle-class, middle-aged, post-heterosexual-marriage Lesbianism.

We didn’t discuss the Hopkins poem, the Janáček music, or the plays – notably by Racine and Ben Jonson – that turn up in the narration.

Mint-flavoured Turkish delight was on offer. Only two of us tried it. I was the only one to finish my piece. I don’t recommend it. I do recommend the book.

Our Book Club met on unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present. I hope that our conversation was in some way in continuity with yarns that have been happening on this land for tens of thousands of years.

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Asako Yuzuki’s Butter

Posted on 6 Feb 2025 | 8 comments

Asako Yuzuki, Butter (2018, translation by Polly Barton, 4th Estate 2024)

This was my end-of-year gift from the Book Club. It is probably an excellent book about misogyny in Japanese culture, with sharp satiric assaults on attitudes to food, with extra piquancy derived from its claim to be based on a true-crime story. It was evidently a huge success in Japanese and this English translation by Polly Barton has been reviewed enthusiastically.

The protagonist, Kira, is an ambitious young woman journalist working on a sensationalist magazine. In searching for a career-defining scoop she becomes enthralled by Manako Kajii, a woman who defies the social norms of slender femininity and is currently in prison for having killed a number of elderly men, after winning their hearts by cooking luxurious food for them. Manako introduces Kira, who until now has survived on a spartan, negligent diet, to the joy of butter – cooking with it and eating the results.

My guess is that the key to enjoying the book is to read it fast, and I’m a slow reader. The themes are real and interesting: feminism versus feminine wiles; social norms versus desire; career ambition versus enjoyment of life. But I struggled with it, and gave up soon after my obligatory 77 pages.

It may well be that Polly Barton has reproduced the feel of the original Japanese, but the best way I can describe my response to the book’s language is to say that it reads like the kind of English you find in school students’ translations. The information is all there, but in the process of capturing it, the student forgets to pay attention to the natural rhythms and sequencing of English prose. That’s fine if you’re a teacher correcting someone’s homework, but if you’re reading a novel, it keeps yanking you out of the story.

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment, but I’ll try to articulate why I find the book such a slog. Page 77* isn’t particularly egregious, but it offers a number of examples. Rika is on an outing with her mother, partly to cheer her up, and partly with the undeclared intention of having a look at Kajii’s apartment. Rika’s mother becomes high-spirited as they inspect the building that has been ‘making a splash in the news’.

I’ll just talk about the beginning and ending of the page, but you can enlarge the image to read it in full:

The first sentence:

Even when a resident came out and gave them a withering stare, Rika’s prevailing feeling was still one of relief that her mother’s mood had shifted.

There’s nothing glaringly wrong with that, but a close look reveals a number of tiny problems contributing to the cumulative awkwardness.

To my ear, the phrase ‘even when’ suggests an extreme event of some kind, and it takes a microsecond to realise that this is something quite undramatic: a resident comes out of the building and gives the pair a withering look. For another microsecond, I wonder why the resident would pay them any attention at all. They’re just two women in a public street. And it’s not just a look, but a stare! How does Rika know that this more or less abstract person is a resident? Moving on, the awkward phrase ‘prevailing feeling’ suggests, if anything, that Rika is experiencing complex emotions, but that suggestion goes nowhere. ‘One of relief’ is clutter – why not just ‘relief’?

One last thing: the word ‘still’, which if you read this sentence without context is completely innocuous. But it’s another example of a micro-interruption to the narrative flow. This is the first time we’ve been told that Rika is feeling relieved. The reader (or at least this one) has to do a quick calculation: oh yes, Rika’s mother’s mood has lifted so of course it was implied that Rika felt relief, so now we’re being told that that relief has survived. This is a recurrent quirk: we’re told that something has happened, rather than seeing it happen.

I can enjoy a text that demands work of me, but these extra little bits of readerly labour bring no joy.

I won’t take you laboriously through the whole page, though I can’t resist mentioning the phrase, ‘In the temple heaving with people’. The meaning is clear, but it doesn’t quite feel like English.

At the end of the page, Rika and her mother are having a coffee (in a Doutor, which Rika’s mother prefers to Starbucks because Starbucks doesn’t allow smoking – in the kind of culture-specific moment that I confess to enjoying).

No sooner had she lifted her mug of coffee to her lips than she began her confession.
‘You know, I feel like I can really understand why Manako Kajii was so popular with men. The truth is … You promise you won’t mention this to anyone?’
She giggled like a schoolgirl and leaned across the table to whisper in Rika’s ear. What Rika heard nearly made her choke on her mouthful of milk tea.
‘What! You worked as a decoy at a matchmaking party? I need to hear more about this.’

Again, these are tiny things, but they accumulate. ‘No sooner than’ is just slightly wrong: can you begin to talk at the moment you lift a mug of coffee to your lips? Specifying a mouthful of tea is unnecessary and creates another of those micro-pauses: I suppose it’s technically possible to choke on a mouthful of liquid, but the term ‘mouthful’ suggests that it’s still in the mouth and more likely to cause spluttering. Having the reader learn what the mother says only when Rika repeats it is an unnecessary and (to me) annoying complication.

Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does. If you want a completely different take on the book, I recommend Theresa Smith Writes.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I happily acknowledge their Elders past and present for caring for this land for many thousands of years.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the book club

Posted on 7 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As I mentioned in my post about Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square, this book has a general strategy in common with a number of other books I’ve read recently – a personal relationship as way of drawing the reader into a big public event.

In this case the personal relationship is sexual. At times I felt like averting my eyes, as if I was intruding on intensely intimate moments.

The book is told from the point of view of a woman who lives alone in the house she has kind-of inherited from her parents in postwar Netherlands. Her brother actually owns of the house but lets her live in it. The story kicks off when he pressures her to allow his girlfriend to stay with her while he goes away for work. The two women are very prickly with each other at first: the owner is prim and obsessive about neatness, and her begrudged guest is an apparently easygoing woman of the world. Bit by bit we realise that the narrator is constantly aware of the other woman’s bodily presence, and eventually the dam breaks and there are many pages of enthusiastic sex.

There are hints along the way that something else is going on. In the book’s very first paragraph, for instance, the uptight host finds a ceramic shard buried in the cottage garden. She recognises a piece from her mother’s precious dinner set, but has no memory of any of those plates ever having been broken. This is the first of a number of hints that there is something about the house that has never been acknowledged. More telling perhaps are childhood memories of strangers knocking at the door and her mother ignoring them.

I guess I knew from the beginning roughty where things were going, and even during the scenes of passion I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does drop, most satisfactorily.

I loved this book.

After the meeting: I wasn’t alone in loving it.

This book group, the majority of whose members are Lesbian, has long had a rule that no Lesbian books were allowed unless the Lesbianism was incidental to the plot. Well, this book smashed that rule to bits, but it did it with such grace and integrity and good writing that not even the Chief Rulemaker minded.

Though we all loved the book, we spent some time discussing the ending. Was it too neat, too quickly achieved, too much out of character? It’s hard to blog about endings but I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that two possibilities were raised in defence: first, it’s like the endings to Shakespeare’s comedies – you’re not meant to think this could really have happened but it’s satisfying to imagine it as a kind of justice; second, the apparent change of personality involved could be accounted for by the transformative power of the passionate sexual experience – certainly it was transformative, and maybe even more so than obvious. If you’ve read the book, you’ll have opinions of your own.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, land that has never been ceded. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square at the book club

Posted on 6 Jan 2025 | 3 comments

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square (Swift Press 2024)

Before the meeting: On page 411 of this novel, the narrator-protagonist, a student at Beijing University, posts an application for an exchange program at a Canadian university. She goes to one of the bars on campus, and then:

The enormity of what I had done began to sink in.

A few pages later, sensations flash across her mind ‘like lightening’, and a few pages further on there is a lake, where a turquoise glow

expanded outward as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the tawny ridges of ochre mountains were flushed at their foothills with dark streaks of wild grass and moss.

The fact that I am brought up short by such moments (enormity is something big and horrible, not something like a major life decision; lightning is what flashes; if the water goes as far as the eye can see, how can you describe what can be seen beyond it?) may say more about me than about the book, but I’m pretty sure if I’d been gripped by the narrative I wouldn’t have noticed them.

If the pseudonymous author is who she says she is, this is an autobiographically inflected story of a young woman caught up in the student uprising in China in 1989. As such, it commands respect.

By coincidence, it shares something of a strategy with three other books I have read recently, telling a story with a tight focus on relationships and then widening out into a huge public event or issue. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is a tales of a toxic relationship between an older man and a young woman that culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is an adolescent boy-boy love story that becomes a retelling of The Iliad. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (blog post coming soon) is a steamy Lesbian romance that turns out to be about what happens to property confiscated from Jews in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation.

In this book, the personal story lacks a clear or interesting focus. The death of a beloved grandmother, an embittered mother, a pallid teenage sex life (though the first unsatisfactory moment of sexual intimacy is vividly realised), and quirky university encounters all compete for attention. And the otherwise powerful Tiananmen Square narrative is undermined by giving the final moment to a twist that’s silly, and not in a good way.

I am glad I’ve read the book. It’s an important story. It’s just that at the sentence level, which is where I mostly live in books, it trudges.

After the meeting: We discussed this book along with The Safekeep. It was the Book Club’s celebratory end-of-year meeting with exchange of gifts in a restaurant, so discussion of the books was perhaps less extensive than usual.

All but one of us had read the whole book, and given that our meeting had been postponed twice because of illnesses, it was clear that it was lack of interest rather than lack of time that had led to the one non-completion. Generally, the completers all agreed that it was too long – it would have been a better book without a lot of the earlier family stories. Not everyone was convinced by the implied eye-witness status of the author – that claim is undermined by what looks like an arbitrary and ahistorical invention at the very end (and who knows, but we might yet be proved wrong in judging the final moment that way).

The book’s strongest advocate felt (if I remember correctly) that the complex mundaneness of the family story and the story of teenage emotional entanglements was the book’s strength: it took the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 away from the abstract an showed them irrupting onto the lives of otherwise ordinary people. While others agreed that that’s how the book works, they (we!) felt that the narrator was peripheral to those big events, so her account of them doesn’t add substantially to what we already know from other sources.

We enjoyed The Safekeep a lot more.

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The Book Club at James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Posted on 14 Oct 2024 | 3 comments

James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023)

Before the meeting: Though this is the first book by James McBride that I have read, he has featured in this blog before, as the author of The Good Lord Bird, one of the Emerging Artist’s best five books of 2014 (link here). That book won the USA’s National Book Award. According to his Wikipedia entry, The Color of Water, a 1995 book about McBride’s African American and Jewish family history and his relationship with his white mother, is widely regarded as an American classic.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is his sixth novel, set in 1925, mainly in Chicken Hill, a ‘ramshackle neighbourhood’ of the Pennsylvania city of Pottstown (Pottstown exists in real life; Chicken Hill not so much as far as I can tell). The store of the title is run by Chona, a Jewish woman, whose husband Moshe runs a neighbourhood theatre. As most of the Jews leave Chicken Hill for more salubrious neighbourhoods, Chona and Moshe remain and, swimming against the tide of their times, continue to serve and welcome the presence of their African American neighbours (always ‘Negroes’ in this book). At the heart of the book is a celebration of friendship and alliance between Jews and Blacks, plus a significant Italian or two.

The book runs to 381 pages, so page 77* occurs at about the one-fifth point. If a conventionally structured Heaven and Earth Grocery Store film were to be made, I imagine that the events on this page would come much earlier, at the 10 percent mark, when the Inciting Incident is due. The set-up has been established: a death has been foreshadowed; we’ve met Moshe and Shona and the main African American couple, Addie and Nate, who work in the shop and the theatre respectively; we’ve seen the theatre and the grocery store in action; we know the story of Chona’s chronic illness and disability; we’ve met the book’s villain, Doc Roberts, who comes from ‘good white Presbyterian stock’ and marches every year with the Ku Klux Klan. It’s time for the first turning point.

Nate has told Moshe about his ten-year-old nephew, Dodo, who recently started working in the theatre. He was made deaf by an accident, and his mother has died.

Nate’s brow furrowed and his old hands moved up and down the broom handle slowly. He said softly, ‘Me and my wife’s got him.’

Moshe looked down at the floor a moment, embarrassed. It rarely occurred to him that he and Nate shared one commonality. Neither of their wives could bear children. They had worked in the theater all day side by side for twelve years but rarely discussed their wives or matters of home.

Their relationship is already changed by this conversation. The distance imposed by their histories is being bridged. The rest of the conversation introduces the book’s main external action.

‘Well, I think that’s fine,’ Moshe said. ‘You can run things as you like.’

Nate’s brow furrowed. ‘A man from the state come to the house last week. Says he’s gonna carry Dodo off to a special school over in Spring City. Dodo don’t wanna go to no special school. He’s all right here with us.’

Moshe’s heart quickened. He felt a request coming, but Nate continued. ‘The man says he’s coming back to fetch him next week. I’m wondering if you might let me slip Dodo into the theater here tonight, just for a few days till the man goes away. The boy’s quiet. Can’t hear nothing. Won’t be scared or make no noise. He can work good, clean up and so forth.’

‘For how long?

‘Just a couple of days till the man’s gone.’

Knowing where this passage occurs in the book, you would almost certainly guess – correctly – that those few days will expand, and the small favour will balloon into something that changes all their lives. As it turns out, when Moshe tells Chona the situation, she insists that they take Dodo into their own home, and he becomes a much loved member of their family until, in spite of their careful strategies to keep him hidden from the authorities, he is taken from them to a ‘special school’, which is in fact a prison-like institution for people deemed insane. Doc Roberts is key to that removal.

The second half of the book is given over to plans to free Dodo. Relationships between Jews, Blacks and poor Whites flourish. Nate’s back story emerges from the shadows and the man who we first meet as the genial, ageing employee shows a dark side that leads to the book’s one shocking moment – shocking because the reader, or at least this one, cheers on a terrible act of violence.

Doc Roberts and his ilk are embodiments of callous, racist, antisemitic hypocrisy and not much else. There’s a subplot to do with water supply to the synagogue that had me wondering why it was there at all until at the very end it joins the main plot to lead to the death mentioned on the first page. (Not really a spoiler.)

The meeting: We discussed this book along with Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky. We seem to be developing a tradition in the Book Club of having a dedicated nay-sayer at each meeting. This month’s nay-sayer said she had had read this one first, and felt it was built from hackneyed tropes with nothing fresh to offer. Then she read There Are Rivers in the Sky, and revised her view upwards. Our non-finisher had the reverse view – based on a small taste of each book, this one was much less gripping.

Such faint praise aside, we had an animated discussion. One person’s bug turned out to be another’s feature. For example, Chona’s neighbour Bernice was once her best friend but they have been estranged for decades, yet when she asks for help in concealing Dodo from the authorities, Bernice is willing to put herself on the line. One person saw this as inconsistency in the character; another saw it as reflecting the nature of the community – solidarity trumping personal animosity.

There’s a sequence in which two young disabled men – one deaf and the other with severe cerebral palsy – work out a way to communicate. ‘Unbelievable!’ someone said. ‘But brilliant!’ someone else replied. It turned out they both meant pretty much the same thing.

Our Book Club meets on the land of Gadigal and Bidjigal, looking out over the ocean. I wrote this blog post further inland in Gadigal Wangal country, where I am priivileged to live. I acknowledge Elders past and present for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My usual blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77. Sometimes, as here, it’s a crucial page.

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There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak and the Book Club

Posted on 13 Oct 2024 | 4 comments

Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky (Penguin 2024)

Before the meeting: I’m glad I read this novel. I am much better informed now on the history of the Yazidi people, and about the unearthing of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the mid 19th century.

After a short opening chapter featuring the tyrant Ashurbanipal in ancient Nineveh, the narrative follows three distinct threads, which remain separate until the final, very short chapter.

There’s Arthur, full name Arthur King of the Sewers and Slums, a fanciful version of the amazing George Smith who decoded the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia, translated the Epic of Gilgamesh and travelled to Nineveh in the mid 19th century. There’s Narin, nine years old at the start, living in south-east Turkey in 2014, child of a shrinking and beleaguered Yazidi family. And there’s Zaleekhah, a 30-something hydrologist in the throes of a break-up in 2018, who we first see renting a houseboat on the Thames.

A number of motifs occur in each of the stories, so that they resonate with each other even there is no evident narrative connection: images of lamassus, the protective spirits of ancient Nineveh who have bearded human heads and lions’ bodies; pieces of lapis lazuli; cuneiform script, on clay tablets or in tattoos; references to The Epic of Gilgamesh; and above all water. The book begins:

Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it al began with a single raindrop.

That raindrop has no causal impact on events, but the identical drop, having lain dormant in the water table, floated in the ocean, wafted about in clouds, turns up again at crucial moments of each narrative, as a snowflake or ocean spray or another raindrop. That conceit, and the way the narrative frequently pauses for mini-lectures – on hidden rivers, the industrial revolution, Yazidi culture, Napoleonic archaeology, etc etc – meant I spent a lot of time being irritated. The fourth wall is forever being broken, either by a mention of water (at least four times there are sweating necks, or a character introduces herself by saying her name is short for an Irish word for water) or by what reads like a piece of undigested research.

Page 77*, it turns out, has some fine examples. Zahleekha has just stepped into her houseboat for the first time. First there’s the water, with heavy-handed metaphorical significance. She drinks a mug of water ‘in one draught’, and:

It tastes earthy and slightly metallic, with an aftertaste of iron. The flavour has less to do with its intrinsic qualities than with its biophysical environment, the set of conditions that brought it about. Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.

Then comes the lecture, preceded by a moment of backstory:

Out of nowhere a memory surfaces – the words Uncle Malek uttered the day she had graduated from university with honours. I’m so proud of you, habibti. I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail.

‘People like us’ … immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders … Too many words for a shared, recognisable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined.

Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion or ethnicity.

Then, after a little more along the same lines, Zahleekhah sits down and after a moment starts to cry. But rather than allow the reader space for empathy, the narrator sweeps in with her insistence on water as ubiquitous and rich with symbolic meanings:

A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallised salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometres away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapour and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and re-located. Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

Again, I’m glad I read this book. But I was annoyed a lot of the time while reading it.

After the meeting: We read There Are Rivers in the Sky along with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. There were five of us, well-fed by the time we got to the books. We began with confessions: only one person hadn’t read either book, and she had read ‘about 35%’ of this one. She spoke eloquently about what she liked in what she had read – mainly the evocation of polluted, foul-smelling mid-19th century London – which makes me think it’s probably a good idea to have someone in any group who hasn’t finished the book.

Of those who had read to the end, we had a range of responses. One enjoyed it, only peripherally put off by the telling-not-showing and heavy-handed deployment of the leitmotifs. Onehad been enthusiastic abut the book because she hoped it would have interesting things to say about Gilgamesh and appreciated much about it, but was disappointed and disliked being lectured at. And the other just found the book tedious, would rather have read a non-fiction treatment of the history and persecution of the Yazidi, couldn’t feel any of the characters as more than made-up figures to allow the plot to move. And there was me (see above).

We all agreed that the most interesting thing in the book was the character of Arthur. Born in abject poverty, his photographic memory and a series of Dickensian coincidences (one of them featuring Charles Dickens) led him to interesting places, and fixation on a book about Nineveh as a way of dealing with the pain of brutal beating led to a grand obsession that gave The Epic of Gilgamesh to the modern world. I now want to find out more about the real-world George Smith, but I’m very happy to have Arthur in my mental world as distinct from him.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, in a place where wetlands have been drained, but the river is recovering health, is home to a marvellous variety of birds, and is a great place for catch and release fishing (one day the fish may be edible again). I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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