Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE GO-BETWEEN by L P Hartley

 

"Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life ..."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

"I put a spell on you

Because you're mine ..." Nina Simone

"Once a go between never a go between." (The older Leo)

Towards the end of this outstanding novel, one of the principals, Marian, tells the narrator, Leo, returned to the village years after the book’s climactic end: ‘There are stuffy people, even in Norfolk’. I knew stuffy people in Norfolk. I arrived there immediately after the film of the book was shot but only now have I read it.

This novel tells a gripping story, a tense drama of sharply defined characters in another world, Hartley’s ‘foreign country’. Moreover, it’s not only the past that is a foreign country, so, too, is the present we enter as strangers. The language we use to explain the new experiences is tested, just as the shaping of the novel tests our sensibilities. The imagery is eloquent: Leo, the young boy invited by a school friend to the big house in the country, the wealthy, landed owners with their set ways and strict protocols of behaviour and dress, finds himself caught up in a bewildering game of intrigue, and stuffy manners, certain things that ‘are not done’ all strange to him. In soaring temperatures, the lad with a fixation about magic and making spells, through them hoping to manage circumstance otherwise beyond him to control, ironically is trussed up in a heavy Norfolk jacket. Add starched Eton collars – as stiff as the etiquette which governs his hosts, especially the horribly priggish Marcus, his school pal, and Hartley has cunningly outlined the central theme of Leo being used, as if he, too, were in a box, ready for wear, all analogous to the anxieties of the young boy which he never entirely shakes off.

At one point, Leo imagines himself proleptically, in conversation with his twelve year-old self: he’d been ‘flying too close to the sun’. Marian, whom he calls the Zodiac, a sort of immortal object, could he but put a name to his bewitched feelings, of his helpless schoolboy crush, uses the pretext of a visit to Norwich to meet her paramour, a secret concealed until later in the story, to go to a shop to buy Leo a suit of lighter clothes. First lie. The summer suit, in Lincoln green, evokes Robin Hood the outlaw, flaunter of repressive rules and regime.

Leo explores the deserted outhouses of the Hall, where in the tangle of weeds, the boy addicted to spells and curses, totems of his desire for otherness and escape, discovers deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna, whose juice is poisonous if drunk but squeezed as drops into the eyes, enlarges the pupils, hence the ‘beautiful lady’. A perfect symbolism. Even the contrast between the orderliness and formality of the house and the wild tangle of the outhouses – where the terrible climax of the novel explodes – is telling, the areas of life under constant surveillance and the neglected places where secrets flourish and are, eventually, catastrophically exposed. Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life, and, like a deadly leitmotif, the messages carried between Marian and Ted the local farmer – Beauty and the Beast…? – by their postman, Leo, the bewildered newcomer sucked into their conspiracy and ignorant about this mysterious practice of ‘spooning’ about which Ted, cleaning the shotgun – ominous portent – remains tight-lipped.

One of Marcus’s favourite words is cads - ‘only cads eat their porridge sitting down’. And into this strait-laced world comes the boy whose widowed mother cleaves to him almost as tightly as the Norfolk jacket and Hartley brilliantly shows us this new world through the child’s eyes; Leo wonders at the behaviour of the adults: ‘their worlds are private, even their games are mysterious’. Marian herself, affianced to the Viscount, is trapped, like a fieldmouse taking refuge in a stook of newly harvested wheat, caught between the heat of desire and the prickle of hidebound, emotionally shorn reserve. After the trauma of what he experienced at the Hall, Leo is, as Marian later tells the older man, ‘all dried up inside’. By contrast, the love that she and Ted Burgess shared was a ‘beautiful thing’, they were made for each other but social convention forbade that. The excruciating moral pressure arising from this denial lay heavily on Leo and crushed him forever, that and the sticky web of lies into which he’d blundered, forced to intrude upon an alien adult world of disappointment and misprision. All masterfully delineated by Hartley.

At the end, I cried.

The Go-Between is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Go-Between directed by Joseph Losey, 1971

The Go-Between directed by Pete Travis, 2015

More of Graeme's choices:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

Guest review by John Case: I AM NOT RAYMOND WALLACE by Sam Kenyon

 

"Sam Kenyon's stunning debut novel ... a beautifully written story of love, loss and redemption; a tale of the emotional costs we can so often suffer for failing to be true to our true selves ..."

Training initially as an actor, John Case spent his early 20s working in theatre in the UK, before moving into the Arts and Heritage Sector, working as a senior manager with Surrey County Council’s Cultural Service Department, covering Performing Arts, Libraries and Heritage. Since 2020 John has been the Festival Director of the Rye Arts Festival, one of the South-East’s largest multi-arts festival, held every September since 1971. John is now working on the establishment of an exciting new project - The Rye Bay Book Festival, which he hopes to launch in 2024.

‘It is Monday October 14th, 1963, Raymond is twenty-one years old, and by the time he leaves Manhattan a mere three months later, on January 8th, 1964, he will have made the greatest mistake of his life.’

So ends the first paragraph of Sam Kenyon’s stunning debut novel, spanning a 30 year period from Manhattan in the winter of 1963, a month before President Kennedy is assassinated, to Paris in 2003. It is a beautifully written story of love, loss and redemption; a tale of the emotional costs we can so often suffer for failing to be true to our true selves; of the role that parental pressure can exert throughout our lives, but it’s also a snapshot of the wider intolerance that existed in 1960s America towards homosexuality; a time when homosexuality was still considered by many to be a ‘disease’ that could, at best, be cured by the psychiatrist or by religious correction. A time when gay men were forced into a dangerous illicit underworld, where to gain entry to gay bars and clubs meant knowing that particular secret ‘knock’ on the door to gain entry, and where the danger of arrest or attack was ever present. It was also a time when the The New York Times could actively publish scaremongering articles about an homosexual epidemic spreading across America - ‘They’re sick, you know? The result of inadequate parenting; absent or detached fathers, overbearing mothers; lack of significant masculine figure in the household…”

Into this 1960s world comes Raymond Wallace, a virginal 21 year old, newly minted from Cambridge University, to work at the offices of  The New York Times on a three-month bursary, where he is assigned to work with top journalist Robert C. Doty (a real life figure, but in Kenyon’s novel Doty is fictionalised) to undertake research for a leading article about the ‘growth of overt homosexuality’ in New York city. Remember we are still four years away from the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in the UK which permitted homosexual acts between two consenting adults over the age of 21, and even further away from legalisation in the United States.

Raymond, encouraged by Doty to venture into the hidden underworld of the gay bars of Manhattan, meets the charismatic Joey Maniscalco, and quickly begins an intense relationship, a relationship that will last physically for a mere three months, but one that will resonate across a generation for the next thirty years.

The relationship between Raymond and Joey is liberating, joyful, loving and beautifully brought to life by Kenyon. Even the intimate sex scenes, which can so often be the downfall of many a writer, work well here, blending perfectly within the main narrative. Both these men will, in time, become famous - Joey, a free spirt, confident in his own sexuality, supported by his beloved Papa, possesses a rare singing talent, whilst Raymond, the ironic observer, the recorder of stories, will find fame as a writer. Kenyon is adept at creating fascinating believable characters - Joey’s relationship with his loving Papa contrasts with the intense controlling relationship Raymond himself has with his own mother, desperate to see her son live a stiflingly conventional life, and who is instrumental in Raymond’s decision to walk away from Joey and return to England, eventually marrying and having a son of his own called Joe.

The novel is divided into three parts - the first covers the intense relationship of Raymond and Joey over that winter of 1963/4, the second, epistolic in form, taking place 20 years later, are letters sent by Joey’s Papa to Raymond, and unsent letters by Raymond to Joey,. The third part, set in Paris, see’s Raymond’s son, Joe, seek out Joey, who has now become a world famous classical singer. The three separate parts and the range of characters and timescales demand a deft, accomplished writing style and Kenyon pulls this off admirably.

It is difficult to write about this book without giving too much away, and I don’t want to spoil the final part, so do grab a copy and read it. I’m pleased to say that despite a significant sadness that takes place, Kenyon does give us, and his characters, a happy ending, and happy endings are something that we all need, particularly right now!

Full praise to Nathan Evans and Justin David from that wonderful independent publisher, Inkandescent, for giving us Sam Kenyon’s novel. This book deserves a very wide audience, as its themes are universal, irrespective of sexuality.

I am not Raymond Wallace is published by Inkandescent.

Sam Kenyon is a writer, composer, performer and teacher. His most recent theatre work is Miss Littlewood exploring the life of Joan Littlewood, which opened at the RSC in 2018. Find out more from his website.

Inkandescent Publishers: website

Rye Arts Festival website

Guest review by Penny Dolan: LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

                            

  

"A delight ... made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lessons in Chemistry did not look like a book I’d choose. For a start, the dust jacket image offers half a woman, in a dated high-heeled stance, carrying a colour television showing an American cookery programme. There are also quantities of – to me - annoying quotes. Nigella Lawson, Nina Stebbe, Rachel Joyce . . . However, as the novel was an important birthday gift, I sighed and opened up the pages.

What a pleasure! Almost immediately, I was swept away by the confident voice and dark wit of the writing. This highly enjoyable novel is – give or take some anguish - such an uplifting read that I forgot my crossness about those quotes.

Set in early 60’s America, Lessons in Chemistry is an almost-fairy-tale. The central character is Elizabeth Zott, misfit and heroine, who shines brightly and positively despite all the sharp injustices, pains, losses and her lack of small talk. As a reader, my heart hurt at her troubles and I rejoiced in her every forward step. (An aside: Garmus did not let me down.)

Not long after the start of the book, the admirable Zott becomes the host on Supper at Six, a daily afternoon TV show aimed at “ordinary housewives”. Dressed in her lab coat, with her notebook, pencil and kitchen knives, Zott explains the science behind the cooking process. Alongside, she tells her audience that they are far more than “ordinary”. She treats the women as intelligent people, reminding them of their own hopes and dreams and insisting, during their busy days, of the importance of making a moment just for themselves. Zott’s show, expected to fail, becomes a success.

However, Garmus, introducing the back story, makes it clear that this is not success to the highly-intelligent Zott, whose dreams have already been broken. She does not see herself as a cook. Zott is and always has been a scientist, ready to pursue a particular theory. Once, for a short pivotal time, such a passion was possible but tragedy struck. Now Zott’s scientific career has become what it always had been, one of picking herself up from one bitter disappointment to another.

Garmus makes clear that the academic establishment has, so far, considered Zott – both her brains and her gender - as challenges to the scientific and social norms of the time. She has been sexually abused, accused of being a slut and denied opportunities. Take this small example. Re-applying for a job at the hateful Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth Zott finds she has been demoted to the role of lab technician. Worse, the smirking boss and “boys” present her with a new lab-coat, embroidered with her initials. E.Z. First time around, being English, I read those letters without American pronounciation. The next time, I understood why she was so upset. You try.

Yet Zott, despite everything, builds a lab in her own home, organises her life and responsibilities as best she can, takes cash in hand from the same staff that dismissed her, and persists. How one longs for her success! But without giving away any spoilers, the plot of Lessons in Chemistry is about much more than nasty bullying or the fame that comes from a tv show.

Yes, there is sadness in the book: the ploys of opportunistic bosses, greedy clerics and the harm of judgemental gossips. Yes, there are moments when my heart cried out for stoical, misunderstood Zott. But yes, there are also moments of delight, humour, affection and quietly happy coincidences. As the story progresses, the lonely Zott attracts a cast of misfit neighbours and self-effacing friends who find themselves standing by and helping her, while others, eventually and unexpectedly, do what is right.

There are three wonderful main characters who are most definitely on Zott’s side: Madeleine, a little girl with a passion for libraries and an imaginative approach to family trees; Six-Thirty, a loving, loyal dog with a vocabulary of over three hundred words and, of course, Calvin Evans, champion rower, scientific genius, grudge-holder and soul mate.

Moreover, between all the conflicts, Bonnie Garmus has laced Lessons in Chemistry with a satisfyingly, mysterious storyline involving mislaid documents, mistaken identities and enigmatic strangers. I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days.

When you find this book, do - if possible - glance at the hard cover beneath the dust jacket. No annoying images, no quotes, almost no words. Simply, unadorned, a pattern made from the Periodic Table. Possibly with poisons.

* * * * * * * * * *

Extract: To the horror of the TV producer, Zott has emptied her studio set of a quantity of homely decorations, clearing her "kitchen" surfaces so they are ready for work. Meanwhile, advertisers are insisting - again - that she shows their products to the audience.

“Hello viewers,” Elizabeth said, “See this?” She held the can of soup close to the camera. “It’s a real time saver."

From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup!

“That’s because it’s full of chemicals,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and eventually they’ll die off, saving you tons of time because you won’t have to feed them any more.”

Lessons in Chemistry is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Penny:

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Guest review by Jane Russ: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, revisited

 

 "The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th..."

Jane Russ is writer and series editor for the UK Nature series of books from Graffeg publishing. The books are not only about the physiology of the animal or bird but about myth, legend, art and literature too. Jane's sixth book, The Native Pony Book, came out in July and joins her others about hares, foxes, owls, red squirrels and robins in this very successful series.

 I asked if I could review an old book, something well loved and read by millions. A book that most readers would know but which has come sharply into focus since 25 May 2020: the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird at school in about 1967 when I was fifteen. The story gripped me and, I am ashamed to admit, I still have my original (stolen) school copy beside me as I write! I was older than the narrator Scout Finch but not so much older that the antics of her day to day life failed to resonated with me, in all their glorious detail.

It was another fifty years before I read it again. I have occasionally been disappointed on re-reading a book I loved the first time around: not so with this one. This second reading threw up all the touch points of my own lived experience and I found I loved it even more. I was shocked by the nuance I missed originally, but what fifteen-year-old knows about nuance? Then I read it a third time in February this year; to see if there were things I had forgotten that could help me understand the horrors going on in America today. Not just the George Floyd murder but the insurrection too.

The novel at its simplest is a tale of two children growing up in the deeply segregated world of Maycomb, Alabama in the mid-1930s. The narrator is a young adult looking back on her childhood. Scout is six when the story begins and her elder brother Jem is ten. Their mother died four years before and Scout and Jem are devoted to their father Atticus, the town’s attorney. Atticus believes in never talking down to children and always answering every question: helping them to understand the world around them. The mother figure in the story is Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, who loves the children as her own and has high standards of behaviour, which Scout and Jem work diligently to ignore. The third child we come to know and love is Dill, who comes every summer to stay with his aunt in the house next door. A fatherless, slightly old-fashioned, only child from Meridian, Mississippi, Dill is the catalyst the other two need for all that follows.

Written with a flowing natural style that effortlessly draws you into Scout’s world, it deals with major issues of the day in a clear gritty way and it is also very funny. In the final storyline, it seems perfectly natural that Scout, dressed as a ham, should be walking home in the dark with Jem after a school event. The ham plays an important role in the end-game. In fact, it could be said that without the ham she would be dead.

Whilst encircled by sharply-observed descriptions of their neighbours and Dill’s obsession with trying to get the recluse Boo Radley to come out of his house, the book has at its core Atticus’ defence of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Bob Ewell, a poor white farmer living with his large brood of children in virtual destitution on the outskirts of the town, accuses his black neighbour Tom Robinson of raping his eldest daughter Mayella. By the time the trial starts, Atticus has already saved Tom from a lynching by a crowd of men who turn up at the jail where he is being held. Scout, Jem and Dill sneak out at night and arrive just before the men. Scout unknowingly defuses the anger in the men when she spots the father of a classmate and speaks to him about his son. Her innocence and kindness prompt Mr. Cunningham to tell the other men to go home. This scene is the start of Scout’s understanding that nothing is fair for black people. (NB: The book was written only five years after the well-publicised lynching of teenager Emmett Till in 1955.)

Bob Ewell, in the eyes of the town is the lowest of the low but inherent racism tops even this and Tom Robinson in the ‘court’ of Maycomb is guilty before the trial starts. The judge sets Atticus to defend Tom as he knows Atticus to be an honest man who will not just put on a show of defence but the real thing; that is exactly what Atticus does. Scout, Jem and Dill, unbeknownst to Atticus, watch the whole trial from the ‘coloured gallery’, where they are brought to the front, known as they are to be Calpurnia’s charges and Atticus’ children. One thing that shocks white sensibilities at the trial is that Tom admits he felt sorry for Mayella being forced to look after her many siblings and her unpleasant father when her mother dies. In a segregated world how dare a black man have the temerity to feel sorry for a white man; even a Ewell. Even though it becomes obvious that Tom was physically incapable of giving Mayella the beating she received (he has a withered arm) the jury, after a very long deliberation, still finds him guilty.

As the story progresses there are things we discover and consider. This is where reading this book as an adult gives you a different perspective; the lessons are the same, just in sharper focus.

Prejudice of all kinds, be it based on religion, skin colour, age or anything else, is abhorrent.

This is something left for the reader to infer from the many characters in the book. As Miss Maudie says “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Atticus, when discussing the court-room verdict, says to Jem. “The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be he any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.’

The majority of people are good at heart. As Scout says to Atticus after realising that Arthur Radley saved her. “Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

There are so many things to take from this book. Not least the realisation that although laws may change, attitudes passed from generation to generation of people needing to find a scapegoat for their own failings, will be hard to change. The end of the Civil War and the American government’s inability to deal with the problem of how to integrate slaves into society, is a harvest still being reaped to this day. ‘Forty Acres and A Mule’ for liberated slaves, meant that someone somewhere, felt aggrieved that they were not included, particularly poor whites. The descendants of Bob Ewell were to be found at the Capitol on January 6th and it is no coincidence that the Confederate flag was much in evidence on that day.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an easy read, just right for a teenage mind needing a story that pulls you along but it is of course so much more than that. I hope I have inspired you to get back to it and give it another viewing; you will not be disappointed.

To Kill a Mockingbird is published by Cornerstone.

By Jane Russ:

Guest review by Julie Cohen: SAGA by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

"At its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone."

Julie Cohen grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University and the University of Reading. Her award-winning novels have sold over a million copies worldwide, and she has twice been selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK. Julie runs an oversubscribed literary consultancy which has helped many writers go on to be published. She is a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, founder of the RNA Rainbow Chapter, and a Patron of literacy charity ABC To Read. Her bestselling novel Together has been translated into eleven languages and optioned for television adaptation; The Two Lives of Louis & Louise was long-listed for the Polari Prize and has been optioned by Enderby Entertainment as a feature film. Her first historical novel, Spirited, will be published in July 2020. She lives in Berkshire with her family and a terrier of dubious origin.

www.julie-cohen.com

Twitter: @julie_cohen

I don’t remember how I got hooked on Saga. I’ve always loved graphic novels and comics. People who don’t read them think they’re all about superheroes and violence, but at its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone. Comics look simple, but their narrative can be incredibly complex. I was already a fan of Art Speigelman’s harrowing and beautiful Holocaust memoir Maus, and Neil Gaiman’s collaboration with various artists on the sprawling, mythic Sandman. I’m also in love with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Un Ocean d#Amour by Grégory Panaccione and Wilfrid Lupano. And then there’s my current favourite, Alise Oseman’s gay teenage love story Heartstopper. 

Saga is special, though. It’s an epic space opera. It’s episodic, with a new volume in a continuing story coming out every year or so. Every volume starts with a dilemma, and ends on a cliffhanger, and in between is a convoluted, surprising story told across a diverse and inclusive cast of aliens, creatures, ghosts and machines.

At its heart, Saga is a Romeo and Juliet story. Alana, who has wings, is a soldier from the planet Landfall. Marko, who has horns, is a soldier from the moon Wreath. Their worlds have been at war since time immemorial, pulling in most of the galaxy to take sides and fight. Alana and Marko meet when Marko’s a prisoner of war, and Alana is his guard. Against all odds, the two of them fall in love. In fact, they bond over a trashy romance novel, which both of them can see is actually a revolutionary text about reconciliation and galactic peace.

The series begins when the couple are on the run and Alana is giving birth to their child, Hazel. Hazel is an impossible child - no one believes that Wings and Horns can ever get along, let alone procreate - and her existence is cause for Wings and Horns and all of their associated allies and enemies, assassins and journalists and bureaucrats and mercenaries and opportunists, to hunt the family across the galaxy. Alana, Marko and Hazel are joined by various characters including a ghost babysitter, disapproving in-laws, a robot prince with PTSD, an ecological spaceship, a transgender ex-con, and a race of religious meerkat-like sentients who are facing extinction. Other storylines involve a lovelorn assassin with a lie-detecting cat, a young girl rescued from sexual trafficking, a gay journalist couple from a homophobic amphibious planet, and the story of the war itself, which has become self-perpetuating, with its own economy, ideologies and so, so many casualties.

As a space opera, it has lots of action, tons of sex, and some pretty devastating character deaths. It’s fast-paced, both funny and sad, and the art is frankly gorgeous. We’re used to serials on television but it’s fun to read a serialised story—although be warned, the cliffhanger ending of Volume 9, the latest volume, is a shocker. And Vaughan and Staples have taken some time off the series to pursue other projects, so I’m not sure when it will be resolved.

Although it’s fast reading - there are very few words per page, after all - I find that it stands up to rereading and it’s an annual treat of mine to reread the entire series before I read the new volume. And one of the pleasures of Saga, like any cult classic, is to unexpectedly find fellow fans of the series.

As with all good science fiction, Saga is really about the world we live in now. It’s about mindless nationalism and how war benefits people in power whilst destroying the rest of us. It’s about how romance novels are seriously underrated. It’s about intolerance and prejudice. It’s about the effects of violence, not only on the victim but on the perpetrator. More than anything, it’s about the love between a couple and for their child, and what it means to be a family.

Saga is published by Image Comics.