9th August 2026

This novel is firmly set in Willesden and its environs – inner north-west London – where the author was born in 1975. From its opening pages, we are brought straight into the heart of the locale: its houses, streets, shops and ethnic complexity, its uneasy (and imbalanced) combination of aspiration and desperation and – above all – the truncated rhythms in which thoughts are formulated and, sometimes, expressed.

The first individual to whom we are introduced is Leah Hanwell, a thirty-something graduate employed in a routine administrative job with a small local charity. We identify with her as a sympathetic character when she naively assists another young woman – Shar, who claims to be a contemporary from school – when the latter bangs on her door and asks for some cash to get a taxi to hospital: an obvious scam. Leah’s husband is Michel, a French hairdresser of African descent with hopes of increasing their modest household income via some online market trading. The marriage appears to be a mutually loving and trustful one, although we soon learn of one important secret that Leah has not revealed.

Other members of the cast list are presented in turn: Pauline, Leah’s widowed and battle-hardened mother, who made the well-trodden journey from Dublin to Kilburn, “a rare Prod on the wing, back when most were of the other persuasion”; Nathan Bogle, a schoolfriend of Leah’s who, having failed to make a career as a footballer, scrounges the funds for his drug habit by selling stolen travelcards for cash; and Natalie De Angelis (another friend from school, when her name was Keisha Blake and she used to have “a big Afro-puff like an atomic mushroom”), who is now a barrister married to Frank, a public-school educated financier.

Our attention then shifts to Felix Cooper, also in his early thirties, who is seeking to progress from his lifestyle of low-level drug dealing (and taking) and casual employment into something more substantial via an apprenticeship working on vintage cars. Here, Smith provides a more conventional free-flowing story relating to Felix’s purchase of a decrepit MG, his previous marriage and family, the painful ditching of a recent lover and his take-up with a younger woman. The reader is even given some assistance with the patois by Phil Barnes, a Keats-quoting local political activist whom Felix describes as “a proper old leftie… a proper commie”: “Now left me get this right: ‘long’ means ‘always late’, doesn’t it. No flies on me. I keep up with the slang. And ‘bare’ means ‘a lot of’ or ‘very’ or ‘really’. It’s an intensifier, more or less. I keep up. Helps living in here”.

In the third – and longest – section of the book, the author time-shifts, initially to follow the continually shifting relationship (from infancy) between Leah and Natalie and then to focus on the latter as she progresses in her legal career. The latter is another sympathetic character – a bright schoolgirl, who spent her time in the local library rather than misbehaving and who (unlike her friend) chose a sensible option at university, but who remains troubled and self-critical.

Smith leaves a periodic trail about the passage of time from which the reader can gain some satisfaction in recognising the cultural and other landmarks, usually without naming the actual event. This eclectic list ranges from the children’s enjoyment of The A-Team (mid 1980s) and “the obscene dance popularised by Salt-N-Pepa” (1987) through to the local interest in The Wire when shown on British Television (2009) and the eruption of the Ejafjallajökull volcano in Iceland (2010).

As with most working-class environments, there is a hierarchy of local areas and dwellings through which an individual or family’s progress might be assessed: from the sink estate to the council flat on a street on which there is an occasional tree to the house with a garden, and so on. The pull to remain in the general area is strong, however, and this adds to an overall sense of confinement and limitation. Even Natalie who, with her husband and two young children, enjoys the luxury of living in a Victorian house in an expensive part of London, finds herself continually having to fight this battle: “…The betting shop. The State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said these were fixed co-ordinates to which she had to be forever faithful?”

The outside observer will note the occasional instances of hope and optimism in Zadie Smith’s narrative. But the undercurrent is decidedly downbeat. We are exposed to the hopelessly lost – swamped by heroin and poverty. We experience the all-pervasive smell of weed. We sense the ready availability of casual sex and – in an unexpected aside – an online route through which one character seeks to regularly obtain it. We fear for someone apparently undergoing a severe nervous breakdown. And, most shockingly, we witness a fatal stabbing in a random street mugging. The last of these events gives us another addition to our NW vocabulary: “A kid on a BMX racer said ‘Someone got juked, innit’”.

15th July 2026

The Valley of Fear was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fourth and final “long” Sherlock Holmes novel, appearing roughly two-thirds of the way through the canon of 56 short stories that ran from A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891 to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place in 1927.

The book is in two parts. In the first, we are fully immersed in Holmes’s world from the opening pages: his successful solving of a complex cipher code sent to him through the post; a link from that to the “formidable and scientifically sinister” Professor Moriarty; the introduction of a Scotland Yard contact, Inspector MacDonald; and the reporting of a ghastly murder. And, of course, his intellectual teasing of his companion in 221b Baker Street: Dr John Watson.

Holmes’s assistance is requested to solve a murder at a remote Sussex mansion. He – and we – are presented with a range of clues: the sawn-off shotgun with a part-inscription of the maker’s name; muddy footprints behind a lounge curtain; an open window with a different – and bloody – footprint on a window ledge; the raised drawbridge; a mysterious card containing a strange inscription; a removed wedding ring… There is something satisfying in the way that, after Inspector MacDonald has asked a number of questions of the mansion’s other inhabitants, Holmes tends to follow up with a single question of his own – apparently innocuous and irrelevant – which we know will turn out to be of some significance.

In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, it is revealed some of the key characters have links to the rest of the world – Australia, South Africa, South America – in which both fortunes and enemies have been made. In this case, it is the United States: Chicago, California and, in particular, the tough coal-field communities in the snow-covered gorges of the fictional Gilmerton Mountains.

The last of these provide the background context of Holmes’s case – some twenty years later – in the Sussex mansion. The “valley of fear” is the Vermissa Valley of 1875, when Lodge 341 of the Ancient Order of Freemen conducts an unremitting campaign of tyranny against the area’s businesses and their senior employees. The Master of the Lodge is Boss Jack McGinty, who oversees the blackmail, extortion and murder undertaken by his so-called “Scowrers”, knowing that the local police and politicians are firmly under his control. When McGinty is reluctantly impressed by the attitude and actions of a newcomer to the valley – John McMurdo, a fellow Lodge member with a criminal past in Chicago – he brings him into the small group at the centre of the Lodge’s operations.

In constructing this setting for the novel, Conan Doyle was clearly drawing on the real-life events (and stories) surrounding the “Molly Maguires” – a secret society of Irish immigrant coal miners in the eastern United States – which had been reported extensively in the British newspapers in the 1870s. After the penetration of the society by an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, twenty suspected members of the society were convicted of murder and other crimes and executed in Pennsylvania in 1877 and 1878.

The reader is satisfactorily drawn along – in their turns – by the two parts of the narrative. The twist in the solution of Holmes’s case is now perhaps a familiar one in much detective fiction, but nonetheless arrives as something of a surprise. Likewise, in the epilogue that Conan Doyle presents as a coda to the overall story, there is another development, which Holmes had anticipated – as the work of Professor Moriarty – but we probably didn’t.

31st March 2026

In Richard Ford’s novel, Frank Bascombe is a sportswriter approaching his 39th birthday and living in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey. Having had an amicable divorce from his wife – whom we only ever know as “X” – he is attempting to establish a relationship with a nurse, Vicki Arcenault, herself a 30-year old divorcée. His two young children live with his ex-wife, though he has regular contact with them. The book’s opening chapter describes the annual early-morning ritual – this one on Good Friday 1984 – of Frank and X meeting at the grave of their other son, Ralph.

We learn something of Frank’s life to date – his college days at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, early success as a short-story writer, a discarded attempt at a novel, an unhappy teaching assignment in New Hampshire, a promiscuous private life – but the core of the narrative takes place over that Easter weekend. The events of those days are set against a continual presentation of Frank’s reflections on life and what it does or doesn’t offer.

Although he is clearly haunted by Ralph’s early death from the rare Reye’s Syndrome, Frank is generally content with his lot. He is also something of an optimist – or at least until the “dreaminess” of his usual state is confronted with the “facts”: “I am always hopeful for a great surprise to open in what has always been a possible place for it… Only when the facts are made clear, I can’t bear it and run away as fast as I can – to Vicki or writing a good sports story or to some woman in a far-off city whom I know I’ll never see again”.

The reader might be frustrated when these periods of reflection and soul-searching cause the pace of the story to slow down. More specifically, there are also disquieting passages describing a couple of Frank’s unspoken reflections – his speculations on the anatomy and hypothetical background of the black Seminary priest to whom he rents a room in his house – the shock of which jumps off the page.

Frank explains his drift into sportswriting to a young girl he meets at a highway service station: “I went to college. Then, when I got older, I failed at everything else and that’s all I could do”. Later, he acknowledges the benefits he gets from reaching a large readership, though he also has no illusions about the reality of his chosen profession: “Writers – all writers – need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member”.

It might be noted that, during the course of the book, Frank doesn’t actually do any sportswriting, though he does conduct one background interview. For this, he takes a trip to Detroit – with Vicki – to interview a former American football player, Herb Wallagher, who is now in a wheelchair following a boating accident.

The engagement does not go well – Herb is by turns confrontational, aggressive and self-pitying – and it takes some resolve for Frank, during his return cab-ride back to Vicki at their downtown hotel, to turn down his driver’s suggestion of being fixed up with a “hundred-dollar whore”. The following evening, when Frank returns to the office and attempts to compose his article, he is immediately distracted by the overtures of one of the new interns.

The weekend break is also less than successful in other regards. Vicki catches Frank rifling through her handbag, in which he has located a photograph of what he assumes (incorrectly) to be her ex-husband. There is an echo here of Frank’s final break-up with X, in which she had come across a stash of (entirely innocent) letters to him from a female admirer.

We get a good sense of time and place. Frank likes living in his hometown, certainly in comparison with the alternative offered by “Gotham” – New York, of course – fifty miles away. There are nice descriptions of topography and architecture and some detailed representations of the local and regional accents to which he is – or has been – exposed. (X is from Michigan, Vicki from Texas). Frank’s television viewing is centred around “watching Johnny” (without the need to give Carson’s surname).

The author is also adept with dialogue. This is evident in some of the conversations between Frank and Vicki – often when Frank is attempting to grasp the real meaning of what she is saying – as it was in Frank’s uncomfortable interview with Herb. Frank also has a couple of awkward interactions with Walter Luckett – a fellow member of their local Divorced Men’s Club – prompted by an agonising personal confession by Walter of something he had recently done.

It is such conversations that help to drive the story along. They also encourage the reader to speculate on what the possible turns of events might be for Frank and/or those around him. I have to report, incidentally, that when one particularly dramatic – and tragic – event does occur, it was not a total surprise to me.

Interestingly, although the novel is set in the (contemporary) early 1980s, some of the characters’ personal views could also have featured had it been published today. One of Frank’s octogenarian neighbours – Delia Deffeyes – is adamant about what she and her husband think the US Government should do to address the country’s current ills: “Casper and I think that the States should build a wall all along the Mexican frontier, as large as the Great Wall, and man it with armed men, and make it clear to those countries, that we have problems of our own in here”. This is over 30 years before Donald Trump first runs for President.

10th February 2026

In August 1960, Gabriel Dax – an ambitious 30-year old travel writer – is in Léopoldville in the newly independent republic of the Congo. Through a friend from university who is now a Minister in the government, he secures an interview with the charismatic Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Gabriel learns that Lumumba had agreed to the meeting because he wanted to talk – on the record, the interview had to be taped – with a journalist from “a foreign newspaper of repute”. He is shocked at what he is told: “They want to kill me… The British, the Americans, the Belgians, President Eisenhower wants me dead… There are people here sent to kill me… I tell you three names…”

A few days later, Gabriel is sitting in a café near his home in Chelsea when a stranger unexpectedly sits down at his booth. He recognises her as someone who had been reading one of his books on the return flight from Léopoldville to Brussels, though they had not spoken then. After introducing herself as Faith Green, they have a general conversation about the Congo before she informs Gabriel that Lumumba had been shot by a firing squad. She also states that she works for MI6. Quite apart from the immediate shock of hearing of Lumumba’s death, Gabriel is further disconcerted when it takes another month before reports of it reach the mainstream media.

Separately, we learn that Gabriel has occasionally supplemented his writer’s income by doing “favours” for his brother Sefton – an official in the Foreign Office – by delivering letters or packages to various destinations during the course of his overseas travels. When Faith makes a similar request – to buy a small sketch directly from a particular modern artist in Cadiz and then pass it on to a contact in Madrid – Gabriel initially declines, only to change his mind when he is offered a sizeable amount (£200) to carry out the task.

In Madrid, Gabriel befriends another avid reader of his books – an American woman – who (of course) asks him to take a package back to Britain for her cousin in Cambridge. Later, at the airport, when Gabriel realises that there is a schoolboy (or schoolgirl) error in the address on the package, he opens it to find a consignment of drugs. He disposes of the contents minutes before he is picked out by the Spanish customs and police for a “random” search.

There are other odd occurrences: on more than one occasion, Gabriel answers his telephone and is met by an intimidating silence; he is convinced that someone has been searching his flat during one of his absences; his Lumumba interview is spiked; the newspaper editor demands that he hand over his notes and tapes of the interview in accordance with the “small print in your contract” for the travel article… Eventually, after the sudden death of one of his acquaintances – and long after the reader has done so – he asks the obvious rhetorical question: “What in God’s name have I got myself into?”

William Boyd is a very descriptive writer: the opportunity for an adjective is seldom passed over. At their meeting in the Chelsea café, Faith is “wearing a green Loden coat. The stand-up collar of an ivory blouse was visible… The unpermed, loose hair, tousled, shoulder-length, was held in place by a black, velvet Alice band”. At a later rendezvous in his flat, “she was wearing… an over-blouse – a taupe colour, some thick material – and a knife-pleated chequered skirt – greens, ochres, matching her coat. Neat, pointed tawny shoes with a two-inch heel”. In addition, this being the early 1960s, the period detail is clearly presented: Gabriel’s girlfriend – the working-class Lorraine – arrives at his flat “still in her red-and-white Wimpy Bar uniform, a red tabard with broad white piping”.

There is a nice in-joke here, I think, although I am not sure if it was intended. At one point, Faith reads some of the flowery passages from one of Gabriel’s travel books back to him and can’t help herself. “She looked at him, holding her laughter back as best she could. ‘My God. Over the top doesn’t come close!’”.

However, none of this hinders the progress of the narrative, which rattles along. The supporting characters are interesting and well-drawn and, of course, not always exactly as they first appear. In Boyd’s engrossing story, Gabriel’s immersion into the world of the intelligence services is complemented by his efforts in trying to determine the facts of a childhood tragedy that has continued to bring him anguish and haunt his dreams.

Over the second half of the story, Gabriel realises – as again does the reader – that he is being inexorably sucked into the mire of spying and secrets from which there is little or no chance of escape. The plot lines become darker and more serious – there is suspicion, duplicity, betrayal and ruthlessness as well as further sudden death.

Later, just when Gabriel is hoping to resume his previous life and devote himself full-time to his travel writing, Faith Green requests that he undertake another overseas trip for MI6, again with his writing as cover. When he attempts another rejection and a final separation of their ways, her response is not what he wants to hear. “Nobody quits in this business, Gabriel. You know that”.

And we know it as well. The scene is set for more of the story of Gabriel Dax – the reluctant spy – about whom William Boyd has recently produced a sequel: The Predicament. I look forward to catching up with it.

18th January 2026

It is a few days before Christmas in 1844, nearly a full year on from the events of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The enlightened Ebenezer Scrooge – now a reformed character and an enthusiastic supporter of the festival – is paying one of his occasional visits to the local graveyard for a chat with his former business partner, the deceased Jacob Marley.

On leaving past “a corner even more tangled and neglected than Marley’s grave site, where a few spaces remained, awaiting new tenants”, Scrooge stumbles across a fresh corpse: a young woman with her throat cut. When, a short time later, Scrooge’s faithful assistant, Bob Cratchit, is arrested and arraigned for her murder, he decides to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Scrooge is aided at various times by Cratchit’s son, Tiny Tim, the latter’s urchin friend Jem and an endearing widow (albeit something of a busybody) called Lucretia Jane Tassell, who has the mistaken impression that Scrooge has been a major contributor to her charitable institution, the Benevolent Feast for the Poor.

We learn fairly quickly that the unfortunate woman was Christina Parley, whose brother Edgar is one of London’s most notorious and ruthless villains. Although Christina herself has indulged in some petty crime, she had been estranged from her brother for some time and living a relatively virtuous – if complicated – life. (The author’s choice of surname has a neat link to A Christmas Carol, an unauthorised version of which was published by Parley’s Illuminated Library in 1844).

The cast-list includes a number of interesting characters – including the wealthy businessman Aldous Scabble and his chemist nephew Alastair Bailey, the jolly printworks owner Felix Merrypaw, Edgar Parley’s right-hand hardman Amos Buddle, and the snobbish Lady Crick with her fragile niece Miss Frome. Scrooge and his colleagues attempt to put together the linkages between these figures – and the nature of Christina’s contacts with them – in order to identify the murderer.

Scrooge also has assistance from other sources. In an echo of the nightmarish visitations that he had in Dickens’s original story, Scrooge is persistently haunted by the cold, wispy ghost of the murdered woman, who initially taunts him in the belief that he had been responsible for her death. In addition, the narrative is regularly interrupted as past events are described from Christina’s ghost’s perspective. Indeed, thus begins the book’s preface; “The pain is sudden and searing. I feel a blow to the back of my head, then a slice at my throat. My hands clasp at my neck as if my fingers can keep the blood inside… I am already on my knees”.

Andreina Cordani writes with a proper reverence for Dickens’s original material. She has a light touch and a nice line in dry humour, not least in reminding us that Scrooge’s pecuniary values have not been totally altered. When he is introduced to the concept of spending money by sending Christmas cards to one’s friends via the penny post, his immediate response is “And then afterwards, what is done with them?” At the same time, there are aspects of darkness in the narrative as other lives are taken.

After being enticed down some dead ends, I – like Scrooge – was fairly confident that I had identified the murderer about two-thirds of the way through the book, the perpetrator’s motives having apparently been clearly signalled. It was another wrong turning, however.

Ebenezer Scrooge does eventually solve the case, of course – with some assistance also received from the spirits that he had encountered a year earlier. I think we might expect some future appearances from him in his new role as a cerebral and empathetic detective.

24th December 2025

It is a day in January 1951. The prisoner (or zek) is awakened by the five o’clock reveille sounded – by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters – for those in his freezing barrack hut. “The clanging ceased, but everything outside still looked like the middle of the night when [he] got up to go to the bucket”. Feeling unwell with a fever and an aching body, he does not get up immediately and is summarily threatened with “three days penalty with work” by one of the camp’s guards.

And so begins the day of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov: prisoner S854 in a labour camp somewhere in the Soviet Union. The frost lies “two fingers thick” on the window panes and the temperature outside the barrack is minus 27 degrees Centigrade.

We learn some details of Shukhov’s background as the day progresses. He had “trodden the earth for 40 years, though he’d lost half his teeth and his head was growing bald”. He is married with two daughters, though his son is deceased. He has served over eight years in other prison camps as well as this one. He “still had another two winters, another two summers to serve” of his 10-year sentence, though he fears that, at the end of that period – even if he were not arbitrarily given an extended sentence – he will be sent into exile away from his home and family.

The author – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) – was drawing on his own experiences. He had been arrested in 1945 and charged with making derogatory remarks about Joseph Stalin. He was placed in various “general” camps for common criminals in the Arctic and then in the “special” camps” of Lavrentiy Beria – the head of the secret police – for long-term political prisoners before being released on Stalin’s death in 1953. The camp described in the book was in the region of Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan.

Shukhov knows that survival in the camp is dependent on adhering to the rules of the game. “If you show your pride too much… you’re lost… Better to growl and submit. If you were stubborn they [the guards] broke you”. He is also aware that dangers also emanate from his fellow prisoners: three “squealers” had recently been found with their throats cut, one of these having turned out to be a victim of mistaken identity.

For those in Shukhov’s team – the 104th – the daylight hours on this occasion are spent constructing a wall on a building site at the adjacent power station. There are long, tedious – and freezing – periods in which the numbers leaving (and, later, re-entering) the camp are checked by the guards. And then re-checked, and re-checked again. On arrival at the site, the snow must be cleared before the productive work can begin, the mechanical hoist is beyond repair so the large stone slabs have to be transported up a dangerous ramp by wheelbarrow, the mortar must be applied as soon as it is mixed, before it freezes…

We learn of some of the others working in Shukhov’s detail, including the former naval captain Buinovsky, the deaf Senka, the malingering Fetiukov and, not least, the group’s strict team-leader, Tiurin, for whom Shukhov has an obvious respect. Shukhov himself takes a pride in his work – lining the slabs up correctly and ensuring they link up securely with the rest of the wall – using the small trowel that he keeps for himself by hiding it safely when the long shift is over. It is clear that this positive approach to the task is a crucial component of his survival mechanism. It is also evident that he has a keen sense of which of the prisoners will survive their long ordeal – and which will not.

Shukhov draws satisfaction from the smallest of victories – very small by any normal standards: the securing of half a slice of bread in the lining of his mattress; being given the final dregs of a fellow prisoner’s cigarette; illicitly obtaining an additional bowl of oatmeal porridge in the breakfast queue, earning a slice of sausage for safeguarding another prisoner’s food parcel. At the end of the day – “almost a happy day” – Shukhov lies on the thin unwashed blanket on his top bunk smoking some newly-purchased tobacco and goes to sleep “fully content”.

“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.

The extra three days were for leap years”.

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, gave permission for the novel of to be published in an edited form in the November 1962 edition of Novy Mir (New World) a literary journal. However, any pretence of literary freedom was quashed after Khrushchev was deposed in 1964. Solzhenitsyn was attacked in the Russian media in 1967, expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1970 and arrested and then deported in 1974. In the meantime (in 1970), he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

My edition is one of the Penguin Books reprints (from 1974) with a translation by Ralph Parker. It has a short – but informative – summary of Solzhenitsyn’s life and career to that point, which I have drawn on here. There are also some helpful footnotes.

Although One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was first published over 60 years ago and has been available in English for over half a century, I think it impossible to read today without contemplating the circumstances of present-day Russia and the fate of some of the opponents to the regime of Vladimir Putin. To give one – prominent – example: the political prisoner Alexei Navalny was sentenced in August 2023 to an additional 19 years in a “special regime colony” having been found guilty (in a closed-doors trial in Moscow) of “publicly inciting extremist activity, financing extremist activity and rehabilitating Nazi ideology”. In December of that year, he was transferred to a colony in the Arctic Circle, where he died in February 2024 at the age of 47.

21st October 2025

The Sorrow of Belgium is generally recognised to be one of the most significant 20th Century novels written in Dutch. It is a long read – just over 600 pages – of which the first 40 per cent or so set the scene in 1939 with the remainder then taking the narrative through to the immediate post-Second World War years. Originally published in 1983, the 1991 Penguin Books translation is by Arnold J Pomerans.

The book is semi-autobiographical. The central character is Louis Seynaeve who, at the start of the war, is a 10 year-old living with his parents in the fictional town of Walle in West Flanders. (Claus himself was also born in 1929. He died by euthanasia – which was legalised in Belgium in 2002 – in 2008).

Although the war provides the overall context to the story, there is no obvious signposting in terms of specific dates. The reader is informed of the passage of time through the offhand references to major events: the retreat from Dunkirk, the German invasion of Russia; the assassination of Richard Heydrich; the Normandy landings and, as the tide of the war changes, “…the East, which crept closer on the map day by day…”.

The story has three main themes. First, there is the accommodation – or collaboration – of the inhabitants of West Flanders with the swift military success of the Germans in Belgium in 1940. The preparations for this begin in the previous year, as is evident when Louis overhears a conversation between two women: “I know for a fact there are people on this very street who have bought up hundreds of packets of coffee. And bags of salt. In case something happens…”.

The early stages of the invasion bring chaos and confusion – there is looting in the shops, the body of a suicidal soldier is found in the river Leie, a German aircraft strafes the town – but the Belgium resistance is short-lived and things settle down to a new-normal. Members of the Black Brigade – Belgian collaborators – are soon routinely playing cards in the local café.

Louis’s extended family makes the appropriate adjustments. The boy’s father, Staf – “Papa” – owns a small printing firm that does good business through its work for pro-German Flemish groups such as the Flemish National League (Vlaams Nationaal Verbond); his mother Constance – “Mama” – takes a job as the personal assistant to the local head of a munitions factory; an aunt enthusiastically opens her home to a group of occupying troops; an uncle makes a satisfactory living as a butcher selling meat of doubtful provenance…

Of course, from 1944 there is a price to pay when the Germans retreat from the advancing American and Canadian troops. For some in the family, there is the jeopardy of semi-formal judicial proceedings; for other family contacts, there is only the summary justice doled out by the so-called White Belgians and their supporting mobs seeking immediate retribution from suspected spies and collaborators.

Second, there is the broader question of the state – in both senses – of Belgium itself. The country’s defensive vulnerability is summarised in the early lament of another of Louis’s uncles when he is contemplating the German invasion: “We have never bothered any other country. Never in all our history. It’s always been the others who have brought their troubles here”. Within the country itself, the deep antagonism felt by the Flemish towards the French (whether in Wallonia or in France itself) is palpable throughout the book. This is evident on the very first page when Louis imagines that his Grandpa is chastising him for using the French word for thumbtack; “Do you have to call them punaises when we have a perfectly good Flemish word for them?”

The third theme is the development of Louis himself. It has to be said that, in general, he is not a sympathetic character: there is a hideous case of physical bullying of one of his young schoolfriends; after he joins the National Socialist Youth of Flanders (Nationaal Socialistische Jeugd Vlaanderen, NSJV), a Nazi youth movement, he struts down the street in his uniform barking orders and intimidating an elderly man; he is lazy at school – twice repeating years – and consistently disrespectful to adults, prompted perhaps by the deteriorating – at times, hostile – relationship between Mama and Papa and the mutual lack of affection for their son.

On the other hand, he gains some credit as he matures. He questions the strict Catholicism of his family and his Convent education; he leaves the NSYV after a short while; and, noticeably, he asks questions (to himself) about the validity of the chronic antisemitism that he sees around him. Most significantly, he becomes a voracious reader not only of approved books and newspapers, but of virtually anything he can get his hands on, including the “degenerate” books banned by the authorities. This sets him on what we can confidently assume to be his career path as a writer.

Not surprisingly, Louis’s teenage years also cover his emotional and sexual development. We are introduced to Bekka, a young gypsy girl, and Simone, the prim daughter of the local pharmacist, and invited to speculate on where these contacts with Louis might lead. However, it is someone else, totally unexpected by this reader – and almost certainly by Louis himself – who is responsible for the youth’s initiation.

This is an intense book that is not an easy read. The details of Louis’s teenage years – his father’s selfish hoarding of sweets, the unappetising food at meal-times, the gossip shared between his aunts and grandmother – sum to an existence of routine and drudgery, notwithstanding the external environment in which they occur. (The narrative is mainly presented through Louis in the third person, but there are sudden switches to a first-person perspective or, more challengingly, to sequences describing Louis’s dreams or imaginings.). In addition, there are many references to past Flemish politicians, writers and heroes that present the reader with an unfamiliar cast-list of historical characters, although this can only be the complaint of one who is uninformed about the region and its people. For the period covered by the book itself, the glossary of parties, groups and organisations in the Belgium and Germany of the time is a welcome feature.

28th August 2025

It is now 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws took the cinematic world by storm, its combination of narrative conflicts, breath-taking shocks and special effects – aided by John Williams’s dramatically sinister score – relating how Amity Island in New England was being terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark. (Not just man-eating, but young woman-eating and little-boy-eating as well). This is an opportune time, therefore, to re-visit the original novel, written by Peter Benchley, which was published the previous year.

Familiarity with the screen-based adaptation makes it difficult to resist making comparisons between book and film. Not surprisingly, many parts of the storyline are common – from the shark’s initial assault on the unfortunate Chrissy Watkins through to its later destruction of the underwater metal viewing-cage belonging to Matt Hooper, the zoologist who specialises in fish life – “an ichthyologist, actually”, as he introduces himself on his arrival from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

The central character is Martin Brody, the Chief of Police, who, in the book, is a long-term resident of Amity, rather than a recent migrant from New York. (In contrast with the film, the novel’s Amity is a Long Island coastal resort). It is Brody who is faced with the story’s core dilemma: whether to close the beaches in the interests of public safety or bow to the pressures exerted by the local businesses, led by the mayor Larry Vaughan, to keep the resort open at the height of the tourist season on the assumption that the shark would (probably) have moved on to other waters. When he initially makes the wrong decision – resulting in the death of the young boy – he is faced with the desperate grief-stricken chastisement of the boy’s mother; I thought this worked better in the film, in which the confrontation takes place in the full gaze of the Amity public, rather than in Brody’s office.

Some of the film’s well-known scenes do not appear in the original. The shocked Brody’s famous line when he (and we) see the dead-eyed stare of Spielberg’s monster for the first time – “You’re gonna to need a bigger boat” – is absent, as is the terrifying account related later by the tough and embittered professional fisherman, Quint, of the fate in shark-infested waters of those several hundred sailors thrown into the sea when the USS Indianapolis was sunk by an Imperial Japanese Navy torpedo in July 1945.

But enough of the film. The novel has the advantage of being able to stretch the narrative out over time. We learn something of the contrasting backstories of Martin Brody and his wife, Ellen. We get a full understanding of how Amity’s year-round economy is totally dependent on the 12-week summer season. We also discover that Mayor Vaughan’s perspective is driven by long-standing financial obligations to his shady business “partners”, who turn out to have Mafia connections. On the downside, the pace of the story sags with another of its sub-plots: the short-lived affair between Hooper and the unhappy Ellen. Martin’s suspicions about this eat away at him in the second half of the book with the result that an initially uneasy collaboration between the local Chief and the visiting shark-expert turns into one of mutual loathing.

In some respects, the book reveals the period in which it is written. A conversation between Ellen and Hooper on their sexual fantasies develops into something really quite unpleasant. Likewise, whilst the few mentions of Amity’s (small) black population understandably focus on the low-skill work that the tourist season provides, the racial divisions of 1970s America can be detected below the surface. When Harry Meadows, the editor of Amity’s local newspaper, considers what the impact of a poor tourist season would be, his reference point is instructive: “[N]ext winter is going to be the worst in the history of this town. We’re going to have so many people on the dole that Amity will look like Harlem”. He chuckled. “Harlem-by-the-Sea”.

And so to the climax, which is also stretched over time. The final voyage of Brody, Hooper and Quint in their quest to find and kill the shark takes place over four separate days and this allows Benchley to build up the tension before the final thrilling confrontation between men and beast. I shall not reveal the outcome other than to say – breaking my earlier promise – that it is different to the film.

1st July 2025

When the 15 year-old Michael Berg is taken ill in the street, he is comforted by Hanna Schmitz, a neighbour in her mid-30s. She cleans him up and then accompanies him back to the home that he shares with his parents and three siblings in the suburbs of Heidelberg in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

It is some time later, during Michael’s second return visit to Hanna’s apartment, that the pair begin their affair. They meet during the afternoons or evenings – depending on the timings of Hanna’s shifts as a tram conductress – with, for the former, Michael initially skipping school until admonished by her for doing so.

The relationship develops: Michael steals a silk nightdress for her from a department store; they go on a 4-day cycling holiday posing as mother and son; their afternoon rituals incorporate Michael reading aloud some of the literature that he studying at school. He is The Reader.

The first-person narration is given by an older Michael, looking back across several decades from the perspective of the present day (i.e. the mid-1990s). He notes the specific memories he has of those early weeks: Hanna putting on her stockings; Hanna on her bicycle with her skirt blowing in the slipstream; Hanna wearing the nightdress for the first time… Interspersed with this are Michael’s wistful reflections on the disappointments associated with the general passage of time: the failure to meet expectations, the yearnings for past happiness, the life unfulfilled…

The other reader – you or I – sense that, at some point, Michael and Hanna’s carefree and liberating relationship must be threatened, if not terminated. There is an early reference to “the knowledge of what came later and… what came out afterwards” which suggests that the affair will not just be compromised by the differences in their respective ages or by their desire to enjoy the here-and-now rather than make any medium or long-term commitment. When Hanna leaves the area without warning, Michael is both puzzled and distraught.

At the beginning of the second act, several years have passed and it is 1965. (The earlier part of the story is thus revealed to have taken place in the late 1950s). When Michael comes across Hanna again, he is a law student at university and she is one of five defendants being tried for war crimes. As a member of the SS, she was a guard at Auschwitz and then at a smaller camp near Cracow before, near the end of the war, being involved in a murderous forced march of prisoners.

I shall refrain from describing the evolving narrative any further from this point. It is here that Bernhard Schlink begins to address the profound philosophical and moral questions that, twenty years after the end of the War, were being confronted by Germany’s wartime generation (Hanna) and the generation that followed (Michael and, by implication, Schlink himself).

For the accused in the dock, there is a simple question, addressed directly to the judge – “So what would you have done?” – to which there is only a floundering and hapless reply.

For the complacent and self-righteous student, the perspective initially appears much more straightforward: “We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst”. However, when reflecting back later on the generational discord that characterised German society in the 1960s, Michael’s thoughts are clearly inconsistent. The view that “the real theme of the student movement [was] coming to grips with the Nazi past”, is immediately contradicted by “[s]ometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the general conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took”.

For Michael, the failure to resolve these philosophical/moral issues arises at a personal – as well as societal – level. At the trial, whilst he has no residual feelings for his former lover, there is a clear inner tension: “[e]ven as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her… I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks – understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both”.

Likewise, when Michael realises that he is in possession of evidence that would shorten Hanna’s inevitable prison sentence – though not exonerate her completely – he is faced with the appalling dilemma of whether or not to reveal this to this judge, when Hanna herself quite evidently does not want it to be produced.

The role of The Reader itself becomes more complicated in the third act – in different ways, it is both Michael and Hanna – as the narrative moves towards its inevitable conclusion and Schlink examines the layering of generational experiences, not only between the different age cohorts but also within the same individual at different points of time.

The translation by Carol Brown Janeway is efficiently undertaken. The only note that jarred with me was Hanna’s use of “Kid” when affectionately speaking to her young lover. I thought that this sounded rather too American: too Humphrey Bogart, perhaps. I wonder if “My Boy” or “Young Man” might have been better options.

28th May 2025

When Dr Max Archer, Associate Professor in Intelligence History at the London School of Economics, receives an old-fashioned calling card inviting him to visit Scarlet King in her Chelsea flat the following morning, it is not surprising that he is somewhat perplexed.

Max is a middle-ranking academic, whose career has stalled and whose wife, pregnant by her new lover, is seeking a divorce. His finances are low and he is currently reduced to renting a studio flat from a friend at a below-market rate.

Scarlet King, a lady in her 90s, is known by Max to have once been the top Russian expert at MI6.

The calling card instructs Max to “tell no one” and to “dry-clean thoroughly”. Thus, we are introduced to our first item of spy-trade jargon: “dry-cleaning” means to undertake counter-surveillance by shrugging off a watcher. Max duly takes a convoluted route to his appointment – glancing in shop windows, doubling back, heading down side-streets. He is unaware that, on arrival at Scarlet’s flat, he is observed, photographed – and identified – from the top floor of the house opposite by two members of the A4 Branch of MI5 who will report back to Saul Northcliffe, Deputy Director of the Security Service.

Scarlet offers Max the opportunity to authenticate her unpublished memoirs – written in the third person – which reveal two highly sensitive post-War state secrets, the publication of which would be highly damaging to Britain’s security services (and some serving officers, Saul in particular) and to the reputation of the UK Government as a whole. As one character remarks, “It would make Kim Philby and the Third Man saga look small fry”. For his part, Max realises that, whilst his involvement in the scheme could bring both academic kudos and significant riches, there would be an inevitable prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and a long jail sentence.

This initial set-up is only the starting point for Matthew Richardson’s impressively plotted narrative, which interweaves the personal stories of the main characters with major intelligence events – some well-known, others fictional – of the Cold War: the exfiltration of German scientists to the West after 1945, the Soviet penetration of the British and American spy agencies, the release of the Miktrokhin Archive of Russian secrets by a KGB defector in 1992, the assassination by the CIA of a “sleeper” being repatriated to Russia in 2010… These events are taken up to the near-present day: there are references to Putin’s nerve agent programme, Novichok and the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, whilst “[t]he 45th President of the United States was accused of being a Russian mole”.

Other members of the cast list make only peripheral appearances. I had a wry smile when, after the success of her first mission in Vienna in 1946, Scarlet is promoted to a new post in Section IX – Russian counter-intelligence – and meets her boss for the first time:

He extended his hand. She shook it and felt the grip lingering slightly too long. His eyes fixed on her. He had a loose-limbed charm about him, drawing people in.

“Philby”. He smiled again. “Everyone around here calls me Kim”.

I did sense that, on occasion, the author was perhaps overly keen to demonstrate the vast amount of research on which his novel is based. (The bibliography extends to over 50 references). For example, an episode set in the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris allows Richardson to offer his view on the eponymous post-War Nazi hunter: “… [T]he list of Nazis Wiesenthal claimed to have brought to justice was overblown… [H]e played little part in the [Adolf] Eichmann saga [his capture in South America] and… whole chunks of his life story were factually inaccurate. Sometimes, though… [we are] happy to believe the myth”. An unnecessary aside, I think.

Nonetheless, throughout all this, the reader feels in control – sort of – of the confusing and duplicitous world around him. We are not surprised by a key role in the story being played by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. Nor by the close links to the intelligence community of a respected Oxford academic. We note the jargon and the acronyms and the betrayals and the surprises. And, as we might expect, the plot twists continue right up until the final pages, when the motives of the key players – and their fates – are fully revealed.