Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 26

Review of Unbridled Spirits by Stevie Davies, pub. The Women's Press, 1998

Generally I choose new books to review on the blog. This time I'm reviewing a book published 18 years ago, quite simply because it's still one of the ones I read most often.

Stevie Davies is a noted novelist, but this is a history book, dealing indeed with the same period that inspired one of her best novels, Impassioned Clay. It is fascinating for a writer to see how she transmutes fact into fiction, but you don't need to be a writer to find this particular period of history absorbing. The subtitle is "Women of the English Revolution: 1640-1660". That twenty years, in fact, when the world turned upside down, when kings could be unkinged, and indeed un-headed, when a country was trying to find a different way to function, and when for a glorious couple of decades, before England relapsed into forelock-tugging mode, nobody knew his or her place.

His or her, for though Cromwell's government was no less inimical to women's rights than Charles's had been, it was a time when the voiceless in general found their voice, and no section of society was more voiceless than women. A married woman, feme coverte in law, had no legal existence, her identity being "covered" by her husband's. Even fewer women could vote than men, and a man without a vote could at least make his voice heard in other ways without much risk of some of the penalties that attended women's speaking. When the Leveller women petitioned Parliament in the 1640s and 50s, their petitions were refused simply on the ground that they were women, and politics was not their concern; they had best, the Serjeant-at-Arms advised, "return to your own business, your housewifery".

But these women were the likes of Katharine Chidley, pamphleteer and disputant, who was not about to be silenced or sidelined so easily:

"Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honourable House. Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other the good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be taken from us more than from men?"

There are many glorious voices in this book, and they aren't all female, for this is not a men-versus-women sort of book, and many men are praised in it. Men in advance of the time, like Daniel Rogers and George Fox, were encouraging women to speak out, even to preach. Daniel Rogers's marriage manual, Matrimonial Honour, would have looked radical centuries later:

"She is always in grief & that for thee, & by thy means; what day, week, month is she free through the year, breeding, bearing, watching her babes. […] She had need to be eased of all that is easable, because she cannot be eased of the rest. Get her asleep, if thou can, but awake her not, till she please."

Less radical men, like the diarist Ralph Josselin, were doing their best to be decent husbands in a society which they dimly perceived was very unequal and in many ways unfair to their partners. There are some moving stories of marriages: the Josselins, growing apart as they lose child after child, John and Elizabeth Lilburne becoming embittered not only with Parliament but with each other.

Some of the women who found their voices most powerfully at this time were Quakers, and their fortitude and daring are both inspiring and terrifying. Barbara Blaugdone, schoolteacher, forsakes her middle-class comforts and sleeps in ditches, an itinerant preacher. Mary Fisher travels to Turkey to convert the Sultan – he was bemused but civil, unlike the privileged but ungentlemanly students of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, who threw stones at her. Mary Dyer, reprieved at the last moment on a scaffold in Massachusetts, promptly returns to the job and is executed.

And there's Anna Trapnel, Fifth Monarchist prophetess, writer of execrable poetry and blessed with a voice that can out-sing and out-shout any heckler. Anna arguably has kangaroos in the top paddock, but listen to her answering the magistrate who questions her motives in travelling from London to Cornwall (an enterprise that could easily get one labelled a vagabond or troublemaker; governments have always liked to limit movement):

"But why did you come into this country?"
"Why might not I come here, as well as into another country?"
"But you have no lands, nor livings, nor acquaintance to come to in this country."
"What though I had not? I am a single person, and why may I not be with my friends anywhere?"
"I understand you are not married."
"Then, having no hindrance, why may not I go where I please, if the Lord so will?"

It is almost impossible not to cheer. It's a sensation that is repeated many times in the course of this book. Though there are sadnesses in it, in the end one is left inspired by these women who simply would not keep quiet. The book can still be found, and I'd urge anyone, not only those interested in history or feminism, to get hold of it.

King Herod and the Cutting-Room Floor

This interesting article on Emma Darwin's blog about psychic distance reminded me how often I used to use other media - like film - to get some writing technique over to students. One such technique was cutting from scene to scene. It can be enormously difficult for new writers to extricate themselves from a scene before it comes to a "natural" end, but it's something we need to be able to do if we're not to risk boring readers. TV shows, with their short timespan, do it ruthlessly (look at how The Big Bang Theory moves on straight after the laugh-line).

But this is by no means a technique that was invented yesterday. "St Stephen and King Herod" is a very old ballad, and its 14th-century author certainly had not seen any films or TV shows. Yet the poem is a beautiful example of how to control pace and drama by dwelling on what really matters, moving swiftly on from what matters less and leaving much out altogether.

After the scene-setting first verse:

Stephen was a servitor
In King Herod's hall,
And served him with honour
As every king befall.

we are plunged into the middle of the action; Stephen coming from the kitchen with food for the hall. He is crossing a courtyard, which wouldn't have been uncommon at the time; kitchens smell and were kept away from the gentry's noses. Not that this is explained: we simply know it is so because otherwise this couldn't happen:

Stephen came from kitchen
With boar's head in hand.
He saw a star was fair and bright
Above Bethlem stand.

At this point we might have been treated to some sort of analysis of his feelings, but our author is more economical than that:

He cast adown the boar's head
And went into the hall.
"I forsake thee, King Herod,
And thy works all."

Now at this point I should say that it has always seemed to me that Herod, who is feasting, is certainly in a good mood and possibly slightly merry. I don't think this is over-interpretation, because his words and actions for some time are unexpectedly tolerant for a king who has just been spoken to so rudely by the kitchen-boy. Indeed his first reaction is concern for the lad's welfare:

What aileth thee, Stephen,
What is thee befall?
Lacketh anything to thee
In King Herod's hall?

Model employer, really... But Stephen, a stranger to tact, readily gets to the nub of the matter:

"Ne lacketh me nothing
In King Herod's hall,
There is one born in Bethlem
Is king of us all".

One can imagine - indeed one must, for it will not be shown - the aghast faces round the board. But the mellow Herod is still inclined to treat the whole thing as a joke: one can almost hear the guffaw in his voice.

"That is all so true, Stephen,
All so true, I know,
As the capon on this platter
Should come to life and crow."

Now for the first time we shall see a couple of lines that aren't strictly necessary to the narrative, a piece of repetition that slows the action right down for a crucial moment - the equivalent, if you like, of the filmic pause before the heroine opens the door of the locked room:

That word was not so soon said,
That word in that hall

If you're reading this aloud to an audience and pause just long enough, I promise you can have them spellbound at this point, just before you shout

The capon crew "Christus natus est"
Among the lords all.

Mellow drunks can turn nasty in a moment, and Herod is about to do so:

"Rise up, my true tormentors,
By two and by one.
Lead Stephen forth of this town
And stone him with stone."

The final verse pans out from close-up and goes back to the dispassionate, straight narrative with which it opened:

They led out Stephen
And stoned him on the way,
And therefore is his even
On Christ's own day.

. One does, at this point, have to explain, to English students at least, that 26th December was St Stephen's Day before ever "Boxing Day" was invented. But what is hopefully self-explanatory is the way this spare, dramatic ballad chooses its details, its perspective and its cuts in the way a film might: dwelling on a scene just exactly as long as it needs, zooming into close-up on Stephen and Herod and then out again to the world they affect so much without knowing it, leaving out just about everything to do with motive and mood (we can judge what mood Herod is in at various points from what he says and does), pausing where pause can make an effect but dropping a scene when it's over with as little hesitation as Stephen drops that dish with the boar's head.

Review of Moonstone by Sjón, trs. Victoria Cribb, pub. (in Britain) Sceptre, 2016

Reykjavik, 1918. The long Great War has made supplies scarce; the sky is dark and the air dusty because the volcano Katla is in the process of erupting, and the ship that has just arrived from Copenhagen, the Botnia, is carrying the germs of a deadly influenza epidemic. Well, it's a Nordic novel; you didn't expect anything too light-hearted… On the bright side, the town's two cinemas are importing a lot of the newly fashionable entertainment, films, and the 16-year-old protagonist Mani Steinn Karlsson sees all of them.

The back-cover blurb will tell you this much; what it doesn't mention, and what you might like to be prepared for, is that young Mani is by way of being a prostitute and the novel begins with a quite graphic sex scene. There will be others, but what really matters about Mani is his ability to move between the worlds of fact and fiction, living both in the world of the silent films and the drama simultaneously unfolding in real-life Reykjavik:

The projectionist's silhouette appears in the aperture.

The projector beam is switched off.

Lights come on in the wall lamps.

The young people glance around and only now does it dawn on them how many members of the audience have been taken ill: every other face is chalk-white, lips are blue, foreheads glazed with sweat, nostrils red, eyes sunken and wet.

Silence falls on the gathering.

The 1918 epidemic, and its catastrophic effects on Reykjavik, are real enough, and so are several of the book's characters, notably the English writers and film-makers Kenneth Macpherson, Robert Herring and Annie Ellerman (Bryher) who arrive on the scene near the novel's close in 1929. It is Mani himself who, though someone like him could very well have lived in that place at that time, is, according to the book's subtitle, "the boy who never was". He is a fiction fascinated by fictions, transmuting the reality around him into fictions of his own and becoming, in that odd way fictional characters have, more real than your neighbour down the street, until the moment when the author chooses to remind us with startling suddenness what he really is. It is also at this point that we discover why Sjón has written the novel at all, and it becomes clear that behind the fictional Mani stands a real person, from a later time, who was the inspiration for the novel though he never appears in it.

Much as I admire the book, I don't think some of the hyperbolical endorsements from other writers do it any favours; it may even put some readers into a "right, prove it then" frame of mind. I don't have to think Sjón "achingly brilliant" or believe that he "changes the whole map of literature" in order to find this book original and rewarding, and want to read it again. I'd leave the writing to speak for itself, if I were him:

From the long, low shed by the harbour the sounds of banging and planing can be heard, though each hammer blow and bout of sawing is so muffled and muted to the ear that it seems almost to apologise for disturbing the silence. It is here that the coffins are being made. […]

By the end of the working day the undertaker has received five new orders for coffins - and two more will await him at home.

In Praise of Adjectives

Well now, there's an odd thing for a writer to say. After all, like any other writer, I have cut my teeth on mantras like "verbs make language move, adjectives clog it up". And in a general sense I still believe it. When I've written a poem, I still tend to do a rough count of the verb-adjective ratio, and I expect to find it about 2:1. If it were the other way about, I'd be worried.

And yet… come with me for a moment into a creative writing workshop where a poem is being considered. The group are dissatisfied with its impact, and someone has pointed to a surplus of adjectives as the cause – sometimes several to a line. Nearly everyone agrees with this diagnosis, and I might have done too, but for the maverick mature student at the back who, when asked his opinion, murmurs "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright".

He's right, of course: it isn't the number of adjectives but the choice and disposition of them. And I'm beginning to think there may be a slight difference in the way good writers choose verbs and adjectives. With a verb, the most important consideration, as often as not, is forensic accuracy: you want the verb that conveys exactly, not approximately, how a thing happened, or how someone said or did something. This is the root of the prejudice of some teachers against adverbs: the feeling that the verb should, often, not need clarifying with more words if a more exact verb had been chosen in the first place.  It's true too that verbs make fantastic shorthand, carrying whole fields of imagery within themselves; it would surely have taken Paul Henry far longer to convey in any other way the mood that comes over from two verbs here (from "The Glebelands"):

The river pedals after the sun.
The paint flakes off the trees.

With adjectives, although accuracy is still a consideration, it seems to me that we are often looking also for surprise, for the qualifier that will cause the reader to look at the object in a new or unexpected way.  This is the more important in that certain adjectives tend to attach themselves so naturally to certain nouns that they can tell us nothing we didn't already know – a pink sky may be worth remarking on, a blue sky generally not.  These expected adjective-noun combos become, in effect, clichés, and can soon kill a poem or story.

But few parts of speech can make you open your eyes wide and re-read the line like a truly unexpected adjective. Here is the 17th-century bilingual Welsh poet Morgan Llwyd, writing in English, in his long poem "1648":

Our king, queen, prince and prelates high their merry Christmas spent
With brawny hearts, while yet their dogs could Lazarus lament.

"Brawny" connotes now, as it did then, physical toughness, though back in Morgan Llwyd's day, more of its original meaning of "fleshy" or "fleshly" may have survived.  In itself it is a compliment if anything, but perhaps because of the alliteration, brawn has also long been an antonym of "brain"; it carries the hint that where there is much brawn, brain ought not to be expected in any quantity. And in British English it also carries a culinary sense: pig's head rendered down by boiling to jelly. It is therefore the last adjective you might expect to see conjoined to "heart" – an arm may be fleshy and tough and no harm done, but a heart? These aristocrats, stuffing themselves with meat at Christmas, are all flesh, nether head nor heart: their very dogs can pity the poor man at the gate but they cannot, because their hearts are toughened and their conscience rendered down to jelly.  That's a word justifying its place in the line, adjective or no.

But how then are we to explain the magic of that line of Herbert's: what is there remotely unexpected or surprising about the adjectives "sweet", "cool", "calm" and "bright", applied to a sunny morning? As Mr Carson said, it's the way you tell 'em, and in this case it is all in the way the genius Herbert has made the line move. In an 8-syllable line he has placed no fewer than three long pauses, effectively caesuras, after the words "day", "cool" and "calm", and the line is end-stopped after "bright" for good measure. There is no logical way of reading it but slowly, pausing on those words, savouring them as you would the qualities they represent if you stepped out of your door on that day. Sometimes the element of surprise is in the commonplace, if readers can be nudged into taking time to look at it afresh; sometimes too, the simplest words are genuinely the most accurate and apposite, though it may take a Herbert to arrange them in such a way that they lose their familiarity.

Anyway, there is no point in being anti-adjective, or anti-any part of speech, for the sake of it. There may be sense in using them sparingly – to continue Llywd's culinary image, as if they were the spices to the meal: a piece of writing overspiced with adjectives can become cloying, but leaving out the spice altogether may produce something deeply unmemorable.

If, of course, you are George Herbert, no rules apply.

Review of The Brilliant & Forever, by Kevin MacNeil, pub. Polygon 2016

I don't know whether animal characters in novels are a fashionable thing, or whether I just have a particular yen for them, but I reviewed three last year – Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, which is told entirely from the viewpoint of sheep, The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe, which is narrated by a rabbit, and Fishbowl by Bradley Somer, in which one of the minor characters is a goldfish called Ian. So it seemed logical to add this novel, which deals among other things with the story of Archie the talking alpaca.

There are ways and ways of using animal characters: they can be anything from their real selves to thinly disguised humans. Ian the goldfish is a sort of Greek chorus to the main action, while the sheep and rabbits in the first two novels mentioned are both trying, with different degrees of success, to be real sheep and rabbits. This novel is different in that, as soon becomes clear, Archie's alpaca nature is barely skin deep. He and the other alpacas on the island somewhere in the Western Isles where this novel is set are very clearly representations of marginalised humans – immigrants perhaps, or Travellers, or any other kind of outsider you can think of. I suppose the advantage of the alpaca image is that it can stand for all outsiders at once.

We do not, therefore, have to ask ourselves how it is that Archie can talk to his human friends, or do various things for which hooves are not naturally adapted, particularly since he is not the only aspect of "the island" which is at right angles to reality. If a small island has an annual literary festival with serious sponsorship, huge prizes and an audience of 20,000, we are clearly in the realms of fantasy, or magic realism, and nothing else ought to surprise us, not even the festival's unusual climax.

It is the festival, or rather the short story competition at its centre, that is the pivot of the novel, and the scene where all the competitors read out their stories to the audience was, for me, where the book really came alive. I love the technique of interpolating short stories into novels, and it's a bonus when there is actually a discernible reason for it (like a musical where people have a valid excuse for singing).

One of the book's themes, in fact, is how everyone has a "story", though some are better worth listening to than others. (I'm not sure I was actually intended to end up thinking that last, because the narrator is constantly admonishing himself and us to see the potential in everyone and not be judgmental, but there it is.) A novel about a literary festival, about the telling of stories, whose first chapter heading is "If On A Summer's Night An Alpaca", is inevitably to some degree a novel about writing itself, and this is where I sometimes find it difficult to gauge the tone. It's clear enough what he is about when satirising the corruption and pretension endemic to the festival and indeed the literary world in general. We've all met the literary celebs who are so unutterably pleased with themselves, or as the narrator's neighbour puts it, "they're awfy guid tae themselves, so they are". And listened to the reader wittering on with a long intro and finally saying, like Summer Kelly "So maybe I should just, like, read the story" – yeah, maybe…. There's no doubt this literary aspect of the satire will resonate with many readers who are also writers.

. But at other times it is harder to gauge exactly where the writer is standing in relation to the material. When he names a café "The Nightingale With Toothache", is he being determinedly quirky, or satirising the determinedly quirky style of writing? When the narrator says "When cycling I like to mindfully inhale the fresh air", are we meant to grin at that fashionable, affected "mindfully", or take it seriously? And Mr Hibiki, a sort of Japanese Mr Miyagi, except that his talents lie in the culinary rather than the martial arts, is so much the stock Eastern Sage With The Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything, that one would think he must be satirically meant.

But I can see how the whole thing might be read, if not quite dead straight, at least less satirically. In fact, the reviews I have read seem very divided on this issue. Myself I don't think we are ever meant to be quite sure where the writer stands in relation to his first-person but interestingly unnamed narrator. Certainly the book's other theme, which is intolerance toward difference, does not easily lend itself to a satirical reading, and maybe it is the constant interplay between these two themes that leaves readers unsure whether they should be laughing or not at any particular moment. The front-cover blurb asserts that the book will "split your sides and break your heart". Well, it didn't do either of those to me, but then I don't think it meant to. I think it's a novel constantly aware of being a fiction. The one review I really disagreed with was the one that called it "too contrived". It is indeed contrivance, skilful artifice, like any made-up world, and in that lies a great deal of its interest.

The Filboid Studge Man

It isn't often you look at a writer and think how well he would have done in some more practical line of business - mostly, the poorhouse would have beckoned - but the more I read Saki, the more I realise he should have gone into the advertising/promotions industry, if only he'd outlived the trenches of the Great War (it's good that we have his last words; sad that they should have been "Put that bloody cigarette out!"). Despite (or perhaps because of) his general contempt for ordinary folk, on the evidence of stories like The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope, Cousin Teresa and Filboid Studge: The Story of a Mouse That Helped, he had a very fair idea of how to sell a product or start a trend. Look at how, in "Filboid Studge", Mark Spayley manages to sell the ailing breakfast cereal Pipenta by rebranding it as something truly revolting (the new name says it all) that one eats not as a pleasure but as a duty, "for one's health". Basically, it's All-Bran.

"Once the womenfolk discovered that it was thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal in forcing it on their households knew no bounds. “You haven’t eaten your Filboid Studge!” would be screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he hurried weariedly from the breakfast-table, and his evening meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up mess which would be explained as “your Filboid Studge that you didn’t eat this morning.” Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves, inwardly and outwardly, with health biscuits and health garments, battened aggressively on the new food.

Clovis operates a similar reverse psychology when helping out his pal Septimus, who writes pop songs for a living but is having trouble thinking of anything new (or finding a decent set of rhymes for "Florrie"). Clovis's solution is inspired:

“How you bore me, Florrie,
With those eyes of vacant blue;
You’ll be very sorry, Florrie,
If I marry you.
Though I’m easygoin’, Florrie,
This I swear is true,
I’ll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
If I marry you.”

Who can seriously doubt that this refreshing burst of honesty would, as Saki asserts with magnificent dismissiveness, have taken off "in Blackpool and other places where they sing"?

For Saki's other virtue in this field would have been never to overestimate his audience's intellect. The ditty that sweeps London in "Cousin Teresa" is the last word in pointless vacuity, but one can't deny the rhythm's catchy in the extreme. When its author Lucas finds himself in the honours list instead of his much worthier older brother who has been administering some far-flung bit of the Empire, we are meant to feel slightly shocked, but in fact, as the Minister observes, this is what the honours system was about then, as it is now: "It would be rather a popular move". Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie both worked in advertising for a time, but I think Saki would have made a fortune at it; he had both the necessary verbal flair and imagination and the even more necessary complete cynicism.

Shame, in so many ways, about "that bloody cigarette".

Review of Laughter in Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard, pub. University of California Press, 2015

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking read, but you need to be aware beforehand of what you are about to be reading. What it isn't: a parade of hilarious one-liners. What it is: a serious, academic (but quite readable) attempt to get under the skin of a particular culture by analysing not just what made it laugh, but how it laughed, how it regarded laughter and what range of vocabulary it used for this activity (her observations on the role of smiling in Roman society, and the lack of vocabulary relating to it, for instance, are quite surprising).  It isn't very often a light read, but it repays the concentration and thought that it demands.

Cicero's work, especially On the Orator, is naturally one of her most important sources, and the man himself comes over as Ancient Rome's most relentless (and often very funny) gag-merchant. In fact as an orator he was continually, and not always successfully, treading a thin line: wit could help him defeat political opponents and win law cases, but get the tone ever so slightly wrong and one could be accused of abandoning the dignity of an orator for the not dissimilar but less well-regarded trade of actor/comedian.  Modern political parallels suggest themselves, but are not insisted upon; Beard is averse to trying to explain or interpret the Romans in terms of our own culture.

Nevertheless, apparent cultural differences often turn out to be not quite so different as they first seemed. Emperor Elagabalus amusing himself by inviting to dinner eight bald men, or eight one-eyed men, or eight deaf men (in which case the dinner conversation can't have got much beyond "Pardon?") was demonstrating extreme power, as were other emperors who liked to subject their guests to cruel mockery, knowing they dared not object. But they aren't so far removed from the City slickers of our own time who find it amusing to burn ten-pound-notes in front of the homeless; both are using laughter as a power tool.  And the hapless citizens of Abdera, constantly guyed for alleged stupidity, have lived on in Gotham jokes, East Saxony jokes, Irish jokes, and will doubtless live on for ever.

People in the ancient world, doctors especially, were in fact very interested in how laughter worked physically and what caused it. Galen confessed himself baffled by this question; Pliny thought the diaphragm was involved in causing laughter, which can't help but remind one of Ken Dodd's explanation: "it starts at the chuckle muscle in the diagram, rises up past the clack, then comes out through the titter valve". We know more about the physiology now, but what actually gives us the desire to laugh is not as easy to pin down, though the kind of things we do laugh at can say much about our culture and society. That is what this book is really about.

Review of My Own Dear Brother by Holly Müller, pub. Bloomsbury 2016

Ursula gasped involuntarily, imagining the stranger – desperate, violent. But then she remembered the dead man and how wretched he'd looked, the emaciated limbs brittle as tinder, not menacing at all, only sad and disgusting.

Not a lot of first novels, begun in the author's student days, get picked up by really big publishers like Bloomsbury, so this is some achievement. It's probably every young writer's dream, but those who want it to happen to them will need to come up with a real page-turner, and write it with unusual assurance and skill.

Müller has drawn on her own part-Austrian background for her story, which is hard to classify – it might be called a war story, though it is very much about the effect of war on civilians, or maybe a coming-of-age story. The protagonist, Ursula, is eight in the prologue and thirteen when the story proper begins, in 1944, which does not mean, as the unwary tend to assume, that it is a children's book; it contains some distinctly adult material. In the small community of Felddorf, ordinary people find themselves adapting to the curse of interesting times – a dictatorial regime in which anyone even slightly non-conformist is threatened, a war that brings privation, danger and the absence of loved ones, and finally the Russian occupation which notoriously turned into an orgy of rape.

In such times, people discover qualities in themselves, both good and bad, that might otherwise have gone unsuspected. The need to keep one's head down leads to acts of cowardice; the urge to protect one's friends to acts of great courage. Petty spites are paid off and altruistic risks taken. People – or most people – prove more adaptable and resilient than they guessed - the matter-of-fact, practical measures they take to cope with the daily rapes during the occupation are described with a dispassionate lack of sentimentality that is far more moving than sensationalism would have been.

They got ready for work and Ursula dressed in her ugliest clothes, concealing her figure with large shawls. She helped Dorli to push a pillow up the back of her coat to imitate a hunchback. Schosi became more cheerful – he always found this process hilarious, especially when they scooped redcurrant jam with their fingers and rubbed it over their faces as though it was a lotion. It created the look of weeping sores. He observed Ursula closely as she tied a scarf over her head in the style of an old woman and screwed up her eyes into as many wrinkles as she could; he wrinkled his eyes too and she was glad to giggle with him, to forget for a moment what the strange attire was for.

There are very few unadulterated heroes or villains. In the young nurse Eva Kuster, still capable of being redeemed by her natural compassion, we see what her older colleagues were probably like before they were brutalised by the regime – after all, it is unlikely that most of them joined the profession for the express purpose of abusing the patients. Similarly, some of the Russian soldiers are serial rapists; others decent young men like Pasha. One of the most interesting and moving characters is Herr Esterbauer, the Party member who has cheerfully gone along with Nazi policies until they threaten to affect his own senile mother and his best friend's son Schosi. He shows great courage in their defence; yet it is not certain that this belated decency can altogether redeem his past.

If I have a criticism, indeed, it would concern the character of Anton, in which there is no such light and shade. It would be fascinating to see how Nazism turns him into a monster, but in fact he seems to have been an unpleasant bundle of neuroses already, and settled in his unpleasantness. I don't dispute the possibility of such people, but they don't make very interesting literary characters, because they offer no chance of development, change or redemption. Ursula and her sister Dorli are two ordinary girls who grow up in extraordinary and difficult times, partly damaged by their experiences but also more aware of their own strengths, and it is just their ordinariness that makes us eager to follow their story; it is very easy to see through their eyes.

If I didn't know this was a debut novel, I should not have guessed it for one; the various narrative strands are interwoven with considerable skill and the telling has the kind of assurance that gives the reader confidence in the writer's knowledge of her material. Above all, it really is a genuine page-turner; I read 455 pages in one go because I had to know what happened next.

Review of The Speed of Darkness by Catherine Fisher

We might slow the speed of darkness but it still comes anyway

He froze, waiting. The Wood across the stream seemed empty and silent, patters of rain dripping from its soaked branches. Then as if the light had changed, or something in his brain had adjusted, he saw them. Thin and spindly and elegant, their coats and dresses red and gold as the beech leaves, they leaned and lazed and laughed, that host of silver-haired, beautiful, sly creatures that ran and whispered through his dreams. Slants of wan sunlight lit their eyes, beady as starlings', their gaudy buttons and jewels, the ribbons on their coats. Their fingers were too long, their voices the buzz of bees. Some of them still had wings for arms, one a beak instead of a mouth.

Yep, the Shee are back. And the Wintercombe crowd: Piers, Maskelyne, Jake, Sarah, Wharton, Rebecca, not forgetting David and Venn, getting ever closer to being able to use the mirror as they want to. Halloween is approaching, the day of the dead, when the best chance will arise of getting Venn's dead wife back – but also the time when the Shee are at their most powerful.

But there are two new elements. For the first time, we go into the future to see the world Janus has made – or will make. This might have been predicted, but a total surprise was that we also go farther back in time than ever before and find out at last what the relevance to the story is of all those chapter epigraphs about Venn's adventure on Katra Simba.

At this stage of the tetralogy, the last thing I want to do is provide spoilers, so I must be careful what I quote or refer to. What I will warn against is expecting the kind of ending that ties everything up in neat bows, because it isn't what you will get. As befits a quartet of novels which has postulated that time doesn't really exist as such, or at least not in straight lines, the endings for the various characters are a lot more interesting and uncertain than that, and the novel's last three sentences, in particular, are very enigmatic. The title comes from a remark, late on the book, by a character I won't name: "We might slow the speed of darkness but it still comes anyway". This, I think, is the clue to the last sentence.

Now the quartet is complete, it can be seen what an ambitious, rich, sweeping piece of work it is. It makes far more demands of its readership than many adult books do, never mind YA ones, both in following its twisting plot and in absorbing and processing the complex and thought-provoking moral and intellectual questions it keeps throwing up. One of the main ones in this volume concerns what could only be called a good deed, which has dreadful results and arguably should never have been done. The whole series is also a fine example of Fisher's skill at world-building, to the point that very few will want to leave it simply because the pages have come to an end. I am already dreaming of a spin-off for Moll…

Poems for Poetry-Haters

Arising out of a Facebook post by the poet Jo Bell, which linked to a list of poems to try on people who think they hate poetry. I didn't know any of them (US poems mainly, I think) but it did inspire me to try to list the ones I have had success with in this line when doing classes and workshops. I'm thinking especially of those who say they can't get on with contemporary poetry, by which they usually mean the kind that doesn't rhyme.

1, Napoleon, by Miroslav Holub

Holub is a good poet for folk who think they hate poetry, because he's very direct and non-mystifying. He was a doctor, and that vocabulary and subject matter often informs his work, as in Casualty

2. 170 Chinese Poems, translated by Arthur Waley

The "170" was a famous anthology in my youth and I've never actually met anyone who disliked it. Waley was particularly fond of the poet Bai Ju-yi (once known as Po Chu-i) from the 8th-9th century, who specialised in very simple, direct language (which if course wasn't near as simple as it looks). "Remembering Golden Bells" was a poem about the death of his daughter.

3. "Everything Changes" by Bert Brecht.

This is quite a good way to get non-poetry-readers to see what can be done by playing around with syntax, and how it really isn't that difficult or frightening.

4. "Eden Rock" by Charles Causley.

You might say Causley is the compromise for those who can't get on with free verse, since he never abandoned rhyme and music, but "Eden Rock" is half-rhyme, unobtrusive, form used in a twentieth-century way. It's also very powerful and most folk of a certain age can relate to it. There are others on his page in the Poetry Archive.