Riddley Walker published in 1980, is set in post-apocalypse east Kent, close to where I live in pre-apocalypse mid-Kent. Society has fallen apart. Modern knowledge has been lost. Language is a debased version of English. Very few people can read or write.

The world destroyed in the war was one divided by maths, clocks, written words, and countless different books. Now there seems to be only one book, The Eusa Story, a kind of religious text setting out a garbled account of what happened to the world when it fell apart. There is a feeling that division led to disaster, the splitting of the atom as the final and most disastrous manifestation of this desire to divide.

But disaster could also be blamed on giving up on messy variety and trying to find one final answer, fighting one final war to end them all, the 1 Big 1 as the Walker language terms it. Much of the plot is driven by a search for various ingredients necessary for the recreation of gunpowder. Elements of the recipe are separate, but we all know what happens when they are combined.

So trouble comes from both breaking things up and trying too hard to force them together.

The language reflects this paradox. Compound words in 1980 English are characteristically broken up in Riddley language. (See the article Dialect, Grapholect and Story by D.P. Mullen of DePauw University). ‘Record’ becomes ‘red cord’, ‘opposite’ becomes ‘arper sit’, for example. But the Riddley language also makes new compounds out of words that 1980s English divides, like ‘musve’ for ‘must have’, ‘iwdve‘ for ‘I would have’.

Creation and destruction, things coming together and falling apart seem to go in cycles, and are part of each other.

Riddley Walker is a thought provoking, philosophical book, at times much funnier than you would expect. The section where people of the future try to get their heads around a preserved example of 1980’s English, had your reviewer chuckling. It is fairly hard work to read, and I couldn’t decide if all the many ideas really gelled – language, intuition versus rationality, gunpowder, Punch and Judy shows, particle accelerators, dogs, ring symbolism, religion, politics, spirituality. But in other ways this book is a rare coming together of what is said and how it’s said. The language is not something you look through to the story, it’s part of the story. And from that point of view the book really felt like a remarkable and complete piece of writing.

The Lowlife is a 1963 novel by Alexander Baron, reissued in May of 2025 by Faber. It’s described as a cult classic. I don’t quite know what one of those is. Maybe it’s a book considered very good, but through bad luck doesn’t get the readership it deserves.

As chance would have it, The Lowlife is very much about luck. Harryboy Boas, an East End Jack-the-lad, now in his forties, makes a living with occasional stints of rag-trade employment, only designed to support his true passions of gambling and reading. He’s an essentially decent chap, who tends to put a positive spin on his life, to the extent of inventing a property empire with which to impress a young couple who move into his apartment building in Hackney.

The couple, Evelyn and Vic, are the opposite, finding themselves in a fascinating, colourful, energetic place, full of varied, friendly people, made wholly negative by Evelyn’s snobbery and Vic’s defeatist approach to life.

Reading the book I began to wonder about luck. In some ways, it’s a clear cut case. The dog on which you have placed your bet either wins or loses, magnifying or disappearing your money in the process. On the other hand, what is winning anyway? Is it being in business where you work all the time? Is it Evelyn’s dream of a smart house in a neighbourhood where there are no blue collar workers around to bring down the tone? Or is it Harry’s plan, which involves making a big win on the dogs, and using this to fund a blissful few weeks in his Hackney flat, reading a recently purchased set of the complete works of Emile Zola? As a reader that last option sounded the most appealing.

Without giving too much away, a run of bad luck leads to a dramatic denouement, out of which you could say there’s an ending that is happy or sad, or both.

Honestly if you think you are not doing well, there is reassurance to be had here.

I really enjoyed The Lowlife. It’s written in an attractive, accessible style, compelling in its story-line, fascinating on the subjects of fate and luck.

A cult classic, which I thoroughly recommend. I’m lucky to have come across it.

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes is a 2019 history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century period in France, known as the Belle Epoch. It features a huge cast of characters, all arranged around the figure of Samuel Pozzi, an eminent and pioneering French surgeon and gynaecologist, who on a visit to London with two aristocratic friends gets his portrait painted in a red coat by John Singer Sergeant. Pozzi is an ideal central point for this account. Everyone, whether they are famous or obscure, rich or poor will eventually get sick and need a doctor.

And just as Pozzi meets a lot of different people, he also personifies contrasting aspects of society within himself. He is a very good doctor, with a celebrity clientele. At the same time he is democratic in his outlook, believing that good health care should be for everyone. He has a high regard for women, insisting on care and consideration in their medical treatment, declaring that ‘chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance’. Yet his view of marriage runs along old aristocratic lines, as in a wife for stability and family, other women for the more fun aspects of relationships. And beneath gathering nationalist storm clouds that would end the Belle Epoque with a terrible war, Pozzi stands out as a cosmopolitan internationalist, seeking the expertise of specialists from all over the world, and treating people with the same humane openness – a lesson for us there.

Julian Barnes does a great job of taking all the contradictions in Pozzi’s personal and wider worlds and concentrating them in Singer Sergeant’s painting of the enigmatic doctor, wearing an oddly unclassifiable red garment, maybe relaxed dressing gown, maybe oddly formal, expensive coat.

I’d like a coat like that.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel about a mysterious portrait of a young man, where the painted figure ages, while the youth himself lives on unblemished.

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray at school. Now on this re-read I’ve somehow reached my sixties. Inevitably there have been changes in your reviewer. It’s difficult to remember what I thought about the book as a teen. Maybe it was a matter of taking youth for granted. Now, having to be mindful of pulling a muscle while stretching in the mornings, the issues explored in The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more pertinent.

We start out with the straight-forward idea that the passage of time is a journey taking us from a golden age towards a fallen state. Dorian begins the book young and beautiful, feeling that time will only dull his charms. Meanwhile in society at large, there’s a sense that after living through long centuries when they knew what was what, people are entering a darker and more uncertain era. Religion is not the force it was, slipping away along with the moral code it once supported, replaced by the cynicism of Lord Henry, and of Dorian himself who blithely makes his selfish way through life without consequence.

But in a sort of equal and opposite reaction, there are aspects of the book that portray the past as a backward time out of which we are slowly emerging. Take the character of Lord Fermor, for example, a retired diplomat who grumbles that these days one has to sit vulgar examinations to be accepted into the diplomatic service, rather than relying on the tried and tested method of noble birth and smart-set contacts. It’s hard not to see progress rather than deterioration in moving on from the heyday of a dinosaur like Lord Fermor.

“Whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us,” says Fermor’s nephew, Lord Henry.

In the end, there is no real sense of youth’s passing as an irrevocable loss. The book grows away from decay, towards development. Dorian eventually comes to see his gilded youth as “a green, an unripe time”. Now maybe we feel that the secret of staying young is to allow ourselves to grow older, to change, to move into new phases of life. Youth, after all, is about the new, not the old.

I’m glad I re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray at this point in my life.