Eugène Ionesco: Rhinoceros (1959)

Translation: Derek Prowse, 1960
Edition: Penguin, 1962
Review number: 956

Ionesco's most famous play may have a surreal idea at its centre (that people are turning into rhinoceroses), but he uses this to say something about human nature while at the same time creating a drama which is by turns funny, surprising, and fascinating.

In the first act, the main characters, Berenger and his friend Jean, are terrorised by the first rhinoceroses, running around the streets of the town causing lots of damage. It is only in the next scene, set in Berenger's office, that we discover that people are turning into the animals, as one of his colleagues destroys the building's staircase. Then everyone around Berenger starts to change - Jean, his colleagues and eventually the girl from his office that he had a crush on at a point when they believe they are the only remaining human beings. Finally, Berenger, alone, wonders why he can't change, begins to feel that his lack of a horn on his forehead makes him ugly, but ends with defiance against the idea of changing.

Though the play is designed to make the audience think it has an ideological point, like one of Sartre's existentialist plays, for example, it doesn't really, in my opinion. The rhinoceroses can be interpreted, say, as people who have accepted a new totalitarian regime, but this identification can only be made vaguely, and it seems to be more that Ionesco is writing an absurdist version of this kind of drama, so that the animals do not need to have a meaning.

Saki: The Square Egg (1924)

Edition: Penguin, 1982
Review number: 955

The second collection of Saki's writing published in the decade after his death is very short; it contains just five or six pieces. The majority are more journalism than storytelling, on subjects such as the way that the Western Front affected the behaviour of birds or on British politics. The pieces about the front - the one just mentioned and The Square Egg itself, about a con man preying on soldiers just behind the lines - are most memorable, but the collection is generally not as interesting as Saki's others. This is because the writing has dated more rapidly, as it requires knowledge of events now obscure, a fault shared with his other brief political satire, Alice in Westminster.

Stephen Lawhead: Merlin (1988)

Edition: Lion, 1988
Review number: 954

The second of the novels in Lawhead's Arthurian series is written from the point of view of Merlin, who is made a descendant of the Atlanteans who settled in Britain in the first novel about Merlin's father Taliesyn. The plot will be familiar - the traditional build-up to the accession o Arthur as king: the madness of Merlin, Vortigern inviting the Saxons to come to Britain as mercenaries, Ambrosius and Uther, the conception and hidden childhood of Arthur.

With any Arthurian novel, as opposed to a simple retelling of the myth, the question which immediately arises is how the author has made the story his or her own. In Lawhead's case, this has two aspects. The first is the quality of his writing, perhaps more obvious here than in any of his other novels. This is particularly the case in the retelling of the tale of Manawydan from the Mabinogion, and in the (first person) description of Merlin's recovery from madness, following a break in the narrative during his actual raving.

The second is the Christian subtext. The story of Arthur, with its conflicts between the Christian Celts and pagan Saxons, lends itself to this, and so to make it an important part of the story is not new to Lawhead (though it has rather gone out of fashion in recent retellings, which have tended to emphasise aspects likely to appeal to students of the New Age). Expressing a Christian apologetic in fiction is difficult to do well, however, as is usually the case with any agenda imposed upon a story. Here, though, it works as well as with any writer since C.S. Lewis, and this is because the story comes first and the spiritual aspects seem to arise naturally from the author's own faith rather than been forced into the narrative out of a sense of duty.

Robin Hobb: Ship of Destiny (2000)

Edition: Voyager, 2000
Review number: 953

In the final volume in her extremely lengthy Liveship Traders trilogy, Hobb knits the complex threads of her narrative back together in a skilful and exciting way, even if some questions remain unanswered (notably that of why the success of pirates in attacking slave ships should coincide with agitation among the sea serpents, which are the events that motivate the entire trilogy).

Like the second book, The Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny contains few surprises; the major new element is the discovery of the origins of pirate leader Kennit. Most of the story concerns the four sided war between the satrapy of Jamailla, its virtually independent colony at Bingtown which is the home port of the live ships, the slavers of Chalced and the pirates. Much of the action takes place at sea, and it is clear that a major motivation of the novel is a desire to replicate something of the atmosphere of the novels about the eighteenth century British navy by writers like C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien in a fantasy context. Ship of Destiny succeeds best in reaching this aim, but it still for me falls somewhat short. The descriptions don't make me feel that Hobb has the feel for the details that Forester and O'Brien had.

As a trilogy, The Liveship Traders is less successful than Hobb's first, the Farseer series. It is less brutal, and has fewer surprises, and its second novel is a let down. Ship of Destiny provides an interesting ending, and there is much to enjoy here, but Hobb has proved already that she can do better.

Lucius Apuleius: The Golden Ass

Translation: Robert Graves, 1947 (Buy from Amazon)
Edition: Penguin, 1950
Review number: 952

Lucius Apuleius' tale of a man transformed into an ass and his adventures in that shape has long been popular as an amusing, slightly bawdy story. Parts of it appear in the Decameron and it is, I suspect, one of the inspirations behind the story of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Lucius is a young nobleman who travels to the Greek town of Hypata, well known for its witches. There, a mistaken application of a salve turns him into an ass, a shape which, he is told, will remain his until he eats some roses. Most of the novel is about his adventures in this form, retaining human intellect and tastes, until he is eventually rescued by the grace of the goddess Isis. (The word "golden" in the title, by the way, refers not to any event in the story, but to the value of the tale itself.)

The question which arises on reading The Golden Ass is how it survived the Middle Ages. It frequently celebrates the ancient pagan religion, especially the mysteries of Isis of which Apuleius himself was a devotee; the author was thought to be a magician, actually standing trial for witchcraft, and the book to be a literal autobiography. Though the devotion to Isis was interpreted as a picture of devotion to the Virgin Mary, this was anachronistic and bears no relation to cults in the Christianity of Apuleius' time, which he may even directly attack (one of the wicked characters who mistreats Lucius as an ass is a hypocrite who disguises her evildoing in a cult of the "Only God"). The bawdy scenes and joking would also not be something of which the church would approve officially, yet they are obviously the key to the work's survival; they make it a fun book for a monk to enjoy copying out, rather than something which would be a tedious duty.

Henry Green: Party Going (1939)

Edition: Harvill Press, 1996
Review number: 951

The setup for Party Going resembles that of a classic murder mystery. A group of rich young socialites is heading for the south of France for a party, but fog means that there are no trains from a station which seems to be Charing Cross. They take refuge in the station hotel and are there as isolated as they would be at the kind of remote location beloved of crime writers, despite the huge mass of people barricaded outside.

Of course, Party Going is not a murder mystery. It is a drama about the relationships between the young people (accompanied by their servants and, rather bizarrely to modern readers, in some cases by their nannies). These relationships centre around the host of the party, Max Adey, whose ideas about hospitality are based partly on the Aga Khan, whose son was a friend of Henry Yorke in real life.

Reading Party Going, I was bizarrely reminded of Zuleika Dobson, though Green's novel lacks the fantasy elements which play so large a part in Beerbohm's. The reason for this is really that both novels portray much the same kind of upper class existence, frivolous and hardly connected to the real world. Though most of the foundations of this lifestyle were swept away by the First World War, it survived until after the second, and the eventual virtual decline of service as a career.

Party Going is given a sense of depth by the unexplained symbols created at intervals and then ignored - they include the death of a station pigeon, falling at the feet of one of the characters at the beginning of the novel, or the paintings in one of the hotel rooms including a depiction of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. The enduring image from the book is the feeling that the privileged few in the hotel are under siege from the vast crowd of ordinary people in the station outside. It is a powerful picture of the end of the old fashioned upper classes.

Sir Walter Scott: The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)

Edition: Caxton, 1900 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 950

Scott was once the most famous writer of his generation, and his novels were still quite widely read until relatively recently. Today, though, most of them have pretty much lapsed into obscurity. The Bride of Lammermoor, for example, is probably better known today through the opera Donizetti based on it.

The Bride of Lammermoor is basically a melodramatic variation on Romeo and Juliet. As the son of a Jacobite, Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, has lost his estates to Whig lawyer Sir William Ashton. He lives in poverty in an romantic ruined castle, Wolf's Crag, and falls in love with Lucy, William Ashton's daughter. Ashton himself is reasonably willing to permit the match, as he has no personal animus against Ravenswood and as he moreover forsees an imminent improvement in the political fortunes of the Tories. His wife has other plans for Lucy, though, and so she remains implacably opposed to the match.

While there is much in the novel which has dated, The Bride of Lammermoor still remains exciting in part. The opera simlifies the novel, leaving out many of the minor characters, and this is something which is going to improve it. The servant characters are mainly used by Scott as opportunities for atmosphere or humour, and to a modern reader they seem two dimensional and their use heavy handed. This is particularly the case with Ravenswood's servant Caleb Balderston, who spends the entire novel making extraordinary efforts to conceal the very obvious diminution in the family fortunes.