THE CHOICE by Michael Arditti, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"A work which skilfully combines many of Arditti’s strengths as a writer in one engrossing story."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

Michael Arditti is a difficult writer to pin down. His religiously-themed epics (The Anointed, Of Men and Angels) stand alongside traditional novels such as Widows and Orphans, which are about real people, usually in testing and desperate situations. I reviewed his short historical novel The Young Pretender on this blog last year.

Now we have a work which skilfully combines many of Arditti’s strengths as a writer in one engrossing story. He has a deep understanding both of religion and the way faith operates in the human heart and also of the bureaucracy of the Anglican Church. He knows an enormous amount about art and he’s informed and compassionate about current debates, many of which appear in this book.

He addresses one of these above all: can you separate a morally dubious artist from his work? As reviews of The Choice appeared in the papers, in the real world a man was arrested for damaging Eric Gill's statue, Ariel, on Broadcasting House in London.

Gill’s story shadows this book and one of the main strands of the plot concerns a work of art in a village church. Should it be preserved and lauded if its creator has behaved appallingly
throughout his life? Surrounding this central moral dilemma (whose roots lie in the past) is the story of Clarissa, a woman priest, who has to deal with shocking and distressing problems both personal and professional from the very first pages. The novel unfolds in several time frames and Clarissa appears both as young girl and as she grows older. Her struggle to be accepted into the Church as a priest is another important strand in the novel. She’s a brilliant creation and we’re rooting for her from beginning to end.

As for the “you can only write from a woman’s point of view if you’re a woman “ argument, Arditti demonstrates exactly what nonsense that is.

While I was reading it, I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful drama it would make, over several episodes. If only producers both on television and on the streaming services would turn away from adapting classics for a while and eschew superheroes who’d be more at home in a computer game, they could put something like The Choice on our screens instead. Nicola Walker was in my mind as I read, but there are many other actors who'd be excellent in the part.

Meanwhile in the immortal words of Fay Weldon, “the book abides." l loved it and urge you to read it.

The Choice is published by Arcadia Books.

See Adèle's review of The Young Pretender

Michael Arditti was our sixth birthday guest last year and chose The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor.

Who will be our seventh birthday guest this year, on 24th July? Watch this space!

Virtual Costa Book Awards Part 1: Adèle Geras and guests

It's my great pleasure to introduce Writers Review's Virtual Costa Book Awards. We were very sad indeed to hear that the real life Costa Book Awards are no more, so we decided to set up our very own Virtual Awards. Over the next three weeks, we're putting up recommendations for the awards from some friends of Writers Review. You'll find my choice at the end of this selection from some wonderful writers. I hope they lead you to read lots of books you will enjoy.

Merry Christmas from us all!  Adèle Geras

KATIE FFORDE nominates Jane Bailey's Sorrow isn't Good Enough for the Virtual Best Novel Prize:

Jane Bailey's writing is clear and easy to read and we instantly connect to the heroine, Stephanie, both in the present day and in the past. Few people write from a child's point of view as well as Jane and the little girl she describes, desperate for love, aware of life's unfairness but accepting it nonetheless, is entirely convincing.

With her we travel back to the Sixties, a simpler, crueller time for children. No wonder there is a darker side to this coming of age story. We learn about the tragedy on the first page: the notorious murder of Stephanie's best friend. But friendship is complicated; not what it seems from a distance.

This is not always a comfortable novel but one I couldn't turn away from. Jane Bailey is a writer who should be known to more people. She is so good.

VAL McDERMID nominates Ali Smith's Companion Piece for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

This novel is the coda to Smith's Four Seasons quartet. She carries the reader along in a broad and diverse narrative sweep and produces a vivid portrait of contemporary life. She writes beautifully but although she shines a light on the worst things we do to each other, her work is imbued with hope. Somehow, while firmly rooted in the real world, she can be surreal and dreamlike at times.

Companion Piece is intelligent, compassionate and often very funny. I found it exhilarating. With her books, when I reach the end I always want to go back to the beginning and do it all again. But with Companion Piece, I felt compelled to go back to Autumn, the beginning of the Seasons quartet and read all five again. And I'm glad I did.

WENDY COPE nominates My Phantoms by Geraldine Riley for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

I've just finished this. It is a brilliantly readable study of the relationship between a daughter and her sad, inadequate and often infuriating mother. Much of the time the daughter distances herself and is sometimes unkind. When she agrees to see her mother and to help her when she's ill, her attempts at forming a relationship more satisfying to both of them meet with little success. Their encounters are often funny as well as painful. The book is only 199 pages long and it left me wanting more.

SOPHIE HANNAH nominates Ignore it all and hope it goes away by Nic Aubury for the Virtual Costa Poetry Prize:

Ignore it all and hope it goes away should win every poetry prize going. It is wise, witty, moving, memorable, and displays prosodic dexterity that one very rarely sees these days. It also has the most wonderful illustrations by genius cartoonist Moose Allain.

MICHAEL ARDITTI nominates Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island  for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize:

I have been particularly taken with Irish fiction this year, including Audrey Magee's The Colony and Emma Donahue's Haven, but the pick of the crop for me is Donal Ryan''s The Queen of Dirt Island. It tells of three (ultimately four) generations of women in rural Tipperary, whose menfolk are either dead, weak, absent or treacherous. In a series of short, almost self-contained chapters, Ryan tells of family love and loyalty, which endures hardship, prejudice, illegitimacy and suicide. Opening in the 1980s, both republicanism and a repressive clergy inevitably feature, but the focus is on the domestic, and often fractious but always nurturing home that the women share. Ryan's writing is by turns sharp, funny, lyrical and tinges with a winning melancholy, and when, in a metafictional twist, we learn that it's also the writing of Saoirse, the novel's central character, we can only cheer at her triumph over the odds.

AMANDA CRAIG nominates Sally Gardner's The Weather Woman for the Virtual Costa Novel Prize.

The Weather Woman reads like Georgette Heyer crossed with Angela Carter, being historical, magical, gorgeously written and pulsing with romantic energy. Its heroine Neva is born with an extraordinary gift: she can predict the weather at any given date. In Regency England, when society is obsessed by gambling, this is a gift that can make or break immense fortunes, so her clockmaker father conceals her in an automaton.

However, Neva is also thirsty for an education, something forbidden to women. She dresses as a man, and soon falls in love with Henri, a charismatic young French count who shares her poverty and her undeclared passion. From its opening at a Frost Fair to its climactic struggle against villainy, it is packed with drama, but it also contains a beautiful description of what making love as equals should be like.

JUDITH LENNOX nominates This is not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan for the Virtual Costa Biography Prize:

Screenwriter Abi Morgan comes home from buying sushi to find her partner Jacob unconscious on the bathroom floor. His seizure marks the onset of a devastating illness. He is put into an induced coma from which he emerges months later, fragile and unravelled, unable to recognise Abi, convinced she’s an imposter.

The everyday continues – taxes must be paid, scripts completed, sometimes at midnight - though life is now irrevocably divided into BC (before collapse) and AD (after disaster). Morgan’s memoir has the urgency of a thriller and is written with honesty and humour, brilliantly describing her fluctuating emotions and the exhaustion of hope and despair. Though the story is tragic, it’s never depressing, as Morgan learns to live for ‘daily glimmers of happiness,’ and they emerge into a strange new world, traumatised and altered but held together by love.

ADELE GERAS nominates The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn for the Virtual Costa First Novel Prize:

The Whalebone Theatre is a most accomplished debut. It's a family story starting before the Second World War and covering many events familiar from other novels. What marks this book out is the characters of the siblings at the heart of the action, brought together to deal with everything the world can throw at them. The eponymous Theatre   (the remains of a carcass washed up on the Devon coast) becomes the heart of the several interlocking stories.  I love "let's do the show right here" novels and this is a hugely enjoyable example of the genre.

Click here for Part 2 ...

Sixth anniversary special guest: MICHAEL ARDITTI chooses THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER by F M Mayor

"F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym."

It's our birthday - today we are six! Since July 2016 we've posted 328 articles by an impressive array of guest authors and independent booksellers, with features including round-ups, anticipated reads, virtual awards and Q&As with authors. As usual on our anniversary we feature a very special guest; this year we're delighted that novelist and dramatist Michael Arditti has kindly written this piece for us about a great favourite of his.

Michael Arditti has written twelve novels and a collection of short stories. He began his professional career writing plays for the radio and stage and has worked extensively as a literary and dramatic critic. His novels have been short- and long-listed for several major prizes. He has been a Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum, a visiting professor at King’s college, London, and was awarded an Honorary D Litt from the University of Chester. His most recent novel is The Young Pretender.

F M Mayor doesn’t feature in my copy of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, although she surely merits a place between children’s writer William Mayne and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The unjustly neglected Mayor (1872 - 1932) wrote a collection of stories and three novels, of which The Rector’s Daughter is generally considered her masterpiece.

The Rector’s Daughter was first published in 1924 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and, in an early chapter, the protagonist, Mary Jocelyn, is taken up by a London artistic coterie, which is surely based on the Bloomsbury Group. The novel was well received, and Mayor was compared to three of her literary heroines: George Eliot, Mary Gaskell and Jane Austen. All of them, incidentally, are referenced here: Mary reads to her father from Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life; she alludes to ‘the Cranford ladies’; more obliquely, a maid is named Mansfield.

Mayor insisted that the book wasn’t autobiographical. Although a spinster who, in later life, divided her time between her parent’s home in Kingston and her brother’s house at Clifton School in Bristol, she had a far more active and eventful youth than Mary, having been one of the first women to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and enjoyed a brief career on the stage. What she does have in common with her protagonist is the clerical background. Indeed, whereas Mary is merely the daughter of a clergyman, the octogenarian Canon Jocelyn, Mayor was the daughter of one and niece of several others, including the Cambridge professor of Moral Philosophy, John Grote.

This ecclesiastical heritage suffuses the novel and gives it its authenticity. The village of Dedmayne (the name is a clue to its character) is defined as a series of negatives. It is ‘insignificant’, ‘without a station’, ‘ugly’, ‘treeless’, ‘on the way to nowhere’ and, most damningly, ‘the social advantages of Dedmayne were on a par with the scenery.’ Mary and her father are the only gentry in the village and act as moral and social arbiters of its rigidly stratified community.

Mayor allows 35-year-old Mary even fewer physical attractions than Charlotte Bronte allowed Jane Eyre. ‘Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes and hid them with glasses. She was dowdily dressed.’

Although the rectory is staffed with a cook, housemaid and coachman, Mary is little more than a drudge, caring for her mentally ill sister, Ruth. When Ruth dies, Mary devotes herself to her father, who shows few signs of gratitude, let alone affection. Her life changes when Robert Herbert, the son of one of the Canon’s old friends, takes over the neighbouring parish of Lanchester. Mayor skilfully delineates Mary’s attraction to him, which she hardly dares admit to herself. After one of the most tentative love scenes in literature, Mary is convinced that an understanding exists between them. Then, on a short visit to Buxton, Herbert meets, falls in love with and becomes engaged to the brittle social butterfly, Kathy Hollings.

Mary behaves with absolute propriety, calling on the new Mrs Herbert, who patronises her. She feels utterly isolated, unable to confide in her one girlhood friend, Dora, who is visiting her sister in China, where (in a phrase that would not get past today’s sensitivity readers), ‘the natives are just like children.’ Afraid to admit that Herbert kissed her to her father, whose enjoyment of Scenes of Clerical Life is marred by knowledge of George Eliot’s adultery, Mary is left to deal with her desolation alone.

The second part of the novel shifts its focus from the rector’s daughter to the vicar’s wife. Mayor expertly depicts the wretchedness of the Herberts’ marriage, from which Kathy flees to the Riviera with her malevolent sister-in-law, Lesbia (in this case, the name is not a clue!). There, something occurs, which it would be unfair to disclose, but which effects a sea change in Kathy. These passages inspire Mayor’s finest prose and reveal her deepest sympathies, as she endorses Mary’s belief that ‘Mistakes sometimes turn out right in the end.’

Notwithstanding its excursions to London, the Riviera and Southsea, The Rector’s Daughter is steeped in a village life which was old-fashioned even at the time of writing. Virginia Woolf may have published the novel, but its subject, style and concerns could not be more remote from The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which had appeared, respectively nine and five years earlier, let alone Mrs Dalloway, which appeared the following year. Nevertheless, the book is a middlebrow classic, and F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.

The Rector's Daughter is published by Virago Modern Classics.

Michael Arditti's The Young Pretender is reviewed here by Adèle Geras.

THE YOUNG PRETENDER by Michael Arditti, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"Sparkling with wit and shot through with sadness: a winning combination." 

(Before I begin , I'd like to thank Michael Arditti for sharing these pictures with me. I'm afraid that, probably owing to my own technological incompetence, I was unable to upload all of them straight to this blog, so I photographed some of Michael's images with my phone and what you are seeing is a photo of a photo. Apologies for this....to readers and to Michael, who was very helpful. The cartoon reproduced below is one of many contemporary cartoons, but Michael owns a copy of the one shown here. I hope that the layers of unreality might add to the theatrical tone of this piece. )

The Young Pretender: the dramatic return of Master Betty was published on April 28th, and has had a very good critical reception. All the reviews I've seen have been enthusiastic. This review was originally published on the History Girls blog but I'm posting it again here for Writers Review readers.

Michael Arditti has an interesting and varied backlist. I've reviewed another of his books on this blog. It's called Widows and Orphans and it's wonderful. It is also as different from The Young Pretender as you can imagine. It's the story of a man trying to rescue his local paper from being taken over and is also a novel about domestic dilemmas and personal lives. Arditti has also written two Biblical epics (Of Men and Angels and The Anointed) and I have read both. They're enormously erudite and very long so I recommend reading them on a Kindle, but I do recommend them. Michael Arditti is a brilliant writer. He is also a critic and is clearly enthralled by both the reality and the illusion of the theatre.

In the Acknowledgements, Arditti says: 'In writing The Young Pretender I have adhered to what is known of Betty's life, while freely filling in the extensive gaps.'

The method he's adopted to write about Master Betty is to adopt his voice. Indeed, he may be said to have become Betty, because every word seems so genuine, so heartfelt and so accurate that it's easy to imagine that this is a memoir by the actor. As a child star he was also known as The Young Roscius. He played Hamlet (and many other rôles) at a very young age and then fell out of favour. In 1806, Master Betty (now to be called Mister Betty, as he has to tell everyone he meets) returns to Bath, six years after his last starry appearance. "I am six years older now, ten inches taller.....Should my name spark a recollection,; my figure swiftly dispels it..."





We learn along the way about Betty's family, and his rise to fame. We see details of the huge acclaim that greeted his every appearance. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, came to see him perform and Betty was the toast of the town in every way. I make a point of providing no spoilers so I won't say more about the plot, but there is one, even in a book as short as this and which is so carefully based on the historical record.




Arditti's huge achievement is tuning in to the authentic voice of his protagonist, narrator and star. I am completely convinced that this is exactly how Betty spoke and how he would write. In the days when I used to visit schools, I sometimes told the children that writing novels was like having a huge dressing-up box at my disposal and that I was allowed to put on the costumes and pretend to be whatever I felt like being: a fat black cat or a retired ballerina or....anyone at all. Arditti has clearly enjoyed inhabiting the 18th century and he is fluent in its language and preoccupations.

It's also instructive to read about how our forefathers dealt with the matter of celebrity in the days long before Twitter and the rest of the social media we have to grapple with. Trolling, and cancelling and gaslighting etc have been part of our lives for a long time. Britney Spears would recognise much that befalls Betty and the way that audiences can consume their idols happens today as it did then. The young are vulnerable. Control is always there: eat this, don't eat that, see this person, don't see that person....some of the ways in which Betty was treated recall what we know of the childhood of Frances Gumm, who became Judy Garland. If you're a vessel for the dreams of many people, it's hard to be yourself.

Another thing I found interesting was the level of detail about the actual running of the theatres in the Georgian period. Actors had 'circuits'. Actor managers were the ones who arranged tours. Rehearsals were often negotiable. You met the other actors at the first rehearsal. Stage business was fixed on before you began: where you'd stand and how you'd move once on the stage and so forth. Then the words came in later. I learned, for example that at this time, what I used to call 'flats' when I was on the stage were called 'flat -scenes': literally flat pieces of wood and canvas which were pushed into place to depict the background. I enjoyed seeing what hasn't changed since those days as well as what has.

I hope very much that readers of this blog will try this most unusual short novel. It's both sparkling with wit and shot through with sadness: a winning combination.




The Young Pretender is published by Arcadia Books.

WIDOWS AND ORPHANS by Michael Arditti, reviewed by Adele Geras

There are certain books - you will know the sort of book I mean - which catch the light. They bring forth reams of newsprint, both real and virtual; they gather prizes; they provide pleasing controversies; they divide opinion; people notice them. There are only a few of these because there's limited space for reviews and the world of those who read reviews is a little one, although also a very pleasant one. The really HUGE books which reach millions of people are the ones which  jump a kind of imaginary barrier and are taken up by those who would ordinarily never read a book, or call themselves 'readers.' I'm thinking of  Girl on the Train or Fifty Shades of Gray or the oeuvre of Dan Brown. 

Those books, the flashy ones that make tons of money and the less flashy but very much garlanded ones which win prizes and column inches, are very few in number. The bestseller lists are instructive in many ways, but what they do not show is the less-good sellers. And these, I have often noticed, are frequently more interesting than their more glittering sisters and brothers further up the charts.

Recently, I took a train across Europe, as is my wont whenever I go on holiday. I am flying phobic and Eurostar and trains through the continent is how I get about. This is an extraordinarily pleasant way to travel and I recommend it, but this is not the place to hold forth about free croissants and lovely scenery. It takes a long time to get anywhere and Kindle comes into its own on a trip like this. The book I read in February on my way to Switzerland and for a day or so after I'd got to my hotel was Widows and Orphans by Michael Arditti. I'd read a review in the Spectator (the only review I saw)  and it sounded just up my street.

I'm not sure that this book was widely noticed. I've not seen it in bookshops. Most people on Amazon enjoyed it very much, and I liked the fact (from the blurb) that it was about a newspaper in a small English seaside town and its editor. I'm fond of books/movies/TV/anything set in the offices of a newspaper. 

Also, I'd once appeared at a reading festival at a school in London and  Michael Arditti was speaking at the same event. I caught sight of him sitting in a Green Room eating sandwiches. I've heard him on Radio 4 from time to time on Saturday Review as one of Tom Sutcliffe's guests, but I've never met him, so for once this is a review from me of a book by someone whom I don't know.  

I realised that the title had a double meaning, too, and patted myself on the back for this. 'Widows' and 'orphans' are terms in printing, as well as meaning what we all know they mean. I thought it was a very clever title. Also, I was drawn to the rather retro cover.

This is a long introduction to what I want to do, which is to recommend this wonderful and unputdownable book to all those who like novels which are about, to quote someone very close to me, "Proper people in interesting situations." 

Duncan Neville is the editor of the Francombe Mercury, the local paper in a small seaside town. The paper has been in his family for generations and he feels a proper pride in it, and the way it has explained, described and recorded the life of the town for a very long time. The paper is now under threat. Because of the internet, all newspapers are feeling nervous. People no longer get their news in this old-fashioned way and Duncan is beleaguered. He's divorced from his wife. His ex-wife has married again and had a daughter, who is disabled. He has a teenage son, too, who gets into teenage-type trouble. His mother lives in the town and she's quite a character. He is friendly with the gay vicar. His enemy, Geoffrey Weedon,  from way back in his schooldays, is a rich, rather vulgar entrepreneurial type, who has always looked down on Duncan, even though Duncan is a much better person.

When Francombe Pier is burned to the ground, Weedon has a plan to open it again as a kind of adult entertainment centre: a sort of sex emporium on stilts. He has the Planning Committee in his pocket, according to some. Opposition to this plan forms one strand of the plot, but there are so many others that it's hard to list them all. Above all, it's Duncan's journey through a turbulent time in his life. We meet his close friends, his colleagues, his mother, and the woman he grows to love. I will not spoil anyone's fun by revealing the end, but it's a novel in which every single character is carefully taken account of. Arditti is interested in the life of the town, in the way the newspaper deals with 'all human life' and he structures the book brilliantly by starting each chapter with an extract from the newspaper itself. This means that by the end, we, too, have grown fond of this publication.

It's written straightforwardly, in plain language, with no posturing, no faux lyricism and this means that the emotional punch of the things that happen to the characters is all the stronger. We get to know and love Duncan through the book, and we are desperately wanting a good outcome for both him and his paper. 

If I were a bookshop, I'd stick a label on the cover saying: satisfaction or your money back, or some such. Please get in touch with this blog on Twitter if you read it and hate it. I'm betting that  almost everyone who picks it up and starts it will love it and thank me for putting them in touch with this brilliant writer who is  not sufficiently appreciated.

Widows and Orphans is published in paperback by Arcadia Books at £8.99. ISBN: 1910050644
£8.99