5th February 2024

The circumstances – serious and dramatic – of Jack Taylor’s dismissal from the Garda Síochána (or Gardaí, Ireland’s national police and security service), after 10 years service and on his third warning, are recounted in the opening chapter of Ken Bruen’s The Guards. It turned out that punching a pompous government minister in the mouth was not consistent with maintaining his then employment status.

Thus it is that we are introduced to him as an alcoholic Galway-based private eye, whose “office” is his usual seat in a basic, spit-and-sawdust public house called Grogan’s. His morning coffee routinely has a large measure of brandy poured in by the elderly and frail Sean, the bar-owner.

We are in no doubt about our sense of place. Grogan’s has three portraits above the bar – of a Pope (Jack is not sure which one), St Patrick and John Fitzgerald Kennedy – with JFK in the middle. (The Pope had previously been in centre field but, following the Vatican Council, had been “bounced” out to outside-left).

Likewise, our sense of the contemporary (i.e. turn of century) period is aided by the frequent references to what might broadly be described as popular culture: a song by Gabrielle, the television series ER, a Beckham haircut… In addition, Jack (and Bruen) occasionally step back to the previous generation – Joy Division, Gary Numan… It has to be said that not all these casual asides invoke a warm recollection from Jack’s perspective.

The early passages of the book also set the tone for the linguistic identity of the locality: “Jaysus”, “yah eejit”, “by the holy”, etc. There is a risk here that Bruen would draw too heavily on a clichéd “Oirishness”, but this is largely avoided thanks to the urgency of the narrative and the underlying presence of both a wry humour and unremittingly cynical take on the world.

Jack sits in the bar most mornings and, a minor reputation having been earned as an effective investigator, waits “for the world to come knocking”, in this case a distressed mother concerned about the drowning of her young daughter.

The story – narrated in the first person – progresses from this initial encounter. At first, Jack and his side-kick Cathy B make little progress and he is on the verge of giving up the case. However, a vicious beating after another evening in the pub convinces him that he might be on to something. And so the story evolves as Jack identifies the powerful figures behind the abuse of teenage girls. There are sudden – and, for the reader, unexpected – deaths.

Bruen’s default style is for short – often once-sentence – paragraphs that intersperse the consistently snappy dialogue in a series of brief (usually one or two-page) chapters. Jack’s conversations – or, more frequently, just his inner thoughts – add to the richness of the cultural references, particular of writers both Irish (JM O’Neill, Patrick Kavanagh) and non-Irish. The latter include Elmore Leonard, Derek Raymond and David Goodis – novelists in the noir genre – whom Bruen is clearly acknowledging as among his own influences.

Jack’s investigative work takes regular breathers, as his assaults on whatever booze comes to hand – beer, gin, whisky – have their predictable effects, notwithstanding his occasional efforts to bring things under control. At about the half-way stage of the book, he spends 12 days in the mental hospital in Ballinasloe following another drink-induced blackout. (Wikipedia informs us that St Brigid’s Hospital opened as the Connacht Asylum in 1833 and housed about 2,000 patients in the 1950s, but subsequently declined in importance, as the Irish mental health policy moved towards deinstitutionalisation. It closed in 2013).

This allows for a reflective – and poignant – interlude in which we learn more of Jack’s love of books and literature: “There’s always been books. All my bedraggled life, they’ve been the only constant”. He had begun with his father’s Zane Grey cowboy stories and advanced through Richmal Crompton and Robert Louis Stephenson until, thanks to the guidance of a kindly local librarian, Mr Kennedy – “a tall thin man with an air of other worldliness” – he graduated to Dickens, poetry, philosophy… and American crime novels.

The Guards – the first (to date) of 16 novels involving Jack Taylor – is not simply a story about a private eye investigating a mystery. In fact, Jack does relatively little investigating at all and it is an apparently minor character – another ex-Guardaí, who has turned to religion – who guides him to resolution. This includes the tidying up of a particular loose end that the author had seemingly left hanging, but which Jack dramatically – and shockingly – resolves on the last page.

Ken Bruen also explores other themes, including the mystery of individuals, even those close to you, such as Jack on his friend Sutton – “even now, I’m unsure of his nationality, his age, his background… the details shifted and swayed so often you could never nail down one particular fact”. We are touched by the references to acts of guidance or kindness, whether long in the past when Jack’s father and Mr Kennedy the librarian sowed the seeds of his lifelong bibliophilia – Ken Bruen is acknowledging another debt here, I feel – or in the present, as in the small acts of comfort provided to Jack by the homeless Padraig or Jeff, another barman.

And, underlying it all, there is the sad perspective of the alcoholic – “you know you’re bad when a publican’s glad you’re not drinking”. We are informed that the measure of brandy poured by Sean into Jack’s morning coffee was “to kill the bitterness”. What we are not told, however, is whether this is the bitterness of the coffee – or the bitterness of everyday life.

10th January 2024

The prolific Australian author Thomas Keneally (born in 1935) is probably best known for Schindler’s Ark, which won what was then the Booker McConnel Prize in 1982 and which was subsequently adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993), the winner of 7 Academy Awards.

A Family Madness has two central characters. The first – in the part of the book’s narrative set in contemporary (mid 1980s) Sydney – is Terry Delaney, a young professional Rugby League player who is attempting to progress from his club’s third-grade team through the reserves and into the first-grade. At the start of the story, his on-field exploits have been halted due to a 6-month suspension for breaking an opponent’s jaw. His day job – though really his evening-to-night job – is as a guard protecting a number of industrial and commercial premises for Radislav (Rudi) Kabbel, the owner of a family-based security company, which also employs Kabbel’s sons Warwick and Scott and daughter Danielle.

The background story of Kabbel, our second key character, begins in the dark days of Byelorussia – then one of the Socialist Republics of the USSR – during and immediately after the Second World War. The events of this period are revealed through Rudi’s own written history of the Kabbelski family and his translation of the wartime journals of his father, Stanislaw Kabbelski, who was the Chief of Police in the city of Staroviche.

Stanislaw Kabbelski’s diary records begin in September 1941, when Byelorussia is under the control of the Germans and the systemic murder of Jews is under way. He is fully complicit in this. The actions come close to home when the young Rudi’s tutor – a First World War veteran called Hirschmann – is said, in the dreadful euphemism, to have “gone east”. In practice, it was probably to one of the mass graves on the Gomel road three miles west of the city.

Much of the central part of the book deals with the complexities within Byelorussian nationalism that surface both within the period of German occupation and then after the tide of the war changes, when the Red Army starts to make its inexorable progress through the region. Stanislaw Kabbelski is caught up in the bloody factional rivalry which continues after his family has fled to the west and into a Displaced Persons Camp run by the Americans. Indeed, it continues into the Australia of the 1950s, when he takes revenge on a fellow nationalist revealed to have been a Soviet spy.

Running in parallel with this part of the narrative is a catalogue of Delaney’s own difficulties, not least his suspension from playing, the pressures on his marriage resulting from his affair with Danielle Kabbel and the reckless actions of his ex-policeman friend, Brian Stanton, in which armed robbery graduates into something even more serious. There is much to admire in the way that Thomas Keneally weaves the various strands together.

For Delaney, it is the game of Rugby League – the principal sport in New South Wales – which provides him with the opportunities to gain kudos and respect, as well as financial reward. As Stanton mentions to Kabbel, whilst Delaney might work as a security guard, “he’s only filling time in between football matches”. Later, after one particular night-time skirmish when on security duty, “Delaney… sat crookedly in a seat in the waiting room [of the hospital], favouring his shoulder and wondering if he could play on Sunday”

Rugby League is a tough sport and, although Keneally is a long-standing supporter of the game, he does not pull his punches – literally – when describing the conflict between alpha males. We learn that one of Delaney’s team-mates was “a second-rower who had an evil reputation for twisting the testicles of the opposing hooker”. Later, an opposing centre “… another whizz-kid… had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney’s eyeball with his blindside thumb… The crowd cheered,,, When tackled [he] always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney’s face” It is Delaney’s act of violent retribution that gets him the 6-month suspension.

At the core of A Family Madness is Keneally’s assessment of the significant ethnic and cultural differences within the melting pot of Sydney’s working class. This is briefly raised in a reference to the suburb of Petersham, which reportedly housed 67 different nationalities: “The Greeks remembered what the Turks had done, as did the Armenians. The Christian Lebanese spat at the shadows of Muslim Lebanese…Croatians told their daughters not to talk to Serbians and in coffee shops Serbians muttered complicated curses at Croatians”. It is more explicit in Delaney’s ostracisation by the Sicilian family of his betrayed wife, Gina – “the child of a sturdy Italian couple from Palermo” – and, following his own affair with a Serbian girl, the vengeful and calculated violence attended to Brian Stanton by her wronged husband.

However, it is the Kabbel family that stand apart. At one level, there is the utter ruthlessness – observed first-hand by Delaney – with which Warwick Kabbel takes revenge on one of the guards working for a rival security company. More significantly, not least in the arsenal of weapons and booby traps that they accumulate, the family members make their preparations for “The Wave”, which they believe to be imminent and after which, when civil society has broken down, it will be every family for itself. (One of Delaney’s police contacts draws a comparison with the Jonestown cult in Guyana in 1978, the perpetrators/victims of a mass suicide-murder).

Above all, there are the Kabbels’ strict ties of family, which bind them together to the exclusion of everything else. After Delaney attempts to go through the formal procedures with the civic authorities in his attempt to rescue Danielle – and their child – from Rudi’s clutches, the response is horrific. As one of the wallopers – i.e. a policeman and also “a handy full-back from the local club” – cries in despair (at the end of Chapter 1), “Oh holy Jesus, Delaney! Who are those people?”

Footnote

[Although Belarus gained
its independence in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the
country’s political and economic structures remain firmly linked with those of modern-day
Russia].

5th December 2023

Elsewhere on this website, I have included WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) as one of my dozen favourite pieces of fiction. I have now caught up with his first novel – Vertigo – which was initially published in Germany in 1990, in the Vintage edition of 2020 with the translation by Michael Hulse.

I was quickly enveloped by some of the familiar characteristics of Sebald’s writing: his elegantly flowing prose style; the ease with which he effortlessly moves from one theme to another; his enjoyment in the discoveries to be made when travelling (usually by bus or train or on foot); and the eloquence with which he recalls people and events of the past – including his own past. In addition, there is the (occasional) uncertainty about what is actually happening in the narrative as he draws on imagination or speculation to supplement the description of events.

The opening chapter (Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet) summarises the career of a writer – Marie-Henri Beyle – from being a 17 year-old in the Napoleonic army invading the Italian peninsula in 1801 until his death in Paris in 1842. At the start of this period, Beyle has occasion to pass the site of the previous year’s Battle of Marengo between the French and Austrians: “he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew”.

Experts on 19th Century French literature (of whom I am certainly not one) will recognise Beyle as being better known under his pen-name of Stendhal (although this is not revealed to us). As an example of how the author sows doubt into the reader’s mind, we are led to query whether one of Beyle’s many paramours – a certain Mme Gherardi, of whom he wrote as having accompanied him on a journey through the Alps from modern-day Italy to Austria – actually existed.

The broad geographical region comprising the Adriatic, northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria also forms the backdrop to the book’s other three chapters. In the longest (All’estero or Abroad), we accompany the narrator (whom we assume to be Sebald) as he makes two journeys – seven years apart – from Vienna to Venice via Verona in the 1980s.

Sebald has an unrelenting eye for the historical and/or the beautiful, as we move on from Giocomo Casanova’s imprisonment (in 1755) in the rat-infested prison chambers below the lead roofs of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Pisanello’s fresco (of 1435) over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel in Verona and Giotto’s fresco cycle (completed around 1305) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In the last of these, “I was overwhelmed by the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries”.

There is an underside to his travel experiences as well, however, quite apart from losing his passport in Limone, when the hotel receptionist mistakenly hands it over on the departure of another person. In Milan, Seward wards off the aggressive attack of two pickpockets and, later – in a bout of travelogue – regrets his decision to take a stroll around for an hour or so: “any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress”,

The book’s other chapters – Dr K Takes the Waters at Riva and Il ritorno in patria or The Return to his Homeland – also describe journeys, though with their respective emphases on the principal destinations.

As with the earlier coverage of Stendhal’s life, some key aspects of the narrative are semi-hidden. “Dr K” – the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers’ Insurance Company – is, of course, the thinly disguised Franz Kafka, who took holidays in the town of Riva del Garda on the northern shore of Lake Garda in 1909 and 1913, on the latter occasion for three weeks.

The immediate pre-First World War period features more the once in Sebald’s narrative. In Verona, he spends some time in the main library – the Biblioteca Civica – (notwithstanding it actually being closed for a public holiday) researching the local papers for the main news items of the late summer of 1913, one of which was a sensational murder trial involving one Maria Oggioni, who pleaded self-defence to the charge of shooting her husband’s batman. Sebald suggests that she might have found it relatively easy to win over the judges, as her enigmatic smile reminded observers of the Mona Lisa (and La Gioconda had recently been found under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated it on Italy’s behalf from the Louvre two years earlier). More fatefully, “1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass”.

A similarly cursory disguise is given to the Bavarian village to which Sebald himself returns (at the end of his 1987 journey) in the final chapter – the village in which he had been born – which is simply labelled as “W” throughout. However, for we amateur literary detectives, Sebald provides a list of the small villages through which his bus passes towards the end of its route, after which we are informed that he walked through Unterjoch and Pfeiffermuhle to his final destination: i.e. to Wertach.

This is a nostalgic and poignant chapter. After an absence of 30 years, Sebald is disconcerted to discover that very little of what he remembered from his childhood still remained: “the village itself, I reflected, as I arrived at that late hour, was more remote from me any than other place I could conceive of”.

Most of the dwellings and other buildings had been demolished or redeveloped: the school, the fire station, the cheese dairy, the grocer and haberdashery… Likewise, not surprisingly, there is the absence of most of the village’s inhabitants whom he could recollect from that earlier time: Kopf the barber, Dopfer the hunchback, Ekram the Turk, his teacher Fraulein Rauch, the friendless and ill-fated Dr Rambousch and, not least, his grandfather, in whose company he was often to be found. One of the few remaining points of reference was now the Engelwirt Inn, in which Sebald stayed for a month; during his childhood, his family had lived there in rented rooms. (The present-day Google Maps lists the Gasthof Engel in Wertach as permanently closed).

Sebald neatly – indeed, brilliantly – completes the circle of his narrative in this final chapter. In discussion with the current owner of the Café Alpenrose, he learns of one of the village’s forebears who led a contingent of a thousand men at the Battle of Marengo, all of whom were slaughtered. Later, when Sebald is given access to the café’s attic – which had been strictly out-of-bounds when he had frequently visited the dwelling with his grandfather – he finds a vast pile of miscellaneous clutter that the previous owners – two elderly spinster sisters – had accumulated over their lifetimes: sacks, ropes, doorbells, mousetraps, beehive frames… Amongst this collection is “the uniform, trimmed in colours pink-grey and green, almost certainly belonging to one of the Austrian chasseurs, who fought against the French as irregulars around 1800”. However, “when I touched one of the uniform sleeves that hung down empty, to my utter horror, it crumbled to dust”.

WG Sebald’s beautifully written narrative has taken us back to Marie-Henri Beyle and the Napoleonic conquests at the turn of the 19th Century.

23rd September 2023

It is 1926. “’Is it a hanging?’ an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no-one in particular” in the early morning crowd gathered at the gates of Holloway Prison.

So begins Shrines of Gaiety. It is not a hanging. The crowd has come to watch as Nellie Coker – the “Queen of Clubs” in the Soho district and the owner of half-a-dozen money-making establishments – is released from Holloway Prison after a 6-month sentence for breaching the licensing laws. From a distance, she is discreetly observed by Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher and his unlikely (and unofficial) sidekick, Gwendolen Kelling, a 30-something librarian, who has recently arrived from York searching for two young girls who have run away to the bright lights of London.

And so we are introduced to three of the main characters in Kate Atkinson’s entertaining tale, which is set in the capital city – its nightlife at once both glittering and seedy – during the inter-war period.

They are soon joined by a cast of other significant figures in the complex network of relationships and contacts that is revealed during the course of the story: Arthur Maddox, a corrupt police detective; Niven and Ramsay Coker, Nellie’s adult sons, one a dispassionate First World War veteran, the other a dissolute wastrel; Freda Murgatroyd, an ambitious young theatrical performer; Vivian Quinn, a louche gossip columnist and chronicler of the ‘Bright Young Things’; Mr Azzopardi, a supposed Maltese gangster with a long-standing grudge against Nellie.

It adds up to a spider’s web of the righteous and the crooked and those placed somewhere in between and we can enjoy the mental mapping of the overlapping linkages – some deliberate, others coincidental – between the main players. (That said, I did find a couple of the coincidences – including one that leads to a hugely dramatic episode – rather convenient for the narrative’s development).

Kate Atkinson skilfully builds up the backstories of the principal characters. In the case of Nellie, this included leaving her drinker/gambler husband in Edinburgh and taking her 5 young children to London, where she initially found rooms at a pound a week near King’s Cross. It is the death of a landlady that provided Nellie with an unexpected and illicit windfall, which she used to buy into and progress through the nightclub scene. This has culminated in the ownership of the Amethyst, a club which is patronised by royalty and criminals alike. “Mixed bag”, she comments, when asked about one evening’s clientele, “Tallulah Bankhead, Frazzini [a leading gangster], the King of Denmark…”. The clubs are protected from raids – initially at least – by Nellie’s connection (Maddox) at Bow Street police station

The main plotline concerns the various threats posed to Nellie Croker’s empire from various sources, both within and outside the family. As we learn from the opening scene, one of these is from DCI Frobisher, who is aware of the corruption at Bow Street and seeks to link the club scene with a series of deaths by drowning of young girls washed up near Tower Bridge. The sheer ruthlessness of Nellie in protecting her interests is duly made evident when it is required.

Atkinson adeptly makes use of both real-life and fictional characters. Amongst the rival gangs mentioned in the narrative are the Elephant and Castle Mob, Derby Sabini’s roughs and the Hoxton Gang, all of whom were major players in the London underworld of the period. (Charles “Darby” Sabini (1888-1950) has a Wikipedia entry describing him as “a British-Italian mob boss and considered protector of Little Italy during the interwar years”. Nellie Coker herself is based on the real-life Kate Meyrick (1875-1933)).

The author’s researches have yielded a plethora of cultural references: Gwendolen’s librarian experience in York had extended to persuading her dour branch manager that they should stock “…the ‘racier’ writers of the day: Elinor Glyn, Ruby M Ayres, Ethel M Dell”; although one of the force at Bow Street was nicknamed The Laughing Policeman, “God, how Frobisher hated that stupid Charles Penrose song”; later, the background sounds include “Billy Murray singing ‘Clap hands. Here comes Charley’”. There is a neat reference to contemporary advertising: “they said smoking was good for you, but Ramsay wasn’t so sure”.

Period detail is essential in establishing the temporal context, of course. However, there were times when I did feel that this was rather laboured: Frobisher was interested in “a demonstration of a ‘televisor’ to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird”; one character refers to another as having been “stopped at one of those new ‘traffic light’ things” near St James’s; later we learn that, “there was much talk in the air of a General Strike” (although not, it has to be said, by any of the characters with whom we are concerned); and “…when I [Quinn] was in Paris I had a very interesting discussion about bullfighting with an American chap called Hemingway, a journalist, writes stories”.

Kate Atkinson has a straightforward writing style, which aids the reader in making good progress through the narrative. The story has a near-linear structure, in which some key scenes are quickly repeated from a different perspective or with additional detail, but these jerky bits of time-shifting should not present a challenge to the engaged reader. (That there are 68 chapters within the 512-page paperback edition published by Penguin Random House – most of which are comprised of shorter sub-sections – reflects the necessary progress of the different characters and plotlines within the overall story).

With the exception of one couple, Kate Atkinson summarises the fates of each of her characters in the final couple of chapters, taking us variously – at least for those that survive for the duration of the story – into both the immediate post-war years and the longer term. Other fates are determined before then, in one case – to me at least – shockingly so.

“Is it a hanging?’ the boy asked his neighbour, standing in the crowd outside Pentonville prison. Yes, the very same delivery boy that we met outside Holloway..”. The first line of the penultimate chapter completes a neat circle for us. And, this time, it is a hanging.

16th August 2023

“Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered… All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead”.

In the first paragraph of Norman Mailer’s account of the invasion of the fictional Pacific Island of Anopopei by American troops at the height of the Second World War, we are thrust immediately into implicit membership of an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon, as it waits on board ship prior to landing,

And, sure enough, the platoon’s first fatality occurs shortly after its arrival on the beach, the young soldier’s inadequate steel helmet pieced by a flying piece of mortar shrapnel.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this war novel is that, as the narrative proceeds, the platoon is relatively rarely in actual combat with the enemy. There is one significant battle when a Japanese attack attempts to break across a river on the front line, several brushes with unseen opponents on the periphery of the island’s jungle and another skirmish when the platoon is on a lengthy patrol. In the background, the sound of artillery fire on the Japanese positions forms a continual soundtrack during the daylight hours. The platoon does suffer further loss of life, however, including when an unexpected machine-gun bullet to the chest brings sudden death to a character with whom we had been heavily invested.

Rather, Mailer is much more interested in telling us about the individual soldiers in the platoon, the continually changing relationships between them, the widespread cynicism and disrespect that they have for their superiors and the unremitting and punishing physical conditions that they all endure.

And so it is that we learn the personal back-stories of, amongst others: Martinez from San Antonio, his nerves highly strung from the previous conflict on the island on Motome; Croft, the tough, bullying sergeant; Red, the cynical drifter; Hearn, the disillusioned graduate; Ridges, the religious son of an impoverished farmer; and Roth and Goldstein, the two Jews at the bottom of platoon’s food chain.

Their ultimate commander on the island – General Edward Cummings – is an ambitious but ultimately sad figure, I think. In the modern parlance, he has a “gender-role confusion” as a closeted homosexual in an unhappy marriage and with complicated feelings towards at least one of the men under his command.

Cummings’s immediate military objective is to break through the Japanese’s defensive Toyaku Line – a thin stretch between Mount Anaka and the sea – but he is under increasing pressure as the time passes. His requests for naval support are continually thwarted and, he realises, the discipline within his forces is ebbing away, as evidenced by the submission of false patrol reports by some of his sergeants and an increased incidence of malingering in the hospital tent.

Although not in regular combat with the enemy, the physical – and mental – stresses placed on the members of the platoon are evident throughout the narrative. At various times, the platoon is pulling a large gun along a heavily muddied track, building a road to the front line, hacking its way through the thick jungle, wading up a river, crossing the sun-drenched lower hills of the mountain and then scaling its perilously thin ledges higher up. At times, Mailer takes us on these tortuous journeys yard by painful yard.

Throughout all this, the combination of torrential storms, stultifying humidity and hot sun means that the soldiers are consistently wet for days at a time, whether from rain or sweat or both. Shortly after their arrival on the island, a high wind blows away the tents from their bivouac near the beach. The guard duty at night involves shivering under damp blankets. Over time, the men endure blisters, diarrhoea, sores on the shoulders from carrying their loads, gnat bites, nausea and sheer exhaustion. There is no respite.

The sounds of the jungle are on permanent call, of course: the noises of various types of wildlife mingled with the perceived and permanent threat of enemy ambush. The wildlife itself plays a relatively minor role – insect bites and one close encounter with a snake aside – until the later stages of the novel. But its impact, when it does come, is devastating. I suspect that, in that particular episode, Mailer took a perverse enjoyment in revelling in the subconscious fears of every comfortable city-dweller.

We keep coming back to the members of the platoon – their hopes, fears, prejudices. From several of them – usually those prone to boasting the most about their sexual conquests – there is little confidence in their wives at home being faithful. Inevitably, there are conflicts within the group – their nerves on edge and energy levels diminished – which are exacerbated by the casual racism and anti-Semitism. The sudden death of one of their number produces – from one or two of the others – a callously shocking lack of sympathy.

For Mailer, the dehumanisation of the soldiers is only one symptom – albeit a significant one – of the savageries of war. After three members of a Japanese unit are killed immediately after being taken by surprise, the fourth is summarily executed on the trail. There is the looting of corpses’ possessions and, on one occasion, the crude extraction of a cadaver’s gold teeth.

Underpinning all this is the realisation amongst some in the platoon that, assuming they remained alive, they were in for the long haul. One of the malingers – Minetta – resting in the hospital tent after sustaining a minor wound to his leg “thought of the war, which would stretch on forever. After this island there’s gonna be another one and then another one…Aaah, there’s no future in the whole goddam thing”. Later, in the absence of a “million dollar wound” – which would lead to a transfer States-side, but with no permanent damage – he seriously contemplates the more drastic action of shooting his foot off and, at the depths of his macabre blackness, weighs up the pros and cons of deciding which one it should be.

Likewise, when some of the other members of platoon start to speculate on what they will do when they get out of the Army, it is Croft – the sergeant – who sets them straight; “Waste of time thinking about it. The war’ll go on for a while”. And so it does: in a contemporaneous passage, General Cummings speculates on whether he could get another promotion before the campaign begins in the Philippines. (Mailer himself saw action in a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippines in 1945).

The Naked and the Dead was the first – and most successful – of Norman Mailer’s 12 novels, published when he was just 25. (His long career – which included journalism, theatre and film – effectively lasted until his death at the age of 84 in 2007, as The Castle in the Forest was published in January of that year). The intense, linear structure of the narrative is punctuated by episodes of “The Time Machine”, which fill in the characters’ backstories, and the “Chorus”, which consist of short acts of play-like dialogue between characters. The main stylistic concession made by the author was the substitution of the word “fug” for the more usual – and, here, prolific – four-letter expletive. The 541-page volume of that I read was published by Allan Wingate of London as the 12th Cheap Edition in 1955 following the earlier nine Impressions of 1949 to 1951.

28th June 2023

Death at La Fenice is the first of the 32 detective novels written by Donna Leon and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. The most recent – So Shall You Reap – was published earlier this year.

The location for the novels is Venice, where the American-born Leon lived for over 30 years before moving to Switzerland, where she now resides.

The mystery facing Brunetti concerns the death through poison of the celebrated German conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, in his dressing room during an interval of a performance of La Traviata at La Fenice Opera House. It soon becomes clear that there are several possible suspects, including the Maestro’s (much) younger wife, the lead soprano, the soprano’s lesbian lover and the Opera House Director. Nor is there a shortage of motives, both from the recent past and stretching back to the years leading up to and of the Second World War, when Wellauer was an enthusiastic Nazi sympathiser.

Brunetti’s approach is methodical and painstaking, as he conducts a series of interviews with the principal characters and with those – a music critic, a gossip columnist, the deceased’s doctors and others – on the margin of events. The most chilling of these – literally – are with an elderly and impoverished former operatic diva living on the island of Giudecca, a short boat ride across the Canale Della Giudecca; “the popular consciousness [was] of a sinister, backward place, where nasty things happened”.

The Commissario conducts the investigation at his own pace, which – apart from a couple of boat trips and a return train journey to Padova – is a walking pace to his various assignments around the city. (In the Penguin 2022 edition, we are aided on these journeys by the map at the front of the book). He receives little effective support from his two immediate subordinates or from his vain, self-serving boss, Giuseppe Patta, the station’s Vice-Questore.

It is through the eyes of the lead character that we get a real sense of Venice. “It seemed to him that all the shops that served the native population – pharmacies, shoe-makers, groceries – were slowly and inexorably disappearing, replaced by slick boutiques and souvenir shops that catered to the tourists, filled with luminescent plastic gondolas from Taiwan and paper-mache masks from Hong Kong”. As for the principal interests of its inhabitants, this was “a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and, where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumour”.

Leon extends this portrayal to relay how life is conducted, perhaps not just in Venice, but across Italy as a whole. Early on, Brunetti commands two medical attendants to take the victim’s body from the Opera House to the Civil Hospital. Their sullen response is that it is late at night and they would be breaking union rules about the length of a shift. Later Brunetti muses on how one of the wealthy characters had obtained permission from the planning authorities to insert large skylights in the roof of an (unlawful) additional floor of an apartment complex: “the bribes would be ruinous”.

The author’s wry humour comes across nicely at regular intervals. There is a revealing review of how each of the daily newspapers – from political broadsheet to tabloid scandal-sheet – report the murder. (This was before the plethora of online news sources, of course). Later, we learn that the aristocratic heritage in the family tree of Brunetti’s wife, Paola, incorporates two doges, a cardinal or two, a composer of secondary importance, the former Italian ambassador to the court of King Zog of Albania, a pope, Garibaldi’s banker and “a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue)”.

Although I solved the case – in the sense of “who” – some time before the final chapters, I did not anticipate the twists associated with the “why” or the post-solution next steps that were to follow. Commissario Guido Brunetti was on top of all these aspects, however, and firmly on the path that has – to date – taken him through 30-plus years of solving Venetian mysteries.

28th April 2023

Hidden Depths is the third of Ann Cleeves’s detective stories set in the North East of England and featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. It has subsequently been followed by seven others, which the prolific Cleeves has – to date – published in parallel with the nine stories centred upon DI Jimmy Perez on Shetland and 18 other crime novels and novellas. As Vera and Shetland have been highly popular television adaptations – on ITV and the BBC, respectively – the author has enjoyed great success in this genre in recent years. (Hidden Depths was the first of the Vera transmissions in 2011).

For many new readers, it will be inevitable that the initial perception of Vera Stanhope will be determined by the skilful way in which the actress Brenda Blethyn has played the role on television. And, indeed, many of her characteristics and circumstances are interchangeable between page and screen: her empathy with the downtrodden, her ability to deflate the pompous antagonist, her lonely domestic life in her late father’s remote Northumbrian cottage…

But other things are different, not least her physical appearance. Her introduction in Hidden Depths refers to “the fat woman wedged in the Delcar armchair” and, later, one of her interviewees makes a mental note of her “loud intrusive voice, her big feet, the heavy hands…” Having climbed up several flights of stairs to interview a suspect, Vera herself acknowledges that “I don’t like lifts. I’m never quite sure they’ll carry my weight”. However, whilst we wait for the culture warriors to impose their Roald Dahl-like amendments to these descriptions in future editions of the books, it remains the case that Vera is as sharp as a tack and fully observant of the detail of the world around her.

Vera Stanhope – and, by extension, we – are seeking to solve two murders that occurred with a couple of days of each other: one of a teenage boy and the other of a young woman. Although there appears to be absolutely nothing to link the victims in terms of mutual friends or contacts, the ways in which their bodies were placed make it difficult for Vera to deny a connection. In addition, we learn early on that the mother of the boy had recently become close to one of a group of the four keen birdwatchers who, whilst sea-watching at a watch tower on the coast, had discovered the second victim. A coincidence or not?

The Detective Inspector is alternately frustrated by and respectful of the efforts of her supporting team: the young, keen Holly Lawson, the experienced and slightly resentful Charlie Robson and, notably, her Detective Sergeant, Joe Ashworth. “I’ve taught you well”, she reflects to herself, when, seeking information about a university lecturer, Joe informally ingratiates himself with a couple of female students in a café near the university. She is less impressed when Joe introduces her to the girls as his auntie.

The role of Newcastle and its environs is given full rein. We learn that the suburb of West Jesmond is a relatively prosperous location in which it would be unusual for a group of students to be sharing accommodation; North Shields was “still not quite respectable, but interesting” with the new apartments, bars and restaurants on the Fish Quay meaning that “there was no shame in living in Shields these days”; by contrast, another (unnamed) location on the coast “… had once been famous for its docks. Now it’s only claim to fame was as the drugs capital of the North East”.

The comforting patois of the locals in their environs is used by Vera Stanhope to her advantage, though not always consistently with the requirements of political correctness. “H’away, hinny. and let me in. I called at the baker’s at the corner and got a couple of custard slices. Let’s get the kettle on and have a civilised chat”, she suggests to an elderly lady reluctant to let her through the front door. “Don’t be daft, lad. I’ve worked with more loonies than you’ve had hot dinners. And I don’t just mean the offenders”, she later responds to another interviewee, when it is suggested that she might be uncomfortable making enquiries in the confines of a psychiatric day centre.

Hidden Depths contains many of the expected characteristics of the modern detective novel: the detailed contributions from the crime scene investigators, the black humour of the pathologist, the red herrings, the sudden revelations of character relationships, the shortlist of potential murderers and, at the conclusion, the race against time to save another potential victim. Ann Cleeves moves the story on briskly and I enjoyed being in the company of the dogged Vera Stanhope and her colleagues on their home patch. As for my detective skills, I had tentatively decided on my chief suspect by about the half-way stage and then changed my mind and then changed it back again. Pleasingly, by the end, Vera and I were on the same wavelength.

17th March 2023

This epic novel – 624 pages in 135 chapters in the excellent Penguin Classics edition of 2013 – is one of the most lauded in American literature (though it was a commercial failure when first published). I was previously aware of the basic theme – Captain Ahab’s obsessional quest to kill the White Whale – but, until reading the book, unfamiliar with the specific details of the tale.

We are introduced to our narrator in the famous opening line – “Call me Ishmael” – and it is either through his eyes or in a conventional descriptive form that the bulk of the tale is presented. The reader is challenged by Melville’s grammatical style, however: occasional scenes are guided by Shakespearean stage directions – “(Ahab to himself)”, “(Ahab goes. Pip steps one step forward)”; various uncommon adjectives and adverbs are used; the prose style varies from high rhetoric to seaman’s slang; and many sentences are broken into discrete phrases bordered by semi-colons. And, of course, in this story, the author has an obvious requirement for a plethora of nautical terminology (on which more below).

The narrative begins with Ismael travelling to Nantucket in New England – the whaling capital of America – in order to sign up for a voyage to the South Seas. We learn that he is an experienced sailor, though in merchant vessels, rather than whalers, the voyages of which could be three or four years in duration. Later, he also tells us of his other work experiences – schoolteacher, stone mason, ditch digger, etc.

Ishmael is a sympathetic character and we warm to his tolerance and wry humour: “I cherish the greatest respects towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical”; “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”. That he is a man of intelligence and learning is shown in his various references to literature, history, geography, the ancient classics, Shakespeare and the Bible. Ishmael also reveals his knowledge of science, specifically the refraction of white light into its component colours.

Although Captain Ahab is not mentioned until page 80 and not seen by Ishmael until page 134, he is – of course – one of the central figures of the story. It is not long after leaving Nantucket in command of the Pequod that he announces to his 30-man crew that the principal purpose of the voyage is to find and kill the White Whale – the other central figure, of course – in unadulterated revenge for Ahab’s previous encounter with Moby Dick: “… suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field”. Only Starbuck, the chief mate, initially demurs; the rest of the crew – including Ishmael – are enthusiastic in their support.

It is clear that Melville – through Ishmael – has a huge respect for those who manned the whaling ships and for the vessels themselves. His admiration for the bravery, skill and physical effort of the crew – especially in hunting and killing the whales and then in extracting the oil and other produce from them – no doubt resulted from his own experience as a sailor (including on a whaler) between 1841 and 1844.

The Pequod’s journey from Nantucket across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, up through the South China Sea (avoiding the pirates) and into the Pacific Ocean towards “The Line” (i.e. the Equator) takes place in a variety of conditions – calm seas, favourable trade winds, a typhoon. A number of encounters – or “gams” – with other vessels are made, beginning with the Goney (Albatross). Ahab’s initial address to the ship’s captain – “Ship ahoy. Have ye seen the White Whale?” – sets the tone for all the subsequent gams, the responses to his impatient queries invariably recounting tales of destruction and loss of life.

At various stages, the Pequod enters the known grounds in which the sperm whales – usually the prime targets of the whalers – are to be found. Notwithstanding his stated personal – and sole – objective, Ahab also recognises that conventional sperm-whale hunting must also be undertaken in order that revenues can be earned for all those – including the crew as well as the ship’s owners – with shares in the profits of the Pequod’s voyage.

At the book’s half-way point, there is a detailed description of the first kill – from the preparation of the harpoon line through to the second mate, Stubb, “eyeing the vast corpse he had made” lying in the water. This is followed by securing the dead whale next to the ship overnight (which attracts what appear to be thousands of sharks) and the next day’s “cutting in” in which, using an intricate system of blocks and tackles, the mammal is partially lifted from the water and rotated so that its blubber is stripped from the carcase like the rind from an orange. (After this kill, Ishmael, who signed up for one 300th of the expedition’s net proceeds, estimates that the blubber from the single leviathan will produce 10 tons of oil). Again, Melville’s detailed description of the disassembly of the whale allows the author to reveal his appreciation of the crew’s technical expertise.

In many of the chapters, Melville does not move the narrative forward in quite the same way, but allows a sense of drift. These are more reflective pieces covering every detail of the background circumstances of the voyage. We learn about some of the crew – the mates Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the blacksmith Perth, the cook Fleece, the chief harpooneers Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo and the diminutive black cabin boy, Pip, who endures his own sad mental deterioration as events proceed.

Melville’s digressions include the etiquette of meals in the captain’s cabin (i.e. the order and contents of the respective portions given to the captain and the three mates), the experience of keeping the watch from the top of the mainmast, the validity of “the historical story of Jonah and the whale” and the intricate physical characteristics of the sperm whale -“… of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet as its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons”.

The long voyage to the South Seas also gives time for philosophical rumination, for example by Ishmael on the contrasting extremes of “whiteness”. On the one hand, “the emblem of many touching, noble things – the innocence of brides, the benignity of age, the holy pomps of the Romish faith” as given in the attire of the pope. On the other hand, the ferocity of the polar bear or the Great White shark, the hideousness of the Albino man. Uncomfortably for the modern reader, included in the former list, his pre-eminence within the human race is described as “giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe”.

I suspect that the present-day readership might be much more impressed with Melville’s recognition of the possibility – no more – that sperm whales could be hunted to extinction as (through Ishmael) he draws a potential comparison with the near extermination of the buffalo on the prairies of Illinois and Missouri. “Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale ships… and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts… the moot point is whether Leviathan… must not at least be exterminated from the waters”. He ends up rejecting the idea for what appear to be sound reasons, but the very raising of it is certainly perceptive for its time, I think,

For completeness, I also note that there is a discussion over three chapters of the portrayal of whales in art and sculpture. Much of it is critical, but praise is given to the French painters “Garnery” and “H Durand”. [We have the luxury of being
able to follow up the references to the work of Ambroise Louis Garneray
(1783-1857) and Jean Baptiste Henri Durand-Brager (1814-1879) on
Wikipedia.  It is well worth doing].

The Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick has an Introduction by a Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco and Explanatory Notes by Tom Quirk on some of the references in the text. I found the latter to be useful, although the reader should be warned that they do include spoilers for a couple of important plot developments. The Annexes also contain detailed sketches of the rigging, sails and decks of a whaler and the harpoons and other implements used by the whalers in addition to a map of the voyage undertaken by the Pequod and a glossary of nautical terms. If you do not know your capstan from your larboard or your gunwale from your kelson, the last of these is very useful indeed.

As might be expected, within academic circles, the Moby-Dick industry has generated a host of interpretations of the story and its underlying meaning(s). As for me, I like the straightforward one of the comparison between the odyssey across the seas that the crazed and fanatical Captain Ahab is making in search of his ultimate nemesis and the (hopefully) more sedate and reflective one that we all make in our journey through life.

Significantly, I think, Ahab recognises his condition. Quite early on in the piece, he utters: “They think me mad… but I’m demoniac. I am madness maddened!” And a little later: “Ah God! What traces of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms”. In Moby-Dick, we know that we are on a journey with Captain Ahab and we know how it will end for him.

As for how it ends for Ishmael, all is revealed in an exquisite one-page Epilogue.

16th November 2022

Although I missed out on reading this book in my youth, I am very familiar with its characters and plot thanks to the various versions presented over the years in comics and film and on the stage, the last of these most recently during lockdown via an online interpretation from The National Theatre. Nonetheless, it was a pleasure to savour the novel in the neat pocket-sized version published by Collector’s Library in 2004.

The story is set in the mid-18th Century. All bar a couple of the 34 chapters are narrated from the perspective of the young Jim Hawkins, whom we first meet in the Admiral Benbow Inn on the shore of the Bristol Channel, the establishment managed by his mother and ailing (and shortly deceased) father. The first of Stevenson’s brilliantly drawn characters – the formidable Billy Bones – appears on the first page “plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty livid white”.

Without turning the page, we are also introduced to Bones’s favoured sea-song –

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest –

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

and we are hooked from that point on as the remainder of the familiar cast-list appear in the introductory chapters: Black Dog, Blind Pew, Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey…

Stevenson cleverly invites his young readers to put themselves in Jim Hawkins’s place at the centre of the action. Hawkins is brave and resourceful as well as impulsive and naïve. It is through him that we experience the key episodes in the fast-moving plot: the initial meeting with Long John Silver, the discovery of the planned mutiny on the schooner Hispaniola, the refuge in the island’s stockade, the discovery of the marooned Ben Gunn, the trek to the site of the treasure… He also witnesses at first hand some of the terrors of the adventure, including the brutal murder of one of the crew and the impact of the inadvertent discharge of two muskets during a close-quarter struggle.

Familiarity with the plot does not diminish the excitement of the yarn but, rather, adds the benefit of retrospective knowledge. When Trelawney employs Silver not only as the ship’s cook, but also as the recruiter of most of the crew, we sense that all might not go according to the Squire’s plan.

The narrative rattles along with little in the way of anachronistic language to hold things up. I was unfamiliar with some of the nautical terminology associated with the manoeuvrability of the ship, but it was of interest to learn that a “quid” was a lump of tobacco, “davy” was the diminutive of affidavit and a “trump” was an admirable person. We also note that a port in South America had “shore boats full of negroes and Mexican-Indians and half-bloods” and that Silver’s wife was “an old negress”, but there is really very little to offend those with even the most acute modern-day sensibilities to dated cultural portrayals. The book is illustrated by 18 exquisite line drawings by HM Brock (1875-1960).

It has been inevitable, perhaps, that academic researchers have looked into the underlying messages that Stevenson might have been attempting to relay to his (generally) youthful readers. One such is evident in Hawkins’s seriously ill-judged initial assessments of some of the adults with whom he comes into contact. To begin with, Silver was judged to be “one of the best possible shipmates”; by contrast, after his first meeting with the efficient and honourable Smollett, Hawkins “hated the captain deeply”. Related to this, according to some interpretations, is Hawkins’s implicit search for guidance from a replacement father-figure following the death of his parent: Trelawney, Livesey, Silver.

The complexity of the character of Long John Silver is such as to maintain the continual interest of the reader. At the most basic level, he is a callous and murderous pirate with a horrendously bloody past. He is also a skilled and experienced seaman with a network of contacts and a profoundly cunning intelligence. At the plot develops, we see how his two main objectives – locating the buried treasure of the late Captain Flint and saving his own neck from the gibbet at London’s Execution Dock – are sometimes in concert and, at other times, pull in opposite directions. He is a duplicitous and appalling man, whom – as with all the great anti-heroes of literature – the reader has a guilty half-wish to survive.

Treasure Island was published in 1883, the start of a productive time for Stevenson that culminated in the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide and Kidnapped, both in 1886. (Two years later, in search of a better climate for his chronic ill-health, he settled in Samoa, where he died in 1894). We have cause for gratitude that, during this relatively short period, he produced the classic literature that can be enjoyed by readers – young and old – nearly a century and a half later.

20th October 2022

In the crowded market for murder mysteries, The Appeal has attracted a great deal of critical attention – and commercial success – for its highly unusual method of presenting the components of the narrative in order that the reader can attempt to arrive at the solution.

In the small town of Lockwood, the “alpha family” is that of the late middle-aged couple Martin Hayward and Helen Grace-Hayward and it is they who are at the heart of the two immediate strands of the story. On the one hand, they are the leading lights – as producer/director and lead actress – of The Fairway Players, the local amateur dramatic society. In addition, Martin has launched the eponymous appeal to raise funds so that his cancer-stricken grand-daughter – the two-year old Poppy – can have access to a hugely expensive course of drugs that can only be sourced from America. The remainder of the book’s dramatis personae are involved with one or other – and usually both – of these overlapping storylines.

The novel’s unusual presentation of the available evidence – the first tranche of which extends to two-thirds of the way through the book – is in the form of a voluminous (though incomplete) collection of e-mails, texts and other miscellaneous notes sent between the various characters in the two-month period up to the day of the final dress rehearsal of The Fairway Players’ summer production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. It is at this point that the death occurs: possibly a murder, though it could also have been an accident or a suicide.

The evidence has been collated by Roderick Tanner QC, the Senior Partner in a law firm (whose interest in the case is later revealed). He has passed it all on to two of his bright junior members of staff – Olufemi (Femi) Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd – with the instruction to “see what you think”. The reader is effectively a collaborator with Femi and Charlotte, as they examine the evidence afresh, with the added benefit of seeing what their own texts to each other reveal about the (variable) direction of their thinking.

Once we have ploughed through this initial collection of evidence, there is a breakpoint at which – usefully for the reader – Femi and Charlotte summarise the various possible suspects and motives as well as outlining several alternative theories about what happened. They also helpfully provide a full list of the relevant individuals. At this point, the already complicated network of possibilities is given a series of additional twists when Tanner sends further information to Femi and Charlotte.

Janice Hallett draws on the full set of components in the murder mystery toolkit. It doesn’t take the reader long to suspect that there is some sort of a fraud attached to the appeal, but who is defrauding whom is not straightforward. Several individuals have curious backstories elsewhere (for example, involving medical malpractice or as aid workers in Africa). There are instances of characters impersonating other characters – one such deception was very neatly done and completely fooled me, though there was a clue in plain sight. One of the e-mail correspondents doesn’t exist at all…

Hallett skilfully allows the e-mail correspondence to reveal something of the (apparent) personalities of the individual characters; we can identify the shifty, the needy, the acerbic, the nosey, the aggressive… She also has fun with the medium itself, most notably – and seriously – in the way in which inaccurate Chinese whispers between the gossips lead to the unfortunate spread of falsehoods. As an aside, Tanner’s incompetence in using even the most straightforward WhatsApp technology is hilarious (if rather close to home).

As usual, the first task of the reader is to identify who the unfortunate victim will be. This is not too difficult: there is a relatively limited short-list to start with and this is followed by a growing number of possible motives for the victim’s demise.

But the guilty party/parties? It is with the denouement that I had the most difficulty. It involves another impersonation (which I thought just about plausible, if unlikely) as well as the particular behaviour of one of the other characters (about which I was less convinced). That said, there is a delicious little coda presented by Hallett to the reader.

Some of the reviews of The Appeal have fallen back on the clichéd description of “unputdownable”. I found myself going in the other direction. Perhaps it reflects my general preference when reading fiction but, in this case, I certainly benefited from consuming the book in relatively short chunks and then taking my time to consider what I had learned and what it might actually imply. Each to their own.

And All My Sons? As one of the Fairway Players texts, “That play is the most depressing we’ve ever staged. How is that making anyone feel better?” A reasonable question, given the circumstances being faced by the theatre troupe. However, by the end of the novel, those familiar with Miller’s play will recognise that Hallett’s inclusion of it in her story is not an accident.