Monthly Archives: November 2025

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

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Ian McEwan, What We Can Know. Jonathan Cape hb 2025. 301 pp. Library copy

I’ve always been drawn to and (mostly) enjoyed the novels of Ian McEwan. In What We Can Know, his latest, he’s even more ambitious than usual, and there’s a strong literary element, in that a central character is a famous (fictitious) poet of the late 20C-early 21C: Francis Bundy, said to have been up there with Seamus Heaney.

The novel deals in the first half with the nature of biography, hence the title. The protagonist here is Tom Metcalfe, a literary scholar specialising in the period 1990-2030. So yes, it’s a sci-fi novel of sorts, in that it’s set in 2119, and the times we live in now have become as distant and different as the Bloomsburys are to us. He’s employed at the University of the South Downs, and he has gone to the Bodleian Library in Snowdonia. After a disastrous series of nuclear conflicts, which have exacerbated the effects of climate change, Britain (and most of Europe) has been inundated, and the habitable territory reduced to a few dozen square miles of former high ground.

I suppose dystopian novel of the future would be a better genre description than ‘sci-fi’. McEwan works in a lot of grim stuff about the lack of creature comforts and technology we take for granted today: food and other basic resources are limited in scope, transport is largely by ferry and boat, and nature has been decimated.

Tom’s on a quest to track down a long-lost poem by Blundy, a ‘Corona’, a sequence of 15 linked sonnets dedicated to his wife Vivien. He’d read this poem aloud to her and their guests at her 54th birthday party in their rural barn house. He’d handwritten it on a piece of vellum, and there were no copies. By its ‘non-existence’ it had in the century that passed ‘become a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.’

The poem, through no merit of its own but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire of political economy, global history and suffering.

With its references to wild flowers, country picnics and river swims, it had taken on the kind of pastoral, idyllic reputation of the poetry of the great Romantics, and Blundy – and in particular this dinner-party ‘corona’ – was seen in the tradition of Wordsworth and Keats. Tom has spent countless hours wading through digital and other archives of largely trivial journals and records of the time, attempting, as all biographers do, to tell a story about a long-dead person’s life that combines textually attested evidence with imagination.

His quest takes him to some dangerous places, and his obsession causes him to neglect his personal relationships. He feels more affinity, in some ways, with biographer Richard Holmes in his account of reproducing RL Stevenson’s travels in the Cevennes with a donkey than he does with his wife.

We hear a great deal about the guests at that birthday dinner. As the novel progresses our perception of their relationships with each other and with the Blundys shifts dramatically, and our view of Tom’s quest and the legendary lost poem MS shifts with it. McEwan handles all this with gusto, and it’s hard not to keep turning the pages to see where he takes us with this motley cast of characters, past and present.

Then the narrative in part two is taken over by another voice, and the novel becomes something very different again. A whole new dynamic replaces what we thought we knew about that dinner party, its hosts and its guests. Plot twists and revelations resemble those found in golden age crime fiction – but all narrated with McEwan’s customary edgy originality.

This was an immersive, rewarding reading experience, yet after finishing it I felt a little like one does after eating a delicious dessert: deep pleasure followed by a realisation that it wasn’t really very nutritious. Some of the dystopian tropes, the surprises and uncovered secrets in the plot seem, in retrospect, too contrived, and the characterisation implausible. But there’s no denying McEwan’s mastery of his material, and ability to tell a cracking good story.

Most of my reading of McEwan was done pre-blog. I posted a brief note on his 2023 novel Lessons HERE.

William Boyd, The Predicament

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William Boyd, The Predicament. Penguiin Viking hb 2025. 259 pp. Personal copy

A sequel to last year’s Gabriel’s Moon, about which I posted a brief note HERE, this is the second in a projected trilogy of novels about ‘accidental spy’ Gabriel Dax. In the previous novel Gabriel is sucked into the murky world of MI6 espionage by his dodgy brother.

This time round Gabriel still harbours a passion for his spy boss, Faith, but it’s very much an on-off relationship, and he’s more stuck on her than she seems to be on him. There are several situations in this novel, again rather too heavy on plot twists and mysterious, duplicitous characters, when they seem to be getting closer, but then she drifts away again, aloof and inscrutable. Gabriel moons (sorry about the pun) like a teenager.

The central spy plot is again very complicated. Gabriel is playing a dangerous game with the Russians, who pay him handsomely for information, unaware (or are they?) that he’s a double agent. He goes to various exotic destinations again, gets caught up in murders and political plots, initially involving CIA machinations in Guatemala, and then a planned assassination attempt on JFK in Berlin.

As an amateur, reluctant spy who constantly wishes he could just focus on his primary career as a travel writer, Gabriel is remarkably resourceful and astute when he finds himself in sticky situations as a result of his espionage. Despite his obsession with Faith, he has some flirtatious moments with a number of other women with whom he comes into contact in his guise as an MI6 ‘unit’ (less established and prestigious than an agent).

It’s a competent piece of genre spy fiction in the manner of le Carré with hints of Ian Fleming (Boyd is the author of a James Bond ‘continuation’ novel), Graham Greene and even Frederick Forsyth, but there are some of that genre’s clichés and stereotypes, and several over-stated ‘how do I get out of this mess’ situations. There are too many scenes in which Gabriel questions his involvement in the spy game, or asks rhetorically what is happening in his missions – his apparent bemusement becomes tiresome.

There’s an excessive amount of background detail, too, over and above what’s strictly necessary to establish the multiple international and domestic settings, or the early 60s setting (lots of smoking and heavy drinking, and unreconstructed masculinity). We get detailed descriptions of what the characters are wearing in almost every situation they appear in.

It’s an entertaining enough read, but probably best suited to those who have more of a taste for spy thrillers than I do.

Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter

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Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter. Picador hb, 2025. First pub. in Mothers and Sons, 2005. 137pp. Library copy.

This is a little naughty, reissuing as a stand-alone hardback ‘novella’ what was originally a long short story in Tóibín’s collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, twenty years ago (as he acknowledges in an Afterword). The story itself runs to just 124 pp. in this small format hardback.

On one level this is a highly atmospheric tale of the mysterious disappearance one day at the start of the harsh winter in the high Catalonian Pyrenees of the mother of Miquel and his younger brother Jordi. She’d had an argument the previous day with their dour, domineering father, and had clearly just walked out.

But the burafa had set in – a kind of swirling, blizzard-like snow storm – and this makes searching for the missing woman nigh on impossible. Neighbours join in, but their help is grudging: Miquel’s father had been pretty much ostracised after his part in a dispute in which he’d shown his mean selfishness.

Much of the story is a tense account of Miquel’s increasingly frantic, futile attempts to negotiate the impassable, snowbound mountain roads and trails. As the neighbours grimly predict, his mother’s body probably won’t be found until the spring thaw – if she had in fact died in the storm.

There’s another, more subtle and poignant storyline. Miquel is gay, and there are a couple of scenes when he exchanges meaningful glances with a visiting police officer (they’d been called in to help with the search).

Then Manolo joins the household. He’s the orphaned young man who’d been housekeeping for a family over the mountain to merit his bed and board. Miquel and his father had always left all the cooking, cleaning and tending to the domestic animals, to their hard-pressed, long-suffering mother. Without her they struggle to survive, and Manolo’s arrival gets them out of a hole.

A bond grows between this young man and Miquel. This is subtly and movingly portrayed by Tóibín. This is a highly conservative, deeply Catholic community, so any kind of relationship between the two would be highly risky. This fine Irish author handles this complex web of secrets, lies and emotional tensions with great skill and delicacy.

Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But The Wind…’

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Frieda Lawrence, ‘Not I, But The Wind…’  William Heinemann, hb, 1935; first published in America in 1934. 276 pp.

This is the second of two books lent to me recently by my friend C. It’s an account by Frieda, née von Richtofen (1879-1956), of her stormy, passionate life with the man who became her second husband: DH Lawrence (1885-1930).

Like the woman herself, it’s a highly unconventional, deeply felt and not entirely reliable account. I could quote the entire four-page Foreword to illustrate its lively, often self-deprecating tone, but here’s a lengthy but I hope revealing sample:

I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? [There’s a lot of insight like this into his not very sympathetic, aggressive criticism of what he perceived as her shortcomings.]…Is it any use, my writing?…Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can’t I?…I will try to write as honestly as I can…

She then writes the first of many descriptions of the fiery, tempestuous nature of their relationship:

It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us.; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills…[there was an] unalterable bond between us…

There are several echoes of the language of DHL himself here and throughout this account, and she clearly took on board some of his ideas and beliefs, that are now often seen as misogynistic and excessively authoritarian. She goes on:

We had many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters. There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence’s chief themes.

Then she points out the ‘class war’ between them: they came from ‘different worlds’ – she an aristocrat, he a collier’s son. They had to transcend this gulf, ‘to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.’

There’s that Lawrentian language again.

Then there’s the ‘race’ difference: he was an ‘Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along. Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.’

Frieda isn’t averse to giving a warts-and-all account. She doesn’t claim to have understood him. ‘I only know that I felt the wonder of him always’:

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather.

She learned from him what true genius was. But she clearly didn’t always like him very much, as when he cruelly mocked her for showing she didn’t know how to turn on a gas hob. Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failures and miseries of my past [including her marriage to her first husband, the Nottingham University academic, Ernest Weekley?]…He fought for the liberty of my being, and won.’

Frieda and Lawrence met in 1912, when she was still living with Weekley. She was, she says on p.3, 31 (but she was born in 1879, so I make it 33), and had three children. Lawrence was 26. Within weeks they had eloped to Europe, and she left behind, to her shame and grief, her children; as Weekley filed for divorce on the grounds of her infidelity, she had no legal right to claim custody of them. Lawrence initially consoled her, but then turned characteristically harsh about her sorrow:

…he was furious when I went on [grieving, having received letters from them at home]. “You don’t care a damn about those brats really, and they don’t care about you!” I cried, and we quarrelled.

She adds that he, ‘who had loved his own mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children.’ She doesn’t pursue this, but that sounds pretty brutal to me.

She wrote this, whatever this book is, memoir, (auto)biography, poetic reminiscence, at the New Mexico ranch where the couple, who married in 1914, lived on and off for several years in the 1920s, and to which she returned to live most of the rest of her life when Lawrence died in 1930. This book poignantly portrays Lawrence’s always fragile ‘consumptive’ condition: ‘I know now how completely he trusted his life to me, he in whom death was always so near’. This partly explains their constant wanderings in search of more congenial climates for his tubercular lungs.

Her description of that first meeting in 1912 is charming: in the opening sentence of the first chapter she writes:

…it surprises me that Lawrence could have loved me at first sight as he did. I hardly think I could have been a very lovable woman at the time…[But] I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self.

What follows is a vivid, always engaging account of their wanderings all over the world. There are over 90 of Lawrence’s letters included, to Frieda, her mother and sister. Some of his poems are reproduced, including (I’m pretty sure I’m not misremembering this) ‘Song of a man who has come through’, with its opening line from which Frieda takes her title: ‘Not I, not I but the wind that blows through me.’

There’s only a short section on their time near Zennor in Cornwall, about which I’ve posted here several times before (link HERE). ‘The war seemed to drive Lawrence to utter despair’, she writes; one consequence of this was the beginning of a souring in their always volatile relationship: ‘In those days Lawrence seemed to turn against me, perhaps on account of the bit of German in me.’ It was hardly ‘a bit’! She was a (very distant) cousin of the famous ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen, the German WWI flying ace.

I enjoyed this as a book to dip into, find weird delights in unexpected places. I can’t recommend it as a full and accurate profile of the married life of the Lawrences (there have been plenty more academic and sober versions published), but it’s a spirited, partial, passionate love letter to a man she clearly adored, and he adored her back – but it was clearly, even from Frieda’s highly subjective perspective, a love-hate thing.

‘It is the devil inside me’: Victoria Mackenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain

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Victoria Mackenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain. Bloomsbury hb 2023. 164 pp. Loaned by a friend, CB.

This is the story of two extraordinary medieval women. This was a period when we ‘usually hear nothing in the annals of history’ about such women, as the author says in her epilogue. Their stories are told here in alternating short sections in what is a very short novel. Considering it deals with the mostly inner lives of two medieval mystics, it’s a highly engaging read. Although they both experienced mystical visions, they were very different in character and life circumstances, and award-winning Scots author Victoria Mackenzie skilfully brings out these similarities and differences in the use of their indirect narrative voices.

Margery Kempe was the wife of a Norfolk merchant, mother of at least 12 children. Soon after the birth of one of her babies she starts having visions of Jesus. She feels impelled to go out into the town to tell people of these mystical experiences. It was a time when claiming to have direct communication with God resulted in the person being burnt at the stake as a heretic. Everyone warns her to keep quiet (‘stop your nonsense’, snaps her neighbour Agnes, who on a later occasion suggests her visions are just what Margery wishes them to be), but she persists with this dangerous course of action. She starts to weep a lot in public, which doesn’t help her image.

Julian of Norwich lost numerous family members to ‘the pestilence’ (usually known nowadays as plague or Black Death), including her husband and new baby. After an illness she had the first of her many ‘shewings’ or visions of Jesus. She too is warned by her priest to hold her tongue. She obeys, but writes them down in secret. This silence causes her to fear she’s a coward. When her mother died she became an anchoress (‘an anchor for God…anchored to God’), walled up for 23 years in a cell next to a church dedicated to St Julian, whose name she took. She can have no direct contact with anyone, and speaks to visitors through a curtained window. Her maid provides her with physical necessities through another window.

There is a ceremony to become an anchoress. A nun is a bride of Christ and so has a nuptial mass, but becoming an anchorite is a death.

I had to die to the world.

At first she’s unsettled, unsure of her vocation, but learns to accept the contemplative life, the cycle of services and prayer. She follows the contemporary rule for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse. ‘The life of an anchoress should be one of quiet reflection, not pain or self-denial’ (Julian’s voice, p. 12) She’s smells the smoke from the flames of executions of heretics in the town, and sympathises with the victims, for she also believes that God’s love saves sinners without the need for a priest’s intercession. This also, of course, reinforces her awareness of the perils of speaking out about her visions.

Both women have doubts about their visions: ‘What if my vision was from the devil? How could I be sure that my vision was something good and holy, and not something evil to make me look a fool?’ (Margery’s voice, p. 9). She is robustly examined and accused several times by church representatives, who suspect her of heresy and of being a Lollard (a contemporary reforming movement associated with Wycliffe, which challenged or questioned many of the Catholic church’s principles and practices).

Julian is allowed to keep a cat; over the years she has several. In one bitter winter a squirrel moves under her bed for shelter: ‘My cat did not approve and slept in Sara’s [her maid’s] room.’

In 1431, many years after her first vision, Margery resolves to visit Julian, of whom she’d heard many good things. With a legacy from her deceased father she’d been able to pay off her feckless husband’s debts, so he felt unable to forbid it. The meeting of the two mystics forms a heart-warming climax to this unusual, beautifully modulated novel. They instinctively understand each other. Julian is impressed by Margery’s courage in speaking out when she had refrained from doing so, and endorses the validity of her visions. She asks her visitor to take her secret book of shewings out into the world. She was to die soon after this meeting. Margery went on to use her father’s legacy to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Compostela and elsewhere.

Soon after returning home to [King’s] Lynn after speaking with Julian, Margery, who was illiterate, wonders, as she considers the anchoress’s pages, what their power could be. In another vision Jesus urges her to write her own book. Her husband is sceptical, saying nobody would be interested in such a thing: ‘”A woman knows little of life,”’ he scoffs. ‘”Other women may be interested,”’ she insists. ‘”Women cannot read,” he said. “Their brains are too soft.”’ Undaunted, she later dictates her story to a series of scribes.

This book came down to us as The Book of Margery Kempe. Mackenzie acknowledges the modern English translation by B.A. Windeatt as a source for her novel. It is credited as being the first autobiography in the English language.

Her other main source is Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing. It is probably the first surviving book in English by a woman. In a note Mackenzie describes her novel as ‘a creative engagement with both texts as well as a work of imagination.’ As such it’s a remarkable and inspiring achievement, even for a reader like me with no particular religious convictions.

I suppose what makes it work so well is that the author avoids adopting a faux archaic style. Instead she writes in clear, largely unadorned prose, with a sensitive ear for the nuances of the two women’s doubts, fears and ecstasies. As I said at the start of this post, it might seem an unpromising subject for a modern novel, this tale of two almost anonymous medieval mystics, but Mackenzie has produced a work aptly described on the cover blurb as ‘writing [that] is sometimes raw, at other times very beautiful’.

Maggie O’Farrell: two novels

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The only novel by Northern Ireland-born author Maggie O’Farrell that I’ve written about (just a brief note) here is her 2022 publication The Marriage Portrait. This was a historical novel (set in the 16C) about the imagined life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, subject of Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’. It was ok, but I wasn’t overimpressed (link HERE).

Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press, 2013, 337 pp., library copy) is set in the extraordinarily hot, dry summer in Britain in 1976. It starts as a high concept mystery, and then like a classic whodunnit sets out to answer the reader’s inevitable questions about what happened – and why.

Robert, a recently retired father of three adult children walks out of his north London home one day to buy a newspaper and doesn’t come back. His distraught wife summons the three siblings to help her find him. This turns out not to be a straightforward plan. All three have complicated back stories; the two sisters have been estranged for years, for reasons that become apparent by the end, and all have complicated family/marital/love lives.

When Robert’s presence in Ireland is finally established, after a combination of amateur detective work and a tip-off, they all head there to try to resolve matters and bring him home. What caused him to disappear so abruptly turns out to upset all the siblings’ assumptions and beliefs about their parents.

It’s all handled very adroitly, and is quite satisfying as a family drama with some unexpected twists in the plot. Maggie O’Farrell is good at exposing the fissures and tensions that afflict families, the lies, misunderstandings and prejudices that cloud the judgement of otherwise sensible and decent people and cause them to behave badly. All the loose ends are perhaps rather too neatly tied up; it would be good if messy lives could work out so neatly in real life.

Hamnet (Tinder Books, 2020, 300+ pp [I forgot to make a note], library copy). This award-winning novel is another exercise in exploring the imagined lives of marginal historical-literary figures. In this case the plot focuses on the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet at the age of eleven, and its aftermath.

Central to the action is the playwright’s wife, called Agnes here, not Anne (O’Farrell explains in a note why she did this). In a series of flashbacks we see how they met, the birth of their first daughter, Susanna, then the twins, and the difficult time they have sharing a building with Shakespeare’s violent, amoral father and disapproving mother. With Agnes’s blessing her husband (I think I’m right in saying he’s never named in the text, to ensure that the reader’s attention remains fixed on her) leaves for London, ostensibly to develop his father’s ailing glove business there. Instead he sets out on the theatrical career we all know him for.

Not surprisingly, we hear that he stays there most of the time for several years as their children grow up, and Agnes comes to feel more and more isolated and anxious. When Hamnet dies, she’s beside herself with grief, and resolves to ensure that her absent husband steps up and faces his responsibilities.

As in Heatwave, the family drama plot is skilfully put together, and the characterisation is mostly pretty convincingly done. Agnes is portrayed as a fey, other-worldly woman who would probably have been described by her contemporaries as a ‘wise woman’, maybe even a witch. She’s inherited her late mother’s almost mystical skills of clairvoyance and healing (with herbal potions). She’s able to read people’s souls just by touching their hands. Shakespeare is certainly bewitched by his first sight of her, when she’s dressed strangely and has a fierce-looking hawk on her gloved wrist. She’s a powerful, headstrong character, I suppose a sort of proto-feminist, and therefore exposed to a lot of prejudice and animosity from her townsfolk and even her family.

All the other characters are rather more sketchily drawn. This is really Agnes’s story, and about how devastating a bereavement can be. Once again there’s a neat and satisfying dénouement, this time more successfully resolved than in Heatwave. It cleverly (and for me, unexpectedly) shows the connection between the dead son and Shakespeare’s tragic character Hamlet.

Maggie O’Farrell is an adept storyteller and creator of period atmosphere. As with much historical fiction, however, there’s a sense of contrivance, and the author’s artifice needs to be less obviously displayed. There’s a fine line between setting a scene vividly and overloading the narrative with detail – such as the tools of a glover’s or a witchy herbalist-healer’s trade.

It’s good to see, on the other hand, that O’Farrell deftly consigns one of the world’s most gifted and famous authors to the side lines and places a little-known, interesting woman centre stage.