Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch

 

"Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A quintessential Iris Murdoch novel would feature a group of highly intelligent people caught in a chain of unrequited love, struggling to find meaningfulness in the random events of chance, and thinking deeply. They often think about how to be good. For some readers The Sea, The Sea is the classic, for others The Bell, or The Black Prince, or A Severed Head. Murdoch published twenty-six novels, so there are many to choose from. My own current favourite is her very first, Under the Net, published in 1954. It is a high-spirited and frequently hilarious exploration of how to live and how to be good, in the form of an extended caper through the streets and spaces of the narrator’s ‘beloved London’ (with an intermezzo in Paris).

Chronically short of money, reliant on what he gets from translating not-very-good French novels and on the goodwill of others, narrator Jake Donoghue finds, at the opening of the novel, that he and his sidekick Finn have been thrown out of their current nesting-place and must find somewhere else to live.

Besides Finn, Jake’s friends and acquaintances include Hugo Belfounder whom he first meets at a cold-cure research establishment (for penniless Jake ‘an incredibly charitable arrangement’), who is a rich inventor, a thinker, and owner of a film studio; Dave Gellman, a lecturer in philosophy whose flat in Goldhawk Road offers a floor if not a bed for Jake and Finn; Lefty Todd, eccentric leader of the New Independent Socialist Party; folk singer Anna Quentin for whom Jake yearns, and her sister, would-be film star Sadie; enigmatic cat-loving Mrs Tinckham who runs a grubby ‘accommodation address’ newsagent off Charlotte Street. And Mister Mars, a canine film star kidnapped (amateurishly) by Jake and Finn, who becomes Jake’s loving accomplice.

Some of these people are met by accident; others are pursued for one reason or another. All form part of an intricate, shifting pattern, pattern rather than plot, for this is a story about chance, luck, misunderstandings, reversals, money that comes unexpectedly and vanishes just as fast. There is unrequited love (Hugo: ‘Jake, you’re a fool. You know anyone can love anyone, or prefer anyone to anyone’), but this is also a novel about friendship.

Under the Net is rich in observed detail. Jake and his friends move through a London that is not yet recovered from the depredations of war, a London of ruined churches and rosebay willowherb. They wander from Shepherd’s Bush to the Holborn Viaduct, from which they look down on Farringdon Street which ‘swept below us like a dried up river’, to City pubs and to the Bounty Belfounder film studio in south London. In the early hours of one morning three of them swim in the Thames when the tide is on the turn and the moon is ‘scattered in pieces’ upon the water.

In between his pondering on inevitability, on fate, on the astonishing fact that the not-very-good French novelist’s latest novel has just won the Prix Goncourt, Jake amiably shares his views and opinions with the reader, and somehow makes us willingly complicit in the most egregious situations. ‘If you have ever tried to sleep on the Victoria Embankment,’ he declares, ‘you will know that the chief difficulty is that the seats are divided in the middle.’ He leads us through a series of wild and comic set pieces (the kidnapping of Mister Mars, the pursuit of Anna through the Tuileries, the clash between Lefty Todd and right-wing agitators at the studio) to an extraordinarily intense climax, which takes place at night on a hospital ward when devastating truth is revealed, but revealed in whispers so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Sister on duty.

Iris Murdoch’s reputation took a trashing, soon after her death in 1999, from an unsavoury memoir published by her husband John Bayley which charted her decline into dementia. I am glad to say that that has been succeeded more recently by biographical and critical accounts that celebrate her wide-ranging interests: her appetite for philosophy, for literature and for love affairs. Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel Under the Net.

Under the Net is published by Vintage Classics (Murdoch Series)

Dreaming of Rose - a Biographer's Journal by Sarah LeFanu is published by Handheld Classics.

Q&A: Jane Rogers interviews Linda Newbery about THE ONE TRUE THING

 

"Each of the three characters - plus Adam, first appearing as a young artist, who isn't a viewpoint character but is equally important - finds, or tries to find, the activity that gives purpose and meaning to life ... "

Linda answers questions from our regular contributor Jane Rogers.

When the ground shifts, where is one true thing to be found?

Jane, in her twenties, is left parentless when her father dies suddenly; a second shock follows when his Will reveals the existence of a son no-one knew of. Now Wildings, the family home, must be sold. Spanning two generations, the novel tells the story of Bridget, Jane’s mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage on which her career depends, and of stone-carver Meg, who wants only independence but is enmeshed in conflicting loyalties and desires when Adam, a young artist, enters their lives, to devastating effect.

Now far from Wildings, Meg is bound by a promise to support Jane in her loss. Having thought of herself as an observer who saw everything, she’s forced to realise how much she failed to see – and the cost to those she loves ...

 
Jane: Congratulations, Linda! Re-reading this book (Jane read an earlier draft) transported me back to the beauties of Wildings and filled me with admiration all over again, for your clever plotting and beautiful descriptions of nature. I’m interested in the way you can shift between writing for children, and adult fiction. In your best-known book for young readers, Lob, you conjure a beautifully innocent child’s view of the world, where love of nature and a powerful imagination are the key ingredients. And that book appeals to adult readers too, because we all have a nostalgia for that kind of innocence.

In complete contrast, The One True Thing is a very grown-up novel, in its exploration of a whole range of sexual relationships: Bridget and Anthony’s marriage shifts through passion and intimacy to downright hostility and back, via infidelity, to a benign accommodation with one another; we learn of Meg’s lesbian love affair with Carrie, who dumps her for a man; there are hints of incestuous attraction between two other characters. How conscious are you of your readership, as you are writing? And does a story always present itself clearly to you as either YA or adult?

Linda: The One True Thing was never going to be anything other than an adult novel, and that's true of my work in progress, too. With teenage fiction there have been times when the boundaries (if there are boundaries) have been less clear: for example with Set in Stone, which I began as a YA novel but for fairly sophisticated readers, and with the hope (which I always have) that it would be enjoyed by adults too. Sometimes I find that a story wants to go in a direction I hadn't planned at the start, and that's what happened with Set in Stone, which caused some controversy when it won the Costa Children's Prize. Some argued - and I'd agree - that it isn't a children's book. But the eligibility for that category does include age groups up to and including YA, so the same could and probably has been said of other winners more suitable for the upper end of young readers. But I won't write any more YA - my focus now is on adult fiction, alternating with stories for young children. 

Jane: The creation of Bridget’s garden is at the heart of the book. Did you have to do a lot of research, or were you already a gardening expert?

Linda: I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert, but I do know quite a lot about gardening and had a clear idea of Bridget's style and approach. I did need to research Chelsea Flower Show garden criteria for the particular year in which two of my characters make a small artisan garden. At the time I was writing the novel, I attended a talk by James Alexander Sinclair, who lives locally and is a Chelsea judge; after the event I emailed him with a few questions, which he very kindly answered, showing me where to find out more.

Jane: Where did the novel spring from? Can you talk us through the inspiration, the starting points? Or maybe I should say, the seeds?  I was fascinated by the precise descriptions of Meg’s work as a stone mason, and I note the book is dedicated to a stone-mason. Can you carve stone? Is this another of your hidden talents?

Linda: I can't exactly remember the starting point - several years ago - but I do seem to have developed a fascination with stone. That started with my late mother's photograph of a caryatid at Copped Hall in Essex, which set me off on The Shell House - Graveney Hall in my novel is based on Copped Hall, inhabited by a fictitious family, but almost destroyed by a devastating fire in 1917, just as the real mansion was. The caryatid, and the sculptor who made it, didn't feature as much as I'd expected, the novel being concerned with a First World War relationship and with a young photographer who discovers the ruins in the present day. So, fairly soon after I'd finished it, I began another novel more focused on stone-carving: Set in Stone. While doing some hands-on research for that one with a local stonemason, Bernard Johnson, I learned to appreciate the beauty of letter-carving, and wanted to have a go. My efforts are very clumsy compared to Bernard's exquisite work (which you can see on his website) but at least I had the tools in my hands and began to understand something of the materials and techniques. I wanted my present-day stone-carver in the new novel to be female, and the character of Meg grew from there, along with how she'd fit around the other characters. 

Jane: What is your writing process? In this novel, Bridget, Meg and Jane all have their own stories and points of view, which are intercut. Did you write them like this, or work on each woman’s story-line separately?

Linda: I seem to have to work like that, moving back and forth in time and/or with intercutting viewpoints - my work in progress has a similar structure, and so do several of my young adult novels (Set in Stone, Sisterland, The Shell House). I don't think I could do it by working on each character individually, because so much depends on the juxtaposition, and what I want the reader to think, wonder, predict or piece together at any one point. When finishing a section from one point of view, I need to leave off for a while, go and do something else, then return (probably next day) with my head in the viewpoint of another character. 

Jane: I hope you won’t mind me saying that I found a lot of you in this novel; yoga, gardening, Extinction Rebellion! 

Linda: Yes, at times while writing I feared that I was using up everything I knew and could write about with authority ... but luckily there are more interests left over (photography, animal activism, an artist I've been intrigued by for many years) for the novel I'm working on now. In The One True Thing, each of the three characters - plus Adam, first appearing as a young artist, who isn't a viewpoint character but is equally important - finds, or tries to find, the activity that gives purpose and meaning to life. Meg is the one who uses the phrase, but it's significant for all of them. 

Jane: I know this novel has been a long time coming to fruition (sorry about the gardening metaphors!) Both you and I, and indeed many other writers, have had trouble finding a publisher for a completed novel – can you tell us the publishing history of this book?

Linda: Sadly, it can be very difficult for an author, even a well-established one, to find a publisher if her or his sales are less than spectacular - and that category includes most of us! Having published only one adult novel before (Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, in paperback as Missing Rose) I'm not yet established as a writer for adults, and I've heard from you and from other acquaintances that much better-known authors than me are finding it a struggle. The One True Thing was submitted, but isn't what publishers are looking for at present, and even though most praised the writing, characters, etc., they clearly didn't think they could make money from it. Although it's tough being rejected, I never lost the sense that readers would enjoy my novel, so I refused to give up on it. 

I'm grateful to Fiona Mountain, a well-regarded and traditionally published author of historical fiction who I met through a reading group, for telling me how and why she had self-published her latest novel, Keeper of Secrets (which I recommend). When I discussed this possibility with friends Celia Rees and Cindy Jefferies, both of whom have wide experience of the publishing industry, Celia had the brilliant idea of forming an imprint, Writers Review Publishing, linked to this blog. That was a moment of epiphany! I'd felt diffident about publishing and promoting my own book as a solo effort, but being part of an author collaborative would be really rewarding - helping other writers to launch new books or reissue backlist titles that deserve to reach new readers, and all benefitting from joint publicity. It was so liberating to find that everything I needed was available: cover designers, interior layout designers, proofreaders, publicists. It had never occurred to me that I could commision my own audio book, but I've now done that through Audio Factory, choosing my preferred narrator. 

It didn't take long to assemble three of us - Judith Allnatt, Mary Hoffman and myself - to be part of the launch. Both their titles are excellent reissues: Judith's The Poet's Wife tells the story of Patty, the wife of poet John Clare, while Mary's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography imagines the life of the model for Michelangelo's iconic sculpture. Two other well-established writers, Dennis Hamley and Sheena Wilkinson, will publish with us later this year. How we progress will depend on what comes our way - though we already have plans for 2026. Watch this space!

The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing. The cover design is by Owen Gent.

Jane Rogers' short story collection, Fire Ready, is published by Comma Press. Read more here.

The other two launch titles for Writers Review Publishing are Judith Allnatt's The Poet's Wife and Mary Hoffman's David: the Unauthorised Autobiography

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Julia Jarman about her novel THE WIDOWS' WINE CLUB

 

"It’s hard to define ‘voice’ but you can’t get going without it, and when I found my writing-for-adults voice it was a joy, like talking to a friend."

Julia Jarman, a regular contributor to Writers Review, has been writing children’s books for forty years, and still is. Cheeky Chick is her latest picture book. Recently, though, she turned her hand to ‘golden years’ women’s fiction and The Widows' Wine Club was the happy result. 

Linda: The starting premise of your novel is a brilliant one, with instant appeal. Were you always aware of how the novel would end for each of the three characters?

Julia: You told me it was a brilliant premise, Linda, when I first mooted the idea. I wasn’t so sure. I had a title in mind, I think, Widows In Love, and saw it as a rom-com. Three widowed women looking for love. It was as vague as that. I didn’t have specific outcomes in mind. I wrote the first draft to find out. You and other friends had begun writing for adults, after several years of successfully writing for children. I wondered ‘Can I?’ – as I like a new challenge - and you said firmly, ‘Yes you can!’

Linda: Did you find it equally easy to engage with each of the three main viewpoint characters? I know that the novel has been several years in the making – how have they developed during this time?

Julia: It has been a very long time in the making! I got the idea soon after my husband died in 2009 and thought of it as ‘Peter’s last gift to me’ but also felt guilty for exploiting the situation. It felt like an invasion of privacy, his privacy, our privacy, and that feeling may have held me up. But Peter had always encouraged my writing and said ‘use anything you like’ when I’d expressed similar reservations in the past. Sweary Viv was the first character who arrived in my head, probably because she is most like me, but I’ve also got a prim and proper side – believe it or not! – and was downright Puritanical in my youth, so I easily identified with Janet and knew where she was coming from. Zelda turned up, and aware of the ‘appropriation’ issue, because she’s mixed race and I am not, I hesitated, but she soon felt very real and insisted on staying and I loved her, so I thoroughly researched to find out as much as I could about her circumstances and carried on writing. All three developed over time. I discovered them as they discovered themselves, becoming more complex, acquiring ‘layers’ as I wrote and re-wrote, drawing on memory, research and imagination.

Linda: I especially like the Pitmen Painters scene. Is this an exhibition that has particular resonance for you?

Julia: Yes! Like Viv, the first I heard of it was when I went to see Lee Hall’s play, Pitmen Painters. It said, it enacted, what I believed, that human beings are makers, that we are more alive, more ourselves, more human when we create. That is what one of the characters says in the play. When he is working down the pit for the bosses he is not truly alive, not truly himself, but when he draws or paints, when he is depicting his reality, expressing his truth, he is. When I eventually stepped into the gallery to see the exhibition I felt I’d entered a holy place, embodying that truth.

I should also say that my father was a coal miner, briefly, three days and that was enough for him. He was put down the pit when he was fourteen and felt that a life in the mines would kill him, spiritually if not physically, though he wouldn’t have put it like that. He thought that no one should have to do that, and I felt that I was connecting with him.

Adèle: Tell us a little about the journey the manuscript took on the way to becoming the book it is today.

Julia: It had a lot of rejections, mostly nice rejections, but nonetheless disheartening. It first went out with the title A Second Summer, to fourteen mainstream publishers of women’s fiction, at the beginning of 2021. Some didn’t respond. Most did, complimenting me on ’wonderfully drawn characters’ ‘the balance of humour and depth’, ‘captivating style’ etc, but then came the ‘but not for me’ for a variety of reasons. Caroline, my agent concluded that it didn’t have the ‘SOH, the stand-out hook’ essential for commercial fiction and there was no point in sending it out again till it did. I was a bit nonplussed as I thought the SOH was the basic premise. Three women hit hard by grief, are looking for love. Will they find it? But I licked my wounds, re-read and re-wrote it, bearing in mind the feedback I’d had from editors and lay-readers. Several said they were confused by the to and fro-ing between the three characters, so I tried to put that right. I also strengthened a thread with an unpleasant minor character, making her more unpleasant, adding plot twists. I sent it out to more readers, including Georgia Bowers, librarian i/c of women’s fiction at Bedford libraries (and a writer herself), asking her to be ruthless in her criticism. Would she buy it for the library? She got back saying yes she would, but not with that title. She suggested The Widows’ Wine Club which I now think is its SOH.

In June 2022 my agent sent The Widows’ Wine Club out to nine smaller publishers of commercial fiction, and I got eight more rejections. Then came an expression of interest from Boldwood Books, a brand new publisher, only three years old. Editor Sarah Ritherdon had ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ my novel but had lots of doubts. It was hard to launch debut authors, she said. My 35 years as a children’s author counted for nothing. She asked my agent, ‘Had Julia got famous friends who would plug her book? Could Julia write more books? Quickly!’ Boldwood didn’t take one-offs. They only did multiple-book deals and their marketing plan required second and third books only months after the first. Gulp. The Widows’ Wine Club had taken me at least ten years. Could I write the next in ten months? Yes, said my friends – and I have!

Adèle: How many drafts did you go through? (I think the answer might be inspiring to other writers.)

Julia: Umpteen. I lost count. Ten at least, and I do a lot of re-writing as I write.

Adèle: Is any character in the novel based on a real person? I’m assuming all three widows have bits of you in their DNA!

Julia: Assumption correct about use of my own DNA! I’ve said quite a lot about this to Linda. As to the ‘real person’ question, I’m going to hide behind the standard disclaimer ‘any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental’. I’ll risk saying that some of the characters are composites of people I’ve met, but sorry - that’s as far as I’m going!

Celia: This is your first novel for adults – when and why did you decide to write for an adult audience? How difficult did you find it to make the move from a writing career that was well established to this very different and challenging market?

Julia: I think the story dictates the audience, so when I have a story in my head I ask myself, consciously or unconsciously, is this a picture book for under-5s, a chapter book for 8-12 or a book for teens? This story was clearly for adults. The difficulty was finding the time to write it as I was very committed to the world of children’s literature and that for me included a lot of school visits. I was finding it hard to find uninterrupted time to write longer fiction for children, and was veering more and more towards picture books, which I love writing, when Covid changed all our lives. Suddenly I had time on my hands and a story in my head, partly written, for adults. I fished out my widows.

Writing for adults is, I think, easier than writing for children, which is why so many writers going the other way, or having a ‘go’ for their first book, come a cropper. They think – heaven knows why – that it must be easier. It isn’t. When you are writing for children you have to be aware that you’re writing for an intelligent audience, probably more intelligent than you the writer, but your readers haven’t had as much experience as you. They don’t know lots of stuff that you know, so you have to impart information and explain concepts in a non-patronising way that respects their intelligence. By comparison when you write for adults, you can assume their experience is much the same as yours. It’s therefore easier to find your ‘voice’ as a writer for adults. It’s hard to define ‘voice’ but you can’t get going without it, and when I found my writing-for-adults voice it was a joy, like talking to a friend.

Celia: The Widows' Wine Club is bittersweet in the truest sense. How hard was it to find the right balance between humour and pathos?

Julia: I didn’t think about this. I just told it how it was, being as true as I could to my experience and that of other widows I’d spoken to. I am I think, unconsciously funny. I come across as funny even when I’m crying inside . I’m not sure why this is, but looking back I think I’ve always made people laugh. A testimonial I like said, ‘People laugh a lot in Julia’s company and if they don’t, she does. She is serious but splendidly without solemnity.’ If that was the verdict on my books I would be happy.

Celia: Your widows are an attractive and likeable group who will appeal to many readers. I understand that you're working on a sequel. Will there be more after that?

Julia: I’ve just delivered the sequel which has a new main character, Libby Allgood. I’m hoping that readers will love Libby as much as they love Viv, Janet and Zelda, and not be disappointed by this change of focus. Reviews have made it clear that readers want the sequel to tell them more about the three Muscateers, and it will, a bit. But they will have to wait for the third book to learn a lot more about all four when I take them on another adventure.

The Widows' Wine Club is published by Boldwood. Widows on the Wine Path will be published on 3rd April.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin Reviewed by Adèle Geras

 "Above all it's about creativity; how it works and why it's vital to everyone's happiness."

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

If you were looking for a target audience for this novel, I would be the last person to be considered. I'm old, and it's mainly about teenagers and youngish people. It's set in a world I have no interest in at all: the world of gaming. I have never played a computer game in my life and even reading this wonderful novel has not tempted me to try any. I downloaded it firstly because my younger daughter said it was very good indeed and secondly because I have read a book by Zevin before: the fascinating YA novel called Elsewhere, which I enjoyed very much. I read it a long time ago and details I remember are hazy but it deals with the Afterlife. I knew she was a very good writer, so I started reading quite optimistically but ready to give up if the gaming became too difficult for me.

I needn't have worried. The story is about people and their relationships with one another, their difficulties, their triumphs. Every character is brought to life most beautifully and we end the book feeling we've spent time with good friends. We care about them. Also, you will need a tissue at several points in the story.

Sam and Sadie meet as very young teenagers in a hospital. Sam has a foot that causes him pain and disability throughout his life and the sections dealing with the treatment he receives are sometimes very hard to read. The two of them find they have a love of gaming in common and the story follows them through their lives. They become creators of games and for me, more than the love stories that play out, more than the sharp dialogue between the characters, more than the bonds that bind Sam and Sadie and several other characters together, more than the excitement in following their fortunes to heights neither could have imagined when they first set eyes on one another, it is the actual process of creating the games that is the most interesting and important part of the book for me.

What I learned from this novel is that building a game involves many of the same processes as those involved in writing a novel. You are making a new world. You are deciding who the characters are, and what they do and how their adventures play out. You find out how they can progress through the game. You put difficulties and obstacles in their way and give them the means to overcome these. You also find out about the Market, and how certain games succeed and make vast fortunes while others fail and come to nothing. You share the anxiety (well known to every writer) of wondering to what extent people will be able to understand your vision, sympathise with your characters, share your world. This novel can be read as a love story, the tale of a group of friends and a moment in history when games became such an important way for people to access stories, but above all it's about creativity; how it works and why it's vital to everyone's happiness.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is published by Chatto & Windus.

Guest review by Nick Manns: BILLY NO-MATES by Max Dickins

 

 " ... he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester.

‘Our friends are curators and co-authors of our life stories. They have a voice in much of what we’re doing, in our characters and in many of the memories that we make together.’ So said Professor William Rawlings in a recent Radio 4 programme called To Absent Friends.

‘Absent friends’ would have been a good title for Max Dickins’s book, because it focuses on the fact that in Western society most 30-something men have vanishingly few close friends – just under half in a recent large-scale survey said they had no male friend with whom they could share their worries or seek advice. In the UK, three in four suicides are male. Suicide is the biggest cause of male death in the under-45 age group. Compared with women, men fare badly once involuntarily separated from a life partner. Three-quarters of the public funerals in Britain each year – roughly 4,000 – are for men.

But Dickins didn’t start from this end of the telescope, and nor is his book written in shades of black. Part autobiography; part dissertation and part comedy script, it hurtles through the lanes and byways of the strange and lonely world of (straight) men, asking the right questions, taking part in activities (think Louis Theroux) – and brimming with compassion and good humour. In the right hands, this book can spark conversations and change lives.

So much for the blurb. Billy No-Mates is a quest – a journey of discovery – and it begins with a problem. Dickins confides to his two (female) flatmates that he’s going to ask his long-term girlfriend (Naomi) if she’ll marry him. One of his cohabitees asks, ‘Tell us then – who are you thinking for best man?’

This becomes the blue touch paper for what follows. Working at glacial speed, Dickins writes down the names of (very few) candidates on Post-its and sticks them on his bedroom wall. Standing back and surveying his work, he describes his list as ‘a cemetery of friendships’ – and promptly Googles ‘Getting married – no best man’. To his astonishment (and to this reader’s), he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem.

One of the academics he consults – an American psychologist – is very direct:

‘You don’t have any friends to call your best man because of the culture in which you were raised. It doesn’t have anything to do with who you are naturally. How you feel now is not the way you were born. What happened to you, Max? What specifically got in the way?’

This response comes down firmly on one side of the nature/nurture divide. But it isn’t the only view. Some evolutionary psychologists posit a genetic disposition, that men’s social isolation reflects a pre-historic division of labour (hunter-gatherer). Women looking after hearth and home; big butch men building alliances and killing creatures (and each other). The problem with this way of thinking is that it lets men off a shed-load of hooks (‘Can’t clean the bathroom darling, I’ve not got the right genes’). It’s also pretty depressing (kill me now).

Thankfully, that’s not the only game in town. Dickins discovers that pre-school boys are more emotionally expressive – both in range and intensity – than little girls. But once they start school (‘shades of the prison house’ and all that) they slowly but surely change: boys ‘start to behave like boys and girls start to behave like girls.’ And boys learn to stifle emotions: they stuff them away because tender feelings aren’t for public display. They start to invest in their future of isolation. Boys’ friendships grow thinner and noticeably cooler from the age of 16 and by the time they’re 30, many men are so caught up in the responsibilities of romantic relationships, family commitments and work, that old friendships wither and die.

This isn’t the same for women. Dickins reports on numerous studies that suggest women are better at maintaining (and deepening) their relationships. They have more freedom to acknowledge and express feelings without the risk of the usual male put-downs (‘Shut up you wuss’). They invest more time on keeping in touch; friendship is seen as a valuable component of who they are.

Taking stock of all this, Dickins is characteristically upfront: ‘Somewhere along the way I’d let work dominate my identity. I had let a vague notion of “my career” crowd out almost everything else. I was working all the time, often way past the point of being productive. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t working: I didn’t know what to do. Ambition was not just a healthy part of my ‘self’ – there was nothing else there at all. I wasn’t so much a human being, as a human doing.’

Many men will recognise themselves from Dickins’s account. They know that male response to experience is carefully policed; that expressing feelings can invite either an awkward silence or a move to shift a conversation onto something more congenial. Men keep the lock turned on each other’s lives.

But acknowledging a problem isn't the same as fixing it and in the second half of the book, armed with research findings and with a modicum of self-knowledge, Dickins starts to do some field work: society becomes his lab. Does he have the capacity to revive old friendships? Can he make new friends? What support is there out there?

To make new friends, a psychologist suggests that rowing might be a good place to start, yet when he arrives for his first session, he discovers that his co-rowers are all fifty-something women, which wasn’t really part of the plan. He joins a male choir (apparently a sure-fire way of making friends) and finds the experience powerfully satisfying. Attending a stag weekend is repulsive (for all the usual reasons) and organising a weekly five-a-side football match ends in failure. But he finds a men’s group rewarding.

Although he had gone to the group full of preconceptions – expecting that it would be run by ‘an old bloke known as White Falcon who would be wanging on about the rejuvenating power of eating tiger hearts’, it was nothing like that. It was a strictly no-banter zone: a place where men of all ages and ethnicities could discuss issues that concerned them. The watchword, Dickins writes, was ‘responsibility’. The men worked together to find solutions to problems ‘that men tend to push on to the women in their lives’ – the ‘emotional labour’ that is mysteriously absent from the obligations recited in conventional marriage ceremonies.

Although he goes on to recount other experiences (a day with a woman from RentAFriend; an absorbing interview with a man who peopled his house with sex dolls), the men’s group seems to offer a way to help attendees reconnect with buried bits of themselves. Kenny – the convenor of the group – says of men: ‘Showing off: we’re good at that, but showing up? That’s a new thing. A different sort of energy.’

Soooh, what did Dickins learn – and did he find a best man? To answer the last question first – yes, he did – but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened on the great day (no spoilers). And as for learning, it is obvious that Dickins has the capacity for prolonged introspection and a powerful desire to fix what he regards as broken. He does the research and explores options but at the end of it all, the role models live within his domestic sphere. He writes of his flatmates: ‘It was how they showed up that was crucial. Unafraid to show emotion, nor to disclose information about themselves. Through their approach and example, the space that (they) created allowed me to express the full breadth of myself. To rediscover the bits of me that I had hidden until I couldn’t see myself any more. This was full-fat friendship.’

Billy No-Mates is published by Canongate.

More of Nick's reviews:

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

The Antidote - Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann

MISS BENSON'S BEETLE by Rachel Joyce, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Rachel Joyce has a gift for expressing profound truths with simple directness."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers, with titles including Set in Stone, a young adult novel which won the Costa Children's Book Prize. Titles for younger readers include Lob and The Brockenspectre. Her latest publication, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us is a guide to compassionate living, looking at the choices we make in our everyday lives and how they affect animals and the environment.

This was a recent choice (someone else's) for my reading group, and I was drawn to it for several reasons. I'd greatly enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce's first novel, and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey even more, with its deeply poignant, revelatory ending. I love stories about exploration, discovery and the natural world, and when you add two highly memorable characters, a mystery, a troubled war veteran and Rachel Joyce's characteristic warmth and insight, this was a winner. And only when reaching the Afterword did I learn that the sparking-point for the novel was a photograph that intrigued me when I saw it at Kelmscott Manor a few years ago; it shows May Morris, William Morris's daughter, with her companion Mary Lobb, with whom she travelled widely. These two women are transformed in Rachel Joyce's imagination into unlikely travelling partners Margery Benson and Enid Pretty, setting off for New Caledonia to discover a golden beetle that's so far been reported but never captured or catalogued. 

Impulsively leaving her dull job teaching domestic science, Margery advertises for an assistant, and it's the least apparently suitable, Enid, dressed in pink with yellow candyfloss hair and pink pompom shoes, who joins her on the voyage to Brisbane. They are stalked by young ex-soldier Mundic, who records their activities obsessively and continues tracking them to the remote island of New Caledonia and the northern settlement where they rent a rickety bungalow as the base for their expeditions. Enid thinks she's the one being followed - what does she have in that red valise she always keeps close by, and what happened to the husband she left behind in London? Margery's suspicions gather, and so do those of the stuffy Consul's wife they meet on arrival at the main town.

But the growing friendship becomes vital to both women. It's the irrepressible Enid who keeps Margery going with the quest for the golden beetle when weather, circumstances and physical failings turn against them, and Margery who first humours then supports Enid in her desire to have a baby. There are many memorable moments, such as when they swim in a forest pool and Margery feels a surge of exhilaration: "She stayed, staring up at the thundering cascade of water and dark green pine clumps and, above them, the sky as blue as a piece of glass. And, just for a moment, she could have sworn she heard something inside her, groaning with pleasure ..."

Enid's distaste for killing makes it impossible for Margery to convince her that three of the golden beetles, if found, must be put into her killing jar and preserved as specimens for the Natural History Museum. For the always-practical Margery this is part of her training, although she was sickened years before by her first experience of the process: "She had screwed on the lid. But the beetle would not die quickly, as she'd expected: if flailed and sucked at the burning air, lifting its antennae, cramming its legs at the glass, calling her - or so she imagined - to stop, amazed and appalled at what she was doing after she had taken such care to lift it with her tweezers." A person who could feel and notice so much would never do that to her special golden beetle, would she?

The larger-than-life treatment lends warmth and humour. Rachel Joyce has a gift for expressing profound truths with simple directness, and Margery recognises something similar in her friend: "Sometimes Enid still surprised Margery - the way she could look into the air and come out with a piece of wisdom ..." As events escalate the search for the beetle becomes almost incidental, but several surprises await in the perfectly-judged ending.  

I highly recommend Miss Benson's Beetle - and if you haven't read The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, that too is not to be missed.

Miss Benson's Beetle is published by Penguin.

Linda Newbery's This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us is published by Pavilion.

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WEEKEND by Charlotte Wood

 

" ... And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel."  

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor living in London. He is a regular contributor to Writers Review.

‘Nobody wants you when you’re old. You have to shore things up before this point. You have to face up to the future, to the worst possibilities, you have to prepare yourself. Anticipate, adapt, accept.’

You might argue that reaching your eighth decade precludes you from having to learn and harness jargonistic alliterative slogans. (Although strictly speaking this is assonance, right?) But events such as the loss of a partner, a child, a friend can prove so destabilising that you’re reduced, in some respects, to learning your A, B, C all over again.

That’s where we find long-time friends Jude, the restaurateur, Wendy, the academic and Adele, the actress, in the aftermath of their close friend Sylvie’s death. The three women are spending a hot Australian Christmas at Sylvie’s home (in the absence of Sylvie’s partner) to clear it for sale and the conclusion of a chapter of their lives.

More oppressive than a dead friend is the inclinator, the platform that elevates – infantilises? passengers and baggage from the ground level to house level. Oh, and Wendy’s poor, dear dog Finn, who soils himself and inconveniences fastidious Jude but is perhaps all Wendy has left of Sylvie. His life so far beyond comfort and opportunity that it surely would better be ended with mercy and kindness. Gulp.

As the women set about their tasks, they engage and remember and rewrite history. They pride themselves on the sophistication of their inner lives and scorn those who lack such vivid interiors.

They might be old but they have expectations. You might not want lost looks, lost love, men or sex, The Weekend argues. What you really want, reasonably, is work. And money. Others might think you’re past it, somehow an encumbrance or liability, but these women know you can still make certain demands. You can trust a lived-in body, you know how it works – ‘you left it alone and it sorted itself out’.

So demanding of the world beyond them, and yet, a lot of the time it seems the best they can offer each other is tolerance or forbearance. Except, of course, when push comes to shove, as it does at the brisk ending. But if you can’t be brisk in old age, when can you?

Charlotte Wood is an Australian writer whose reputation is enhanced with each new publication; The Weekend, her last-but-one novel, was published here with a splash last year and deservedly so.

You’ll learn a lot about contemporary Australian life. You’ll understand where Australia has emerged from. (The surnames alone – Wendy Steegmuller, Adele Antoniades - are telling.) But interestingly, the cultural references are British – no mention of the Miles Franklin Award, instead the Booker Prize. The women reference the Mamas and the Papas from their youth, not The Seekers.

There’s always been a tension in Australia that anyone with ambition is punching above their weight – ‘the tall poppy syndrome’, it was called. How much worse is it for the high-flyers now diminished in old age, by themselves, by others, by society?

And yet the hunger remains, the appetite for life. What’s the best you can hope for? That’s what The Weekend is about. A hungry novel. I loved it and recommend it. So will you.

The Weekend is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

More recent choices by Jon:

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

Easter Saturday extra: guest feature by Paul Dowswell. RETURN TO SENDER - A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG CLOT

 

"Imagine my surprise when I was sacked at the end of the week..."

When there’s not a pandemic going on, Paul Dowswell writes historical fiction and is a frequent visitor to schools, both home and abroad, where he talks about his books and takes creative writing classes. His novels Eleven Eleven and Sektion 20 won the Historical Association Young Quills Award and Ausländer won the Hamelin Associazione Culturale Book Prize and the Trinity Schools Book Award. Recently he has become increasingly concerned about how deranged he looks in Zoom calls.

Readers of  Writers Review will no doubt be familiar with the joke about the rabbit who goes into the butchers and asks ‘Got any carrots?’ The butcher tells him he doesn’t sell carrots. But following four days of the same repeated request from the rabbit the butcher loses his temper and says ‘If you EVER ask me for carrots again, I’m going to nail your ears to the floor.’

The rabbit comes back the next days and says ‘Got any nails?’

The butcher looks perplexed and shakes his head.

‘Got any carrots?’ asks the rabbit.

Reader, as a young man, I was that rabbit.

And evidence of that rabbithood is everywhere in a bundle of my letters home from the age of 13 to 23, which I found whilst recently clearing out my mum’s house.

The early 70s found me incarcerated in a horrible little boarding school in the depths of Shropshire, where, unlike Byron at Harrow, I didn’t spend my pre-University years translating The Iliad from the original Greek into Latin. I was an academic mediocrity. I did write a lot of letters home though. And here, in defiance of the widely held view that texts and emails have destroyed the traditional art of letter writing, I present an extract from my letter home from November 27, 1972:

On Thursday there was the House Music competition. We came 4th. (Woe!) On a happy note I’ve had dioreaha (or however you spell it) recently.’

‘That’s nice, dear,’ I can hear my mum saying.

Having cocked up my A Levels I got into Goldsmiths’ in 1975 via the clearing system and read History – a subject I wasn’t terribly interested in at the time. Not a lot of work was done. On Nov 3, 1977 I wrote home ‘As for me, I’m ill at the moment – it’s sort of bronchitis and Flu and I don’t feel so good. However I’m taking good care of myself and getting lots of sleep.’

I obviously had no understanding of the laws of cause and effect, for in the very next paragraph I write: ‘John and Johnny P. (my brother and his best friend) came down this last weekend… we played a ridiculous game of spin the knife the low/high point of which was me having to take a paddle in the birdbath, John whipping himself around the garden, and Johnny having to squirt lemon juice down his throat (blaaaaghhh). We got utterly wrecked on Saturday night and all ended up sprawled on the floor playing I-spy and with Johnny P. drinking Italian plonk from his boot.’

I finished with the reassuring words ‘p.s. am taking approx. 5,000 pills a day so don’t worry.’

Other letters from university are full of ramblings about the travails of my rotten band. My dear dad, who hated rock music, wouldn’t have been remotely interested. ‘We did two gigs this week – One on Tuesday at a Psychology society Party at College + the other at some Greenwich rowing club on Friday. The psychology one was alright – only trouble was **** broke a lead, thus we balled up things a bit. The one on Friday was a disaster. **** broke a string and we lost the attention of what little audience we had.’

A pattern was emerging.

The band broke up shortly after, although **** is still a good pal. (Hence the *s.)

I graduated in 1978, and moved to a grisly bedsit in New Cross Gate. (‘Paul’s room is not so bad,’ wrote my girlfriend to my parents, ‘just a bit scabby – but there aren’t any cockroaches or rats.’) Eventually I found work at a market research company, where I collated surveys on fork-lift truck lubricating oil. Desperate to escape, and still not really having A CLUE what to do, I enrolled on a teacher training course back at Goldsmiths’ College. Nowadays, my respect for the teaching profession knows no bounds, but back in 1979 I wasn’t so sure. My course, I wrote to my mum, herself a teacher, ’… contains a million bossy girls/women all called SUSAN (no Sue, Suzie, Suzanne etc just SUSAN) who have been nursing a burning desire to teach since they lined their dollies up at the age of three and told them off for not doing their homework.‘

Mea Maxima Culpa, teacher chums. And friends called Susan.

The autumn of 1980 found me on the dole (again) and subject to the whims of the job centre, who sent me to Woolworths head office on Marylebone Road to act as a security guard in their impressive glass and marble foyer. ‘It’s crushingly boring beyond belief and only suitable for the lobotomised and those in a deep opium trance,’ I wrote home. ‘I try and keep myself amused by seeing which hurts the most when I bang my head on it, (Of Marble, Glass, Plaster and Plastic, Marble is by far the worst), and breathing on the main glass door and drawing Anarchy signs in the condensation.’

Imagine my surprise when I was sacked at the end of the week.

But other more exciting opportunities in the world of work were presenting themselves. One, in particular, promised a life-changing turn in the road. At 22/23 I was desperate to work for the BBC and understood the important thing was to get in, doing anything, and then apply for the more interesting jobs from the inside. With that in mind I wrote home in June 1981 ‘The BBC have been in touch. I had an interview yesterday for a job in the outside broadcasting dept – v. boring – costing transmissions via the G.P.O. (British Telecom)…’

With mounting excitement I relayed the news that ‘the bloke rang that afternoon and told me I didn’t get the job BUT………..

1. They were very impressed (repeated 9 times)

2. The job was ‘way below my capabilities anyway.’

3. He would be in touch with the right people and they would be looking out for a suitable post and I would hear from them shortly.’

40 years later, whenever the phone rings, I still hope that it’ll be them.

See also: I NEVER READ MY REVIEWS, by Paul

Guest review by Jill Dawson: NEGATIVE CAPABILITY by Michèle Roberts

"Feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet ..."

Jill Dawson is the author of ten novels, including The Crime Writer, about Patricia Highsmith. The latest is The Language of Birds, about the nanny murdered in the household of Lord Lucan in 1974. She runs a mentoring scheme where established writers work with new ones, Gold Dust Mentoring.

Following a series of devastating rejections, novelist and poet Michèle Roberts decided to keep an account of her life in order to make sense of her shattered sense of self. This wonderful, fearless, surprising memoir is the result. I have been recommending it lately to all my writing students because if there’s one thing all writers need to understand it’s how to cope with rejection, how to survive it and carry on writing.

I should state here that I know Michèle (she was my boss, the Director of the MA in Creative Writing when I taught at UEA) so I don’t doubt I’m biased, but I loved her writing long before I met her: its sexy openness, daring experimentation, vividness and warmth. If you haven’t read her, along with poetry and memoir and short stories, there are fourteen novels. Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker, is a good place to start. 

I devoured this. An honest insight into how another writer – one as established as Roberts no less – feels when a novel gets bounced around by agents and publishers is rare. The book could be read as a companion to her earlier memoir, Paper Houses, which tells of her formative years as a young feminist in the 1970s. Alongside her thoughts on writing, on Creative Writing students who want to produce ‘marketable commodities’, set against her own passionate desire to make art and take risks, there is also a glorious exploration of food, sex, friendship, loss, feminism, art and religion. This intimate memoir feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet, (although this artlessness, the creation of such a natural-sounding voice is of course the skill of an accomplished writer who makes it look easy).

In one chapter, reading Roberts on rejecting the idea that the male gaze creates desire, I was struck by how powerfully her thinking had influenced me in my twenties. The idea of the radical nature of actively desiring, feeling desire as a woman and not just wanting to be desired, reflected back at twice your natural sexiness is a theme that comes up in my novels a lot. Since I was reading Michèle Roberts in the 1980s at the start of my writing life, I am aware of how much I owe her.

‘Negative capability’ she reminds us, is a term Keats used in a letter to a friend, meaning ‘to be capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ Dwelling in the not-knowing, not being able, is of course so much easier to talk about, preach, than to actually practise. Might the concept be extended not just to writing but to living? Perhaps it could more broadly refer to all situations where a person felt out of control, even to ‘not being published, not being read’?

‘Just treading water, swimming, just lying on my back, floating in the present, the buoyant present holding me up and rocking me’, she suggests.

If you want to be buoyed up, nourished, encouraged to be fully alive, to challenge and to doubt, this memoir is a joy from start to finish.

Negative Capability is published by Sandstone Press.