Melmoth the Lost

China - slavery in the 20th century?

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:57:45 GMT

Some months ago I read, but didn't review here, Rani Manicka's novel The Rice Mother which traces the history of a family across most of the 20th century. One thing which particularly caught my attention relates to the family's neighbours, and that is the presence of a female slave in the latter household from the 1930s until some time after WWII. This part of the novel is set in British-controlled Malaya.

We first meet her as a young girl, known as Mui Tsai, who had been kidnapped from her village in China and subsequently bought by her present owner. Expected to carry out household duties from childhood, on reaching puberty she was also used as a concubine for several decades, producing a regular stream of children who were taken from her and given to the patriarch's various wives to bring up as their own. Eventually Mui Tsai goes mad and disappears into an asylum, to be replaced by another girl who is also known as Mui Tsai. We discover that "Mui Tsai" is not a name but a lable meaning "little sister" and applied to a menial female servant.

More recently, I have recently read Catherine Lim's The Song of Silver Frond, set, like virtually all of Lim's works, in Singapore in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although this particular novel of hers does not deal with slavery within the Chinese culture, I looked at a number of her other novels on Amazon and discovered The Bondmaid whose central character had been sold as a slave at the age of four. This too is set in 1950s Singapore.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, though given the upsurge in kidnapping of men as labourers and women as wives and sex slaves in China during the past couple of decades it doesn't seem realistic to take the view that slavery or bonded labour was not part of Chinese culture in the mid-20th century.

No, my confusion derives from the fact that both Singapore and Malaya were under British rule for well over a century, and the UK had been actively rooting out slavery around the British Empire since the early 19th century. How then does it appear to continue well into the 20th century in two important parts of British territory? Did the colonial administration know of it but choose to turn a blind eye to it for some reason, did it genuinely not know of its existence, or did it think it had eradicated it?

Val McDermid and Americanisms

Sun, 31 May 2009 11:05:51 GMT

I've just finished reading the first three works in Val McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, ie The Mermaids Signing, The Wire in the Blood and The Last Temptation.

What struck me about them (leaving aside for the moment the plot, characterisation etc) was the number of Americanisms she uses and/or puts into the mouths of her British characters, such as movie instead of film or ass instead of arse. There were others which I didn't note down and cannot remember now, as well as a number of instances of American syntax, eg someone talking of doing something Thursday instead of on Thursday.

Where are these Americanisms coming from? Are they there in McDermid's original manuscript, and if not who is introducing them and at what stage in the publishing process? They seem incongruous in the British edition of her works published specifically for sale in the UK - and bloody irritating to this British reader.

I'm thinking of having a day at the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in July so might have the chance to ask her directly.

End of another year

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:57:14 GMT

2008 was to be my year of reading stuff set outside of the UK and Ireland, and for the first 6 months that's indeed how it went. Then I bought a few whodunnits and couldn't resist reading them. The result was that most of the second half of the year was spent reading crime and horror/ghost stories with a few examples of what I should have been reading slotted in as and when. So this is what I actually read during the year:

The People's Act of Love - James Meek* (Siberia/Russia)
Plain Tales from the Hills - Rudyard Kipling (India)
The Glass Palace – Amitav Ghosh* (Burma, India, Malaya)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Congo)
Like Rabbits – Lynne Bryan*
The Poison that Fascinates – Jennifer Clement* (Mexico)
Wagner the Werewolf – George W M Reynolds* (Florence, Istanbul)
The Coroner's Lunch - Colin Cotterill* (Laos)
Shame - Salman Rushdie (Pakistan)
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami* (Japan)
The Outsider - Albert Camus (Algeria)
Monsignor Quixote - Graham Greene (Spain)
The Crime of Father Amaro - Eca de Queiroz* (Portugal)
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan)
The Interpretation of Murder - Jed Rubenfeld* (New York/USA)
Memoirs of a Byzantine Eunuch - Christopher Harris (Turkey/Istanbul)
Empress Orchid - Anchee Min* (China)
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov* (Russia)
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (New England/USA)
Binu and the Great Wall of China - Su Tong* (China)
Music and Silence - Rose Tremain (Denmark)
Midwinter of the Spirit - Phil Rickman*
A Crown of Lights - Phil Rickman
The Cure of Souls - Phil Rickman
The Sultan's Seal - Jenny White* (Turkey)
Thirty Three Teeth - Colin Cotterill (Laos)
Ratcatcher - James McGee*
The Shifting Tide - Anne Perry*
The Girl from the Coast - Pramoedya Ananta Toer* (Indonesia)
The Miniaturist - Kunal Basu* (India)
The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper*
Crack Down - Val McDermid
Strange Affair - Peter Robinson*
Lamp of the Wicked - Phil Rickman
The Necropolis Railway - Andrew Martin*
The Shape of Snakes - Minette Walters
A Death in the Family - Hazel Holt*
The Harper's Quine - Pat McIntosh*
Death Cart - Susan Parry*
The Excursion Train - Edward Marston
Resurrectionist - James McGee
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd - Phil Rickman
Friend of the Devil - Peter Robinson
The Risk of Darkness - Susan Hill*
A Sudden Fearful Death - Anne Perry
Sherlock Holmes: The Game's Afoot - Edited by David Stuart Davies
An Orkney Murder - Alanna Knight*
The Janissary Tree - Jason Goodwin* (Turkey)
The Riddle and the Knight - Giles Milton*
Disco for the Departed - Colin Cotterill (Laos)
A Golden Age - Tahmima Anam* (Bangladesh)
Terror by Night: Classic Ghost & Horror Stories - Ambrose Bierce (USA)
The Crimson Blind & Other Stories - H D Everett*
The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories - Marjorie Bowen*
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel*
The Swallows of Kabul - Yasmina Khadra* (Afghanistan)
Staying On - Paul Scott* (India)
Tales of Unease - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer - Alice & Claude Askew
Uncanny Stories - May Sinclair*
Night Shivers: Ghost Stories - Mrs J H Riddell*
False Scent - Ngaio Marsh*
The Wine of Angels - Phil Rickman
The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror - Edith Nesbit
Strange Tales - Rudyard Kipling
Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls - Anonymous

Items marked with an asterisk (*) simply denote an author I've not read before.

I've decided to give the annual reading themes a miss for a year and allow myself in 2009 to read whatever I fancy. It'll be interesting to see where I end up.

Mrs J H Riddell

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:28:39 GMT

I've just finished reading Night Shivers, a collection of ghost stories by the above published by Wordsworth in their "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" series. Mrs Riddell is a completely new author to me and sufficiently obscure not to be featured at all on the Gaslight website, though a number of these and other stories appear on the Horrormasters website.

The core of the volume is a collection of stories originally published in 1882 as "Weird Tales". It seems that during her lifetime she was compared to Le Fanu, and it was indeed of Le Fanu that her writing kept reminding me.

"The Girl from the Coast" - Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:39:51 GMT

It's somewhat strange to read a "colonial" novel in which the colonial power is not British. There is presumably a body of literature in French which deals with, and is set in, the various French colonies around the world, though the only example which comes to mind is Albert Camus's L'Etranger. No, almost invariably colonial literature means literature set somewhere in the British Empire, but this one is different as Toer's novel is set in Dutch Indonesia, and Java to be precise.

The central character, the never-named Girl from the Coast, comes from a tight-knit but poor fishing community, and is married off at the age of 14 to a wealthy local aristocrat whom she had never seen. Her father, who agrees to the match, obviously sees it as a match without a down side as it allows his daughter escapes the poverty into which she was born. She enters the house of the man she will only ever know as Bendoro - not "husband" but "master" - and is given the training in etiquette and behaviour, crafts and religion considered necessary to render her a fit consort for her husband.

But the house is cold and silent, its inhabitants intimidated and ruled with severity by its (also never named) master whose austere religious exterior conceals a disdain and disregard for those not of his social class. The Bendoro is as much a collaborator with the Dutch colonial power as any equivalent Indian was in the British Empire, adopting the colonial language and seeking to become part of its power structures.

The Girl comes to realise that she is not his wife but a servant, that there have been others like her in the past whose legacy is a number of young children around the house and who were divorced and sent back to their villages when the Bendoro tired of them. She is forced to confront the reality that at best she is a concubine and not fit to be seen by aristocratic and colonial visitors to the house. After giving birth to a daughter, to whom the Bendoro is indifferent but determined to retain as his property, the Girl too is divorced and thrown out.

Although novelists are expected to become emotionally involved in their creations, Toer is unusually involved in this one on an emotional level. In itself this is not surprising, given that this purports to be family history and the main character is his grandmother. It's also an angry novel, as the story revolves around the way she is used and deceived by her husband and later discarded by him. However at times that emotional involvement in one side of the story does seem to overwhelm its other aspects, one victim of this being the roundedness and complexity of the characters which could have been more developed.

The novel's damning indictment is both of the callousness of the native aristocracy towards the native lower class population, and of the religious and moral hypocrisy of the Bendoro who seems to be obsessed with Koranic and other religious study, with building a mosque in the Girl's village and ensuring that its inhabitants are religiously instructed and observant, while lacking any of the mercy or compassion supposedly enjoined upon the pious Muslim. On the contrary, his rages and tantrums when disobeyed or challenged are profoundly childish and out of keeping with the grave image he projects to the outside world. It is his cynicism and hypocrisy which lead him to marry and discard at will a series of girls from poor villages, using and discarding them at will.

Apart from the character of the Bendoro himself, it is the life of the fishing village which is most strongly drawn by Toer, representing, no doubt, an Indonesia largely untouched by colonialism.

"The Shifting Tide" - Anne Perry

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 03:05:04 GMT

I came across Anne Perry in the same way that I came across James McGee - by simply browsing the crime fiction shelves of Borders looking for unfamiliar writers whose books caught my attention and intrigued me enough to part with £6.99 for one of them.

Unless McGee writes under a range of pseudonyms, as Paul Doherty does, Perry is much the more prolific author. She has been around long enough to have created at least three heros, The Shifting Tide apparently being one of the later novels featuring her best-established character, William Monk, a former London detective turned private investigator.

I'm not going to review this novel, which is largely set in the Pool of London, in depth. Suffice it to say that it was sufficiently entertaining for me to want to read more of Perry's work when my brain needs a veg-out.

The only comment really is about the inevitable anachronism: would one character be giving another a guinea in 1866 in a context which indicates that this is a coin which is being handed over rather than a sum of money (ie 21/- or a sovereign and a shilling) when the sovereign had replaced the guinea as the gold coin of issue in 1816 or 1817?

The other point is that it was the half sovereign, worth 10/-, which was the main circulating high value coin in Victorian Britain. A sovereign, or one pound sterling, represented a week's wages (or even more) for a working man and most of them were retained as people's savings rather than circulated, so how likely is it that someone would hand a near stranger a week's wages? I mean: would you casually hand over £450 cash to someone for expenses today? Or even £225 for that matter?

"Ratcatcher" - James McGee

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:47:05 GMT

McGee, writer of historical whodunnits and thrillers, is a new author to me. This is the first in a series of (so far) three novels set in Regency London against a backdrop of the threat of invasion from Napoleon's French Empire. His hero is Matthew Hawkwood, crack shot and former junior officer in Wellington's Peninsular Army who was cashiered on a technicality and then joined the guerillas in the Spanish mountains, accompanied by his faithful sergeant, Jago, now turned London criminal mastermind. Hawkwood is now one of London's Bow Street Runners investigating organised and other serious crime, primarily in London. The novel is entertaining, good escapist fun and has a suitably dark edge to it, such that I'd be happy to read more of McGee's work.

So far, so good.

From internal evidence (there is a mention of the Battle of Trafalgar having taken place 6 years previously), we can determine that the action takes place in 1811. It is mildly annoying that McGee seems to have done plenty of genuine historical research for the time and place in which he sets his novel, yet there are a couple of anachronistic howlers:

The gold sovereign
In the novel, gold sovereigns are used to buy the silence of a servant. However they were not in circulation at the time of the action. The coin was originally introduced in 1489 and issued until 1604 when it was replaced by the unite, and was not reintroduced until 1816 or 1817, about 5 years after the time when the action of this novel takes place. In 1811 the gold coin in circulation was the guinea.

Cholera
In the novel, Jago's parents are said to have died of cholera when he was a boy. Since Jago appears, from internal evidence in the novel, to be aged somewhere around 40 during the novel, we can place their supposed death around 1780.

McGee is not the first author to be caught out by this particular anachronism: Patrick Suskind, in Perfume, has cholera in the slums of Paris in the 1740s. Yet as late as 1815 cholera was a localised disease endemic in Bengal. It spread across India and Asia between 1816 and 1826 and only arrived in Europe in 1829.

Asia bookbox

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:15:38 GMT

I have finally received the travelling bookbox that I signed up for back in early March. It was, perhaps, too much to hope for that a selection of the books with which the box started its voyage, would still be in it when it arrived chez moi - especially as I was the last person before it returns to its owner. Only one book of the original selection remained, and that not to my taste, so my choice was essentially of books the box had acquired on its travels.

A book-box, if the reader is not familiar with the concept, is a box of books, usually on a specific theme, which passes from one participant to the next in line, usually by post but sometimes by hand, each person taking out as many books as they wish and replacing them with an equal number of books on the same theme. Popular themes include "chick-lit", thrillers, romantic fiction and "Christian literature", but as previously mentioned this one was "Asia", for books by Asian authors or by non-Asian authors but about or set in Asia.

What struck me was just how dominated the box was by India, China and Japan. There was nothing by a Thai writer or set in Thailand, nothing by an Indonesian or Korean writer and nothing about or set in those countries either. Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, the former Soviet central Asian republics, Burma et al were similar unrepresented.

I suppose the selection reflects the prominence of what I've come to term the "Big Three" in the modern western literary consciousness. Although India has been part of that consciousness, in the UK at least, for well over a century for historical (ie colonial) reasons, Japan and China have become part of that consciousness much more recently, and in the case of China probably only in the past decade or so. While there's no denying the richness of what has emerged and continues to emerge from these societies, it's unfortunate that it seems to prevent the literature of and books about other countries in Asia becoming anything like as well known.

One of the books I took out was A Golden Age by Bangladeshi writer Tahmina Anam which I replaced with The Coroner's Lunch.

"Binu and the Great Wall of China" - Su Tong

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:58:47 GMT

When I responded to Canongate's recent offer to read and review one of its recently-published novels and chose this one, I had not realised that it was a modern retelling of a traditional Chinese folktale. This it not to say that had I known I wouldn't have asked for it, because in practice it wouldn't have made any difference. And besides, I have been a supporter of the revival in traditional storytelling in the UK for many years and the old stories are old and traditional because they have resonated with ordinary people over centuries, and in this case millennia.

One of the issues in considering a reworking of a traditional story from another culture is to work out how much of the original story is being reused, what has been omitted and what is the author's embellishment and contribution to the core story.

The core tale of Binu, or more properly Meng Jiangnü, is set in the Era of the Warring States in the late Zhou or early Qin period and tells how her husband is pressganged along with countless other men to work on the building of the Great Wall of China by Qin Shi Huang, who unified the warring Chinese kingdoms and became the first emperor. Binu sets out to walk to the far north of China to find her husband and take him warm clothes for the winter as told in this version of the story. Su Tong chooses to end his novel well before the end of the traditional tale. In Su Tong's version, finding that her husband is already dead, Binu weeps and her tears undermine and bring down a section of the wall. There is nothing in the novel about the intervention of the emperor, about Wan Qiliang's funeral or about the eventual suicide of Binu. Equally there is nothing to indicate why Su Tong chose to end the story where he did, unless perhaps he thought it more fitting that Binu should passively die of grief than take on, and trick, the emperor.

One of the most fascinating sources I dug up is this brief account of early folkloric studies of the legend and the forensic investigation of its origins and variations, suggesting that from a very simple beginning that had nothing to do with the Great Wall at all, elements, themes and ideas gradually accreted over almost 1,000 years before the story became the one which has been told since.

But what of Su Tong's telling of the tale? It is, as these types of traditional tales often are, a catalogue of the cruelties and privations undergone by the necessarily virtuous heroine on her quest. There is a tale or myth type in western culture of a heroine separated from her husband (usually as a punishment for disobeying some instruction) and having to search to the ends of the earth to be reunited with him, and reunited she invariably does (the Eros and Psyche myth is of this type), but in the tale of Binu/Meng Jiangnü the outcome is necessarily different otherwise the heroine would have had no reason to weep on reaching her journey's end. Is it typical, I wonder, of Chinese folk tales that the wife fails to find her husband? If so, why? Both western and eastern cultures have valued the concept of the chaste and loyal wife, but in the western stories the wife's virtue and persistence are rewarded whereas in the case of Binu they're not.

It is difficult, in not knowing what in this novel is part of the core story and what is Su Tong's invention, to single elements out meaningfully for comment. One of the most attractive and whimsical elements is that of the horse-men and deer-boys; these are men who substitute for horses and carry hunters on their backs and boys who don antlers and leap through the forests imitating deer to be hunted, made necessary by the commandeering of virtually all the horses in China for work on building the Wall and by the depletion of actual deer for hunting. The boys, however, are truly part of the natural world, feral by instinct and dangerous if only because they are able to operate as a pack without recourse to morals or civilisation.

What seems to be an elaboration on the source tale is the degree and frequency of Binu's weeping. In the original tale she seems to weep only when she reaches the Great Wall and learns that Wan Qiliang is dead whereas in the novel she starts weeping almost from the first page and is still weeping at the end. I'm not convinced this works. Not only does it detract from the power of her weeping at the end (the saying about keeping one's powder dry seems appropriate in the circumstances) but it also becomes rather irritating and detracts to some degree from the sympathy the reader is clearly expected to feel for her.

All in all, however, this is an entertaining read filled with magic and a sense of a very distant time and a very distant place.

Rewarding mediocrity and the banale

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:31:03 GMT

On the day the sun reaches its most northerly position in the sky in the northern hemisphere, the BBC is carrying a news item on a new fiction award aimed at what is probably the nadir of modern fiction - the derisively termed "chick-lit". Except they've not given it an honest and straightforward name like "The Chick-Lit Awards" but something more grandiose and pretentious - "The Melissa Nathan Awards for Romantic Comedy".

The genre is summed up by the BBC as:

"..... everyday tales of women who muddle comically through the mundane, bagging a handsome hero along the way to the happy ending - even if he does tend to be the local headmaster or a vet."

and by awards guest Jo Brand as being:

"..... about fed-up heroines trying to get to work on time or washing their pants. Women like to read about romance, but they also want to feel that connection with the heroine as well."

There. Doesn't that make you want to hammer down the doors of the nearest Waterstones and strip their shelves of chick-lit? Nope, didn't think so.

Apparently the first awards night was "appropriately held in a club in London strewn with red rose petals, while guests sipped on pink champagne" and a judging panel which included such literary illuminaries as Sophie Kinsella (whose official website has java'd floating pastel handbags which cluster round the visitor's cursor) and Joanne Trollope doled out sub-awards in categories such as Best Bastard (presumably a reference to Heathcliffe-type characters rather than the illegitimate products of the bonking scenes, though these days I wouldn't bet on it), Best Lovable Rogue and Best Bitch. Not expecting much complex character development there, are we?

OK, go on - call me a literary snob. I confess. Guilty as charged. Wouldn't be seen dead with this stuff in my hand and wouldn't risk it even if camouflaged by something more literary because it takes only one slip of the hand for one's shame to be broadcast to the world. Even if I wanted to read it. Which I don't.

Low brow entertainment in all genres has its place. Everyone needs to wind down and relax from time to time and mass market trash, whether on paper or on TV or at the cinema, can help in that process. A former housemate of mine, a trainee surgeon, used to come back to the shared house in which we lived and immediately switch on the TV to watch Hollyoaks. Hollyoaks is superficial and crap, as she freely admitted, but it helped her to unwind after a stressful day in theatre cutting people's eyeballs open or telling patients that they'd be blind in less than a year. Fair enough - after cooking she'd then spend the evening studying.

No. It's the rest of the TV-watching, trash-reading population which is worrying. 4.5 billion years of evolution and over 125 years of compulsory state education in the UK and millions are still reading nothing more demanding than chick-lit?

The way education is going, the first university English degree in chick-lit can't be far away.

Free book from Canongate

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:33:37 GMT

Canongate recently offered copies of three of their recent novels free to UK bookcrossers. Today a copy of Binu and the Great Wall of China, a modern reworking of a traditional Chinese folk tale, by Su Tong arrived. I chose it with a view to reading it quickly and including it in the travelling Asia-themed bookbox which will probably reach me in about a month.

"An Artist of the Floating World" - Kazuo Ishiguro

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:48:03 GMT

This novel came to me bundled with another of Ishiguro's works, the rather better known The Remains of the Day which I had previously read in a different edition several years ago.

In the present novel, Ishiguro returns to the Japan he left with his parents when very young and to the years immediately following the end of WWII. His narrator Ono, the artist of the title, after what seems to have been a decade or more in a commercial art workshop and later in retreat as the pupil of a respected established arties, breaks with his teacher and fellow students and becomes involved in the development of a new style of art whose purpose is to serve the militarising Japan of the 20s and 30s. It's not clear how deeply Ono is involved with the militaristic regime but he was sufficiently so for his position in the post-war period to be the subject of some awkwardness and to possibly damage the marriage prospects of his younger daughter.

What struck me within a very few pages, and stayed with me until the end and afterwards, was that An Artist of the Floating World is in many respects a rewrite of The Remains of the Day, or rather, The Remains of the Day, being the later novel, is a more sophisticated rewrite of An Artist of the Floating World.

The central character in both cases is an emotionally repressed and self-deceiving middle aged or elderly man finding the time to revisit his past and examine his relationships with those around him and the part he played in the rise of militaristic nationalism.

Both men are alone, Stevens the butler because he failed to see the possibility of a relationship with and marriage to the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and Ono because his wife was killed in an air raid right at the end of the war.

Both men take both physical and psychological journeys. In physical terms Stevens takes a motoring jaunt to the West Country and Ono engages in wanderings around the unnamed city in which he lives both as he comes to terms with the changes wrought by the war and its aftermath on districts he knows well, and as he remakes contact with old acquaintances and colleagues who he hopes will speak well of him and his family if approached by the detectives acting for the family of his daughter's prospective groom. Psychologically, both are exploring the relationship between a past seemingly full of certainties and a present full of uncertainty and change which they do not seem well equipped to deal with.

Structurally the two novels are also similar with their constant swings between past and present. While this in itself is hardly unusual or distinctive as a structure, the way in which Ishiguro handles the transitions in time in both novels which seems to be essentially identical. It's as though, the technique having worked so well in The Remains of the Day, he couldn't resist squeezing additional mileage out of it by reusing it as classical composers recycle particularly impressive themes or melodies by lifing them from an overture and transplanting them into a piano trio.

Finally, Ishiguro has both of his narrators speak with virtually identical voices. There is the same pedantic urge to explain or justify what they have just said, the same stiltedness of phrasing, the same convolutedness of explanations, the same need to report a conversation in detail followed by the same backtracking amounting to "Of course it was all along time ago and I'm not sure that those were the exact words I used, but looking back I suspect they were" etc, and the same stiff and outdated vocabulary.

Of the two novels, The Remains of the Day is the more polished and successful, but then one would expect it to be, it being both a later and therefore more mature work and of course the winner of the Booker in 1989.

"The Outsider" - Albert Camus

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:31:10 GMT

I originally read this novel exactly 30 years ago, in French, when it was one of the set texts for my French 'A' Level (the others being Molière's Le Bougeois Gentilhomme, Alain-Fournier's Le Grande Meaulnes and Jean Anouilh's Becket) and would have had neither reason nor opportunity to re-read it, this time in English, had it not turned up in one of the boxes of cheap classics from Ebay.

In re-reading it, this time in English, it's interesting to see what had stayed in my mind over the decades and what I had forgotten. What had remained most vividly was, perhaps not surprisingly, the killing itself and in particular the heat and blinding sunlight of that day and the effect they had on Meurseult. I had forgotten the circumstance that took him to the beach that day, though I had vaguely remembered his neighbour Raymond but not Raymond's connection to what happened.

Virtually all else - the events surrounding the funeral of his mother, his relationship with Marie, the details of the trial and the details of his life before his involvement with Raymond - had been forgotten over the years. In short, I remembered not a lot considering that I must have read the novel at least several times for my studies.

Meurseult is, to some extent, a sacrifice, a scapegoat. When I was doing my French 'A' Level the tutor said that in practice it would have been unthinkable for a white French citizen (which Meurseult is assumed to be) to be executed for the killing of an Arab and that in such a case the French accused would have been acquitted on some technicality or, at worst, sentenced to a few year in prison. So Meurseult's death sentence is, on this level at least, about much more than the murder, but we know that already because that is what the novel is ultimately about.

He is obviously poorly served by the circumstances of his trial: the hostility of the Prosecutor and his prosecution of the case on the basis of completely irrelevant matters, ie his behaviour at his mother's vigil and funeral; the fact that the newpapers, needing something to fill their pages in the news-quiet summer season, have built Meurseult's case and pending trial into a major story; and the question over the competence of his defence counsel who seems to misjudge the situation entirely.

Nevertheless, Meurseult is his own worst enemy in that he is almost entirely passive. Offered a chance of promotion and a move to Paris, he refuses on the grounds that he sees no reason to make changes in his life. He agrees to marry Marie because she suggests it and he's not bothered either way but he will do it if she wants to. He allows himself to drift into a sort of friendship with Raymond and to be used for Raymond's advantage. In short, Meurseult is a man to whom life and other things happen and who is, to an extent, an observer of his own life rather than an active participant in it. He essentially drifts into a disaster which one senses would not have happened had he taken some positive decisions earlier on.

What strikes me is that at the end of the novel, after Meurseult has thrown the priest out of his cell and refused the "consolations of religion" claiming to be an unbeliever, he anticipates his execution and hopes that he will be greeted by a crowd filled with hate. Is this a reference to Jesus carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha through jeering crowds? Is Meurseult, who ostensibly rejects God, being set up as a sort of Christ figure the way that Elzevir Block seems to be in Falkner's Moonfleet, or is he merely a scapegoat for a society which cannot come to terms with that which is different?

The end of "Norwegian Wood"

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:50:30 GMT

This proved to be a surprisingly quick and easy read, though I'm not sure I can say why. Murakami's style is undoubtedly readable and engrossing, creating a momentum which carries the reader from page to page. Even so, it's still difficult to identify anything distinctly "Japanese" about the novel and I'm not sure what to make of many of the author's characters.

Watanabe, the narrator, comes across as a thoroughly decent chap recounting only one episode, his abandonment of his first girlfriend when he goes to university, which reflects poorly on him. Nevertheless he is the narrator: the novel's action and events are told from his point of view and seen through his eyes and it's rare that a narrator, being usually the most important character in a work, is presented as a seriously unpleasant piece of work.

Naoko, his second girlfriend, is never quite present in the novel in much the same way that she is never entirely present in the world at large. Having never recovered from the death of her first boyfriend, she seems to be unwilling to belong to the world and, as we discover, eventually chooses to follow Kisuki in death.

Perhaps the most attractive character in the novel is Reiko, originally destined to be a concert pianist but whose career was dramatically cut short by mental illness and a series of stays in mental hospitals and asylums. Her greater maturity and experience of life allows her to provide support to Naoko in a way that Watanabe, the same age as Naoko, cannot do. One feels that, at the end, something has snapped back into place for Reiko and that she has made the transition necessary to step back into society.

If Reiko is the most attractive character, Midori is probably the most unattractive in some respects. Brash, crude and entirely physical, and seemingly the opposite of Watanabe, it's difficult to imagine them finding sufficient common ground for their relationship to succeed and last.

Perhaps I have missed something but this is not the demanding novel I had been expecting. That is not to say that was disappointing because it wasn't; indeed, I will almost certainly pick up another of Murakami's works in the future.

"Norwegian Wood" - Haruki Murakami

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:31:05 GMT

Once upon a time and long ago, in the days when the sun rose in the West and set in the East and rivers flowed from the sea to the mountains, there was a chain of bookshops named Ottakars. And every once in a while the management of Ottakars chose an author they thought people should try and negotiated a special deal with a publisher to make available an astonishingly cheap Ottakars edition of one of that author's novels.

And so it came to pass, several years ago, that Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood was briefly on offer in Ottakars bookshops for 99p, and having migrated from their shelf to mine it has sadly languished, unread, ever since.

Until now. Hurrah!

I confess that during the first 25 pages or so of reading this novel I was decidedly lukewarm about it. Its understated and very quiet style made it unexpectedly difficult to engage with, but even as I was asking myself why I was reading it I was being drawn into its subtle world.

In some respects I struggled to identify anything in it which was specifically "Japanese". Students, universities, student political activism in the late 1960s, mental hospitals, urban bars and so on - none of this spoke to me of anything identifiably "Japanese" in the way I had been expecting; indeed all could just as easily been British, American, French or whatever. What eventually started to emerge as "Japanese", however, were the subtle, light touches of Murakami's style mentioned above and the theme of suicide, in this case amongst young people. It's not that suicide does not happen amongst western young people, but that there is a very real Japanese cultural tradition connected with suicide, which would be bizarre in a British, German or American context, which Murakami seems to be exploring in this novel.

One moment which jars, possibly wrongly, is the one in which Nagasawa uses a credit card to pay for a meal for himself, his girlfriend Hatsumi and Watanabe, his college-friend and the novel's narrator. The action at this point is set in 1969, at the latest 1970, when credit cards were very new indeed and I wonder if the author, writing 20 years later, misjudges this point and introduces an anachronism.

"The Coroner's Lunch" - Colin Cotterill

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:41:39 GMT

I don't suppose there are many novels in English which are set in Laos, it being a bit of a backwater in south-east Asia. It is, nevertheless, a country I've wanted to visit for a few years, at least in part precisely because it is something of a backwater and hasn't yet been adopted by mass tourism in the way that Vietnam and Thailand have.

I picked this novel up in a small, independent bookshop in Richmond, north Yorkshire, just before Christmas and probably wouldn't have got around to reading it yet were it not for the fact that I've signed up for an Asia-themed bookbox and want to ensure I have three or four books available to put in it should there be a number of books I want to take out.

The Coroner's Lunch has been a most entertaining read, mixing as it does a fair bit of modern history, a good slosh of political satire, a touch of the "natural supernatural", a genuinely intriguing plot that keeps the reader guessing, and characters that are quite engaging.

Dr Siri Paiboum, an elderly widower and the only doctor left in Laos immediately after the Communist takeover in 1976, is appointed coroner for the country despite his only wish being to retire and leave the revolution to others. Faced with the suspicious death of the wife of a senior party member and the corpses of several tortured Vietnamese soldiers bobbing up in a lake and a hairdresser who may or may not have committed suicide, Dr Paiboum is sent on an ever more dangerous chase around Laos and its sleepy capital Vientiane in an attempt to pull all the theads together.

Add a sandwich seller who has a crush on him, a 'chicken counter' (government spy) camped out at the back of the mortuary, and the curtain-twitching Miss Vong and you have a thriller-cum-mystery which has a lot of sometimes black and sometimes rather gentle humour which acts as a foil to the often quite graphic descriptions of death and post mortem work.

Another point worth noting is that the novel includes a character with a mild form of Down's Syndrome in the shape of Mr Geung, one of the mortuary assistants.

I enjoyed this immensely and will be looking out for Cotterill's next novel in this series, Thirty-Three Teeth.

More cheap books from Ebay

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:05:13 GMT

After almost a year of non-activity I have bought a couple of cheap job lots of classics on Ebay. Although both lots include copies of the most popular and obvious classics, there are a couple which I do not currently have in my in-pile and which I will therefore be commandeering for my own reading, ie:

Victory - Joseph Conrad
Lord Arthur Saville's Crime - Oscar Wilde.

However there are quite a few more which are suitable in theme for a release at the WGW towards the end of April, eg:

The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Fall of The House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe
The Hound of The Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Collected Ghost Stories - M R James

"Wagner the Werewolf" - George W M Reynolds

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:40:54 GMT

Wagner the Werewolf is one of the books in Wordsworth's Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series which I acquired at the Whitby Gothic Weekend in April last year. The intention, as with the others, was to read it and release it at a subsequent WGW and to buy more books in the series while there.

Wagner the Werewolf was one of three classic "Penny Dreadfuls" serialised in instalments in weekly papers during the winter of 1846-7 and marked the high point in terms of quality of that genre of popular writing which was much maligned in its own time and has remained so ever since. As well as Wagner the Werewolf, the first substantial werewolf work in British literature, that winter saw the serialisation of Varney the Vampyre and The String of Pearls, which today is remembered mainly for introducing the character of Sweeney Todd.

I am now around half way through the work. Wagner and Nisida are marooned on their paradisical island somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, Wagner having just drowned the former bandit leader and would-be rapist, Stephano. Over in Istanbul, now ruled by Suleiman the Magificent, Alessandro Francatelli, secretary to the Florentine envoy to the Turkish court, has just defected to the Turkish side and, having agreed to convert to Islam, renamed Ibrahim. As he is the brother of Flora Francatelli, formerly the personal attendant to Nisida and beloved of Nisida's brother, Francisco, I am sure we will be seeing much more of Ibrahim in the pages to come.

To get the reader to this stage, Reynolds has introduced the numerous twists and turns expected of any lengthy work in the gothic genre - a convent prison ruled over by sadistic mother superior, the shadow of the Inquisition, bandits, secret pacts and conspiracies, murder of innocents and all the other stuff which went to make up the 18th and 19th century equivalent of the TV soap opera. I was going to say that the only difference between the two is that the TV soap opera is supposedly based on and reflects real life, but on second thoughts I'm not convinced is it. I suspect that it reflects the ideas middle class media luvvies have about working class life in the same way that gothic literature reflected Prostestant northern Europe's darkest fantasies about the Catholicism of southern Europe.

What has surprised me about this novel is just how readable it is. Once you attune to the exhortational and purple prose employed by Reynolds this is actually a rollicking tale and quite a page-turner. This stands in complete contrast to Matthew Lewis's The Monk which, drawing on much the same elements (except for the werewolf motif), which is turgid in the extreme and quite an ordeal for the reader as well as the characters in it. The difference no doubt lies in the authors' very different motives for writing: Lewis was indulging in a cathartic vent of rage against a society in which he was forced to conceal his homosexuality while Reynolds sought to entertain a somewhat unsophisticated readership while lightly peppering his tale with positive views about and examples of Jews and Muslims - which was itself quite revolutionary at the time.

So: at the half way stage a much better and more entertaining read than expected.

"Like Rabbits" - Lynne Bryan

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:34:21 GMT

This is not the sort of novel I normally read in that the narrator is a small child and I loathe small children. But it's also about rabbits and I like rabbits a lot.

The child-narrator, the almost-6-year-old Lily, lives with her mother, Donna, and grandfather, Jim, in the latter's council flat at the top of a rough inner city tower block and surrounded by her mother's siblings and their families. Grandfather breeds and shows English rabbits which are kept in his bedroom. Donna, separated or divorced from Lily's father, is unemployed but studying to be a solicitor and it is this which fills her day and absorbs all her energies and attention.

What is clear is that Lily is, to some extent and in some respects, neglected by her mother and relies on her aunts and grandfather to ensure she is washed, fed and clothed. Repeatedly Donna snaps and snarls at her daughter, and her inadequacies as a mother are thoroughly disapproved of by other members of the family. On the day on which the action of the novel takes place, it is Jim who gives Lily her breakfast while Donna forces her to dig out of the laundry dirty, smelly and ill-fitting clothes which should have been washed had it not been for Donna's not being arsed to go to the laundarette.

In some respects, Donna is the sort of individual who, in real life, we are expected to admire. Born into a working class family with few educational opportunities during her statutory school years, she has made the decision in the wake of a failed marriage to seek to better her opportunities through education. At the same time, the mother who neglects her child finds no respect or sympathy. What we see in Donna, therefore, is a conflict between her immediate responsibilities and her longer term plans and aspirations. Further, she seems to have a fundamental ambivalence towards Lily who functions as a constant, and seemingly unwelcome, reminder of a marriage which has failed and a husband which Donna clearly wants to forget and consign entirely to the past. Her educational attempts are as much an attempt to distance herself from marriage and former husband as her ambivalent attitude to Lily are. Part of Donna's tragedy is that in her behaviour to those around her, especially Lily, one really cannot recognise a future solicitor.

Her relationship with Jim and the rabbits provides, along with her contact with her aunts and their families, what her mother should be providing - emotional warmth, a sense of a way to grow into something more than she is at present and a sense of a larger and wider world beyond the council flat in which she lives.

And at the end one is left wondering what happened to Jim's prized rabbits.

The Year of Far Away Places

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:43:46 GMT

The end of another year - the Year of Classics.

I seem to recall that my intention, when I embarked on this themed year, was to ensure that at least half of the books I read in 2007 would be acknowledged classics. In practice I think I have read nothing but classics and to be honest it became rather gruelling towards the end and I found myself longing for a change of tone and pace. Not that I wasn't permitted to read anything else but the reality is that I became somewhat bogged down in classics and somehow never took a breather from them with the odd contemporary breath of fresh air.

How the Victorians coped with end to end classics, especially 19th century ones, buggers me.

A change of scene is clearly called for, which is why 2008 will be the Year of Far Away Places in which the focus will be on fiction and literature whose setting is at least substantially outside of the UK and Ireland, whether the author is British or Irish or foreign. Given the greater variety of works available it seems likely that all or vitually all of my reading this year will fall within the theme but I reserve the right to read the odd Dickens if I want to.

First up: The People's Act of Love - James Meek

"The Rainbow" - D H Lawrence

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:31:23 GMT

I see it is exactly a month since I last posted on my reading of this novel. In practice I haven't read much further than I had then as for various reasons, including somehow becoming bogged down in Lawrence's prose, I laid the novel aside and wasn't in a hurry to pick it up again. Today, however, having listened to the Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, I started again from where I left off - if for no other reason than to finish it by the end of the year.

This novel first crossed my path when I was 15 as it was one of the chosen set texts for my English literature 'O' Level. I don't recall how far I or anyone else in the class got with it as the teacher who chose it went off on sick leave very shortly afterwards and never returned. Her replacement abandoned Lawrence and chose William Golding's Lord of the Flies instead. To general rejoicing, I imagine.

Having read as far as I have with The Rainbow I am somewhat at a loss to understand why any examination board regarded it as suitable for 15 and 16 year olds as I can see nothing which would interest such a readership or hold its attention. That's not to say that no 15 or 16 year old would be capable of reading this novel, but I find it difficult to imagine that it would do anything for a classful of teenagers other than to turn them off literature for life.

"Carnacki the Ghost Finder" - W H Hodgson

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:42:24 GMT

Over the past few days I've been reading, and in some cases re-reading, W H Hodgson's Carnacki stories. The name of Carnacki is one of those I seem to have known from fairly early childhood but whether I read any of the stories until the fairly recent past I don't know. The stories were out of print for many years until reprinted as The Casebook of Carnacki - Ghost Finder in Wordsworth's "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" series earlier this year, however they must have been either in print or somehow available in the 1960s when my father read them and other classic works of fantasy, horror and the supernatural. I particularly remember his mentioning the Electric Pentacle, for instance, which is a key element in Carnacki's stock in trade and indicative of the author's originality in his writing.

I read four of the stories last year on the Gaslight website and the present volume has introduced me to all of the originally published stories plus the three published after Hodgson's death.

Although the stories are in many respects formulaic and Carnacki himself lacks depth as a character, I find myself regretting that Hodgson was killed in WWI and was unable to add more stories to those he had by then written. What the Carnacki stories have which those of many other writers of the genre and era lack is a genuine ability to frighten the reader. Additionally they contain an element of surprise in that some of the cases Carnacki investigates are revealed to be false hauntings, the work of human agency, which ironically points up the horror of those cases which lie beyond such rational explanation. Where the supernatural is genuinely involved, it is demonically malevolent and creates a physical and moral peril which both chills the reader and points the way to the works of H P Lovecraft a decade or two in the future.

The human-agency stories apart, these are not stories dealing with the merely unsettling but tales of encounters with cosmic horrors capable of destroying life and soul. It's difficult to imagine that Lovecraft was not familiar with The Gateway of the Monster, so perfectly does it foreshadow the latter's work; equally it is unfortunate that The Hog was not published until many years after Lovecraft's death as one feels that had he known of it it would have had some further influence on the development of Lovecraft's work and ideas.

What is noticable also is that in the stories in which human agency is shown to have been at work, such as The Horse of the Invisible, The House Among the Laurels and The Searcher of the End House there remain elements of the manifested phenomena which cannot and are not explained by human activity. Not everything is explained rationally at the end of the story. Only in The Thing Invisible does human agency account for all that takes place.

All in all, a most satisfying collection of stories which is all too short.

"The Rainbow" - mystery solved

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:28:16 GMT

It dawned on me overnight that I'd been looking for the wrong Polish insurrection. In sketching Lydia's background, and the reason for her and her first husband's exile in Britain, Lawrence refers to the "great rebellion", and searching on this in Wikipedia brings up a reference to the rebellion of 1830-1831. However it is now obvious that Lawrence's reference is to the Polish experience of the various rebellions and insurrections of 1848, which makes the chronology fall into place and removes the seeming problems.

On the basis of the Lenskys' arrival in Britain in 1848 or 1849, Anna's birth, and Lensky's death, shortly afterwards would have taken place in 1849 or 1850, so the later reference to Anna aged 16 or thereabouts taking Princess Alexandra as a fashion model makes much more sense given that Alexandra of Denmark became Princess of Wales in 1863 and Anna would have been 16 in the mid-1860s. Although this fits much better with contemporary history, it is a decade or two later than I'd originally envisaged.

I am about a third of the way through the book as it's proving quite difficult reading - more so than I remember Sons and Lovers having been. I can't decide whether I'm enjoying this novel or not, but if I'm not I don't dislike it enough to give it up at this stage.

"The Rainbow" - D H Lawrence: A puzzle

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:14:15 GMT

I have begun reading D H Lawrence's novel The Rainbow and am struggling to work out precisely when the action of the novel takes place since the internal evidence of the text seems contradictory. I appreciate that understanding this is not essential to understanding the novel, but I find I get much more out of a classic novel when I understand the historical context in which it unfolds.

We know that the novel was published in 1915 and that it covers the history of three generations of a family. If we therefore allow, for the sake of argument, 25 years per generation we need to go back 75 years to find the theoretical starting point, or c1840. In itself this ties in fairly well with an early reference to the running of a railway through the Marsh Farm. Although there were a number of railways prior to 1840, the real boom in railway speculation occurred in the 1840s so statistically it seems likely that the railway close to Marsh Farm would not predate 1840, though obviously it might do.

One the other hand, other broad historical references contradict this timescale. We learn that Lydia and Paul Lensky fled to the UK from Poland in the wake of the failed Polish rebellion, which took place in 1830 - 1831. Anna, their daughter, was born in the UK but it's not exactly clear how long after their arrival she was born. We know, however, that Paul Lensky died when Anna was about a year old and we might conjecture that Anna was born c1835.

Ranged against this timescale, however, is a fleeting reference to Anna, aged around 16, taking fashion plates of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, as her model in matters of dress. Now Alexandra married Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1863, so if Anna was aged around 16 at that date her birth cannot have been much before 1847, which leaves an awkward gulf between the Lenskys' arrival in the UK in the (supposed) early 1830s and Anna's presumed birth c1847.

Shortly before their marriage, Lydia tells Tom Brangwen that she was 34. Anna was then aged 4, placing Lensky's death 3 years before Lydia's marriage to Tom. This means that there's a gap of at least a decade and possibly 15 years in Lydia's history which remains unaccounted for. It seems reasonable to assume that if the Lenskys needed to get out of Poland following the failed rebellion they would have done so fairly promptly, again suggesting that a putative year of birth for Anna was c1835.

Am I missing something or are there really internal inconsistencies in the chronology of this novel? I know if shouldn't matter, but these things bug me if I can't work them out.

"Mrs Dalloway" - Virginia Woolf

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:15:39 GMT

I first tackled Woolf almost two years ago when I read To the Lighthouse. After having finished reading that, I wasn't sure if I'd enjoyed it or not and the same can be said of Mrs Dalloway. If these two works are typical of Woolf's writing, her novels are as hard work as they are short.

I'd originally started on Mrs Dalloway a couple of weeks ago and having only read a few chapters laid it aside to deal with other, more pressing, matters. On returning to it, however, it was apparent that picking up the thread of a stream of consciousness is inordinately difficult for a reader who tends to lose track of what was going on at the point a book is put down. It was obviously going to be necessary to start the novel again at the beginning and not to allow anything else to distract me until I'd finished reading it. Which I've now done.

Set during the course of a single day, Mrs Dalloway explores the inner worlds of a number of characters whose stories have either been interlinked for very many years (Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard; Peter Walsh, whom Clarissa refused to marry decades previously and who has just returned from a self-imposed exile in India; Clarissa's old friend Sally Seton whom she hasn't seen for many years either; and Hugh Whitbread who has some very minor position at court) or those whose lives touch with theirs only tangentally and only on this single day (notably the doomed Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Rezia). How they react to each other and think of each other, or how they relate to and think about the very changed, post-war world which they now inhabit, makes up the total of this novel.

What runs through all of the characters is a sense, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, of personal failure. Peter Walsh was sent down from Oxford having failed to take his degree, failed many years before the action of the novel to convince Clarissa to marry him, since when he made a hurried and disastrous marriage, has carried out some minor administrative roles in India, become entangled in a series of unsuitable relationships and returns to Blighty without a job or prospects but that "To help him, they [Richard Dalloway, Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton] reflected, was impossible; there was some flaw in his character". Hugh Whitbread good for little more than writing letters to The Times and flitting about court on unimportant errands. Richard Dalloway, competent as an MP but certainly not Cabinet material. Clarissa herself, growing older and becoming increasingly aware of the essential emptiness of her life in which giving parties is the highlight.

Contrasted with this privileged stratum of society are London's ordinary people - Miss Kilman the teacher of modern history and religious fanatic, embittered by her failure at just about everything; the shopkeepers such as Miss Pym the florist; the lodging house keepers such as the Filmers; the temporary staff engaged to assist at Clarissa's party; the vagrants and destitute of London seen on the streets and in the parks.

There is a sense of society not being "quite right", of the war having dislocated all that was familiar. While the privileged try to pick up from where they left off at the outbreak of the war, there are echoes of further change yet to come - we are told indirectly, for instance, that the papers are full of the "Indian question", ie the agitation for Indian independence which will come to fruition in a generation from Clarissa's party.

The not being "quite right" is represented most movingly by the wreck of Septimus Warren Smith, a volunteer who fought through the war and seemed to have emerged from it unscathed only to be sinking five years later into a terrifying paranoid psychosis which eventually drives him to suicide around the hour that Clarissa's party is getting under way. There are hints that what he is suffering is a latish onset of schizophrenia, though no doubt directly triggered, albeit some years later, by his wartime experiences. There's a sense also of the betrayal of men such as him by the mainstream medical establishment - his symptoms, even when obvious and fairly advanced, are dismissed by Dr Holmes who assures Rezia that there is nothing wrong with her husband and that he needs to be kept occupied but not excited; though too late to help Septimus, the specialist psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw recognises his condition as delayed shell-shock and seeks to have him admitted to a mental hospital.

In reading Mrs Dalloway I was greatly reminded of another work of the same period, T S Eliot's The Wasteland which also meanders through London at precisely the same time, eavesdropping on the conversations and inner dialogues of not only post-war Londoners but also the European rich and previously-rich whose worlds have been altered inexorably by the war and the social and national dislocations it caused. The echoes were obviously consciously in Woolf's mind in writing the novel since phrases and quotes or near quotes appear from time to time woven into the text.