The House in the Cerulean Sea is a fantasy novel by TJ Klune, published in 2020. It’s about Linus Baker who works for a government department overseeing homes for children with magical powers. After many years of dutiful service, he is given a special job of inspecting a secret home run by one Arthur Parnassus. It is here that Linus has his eyes opened to the discrimination that magical people suffer, and has to decide what his response will be.

This book is a morality tale. Linus and Arthur discuss Kant and Schopenhauer – Kant a rules is rules man, and Schopenhaur a more easy-going, do as you would be done by, proponent.

Name checking these heavy weight philosophers does not reflect the tone of the book, which is more YA than intellectual tome. The story very much waves the flag for team Schopenhauer. There are nods towards team Kant, Linus struggling with his weight, for example. We see him trying to follow a diet at the beginning of the book. His natural inclinations lead him to food, when stern Kant’s ‘unconditional principle’ would say that you can’t just eat whatever you like whenever you want. But, this is a background detail compared to the emphasis on forgetting rule books, in favour of empathy as the basis of morality. Indeed, after spending time at Parnassus’ house and forgetting his beloved book of regulations, Linus gets slimmer without even trying. Does this mean you can throw off restrictions, live on the beach, enjoying a beach body without the pain of dieting?

Your response will probably depend on whether you are more Kant or Schopenhauer. I would humbly suggest, we need both, but for me, the no rules beach living is sadly a bit extreme. Rules might change according to altered circumstances, but that does not mean they are meaningless, since the temptation to follow natural inclinations to immediate, and very possibly unwise, gratification remains unchanged in changing times. Also basing morality on empathy is a bit risky when a proportion of people, known as sociopaths, have a constitutional lack of this ability.

So tricky topics. This book certainly touches on contradiction, but I have to say, at the risk of sounding like an old bore, it prefers to go in for lots of sentimental sweetness when maybe too much of that sweet treat gratification might not be realistic, or good for you.

Brick Lane is 2003 novel by Monica Ali, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Nazneen, a young woman from Bangladesh who is married off to an older man and obliged to live with him in the Brick Lane area of East London.

This book caused controversy when it was published, some in the Tower Hamlets Bangladeshi community feeling it portrayed them in a negative light. Personally I thought the negative light shone much wider than that community. Perhaps the approach of the book is summarised in the small details of twee knickknacks that Nazneen finds herself dusting in her London flat. These figurines include lions and tigers, which have a wider significance, as the names of rival groups – Lion Hearts, right wing British nationalists, and Bengal Tigers, a Bangladeshi Islamic group formed to oppose them. Lions and Tigers actually require each other to justify their belligerent existence. And the book quietly presents them both as pointless clay figures, together on a shelf.

This lion/tiger symbolism is the sort of thing that Nazneen’s husband Chanu would appreciate. And he would have liked all the stuff about fate and free will in the book. Chanu was my favourite character really, a bumptious man, proud of his reading of classic English literature. Lion and Tiger slogans annoy him equally, not that all the subtleties of his high-end reading get him very far. He takes a considered essay on race relations along to a Bengal Tiger meeting, but is not brave enough to present it.

There is no simple answer in this book, though it is perhaps telling that Chanu is possibly the most successful character, not perfect by any means, not a hero, but somehow more sympathetic than any lion or tiger. So personally I don’t think this is a book to be offended by. The character I most identify with is hapless Chanu, who like me thinks he is a cut above cheap political posturing, preferring to sit quietly with the subtleties of fancy reading. But I’m not offended by the portrayal of a passive, sometimes completely useless, bookish fellow. It’s true – I wouldn’t be keen on reading out my race relations essay at a rowdy meeting either. Chanu is a character of the middle ground, in a book which is even handed in bravely casting a neutral eye over lives that usually polarise themselves into one side or another.