In July 1942 Irène Némirovsky, author of the now-bestselling Suite Française, wrote in her notebook on her last day of freedom before she was deported by the Nazis, “The pine woods all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night’s storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs tucked under me! In my bag I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the Journal of KM and an orange.”

KM’s husband John Middleton Murry published this journal after her death and it went on to become a best seller. All the royalties went to him and he was accused of being jackal and became “the most hated man in England”. I’ve just read a review here on GR of KM’s scrapbook which Murry also published and the reviewer says: “The results of Katherine Mansfield willingly consigning her literary works, notebooks, letters, etc. to a self-serving contemptible man are unfortunate.” It would appear “self-serving” and “contemptible” are monikers for Murry which are being somewhat thoughtlessly handed down from generation to generation. Was he really that bad? He certainly wasn’t the ideal husband, but then KM was hardly the ideal wife (“I’d always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much”) And I can think of much worse husbands – TS Eliot and Ted Hughes spring immediately to mind. Murry was essentially a blunderer rather than a monster. And it was fascinating to learn how this journal was put together. In truth this journal never existed. It was compiled by Murry from fragments of diary entries, unsent letters, notes for stories and various scraps – in other words anything dated which could be woven into a volume called a journal. Which to my mind makes it one of the most brilliant editorial feats in the history of literature. Needless to say he received no praise. In fact, his achievement continued to meet with a kind of sanctimonious prudery. Dorothy Parker, in her review, says: “It’s a beautiful book and an invaluable one, but it is her own book and only her sad dark eyes should have read its words.” (The garish sentimentality of that “her sad dark eyes” is a red flag that we’re dealing with a suspect emotion here!) It’s interesting no such moral outcry followed the publication of Virginia Woolf’s diaries or letters or anyone else’s for that matter. It’s also worth noting that KM had an agreement at one point with her publisher to write a journal for publication. So some of the time – one could argue all the time as she always struck me as conscious of posterity and destroyed everything she didn’t want read, even going to the lengths of buying back her old letters – she was aware her words would be read.

A wonderful added bonus of this edition is that it contains Virginia Woolf’s review which is generally regarded as ambivalent and to my mind discloses the odd note of jealousy that marred her relationship with Katherine.

“The most distinguished writers of short stories in England are agreed, says Mr Murry, that as a writer of short stories Katherine Mansfield was hors concours. No one has succeeded her and no critic has been able to define her quality. But the reader of her journal is well content to let such questions be. It is not the quality of her writing or the degree of her fame that interests us in her diary, but the spectacle of a mind – a terribly sensitive mind – receiving one after another the haphazard impressions of eight years of life. Her diary was a mystical companion. “Come my unseen, my unknown, let us talk together,” she says on beginning a new volume. In it she noted facts – the weather, an engagement; she sketched scenes; she analysed her character; she described a pigeon or a dream or a conversation, nothing could be more fragmentary; nothing more private. We feel we are watching a mind which is alone with itself; a mind which has so little thought of an audience (disagree with Virginia on this point!) that it will make use of a shorthand of its own now and then, or, as the mind in its loneliness tends to do, divide into two and talk to itself.

But then as he scraps accumulate we find ourselves giving them, or more probably receiving from Katherine Mansfield herself, a direction. From what point of view is she looking at life as she sits there, terribly sensitive (second time she’s used this rather disparaging phrase!), registering one after another such diverse impressions? She is a writer; a born writer. Everything she feels and sees and hears is not fragmentary and separate; it belongs together as writing. Sometimes the note is directly made for a story. “Let me remember when I write about that fiddle how it runs up lightly and swings down sorrowful; how it searches,’ she notes. Or ‘Lumbargo. This is a very queer thing. So sudden, so painful, I must remember it when I write about an old man. The start to get up, the pause, the look of fury, and how, lying at night, one seems to get locked. ..’

Again, the moment itself suddenly puts on significance, and she traces the outline as if to preserve it. “It’s raining but the air is soft, smoky, warm. Big drops patter on the languid leaves, the tobacco flowers lean over. Now there is a rustle in the ivy. Wingly has appeared from the garden next door; he bounds from the wall. And delicately, lifting his paws, pointing his ears, very afraid the big wave will overtake him, he wades over the lake of green grass.’ The sister of Nazareth ‘showing her pale gums and big discoloured teeth’ asks for money. The thin dog. So thin that his body is like ‘a cage on four wooden pegs’, runs own the street. In some sense, she feels, the thin dog is the street. In all this we seem to be in the midst of unfinished stories; here is a beginning; here an end. They only need a loop of words thrown round them to be complete.

But then the diary is so private and so instinctive that it allows another self to break off from the self that writes and to stand apart watching it write. The writing self was a queer self; sometimes nothing would induce it to write. ‘there is so much to do and I do so little. Life would almost be perfect here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. Look at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold. …next day. Yet take this morning for instance. I don’t want to write anything. It’s grey; it’s heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal and not worth doing. I don’t want to write; I want to live. What does she mean by that? It’s not easy to say. But there you are!’

What does she mean by that? No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did. In all the pages of her journal, instinctive, rapid as they are, her attitude toward her work is admirable, sane, caustic and austere. There is no literary gossip; no vanity; no jealousy. (Because Murry had edited these things out of the version VW read. Hermione Lee is much closer to the truth when she describes her as “malicious and chilling as she could be appealing and vulnerable.”) Although during her last years she must have been aware of her success she makes no allusion to it. Her own comments upon her work are always penetrating and disparaging. Her stories wanted richness and depth; she was only ‘skimming the top – no more’. But writing, the mere expression of things adequately and sensitively, is not enough. It is founded upon something unexpressed; and this something must be solid and entire. Under the desperate pressure of increasing illness she began a curious and difficult search, of which we catch glimpses only and those hard to interpret, after the crystal clearness which is needed if one is to write truthfully. ‘Nothing of any worth can come of a disunited being,’ she wrote. One must have health in one’s self. After five years of struggle she gave up the search after physical health not in despair, but because she thought the malady was of the soul and that the cure lay not in any physical treatment, but in some such ‘spiritual brotherhood’ as that at Fontainebleau, in which the last months of her life were spent. But before she went she wrote the summing-up of her position with which the journal ends.

She wanted health, she wrote; but what did she mean by health? ‘by health,’ she wrote, ‘I mean the power to lead a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof – the sea – the sun…then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And of out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.’ The diary ends with the words ‘All is well. And since she died three months later it is tempting to think that the words stood for some conclusion which illness and the intensity of her own nature drove her to find at an age when most of us are loitering easily among those appearances and impressions, those amusements and sensations, which none had loved better than she.

These letters cover the last year of KM’s short life. To begin with, she’s up in the Swiss Alps, living with her husband, John Middleton Murry. For the first time in her life her writing has met with wide success with the publication The Garden Party. She’s planning a new book, perhaps a novel. As usual she rarely goes into much detail about her health – it’s clearly a deep source of shame to her – and for the most part her letters are lively and playful and betray few clues just how physically incapacitated she is (she can barely walk). It’s sometimes difficult to understand if this is bravery or delusion. Probably both in equal measure. But there comes a moment when she hears about a Russian in Paris who supposedly has discovered a miraculous way of curing tuberculous. (By firing x-rays at the spleen of TB patients.)  She drops everything and leaves for Paris. Her husband doesn’t accompany her. He’s too engrossed in the novel he’s writing.  (I’m reading this novel at the moment: I wanted to discover what was engrossing him so much, to the point where he could justify this decision. KM barely mentions this novel and reading between the lines you sense she didn’t think much of it – neither do I, it’s like something written by an undergraduate in a garret.)

It’s painfully sad reading how much hope she put in this (very expensive) miracle cure. Manoukhine, the Russian, tells her she will get worse before she gets better so even her deterioration becomes a source of hope.

There were times when I wondered if, deep down, KM really liked many of the people she was writing to. Everything often seems a performance with her. Her letters glow with affection for the recipient. But the next thing you know she’s scathing about this same person in a letter to another person. In part, I think this is down to an insecure tendency to surround herself with slavish acolytes. Her controlling personality encourages submissive adoration but scorns anyone willing to provide it. She’s much more guarded and mistrustful of bigger, more volatile personalities – as exemplified by her problematical relationships with DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury in general. She’s not in the cool club, snubbed, you sense, because of her background. Murry likewise was snubbed perhaps in part because of his working class background. The Bloomsbury crowd were rampant social snobs. Probably the most startling (and chilling) letters are those to her father. She comes across not as a grown woman but a timid adoring little girl desperate not to incur his disapproval. I think it’s here you most understand why she was so continually reproaching herself for being false. “Nothing of worth can come from a disunited being.” It’s interesting she objects to Ulysses on prudish grounds (though Joyce after they met was to say she understood his book much better than her husband) much as Virginia Woolf objected to KM on the same grounds. I struggle to conceive of her as prudish. Her early life seemed a battle cry against prudery. Her falsity is again to the fore when she is appalled by her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim’s new novel but tells her it’s “delectable” and only Mozart could have written it. It’s this sense of her falsity that finally leads her to join what we’d now call a hippy commune. She decided to stop writing until she was “whole”. I’m now reading the stories she wrote during this period. They aren’t very good. There’s a sense of her going through the motions. Many are unfinished. She largely shies away from writing about death or infirmity. There’s a sense of her trying to escape into stories rather than her bringing to bear any revelations her closeness to death has provided. She had perhaps come to the end of her talent as the writer she was, like Virginia Woolf when she committed suicide. I’m not sure I believe in the kind of radical personal transformations she was often determined to bring about in herself. Which means I don’t think she would ever have become a different writer or person had she lived. It probably would have been more of the same. But it’s a tragedy we don’t have at least one more collection of her stories or, even better, a novel.

Her husband is a fascinating character. His prodigious literary output now meets little acclaim and is gathering dust. He’s most known for being Katherine’s husband. He was much maligned for exploiting her legacy. After her death he had an affair with DH Lawrence’s wife which would have horrified KM. Later he married a young girl who worshipped KM and even looked like her. She didn’t succeed in emulating KM’s literary reputation but she did manage to replicate her death, by dying tragically young of TB, just as Katherine emulated Chekhov’s fate who she worshipped.

The most expensive book I’ve ever bought but worth every penny. KM has been an inspiring and favourite friend to me ever since I met her.

You probably only have to read one Muriel Spark novel to realise she doesn’t hold human beings in very high esteem. Unless, perhaps, they are mad. She has a soft spot for mad women, as long as they are disruptive. As if this for her is the most adept and wise response to life.

Momento Mori gathers together a set of characters in their twilight years all of whom behave as if they are immortal and are motivated almost exclusively by base emotions. The mercenary self-absorption to which they are prey should be tempered by a series of disarming telephone calls they receive. “Remember, you must die,” the voice always says. The voice, of course, is Muriel Spark’s. But will her characters listen to her?

The other day I had to stand in line behind an elderly man who was buying dozens of lottery tickets, dozens of scratch cards and a copy of The Daily Mail. I can imagine it was a similar experience that inspired Muriel Spark to write this novel.

This novel is a little longer than is usual for Spark. It’s madcap and often very funny. But I can’t give all her novels five stars. So this is a 4+.

These letters cover the penultimate year of KM’s life. It was the year she wrote a lot of her best work, including At the Bay and The Garden Party. Often, you’d never guess she was almost completely physically incapacitated with a terminal illness. Her letters, more often than not, are playful, witty, celebratory. She seems bursting with life and is brilliant at communicating a contagious joie de vivre. Not that she’s denying the tragic reality of what is happening to her – “The beauty of the world is a kind of anguish; it is almost too much to bear. It’s like being a child again – but all glorified. The light shakes through the grass, and the wind whispers over, and one’s heart trembles. A new flower appears in my garden. How has it come there, so silently? But it is the silence which is so different. It’s as though the silence becomes your old nurse who said: Very well, you may play a little longer if you are so happy and not tired, but remember I have called you. But the sun goes down so fast, so terribly fast. Now it is shining through the topmost branches of the thinning trees – now there is only a rim of gold to the hill.”

How chilling is that but remember I have called you?

There’s also the sense of her taking stock of her life and finding much to criticise herself for, most notably perhaps her “falsity”. (The irony here is that she still continues to adopt a different persona for each person she writes to and contradicts what she says to one person to another.) KM is one of those people who obsessively sought to obliterate her past. She made a lot of mess in her young years. (Her father was anxious to ship her off to London after a scandalous relationship with another girl at her college in New Zealand, a wealthy Maori called Maata. She had another passionate affair with a girl at the London college where she played the cello. She then had an affair with a musician, was pregnant with his child at twenty but married a respectable older man and then left him later that same day. It’s not known for sure how the pregnancy ended. Only that she went to Germany. Her first literary success was a story she plagiarised from Chekhov – a lover of hers was the first person to translate him into English and so perhaps she thought no one would discover her theft. At some point during this period she unknowingly caught gonorrhoea, which, going untreated, contributed to her later bad health and also led Virginia Woolf to once comment: “We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking.” Even after she finally settled down with Middleton Murry her eye was constantly wandering and one time she travelled alone to Paris during the war to have an affair with a French writer. During these letters her husband is blackmailed by one of her ex-lovers. Despite being poor she has no qualms about paying the money.)

Her husband has come in for a lot of criticism. But I’ve always quite liked him. For one thing he inspires her best letters. But he was clearly out of his depth with KM. It’s a bit like trying to imagine a present day woman married to a Victorian man. Murry was vying with TS Eliot for the accolade of best upcoming poet and critic (we all know how that fight ended.) The novel I read of his was as if written with a board stuffed down the back of his shirt; same goes for his attempts at poetry. He personifies what happens when a high intellect bereft of artistry attempts creative works of art. Also he was guilty of one of the cardinal sins – stinginess. The most awful example when he makes KM pay half the cab fare when she returns home after surgery. As ever she responds with wit – “I suppose if one fainted he would make one pay 3d for a 6d glass of sal volatile and 1d on the glass.” – but you can tell how much his insensitivity hurt her. I can’t help wondering what she truly thought about her husband’s work. Now and again she berates him. But there’s a sense she was more comfortable with acolytes than equals (hence her difficult relationship with VW). In fact, KM’s most loyal friend is a woman who slavishly idolises her and at times you feel she is trying to mould her husband into a similar role. KM was in love with the idea of being in love. She was the same with places: initially upon moving to a new home we get an outpouring of love only to be followed by bitter disillusionment.

A moving moment is when her cat is brought to Switzerland. She humanises this cat in her letters just as she does with her dolls. So we hear about him writing his memoirs and acquiring a pair of skis. It’s indicative of the lost idea of innocence she’s searching for up in the Swiss Alps which is why nearly all the stories she wrote were inspired by her childhood in New Zealand. Her beloved brother had died in WW1. She had come to see the modern world as corrupt. This dynamic of innocence and corruption was a constant theme throughout her work. You can see how this struggle impacts her personal life in these letters.
Finally, it’s fitting that Ali Smith gave a love of KM to a woman dying of cancer in Spring because I can imagine these letters would provide a measure of sustenance to anyone living under a death sentence. Onto Volume 5 now…

Many writers strive for a fresh vibrant distinctive voice; few achieve it as well as Anna Burns does in this novel. It was fitting that I read this while reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved because both novels have a fresh and innovative female voice at the helm and both very cleverly and subtly bring heaps of searing intelligence to the essentially uneducated worlds they depict.

Milkman is an evocation of a world in which bigotry rules supreme. And this bigotry is mocked relentlessly with often hilarious biting ingenious satire. No one in the novel gets a name as if names in this world are meaningless. Everyone is tagged, like walls. Milkman himself, probably a candidate for most sinister villain of the decade, isn’t a milkman at all. He’s the sum total of fearful rumour, a veritable stalking bogeyman. Two things though are certain. Firstly, he possesses intimidating authority as an enforcer of the repressive status quo. And secondly, he drives a white van, one of misogyny’s most benign yet potent symbols. When he begins driving alongside our narrator who likes to read while walking her autonomy, identity and living space all suddenly shrink under his menacing interest. Though there’s no overt sexual harassment the narrator explains her predicament – “At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.”

The armed forces of “that country over the water” pose little tangible threat in Milkman. What everyone most fears is the opinion of their neighbours. Because this is an us and them world which permits no nuance of allegiance. You’re either with us or you’re against us. Everyday life is an obstacle course of not providing the local gossip mongers any reason to single you out. To be singled out is to invite suspicions of belonging to them, not us. The narrator’s “maybe boyfriend” gets into trouble when he wins part of a Bentley car in a raffle. To his neighbours this small piece of engineering is a symbol of “the country over the water”. This scene is one of the many brilliant withering mockeries of mob mentality, ideological paranoia and the underhand blood lust innate in draconian repressive measures. Another of my favourite scenes is when the narrator tries to convince her mother she’s still attractive and resorts to the tactic of throwing high-sounding numbers at her, just as politicians often do on our TV screens. So Milkman is about much more than Belfast during the troubles. It’s about the hard and stifling lines that are drawn up for us and the often exhausting struggle to push them back. And it’s brilliant.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to discover Penelope Fitzgerald and Muriel Spark. Their books are wonderfully short, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully funny. In other words, the ideal remedy when you’re in a reading slump.

In The Gate of Angels two innocents meet through a cycling accident. Freddie is a junior fellow at the college of St Angelicus where no female has ever been allowed to set foot through the gate. Daisy has just lost her job as a trainee nurse in London and has come to seek work at a psychiatric hospital in Cambridge. It’s 1912 and we all know what is about to happen in the world. (There’s one subtle poignant reminder when two of the characters go to see Rupert Brooke in a theatre production.)

Like in Offshore Fitzgerald flits like a butterfly around her characters without ever quite settling on them for long. She’s interested in their innocence and how that innocence will be hurt. And she’s interested in the circumstantial as a means of understanding the roots. To call a novel charming can sometimes be a bit patronising but it’s Fitzgerald’s most effective weapon; it’s the charm of a novelist who feels a deep infectious affection for her characters and applies a subtle wit and intelligence to every page. She also manages to effortlessly load the novel with the age’s relevant themes – class barriers, the encroachment of women into men’s hallowed territory, the looming discoveries of science.

It’s perhaps something of a cliché to depict that generation exclusively in terms of innocence as Fitzgerald does here but the ending is super effective in making you wonder how the world went suddenly so insane. Freddie is about to attend a lecture by a physicist who has a German assistant and claims to have proof of the nuclear atom. Freddie’s old-world professor, who only believes in the observable, jokes that next people will want to believe even the atom can be split. Suddenly we have all the horrors of the 20th century before us.

The hostel where all the girls in this novel live has a roof where, it’s implied, a kind of liberating excitement awaits, but the only way of getting up there is to squeeze through a narrow window. Most of the girls can’t get their hips through. Some of the girls strip naked and smear their bodies with margarine in a futile attempt to squeeze through. Hard to think of a more bitingly witty metaphor for what awaits young women in 1945 when they aspire to a bigger horizon.

For much of this small novel it’s like we’re following the author around the hostel in search of a plot. We meet the beautiful Selina who has “long unsurpassable legs” and is the only girl capable of squeezing through the bathroom window. She has sex on the roof with a poet. The misguided pinnacle of every young girl’s fantasies! We meet the overweight Jane who does “brain work” – often consisting of writing faked fan letters to famous authors in the hope of getting a signed reply so the man she works for can sell the autograph. We meet the virginal Joanna who gives elocution lessons and whose voice is a ubiquitous presence in the building sounding out eerily portentous oracles of poetry. It’s a kind of marvel how this novel appears on the surface to flit about without much rhyme or reason and yet end up being so entertainingly robust and lucid and poetical in its achievement – that of dramatizing, broadly, the straitjacketing of women’s expectations.

Many writers strive for a fresh vibrant distinctive voice; few achieve it as well as Anna Burns does in this novel. It was fitting that I read this while reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved because both novels have a fresh and innovative female voice at the helm and both very cleverly and subtly bring heaps of searing intelligence to the essentially uneducated worlds they depict.

Milkman is an evocation of a world in which bigotry rules supreme. And this bigotry is mocked relentlessly with often hilarious biting ingenious satire. No one in the novel gets a name as if names in this world are meaningless. Everyone is tagged, like walls. Milkman himself, probably a candidate for most sinister villain of the decade, isn’t a milkman at all. He’s the sum total of fearful rumour, a veritable stalking bogeyman. Two things though are certain. Firstly, he possesses intimidating authority as an enforcer of the repressive status quo. And secondly, he drives a white van, one of misogyny’s most benign yet potent symbols. When he begins driving alongside our narrator who likes to read while walking her autonomy, identity and living space all suddenly shrink under his menacing interest. Though there’s no overt sexual harassment the narrator explains her predicament – “At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.”

The armed forces of “that country over the water” pose little tangible threat in Milkman. What everyone most fears is the opinion of their neighbours. Because this is an us and them world which permits no nuance of allegiance. You’re either with us or you’re against us. Everyday life is an obstacle course of not providing the local gossip mongers any reason to single you out. To be singled out is to invite suspicions of belonging to them, not us. The narrator’s “maybe boyfriend” gets into trouble when he wins part of a Bentley car in a raffle. To his neighbours this small piece of engineering is a symbol of “the country over the water”. This scene is one of the many brilliant withering mockeries of mob mentality, ideological paranoia and the underhand blood lust innate in draconian repressive measures. Another of my favourite scenes is when the narrator tries to convince her mother she’s still attractive and resorts to the tactic of throwing high-sounding numbers at her, just as politicians often do on our TV screens. So Milkman is about much more than Belfast during the troubles. It’s about the hard and stifling lines that are drawn up for us and the often exhausting struggle to push them back. And it’s brilliant.

I was enjoying this until I realised the author was writing a different novel to the one I wanted to read, was following characters I wasn’t interested in. There were clues early on that this was going to go off the rails when an overwrought narrator kept interrupting the wartime narrative to speak in the first person. However, these interludes were short so it was easy to ignore them and hope for the best. What interested me initially was she focused on two characters who were potentially dangerous to the Jewish family at the heart of this novel. Almost always in Holocaust novels the author concentrates on the good guys and makes little effort to depict the bad guys with any insight. They’re just plain evil as if that’s all we need to know. For a long stretch of this novel I thought the author was going to give us the bad guys. Marta is the housekeeper of a wealthy Jewish family in the Sudetenland. She’s having an affair with the pernicious foreman of her employer’s fabric factory. She’s not a bad person but she’s resentful, uneducated, emotionally unstable, easily influenced and clearly dangerous to the wellbeing of the Jewish family that employs her. Most of the considerable tension of the early part of the novel is provided by the volatile whims of these two characters. We’re dealing with the banality of evil.

Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens – the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward’s father. The novel’s focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I’m afraid I didn’t find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema – no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.

There’s a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It’s easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He’s nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension.

Another bloated Booker prize winner. Shared the prize with the infinitely more sophisticated and innovative The English Patient. Another baffling decision on the part of the judges. The English Patient is a torchbearer of how nimble and ironically self-regarding historical fiction will become in the 21st century – I’m thinking of Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell.

This on the other hand, is old school historical fiction. No irony, no mischief, no architectural sleights of hand. Unsworth goes for authenticity of tone which unfortunately often creates a rather leaden feel, most damningly represented by the journal the doctor on the slave ship writes. Here, we’re treated to lots of Victorian soul searching which might have been realistic but to me was also dreary and meant I had little sympathy for the hero of this novel. In fact, I was more attracted to the baddie, Erasmus, without question the best character in the novel. His inept courting of a girl during the rehearsals for an amateur performance of The Tempest was the best part of the whole novel for me. In fact, that was the only relationship in the entire novel that interested me. Life on board the slave ship should have been highly charged and gripping; instead, because of the nature of the journal, the telling instead of showing, and the wholly predictable relationships between the goodies and baddies it was dull. There was also the problem that the characters of most interest were the slaves themselves but we learn nothing about them. Instead we get detailed intimate accounts of many of the rather dreary motley crew of sailors. In fact, Unsworth spends way too much time focusing on minor characters who indulge in pages of pointless chit-chat – I soon learned one could skip these pages without losing a shred of significance to the book’s plot which begs the question, why are they there? The novel repeatedly went out of focus for me.

The novel’s fulcrum is the lifelong enmity Erasmus feels towards his cousin, the surgeon. It never made much sense to me. Was Erasmus gay? That’s the only explanation I can come up with why a man would hate another man because he felt slighted by him when they were children.

On the good side, Unsworth clearly wrote this novel with lots of love (this actually becomes a problem because it causes him to get carried away with all his minor characters who might be vivid to him but were often vague to me because there were so many of them and all with similar names). And he can write well. And it was excellently researched. He does a good job of evoking the base mercantile spirit of Empire but failed to dramatise it effectively for me.