H.D.F. Kitto: The Greeks (1951)

The Greeks has long been touted as the best basic introduction to the culture of ancient Greece, where the foundations for much of the way we think and live today were laid but which still can seem strangely alien from a viewpoint two and a half millennia years later. Now over sixty years old, is it still worth reading?

Clearly, the book itself has not changed in any way (especially as mine is quite an elderly copy). It remains an excellent basic description of ancient Greece, concentrating on the aspects of the culture which are especially influential. Kitto is occasionally self-indulgent, getting carried away by his love of the literature, as when he translates large portions of the first book of the Iliad which are not directly relevant to the aims of the book (though it does illuminate aspects of the culture almost in the way that a lengthy Bible quote would shed light on Western culture, or a section from the Koran would on Arab thought). My background (growing up with a parent who had not just studied classics, but who wrote books about Greece and Rome alongside translations of ancient texts) does not make me an ideal test for the use of The Greeks as an introduction, but from what I can see it does seem to do the job it sets out to do.

One thing which has certainly changed is the correctness of the assumptions Kitto makes about how much of Greek culture is already known to the general reader. Kitto assumes a certain amount of knowledge in his readers, and in the 1950s he would have been able to assume more than would be the case today; after all, most British schools still taught at least Latin in those days, and hardly any do so today. This has two consequences: the number of people who have any idea that the book might be interesting to them is smaller, and the likelihood is that they will find it far harder to understand. On the other hand, web sites like Wikipedia will fulfil many of the needs which The Greeks was intended to, so it is not as useful as it once was.

Edition: Pelican, 1958
Review number: 1456

Michael Collins: The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton (2006)

Campus novels are not uncommon; novels about writers even less so. But Michael Collins has here produced an excellent novel, by incorporating a striking crime thriller theme into this self-consciously literary setting.

The title character is a literature professor at Bannockburn College, a once-famous writer whose punk-like attitude helped bring about a decline in his career to the point where a meeting with an old friend who is still a best-selling author drives him to a suicide attempt. While he remains near death, a postgraduate student from the English department discovers a lost novel in his home, published decades ago by a now defunct vanity press and apparently so thoroughly forgotten that it no longer appears on Pendleton's CV. Intrigued, Abi begins to read it, and is impressed by what turns out to be a first person narrative daringly written from the point of view of a child killer. She eventually manages to get Scream published, and it becomes a best-seller as well as restoring Pendleton's literary reputation. But then a few people begin to realise that the crime depicted bears a close resemblance to a real cold case from local area.

Considered as a crime thriller, The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton moves at a glacially slow pace. It will, however, retain the interest of a genre fan because of the idea behind the plot. The extra space is used to include elements from literary fiction, particularly to develop the characterisation of Abi. The themes of the novel seem to be the way that bad choices come back to haunt us, and the relationship between fiction and reality - does Pendleton's depiction of the crime in Scream make him the criminal, someone who spoke to the criminal, or someone with a imagination unfortunately too close to that of the killer?

A touch of patience from thriller fans will be well rewarded. There are some fantasic scenes, such as the interrogation of another author and academic by the police, where he deconstructs the questions as though they are texts relating to an academic study of the philosophy of crime genre fiction.

All the main characters in The Secret Life are failures of one sort or another, at least in their own eyes, and are generally not at all reconciled to being so. There is the perennial student, the once fêted writer who cannot maintain his early promise, the writer who pursued commercial success and despises himself for it, the policeman unsatisfied by his second marriage, not to mention the people originally suspected of the murder, none of whom have done anything with their lives. They are not particularly likeable, either, which is something which usually makes it harder for me to enjoy a book; but this time, it did not, because of the interest of the idea and the complexity of the characters (who do at least have sympathetic traits as well).

The title is one of the poorest parts of The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton, being long, awkward, and unmemorable, as well as saying little about the themes of the novel. It has also been published as Death of a Writer, which is misleading and not very good either. A couple of minutes' thought suggested A Murder in Fiction, but I think that with only a modicum of effort, this too could be bettered.

My rating - 8/10.


Edition: Phoenix, 2007
Review number: 1455

Maeve Gilmore: Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast (2011)

The Gormenghast trilogy, by far Mervyn Peake's best known work as a writer, has many fans, including myself. And fans always want more, so we were intrigued when the publication of Titus Awakes was announced last year. Maeve Gilmore was Peake's widow (and, like her husband, an artist), who edited the fascinating but uneven compilation of Peake's less well known work, Peake's Progress. One of the items included there was the sketchy plan which eventually became Titus Awakes: a list of single words which form the themes of each of the chapters. There was also a draft of the first chapter, which I don't think was included (my copy of Peake's Progress being packed in a cardboard box in the garage, I can't easily check). Ironically, this completion of a lost novel was itself lost on Gilmmore's death in the eighties, only to be found in 2011.

The end of Titus Alone found Titus wandering in the vicinity of his ancestral home, Gormenghast Castle, before deciding to leave again. Titus Awakes begins at this point, with a brief scene between the Countess, Titus' mother, and Doctor Prunesquallor, also a character in the earlier books and fellow inhabitant of the castle. After these couple of pages, the rest of the chapter follows Titus closely, as he descends from the mountain on which the castle is built and sets off again. This is the end of the material that Peake wrote, and Gilmore then continues in the same vein.

The story consists of a series of bizarre adventures, much like those in Titus Alone, until the young man ends up in Sark, a plan which Peake divulged to his wife. Once this happens, the story has much more life; Maeve Gilmore was pretty clearly more comfortable writing about a real place familiar to her. Parts are clearly based on the writer's own life (and acknowledged as such in the introduction). This includes a sombre episode in which Titus, working temporarily at a mental hospital, meets Mervyn Peake as a patient visited by his wife Maeve Gilmore. Though all three do leave the hospital - Peake being misdiagnosed - its unending grey hopelessness is portrayed in what is probably the best written and certainly the most striking section of the novel.

The intention of the story, as in Titus Alone, is to use some of the external details of the situations in which Titus finds himself as allegorical mirrors of his growth as an individual. This means that the narrative is again heavily focused on the protagonist. I find this something of a problem with both books, as to me, and, I suspect, to many other readers, the most interesting aspect of Titus Groan and Gormenghast is the castle and the strange, ritualised lives of the grotesques who live there. While Titus psychologically needs to escape, and never quite manages to do so, the young man at the end is not as interesting as he is as the Earl of Groan, centre of the castle's culture, and the people he meets, no matter how strange, are never as interesting as the inhabitants of the castle. It must be said, too, that Peake's imagination for the bizarre is better than Gilmore's, making Titus Alone a more interesting read than Titus Awakes.

Titus Awakes is no masterpiece, no stunning new addition to the Peake canon. Few readers will have been expecting it to be, especially if Titus Alone seems less than stellar to them already. What it does offer is a glimpse at the intentions which Peake had for the later adventures of his best known character, and a measure of resolution to a story which was lacking it. My overall rating - 6/10, mainly because it is most like my least favourite novel in the original trilogy.

Edition: Vintage Books, 2011
Review number: 1454

George MacDonald Fraser: The Light's On at Signpost (2002)

Best known to me as the author of the fantastic Flashman novels, George MacDonald Fraser turns out from this volume of memoirs to have also been involved in the scriptwriting for a number of well known films of the 1970s, and to have had a lot of strongly held opinions,  both of which he was able to write about in an interesting if sometimes irritating manner.

The wildly diverse material in this book is helpfully divided into appropriately titled alternating sections, either Shooting Script or Angry Old Man, with Interludes - comment difficult to fit into either category - interspersed every so often. This means that the reader with little tolerance for political ranting but an interest in the cinema can read self-admittedly star struck reminiscences of films from The Three Musketeers to Superman and Octopussy; and the Daily Mail-reading UK Independence Party supporter can confirm their prejudices without bothering with the cultural memories. (Even if you agree with everything he says, however, I think that the tone of the latter sections would become wearing after a while.) Reading them both, though, has a jarring effect due to the contrast in tone between vitriolic rage at the state of Britain at the start of the twenty-first century, and affectionate enjoyment of the opportunities to work with a long list of stars. The Light's On at Signpost presents a schizophrenic reading experience, and is hard to enjoy.

Fraser lived at this time on the Isle of Man, and the book's title is a Manx expression. Derived from the practice of turning on a light at the top of a signpost when a rider in the TT motorcycle road race is nearing the end of the final lap, it is used to indicate how near death Fraser felt (though  in the end he lived for another six years, producing two more novels and another volume of non-fiction). The book basically contains the things that he wanted to say before he would no longer be able to, and it has for this reason something of the feel of a series of blog posts. At the end, Fraser describes the book as a "mixed bag", and that is a pretty exact description of what it is. It was interesting to read once, but I certainly won't be picking it up again now that I have.

I'd rate the film sections at 7/10, and the angry old man sections at 3/10, which averages to a rating of 5/10 for The Light's On at Signpost as a whole.


Edition: HarperCollins, 2003 (Available to purchase from Amazon here)
Review number: 1453

Nick Hornby: The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006)

Nick Hornby writes an approximately monthly column for American literary magazine The Believer, entitled Stuff I've Been Reading. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree collects the first three years or so of this column (September 2003 to June 2006), and, even though it is quite a short book, the contents were originally published by the magazine in two smaller volumes; a third has since appeared, according to Wikipedia, so the title is no longer accurate. Not precisely a book review column, Stuff I've Been Reading is basically a short essay about books, themed around whatever Nick Hornby has happened to read (or, in many cases, what he has bought intending to read but hasn't). Its piecemeal nature makes it not as compelling to read in one go as his book on music, 31 Songs, but being Hornby, it is extremely funny and often thought provoking.

I did get tired of the running joke which gives the book its title. Hornby claims that The Believer is run by a cult-like group of individuals in white robes, and names this group the Polysyllabic Spree (a reference, in case you don't know, to the rock group The Polyphonic Spree). The point is that The Believer has a review policy that reviewers should not be overly critical: the point of the journal is to encourage a love of books, not to allow reviewers to make points at the expense of writers. (This is of course paradoxical, making a point at the expense of other literary magazines...)

One of the interesting things to me about The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is just how little my reading and Nick Hornby's reading overlap. I've read a lot, and he's read a lot, but of the hundred or more books discussed here, we have both read fewer than a dozen. Our tastes differ. He has an interest in recent history and political commentary which I don't, while I read a lot of science fiction, a genre which he freely admits is alien to him - he describes reading Iain Banks' Excession, in an attempt to break new ground, but gives up after only a few pages, finding it virtually incomprehensible. (It's probably not an ideal choice as a science fiction starter, being set in an idiosyncratic milieu already well established from the earlier Culture novels, and being written in a way which assumes familiarity which the genre in the reader. Thinking about what he should have read: that's a blog post in itself.) His descriptions have prompted me to look out for three books: Never Mind, by Edward St Aubyn (not itself mentioned, but the first of a series which is), Francis Wheen's When Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, and John Carey's What Good Are the Arts?


The biggest problem with The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is that the material in the book was not intended to be read consecutively. It certainly gives the impression that no editing was done to make them fit better into the book format. This means that the overall impression is not as favourable as it would be to reading the columns one at a time, with a month or more separating them, which means that my final rating is 6/10.


Edition: Penguin, 2007
Review number: 1452

Carol Goodman: Arcadia Falls (2010)

Note: There is a serious spoiler in the final paragraph of this review.

There is almost a subgenre of fiction set in remote New England boarding schools and colleges. Like thirties house parties in English stately homes, a staple setting for vintage crime fiction (as well as P.G. Wodehouse, of course), they provide a sealed community of privileged individuals which acts to intensify relationships, promote jealousy and passion, and makes more or less normal people behave in strange and bizarre fashions - as happens, for instance, in Donna Tartt's Secret History, referenced in a review quoted on the cover of this edition of Arcadia Falls.

The specific location for this story is school focusing on art, formerly an artistic colony. It is told from the point of view of a recently widowed (and, as a result, newly poor) single mother Megan Rosenthal, who gratefully takes up a post teaching English literature at Arcadia Falls, which is accompanied by the offer of a place at the school to her daughter Sally, only to find that within a few weeks of her arrival and the start of the school year a student goes missing before her body is found at the foot of cliffs in the (extensive) school grounds. At the same time, Megan becomes fascinated by the relationship between the two women who effectively founded and then ran the school for decades with a somewhat peculiar vision (which includes participation in pagan rituals to mark the seasons by the pupils).

A "finding oneself" theme is very important in Arcadia Falls, exemplified by a children's story, The Changeling Girl, written by one of the school's founders which is told, retold, reflected and commented on throughout the novel in ironic fashion, as characters both act it out and talk about it - adopted children discovering or seeking the identities of their parents, for example, as well as Megan trying to build a new life for herself and Sally after the death of her husband. Another theme is the way that the decisions made in one generation affect the next, with several mothers giving up careers to raise children, or giving up a baby for adoption, with repercussions for both the parents and the children. Sometimes the treatment is a little mawkish, but generally these themes serve to unify the disparate elements of the story and even provide something of a moral, if the reader feels that such a thing is necessary.

Though the setting with its Gothic touches and the themes of Arcadia Falls are hardly original, it is a well written and entertaining novel on the boundary between literary fiction, crime fiction, and fantasy, the last being more suggested than the other two genres. It is the depiction of character and the touches of atmosphere which make the story worth reading. It reminded me of the novels of Mary Stewart, particularly the later ones. However, the sentimentality of the ending was a big problem for me, so in the end I would rate it at 6/10.

Edition: Piatkus, 2011
Review number: 1451

John le Carré: Our Kind of Traitor (2010)

Since 2000, John le Carré's novels have been rather downbeat, even by the standards of a writer not known for cheerfulness (The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, The Mission Song, and A Most Wanted Man). Our Kind of Traitor is much more of a pleasant read, with a rather arch tone shared with some of his earlier novels, The Russia House and The Tailor of Panama in particular coming to mind. The former also shares with this novel a plot in which innocent people are used as intermediaries in secret negotiations. Thus, the story is simple: Russian money launderer Dima wishes to give up the secrets he holds after the betrayal and murder of one of his closest friends by a Russian Mafia boss for whom they both worked, and chooses the British Secret Service as the recipient (asking for a place for his daughter at Roedean school in return).

Dima's chosen instrument for making contact with the British is Oxford English fellow Perry, who is holidaying on Antigua with his girlfriend Gina at the same time as the Russian, with whom he also shares an interest in tennis, which provides a convenient reason to meet up and become friendly. Most of the first part of the novel is taken up by Perry and Gina's debriefing, describing the initial tennis match and the introduction of Dima's proposal to the two of them. Both the description of these sessions and the questioning itself are arch in tone, occasionally to the point of becoming irritating rather than light and amusing. It sometimes reads as though Le Carré is parodying his earlier writing in this vein (in the novels mentioned above).

Myself, I feel that John le Carré peaked a long time ago.  His books from the last decade are still worth reading, but something of the spark has gone out of them, even though he still has something to say, finding new topics after the end of the Cold War. The change of tone makes Our Kind of Traitor more fun to read than, say, The Mission Song, but perhaps too its subject matter is less significant than Le Carré's righteous anger at the way that the poorer nations of the world continue to be exploited by the richer. For the best Le Carré experience, go back to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. My rating: 6/10.

Edition: Viking, 2010
Review number: 1450