A dear, pretty well-read friend, a generation older than me used to scoff at me in the 1970s, when we worked together, for reading what he called “predictable fiction”. I’d just discovered Mazo de la Roche at the behest of my new mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law and was working my way through the Jalna series from the library – yes, I was very young. Anyway my friend was always teasing me and extolling the virtues of Iris Murdoch because, he said, you could never tell what her interesting characters might do next. In the end I read two or three of her classics and thought they were all right but, frankly, implausible and not likely to become part of my regular reading fare.

Then, recently, a contemporary friend mentioned Murdoch (1919-1999) and asked if I’d read any lately because she hadn’t.  That conversation sparked my curiosity and I bought in paperback The Sea, The Sea.  It won the Booker Prize in 1978 and I’d never read it. It was her 19^th novel and, always highly regarded by the literati, Murdoch had been shortlisted for the Booker four times before.

Charles Arrowby, the narrator, has bought a run down property without electricity in a south coast village just a few yards from rocks leading to the sea. He is in retreat from his life as a famous actor and theatre director and from relationships with women which have never worked out conventionally. Love and loss are uppermost in his mind. He swims regularly although the sea is pretty dangerous by his house. The clue is in the title and, whatever my old friend said about unpredictabilty it’s pretty obvious from the start that the sea isn’t always going to be benign in this novel.

Arrowby’s narrative is presented as a diary and he writes at length and with much density about the people in his life, mostly from the world of theatre.  Apart from Clement, a woman he loved deeply, now deceased, one by one they turn up to visit him –  several times in most cases –  as this long novel (538 pages) inches forward. Cue for interesting, if unlikely, group dynamics.

Meanwhile, Arrowby meets an elderly woman in the street and recognises her as Hartley, the love of his teenage years who unaccountably abandoned him decades before. She’s living in a bungalow up a road with a husband who Arrowby convinces himself is abusive. So he determines that she must be rescued. To this end he pesters her relentlessly and cunningly, at one point kidnaps her. Separately he befriends her adopted son, Titus. It is, in effect the study of an obsessed mind in breakdown. He describes minutely, for example, every garment everyone wears and the continual accounts of what he has cooked and eaten are telling.

Every Murdoch novel I’ve ever read has left me exasperated at the overwrought phoneyness of it all and this one was no exception. And yet … there is an intelligence in the writing and something alluring in these strange characters (actually Hartley’s husband Ben is about the most “normal”) which kept me turning those 538 pages. Murdoch was, after all, a philosopher by training and her writing is a lot more than simple story telling.

I’m not sure it would win the Booker Prize now. Some modern judges from different fields in life would find it turgid and of course it’s pretty dated. As a piece of literary history, however, it’s worth investigating.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The World’s Worst Pets by David Walliams

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