Many of these blogs are about re-reads. As anyone who is kind enough to be a regular reader will know, I am interested in the way one’s reactions to a particular book evolve over a lifetime. But of course I gleefully gobble up lots of new ones too. Some I enjoy but forget almost as soon as I read the last page. Others grab me by the throat and shake me so dramatically that they really make me think long and hard: Louise Swanson’s End of Story, for example, which was published last month.

We’re in a 2030s dystopia. Fiction of all sorts  has been been banned and the ban is ruthlessly enforced. There are sinister, intrusive visits to people’s homes, punishment by mutilation and the ever present threat of a re-education centre where lobotomy is a common “cure”. The imagination must be suppressed at all costs. The narrator, Fern,  has been a  best selling, prize-winning novelist with a nice house. She now lives widowed and alone in a small house and works as a hospital cleaner. All her books have gone.

Fern writes in a notebook, though, and lives in constant fear of being caught with it because, of course, writing fiction is a criminal offence. And the tension rachets up when she associates herself with an underground (literally) organisation which reads bed time stories to children on phones. There are serious punishments for anyone caught corrupting children by sharing fiction with them.

It feels like a world co-created by George Orwell and Margaret Atwood with a strong whiff of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451. And somehow it seems slightly more plausible today, when we all vividly remember the absurd, draconian rules of 2020 and 2021, than it would have done say, five years ago. I’m not surprised, therefore, to read in Swanson’s afterword acknowledgements that she was (partly) inspired by Rishi Sunak’s 2020 suggestion, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, that arts people should retrain, thus suggesting by strong implication that the arts are expendable.

So we’re pounding along in this dreadful environment in which horror story decisions are being made at the hospital, Fern develops a serious aversion to milk and forms a forbidden bond with one of the phone-in children she reads clandestine stories to. Then, like a bombshell, comes the best plot twist since Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Of course I’m not going to reveal it here but I don’t think it’s giving much away to observe that we’re firmly in the world of unreliable narration. Suddenly the reader is confronted with another set of issues to reflect on and the realisation that yes, silly me, the hints and clues were there all along. It’s an exceptionally well crafted novel.

My only tiny gripe is that the publisher has marketed End of Story as a “thriller.”  Well I don’t think I can define “thriller” beyond the sense that whatever this book is it’s not what I think of as a thriller. I’m not sure why we need to be constantly trying to categorise books by packing them neatly into genres anyway. So I shan’t try here – suffice it to say that End of Story is an outstandingly compelling read and one of those rare books which has permanently changed the way I think about several things.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

Forget David Jason and Bradley Walsh. Go back to HE Bates’s 1958 short novel. No dramatisation will ever capture the glorious, hilarious, sensuous plenteousness of the writing.

Pop Larkin has a “perfick” life. He has a wife (sort of) who is “almost two yards wide”, laughs like a jelly and cooks likes an angel. She has borne him six pleasure loving, contented children. He has a comfortable  home surrounded by nature, his land, farm animals, wheeling/dealing activities and vehicles. Taxes? What are they?

It’s the most colourful book I’ve ever read – you almost need sunglasses. There are, for example, eleven colour references on page one alone.  Everything gleams, beams, beckons and glitters.  The book works on every one of the reader’s five senses. You can taste the apple sauce, feel the feathery goose foraging under the table, hear the sounds of the horn on the old Rolls Royce which Pop acquires (don’t ask how), see Ma’s capacious folds and smell the blossom and fruit in the Kent countryside in a warm May.

Now, I remember 1958 clearly. It was the year I left primary school. We weren’t well off at all but did all right  by the standards of the day, as did most of my friends. But I never saw a fresh pineapple. Ma Larkin goes out and buys three – which they eat with Jersey double cream, a product I’d never seen or tasted at that date. For most of us it was a dribble of Libby’s evaporated milk on tinned fruit  which was supposed to be a treat. The last of WW2 rationing had only been gone four years after all. My family had a small fridge by then but I had lots of friends whose mums still had to rely on cool larder. The Larkins have a huge fridge and a deep-freeze – I knew no one who had the latter in a private house at that date. Most of us had TV in the sitting room by then but the Larkins have two sets.  Few ordinary people kept booze in the house other than at Christmas but the Larkins knock back blow-your-head-off cocktails all the time.

So the Larkins are not ordinary. And that’s where the humour lies. They are neither educated nor privileged. Pop cannot sign his name, although he manages to read a book of cocktail recipes. These people are what my Grandmother (decades before political correctness or wokery were invented) would have called “common as dirt”.  While people in circles like mine were worrying about the eleven plus, paying the rent and maybe having a roast chicken (luxury!) for Christmas,  The Larkins are cheerfully and happily  living life to the full – very full. In places the description of Ma’s meals – which are served continually – is almost food pornography. Yet, they’re wonderfully generous to other people and the chuckling reader can’t help liking them. l

The main plot line in The Darling Buds of May (the first of five Larkin books) is the arrival of querulous, thin, anxious Mr Charlton from The Inland Revenue. Pop plies him with drink and friendly overtures and flaunts the delectable Mariette (the eldest daughter who could do with a husband fairly urgently – although that eventually turns out to be a false alarm). Gradually Mr Charlton goes native – and the transition is laugh-aloud funny  because we can see that Pop isn’t quite as disingenuous as he pretends. He has no intention of paying any taxes and this young man, knocked out by rich food, strong drink and arousal, could be a useful way of dealing with Mariette’s situation.

Finally, and as an extra bonus, the book is worth reading for the rich originality of HE Bates’s writing. “The field trembled like a zither with chattering women’s voices” and “… a pair of crumpled corduroys the colour of a moulting stoat” are examples of the sort of writing which makes this reader alternate between jumping for joy and sighing in admiration.

No TV adaptation comes close. I rest my case.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: End of Story by Louise Swanson

I read first read The Group in 1963 not long after it was published. I was a callow, shallow sixteen year old. Word on the street was that this book included explicit sex. There wasn’t too much of it about then (less than three years after the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial) and we were hungry for it. Rereading it now in the coolness of maturity I notice that yes, there is some sex there, but it’s bluntly matter of fact and not remotely erotic. I doubt I understood the difference in 1963.

Mary McCarthy’s best known novel details the lives of eight women in their twenties. They graduated from Vassar in 1933 and this is what happened next. They’re all bright and ambitious in their different ways but marriage and childbirth proves restricting – in what soon became a seminal feminist novel.

I find the timing fascinating. I’m over thirty years behind the women depicted but I can identify totally with some of their predicaments. Priss’s paediatrician husband wants her to breastfeed their son but she finds it difficult and nobody else – family, friends, nursing staff is committed to it. That was exactly the situation I encountered, at least with medical professionals, when my babies were born in Britain in 1972 and 1976 – except that I’m a lot more bloody minded than Priss is and did it anyway. Interestingly they were told then (as I was in 1972) that you had to stick to a 10.00/2.00/6.00  feeding routine through the 24 hours so that the baby would soon learn to sleep though the night. I’ve wondered for decades how/why it is that my fully breast fed boys slept through at 3 months and modern children seem to go on waking up in the night until they’re at least 2 years old. Perhaps there’s something in the old ways. McCarthy contrasts this with Norrine’s “Bohemian” child-centred approach which is, of course, exactly what young mothers are advised to do now. It certainly set me thinking. But of course, these issues passed me by completely in 1963 when I hadn’t even taken my O levels.

Then there’s Polly who has an affair with Libby’s married publisher boss which clearly isn’t going anywhere. Eventually she settles amiably for a decent doctor – there’s no passion but it’s a workable marriage. Haven’t we all known people like this? McCarthy’s observation is very sharp.

The book is structured around Kay – first her short-lived marriage to the rather tiresome, pretentious, wannabe actor/playwright/director Harald – and eventually her funeral aged 29, which neatly brings the whole group back into the same space. Kay, a “blurter” who can’t help saying what she thinks, puts her own career on hold – taking a fairly menial job at Macys – in order to support Harald who never achieves anything much and is serially unfaithful.

Some members of the group remain single and are therefore able to do the work they’ve chosen without reference to anyone else – although parents are quite prominent in this novel too. One goes off to Europe and returns after the outbreak of war with a lesbian partner who is, after initial awkwardness, cheerfully accepted by the rest of the group as any other husband would be. These women, have after all, had a liberal education.

One of the most disturbing episodes is Kay’s being committed to a mental hospital by Harald. She is not mentally ill but cannot be discharged without Harald’s permission. That’s chilling. As I often opine, some things have improved – and female equality is one of them on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Group, now 60 years old, speaks of both the 1960s and the 1930s. It has worn very well. It’s funny in places and the writing is needle-sharp. But don’t bother to read it for the explicit sex.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Darling Buds of May by HE Bates

After I’d been accepted at Bishop Otter College to train as a teacher in 1965, I was sent a general reading list. I suppose the idea was simply to get students reading more widely. Interestingly it went to all students – not just the ones interested taking English as a main course.  Now I’ve always liked reading lists (usually, these days, in the form of book reviews in newspapers etc) because they give me recommendations and nudge me towards things I might not otherwise have discovered. The Bishop Otter list (with hindsight I wonder who compiled it and what the criteria were?) included James Joyce, CP Snow, Gavin Maxwell and Graham Greene among many others. I don’t know what other students did but I steadily worked my way through most of what was on the list over the next three years and beyond.

Thus I came to Graham Greene (1904-1991).  I read all his major titles (vivid memories of giggling over Our Man in Havana in a tent in Greece in 1966). But – apart from one or two short stories such as The Destructors and A Little Place off Edgware Road which often appeared in school anthologies I was teaching with – I have read very little of his work since. So how has The Quiet American  (1955) fared  67 years after it was published and over half a century since I first read it? Surprisingly well, I think.

We’re in Vietnam in the early 1950s during the Indo-China wars. The eponymous quiet American is a idealistic man named Alden Pyle who’s a CIA agent. The narrator, Fowler, is a cynical but troubled British journalist. At one level it’s a love (lust? power?) triangle because both men want the same girl, Phuong. Perhaps more importantly it’s a pretty devastating, condemnatory account  of war.

Greene was often accused of writing journalistically as if he shouldn’t but Fowler’s account of the deaths of the women and children after the explosion of the bomb in the square is masterly. So is a bombing sortie he goes on with a French pilot named Trouin:

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and headed for home.

Later Trouin tells him that what he hates most is napalm bombing. “You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground. The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet though with fire”.

Discussions between Pyle and Fowler, who become close but are never friends, focus on the former’s simplistic views and the latter’s worldly wise languor, enhanced by opium. Their awkward relationship is further complicated by their being attacked when stranded by a car breakdown. Fowler is shot in the leg and Pyle saves his life which alters the dynamic although it isn’t what either of them wants.

The novel, which has been filmed twice, is presented in punctuated flashback. It begins with the death of Pyle who had been planning to marry Phuong. Fowler has to break it to her. It ends with the sort of fairytale ending that Phuong, who isn’t fully developed as a character and always seems a bit distant, reads about in her magazines. But we’re not at all sure it will be “happy ever after” whatever that means in real life.

One of the most interesting and attractive things about Greene’s writing is the insouciance of his observation. I loved, for instance, “the gun fire travelling like a clock-hand round the horizon”. And this glorious bit stopped me in my tracks:

“Will you have a cup of tea?” “Thank you. I have had three already.” It sounded like a question and answer in a phrase book.

 Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Group by Mary McCarthy