Author Archives: Simon Lavery

About Simon Lavery

Author, blogger.

Susie Dent, Death Writ Large

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Susie Dent, Death Writ Large. Zaffre, 2026, hb, 401 pp.

A genre of fiction that seems now to be generally known as cosy crime isn’t usually my cup of tea. In the past I’ve read the odd Maigret novel, even tried Agatha Christie. They’re often entertaining, and make a change from what might pass as more ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ fiction.

Susie Dent’s follow-up to Murder By Definition (2024 – I posted on it HERE) repeats the formula she established there. Once again the protagonist is Martha, leader of a team of lexicographers working on a lightly fictionalised version of the OED in Oxford. The surviving members of that team from two years ago also reappear.

It might help to look up online the plot summary of M B Definition, as there are frequent allusions here to what happened in that novel; Martha in particular is still haunted by some of its traumatic events.

The convoluted plot closely resembles its predecessor. An apparent murder is accompanied by cryptic messages and puzzling clues, seeming to point an accusing finger at a snooty group of ex-Oxford undergraduates known as the cabal. When members of that exclusive, elitist clique seem to become targets of a would-be murderer, the rather languid earlier pace of the novel picks up and tension increases.

As in the previous novel the formula moves in the final chapters to the revelation of the perpetrator of the attacks. What’s slightly more interesting this time is that Martha herself is seen to be in danger.

Susie Dent once more handles her material with aplomb, despite some rather clunky stage direction-like narrative details during scenes involving dialogue. Here’s a random example; Martha is talking with a friend:

Alice didn’t push. She sipped her wine and looked around the warm kitchen.

We’re constantly given these rather annoying and random details of business that suggest to me that the author is trying too hard to bring to life these scenes that form, of necessity, the bulk of the narrative – people discussing what’s just happened and how they interpret the events and puzzles accompanying them.

The characters aren’t, for the most part, successfully brought to life – they’re either insufficiently differentiated, or made to behave and speak like stereotypes: the snob, the eccentric academic, etc. There’s a not too convincing, faltering romance sketched out between Martha and the senior detective who reappears from the previous Dent novel – this seems like an afterthought, or an attempt to add a bit of colour to a fairly monochrome genre piece.

My thanks to Mrs TD who passed Death Writ Large on to me after she’d finished it. I don’t share her level of enthusiasm for this genre or author, but I wouldn’t want to put people off reading what’s essentially an entertaining novel.

As with M B Definition, the main interest for me, and largely what kept me reading, was the erudite stuff about language. There are, once again, obscure items of vocabulary that form the headwords of every short chapter that relate to the content of that chapter (eg ‘ludibry, noun, sixteenth century: an object of derision’). The dictionary team frequently ponder the significance of words and sayings; another example chosen at random: Martha uses the expression ‘It’s still touch and go’, which causes her colleague to reflect ‘Nautical, that phrase, like so much in English’.

Make of such linguistic digressions what you will. At least it makes Susie Dent’s otherwise generic crime fiction possess an element of originality and distinctiveness.

Private Peaceful, by Michael Morpurgo

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Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful

We went this week to see the stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful. Adapted by Simon Reade from Morpurgo’s YA novel first published in 2003, it’s a one-man play about the final hours of teenage ‘Tommo’ Peaceful on the night and morning before his execution during the early years of WWI.

It was an extraordinary performance by the actor Benjamin Cain. With only a camp bed as prop and a stark backdrop of a shell-scarred, mist-shrouded no man’s land, Tommo frequently checks his watch and counts the hours passing. His terror and barely suppressed sense of injustice are palpable, and make for a deeply moving and heartbreaking experience.

He begins by reliving scenes from his childhood and family life in rural Devonshire. By frequently adopting the voices and personalities of the characters he encounters, he creates, with that magical impact that’s only possible in live theatre, the impression of a large cast of actors. We’d seen a similar feat in the live-streamed film of Jodie Comer’s extraordinary performance for the National Theatre in the courtroom drama Prima Facie.

During these early parts of the play we hear through Tommo’s ingenuous account how unjust and exploitative the class system was – a hierarchy that was replicated in many ways in the military.

When war comes, Tommo is reluctantly moved to enlist (lying about his age – 16 – as so many others did) when a recruiting campaign comes to his village. In another scintillating act of ventriloquism he enters the character of an onlooking old woman who taunts him with the accusation of cowardice if he doesn’t join up. This ‘white feather’ emotional pressure from the womenfolk (and others) of the time reminds us of the populist, bullying misconception about the ‘nobility’ of young men fighting and probably dying ‘pro patria’.

The trench warfare scenes are brilliantly conveyed entirely through the actor’s performance, reinforced by sound and lighting effects; he doesn’t even have a prop rifle, he just mimes shooting (and being shot at and shelled). This makes the terror and hellishness of endless hours under enemy fire that he endures more powerful than any realistic film representation (the story was filmed in 2012): the psychological damage is conveyed into the audience’s imagination through a kind of theatrical osmosis. It’s the visceral kind of experience only possible in live theatre performance.

Tommo is court martialled for refusing to obey an order in battle. It was a stupid order, which would have meant leaving his badly injured, much loved older brother in a shell-hole in order to join a futile, suicidal advance into the enemy guns. The programme notes point out that over 300 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed for similar charges of ‘desertion’ or ‘cowardice’. The concept of shell shock or PTSD wasn’t considered seriously until years afterwards – which puts us in mind of course of the writings of the likes of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and, more recently, Pat Barker in her Regeneration trilogy of novels.

As the hours tick past and the inevitable climax arrives – the execution – the tension is almost unbearable. The cruel fate of this young lad, who’s probably only 17 when he’s shot by firing squad, is a salutary reminder of the potential for otherwise civilised societies to lapse into barbarity and class oppression. At least the UK government finally, in 2006, posthumously pardoned these men.

I’m writing this on the day after the US so-called ‘war secretary’ announced that an execution by firing squad in December of a former army major who shot dead 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood will be live streamed for the public to view. Only two countries in the world that still make use of the death penalty have done so in public this past year: Iran and Afghanistan.

Two films

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Here are some first impressions of two films I’ve been to the cinema to see over the last couple of weeks.

‘Pressure’ was directed by Anthony Maras and co-written with David Haig, the author of the 2014 stage play on which the film is based. It’s a vehicle for a fine central performance by Andrew Scott as the scratchy but brilliant British meteorologist, group captain James Stagg, who had to argue his case vehemently to overrule his American counterpart’s insistence, on the basis of a wrong-headed trust in historical data, that the D-Day invasion scheduled for June 5, 1944 should go ahead. Stagg, basing his prediction on scientifically up-to-date meteorological data, finally wins the agreement of supreme commander Eisenhower – the predicted storm duly shows up on cue, and Stagg is vindicated.

It’s a bit slow at times, and some of the invented material not based on historical fact is a little contrived, but the screenplay writer, director and cast did a fine job in making what must have been a very static and technical central premise – which scientist to believe and trust – sustain the whole film. Especially as we all know from the start what happened in history, so creating the dramatic tension that’s so apparent in this film was a fine achievement.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ is a brave but flawed attempt by British director Georgia Oakley to bring Jane Austen’s first published novel (1811) to life on the screen. Many of us will recall director Ang Lee’s fine film version of 1995, with a radiant 19-year-old Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood, the impulsive, passionate and emotional representative of ‘sensibility’, and Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, as older sister Elinor, the more restrained, rational embodiment of ‘sense’.

Hugh Grant played Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars, while Alan Rickman was Colonel Brandon, whose constancy, moral probity and decency are rewarded when Marianne learns to rein in her impetuous, romantic infatuation with the philandering gold-digger, Willoughby, and recognise the more sober decency and probity of Brandon as a better bet for a happy marriage.

It’s a complicated plot, revolving around the usual urgency for a young woman to find a wealthy husband (I’ll resist the temptation to quote the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, a novel that sets the scene more ironically and subtly than in this less mature and nuanced Austen effort). Love might conquer all, but economic security was the more ‘sensible’ route. Elinor’s outwardly more rational, restrained, self-denying character perhaps represents Jane Austen’s moral touchstone in the novel; I read it so long ago I don’t remember it well enough to assert this definitively.

What this new film version does convey is that the sisters can benefit from learning something from each other: Marianne’s immature, exuberantly emotional approach to life is endearing but potentially leads to catastrophic misjudgements, and an element of more temperate rationality, she discovers, leads to a less precarious outcome. It’s worth remembering that in the novel she’s only 16. Brandon is 35 – a sort of prototype Mr Knightley.

Elinor, for her part, comes to realise that repressing her own powerful feelings and sacrificing her hopes for happiness to a higher moral purpose doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness – though I suppose Jane Austen ultimately tips the balance in her favour by engineering plot devices to make Edward conveniently available again, freed from his honourable but loveless engagement to another heartless gold-digger, Lucy.

When Edward’s decency leads him to refuse to break off this arranged match, his mother ruthlessly strips him of his inheritance, making his newly enriched brother a more desirable match for Lucy.

That rather clumsy summary probably conveys some of the overly apparent authorial (by Jane Austen I mean) inclination to favour Elinor as the guiding spirit of the novel. What Oakley’s film failed to achieve, as Mrs TD and I found, was to make Marianne’s character appealing while she overdid the teenage emotional stuff. Instead she tends to come across as irritatingly self-absorbed and foolish. We just didn’t care what happened to her (and to a lesser extent to Elinor) – we left the cinema half an hour before the 132-minute film ended.

There were some touching moments depicting the love of the sisters for each other, but Marianne’s self-destructive impetuosity led to some serious overacting by Esme Creed-Miles. Even allowing for her character’s youth, she failed to engage our sympathy. Daisy Edgar-Jones does a better job as Elinor, but she still seemed to us to be a bit colourless.

It all looked wonderful, with some atmospheric indoor evening candlelit sequences, but many scenes just went on too long, and slowed the pace to the point of tedium. The actors playing Edward, Willoughby and Brandon came across as too one-dimensional and vapid – especially stiff and seemingly bored Brandon.

On a more positive note, the film succeeds in portraying the dismal necessity for young women at that time, and to a lesser extent young men not in possession of a large fortune (or inheritance), to balance the prospect of a happy, loving marriage against the reality of needing to secure a suitably wealthy spouse.

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

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Sebastian Barry, Days Without End. Faber & Faber pb, 2017; first published 2016. 301 pp. Library copy

I had mixed feelings about this novel by Irish author Sebastian Barry. It’s a rattling good story, full of exciting and often brutal action and incident, and narrated in a distinctive Irish-American vernacular, complete with grammatical and other foibles and idiosyncrasies. At its best this prose is lyrical and soaringly beautiful, but at times it becomes grating and too mannered. It’s reminiscent of Huck Finn’s voice, with shades of Cormac McCarthy also evident.

Irish-born Thomas McNulty meets another teenager, ‘handsome’ John Cole in Missouri. They get a bizarre job as a sort of drag act in a rough mining town bar, doubling as pay-per-dance partners for the grizzled, womanless clientele.

There follows a long sequence of bloody encounters when they join the army. Some of these involve the shameful betrayals and massacres of the native Americans of the Midwest, ironically perpetrated by a predominantly Irish-American soldiery whose forebears had suffered similar depredations at the hands of Cromwell and subsequent repressive British colonists, then the famine that is also seen to be prevalent among these indigenous tribes.

As a consequence of some of these vicious exchanges and some savage revenge attacks, Thomas and John end up as unlikely adoptive parents of the niece of a Sioux chief. They name her Winona, which they claim means first-born daughter in the Sioux language; I haven’t checked this, and of course it brought to mind the famous Hollywood actor of that name, most recently featuring in Stranger Things.

Then they get caught up in the equally brutal Civil War, where some of the battle scenes put me in mind of some of those in The Odyssey and The Iliad. There’s a gruelling sequence set in the notorious rebel POW camp, Andersonville, where Thomas and John are held until released under an exchange scheme.

Winona is another who becomes an exchange, this time for a kidnapped white American child, and Thomas is forced to make some tough choices in order to rescue her. All kinds of mayhem ensue, and he narrowly escapes being executed by the Union army on charges of desertion and murder.

The narrative voice I mentioned at the start is the most extraordinary feature of this novel. Here’s an example of its best aspect; Thomas is describing, in that characteristically demotic style, a tough sergeant he serves under:

…he looks like an old man. Like we got ten faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.

There’s an almost biblical grandeur to some of the descriptions of the wild American landscapes Thomas travels through in various seasons, and of the often harrowing experiences he and John undergo.

Ultimately, though I enjoyed the novel immensely as a fast-paced, incident-packed yarn, with moments of breathtaking beauty in the language, I found it all a bit too frantic. The love affair between Thomas and John is often touching and tenderly evoked, but it veers into unlikely and anachronistic modernity at times. The ending is a bit pat, too.

But I shall be ordering from my local library some more of Barry’s sequence of McNulty novels – just not yet. I need something a little less disturbing first.

Mavis Gallant and a new Elizabeth Strout novel

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Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say. Penguin Viking hb, 2026, 201pp. Library copy

After my immersion in Greek and Latin classics, I read the first half dozen or so of the Collected Stories of Canadian author Mavis Gallant. They were beautifully written, but I found them too ‘literary’ – hard to explain, but sort of self-consciously ‘clever’ and oblique. Very serious, too; sombre and a bit depressing.

What a relief to turn to the latest Elizabeth Strout. Her approach is very different from Gallant’s. Her style is (deceptively) simple and lucid, smooth and accessible – and yet one feels there’s real human depth and complexity in her characters.

There’s much of the same kind of existential crisis going on as in her other fiction. Artie Dam, a 57-year-old high school teacher of history, has lost direction and grounding (if that horribly mixed metaphor makes any kind of sense). A devastating piece of news further destabilises him, and he’s forced to reassess his closest relationships.

It’s difficult to say much more without spoilers. The backdrop is the election for his second term of President T (can’t bring myself to write his name), and Artie is distraught as his country heads for disaster. He tries to reassure his teenage students that all will be well – no more civil wars or fascist regimes – provided they don’t succumb to this president’s brand of divisive populism and nationalism.

There are numerous other characters, all of whom are well rounded and convincing – unlike some of Gallant’s bloodless expats and waifs. (I know I’m very much in the minority in not raving about the brilliance of her work – opinions differ, to paraphrase a statement made by the British royal household in the recent past).

Artie’s son Rob is also traumatised by life events; like Artie there’s an anguish and loneliness about him – as in so many of Strout’s characters. They find it hard to tell each other the important things – hence the title.

At times the narrative strays into sentimentality, as in some of the classroom scenes in which Artie’s love for his students is emphasised a little too much, while the devotion and affection of his students for him is at least tempered by some of them being pretty hostile. His teaching style falls foul of the rise in ‘anti-woke’ sentiment instigated by the new political administration.

Artie’s growing obsession with ‘free will’, and flashes of ‘precognition’ also stretch credibility rather too much – gratuitous discussions of Jungian psychology and philosophy become intrusive.

As his wife says – a sign of the growing disconnect in his marriage – Artie is too ‘soft’. Another character urges him to carry on being ‘jovial’. He’s a sad mix of decency and despair. Artie is I suppose a sort of Trump-era Willie Loman, a broken victim of what’s going wrong in our world; at one point he reflects that he doesn’t want to die, but isn’t sure he wants to live.

This second-term president has a lot to answer for.

Virgil, The Aeneid

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Virgil, The Aeneid. Translated from the Latin of Virgil (70-19 BC) by W.F. Jackson Knight. Penguin Classics, 1964 (first published 1956), 361pp.

As Knight says in his introduction to this prose translation of Virgil’s epic, unfinished poem, The Aeneid, it is a ‘legendary narrative’ about ‘the imagined origin of the Roman nation in times long before the foundation of Rome itself’. According to legend some Romans could trace their origins back to the Trojans who escaped the sack of their city by the Greeks (as told in The Odyssey and The Iliad, about which I posted recently, having just seen the Nolan film).

The Trojan prince Aeneas is said to have fled Troy and sailed with a group of others to the west coast of Italy, experiencing various trials, setbacks and adventures on the way. In this sense it resembles The Odyssey, and echoes many of the incidents endured by Odysseus/Ulysses in those Greek epics. Aeneas and his compatriots settled there, having fought a bloody war with jealous locals, and their descendants are later said to have played a part in the founding of Rome. So it’s a sort of origin story, as well as another adventure/voyage/quest narrative.

One of the most striking parallels with the adventures of Odysseus on his homeward journey relates Aeneas’ romantic idyll with Dido, Queen of Carthage (in Odysseus’ case it was Calypso). Purcell’s beautiful lament of Dido from his 1688 opera, which takes place when she’s abandoned by Aeneas, who’d been summoned by the gods to resume his quest, is a haunting companion to the depiction of her grief, anger and despondency as related in The Aeneid. The Trojan hero doesn’t cover himself in glory here, and she’s still understandably furious with him when he later encounters her shade in the underworld (another parallel scene with the one in The Odyssey).

My Latin is pretty rudimentary, and I don’t have a copy of Virgil’s original to consult, so I can’t get into an Emily Wilson kind of analysis of Knight’s prose translation. All I can do is comment on some aspects of it as an English version.

Knight favours an uneasy blend of faux-archaic and lofty ‘literary’ style with occasional more readable, smooth-flowing vernacular. But mostly it’s the former. Here’s an example chosen at random; it’s from Book 6, ‘The Visit to the Underworld’.

From this place starts the road which leads to Tartarean Acheron. There in mud and murk seethes the Abyss…[Then there’s a description of Charon, the underworld’s ferryman] a ragged figure, filthy, repulsive, with white hair copious and unkempt covering his chin…

Most of that isn’t too clunky, but why those foregrounded inversions and unnatural word order? ‘White hair copious’ just sounds like a literal translation from a language which doesn’t have the same adjective-precedes-the-noun sort of structure as English. I know that Latin, as an inflected language, has very different structures and word order from ours, and Knight is no doubt trying to convey some of the high style of the original. But as Wilson says in her essays reviewed here last time, it’s still necessary to write well when translating, to strive to produce an English text that’s enjoyable to read.

It’s a difficult feat to pull off, and I don’t mean to be too hard on Knight; but I’d be interested to hear if anyone knows of a more recent translation that works better.

Old words, new voices: Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

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Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: journeys through ancient literature. Profile Books/LRB, 2026, pb, 280 pp.

How to ‘give old words new voices’.

This was a birthday gift from some friends with whom I’d had discussions about the Nolan film ‘Odysseus’, and who knew about my subsequent reading of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (posted about recently here).

It’s a collection of 13 essays, some of them revised versions of ones that were published in various literary and specialist academic journals, on the theory, nature and practice of translation. How far is it possible to convey the sense, meaning, cultural and other values, and a whole range of related matters, in translations of texts from so long ago that we find it almost impossible to imagine what life might have been like then.

Can the translator somehow render those ancient words into readable versions, preferably almost as well-written as the originals, that make accessible to the modern reader those texts that were the products of an oral literary culture, probably performed by professionals and choruses who either memorised the written texts, or extemporised around well-established tropes and images.

Should the translator of an original that was written in verse try to bend her own very different language, with its different sounds, rhythms and nuances, into verse as well? Does translating them into prose in some way traduce the intentions and effects of the verse original? What about dealing with tricky linguistic matters like idioms, or words that have no modern equivalent?

These and a host of other fascinating questions are raised and discussed in these brilliant, perceptive and erudite essays. Wilson frequently compares different translators’ versions of a key passage from the ancient Greek, analysing the choices and assessing their various degrees of success. I didn’t always agree with her conclusions, but they were always carefully presented and argued.

Because of my recent film and reading experiences I turned first to the final essay, ‘Translating The Odyssey’. It’s highly accessible, witty, insightful and thought-provoking. Wilson considers, for example, the problems for the translator in contextualising and rendering into English for modern sensibilities passages like the one in which Odysseus’ son Telemachus hangs the slave women who were sexual possessions of Penelope’s suitors. Should this shocking scene be made to arouse sympathy for the slaughtered women, or indicate the social and cultural assumptions in Homer that they had dishonoured Odysseus and his son: both the suitors and the women had to die in order for honour to be restored.

It’s difficult for the reader today to avoid feeling the injustice in this scene – something which it seems would not have troubled Homer or his contemporary audience. Or at least, in his presentation of the world of honour of those characters at that time.

The other essays deal with similar crucial moments in a range of old Greek texts, most of which I know little about, from Aeschylus to Sophocles. Classical Roman authors and texts are also considered in their responses to these Greek works. There’s a particularly inspiring essay on ‘slut-shaming of Helen of Troy’ – a title which sums up Wilson’s jaunty habit of slipping into slang and the vernacular to convey some of the spirit of the original texts, and our responses to them. It’s a very scholarly and deeply researched approach, but is never stuffy or over-academic in tone. So there are references to the likes of Cardi B and Wodehouse’s Jeeves to help us place the literary equivalence of some of these ‘old words’, characters and themes.

One contemporary reference I found particularly congenial. In discussing the notion of ‘classical studies’ in the last century or so, she points out how it has tended to form a kind of ‘gatekeeping’, an indication that their reader has been to a ‘good school’ (UK code for what we call a public, ie private school, definitely all-male) which maintains traditional standards of a ‘classical education’:

The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek – or at least, knowing enough to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy – has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs…[it’s become associated with] systems of exclusion based on income, education, race and gender. In the United Kingdom, its cultural capital remains high enough that Boris Johnson – an incompetent drunkard whose social privilege enabled him to attend Eton and…Balliol College, Oxford – managed to hold the highest political office in the land for an astonishingly long period of time, and even maintain the illusion of being an intellectual partly on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek. No other party trick could have served him as well. Thanks to centuries of culturally ingrained snobbery, even a passing acquaintance with these languages is still often considered a sign of extraordinary intelligence… (p.182)

I make no apology for quoting most of that passage, because I think it demonstrates Wilson’s refreshingly unsnobbish, even iconoclastic approach: her love of and enthusiasm for the classics doesn’t prevent her from acknowledging this uncomfortable tendency towards snobbery and arrogance in the modern British world of classical studies.

It all made me think of my own studies at university of Old English and Middle English literature. How can we reimagine the force and intention of texts produced in such alien and distant times and contexts, with such different, often abhorrent, attitudes and beliefs embedded in them – for example to class, women’s place in those worlds, war, culture, the enslavement or colonisation of people.

Even if, like me, you know very little about the classics, I’m sure you’d find this collection of essays very stimulating.

Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King

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Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King. Granta hb, 2026.

Rebecca Perry is known for her poetry; this is her first novel.

Mrs TD bought this, a victim of a heavy marketing push at our local high street chain bookshop. She asked me to read it so that we could compare notes. We were neither of us too keen on it.

It’s apparent that the author is a poet: the language is cadenced and allusive. She avoids a conventional plot or structure. Chapters are short and lyrical, with cryptic titles.

An unnamed narrator whose gender isn’t specified (there are many such omissions and elisions in this novel) is a setter-up of rooms in historical houses, the person who arrays the furniture and fittings, with fake food in kitchens and dining rooms. They’re commissioned to arrange six rooms in a former palace, now ‘a historic house open to the public’, to celebrate its 750-year anniversary. They seem to have undergone a recent emotional setback, but its nature is never specified – a key feature of May We Feed the King.

Their aim is to make the visitor to one of her arranged rooms feel that the inhabitants of the past had just left. Most will see this

in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.

There’s where I find a problem with this novel. It comes across as aimed at the ‘one in a thousand’ who will appreciate what she’s aiming for: a historical novel that points out the impossibility of ever really knowing what happened in history. Records, ledgers and other documents in archives can indicate certain possibilities, but like folk memories, legends and myths they aren’t all entirely reliable.

So the long central section of the novel is her imagined (overtly fictional, constructed) account of the unhappy reign of a medieval king (never named). He hates the factions and gossip of court, the expectation that he’ll openly flaunt power and endorse pomp and ceremony. He’s disgusted by the insistence of his advisers that he rule with cruelty, executing those suspected of misdemeanours (or just to set an example to the others). He refuses to indulge their entreaties that he go to war on the slightest of pretexts.

His queen instals her lover in court, causing more malicious gossip. This intensifies when his own sexuality is called into question by rumour-mongers. Eventually he simply absconds.

There’s another framing section at the end in which the room-dresser (I’m not sure what else to call them) seems to be on the verge of entering into a relationship of sorts with the palace’s archivist – another character whose gender isn’t specified.

It’s all very competently done, but I had a distinct feeling of ‘so what?’ when I finished reading. Even the ending is left inconclusively open. I found it all rather cold and airless. I’ve seen reviews that praise it in glowing terms, so maybe I’m missing something.

The title, btw, comes from some early scenes in the historical section where attendants try to tempt the ailing previous king to eat; he leaves untouched most of the food they serve. This might be symbolic of something.

Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House

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Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House, Harvill Secker hb (library copy), 2023. 227 pp

I felt in need of a change after Homer, so opted for an author I’ve read before: Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls – both of them pre-blog. I don’t remember much about them, but recall finding them entertaining historical novels.

My Father’s House is set in WWII, soon after the Germans occupied Rome in autumn 1943. The central character is an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, based at the Vatican – which is an island of non-Nazi independence. Germans aren’t allowed in, so the inmates enjoy an uneasy freedom. But if they venture beyond their boundary into the city, they are as much at the mercy of the ruthlessly murderous German military as the rest of the beleaguered population.

Hugh has assembled a group of people to run an ‘escape line’ for fugitive Allied troops and others who need to hide (and ultimately escape) from the enemy. They’re an odd assortment: an Italian Contessa, an Irish diplomat’s wife, a British diplomat, and a few others. Their cover for meeting is that they are members of a choir. Their missions involve dropping money in secret locations to finance escapes, or other furtive acts of assistance.

The central storyline involves one particular mission: to drop money packages in three different locations on Christmas Eve/Day. Things don’t go according to plan, and dangerous adjustments have to be made. Hugh’s life is in peril, and if he’s caught he’s likely to be tortured into giving up the names of his fellow ‘choristers’.

It’s all in the same mode as some of Le Carré’s novels of espionage. All quite professionally done and an exciting enough read. But it’s not as satisfying, ultimately, as Le Carré. Some of the characters are well drawn and rounded, but too many are ciphers, verging on the cartoonish.

There’s the uber-villain Hauptmann, the Nazi commander and brutal master of the city. He’s not averse to shooting unarmed suspects in the head, and ordering troops to commit awful acts of violence and murder on the slightest pretext. No doubt he’s based on a real-life monster, as are most of the ‘choristers’, so perhaps I’m being a bit unfair on O’Connor. It’s in the nature of the story that his characters have to behave in unlikely ways.

He doesn’t over-idealise them, however. There are squabbles and friction between the conspirators, and all of them are capable of making mistakes, or behaving badly. The character of Monsignor Hugh is the most interesting: a celibate priest who bravely defies the German authorities, risking his life all the time. There are some particularly stirring scenes when he’s authorised to visit POW camps run by the Germans in order to report on conditions there; the Germans pressurise him into producing sanitised accounts that conceal the cruelty and hardship they inflict on the Allied prisoners. He openly challenges and accuses the commandant, and goes against instructions not to mingle too much with the starving, brutalised prisoners.

What follows is one of the most chilling scenes in the novel: the Pope himself castigates Hugh for upsetting the German authorities, and strips him of this role, confining him to the Vatican premises. It’s a reminder of the shameful collusion between the senior Catholic clergy at the time and the Nazi occupiers.

I had two other problems with this otherwise enjoyable novel. One was that there are alternating chapters, some relating what was happening in the build-up to this climactic Christmas mission and immediately after it, the rest consisting of various transcripts and statements made by the conspirators years after the war. These reveal some interesting details about the relationships between them, and what became of them after the war; but they also reduce some of the suspense by indicating which of them survived.

My main issue was with the mannered prose style. O’Connor overdoes the ‘literary’ language. He favours obscure and even invented vocabulary when plainer alternatives would, in my view, have been preferable. I’ve returned the book to the library now, so can’t check for examples. I recall a description of a car ‘jouncing’ over bumpy roads – presumably a blend of ‘bouncing’ and ‘jumping’? These oddities are frequent and intrusive.

There are also too many minor (ie verbless, usually very short) sentences. Sometimes these work in scenes of high tension and peril. But overdone, as they are, they become jarring and too foregrounded. There’s even a sort of prose-poem section at p. 133 (I made a note of that one). This is writing drawing unsubtle attention to how dramatic it means to be.

I would still be inclined to read the next two volumes in this trilogy, if nothing else because it’s a testament to the incredible bravery and heroic resilience of some people in the face of monstrous political mistreatment. There’s a lesson there for the present day.

Homer, The Iliad: some jumbled thoughts

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The Iliad, translated from the Greek by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1980, first published 1950, and some random points about it and The Odyssey

 The opening lines of Rieu’s translation of the opening of Book 1 of The Iliad entitled ‘The Quarrel’ (like The Odyssey, which I wrote about in my last two posts, it’s divided into 24 sections called books) set the gruesome tone for the rest of the epic story of some of the closing weeks of the final year of the 10-year Trojan War:

The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans [ie the Greeks] so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.

The action is precipitated when Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, punishes the Greek commander, King Agamemnon, for his discourtesy to Chryses, Apollo’s priest. He had come to Agamemnon to offer ransom and plead for the return of his daughter Chryseis, who had been captured by the Greek warrior-hero Achilles at the sacking of a town allied with Troy along with another young woman, Briseis. Agamemnon had taken Chryseis as his slave, while Achilles took Briseis – and she became his sexual possession/slave.

Agamemnon initially refused and was rude to Chryses, and the priest asked Apollo for vengeance. Apollo visited a plague on the Greeks. Urged by Achilles and others to relent, Agamemnon agreed to return Chryseis, but took Briseis from Achilles. Enraged and humiliated, Achilles insisted that he and his men would no longer fight for Agamemnon.

What follows is a catalogue of graphic and gory descriptions of the battles that follow, with the fortunes favouring at first the Trojans, who force the Greeks back to a fortification of their own before their ships, and then the Greeks. When Achilles’ close companion (and according to some commentators, his lover) Patroclus fails to break Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon and stubborn refusal to help the struggling Greek armies, he persuades Achilles to let him wear his famous armour and join the battle in this disguise. Of course he’s killed, after initial bloody successes, and Achilles, angrier still and grief-stricken, storms into murderous and terrifying action.

The climax comes with his fight with the Trojan hero Hector, followed by the funeral of Patroclus and Achilles’ desecration of his vanquished adversary’s body. His angry brutality ends with Hector’s father, aided by the god Hermes, secretly visiting Achilles in the Greek camp to beg for the release of his son’s body for decent burial. Moved by his entreaties, Achilles relents and for the first time shows some humanity and compassion.

All of the action is portrayed as being instigated or influenced by the conflicting factions of the squabbling gods, notably Athene (or Athena) and Here (or Hera), who aid the Greek cause. Not described in The Iliad is the Greek myth of the judgement of the Trojan prince, Paris, who went on to abduct or seduce Agamemnon’s wife Helen – hence the Greek armies attacking Troy to take her back and exact vengeance on the city’s inhabitants, and Paris in particular. Aphrodite sides with Paris (who chose her as the fairest of the three competing goddesses, to the disgruntlement of the other two) and the Trojans.

It’s a very different account from The Odyssey, which has a much more varied storyline. There are admittedly stirring and graphic descriptions of close-quarter fighting, and contrasting scenes of domesticity in both camps, but the themes of glory, hubris, pride, anger and fate, among others, create a less compelling story, I think, than the account of Odysseus’ ten-year struggle home to Penelope.

I’m not a classical or Greek scholar, so much of my background comment here is the result of some basic online digging; my apologies for any glaring errors.

It’s obvious why these two works constitute some of the foundations of western culture and literature, even though to modern sensibilities the depiction of warfare, gender relations, and so on, can be jarring.

Now for a few related and random comments. At the British Museum website is an interesting and informative illustrated article ‘Who was Homer?’, which includes discussion of the putative authorship of Homer, HERE. This and other links on the BM site accompanied various exhibitions from 2019 about the Trojan War and related topics.

One example: ‘Who was Achilles?’ – link HERE.

Natalie Haynes (author of A Thousand Ships [2019], a feminist retelling of the stories of the Trojan War from the perspective of women involved (see below), and, among other things, broadcaster/humorist on classical topics, including Homerian): ‘Women and goddesses of the Trojan War’ HERE.

See also the 1955 novel by Robert Graves, Homer’s Daughter, which is said to have been influenced by Samuel Butler (1835-1902, best known as the author of the novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 because of its controversial critique of Victorian values and hypocrisy) and his book The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). In this account Butler argues that the author wasn’t Homer, but a young woman from the Greek settlement in Sicily. He also suggests that this woman introduced herself into the narrative in the character of the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, who helps Odysseus when he arrives in her country. Btw, this part of the story was omitted by Christopher Nolan in his film ‘The Odyssey’. There’s an interesting note on all this, including the information that Butler wasn’t the first to advance such a theory, in a recent blog post at the TLS by Mary Beard. She also points out that there’s some evidence Butler might not have been entirely serious with this thesis – though this is disputed.

 It was probably a catalyst for what could be said to be a sub-genre of feminist versions of the Homerian epics and related Greek classical texts:

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005).

Madeline Miller, Circe (2018); The Song of Achilles (2011) retells the story from the perspective of Patroclus, and portrays Miller’s take on the relationship between him and Achilles.

Claire North, The Songs of Penelope trilogy, beginning with Ithaca (2022).

Pat Barker, a sequence of novels beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018 – I mentioned this one in my last post, as it’s the only one in this group that I’ve read; it tells the story of Achilles’ wrath from the perspective of his slave, Briseis).

Earlier examples include Christa Wolf, Cassandra (1983).

My googling around in this rabbit-hole (horrible mixed metaphor, appropriate for this jumbled post) turned up a scholarly collection of essays on the topic: Homer’s Daughters: women’s responses to Homer in the twentieth century and beyond (ed. Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos, OUP, 2019), beginning with a discussion of the extensive body of poetry by the remarkable ‘first-wave feminist’ American HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), colleague and collaborator with (and for a time, fiancée of) Ezra Pound, dating from 1912 onwards. She produced early imagist poems, then later frequent fragments and even epics in speculative reimaginings on this theme.

Another tangential point (this post I’m afraid is full of them): HD was for many years the partner of the author and arts patron Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983), who took her name from a visit to the Scilly Islands, and her favourite island in that group. Having inherited a fortune from her shipping magnate father, she supported many early modernist writers, artists and pioneers of film, and helped finance the famous Parisian expat bookshop Shakespeare & Company.

One final minor point: the title of The Iliad comes from one of the names by which the ancient Greeks knew the city now known as Troy: Ilion or Ilios (the other was Troia). Its present-day location is said to be in western Turkey.