I can’t remember when a book grabbed me by the throat quite as forcibly as this one did. Although, of course, I’ve read Jude the Obscure before, I’d forgotten its richness and astonishing forward thinking for a novel which was published in 1896. I read a lot – QED – but it’s rare for me to sit down with a book on a weekday after lunch and still be there as dusk falls. Almost unable to put it down, I did that twice with this wonderful novel.

First a quick, inadequate summary in case it’s new to you. Jude, from a humble background, is a dreamer: studious and bright. He yearns to go to Christminster (Oxford) and become a clergyman. Then his sexual urges get the better of him and he is trapped into marriage by an alluring but totally unsuitable, grasping woman named Arabella. They separate, and he meets someone much more suitable but the going is rarely smooth because 19^th century attitudes to marriage, still driven by the church, prevail. Inevitably it ends in tragedy on several levels with some desperately dark incidents along the way.

I was fascinated by the importance of education in this novel. Schooling had been compulsory for only 16 years meaning that from 1880 every child between the age of 5 and 10 (11 after 1893 and 12 after 1899)  had to attend school.  The Forster Education Act had set up a system of state education 10 years earlier in 1870. The school Mr Phillotson runs, assisted by Sue, is managed by one of the newish School Boards and he attends regional meetings along with his friend Mr Gillingham who runs a similar school nearby. This means that almost all the characters are literate – Jude is able to study the books he sends for. Even Arabella can read and write letters competently. It also means that people like Jude and Sue, despite their backgrounds, can read academic texts and think independently.

What the novel is really about, though, is sexual morality in a patriarchal society and Hardy is exploring some pretty progressive ideas. Both Jude and Sue have been married to people they don’t love. In fact Sue finds the much older Mr Phillotson physically repulsive. So there is an argument that morally they should leave these relationships, irrespective of the demands of vows made in church and pursue the relationship which seems true and honest. Sue for a long time, feels so guilty that although she lives with Jude she refuses to have sex with him – and both their former partners keep reappearing to complicate the issue while Gillingham throws his hands up in horror “By the Lord Harry! – Matriarchy!”  Life with Phillotson is sex-free for a long time too until  a deeply disturbing self-sacrifice on Sue’s part. The evolving attitude of the widowed  Mrs Edlin is interesting too – her own marriage lay in the distant pre-Victorian past and she’s much more relaxed about sexual politics. She tries very hard to persuade Sue to see sense and grab happiness where she can.

At one point before Sue –  ever  anxiously capricious –  succumbs to guilt, regret and self-imposed penance, she says: “I may hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father of a woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers as the cut of her under-linen.” Jude, meanwhile declares late in the novel that “…the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon”. Examples of  Hardy’s astonishing prescience come thick and fast –  and pulled me up short many times.

Hardy, who was 56 when it was published, was roundly condemned for the “immorality” of Jude the Obscure which was deemed critical of religion, class, sex, education and marriage. He seems to have seen it as a final bolt shot across the bows of the Establishment, because he wrote no more novels. Instead he devoted the remaining 32 years of his life to poetry. That makes him an unusual writer for another reason: a nineteenth century novelist and a 20^th century poet.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph

Anita Brookner – mistress of understatement, crystalline prose and unfulfilled older women –  won the Booker Prize with Hotel du Lac in 1984. I read it then and again after enjoying the rather good film of the same name starring  Anna Massey who got Edith Hope perfectly.

Edith is a novelist (romantic fiction) who is staying in an old-fashioned hotel on Lake Geneva. The autumnal “fin de saison” ambience reflects her state of mind as she observes and mixes with the other, mostly English, guests. We know from the outset first that she’s been “sent” to Switzerland by friends who are very cross with her and second that she’s deeply in love with a married man. It is a long time before Brookner reveals the precise reason for her exile – and it’s quite an arresting moment because most readers will not have seen it coming.

Meanwhile – with faint echoes of Room with a View there are other guests such as ghastly Mrs Pusey and her almost-as-ghastly daughter Jennifer. Her character – rich, self-interested, cunning, demanding, manipulative, excessive – sits somewhere between James Heriot’s Mrs Pumphrey and Mrs van Hopper who employs the unnamed narrator at the beginning of Rebecca. There’s also a man, Philip Neville, who seems gallant and shows interest in Edith but he’s chillingly manipulative too. In a novel which is full of literary cross-currents his calculatedness reminds me of St John Rivers in Jane Eyre.

So Edith has choices to make and they rattle about in her mind all the time she’s doing very little on the misty shores of the Lake. Should she let her life veer off in a totally different direction or should she simply continue more or less as she is despite the crushing disapproval of bossy friends?

Brookner, who died in 2016, was a miniaturist. Her characterisation is finely observed – and probably enhanced by her day job as an art historian.  I love the precision of the uncompromising, grown up language too. She can write elegant sentences such as “Yet it was less Mrs Pusey’s tranquil exhibitionism that worried Edith then the glimpses she had caught of a somewhat salacious mind” with ease. Every word speaks and there is never, ever any waffle. Many modern novels could shed a third of their length and be better for it. Not so Brookner. Hotel du Lac comes in at 184 pages and the succinctness is part of its perfection.

I was struck afresh this time by the title and wondered if there was a pun intended? Hotel du Lack? While Edith is staying at the titular hotel her life lacks everything she has come to be reasonably contented with – which is why she writes passionate letters to the man she actually loves despite having to take him on his own terms. Well never mind the vexed field of intentionalism the central character in this novel certainly uses her weeks by the lac to think about what her life is lacking. And it’s as good a read now as it was nearly 40 years ago when it was first published.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

First published in 1958, Things Fall Apart is a moving account of what happened in the late 19^th century Nigeria when colonial Christianity arrived in Igbo society.  The conflict is partly reflective of Achebe’s own background benefiting as he did from a Westernised education. It was – and remains – an extraordinary account of two cultures tragically misunderstanding each other. The underlying message is probably “All we need to do is to listen to each other” which is as relevant today as it ever was, given tensions with, for example, China and some Islamic groups.

And consider that 1958 date. Apartheid was, by then, well established in South Africa: the Sharpville massacre lay two years into the future. Segregation was the law in the southern states of the USA and it was just two years since Rosa Parks had made her famous stand on that Alabama bus. In Britain the law allowed landlords to display notices in their windows reading “No blacks”. Nigeria was still a British colony.

The structure of the novel fascinates me. It is presented in three parts like an elegant three act play. The first part ends with the seven year enforced exile of the central character Okonkwo to his mother’s home village as a punishment for contravening tribal law. The middle section describes his exile and the third takes him back home seven years later.  And this novel has what must be one of the longest expositions in fiction. Achebe spends 121 pages of a 183-page novel showing how things are and how well they work before anything happens to change that. Thus we see marriage, death, birth, polytheism.  farming, hierarchies, inter-village relations, justice, family arrangements and everything else which binds together the Igbo way of life. Then on page 121 we read that “a white man had appeared in their clan” … “riding an iron bicycle”. Briefed by their oracle who predicts very accurately that the white man would eventually  mean trouble, the men of Umuofia kill him and that, of course, leads to retribution.

At first there are churches and for a while, an enlightened missionary who takes the trouble to get to know, and listen, to the Igbo people. Then he’s replaced by a blinkered evangelist and things begin to fall apart quite quickly. Of course, nothing about this is simple. Some Igbo people are attracted to the new religion. Okonkwo’s eldest son, for example takes the baptismal name Isaac (interesting choice given his troubled relationship with his father) and becomes a Christian. Moreover the missionaries bring schools and hospitals which seem to be a benefit. But they also bring law courts and a District Commissioner. Of course no British court was ever going to condone, for example, throwing away twins (dumping them alive in the forest) because they are cursed. The two sides don’t – in any sense – speak the same language. Corruption amongst the DC’s men works against the Igbo people too. And then, inevitably, it ends in tragedy. And, as in every literary tragedy you read the last page with a lump in your throat and the frustration that most of the novel’s suffering could so easily have been avoided.

It was always promoted as one of the greatest of 20^th century novels but I haven’t heard anyone talking about Things Fall Apart for a long time now. We used to teach/read it a lot in secondary schools. In fact the copy I have, and have just reread, is one of those nice old Heinemann low budget, hard backed Windmill Series editions with an introductory note by Ian Seraillier, who was series editor. Such books used to be ubiquitous in English department stock cupboards. But this one seems to have fallen out of favour rather although I see it is still on the GCSE syllabus in Northern Ireland.

There may another reason for this. When I wrote my So You Really Want to Learn English series – class textbooks for age 10-13 in the early 2000s each chapter was based on a major extract. One of these was from Things Fall Apart.  Then ten years later we did revised editions and the Achabe family network (he died in 2013) announced it wanted £2,000 for permission to use the passage – around ten times as much as anyone else was asking for at the time. So of course I had to use something else thereby depriving thousands of young readers of an introduction to this fine, important novel. Anyone would think that the people close to the author didn’t actually want the novel to be read by the next generation. If they make a habit of this greedy stance then it’s no wonder that the book is not now discussed much is it?

Oh well. Of course you can still buy it – I don’t think it’s ever been out of print. Let’s hope teachers are encouraging students to read it anyway because it really is a novel which matters.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Earlier this year I read Frances Quinn’s That Bonesetter Woman, on the strength of a Sunday Times review, and liked it a lot – partly because I’m a sucker for historical novels but mostly because I was intrigued by its unusual subject matter. Well reading is, of course, an unending one-thing-leads-to-another journey so next I scurried off to Quinn’s backlist – where I found The Smallest Man which was published last year,

Obviously I’ve seen reproductions of the van Dyck painting of “the Queen’s dwarf”, Jeffrey Hudson, with Queen Henrietta Maria (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and I’d read accounts of his being presented to her as a gift in a huge pie. Beyond that I’d never given him much thought.

Inspired by what we know about Hudson, Quinn has created Nat Davy, one of the most engaging fictional characters I’ve enjoyed the company of in ages. Born to a humble family in Oakham and then sold by his pretty awful father to the nearby Duke of Buckingham as a gift for the Queen, Davy – fearful, distressed and aged only 11 – arrives at court. There he’s bullied, petted, befriended and gradually grows up.

What follows is a fine Civil War novel from an unusual perspective. Quinn’s take on Henrietta Maria is more sympathetic than many. Through Nat’s eyes, we see a competent, feisty but terrified woman in great danger, desperate to make her husband see sense even when she is in Paris and he remains, stubbornly, in England. Quinn’s rather neat conceit is that Nat, who is fully literate, becomes the trusted confidant who ciphers and deciphers their letters. That means that he and the reader are at the heart of what’s going on.

It’s a novel about disruption – arguably the worst Britain has ever seen with family members often ending up on different sides – with a lot of travel and dislocation. Poor Nat is very loyal – although privately he often tells the reader that he can’t see what the arguments are about. Prayer books and priests seem very minor, really. Along the way he makes two fine friends – Jeremiah who has “giantism” and Henry who has an eye for the girls. And there’s a love story running through the narrative which makes you long to take Nat, who doesn’t value himself, on one side and talk sense to him.

One of the best things in this novel is Quinn’s empathy with Nat’s condition – I hesitate to call it a “disability” because by the last page he certainly wouldn’t have done. Hudson – and thus Nat – was less than two feet tall and that’s tiny even by dwarfism standards. Modern medics tell us that the condition is usually caused by growth hormone deficiency and/or genetic mutation. In the seventeenth century people invented stories about curses, witchcraft and so on to explain what they didn’t understand and were frightened of. Nat, however, is a fully functioning, intelligent male adult who learns to ride a horse and shoots a man dead in a duel. He loathes being picked up or patronised although he cannot run fast or walk too far because of his stature.

Quinn gets the internal conflicts, emotions and anxieties very convincingly. And there’s a splendid first person account of the horrifying events in Whitehall on 30 January 1649. Yes, that’s one of the best documented events in history but by putting Nat there in the crowd, Quinn manages to make it very fresh and vivid.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe