1001 Books Reviews: Kindle Reads Edition

This new Kindle of mine is not good for my to-read pile, although it is already doing excellent things to the status of my 1001 Books challenge. I can now get endless out-of-copyright books for free, and this has sent me slightly loopy with excitement. Here's a quick run-down of my latest classic reads.


Vathek by William Beckford

A lot of people wonder why I'm doing this 1001 Books project. To be honest, when I stare into a future consisting of the whole of The Forsyte Saga, I wonder as well. But while there are some 'classics' that give reading for pleasure a bad name (James Joyce, I am looking at you), there are some that remind me that there's method to my madness. And Vathek turns out to be one of the latter.

One of my favourite Gothic novels of all time is The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. This completely bonkers little book was one of the novels that kicked off the entire genre - and when you consider that it starts with a GIANT, UNEXPLAINED HELMET just FALLING OUT OF THE SKY and CRUSHING SOME GUY TO DEATH, you understand why people (especially me) have loved the Gothic ever since.

To my great joy, Vathek turns out to be The Castle of Otranto with camels. Completely insane and completely nonsensical, it's the literary equivalent of a Vegas showgirl's outfit, an outrageous flight of fancy by someone who has absolutely no idea what he's talking about and doesn't even care. It's a nonsense view of the Middle East, so off-target that it's almost beyond offensive (note: almost, but not quite), just because it so little resembles any actual Middle East that ever was or will be.

Illustration by Richard Westall, V&A collection

Marina Warner's Stranger Magic, which I read a few months ago, explains how the first European translation of The Thousand and OneNights, Antoine Galland's 1704-17 French version, sparked off a massive fetishy craze for all things Oriental. People literally could not get enough of houris and dervishes and magic carpets, and you can absolutely see this coming out in Vathek. There are evil enchantresses and mummies and camels (which I think Beckford may have confused with elephants) and deadly potions and Genii and riches beyond compare... and so on, and so on, in total excess, for ever.

There really isn't a plot, to speak of - things just happen, and keep on happening, until the story ends with everyone dead in a big ridiculous heap. Nominally, it's about Vathek, an evil ruler who has a Palace of Sin, and... goes on a quest to find some sort of Oriental hell (said quest keeps being interrupted as Beckford gets bored and makes new plots up). Vathek also has a super-evil enchantress mother, who likes killing people and has a poisonous camel (the mother and the camel are my favourite parts of this book), and they do stuff, and then they meet this beautiful princess and... I don't even know. It's like all of the Arabian Nights got rolled up into one. Vathek is totally crazy and ridiculous, and also terribly written, and I totally loved it.

3.5 stars


Trilby by George du Maurier

I am a Dracula superfan. Seriously. I am so obsessed that I am tiresome about it. Start me talking about the lack of good movie versions of this book and I could bore you for hours. Also I wrote an essay for my MA about Freud and Dracula, on how Dracula's female vampires are just poorly-disguised hysterics who need to be cured by the love (and the stakes) of good Victorian men (think about this. It is true). So when I heard people saying that the Svengali character in Trilby is basically the Count Dracula of the music scene, in that he is villainously foreign and enjoys altering the character of women by hypnosis, I knew I had to read the book. It was the first thing I downloaded on my new Kindle, and the first thing I read on it, and I thought that it was awesome.

Trilby, although it's been largely forgotten about today (apart from when people talk about an overbearing impresario being a 'Svengali', and even then they've usually got no idea what they're really referring to), was a huge craze when it came out. It was basically the Twilight of 1894. In the same way that people buy underwear and bedspreads with Edward's face on them today, people in 1894 bought Trilby perfume, and Trilby boots, and Trilby hats (yes, trilby hats! That's where the term comes from).

Trilby is about three English bohemians in Paris in the 1850s - think the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gone Gallic - and the artists' model they all fall for, Irish lass Trilby O'Farrell. I was expecting Trilby to be a mimsy little Dickens heroine, or a slender and fainting fin-de-siecle angel, but instead she's a big, rowdy, fun-loving woman with a great sense of humour. For once, it's not hard to see why every man she comes across is so fascinated by her - the three Englishmen, of course, and all their friends, but also their sinister foreign acquaintance Svengali. Svengali's possibly Jewish (it's that kind of latently racist book), a musical impresario who's got a good sideline in hypnotism. He loves Trilby in a way that's terribly creepy (his most-used chat-up line is basically: if you don't love me then one day I will come VISIT YOUR CORPSE IN THE GRAVEYARD, which... is not a turn-on), and keeps trying to hypnotise her in a pretty obvious bid to get her under his evil spell.

One of du Maurier's original drawings

Unsurprisingly, Trilby is not taken with Svengali. More inexplicably, she is taken with one of the three Englishmen, the painter Little Billee (I know. His name is awful, twee and tiresome, just like Little Billee himself), but after their love-affair is broken up by Billee's officious middle-class idiot of a mother, Billee and his friends lose track of Trilby. Five years later, though, they hear about a mysterious Madame Svengali who's taking the whole world by storm with her astonishing vocal feats. And Madame Svengali is always accompanied by her husband, who manages her stage performances and seems to control her in every way...

It's really interesting to read this book now, because (just like Dracula) its main plot twist has become so immediately obvious. In 2013 it's impossible to get more than ten pages into Dracula without thinking, dude. Come on. He's a VAMPIRE, and likewise you can't read Trilby without understanding that Trilby is being hypnotised. Both ideas were completely new when the books first came out - that was one of the reasons why they were so popular - but while in one respect this makes their plots totally dated, there's also something about the characters' totally shocked responses to the nature of the horror that's unfolding in front of them that still feels fresh.

It also doesn't hurt that Trilby is such a great heroine. She's in the Mina Harker mould of smart, bold New Women, and while she's obviously not without her issues, she's a damn sight better than most of the rest of the leading women of the time. And then there's all the Bohemian hijinx that goes on at the beginning of the book (fun, if rambling), and the super hyped-up theatrical scenes at the end (fun, if OTT). I can absolutely see why 1894 loved this book so much. In fact, I pretty much agree with them.

4 stars.


A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

The fact that I read A Modest Proposal for the first time a week ago is one of the dark literary secrets of my heart. It was on my university reading list and I, er, didn't see it there, I guess. I sat in my seminar for an hour nodding intelligently and privately thinking EATING BABIES? What IS this? Well, I can now tell you that A Modest Proposal is indeed about eating babies. More specifically, it's a deceptively calm and understated response to the problem of Irish poverty that suggests that it would be cost-effective to just eat the nation's excess children.

Swift lays out a whole economic model: each baby would fetch so much money and would save so many pounds of food a year, and their skins could be made into so much leather, and so on, and so on. I know it was written more than 200 years ago, but I can very easily imagine this being published today as a long comment piece in a left-leaning paper, ironically insisting that we all pop down to the Job Centre and pick ourselves up a tasty NEET or two for dinner. Swift's prose is incredibly dark and very barbed, but (probably because of that darkness) it's also extremely funny. Sadly, it's also still very relevant.

The Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

I'm pretty much lumping this together with A Modest Proposal. They're both polemical state-of-the-nation pieces dressed up as bits of almost-fantasy - with, in The Tale of a Tub's case, a side of transparent allegory. The Tale itself comes chopped up into little bits, with random little pieces, or 'digressions', about criticism and authorship and modern taste shoved in between its chapters. These are funny and quite clever in themselves (I guess), but also pointedly pointless and with their wit incredibly overworked in that special self-hating eighteenth century style that really hasn't aged well. Honestly, they nearly finished me off. I had to strive to get through them - but every time I got close to breaking point, another part of the Tale would come along and wake me up again.

What still works about Swift - and there's something about him that really does still work - is his ability to write satire that, while it obviously started its life directed at a completely contemporary issue, nevertheless manages to pick out timeless human failings that will never stop feeling relevant to readers. The Tale is a criticism of different factions of Christianity, pointing out how far each sect has diverged from the religion's original tenets. It's about three 'brothers' who are given a 'will' by their 'father'. They follow it for a while, and then they all begin to reread the document in ways that fit with what they want out of life. There are lots of really good digs at a lot of holy cows, and while a lot of them are aimed at Catholicism, Anglicanism comes in for a few nice shots too. Swift clearly thought that the whole world was full of idiots (he is probably right), and was very good at communicating that vision in a way that makes you laugh even as you feel depressed.

Swift was most definitely cleverer than me. I think I'd have enjoyed knowing him, back in the day, and I do enjoy reading the things that he's written. But all the same, I don't think I'm ever going to read either A Modest Proposal or The Tale of a Tub again.

They both get 3 stars.

1001 Books Review: Parade's End

Let's carry on the 2013 reviews by featuring something I actually read in 2012. I know, I've been lazy. But there is just so much to this book that I'm daunted by the thought of trying to sum it all up. Here goes.

Parade's End has recently been a TV show starring Benedict Cumberbatch and his strangely motionless face, but, before that, it was a novel by Ford Madox Ford. In fact, it is four novellas packed into one enormous 800 page tome. About the effect of World War I on England in general, and about one hidebound bastion of English maleness in particular, Parade's End is the story of how Christopher Tietjens learned to shut up and be unfaithful to his wife already.

Tietjens presents himself as the last outpost of true English values, which he sees as being located firmly in the eighteenth century. This is brilliant in ways that Ford probably couldn't even predict, since these days we think of English values being eternally Victorian (or even Edwardian) - proving, if any more proof were needed, how nostalgia is permanently jumping backwards to the year before, and the year before that, and so on for ever. I bet the first Homo sapiens got nostalgic about being Australopithicae.

Anyway, Tietjens has a sulky and unfaithful wife called Sylvia who sort of hates him and sort of loves him and LONGS to divorce him - but he won't, because he believes in keeping up appearances (also known as parades, you see. There are a lot of different parades in this novel). Then Tietjens falls in love with a youthful suffragette called Valentine Wannop (a glorious name) and dooms them, because of his refusal to divorce his wife, to years of sexless super-British yearning. And then along comes WW1.

None of their faces ever move.

I'd read some Ford before - The Good Soldier, coincidentally also about miserable early twentieth-century marriage - so I was sort of expecting a more protracted version of that. But not at all. The Good Soldier is an Edwardian novel, albeit one with its petticoats over its head, but Parade's End is a fully-fledged modernist text, slightly mad and stark and with lashings of disconnected stream-of-consciousness confusion. Almost the whole thing is told as a series of flashbacks, which is very disconcerting. A character sits staring at a pot of flowers for ten straight pages, thinking about elephants and metaphysics and breasts, and then suddenly it's five years later and we're in France and the same character is huddling under a shell bombardment that sounds like metaphysical elephants dropping pans on each other's breasts. Or something.

I'm being facetious - really, I enjoyed this book. Sylvia, especially, is an astonishing character. She's so bad, but you understand and empathise with every step of that badness and with every nutty action it drives her to carry out. It's also got a lot of very smart things to say about gossip and reputation. So much mud is flung at Tietjens and the other characters during the novel and (I think this is a brilliant touch) not a single one of those rumours is true. Everyone is better, and more boring, than they are painted. Even Tietjens' brother Mark, who lives in sin with his mistress, has been faithful to her for twenty years and comes home every evening to the meat and potatoes she has cooked for his supper.

For a book that seems like it might be full of reactionary muttering about how bad change is, I was quite delighted by how balanced Ford is about the way that life - and the world - is constantly moving on. Christopher needs the parades he's so obsessed with to be over so he can finally free himself from mad Sylvia. His brother Mark, heir to an ancestral title he doesn't want, needs the world to change so he's not forced to manage a huge estate that he hates. Those that don't or won't change die - no, literally, they die - and what's left are those who are willing to alter and compromise. Thank god, Parade's End is a nostalgic novel that's not sentimental.

There are a lot of lovely things about Parade's End.  The relationship between Tietjens and Valentine is wonderful - they fall in love by having an argument about Latin translations, and the main reason why Tietjens fights through the war to get back to her is because he wants to spend the rest of his life talking to her about interesting ideas. The book itself, for all its convolutions and modernist clever-clever, is beautifully written and the characters are sympathetically drawn. This is not a novel to pick up lightly - seriously, it's got a heft like a brick - but it is one that deserves to be given the time it takes to read it. And, having read it, I can endorse the amazing BBC TV series even more fully than I did before.

4 stars.

Review battle: ladies of the night edition

The two books I'm reviewing today complimented each other in ways I didn't even fully realise they would until after I'd finished the second. The connection I was originally going for, ignorant of all but their blurbs, was prostitutes. The protagonist of the first, after all, is a very successful one, and the action of the second centres around a home for (supposedly) reformed ones. But while the wholly expected pleasure of the first is its unrepentant, unlikely, idiotic naughtiness, its absolute commitment to the propagation of the myth of the happy and gloriously rapacious prostitute, the unexpected joy of the second is how it takes that expectation and kicks it straight in the face.

So, step into the ring Fanny Hill and The Unpierced Heart.

Fanny Hill by John Cleland

This is a novel on my 1001 Books list, and one with a history as eventful as its contents. First published in 1748 while its author languished in debtor's prison, it's been in trouble with the censors ever since. It's got a long and proud tradition of being only available in underground, bootleg editions, and it wasn't until the 1970s that it was available to purchase in legal and unexpurgated form. Essentially, the courts decided that while it was obscene, they'd seen obscener, and that it's also a pretty well-written book whatever its content. And I'd have to agree.

Rest assured: this book is erotica. Of course it is. Approximately half of the words in it are descriptions of genitals, and most of the rest are lavish descriptions of how those genitals are used. But it's also a lot of really charming fun. Fanny herself is a lively, lovely heroine. She's sharp and determined, with a sexuality that's shown in a basically positive light, and her story is an engaging Bildungsroman with naughty bits. You want her to triumph over adversity and masculine wiles, and she does. Cleland's female protagonist isn't just languishing about like Clarissa (a character I hate so much that I swear to god I would set her on fire if I ever came across her in real life), she's getting up and taking control of her own fortunes. Yes, she's doing it by, er, having graphic sex with a lot of men, but this is a woman with ambitions and intelligence, who knows what she wants and gets it.

It's much clearer to me than it usually is why this book deserves a place on the 1001 list.  It's not just a good novel in and of itself, it's a foundational text for a genre which could be broadly defined as Books About Saucy Ladies of the Night, and which still sells today. The Crimson Petal and the White, Memoirs of a Geisha, Tipping the Velvet - they're all Fanny's progeny in one way or another.

Which brings me on to my next point. Yes, I enjoyed Fanny Hill. Yes, some bits of it are sexy. But others are much more problematic. A lot of episodes that are presented as happy fun sex times are, to put it baldly, rapes. Waking a woman up by having sex with her? That would be called rape. Grabbing a woman and forcing her to have sex with you? Yes, that's rape too. Sadly, many people in 2012 still struggle to understand what is rape and what is not (clue: rape is when you have sex with someone without their consent), so it's difficult not to conclude that Cleland, writing 250 years ago, was part of an anti-female culture so horrendous that he should get at least something of a pass. But acknowledging that doesn't make my discomfort with parts of Fanny Hill go away. A lot of this novel is sexploitation. Fanny and her female friends may be engaged in conning their johns out of some serious money, but they do it by allowing themselves to be abused and belittled in ways that are described for the express titillation of the reader.

So while reading Fanny Hill made me realise where a lot of the novels I love have come from, it also made me understand exactly what those more modern books are subverting. Tipping the Velvet, in particular, suddenly made about 100% more sense to me - while it essentially follows Fanny's main plot points (even down to some of the orgies), Waters makes her 'Fanny' a lesbian and gives her and the other characters back actual human emotions - like shame at being publically abused, or anger at being forced into prostitution. It was a huge aha! moment for me - I finally discovered what book Sarah Waters is mad at, and why she's justified in so being.

Actually, since Waters wrote an entire book pastiching Fanny Hill, I suspect she loves it even while she's being mad at it, which is pretty much how I feel myself. There's so much wrong with Fanny Hill's morality, and so many dumb contrivances in its plot, but all the same I also thought it was pretty great. And I'm not going to apologise for either emotion.

3.5 stars

The Unpierced Heart by Katy Darby

Katy, as well as being an author, happens to be my fellow Story Sunday editor over at Litro. When I first joined the team during my MA last year I told our boss Eric that I was writing an essay about Victorian women in public places and he said, "You should meet Katy. She's writing a book. It's about WHORES." "Horses?" I asked, bewildered. "WHORES!" said Eric. "WHOOOOORES."  And that was how I found out about Katy Darby.

Katy and I obviously have a lot of the same mind-furnishings. A pastiche sensation novel set in Victorian Oxford and written as a series of 'discovered' documents by linked narrators? It's like someone wrote the book I didn't know I wanted to read. After all, I grew up in the nerdy, donnish world of Oxford colleges (where the nineteenth century is still playing on repeat), and Wilkie Collins and friends were one of the best discoveries of my teenage years.

Sensation novels are so wonderfully plotted, so exciting (stuff happens! All the time!) and so much fun - but I've got to admit that most of their female characters are horrible. The blonde haired angel with the heart of a devil beating in her bosom, the mimsy little heroine so stupid she can barely spell her name and the smart lady too mannish to be loved are all tropes on constant repeat, and none of them (except maybe the smart woman) even vaguely resemble any real person I have ever met. But while there's nothing to be done with the output of long-dead authors, I'm damn sure (see above) that I want any modern takes on their genre to correct those errors. And Katy, I discovered to my joy about three quarters of the way through The Unpierced Heart, has answered my prayers.

Her anti-heroine Diana seems, at first meeting, to be a vapid, pornographic femme fatale through and through. She makes evil decisions for totally random reasons and ruins the lives of worthy men with callous abandon. First encountered by priggish frame narrator Edward Fraser when he is a Theology undergrad at Cambridge in the early 1880s, Diana's unfaithfulness has already destroyed two of her lovers. So when Fraser meets her again at Oxford, under a new name and with yet another one of his friends within her grasp, he determines to unmask her for the fiend she really is. Can he save his innocent friend, the pathologist Stephen Chapman, from falling prey to Diana's charms? Or will she triumph again?

That's the story that Darby is apparently telling. But, as the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that there's a whole lot more going on here. Without giving the (very satisfactory) twist away, it emerges that Diana has (gasp!) reasons for the things she does. She is actually... a human being! Thoughts go through her brain and emerge as ideas! It's a modern miracle.

Her settings and set-ups may be wholly sensation-novel conventional, but Darby has actually thought about what she's writing and the result is a very intelligent reimagining of all those thoughtless, worn-out sensation tropes. Fanny Hill temporarily seduced me into buying the myth of the willing prostitute, but The Unpierced Heart reminded me that, in reality, they inhabit a grim, dangerous and thankless world where a woman won't magically fall in love with the life she's been forced to lead. Diana comes to Oxford to run a halfway house for Jericho prostitutes (hence the title of the hardback edition of this book, The Whores' Asylum), and although most of said prostitutes are unrepentant, they are also wholly human. They're no better and no worse than the novel's men (and actually much better than its male villain), and that's as it should be. There are misunderstandings and stupid decisions on all sides, and the tricky plot rattles along under the steam of those confusions to produce a fast-paced and intriguing sensation narrative that's nevertheless a lot more emotionally real than the genre it's working from.

I honestly really liked this book. It's very clever, it's well written (with a good ear for the turns of phrase used by novelists from Darby's chosen period), it's set in one of my favourite eras and it's about one of my favourite places. Spot on, essentially. I may have liked Fanny Hill, but this descendant of hers is one that I both like and fully approve of.

4 stars.

1001 Books Review - Surfacing

Margaret Atwood is a very good writer, isn't she? A very good writer. That is not in any doubt.

But oh I hated this particular book.

This is partly due to over-exposure. I've now read almost all of Atwood's books, and I feel like I know her much, much too well as a result. If this was a real relationship we would be over the honeymoon stage, way past easy fondness and at that awful place where every word that comes out of the other person's mouth sounds like a broken record. You hear them start to tell THE SAME STORY like it's still brand new information, and all you want to do is leap up and scream, "THIS IS NOT FUNNY! IT HAS NEVER BEEN FUNNY! WERE YOU ALWAYS THIS BORING?"

I mean, GOD, Margaret Atwood, is there some line in your contract that stipulates that every single one of your novels must contain a man repeating the phrase 'Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot!' and then laughing like it's funny? Is there? IS THERE REALLY? Because if not, why do you keep doing it? Why? And why are your main characters always you, and why do they all have the same childhoods, and why do they all hate themselves, and why are all the men in your novels hideous penis-brained idiots? WHY?

I'm overreacting, and I know I am, but I just can't take it any more. I am Atwooded out.

Surfacing is the story of Narrator X (many of Atwood's narrators don't have names, because 1. they are secretly just Margaret Atwood, and 2. they are simultaneously Everywoman and a big woman-shaped vacant space), who goes into the Canadian woods with her three friends to look for her missing father. Of course, what she discovers is that culture is terrible, humanity is terrible and she has spent her adult life as a TOOL OF MEN. So she goes crazy, rips off all of her clothes, smashes some mirrors and returns to nature. Sigh.

The sad thing is that I technically agree with a lot of what Atwood has to say. Humans are destroying the natural world. A lot of men do treat women reprehensibly. We haven't solved any of the problems that feminism was created to combat. Thinking about all of that makes me incredibly angry. And yet, Surfacing just left me wishing profoundly that Margaret Atwood would write one novel at least that didn't read like a big old cloud of unrelieved despair.

The one bright spot, for me, is that Surfacing (first published 1972) does inadvertantly prove that, for all the awful sexism that women still have to deal with on a regular basis, relationships between men and women (or at least some men and some women, or at least the men and women that I know) have improved immeasurably since it was written. I found myself really struggling to connect with the mindset of Atwood's characters. There's Anna, who can't ever take off her makeup in case her husband David hates her, and then there's the narrator's boyfriend Joe, who keeps trying to rape her while shouting "DO YOU LOVE ME YET?" I just can't imagine a group of my own friends behaving the way they do, and more importantly, I can't imagine my boyfriend or my male friends behaving the way Joe and David behave. Yes, the men in my life still sometimes insist on making pointless sexist jokes, but they do it sheepishly, like they know at a base level that they're being bad.

I've suggested before that this disconnect between Atwood's lived experience and my own is because it has taken (and will still take) a long, long time to create a sensible and automatically feminist pool of potential husbands. Atwood was writing in the second-wave 70s, but the men she was surrounded with had been brought up in the 40s and 50s, when women were mostly housewives and made meatloaf and stared at the wall and cried. My own men, by contrast, were brought up in the 80s and 90s, when women mostly wore power suits and were Prime Minister. My boyfriend's mother is a GP, so it would have been pretty difficult for him not to grow up knowing that women were capable of being intelligent and effective public figures.It's a process of tiny baby steps, is what I'm saying, but all the same those baby steps seem to have led us somewhere.

I feel very lucky that the battle of the sexes in Surfacing didn't ring true for me, because of the effect that it has on its narrator. The hate X receives from the male characters has been internalised and turned in on herself. She despises herself. She sees herself as intrinsically wrong and lacking and stupid, and Atwood's pretty clear that this is because she's been surrounded by people feeding her this nonsense every day of her life. If you get hate, hate's all you know, and you can't possibly like yourself as a person if you're constantly being told how inadequate you are. In a way, Surfacing is an updated 'Yellow Wallpaper' - the woman takes what men imagine her to be and twists it into a really terrifying monster version of herself. Again, I know that this is a problem that has nowhere near been solved for all women, but I'm so glad that, for me, that updating feels in need of another update. Baby steps!

By rights, I should probably like, or at least agree with, Surfacing. But I can't. I see that it's beautifully written, I see that it's got views that I am intrinsically on board with, but all the pleasure I might have had in actually reading it fell down that tiny gap between Atwood's point of view and my own and was lost for ever.

Purely on enjoyment, I have to give this

2.5 stars.

Oh, and my 1001 books progress? 20.48%

1001 Books Review: Shirley

Some books come along exactly when you need them, and Shirley by Charlotte Bronte turned out to be just such a one.

As many of you will know, I am currently... not gainfully employed (although not through want of trying). As any of you who have met me will also know, I am the worst unemployed person in the world. If I haven't done six impossible things before breakfast, the day has been a failure. In an ideal world I'd be editing a book with my left hand, drafting an email with my right, making up a blog post in my head and filing with my feet. I really need to be busy, is what I'm saying. My brain just will not shut up.

I always wondered what women like me did before we were allowed to apply for jobs and have actual serious careers. I sort of hoped that they didn't know what they were missing.

Alas, no.

Shirley is technically about the frame-breaking riots in the North of England during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. Actually, though, that's all just background to a double marriage plot, itself window dressing for the concept that Bronte really wants to get across: how damaging it is not to give smart women a purpose in life.

Shirley has two heroines, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, and both are (as you would expect from Bronte) clever, witty and determined. Like all of Charlotte Bronte's leading women, they're Bronte repackaged, but it's the packaging Bronte chooses this time around that's so interesting. If you're expecting mousy Miss Eyre or plain and serious Lucy Snowe, you'll be surprised. Both Shirley and Caroline are knock-down gorgeous and adorably dainty. They look like the stereotypical dumbass girly girl of Victorian fiction: the fainter, the weeper, the scream-if-she-sees-a-mouser, the lady who can't wrap her pretty little head around a complex sewing pattern let alone an expenses sheet. The reader reads their physical descriptions and expects them to be stupid, and so do most of the novel's other characters.

Owner of a beautiful brain

Bronte, of course, is just waiting for you to fall into that trap. She knows that if this were a novel by Dickens, Caroline would be presented as a living doll, an angel in human form, with nothing between her ears but fluffy clouds and the nicer bits of the Bible, and she takes that preconception and mashes it into the ground. Caroline is sweet-natured, yes. She ties herself into knots trying to be dutiful to her overbearing uncle, a man who unthinkingly expects her to be happy sewing and doing her hair and staring at the wall. But although Caroline really tries to be a good and stupid girl, her brain just won't stop working. She begs to be given responsibilities, to be allowed become a governess, to do anything, and her uncle's response is along the lines of "Oh! The silly poppet! It mustn't worry its little head! I shall buy it a pretty dress and then it shall be happy." At which point Caroline takes to her bed and literally almost dies out of sheer unadulterated boredom.

Readers, in that moment I felt for her.

Shirley herself doesn't actually appear until page 150 (this is something that Victorian novels do a lot, and I find it really bizarre), but when she does she confounds expectations even more beautifully. An orphaned heiress with control over her own fortune and a keen business sense, Shirley has to be the predecessor of characters like The Well of Loneliness's Stephen Gordon. Like Stephen, she begins a lot of sentences with 'If I were a  man...', she refers to herself as a 'gentleman' and at one point she works out which of the women in the neighbourhood she'd be willing to marry. But (and I think this is an absolutely genius move on Bronte's part) Shirley does not have one single physical characteristic that is traditionally manly. She is very slight, her fingers are small and white, her face is pretty, her figure is slender. On the contrary, she is repeatedly described as feminine - meaning that her shrewdness, her ability to manage her business, her facility with numbers and her bold opinions must all be essentially female qualities. You can almost hear Charlotte Bronte yelling GOTCHA.

Caroline and Shirley are both utterly realistic and rounded human beings. They resolutely walk through snow, rain and wind without getting sick or fainting, they go on a daring escapade in the dead of night, Shirley uses a pistol, they have reasoned opinons about life, the universe and everything and, although they are set up as love rivals for the hand of one man, mill-owner Robert Moore, they never allow that rivalry to get in the way of their friendship. And they do it all while wearing really nice dresses. I think that Bronte's arguing for women to be seen for what they are already. They don't have to be like men, or not like women, to be worthy of respect. They just have to be allowed to develop the intelligence and strength of character they naturally have inside them.

I think it's also a nice touch that Bronte shows her smart women falling in love (and being loved themselves) without having to compromise their intellect. Yes, Bronte has a thing about teacher/student relationships that looks disturbing to many twenty-first century readers' eyes, but when you consider that the teachers she knew were the only men who valued her brain, and that she was one of those people who falls fervently in love with someone's brain, it all makes sense.

There's an idea that comes up in every Charlotte Bronte novel ever: that if two people are really in love they will suit each other. Not just fancy each other, but suit. People's characters need to be compatable, not just their faces - which is why I dig Bronte's attitude to love so much. She's totally right, but in being right she's before her time, because she's acknowledging that a woman's brain can be the match of a man's.

It's probably because of this that I think Charlotte Bronte is so uniquely wonderful at generating great sexual tension. Characters glare at each other, or don't speak, or even refuse to be in the same room together, and you suddenly know that they LOVE EACH OTHER and they are MEANT TO BE, and that if they are not allowed to be together, your whole brain will die. As I said at the time,

Reading CBronte's Shirley. If Caroline doesn't end up with Mr Moore I'm going to be as angry as a badger stuck in a tumble drier.
— Robin Stevens (@redbreastedbird) November 13, 2012

And I meant that.

I don't know why this novel isn't more widely known and read. Yes, it's a slow starter, and yes, like all of Bronte's other books, it's drowning in Biblical references complex enough to fox even the most theologically aware reader today. But it's amazing. It's a great story that doubles as a beautifully rational polemic against treating one half of the human race like idiot children. Shirley and Caroline are both immensely intelligent, obviously the equals of any of the novel's male characters. It's wildly stupid - and Bronte points this out forcefully - that they're being made to waste the talents they have on staring at walls. The answer that Shirley gives to this problem is simple: everyone's lives would be better if women got up off their sofas and went to do the work they're capable of.

Thank goodness that, today, I at least get that chance.

4.5 stars

1001 Books review: David Copperfield

My experience with David Copperfield is a pretty excellent example of my theory that there is no such thing as an objectively good book. I picked it up for the first time when I was thirteen, as part of my efforts to be a Serious, Grown-Up Reader.

Internet, I hated it. As I remember, I got about three chapters in and gave up in impotent fury.

I started David Copperfield again last week. I am absolutely certain not a single word of it has changed (I know this because I was reading the exact same copy that I had when I was thirteen), but somehow this time I wasn't offended by them at all. Just like capers and things that taste like marzipan, it turns out that the adult version of me really likes David Copperfield.

I always try to be a bit sulky hipster about Dickens. He's so famous, and so beloved, that I feel like there must be a catch somewhere. But every time I stop whining and actually read a Dickens novel, I realise why he's lasted so well. Yes, he's mawkishly sentimental, yes, he has a thing for golden-haired angels and crossing-sweepers dying tragically in debtors' prisons, but he's also an excellent plotter with a total genius for creating instantly memorable and entirely unforgettable characters.  

David Copperfield is obviously just one novel, but it's given the world sickening snake-villain Uriah Heep, exuberant and permanently insolvent Mr Micawber, and secretly good-hearted donkey-hater Betsey Trotwood. And then there's Peggotty, who bursts all the buttons off her dresses whenever she gets emotional, and Mr Murdstone, so evil that he can kill his wives with just the power of his mind. And so on, and so on....

Dickens's heroes and heroines tend to be his weakest creations, dull and dinkily foolish respectively, but everyone else is stellar, and everyone else is the reason why Dickens is still so beloved. He is quite simply the best ever at creating his bit-parts.

Having said that thing about Dickens making up boring heroes, I actually found David Copperfield's hero quite interesting. This is largely because I can now appreciate that he is essentially just Dickens in disguise. David Copperfield is Dickens's autobiography. Consider the facts: like Dickens, David spends time as a child labourer in a London warehouse, he has a really bumptious small-time fraudster father figure in Mr Micawber, he grows up to become a famous writer and he has a very youthful marriage to a woman so helpless and daft that she is functionally a child. I'd say that was all pretty conclusive.

This woman. How I hate her.

That fictionalised portrait of his marriage, of course, interested me the most of all. I've somehow managed to get really involved in the Dickens relationship, but until now what I've read about it has been from the point of view of Mrs. I was all ready to blame Mr for everything - until I heard his views on the matter.

David's wife (the Catherine Dickens substitute) is called Dora, and on the strength of his description of her character, MAN do I now feel for Charles. I am a pathetically non-violent person. I can't even kill zombies in video games because I worry about their feelings. And yet while I was reading David Copperfield I had to struggle with vivid fantasties about taking Dora out and just SHOOTING HER IN HER STUPID CHILDISH FACE.

Lord have mercy, that idiot woman. She weeps because David points out that all their servants cheat him and he hasn't actually eaten dinner in weeks. She begs him to call her, and I quote, Child-wife, so that he will never forget how stupid and useless she is. (I am not kidding. She SERIOUSLY SAYS THIS.) I hate her. Yes, Dickens gives us an over-dramatic, highly biased version of events, but I can imagine that it would be pretty awful to be as smart and worldly as he was and married to someone with not an ounce of practicality in her fleecy little brain. Even Dickens/Copperfield has fantasies about her 'becoming an angel' (ie DYING). Beautifully, of course. So then she could be a hot fantasy object in his mind AND he could finally get the servants to bring his dinner on time. Dickens really was quite emotionally weird.

I do think Dickens has some serious issues about women and sexual relationships. I'd love to believe that the 'Child-wife' concept is presented as a bad thing and he understands the values of equal parnership in a marriage ... and yet. Quite aside from Dora, another character's beautiful emotional conclusion comes when she calls the man she married 'my husband and father'. Oh, and a lot of characters who are siblings (though admittedly not genetic ones) fall in love. We are meant to find this adorable. My brother and sister are adopted. I don't.

This kind of thing is so widespread in all Dickens novels, though, that protesting against it feels like trying to throw Boris Johnson over the Eiffel Tower. I've pretty much decided to ignore it and focus on the stuff that Dickens does do well. Like death. Dickens gives great death, doesn't he? I know all that Victorian hyper-emotionalism is a bit past its best, but you can't beat a good bit of tragedy, especially when everyone weeps and reconciles with their enemies just before they breathe their last. Without giving away the end of David Copperfield, I will say that the bodies mount up in a satisfying heap. And then everyone who doesn't die gets hitched. In fact, it all rounds up in a distinctly satisfactory (although totally not postmodern) way.

Second time round, I ended up having a great time following the ridiculous trials and tribulations of young David Copperfield. I found David Copperfield charming, silly and fun, if a bit morally dodgy in places. You know what? I've given up fighting Dickens. I've realised that if you want a big blockbuster Victorian novel with lots of charming, slightly crazy characters and a fat serendipitous plot, you just can't do better than him. I hate to admit it, but Dickens is great.

4 stars.

1001 Books Review: The Master

No matter how hard I try, all the books I write turn out to be about people saving the world. One time I tried to write a gentle romance where nothing happened and a) it was terrible and b) they ended up saving the world anyway. Therefore, I am consumed with admiration for authors who manage to make plots about characters just wandering around houses and talking to each other seem elegant and interesting.

I don't mean those books that do not feature the invasion of giant rats from Mars or werewolves or decapitated heads in pies or something, like the novels of Dickens or Byatt or Ali Smith, I mean books in which the entire point is that literally nothing happens. The plot is that there is no plot, just some dude walking about and thinking.

Where do all the words come from? How do you keep going when you know that nowhere in the 100,000 words you have yet to write does anybody blow up a power plant or transform into a dragon? Don't get me wrong, I love reading that kind of book, but the thought of writing one makes my brain short-circuit. Evidently, though, there are lots of writers out there who have no idea why anyone would ever write about werewolves, and since those are the writers who win the Booker prize I guess I should envy them even more than I already do.

Just such a writer is Colm Toibin (which I learnt today is pronounced Collum Toebean, you can thank me later unless you are Irish and knew that anyway), and just such a text is his novel The Master.

Not this one

No, Doctor Who lovers, not that Master. The Henry James kind of Master. I'm not sure if that's a nickname all the cool academics use, or if Toibin just made it up to convey the idea that James wrote a lot of masterpieces, but the point is that this book is about the later life of Henry James, as he travelled around Europe gathering plot ideas for his novels while failing to have meaningful life experiences or form emotional connections with other human beings.

This one

Toibin's James is a man chronically afraid of feelings. He watches other people being bereaved, or falling in love, or struggling with depression, and sucks it all up into his head to use in his books. He refuses to actually vocalise or act on any of his own emotions - instead, he hides them in his novels in the fond and mistaken belief that no one will realise he's writing about himself.

There's a story that gets told repeatedly in The Master. In his younger days, in Paris, James once stood all night outside the home of a man he fancied, just glaring up at his window and getting rained on because he couldn't bear to actually go on in and try his luck. That's pretty much the pattern of the life of Toibin's James. He makes eyes at men but fails to sleep with them; he makes friends with women but fails to invite them to stay with him (after which the women die and James suffers hidden inner tragedy).

It's all written in a very peaceful, detached way, like looking at the reflections of buildings in water rather than the buildings themselves. There's a sense of unacknowledged things lurking in the depths that make the surface calm seem a little bit creepy - which is completely genius on the part of Toibin, because that's precisely how it feels to read one of James' stories. The one everyone knows, of course, is The Turn of the Screw, which you should ABSOLUTELY READ THIS MOMENT if you haven't already (that is how strongly I feel about how brain-wigglingly brilliant it is), but I had to read 'The Beast in the Jungle' for an MA module last year and it has exactly the tone that Toibin has captured in The Master. In 'The Beast in the Jungle', two people are waiting for something creepy to happen, nothing happens, nothing happens and then it turns out that the creepy thing they have been waiting for is... nothing. And yet it is still creepy. 'The Beast in the Jungle' is (probably) about being gay, which is (probably) what Toibin's novel is about too, but like everything to do with James, you can never quite be sure.

In The Master, Toibin has pulled off something pretty special. It's a well-researched, interesting and pitch-perfect homage to James' fiction, a book about James that could almost have been by James. For a book in which literally nothing happens, it's amazingly compelling, and (the test of a good piece of writing about an author) I came away wanting to read a lot more of James' novels. On balance, I probably prefer to read about werewolves and decapitated heads, but if you want a bit of elegant nothingness in your fiction, Toibin - and by extension James - is a very good way to go. Yes, nothing happens in a Henry James novel or in The Master, but it doesn't happen in a really interesting way.

4 stars, and 20.68% of my 1001 List finished.

Swiss wine and cheese reviews part 2: The Riddle of the Sands and A Single Man

First, I would like to share some good news with you. The furniture has gone. It has ALL GONE. There are NO MATTRESSES IN THE HALLWAY ANY MORE and there is NOT A WARDROBE IN THE BATHROOM EITHER. I am euphoric but also slightly suspicious, in case this is all too good to be true and I wake up tomorrow and discover that it has returned, bringing friends.

I seem to recall that I only reviewed half of the books I read on holiday. This is because the furniture made me too angry to think. But now it has gone, and I have room in my brain to get angry about books again.

Actually, neither of these books made me particularly angry. One did make me sad (you'll see why), and one just confused me, but both of them turned out to be not at all well-chosen holiday reads. Oops.

First up, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

If this book was a person, and I met it on a singles website (go with me on this), we would immediately flag up high uncompatability and any date we were forced to go on would be a disaster. If it was a dog, it would be a short-haired chihuahua and I would be looking for one of those dogs that look like an enormous toilet brush. What I am saying is, this book was not the book for me.

If you want to find out whether or not you will enjoy The Riddle of the Sands more than I did, you need to ask yourself one important question. Do you like boats?

For me, boats are like horses: I find them pleasant from a distance, but quite puzzling close up. They have lots of bits to them, like jibs and booms and all manner of little clippy things (?) that need constant attention, and I am daunted by this. This is not to say that I am incapable of getting on board with aquatically-themed novels. I read the whole Swallows and Amazons series in my youth (although I did mentally look away during the more naval parts), and I think boats are excellent places to put a plot. But there are books featuring the sea and there are books where THE WHOLE STORY is people belaying the fore-top-poop-sail and then letting it out again. (Or is belaying letting it out? Answers below please). And the second is the case in The Riddle of the Sands.

Unfortunately, my duffer of a brain does not allow me to focus properly on seafaring terms, meaning that I was only able to take in approximately one-third of the words in The Riddle of the Sands. To me, a typical paragraph looked something like this:

"??? the ??? ???!" said Davies. I quickly ???? ???? and jumped into the ?????. "Quick!" cried the normally taciturn Davies, turning a violent shade of puce. "We only have three hours until the ??? fills up the ??? and we are left in the ????" "But what of the villainous Germans?" I asked. "Surely their ??? must ???? on the ???? at ????." "Nonsense," said Davies. "Remember the ??? ???? ????? ???? at eight ????. Also, canals."

The narrator, Carruthers, is a twerp - he begins the story by complaining about how BORED he is of London because all his friends are away and both(!) of his clubs are being cleaned - but even though the real hero is sweet, silent Davies, he is still too nautical to make me feel like I had discovered a kindred spirit. Our intrepid heroes (?) have to foil some sort of plot to do with Germans and canals, which they are either in, or not in, or in the wrong ones, or something. Anyway, the important point is that they are VILLAINOUS, like all Germans in British novels at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If you want a good tonal comparison for The Riddle of the Sands, think The 39 Steps but with boats. It's got the same jolly-ho British gentlemen, casual racism, open-air chases and random but very dangerous danger. I think I would have found The Riddle of the Sands gently amusing in its own unintentionally offensive way had I not been so befuddled by all the boat words. If you do like boats, I think you'll find it charming but dated, but because I don't I have to give it

2.5 stars.

My last holiday book was A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. So far, I have had 100% success with Isherwood. Even though I'm not sure Isherwood's someone I'd like to hang out in a pub with, I love his prose style, and both of the books I've previously read by him were pretty dark but unfailingly funny. In this novel, though, he has magnificently lost his sense of humour.

It's clear that Isherwood was going through a very, very bad time when he wrote A Single Man. Every page of it washes you with utter black despair of the kind I haven't experienced since the last time I read The Bell Jar (which I keep doing because I love it, even though I know that afterwards I will have to crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling for a while thinking about doom). Like The Bell Jar, it feels intensely personal in a way that makes you want to phone the Samaritans on the author's behalf.

Set in sixties America, it follows one day in the life of George, whose life-partner Jim has suddenly died. Because George is a man and Jim was one also, he can't acknowledge his grief, he can't properly mourn and he has no physical or legal claim on the person he loved. (Sounds familiar? Of course it does. And the worst thing is that it's not just ancient history. In the kind of life-mirroring-art that you wish would never happen, George's exact story played out again last year. That last link, by the way, is to a youtube video made by the surviving partner, and you should probably be in a strong mental state before you click play.)

Feel depressed yet? It gets worse. If that whole scenario wasn't awful enough on its own, A Single Man is set in Los Angeles, the most grim city in the universe, where the roads are neverending circles of hell, the sky is a permanent weird shade of yellow and everyone is starving hungry and hates each other. Everything is horrible, George hates everyone and his life is just A LITANY OF DESPAIR. And that is how this book goes.

I felt uncomfortable and upset while I was reading it, and disliked George intensely, which I'm sure is exactly what what Isherwood wanted to happen. The idea he's trying to get across- and it's an extremely powerful one - is that if you're subjected to hate all your life, you will become a hateful person. If you simply feel soggily sorry for George, you've missed the point. He's not a tragic martyr, he's a painfully angry, sad man, and that's the fault of all the people who have made sure that he can't be open about the life that he's lived. Isn't that a jolly holiday thought?

A Single Man was incredibly powerful, but also incredibly embittered. Rage and sorrow just shoot out of it in waves. I think it'll stay with me, and I know I agree with what it's got to say, but I didn't actually enjoy the experience of reading it.

I just wish it wasn't still so completely relevant.

3.5 stars.

Swiss wine and cheese reviews part 1: A Dark Anatomy and The Colour

Last week my boyfriend and I went to Switzerland, where we shocked our bodies by alternatively pounding up and down large alps and eating our bodyweight in Gruyere. We also visited the chateau where Byron wrote one of his tragic poems; went to a St Bernard dog museum (complete with real dogs, all lying lazily upside-down with their eye-folds drooping); and (in my case) read a lot of books.

First was A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake, a trashy historical murder mystery that reminded me why I'm usually cautious about reading trashy historical murder mysteries.

I’ve said before that there are several different ways to make your historical novel seem properly historical. You can either go ploughing through actual accounts from your chosen period and come up with scrupulous background detail about roofing materials and recipes; or you can read a lot of contemporary literature to make sure your characters sound right; or (and funnily enough, this is often the most successful method if you’re trying to write a crowd-pleaser) you can sit down and brainstorm vague popular concepts about your period and then make sure you name-check every single one of them. For example, if you’re writing about the middle ages, at least three of your characters must die of the plague; if it’s Victorian you must feature a fat cruel overseer whipping poor people and screaming “TO THE WORKHOUSE!” and if your story is set in Pompeii you must have someone turn to his friend and say, “Goodness, hasn’t the mountain been quiet recently?”

Different as they are, all of those methods nevertheless rest on the basic understanding that History is not just some vanished place where all the people had bad teeth and ate a lot of radishes. As every historical novelist should know, 1540 is not the same as 1640 which is not the same as 1740, just like China is not the same as Japan which is not the same as Korea. 

I wish someone had explained this to Robin Blake before he sat down to write A Dark Anatomy. I very much suspect that Blake (who does grave discredit to the noble first name that he and I share) saw C. J. Sansom’s sales figures and decided that he wanted a piece of that action. Obviously, he couldn’t set his own historical detective series in Tudor England, so he slammed his hand down on the number section of his keyboard, got ?17!40* and went with it. 

I am making this up, of course, but it would certainly explain the bewildering contents of A Dark Anatomy. I tried so hard to make the outfits, speech patterns and background detail chime in any way with what I know about the eighteenth century, but it just did not happen. There were no stomachers or tricornes. There was no political humour, or, in fact, humour of any kind. There was vague acknowledgement that British people occasionally travelled overseas, but no mention of them bringing back anything other than improbable wives – no sugar, for example, or silk, or tea. Even the poor old Enlightenment, which was sort of the defining idea of the entire century, got barely a look-in. The microscope, for example, gets a single mention (in the same sentence as molly-houses: Blake pretty much uses up his entire fund of historical detail in that one paragraph). I might be wrong – Blake might be perfectly evoking 1740s Preston, which I admit I know nothing specifically about – but none of it seems right, and when you’re writing cheap, fun historical fiction, seeming right is almost more important than being right.

Allegedly, the whole plot takes place in and around an eighteenth-century country house, and yet the characters talk and behave as though they’ve been shot through a worm-hole from (heavily stereotyped) 1540. There’s a hilariously mud-encrusted and motley cast of halfwit peasants and flatulent local officials who all stagger around praying randomly and screaming about werewolves like medieval idiots. Even local doctor Fidelis, who admittedly does have new-fangled notions about ice keeping meat fresh, is bewilderingly ready to believe that the devil might be hanging out round the back of the privy. At least coroner Cragg is reassuringly bad at detecting things. The notion that there might be MORE THAN ONE POTENTIAL MURDERER, i.e. MULTIPLE SUSPECTS, is so shocking that it blows his mind for about five chapters. He barely comes back from it in time to solve the murder.

The plot’s cookie-cutter: when Squire Brockletower’s wife Dolores is found nastily slain in some woodland, it is up to Cragg and Fidelis to work out whodunit. Blah blah blah, etcetera. There’s exactly the proscribed number of shock discoveries and suspicious characters who all turn out to be innocent, and if you’ve ever read a historical murder mystery, you’ll have essentially read this one. It’s nothing more than an ugly and fundamentally awkward serving of History Stew, written by someone who doesn’t understand how to use the material he’s been given. 

Trash, and not the good kind.

2 stars.

After A Dark Anatomy, Rose Tremain’s The Colour was a total delight. A book by someone who knows how to use words! Where the characters do not speak like Ye Olde Knocke-Offe Shoppe cut-price human beings! Where a historical period is well-imagined and made to seem interestingly different from both our own and any other! I kept turning to my boyfriend and exclaiming, “Did you know books could still be GOOD?”, and he would reply, “Yes dear,” which I knew meant that he was very happy for me.

The Colour - on the 1001 Books list, by the way, and deservedly so - is all about the New Zealand gold rush of the late nineteenth century (hence the title: in this book, gold is always referred to as the colour, which can be a bit puzzling at first if you inadvertently picture blue, or pink). Awful human being Joseph Blackstone has dragged his aged mother Lillian and reluctant new wife Harriet (who is reluctant about being a wife, not about going to New Zealand) halfway around the world to start a farm in the wilderness. When he finds a tiny bit of gold in the creek near his house, though, he loses his mind and decides that he has to have ALL THE GOLD, otherwise his life will be worthless. So he abandons Lillian and Harriet (who is way too good for him in every way possible) and goes to seek his fortune in the goldfields across the mountains. 

Of course, he doesn’t find any more gold. He ends up a horrible beardy skeleton, scrabbling around in the bottom of muddy pits and weeping (which is no more than he deserves). The farm, meanwhile, goes to pot, and Harriet is forced to go trekking awesomely across the New Zealand landscape, slowly realising as she does so that her husband is awful and she would be so much better off without him.

It’s a great plot, nicely and intelligently written, and Harriet is a wonderful main character. Admittedly, the book wastes time on a puzzling sub-plot, in which a white child and his Maori nurse slowly and mystically fade away because of something magical and Spirit-Worldy. I suppose it's all very tragic and romantic, but reading it I just wanted them to stop messing about, get up and have a sandwich. I don’t think I’m a very Spirit World kind of person.

Concentrate on the Harriet part, though, and The Colour is great, clever and fun, with a satisfactory strand of commonsense morality underneath it: don’t go chasing after gold, because you will end up losing everything and feeling really stupid. I approve of that message, and I thoroughly approve of the world Tremain has so carefully and imaginatively constructed. After I win the lottery, my next holiday will be in New Zealand.

4 stars.