Some thoughts on The Odyssey

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Thoughts and observations about The Odyssey

There’s a lot of fuss about the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster film ‘The Odyssey’ this summer. I’d read and heard some mixed reports about it, and didn’t feel particularly inclined to go and see it. Then my sister-in-law went to see it, and some friends whose judgement I trust, and they all recommended it, so maybe I will – next week.

Meanwhile I’ve just finished reading the battered Penguin Classics edition that’s waited more or less untouched on my shelves since my undergraduate days when I bought it – and it was second-hand then, published in 1965.

It’s the translation by EV Rieu, first published in 1946, and was the very first of that remarkable series. The Greek epic was probably written in the 8th or 7th century BC. Rieu’s style is a curious mixture of uncomplicated, even jauntily colloquial modern prose, with expressions like ‘bit the dust’ for a fallen battle opponent, or frequent descriptions of the boorish importunate suitors of Odysseus’ bereft wife Penelope eating him ‘out of house and home’.

But then he uses some oddly stilted or archaic expressions: ‘forgather’ (as when a ship’s crew assemble before embarkation); Telemachus sits among the carousing suitors (harassing his household and his mother) and dreams of his father returning to ‘drive all these gallants pell-mell from the house’. Feasts begin with dishes of ‘dainties’. Suitors didn’t start a meal, they ‘fell to’ it.

At one point a ship’s crew prepared to leave, and ‘brailed up the sail’ – a term I had to look up: sailors haul or tuck in a sail to the mast or yard using small ropes called brails.

But such dated or obscure language isn’t too intrusive, and most of the translation reads pretty fluently. I don’t know any ancient Greek, but as Rieu says in his introduction, it must have been a very difficult task to translate the formulaic, repetitive and poetic-bardic language of the original into something that reads approximately like idiomatic English, while retaining something of the stylised original (with roots in an oral/lyrical tradition – like some Anglo-Saxon poetry).

On the other hand, Rieu often employs rhythms resembling iambic pentameter, perhaps as a deliberate tactic to add a flavour of the poetic original. Here’s a passage chosen at random to illustrate this odd prose-verse style; this is Penelope, lamenting her fate as a wife believing her long-absent husband is dead:

‘Ah, it is hard but not beyond endurance when sick at heart one weeps the whole day long but is possessed by sleep at night…This very night again I thought I saw Odysseus by me in the bed, looking exactly as he looked when he sailed away with the fleet; and my heart leapt up, since I took it for no dream but actual fact.’

It’s a bloodthirsty tale, with lots of encounters with gruesome monsters, cannibals, cyclops and the terrifying Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus ends up losing all of his men and ships before he finally reaches home and metes out his revenge on the hated suitors.

The depiction of women is at times problematic. I just checked back at my post on Pat Barker’s reworking of some elements of The Iliad and The Odyssey in her novel The Silence of the Girls, in which she narrates much more from the perspective of the female characters, very much the victims of misogyny and abuse. In The Odyssey wives (and daughters) are expected to be loyal, submissive and dutiful, but the men are promiscuous with impunity. Odysseus himself sleeps with various beautiful goddesses and nymphs, staying with Calypso for years, though he does weep daily for his distant homeland and wife. The slave women who served in Odysseus’ palace and became sexually exploited by the suitors meet a particularly gruesome fate when he starts the slaughter.

Then there are the meddlesome gods; the mortal characters (especially the women, as I’ve just said) have little agency. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the mortals are to the gods like flies to wanton boys – almost everything that happens to them is orchestrated by malevolent or benevolent gods and goddesses. Even with the goddess Athene’s protection and advice Odysseus is very much a target for the vengeful Poseidon.

Despite these misgivings I enjoyed The Odyssey; it’s an exciting and energetic narrative, and it has deeply influenced our culture. Maybe I will go and see the film.

Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table

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Janet Frame (1924-2004), An Angel at My Table. Virago, 2014. First published in New Zealand 1989, UK 1990.

Janet Frame’s trilogy was known to me from Jane Campion’s 1990 award-winning film of the same name, which I seem to remember was deeply moving and beautifully done.

It was originally published in three volumes:

To the Is-land (1982)

An Angel at My Table (1984)

The Envoy at Mirror City (1985)

It’s a highly poetic, impressionistic autobiography, dealing with the author’s childhood in New Zealand, the effects of WWII, a long spell in institutions for what would then have been known as mentally ill or mad people, then her growing success as a published author.

Janet’s family were poor: her father worked on the railways, and ruled the household like a Victorian patriarch. Her mother played the role of submissive wife and housewife (‘an everlasting servant’), and carer for her children. They moved from one depressing, tiny rented home to another, always worried about finding the money to pay the rent and bills.

Always a shy, imaginative and introverted child, Janet was deeply affected by the early death of one of her sisters, followed a few years later by that of another. It was her inability to cope with this lacerating grief that possibly led to her, as a young woman, attempting suicide. Soon afterwards she’s admitted to hospital, where she’s ‘shocked’ to find she’s in a psychiatric ward. She’s transferred to Seacliff, the dreaded mental hospital, ‘where the loonies went’.

From this point, and for years to come, she loses agency:

No one asked me what my plans were for the future. I became an instant third person, or even personless…I was taken (third-person people are also thrust into the passive mood) to Seacliff…

This part of the book is the most moving and powerful. She recounts how she becomes institutionalised, along with all the other – well, it’s not quite fitting to call them patients, for that implies they were being cared for and treated, but this was far from the case. Once diagnosed as schizophrenic, Janet became even more personless: a label had been attached to her, and the consequence was that she was drugged and electrocuted into deeper passivity, and only narrowly avoided being lobotomised.

Her account of this horrific time is difficult to read, but salutary. It put me in mind of the men in a similar institution in the USA in the book and film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. Seacliff staff were all more vindictive and cruel than Nurse Ratched.

Finally released, she’s awarded a writer’s grant to travel so that she can broaden her experiences. She spends an idyllic time with local families in Ibiza and Andorra, then a more hectic period in various dingy parts of London. There’s a sad return to NZ at the end: her parents have died, but she’s becoming acclaimed at last as an author.

There are elements of autofiction in the telling of her story: she reflects on the nature of fiction, how it’s structured and expressed, and its flexible relation to what would generally be considered the factual nature of autobiography. She states several times that even in reconstructing and narrating events that she believes really happened, she’s inclined to embellish and invent. The book is as much a meditation on the nature of representation of a life in literature as it is about her life as it evolved in the real world.

A central image is that of what she calls ‘the mirror city’. Looking out of her window in Ibiza she sees ‘the city mirrored in the sea’. One day she walks round by the harbour:

…where the real city lay that I knew only as the city in the sea, but I felt as if I were trying to walk behind a mirror, and I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real mirror city lay within as the city of the imagination. (p.399)

A few pages later she goes to sit on a ‘pine-bordered beach’ and there follows one of the countless lyrical descriptions in the book of her response to nature:

…where I lay under the trees and listened to their their hush-hush, and the light fell like blue and green snow around and upon me, and the sea glittered through the pine branches. Not an unusual scene, but, as in my visit to the pine forests of the interior, it touched the antenna reaching from childhood, just as childhood contains its own antennae originating in conception and the life of the dead and the newly begun; and feeling the sensation at the nerve ending and its origin in the past among the pine trees and sky and water and light, I made this scene a replacement, a telescoping with the trained economy of memory, so that from then on, and in the future the memory of this scene contains the collective feeling of those past, and now when I listen to the pine trees by water, in light and blue, I feel the link, the fullness of being and loving and losing and wondering, the spinning ‘Why was the world?’ that haunted me in childhood, the shiver of yesterday, yet I remember the pine trees of Ibiza.

I’m not sure I understand all of that, but it’s beautiful. I suppose those ‘pine forests of the interior’ are another iteration of her ‘mirror’ imagery, while all that stuff about childhood antennae, the sensations along the nerve endings, the ‘telescoping’ and what follows sounds Wordsworthian to me. It’s worth reading this long trilogy just for passages like that.

Language and correctness and Kingsley Amis the captious critic

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Language and correctness

My previous two posts were about some expressions in English that had interested me. Some of the comments raised questions about the notion of ‘correct English’ v. evolving usage. I tend towards a critical but not judgemental version of the latter way of viewing language use.

Is there such a thing as ‘correct English?’ I typed this sentence into Google, and it came up with this:

Yes, “correct English” exists as a social standard, but not as a scientific rule. Linguists generally agree that no regional dialect is naturally superior, but society uses Standard English as a baseline for formal writing, education, and legal communication.

That sounds about right to me; it’s not helpful to have an over-prescriptive view of what constitutes correctness in language use; so much depends on a complex range of factors, from social and other contexts in which the language is being used, to the purpose and audience of the conversation or written text.

With these kinds of questions in mind I dipped back into The King’s English: a guide to modern usage, by Kingsley Amis (Harper Collins, 1997), a self-confessed ‘officious neurotic who sets right venial blunderers uninvited…a vocal stickler’ (introductory section, p. xi). He begins by citing his debt to HW Fowler’s monumental Modern English Usage (1926), the aim of which Amis says was

 …to settle scores as well as problems, to shake things up, to make people think about what they said and wrote, to be provocative with being unjust.

Amis’s book also does all of those things, but usually with the emphasis on ‘provocative’ and negative, an approach that’s hinted at just a few sentences after the quotation above, where he writes

…without Fowler and his heirs and allies, the language might be in an even worse state than it is. A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted.

He goes on to say that occasionally he feels he has insufficient ‘training’ to launch into linguistic argument, but then

I spot some fresh linguistic barbarism and am off again. I am sustained by reflecting that the defence of the language is too large a matter to be left to the properly qualified…

Ok, it’s clear he’s being mischievously contentious here, and in much of the rest of the book. But that kind of ultra-prescriptive attitude is still fairly prevalent, and says more about the person pontificating than it does about language itself. That language is in a decadent state, that those who try to rectify ‘barbarisms’ are fighting a ‘lost cause’ is meant, I presume, to be amusingly splenetic, but it exposes an attitude that’s patrician and surely rather snobbish and patronising.

I admit to sometimes feeling my hackles rise in a way that probably resembles what Amis describes when I hear people say (and even write) things like ‘I should OF done X’ or ‘I would OF liked to…’ But it wouldn’t presume to ‘correct’ this ‘error’. This is a structure that’s clearly caused by the speaker or writer HEARING ‘of’ instead of the standard form ‘have’ when it’s compressed into ‘should’ve’ or ‘would’ve’, and being unaware of the distinction. Some might call this ignorance or sloppiness, but it’s best surely to see it as a fairly natural development in a culture that’s increasingly oral rather than written, or in which written texts are mostly electronically generated and shared, and ephemeral – like text messages and social media posts.

An example or two of Amis’s bromides about language use. On the term ‘aggro’, for example (the key words under discussion in his book are arranged in alphabetical order, so this is on pp. 4-5) he writes

Plenty of disreputably descended works and persons have found a tolerated if not a welcome place in this country, to risk sounding pompous.

Yes, I find that unsubtle quip pretty pompous, like many of his other entries in the book. But some are more balanced and tolerant; for example, the idea that we should avoid starting a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’. This is  what he calls ‘an empty superstition’. It’s a pity he isn’t often as broadminded as that.

I could go on with countless further examples of his heavy-handedly witty fulminating about ‘barbarisms’ and errors, but I’ll end with his mildly offensive characterisation of what he calls ‘berks’ and ‘wankers’.

Berks are ‘careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way’ [dropped Hs, glottal stops and ‘mistakes in grammar’]. ‘Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.’

Wankers ‘are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded…Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.’

For once I think this is quite clever and witty. He goes on, however, to suggest we ‘try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious’, avoiding extremes, ‘and this is healthy’ for speakers and writers, and for the language. All very laudable – but I don’t think he succeeds in avoiding the position of the excessively pedantic ‘wanker’.

I leave the final word to Fowler, as quoted by RW Burchfield in his invaluable revision of that 1926 work: The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (third edition, Oxford, 1996). In his entry on ambiguity, Fowler originally wrote (and Burchfield quotes):

‘A captious critic might find examples [of false ordering of words] on almost every page of almost any writer.’

 Amis is definitely a captious critic.

I recommend an article which expounds a very different, much more liberal and, in my view, more sensible attitude to such matters. It’s by writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen, whose engaging and entertaining BBC Radio 4 programme on language, Word of Mouth, I’ve mentioned before. It’s called Sorry, there’s no such thing as ‘correct grammar’, and was published in the Guardian newspaper in 2012; it’s available online HERE (no paywall).

More language comments

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More language comments

I posted last time about some English language expressions that interested me. Here are a few more.

GEOPOLITICS, GEOPOLITICAL. This is now used almost exclusively, I’ve noticed, in the media instead of just ‘politics/political’. I suppose there is a subtle difference, but I don’t think this is what’s behind the trend – it’s just because it’s become fashionable, perhaps. Maybe its users think it sounds more impressive, as it consists of more syllables. I suppose it relates to references to international rather than purely domestic politics? Maybe it is a justifiable usage, then…

OFF-RAMP. This American term is becoming increasingly common here in the UK, especially in recent coverage of President Trump’s position over the Iran war; a typical example back in March in the UK Guardian newspaper stated:

Trump’s advisers have maintained that he is negotiating in good faith – but the past year has shown that military build-ups rarely veer to the off-ramp…

The primary sense of this term in America, I believe, is to signify what in Britain is called a ‘slip-road’, that is, the turning off or exit away from a major road, called here a motorway (or a freeway or highway I suppose in the US). The usage cited above, then, is metaphorical, signifying in political (or geopolitical) contexts, so a google search told me:

a diplomatic or strategic exit strategy that allows a party to de-escalate a conflict, back down from a firm position, or avoid a disastrous outcome without losing face or suffering total humiliation…a graceful alternative to ‘surrender’ [or] ‘way out’ of a ‘doomed highway’ in political stand-offs.

[I resist the temptation to analyse that use of ‘stand-offs’]

The relevance to Trump’s dilemma over the ever-longer, deadlier and more costly Iran war is evident: he needs a way out from the dangerous, high-speed highway he entered back in February, presumably thinking (if that’s not a stretch when considering his decision-making processes) that it would be over in days, as with Venezuela.

There are a few other terms I’ve noted in the recent past that might also have their origins in American usage.

WHAT DOES X LOOK LIKE?

This kind of expression has been popping up everywhere for the last few years. I have a note from December 2024 about a newspaper item discussing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Syria. ‘What would peace look like?’ (or something along those lines) was the structure used. It’s a formula that’s replacing the simpler (and to my mind, less unnecessarily metaphorical) ‘what form might peace take?’ or ‘it’s difficult to imagine what form of peace could replace the current turmoil caused by military action’. These alternatives use more words, but avoid slipping into journalistic cliché.

A similar pair of clichés now used everywhere in the media:

HOW WILL X LAND? – instead of ‘what will happen about X?’ or ‘what reaction could there be to X?’ I find this metaphorical term has unfortunate implications or connotations, as if the topic X is like a bird or aircraft coming to the ground from the air, or an athlete or non-human object dropping to the ground from a height, potentially incurring injury or damage.

TO BE ACROSS SOMETHING – seems to mean that a person is familiar with a topic or problem, dealing with it competently, handling it well, etc, as in ‘she’s across all the details of her brief’. It’s replaced the earlier cliché that went something like ‘to be on top of something’, meaning one is fully conversant with something under discussion, or that it’s under one’s control, the person with whom the expression is directed is therefore not to worry – it’s a coded form of reassurance (rather than assurance).

There I’d better stop before I sound too prescriptive and curmudgeonly (what a great word).

Aside: language use

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An aside about language use

It’s been a while since I posted one of these ‘asides’ about language. Time for one now.

First, a couple of usages that I think are American rather than British English. We’ve recently been watching a rather cumbersome dystopian/sci-fi series on Netflix called Silo. In one episode a character confesses shamefacedly to his mother that he was asked by the protagonist of the series, Juliette, to help her unveil the lies being told to the community in the silo by their leaders. He said he couldn’t, he was his mother’s only carer. He admits this was a lie, an act of cowardice. He goes on to say something along the lines of:

‘I wish I WOULD’VE SAID something different’.

In British English I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t use that modal structure; we’d say ‘I wish I HAD SAID something different’ – because there’s no doubt about this assertion. The use of ‘would’ve’ implies some weird kind of uncertainty or possibility in the future, not the past.

Another usage that I think was American involves expressions including ‘no matter…’ without being followed, as is usual in British English, by ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, etc. Here in Britain then we’d say ‘no matter what it costs’ or ‘what the cost’; in America they drop the word following ‘matter’ (usually an adverb or pronoun of some sort, I think; my memory of grammatical terms isn’t what it used to be). So that would become ‘no matter the cost’. This sounds a bit odd or disjointed to my English ears.

I googled it, and AI came up with this explanation:

In American English, ‘no matter the (something)’ means ‘regardless of’. It shows that a specific condition does not change the outcome. ‘No matter the weather, we will hike’ means we will hike even if it rains.

As is the way with evolving language, it’s started to appear in the media here in England. I came across examples on the Guardian newspaper website recently, but unfortunately neglected to make a note of the exact sentences, but it was a similar structure to the American ‘no matter the X’.

That’s not intended to be a criticism of the ‘our language is deteriorating’ type, just an observation of an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Language changes all the time, no matter what we might think about it…

One final comment: a couple of days ago on the BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news there was an item about the corporation’s financial squeeze and accompanying problems. This was because, said the presenter, Sarah Montague [something like]:

‘The number of people who have stopped paying the TV licence fee has dropped’.

Perhaps I should explain for overseas readers that here in the UK everyone who accesses BBC broadcast TV services, including online, must buy an annually renewable licence, which costs this year, I believe, £180.

Montague then introduced the programme’s media correspondent, who repeated this expression almost word for word. She went on to give the numbers involved, which was something along the lines of ‘in 2023 there were 25 million licence fee payers, and in ’25-26 it was 23 million’.

That is, the number of people who have stopped paying the licence fee has RISEN, not ‘dropped’; it’s the number of people who are still paying the fee that has fallen.

Ok, I daresay I’m sounding like a pedantic language maven here, but this is surely just careless inaccuracy, not natural language change in action.

I’d be interested to know what others think about the points made above.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night. Hodder pb, 2016; first published 1935. 564 pp. Library copy

I’m not a fan of crime fiction, not even the ‘golden age’ variety of which DLS is a prime exponent. Somewhere down the line I must have had Gaudy Night recommended to me, so I collected a copy from my local library and persevered to the end of what’s an overlong, overwritten, intriguing and muddled example of the genre.

First off, there’s no murder for the arch sleuth to solve. Instead, Harriet Vane, a crime novelist clearly intended to be something of a surrogate for DLS herself, is the primary ‘detective’. She’s attended the reunion of the novel’s title at her old (all-female) Oxford college, where some mischief-maker has begun a campaign of poison pen letters, obscene graffiti and other acts of nasty vandalism that seem to be aiming their vitriol at the female academic staff. The college’s senior members ask her to investigate.

What follows is an over-elaborate account of her attempts to identify the perpetrator. There’s a large and (I found) confusingly undifferentiated group of characters who are the main suspects. After a hundred pages or so I couldn’t really get too excited about all this.

There are long philosophical-sociological discussions about intellect v. heart (I think). There are a few implausible undergrad flirtations with HV, including an infuriating Bertie Wooster-type viscount, nephew of Lord Peter Wimsey, the other main sleuth in a sequence of these DLS novels.

There are some interesting debates and observations about the right of women to follow a career, whether in academia or elsewhere, so long as it doesn’t confine them to the domestic sphere. This being the mid-30s, there are a few chilling references to Nazi slogans on such things. In this respect it’s something of a politically charged feminist novel.

What’s disappointing, therefore, is that Harriet is reduced to calling on the help of Lord Peter when her own enquiries seem to be getting nowhere, and the vandalism continues. Like a deus ex machina he swoops in and solves the mystery.

I said at the start that the novel is overwritten. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from renaissance writers, and many of the characters, especially Lord Peter, find it almost impossible to complete more than a few sentences of dialogue without inserting a quotation or allusion to literature of that period, or from Latin or Greek sources. Nothing wrong with that, but it begins to look like the author is showing off her literary erudition in a way that distracts from the main narrative. The effect is stilted and seems affected.

There’s some quite interesting detail about clothes and dress conventions of the thirties; Moira of the excellent blog Clothes in Books (link HERE) has some interesting comments on some of this. Her response to DLS is much more enthusiastic than mine, so it’s worth taking a look at what she has to say to provide an alternative to mine.

There are some single sentences that stand out as marvellous bits of writing – but they are outnumbered by countless others that are too rococo in style.

Not a terrible novel, then, but not my cup of tea.

Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

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Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day, Jonathan Cape hb 2019, 280 pp.

Two couples negotiate bereavement, infidelity and parenting: the basis of many if not most novels. The ‘novel’ part is what the writer does with this familiar basis to raise it above the mundane and predictably ordinary. Tessa Hadley tries perhaps a bit too hard to do this with her quartet of self-absorbed middle-class characters, and the result isn’t entirely satisfactory – but there are some redeeming features.

The novel begins with the bereavement I mentioned, and what follows is an account of the fallout this causes in the three survivors who were closest to the deceased. Fissures in their relationships deepen as a consequence, and the uneasy equilibrium of their lives is disturbed irretrievably.

A series of flashbacks gives us the back story to all this. One of the women, Christine, has a record of not finishing things: a PhD that was abandoned, a potential career as an artist given up, perhaps temporarily, because of self-doubt and an unsupportively critical husband. Her best friend Lydia is vain and selfish, and all of these factors play a part in the tumultuous after effects of the bereavement.

Tessa Hadley pulls all this together skilfully and with some well-crafted prose. It’s just that I couldn’t really care too much what happens to these characters through the ill-judged or self-serving choices that they make.

There are some fine passages of description of the setting (mostly London – and its growing population of raucous parakeets), and interesting details about several of the characters’ attempts to produce works of art in various media. There’s this, for example, about Zachary, whose wealthy parents were ‘enthusiastic patrons of the arts’ and were able to provide useful connections. Zachary was later the owner of an art gallery, but in his younger days ‘was struggling with a novel’ and the creation of ‘light-box installations’ which had attracted the attention of editors and galleries (thanks to those influential parents and his own ‘resilient good luck and his charm’) – but like Christine, mentioned above, ‘he hadn’t finished anything yet’:

[His friend Alex] didn’t think Zachary had the necessary cruelty that made an artist, or the incompleteness in himself. He was too rounded and too hopeful. His work was derived from his enthusiasm for the arts, which was all upside down. But then Alex’s ideas about an artist’s life were based naturally on his own father, whose gifts [as a novelist] had been so bitterly unfulfilled.

This passage says a lot ostensibly about Zachary and his shortcomings, but also about Alex, through whose consciousness this is filtered.

Passages of this calibre do appear elsewhere in the novel, but they serve to highlight the less inspiring majority of the narrative.

I was much less impressed by the other Tessa Hadley novel I’ve posted about here: The Party. There’s a brief note on it from a couple of years ago HERE.

 

William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

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William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault, Penguin 2017; first published 2002, pb 228 pp.

Ireland in 1921: the war of independence was nearing an end, and the partition of the island was about to be agreed – but that didn’t end the armed struggle, as has been recorded in so many novels, poems and films. It’s against this background of guerrilla warfare and internal strife that William Trevor’s superb novel begins.

It’s not possible to say much about the plot without giving away spoilers. The novel opens like this:

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers’ heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

They had come to ‘fire the house’, intending either to drive these hated Anglo-Irish landowners out of their country, or to kill them. Everard and his wife decide to follow the lead of so many others in that country in a similar position of peril and leave for a safer place. They pass the news of this decision on to their eight-year-old daughter Lucy. She’s heartbroken at the prospect of abandoning the place she loves.

What follows is a desperately tender and poignant story of a family’s lives blighted by loss, guilt, and lifelong struggles for understanding, redemption and forgiveness.

Meanwhile Trevor also follows the life of the young man who’d been wounded that fateful night. His connection with the Gault family doesn’t end on that June night.

It’s a wonderful novel, beautifully written. I find it hard to describe Trevor’s capacity for writing prose that’s lucid and spare but also full of subtle cadences and poetic touches that resonate long after the sentence just read. I had to keep stopping and taking a breath to allow these resonances and effects to sink in. It’s all profoundly moving without ostentatiously striving for dramatic impact, or becoming morbid or depressing.

I’ve read much of Trevor’s fictional output over the years and always considered him one of the finest writers of his generation; this novel is by far the best I’ve read so far.

Iris Murdoch, The Flight From the Enchanter

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Iris Murdoch, The Flight From the Enchanter, Penguin pb, 1962; first published 1956. 287 pp.

Just back last week from a three-week trip to Canada and Alaska, which was wonderful. That’s why there’s be nothing posted here for a while. Still haven’t recovered fully from jet lag, so this may be a bit less coherent than usual.

The first book I finished while travelling was this strange novel by Iris Murdoch – the first of hers that I’ve read (I think – might have forgotten one from years ago). I enjoyed it as it went along, but it left me at the end thinking, so what?

As days went by afterwards, I reflected some more, and it began to reassemble itself, in a way, in my thinking, and I became less dismissive. I’ll try and explain, but it’s difficult.

The plot and characters are borderline surreal or magical-realist. Different threads develop seemingly unconnected. Some seem to go nowhere, signify nothing. But afterwards a kind of fuzzy coherence becomes apparent.

A young woman leaves her posh finishing school and celebrates by swinging on the chandelier in the staffroom. She’s determined to learn in the ‘school of life’ – but what follows seems to teach her little. Her resistance to the conventions of the system, her quest for fulfilment and freedom, is celebrated, if not her rather immature character and privileged background.

If there’s a central storyline it’s the attempt by a shady, possibly east European press magnate called Mischa Fox (apt name), to buy out a failing literary-political magazine founded by suffragettes. Its current owner-editor, Hunter (all the names are apt), resists this attempt, appalled by the personality and reputation of Fox and his ruthlessly amoral fixer, Calvin Blick – who blackmails him into compliance.

He does this by taking compromising photos of Hunter’s sister Rosa, who’s engaged in a bizarre love triangle with two Polish brothers who work in the same factory as her (why is a nice middle-class girl of the 1950s working there? It’s one of many weird details that drift by.) She, and several of the other female characters, all succumb to the seductive charms of Fox.

That’s sort of it. Summarising the plot doesn’t begin to do justice to the strange incandescence of this unusual novel. It hints at all kinds of symbolic significance (I think). There’s also a scholar engaged in a noble but quixotic quest to decode a set of ancient texts written in a kind of cuneiform or hieroglyphic script – does he represent the futility of aimless research, or the purity and integrity of the seeker after truth and clarity? What, after all, is truth?

A civil servant vegetates in a pointless bureaucratic system, resentful of the rise of the young women who increasingly challenge complacent dinosaurs like him: there’s quite a lot of this kind of thing, celebrating the struggle of women to liberate themselves from submission to the patriarchy – hence that magazine founded by suffragettes; btw, that’s the word IM uses, rather than ‘suffragists’. The magazine takeover is resisted by an ageing group of the women who helped found it.

Other themes, related in part to the above, include other kinds of struggle for freedom, as so many people live a life of deprivation, confinement, restriction of opportunity, and even oppression. The flight from the titular enchanter, Fox, represents a variation on that theme. A surprisingly contemporary corollary of this is the depiction of immigrants, possibly illegal, terrified by the prospect of deportation. One such character takes the most extreme way out.

There are some aspects of the novel that show some dated attitudes, including a rather nasty sexual assault on a young woman. Fox himself shows an attitude to the women who find him (unaccountably, it seems to me) irresistible that’s not a million miles away from some of the high-profile sexual predators who have come to public attention in the last few years.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note. Murdoch’s writing is elegant, witty and satisfyingly rich and full of layers of significance, as I hope I’ve (not too clearly) suggested. Although some parts of it haven’t dated well, it’s one of the most unusual, original and cerebral novels I’ve read in a while.

Jean-Christophe Réhel, All Kidding Aside

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Jean-Christophe Réhel, All Kidding Aside. QC Fiction 2025 (first published in French 2023 as La blague du siècle), pb, 303 pp. Translated by Neil Smith.

There’s a hint of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men about Jean-Christophe Réhel’s novel All Kidding Aside. The central character is 32-year-old Louis, who lives in Pointe-aux-Trembles, east Montreal. He’s a carer for his terminally ill father, but more to the point for his hulking schizophrenic brother, who’s obsessed with playing rap music at full volume, and constantly on the verge of psychotic episodes. Louis is often frustrated and angry with Guillaume’s erratic behaviour, but their mutual love is palpable.

This might all sound a bit grim, but it’s a deeply moving, heartfelt account of familial love and loyalty. Louis is in a dead-end job working at a fast-food joint, the tedium of which is alleviated by the generosity and friendship of one of his co-workers. His father is weirdly obsessed with finding love via dating apps, and one of his dates turns out to be a truly supportive figure when there’s a crisis.

There’s not much in the way of plot; we simply see this family group struggling to cope with adverse circumstances, but finding resources and depths of affection that are inspiring and uplifting to read about. Despite the sobering content, it’s not a pessimistic or depressing read. There’s a lot of humour that blends naturally with the seriousness. The title, for example, alludes to Louis’ dream of becoming a stand-up comedian, and he often visits a local bar that has regular comedy nights.

The translation is worth a separate comment. I’ve recently read the first two volumes of the Penguin Classics selections (in chronological order) of Chekhov’s short stories. I struggled with them at times, partly because the translation was sometimes stodgy and awkward. I don’t like to criticise a translator’s work, because it’s a very difficult feat to pull off convincingly. Neil Smith has done a terrific job with this novel. There’s a lot of French-Canadian idiom and local profanity (which merit their own endnote to explain their Catholic church origins, weirdly) which must have been particularly tricky to render into something that sounds authentic in English – but he manages it with aplomb. It’s one of the most fluent, natural and unobtrusive translations I recall reading in a long time. Even the English title is an inventive and successful rendering of the French original.

My thanks to QC Fiction for providing me with this review copy.