This is my second read of Three Men in a Boat. The review I wrote a few years ago follows this article. But first, we have my more recent musings, which ended up not really being a review at all. It’s more me peering into the depths that lie beneath the surface of this collection of jolly reminiscences and reflections on Thames leisure boating. It’s Martin’s companion to Three Men in a Boat, if you will, though I am perhaps more of a stowaway than an invited guest. The article that follows is quite long and meandering and probably only of potential interest to those who have read the book, rather than to those who are thinking of reading it.

So if you are amenable to a longish trip where you might have to do some rowing, off we go.

Harris, George, and narrator J, three young men with middling jobs and lives in nineteenth century London, decide to take a trip on the Thames. They think this will be good for their health. The journey starts at Kingston, former place of crowning for Anglo Saxon kings, the centre of the kingdom in effect. The focus has since left Kingston, but an important royal palace remains close by – Hampton Court.

Harris recounts his experience in the Hampton Court maze, a journey where the main aim is not really to get to the centre. I mean that’s part of it, but once you get there, the next challenge is to get out again. Reaching the centre repeatedly, as Harris ends up doing, is not the definition of success. And just before Harris’s maze memories, we have J reflecting on the fact that people always want what they don’t have – girls who are alone desperately wanting boyfriends, and girls with boyfriends wanting rid of them, for example. The girls go in to something they want to get out of again.

Against this contradictory backdrop, J and Harris set out on a journey where there is really only one way you can go – along the course of the river, to their destination in Oxford. We will soon find things are not that simple.

No sooner has the journey started than it seems to flirt with endings. Harris wants to go and see significant tombs. Tourists seem to like visiting tombs, but not J, who seeks to avoid such morbid interests. He drags Harris away from his graveyards, so that the journey can continue towards Weybridge where J and Harris will pick up George, and complete their group of three. We’re almost halfway through the book by this time, a point marked by confusion. George is given a towline, with the aim of walking along the river path pulling the boat behind him, providing a rest from rowing. The towline gets hopelessly tangled. J tells stories of two men so intent on untangling a towline that their boat drifts off, and of a couple so engrossed in talking to each other that they have no idea their towline came loose from the boat they were apparently pulling, many hours before. But even if these stories of towing all end in failure, does the fact of a boat not reaching its destination really represent failure? After all, we have already had an example of undesirable endings in the graves Harris wanted to visit. Maybe in that context, not reaching the destination is no bad thing.

We get to the end of the first day, which comes to a rather painful conclusion as the three elect to push on a few extra miles before dark and regret their decision, achieving nothing beyond wearing themselves out. In their tired state, a mile feels much further than a mile. Making tea on the first night, advice is given not to watch the kettle boil, otherwise it never will. Focusing too much on your destination is a mistake. You will get there more surely if you forget counting the miles, which somehow lengthen in the counting of them.

During the night J finds it hard to sleep. A bed in a rowing boat is not a restful place. He gets up, stands on the riverbank and looks up at starry skies. Ironically, in standing sleepless under the stars, he feels peaceful.

The journey then follows a sequence of events where the mundane and the significant travel together. Passing Magna Carta Island, J reflects on great moments in history, before recounting the history of his efforts to get into a tin of pineapples without a tin opener. When the wind starts blowing in the right direction, the crew raise a sail, which has the boat flying along with the breeze, part of the glories of nature, before crashing down to Earth again in the form of a collision with fishermen. The three making this journey are a trio of ordinary men, and yet the number three has quiet parallels with the divine trinities that appear repeatedly in various religions. And the fishermen they crash into have religious connotations too, as in fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, recruited to be fishers of men.

After having trouble with steam launches, the three stop at Wargrave, near the George and Dragon pub. The pub sign shows the battle with the dragon on one side, George having a pint on the other side after the work is done. Heroic George becomes ordinary again after his battle. Meanwhile, at Henley, non-heroic Thames tourist George tries to play the banjo he has brought along on the trip. Being a beginner, no one is impressed with his efforts. We also get reminiscences about the chaotic early rowing efforts of J and George. They both might aspire to banjo playing and rowing greatness, maybe even to becoming a hero like that famous George who fought the dragon. And yet we have already seen heroic George having his pint like an ordinary man. This makes you wonder if hero George’s situation is really any different to that of tourist George, who can’t play the banjo let alone fight dragons. J chooses this moment to comment on the nature of achievement with reference to an experienced boatman:

There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of the nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him – all those that are going his way.

A beginner will be trying to get somewhere. An old boatman won’t mind too much about getting somewhere, and will get there more effectively.

Chapter 16 is about the stretch of Thames at Reading. Here the metaphorical maze we have been exploring takes a moral turn. J accepts an offer from a friend to have a steam launch pull their boat for a while. Now there is a shift in perspective for the three men in their boat. Until this point, steam launches have been the bad guys of the river, swaggering along, bullying little boats in their path. Now that J, Harris and George have joined the steam launch brigade, it is the rowing boats that become the enemy, getting in the way, causing trouble for the sake of it.

Following this lighthearted reflection on moral relativity, a much darker moment makes the same point. George sees a floating object which turns out to be the body of a young woman. Later the story of this woman is revealed, a not unusual tale for the time, of unexpected pregnancy outside marriage, the subsequent shaming and shunning of the woman by all who knew her, leading eventually to hopeless despair. Those who turned their backs on this unfortunate individual felt they were taking the moral high ground, when in J’s telling they become wicked. Virtue becomes vice, and vice versa. The moral maze takes a twist. Morality can be compared to the claims of fishermen, which we hear about in chapter 17, claims which famously cannot be trusted for a moment.

In chapter 18, J recalls a time when he and George were sitting in their boat waiting for a lock to fill. On the bank, a photographer was setting up a shot of all the happy travellers, hoping to sell the pictures to his subjects. Everyone strikes a pose, distracting J and George who fail to realise that the bow of their boat has become stuck in lock woodwork, threatening to tip their boat as the water level changes. Quick and ungainly action saves the day and spoils the shot. All photos of the Thames are still, while the actual river is ever moving and unpredictable. Movement might seem hazardous, just as a world with no fixed conception of morality might seem to offer no security. And yet the photograph scene suggests the real danger comes from trying to fix things that will not be fixed.

So we reach the final chapter. After two days in Oxford the travellers begin their return journey. They are going downstream now, going with the flow. But there is no feeling of ease. Rowing against the tide provided a feeling of achievement, whereas now the sense is more one of drifting. It starts to rain. The bright river of sunny days is reduced to a dirty brown stream. After originally going on this journey for their health, the travellers fear their health is under imminent threat. They abandon the boat early and catch a train back to Paddington, before heading to a restaurant in Leicester Square. You could say that the journey ends in disappointment and failure, and yet the lovely Leicester Square meal is more like a victory banquet. The rowers escape from the river, back into their everyday lives, now transformed into a sanctuary they are glad to find again. So even if the three travellers did not find a great destination at the end of their jaunt, even if they did not find the centre of the maze, they managed to find a way out, which in maze terms is success.

2018 Review

Holidays are odd things. They derive from exhausting pilgrimage where sedentary, medieval folk would up-sticks and walk hundreds of miles on muddy tracks, in unsuitable clothing, at the mercy of thieves, brigands and weather, to reach a distant shrine. Equally, holidays also derive from peaceful rest cures at spas and seaside towns, where instead of getting foot sore you’re more likely to get foot massage. This contradictory ancestry ends up combining a long physical ordeal in search of spiritual meaning with the beach resort experience, reclining on a lounger, watching waves lap on smooth sand, cool drink in hand.

Both the pilgrimage and sun lounger aspects of holidays are explored in Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome’s nineteenth century account of a Thames boating trip. The nineteenth century was the time when holidays came into being for people generally. You no longer had to be religiously earnest, or be wealthy enough to sit around drinking mineral water in Bath or Tunbridge Wells. People were earning better money, had more free time and, thanks to the railways, could travel more easily. The three men who take Jerome’s boat trip are regular chaps. George works as a bank clerk. It’s not clear exactly what Harris and Jerome do, but you don’t get the sense that they are government ministers, captains of industry, or deep-thinking academics. They are the new holiday makers, embarking on a journey of ancient contradictions.

In many ways this boat trip is a spiritual pilgrimage, an attempt to leave behind the humdrum and find something more profound. Against a background of arduous effort and spartan living conditions, there are reflections on life and extravagant descriptions of nature in all its comforting, uplifting beauty. But the attempted profundities are always punctured by various down-to-earth mishaps involving ill-behaved dogs, poor boatmanship, bad cooking, vengeful steam launches, forgotten tin openers. While this journey might be seen as a kind of physically demanding pilgrimage, it is also an indolent escape from stress and strain. Each man takes it in turn to pull tricks to get out of rowing. Jerome avoids tours of churchyards containing historically significant graves. There is much lounging around in riverside meadows, and laughter at the memory of conscientious old school fellows who threw themselves into French irregular verbs.

So where does this physically demanding, yet languid – profound yet commonplace – journey take us? Without giving anything away about the “denouement”, it takes us somewhere significant, while allowing us to escape heavy significance. It takes us somewhere new, while also taking us home again with a new appreciation of our daily lives.

That’s what the best holidays do for us.

The Three Body Problem is a 2008 science fiction novel by Liu Cixin. I read it as part of a little project to look at the rule of three, the idea that groups of three seem to resonate with people. In terms of writing, the rule of three refers to three part structure – as in beginning, middle and end – and the portrayal of groups of three characters.

The Three Body Problem describes a conundrum in physics, where it is possible to predict the orbits of two objects circling each other, but almost impossible to do this when a third body is introduced. In Cixin’s book, the three body problem is presented as the Alpha Centauri triple star system. A planet called Trisolaris bumbles along in the vicinity of this triad of stars orbiting chaotically. The planet’s inhabitants have a dreadful time, their climate alternating between roasting heat and deep cold, with occasional equable periods in-between, depending on where the suns are at any particular time. The Trisolarians are looking for a steadier life. After trying and failing to work out a way to predict their suns’ trajectories and adapt accordingly, they decide moving elsewhere is a better option. Their hopes are rewarded when they pick up a message from a secret Chinese facility dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. The inhabitants of Trisolaris soon realise this message comes from a very pleasant planet with a nice stable orbit, and a lovely mild climate. And all of this might be theirs, as long as they get rid of the annoying creatures who already live there…

The book is interesting in exploring the philosophical ramifications of the Three Body Problem. Stability is attractive, but can become a lifeless stasis. Introduce a third body and suddenly you have a situation where anything can happen, exciting or terrifying by turns. Perhaps this contradiction informs the rule of three generally. The rule of three might also be considered an anti-rule, a well worn path that can lead anywhere.

As far as the structure of the book itself was concerned, it did follow the rule of three in its division into three sections, and in its use of three main characters. Students of the rule of three have pointed out that trios of characters often embody a basic set of psychological types – the instinctive types, the thinkers, and those who mediate between the two. Some have drawn parallels with Freud’s division of human psychology into thoughtful superego, instinctive id and mediating ego – a bit like Spock, McCoy and Kirk in Star Trek working together on the bridge of the Enterprise. In The Three Body Problem, theoretical physicist Ye Weinjie, practical researcher Wang Miao, and tough-guy policeman Shi Qiang fit these roles. So you could say the book’s form has a clever agreement with its content.

This is an interesting book, particularly if you are pursuing an eccentric interest in the rule of three.

A tornado strikes a Kansas farm, blowing a young girl called Dorothy off to the Land of Oz. Here she meets three characters who are searching for various attributes: a scarecrow wanting brains, a woodcutter made of tin yearning for a heart, and a lion desperate for courage. They all decide to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to find the great wizard Oz. Apparently only Oz has the power to send Dorothy home, and provide her companions with what they desire.

The journey begins and, ironically, it soon becomes clear that each character already has the qualities they feel they lack. The scarecrow, for example, having straw for brains, sees things in a straightforward way. When Dorothy describes the home she is so keen to find again, he wonders why anyone would want to go back to a grey place like Kansas. Dorothy dismisses such nonsense, but on the journey to the Emerald City, it is the Scarecrow who generally does the thinking and comes up with ways out of scrapes.

It’s the same with the Tin Woodman who, not having a heart, is always worried about acting in a heartless way. This means he compensates by always behaving with great sensitivity. When he has a heart, he muses, he won’t have to worry so much.

And then there’s the cowardly lion, who performs many brave acts on the journey. As Oz eventually tells the lion, courage cannot really exist in the absence of fear. The lion’s fearfulness is actually part of his courage.

Which brings us to Oz himself, who turns out to be a circus promoter blown in by accident from Omaha, just pretending to be a wizard. He ‘grants’ his visitors’ wishes, using theatrical flimflam – pins for the scarecrow’s head for example, to make him ‘sharp’. And though Oz gives nothing, he is at least wise enough to realise his limitations.

While he provides Dorothy’s companions with the confidence to believe in what they already have, Oz can’t send Dorothy back to Kansas. For that, he suggests that the homesick girl visits someone with proper magical power, Glinda the Good Witch of the South. But Glinda merely informs Dorothy that she already has the ability to go back to Kansas. It had been there all along in the pair of magic slippers which she inherited from the Wicked Witch of the East, when Dorothy’s wind-borne house fell on her.

This is a fairytale relevant to modern times. Dorothy doesn’t do the usual fairytale thing of waiting around to be rescued by a knight, who in this case seems to have been taken down a peg or two to become a tin man, who is actually rescued by Dorothy. There is also the fact that in praying for rescue, the godlike presence Dorothy seeks turns out to be a mirage. Oz, using showbiz smoke and mirrors, appears in the form of a beautiful woman, a huge face, or a ball of fire, maybe recalling gods, goddesses or sun worship. But these authorities are merely Oz, who has no supernatural power to answer prayers. All of the things we wish for have to be found within ourselves. And yet, even if old forms of omniscient assistance are shown to be a fraud, this modern-feeling story still presents its sources of actual help in terms of ancient religious symbolism. For example, there’s the trinity of helpers assisting Dorothy. Religions often have a group of three central figures, and Dorothy is helped by a group of three. The idea of a helpful trinity also crops up with the powerful Flying Monkeys, who grant three wishes. And Dorothy has to click the heels of her magic shoes together three times to get back to Kansas. There are other possible religious parallels, in the Yellow Brick, which some critics portray as Buddhism’s golden path to enlightenment, and in the cyclone, representing death and rebirth.

Written in 1900, The Wizard of Oz remains a fascinating modern fairytale, accepting the new while continuing with a sense of long established reassurance. Historian William R. Leach summed it up nicely when he said that The Wizard of Oz meets “the particular ethical and emotional needs of people living in a new urban, industrial society. The Wizard of Oz was an optimistic secular text: it helped people feel at home in America’s new industrial economy.”

Small Prophets is a BBC series written and directed by MacKenzie Crook, released in February 2026. The following article might contain spoilers, so watch and enjoy first.

Michael Sleep is a middle-aged man living a lonely existence in a house full of cardboard boxes, with a living room recreating a 1970s Christmas Day. The neighbours nag him about his overgrown garden. He works in a DIY superstore, making fun of customers, and his boss, who focuses on issues like whether the vending machine has enough beef flavour Discos.

He visits his father, Brian, in a care home. Brian has forgotten that Michael’s partner, Clea, disappeared some years previously. When Brian remembers Clea’s disappearance, he offers to help his son by sharing an alchemical recipe taught to him in Egypt by an Italian mystic. This recipe apparently creates small, magical people – homunculi – in water filled glass jars. These creatures have the power of divination and will be able to answer Michael’s questions about Clea.

What’s going on here then? Initially, I assumed the homunculi recipe was just a symptom of Brian’s declining mental state. But no. I was soon confronted by small people in glass jars.

After watching the whole series I had a think. And there seemed much to think about. There’s the fact that this story about fortune-telling homunculi begins with confusion about the past. What happened to Clea? Brian has memory issues. So the past is as enigmatic as the future, into which the homunculi are supposed to provide a glimpse. The present exists between two mysteries it seems. Michael, with the help of Kacey, a young friend from the DIY store, continues to work on his homunculi, developing them towards the stage of divination when they will be able to answer questions. And questions about the past – what happened to Clea? – are wrapped up with questions about the future – will she ever come back?

Is it a coincidence that Michael’s surname is sleep? When Michael first goes to the care home, his father is asleep, as are most of the other residents. Michael himself is shown sleeping a lot. He has strange dreams where he is on a beach holding a large egg, with seagulls flying around his head. Is there a suggestion that we live in a sort of dream state, between a past we are not sure of, and a future we plan for but cannot ever see? In the dream, the egg and all those birds could suggest the chicken and egg conundrum. Which comes first? Or do they exist in a cycle where past and future are part of each other? It is interesting that Michael’s companion in his effort to create the prophets is Kacey, a young woman. Older and younger are working together. Clea, lost in the past, may live on. There could be a chance that Micheal will find her again one day in the future.

Of one thing we can be sure. If Michael does find what he is looking for, it will not be like locating a bucket in a DIY store, or seeing your road illuminated by those pointless security lights, serving only to wake up neighbours with their annoying on and off routine. True answers are revealed in a way that is more like Clea’s name, with its hidden reference to the word ‘clear’, which at first you might not notice. Interesting mystery remains in the clarity.

This is a lot for BBC 2 on a Monday evening in February. Small Prophets is a fascinating, thought provoking and clearly brilliant piece.

Peter Benchley’s Jaws published in 1974 was a massive bestseller, and the Steven Spielberg film version invented the summer blockbuster. Over fifty years later I thought I’d have a look.

I found a story that was a kind of morality tale with no specific moral – an amorality tale if you will.

The shark is the ultimate bad guy of the piece, arriving off the beach of the American resort town of Amity and causing mayhem. An uneasy team gets together to fight the beast, Amity police chief Martin Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper, and Quint, a local sports fisherman.

As a character the shark is amoral, Hooper explaining that the animal is simply acting instinctively in attacking people. But ideas of morality swirl around the human reaction. Is it immoral to keep the beaches open so that the tourist town of Amity can survive? Should they be closed to protect people from possible shark attack? And while Hooper the scientist, is rational, he can appear cooly unprincipled in his detachment. Look, for example, at how he behaves when Brody’s wife makes a pass at him. Let’s just say he acts on instinct, and doesn’t trouble himself too much with scruples. And Quint, the shark hunting fisherman – a cynical figure who insists on double pay for shark duty, with no care for bathers eaten if the stretched Amity police department can’t meet his demands – hardly a heroic St George saving the kingdom from a dragon.

And then there’s the final section where Quint, Brody and Hooper are hunting the shark. On each side of him, in the characters of his two companions, Brody seems to face a different kind of amorality – Hooper’s scientific detachment, and Quint’s brutish, animal cruelty. Brody has to somehow cobble together a sense of decency in the middle.

Admittedly I did find the writing in Jaws clunky, particularly in its awkward point of view shifts. And the final battle with the shark loses momentum when our heroes take a night off in the middle of the action – which of course didn’t happen in the film. Even so, this remained an interesting and thoughtful read, especially if you think of it as a modern fairytale, where sharks take the place of dragons.

D’Artagnan is newly arrived in 1625 Paris. He is a young man with dreams of joining the King’s Musketeers, an elite group of soldiers who guard Louis XIII. But as soon as D’Artagnan rolls into town, some hot-headed behaviour leaves him facing a duel with no less than three Musketeers – Aramis, Athos and Porthos. On cooler reflection both D’Artagnan and the Musketeers think a duel might not be a good idea, but a sense of honour pushes them forward. They are saved and brought together, not by someone coming along to talk sense into them, but by a challenge from rivals, the guards of the King’s powerful counsellor, Cardinal Richelieu.

The Cardinal’s guard take much pleasure in pointing out that a duel breaks public disorder laws. So what do the Cardinal’s Guard do to teach these rascally Musketeers the meaning of the law? They fight them, which of course is itself public disorder. The Guards use the law as an excuse for an illegal ruckus. In the fight itself, D’Artagnan takes the side of the same Musketeers he had challenged to a duel. He is not trained in fencing, but because of his inexperience, he proves to be an unpredictable and lethal opponent. If he had known the rules, the suggestion is he would have been less effective.

This fight sums up many of the themes of The Three Musketeers – describing a world where allies and enemies, rule and misrule, the forces of order and chaos, are interchangeable.

And over all this I would suggest hangs the symbolic power of three. Three is a contradictory number, suggestive of the Holy Trinity, the divine plan, which Aramis mentions during one of his retreats for spiritual reflection. And yet three is also the number of trouble. While the Three Musketeers are a tight group of friends, the story is full of three sided relationships which are destructive. Louis XIII, Queen Anne of Austria, and the Duke of Buckingham. Constance Bonacieux, Monsieur Bonacieux, and D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan, Athos and Milady. Porthos, Madame Qouquenard and Monsieur Quoquenard. And Richelieu’s rejected attempt to enter a triangular relationship with Queen Anne leads to his vicious vendetta against her, which drives much of the plot.

In some ways The Three Musketeers reads as low brow, pulpy, adventure fiction. But for all that, there are fascinating contradictions playing out beneath the melodrama. This book is subtle entertainment, suggesting that there is order in chaos. I’m tempted to give The Three Musketeers three stars, which in this case would be the top rating.

Ian McEwan’s 2025 novel, What We Can Know, imagines Britain in 2119, as an archipelago of islands, the result of flooding caused by global warming and wars. You could say this is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel, and yet the feeling is rather cosy. The narrator is Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs. I found it reassuring that after global disaster there could still be literary types pottering about with their research – in this case, Tom’s obsessive study of fictional poet Francis Blundy who apparently wrote great stuff in the earlier twenty first century.

I did find it odd dealing with a fictional poet who was supposed to have written his best work by now, particularly as there are also references to the work of real contemporary writers. This did require some suspension of disbelief. Also the future world had a strange combination of advanced technological features – a national AI service – and a sense of regression – no aircraft and, apparently, no cars. People get about by electric boat or bike. I mean, I liked this scenario, being a keen cyclist, but it did not seem very likely. How do you build a university on the South Downs without some serious road transport?

On the up side, there is much interesting reflection on how people respond to disaster, cycles of growth and collapse, and how the study of history might be different in the future. The proliferation of electronic communication could leave a hugely increased amount of information to draw upon, for example. This last theme might seem rarified and academic, but it certainly takes an emotional presence in the second half of the book, when Tom finds a document which shows how close, or far away, he might have been from the truth in his previous years of research.

Overall, What We Can Know maybe included a few things that made its world a little less than believable, but putting those details aside, it remained a very interesting and compelling read.

Old Filth is a 2004 novel by Jane Gardam shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s about a judge, Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, famous in the legal world. His great career over, Edward has retired to Dorset. His wife’s death leads to a period of mental and physical wandering. We learn about his life, born in Malaysia, sent home to England as a child, looked after by careless family members and cruel paid guardians. Then boarding school, university and a legal career in Hong Kong and England (‘Filth’ stands for ‘failed in London try Hong Kong).

The book is about old worlds passing away, both in terms of individuals and their wider society. Edward Feathers is one of the last so-called Raj orphans. It was interesting that the book’s elegiac atmosphere doesn’t present a picture of progress, or of regression. This might irritate those who think of British history in terms of glories. And it might annoy those who see history in terms of progress away from the iniquities of the past. I will leave you to your personal feelings on that, but in this book there is an overall sense of things coming out about even, as a kind of steady state. This is both true of the wider historical picture and of Edward himself, who at the end of the book faces up to a ‘crime’ committed in his youth. I won’t go into details, as to do so would give away one of the book’s reveals. Suffice to say that Edward confesses his crime to a priest, his wrong-doing existing in a grey area between premeditated offence, accident, self defence and fated denouement. And in the end, even though he feels guilt, Edward has no regrets.

There is the potential for melancholy, as Edward realises his once fancy life doesn’t add up to anything in the end. On the other hand, even if we don’t really get progress, perhaps the sense of a steady state is reassuring in a situation that seems to be all about endings.

Old Filth is a poignant, sometimes funny depiction of the end of an era, set against a sense that life goes on. I enjoyed it.

Barchester Towers is an 1857 novel by Anthony Trollope. It tells the story of a power struggle among the clergy of fictional Barchester following the death of a popular and long serving bishop.

One of the most engaging things about the book is the friendly, mischievous, sometimes indulgent, sometimes exasperated, voice telling the story. Initially we seem to be in the hands of an omniscient narrator from an age when people readily believed in a higher power directing human affairs. But sometimes this voice comes down to Earth, as we find our author sitting in the pews of Barchester Cathedral along with the other characters in the book.

And, fittingly, this omniscient, yet human, narrator, tells a story about the contradictions of power. We meet a bishop who seems powerful, while actual authority lies with his formidable wife, and a unpleasantly ambitious junior Church official intent on rising through the ranks. Some characters decide not to play the silly game of climbing the greasy pole, only to find themselves unaccountably ascending to senior positions. Others who yearn for power are denied it. And yet I was left wondering what is really achieved or denied, when authority remains such a shifting concept. This was a fascinating exploration, especially in a book from 1857.

I enjoyed Barchester Towers – moving, funny and insightful. Yes, there are occasional long passages of biographical background, which might have been best left in the author’s notes. But this author does not set himself up as perfect, and I could not help forgiving the bits and pieces that maybe could have done with the guiding hand of an editor. Do editors have the real power in the writing world? That might be a good point to end on.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a young adult novel by Judy Blume, published in 1970. It has since received many awards, and appears on the Time Magazine list of best novels since 1923. In the United States it has also featured prominently on lists of books that have been ‘challenged’ which is the term that the American Library Association uses when people make a complaint about a book and ask for it to be taken off library shelves.

So, I had a look, and found a charming, funny novel about eleven year old Margaret Simon who worries that she will never get her period, never develop breasts and will be some kind of freak for the rest of her life. She also frequently talks to God, but struggles to work out which religion she should be identifying with.

I suppose the book does cover familiar young-adult ground in exploring themes of belonging and identity, but it does so in a way that really takes things up a notch, notably through the frequent chats with God. Strangely these passages reminded me of the film Gravity, where stranded astronauts talk to “Houston in the blind’, a term used to refer to radio communications, where astronauts cannot hear Houston, but continue to send messages just in case Houston is receiving. In Gravity there is much interesting enigma about these messages. Do they get through to Houston? Are they similar to prayer where no one seems to be listening? Even if no one listens, do the messages sent to Houston offer comfort and reassurance in themselves, even if no reassurance seems to be literally forthcoming? Is the fact that the audience hears these messages significant?

Margaret’s one-sided God chats have a similar enigmatic quality. They are comforting in themselves even though no apparent reply comes back. And although the blessings Margaret asks for fail to be granted, this turns out to be no bad thing. Big breasts for example. Margaret envies a girl in her class who has been granted such a gift, only to discover, after talking to this apparently fortunate girl, that maybe a blessing can also be a curse. Maybe Margaret’s prayers are answered in the lack of any response.

You see? This is a book that gets you thinking in broad terms, about more than just fitting in with your friends at school.

These are the themes that have had people in America queuing up to demand the book be taken out of libraries. America is a strange country, seeing itself as free-thinking, but actually fundamentalist in many ways. A good novel will show and not tell. There is a constituency in America that prefers the illusory certainty of telling and being told. Showing is always going to be more nuanced than telling, tending to pose questions rather than apparently giving answers.