Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume is one of the 20th century’s best selling German novels, winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the PEN Translation Prize for the English edition by John Woods. It’s about an eighteenth century Parisian man, born with a superhuman sense of smell, and a lack of any normal moral sense. He will stop at nothing in his efforts to make the world’s greatest perfume.

I will tell you right away that this is a weird and dark book, its creepiness deriving from the fact that we are in the realm of smell. Smell, as I have learned with a bit of background reading, is the most ancient of senses, evolving from the primeval ability of early life forms to understand the chemical make-up of their environment.

A book set in an aromatic world is in tricky territory because reading is a visual, or auditory, experience. A ‘smell book’ would be very revealing in some ways, reaching places that the other senses could not, while also having the ability to trigger all sorts of emotions and memories. But the structure of the narrative would be all over the place. Smells linger and merge. Chapter one might not really end on its last page, but potentially persist into all the chapters that come after. And the last chapter could very well waft into the first. Also the book would be very short on thought and analysis. You smell things like manure and roses, not justice or the law. Old books smell, literature does not. We are talking something elemental here, which does not recognise abstractions. Smell is like an ancient world, which survives into the present day as a kind of Jurassic Park. Actually, the novel Perfume could be compared to that film – a fanciful portrayal of a reborn primeval force, sometimes beautiful, often scary and violent, with a terrifying T. rex central character who cannot be confined, despite the cheery confidence of Richard Attenborough. Very interesting, but approach with caution, and don’t expect to find the experience entirely pleasant.

The Story of the Lamp (and the Candle) is a history of artificial light, by F.W. Robins, published in 1939. I read the book as research for a novel I am writing which involves candles.

This book has a lot of detail about individual types of lamp and candle through the ages. But it’s also good on the big picture, of how fire and light have influenced human history. The evolution of technology, from pottery, metal work, and all other related crafts, to engines – whether that’s steam, internal combustion or rocket – through to the generation of electricity and everything that comes with it, derives from the control of fire. This breakthrough also had the effect of greatly expanding the time available for people to do things. Not much can be done in the dark, but people had the ability to turn night into day. Given the revolution this represents, it is not surprising that a veneration of fire and light has echoed down the centuries. The Story of the Lamp was very good at tracing these echoes. As just one example, the centre of ancient societies was the communal hearth. At some point someone discovered you could take a small portion of that light and heat into the surrounding darkness, in the form of a burning stick, which became a taper, then a candle; or it became a lamp, burning the fat that came from cooking, done on that same communal hearth. These separate flames could go off and wander about, even set themselves up in new communities, while always maintaining their link with the original fire. They were small parts of the whole. As just one example of the echoes that remain of this long lost primal camp fire, the epilogue suggests we think about the tradition of the Olympic flame, lit every five years at Olympia, and then taken off to wherever the Olympic Games has set up its new camp.

The Story of the Lamp shows how the present is a mirror of the past. All the aspects of our complex world can be traced back to people sitting next to a camp fire they managed to start and maintain. That is rather comforting. At the same time, the book serves as a reminder that ancient people saw danger in the seemingly miraculous gift that made their lives so much better and brighter. This fear was part of respect they felt for what they had been given. Maybe we could do with some of that

The Wall is a 2019 novel by John Lanchester, taking the rhetoric of Brexit to its metaphorical extreme by imagining a dystopian future where Britain is surrounded by a concrete wall. This barrier has a dual role, holding back both rising sea levels and migrants who are trying to escape climate disaster further south – known as Others in the book. The narrator is Kavanagh, a newbie wall guard, doing his obligatory national service.

The sections I found most interesting were the passages where Kavanagh is just hanging around on the wall. There isn’t much to do except think. We get some subtle sense that a wall is never a simple barrier between us and them. Who are we and who are they? Have a look at this short passage, for example, where Kavanagh thinks about his opposite number on the Wall duty roster:

When you came on shift you always hated the person you were relieving. The fact that you knew the other set of emotions so completely, that you knew exactly what the other person was feeling, made it worse. Your shift twin was a person you met twice a day, about whom you had very strong opinions, who you didn’t really know.’

In a way, the other you, your twin who does what you do for the twelve hours when you’re off duty is as unknown as the Others out there beyond the wall. Given a slight twist of fate you could easily exchange places with them. Maybe you are one of them already – as we see in the case of a senior officer on the Wall who used to be an Other.

There is a lot of that sort of thing. At one point we encounter a group of ruthless people who are really bad people, who act selfishly for nothing but their own gain. Are they truly the Others who we have to keep out, or are they a reflection of a people who refuse to help others on a national scale?

There is action in the book. It’s not all a young man hanging around thinking. But I would say the real action goes on inside Kavanagh’s head. Personally I would have had less action and more of Kavanagh mooching about. As Anthony Powell once wrote

“Action might have confused the issue by proving too exciting. Action is, after all, exciting rather than interesting.”

But that’s just me.

This book is an interesting reflection of its times, using a highly unsubtle, simple-minded caricature of an answer to national issues, to explore them in complex ways.

Brighton Rock is Graham Greene’s 1938 novel depicting gangland conflict in 1930s Brighton.

I’ve read that Graham Greene novels can be divided into ‘entertainment’ and ‘serious’. Brighton Rock seems to be included in the entertainment category. The plot involves a murder, the police messing up, a determined, amateur lady sleuth stepping in. The part-time lady sleuth idea goes back to Andrew Forrester’s Mrs Gladden character created in 1864, and had plenty of mileage in the 1930s with Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, Harriet Vane, and others.

If this is a familiar genre thriller, does that mean it can’t be a serious book? Graham Greene was a serious fellow. I think he saw himself as better than some workaday writer of detective fiction. If he was going to write a commercial lady detective story, he was going to use it to reflect on popular culture in general.

What is the popular outlook according to Brighton Rock? In broad outline, it involves an intense, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, and a trust in ordinary people over experts. The amateur lady sleuth, Ida Arnold, is rigid in her judgements, thinks the police are incompetent fools, and uses seances to provide guidance and clues. So, there’s a scary sense of seeing the world in stark categories of good and bad, who’s in or out, all caught up in a vague wash of emotion and credulity. It’s a combination of the judgemental and a lack of anything substantive on which to base judgements.

Brighton Rock portrays a chaotic society, as strident as it is superficial. This all sounds painfully familiar. Does Greene provide any answers? Well no not really. The mob lawyer character, Prewitt, well educated, with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare, is as much part of this gritty milieu as the young mobsters. And talking of Shakespeare, it has been noted, not just by me, that Brighton Rock, as well as feeling like a violent Miss Marple story, is also reminiscent of something much more high end – Macbeth, no less. Ambitious young man commits murder and then gets pulled into more murder to cover it up. There doesn’t seem to be any meaningful divide between high and low brow in the world of Brighton Rock. Pinkie the young aspiring gangland boss even comes out with Latin phrases on occasion.

So does modern consumer culture swallow everything? That might be one way to look at it. The gang leader Pinkie is a Catholic, and even the ancient Catholic Church might become another expression of the popular outlook. After all, an intense, judgemental, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, might not just apply to secular Ida and her seances.

I spent a long time thinking about this book, and had a few tries at writing a review. I suppose in the end I came to think of Brighton Rock as a prescient portrayal of how the popular can become the populist. That was certainly interesting. But the bleakness was a bit much. Popular culture isn’t necessarily rubbish. In his time Shakespeare was very much a popular playwright rather than an academic one. Then again maybe Greene would grudgingly agree, since he mixes high and low brow in the way he does. It’s not a gentle mixing, it’s like a scrapyard crushing a Rolls Royce with a Ford Fiesta and presenting a reader with the compacted result. But still, there is a lot to think about here as you look into the tangled mess of what was once Rolls Royce and Ford Fiesta.

The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955, based on his experience as a war correspondent for the Times and Le Figaro.

British journalist Thomas Fowler has spent a few years in 1950s Saigon, reporting on the tangled mess of unravelling French colonial rule in Indochina. The story opens with some naive whippersnapper entering Fowler’s jaded, but oddly settled existence. Alden Pyle – young, American, Ivy League – turns up, apparently with all the answers to Vietnam’s problems. Pyle might lack practical experience, but he has read a book about foreign policy, and decides this qualifies him to wade into the morass of France’s struggle against various groups of Vietnamese resistance fighters, who also fight amongst themselves. Pyle’s plan is to direct American support to one of the Vietnamese factions, supposedly sympathetic to Western values, and allow this group to take over.

Fowler, meanwhile, is an observer, neutral, not taking sides, because that’s how a writer remains objective. A clergyman tells Fowler at one point, referring to his church:

“We are neutral here. This is God’s territory.”

This suggests that God and a weary British journalist have something in common. Fowler, however, thinks that maybe God should give up his position above it all and pick a side, preferably the side of scared, hungry people who take shelter in the church hoping to escape the fighting. Fowler, lacking Godly qualities, finds it increasingly difficult to stand idly by, as Pyle funnels resources towards a lawless, brutal warlord.

Fowler, the dispassionate writer is eventually forced to come down from his ivory tower, figuratively, and literally actually, since there is a tower in the book, a watch tower where he gets marooned with Pyle, when their car breaks down. The tower is attacked by the Vietnamese and collapses. Fowler finds himself back down on the ground, with a broken leg. This is where he, like all of us, has to make his imperfect judgements.

People are not omniscient. They are involved and subjective. Maybe we should conclude with the sort of religious metaphor characteristic of the book. People are perhaps in the position of Abraham in Genesis, when he tells God that some local perspective is lacking in the big picture judgement of the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah. Before raining down fire, brimstone and napalm for the greater good, there are a few decent people in those cities who should be considered along with all the rest. Don’t kill the innocent along with the guilty – and is it so easy to divide guilt from innocence anyway? Abraham presents the wisdom of his limited view to a superpower claiming to know everything. The Quiet American does the same. The difference, I suppose, is that God to an extent listens to Abraham, Pyle doesn’t listen to Fowler.

Dr No is a 2022 novel by Percival Everett. It’s about a maths professor Wala Kitu who studies nothing, as in the concept of nothing. A super villain in the James Bond manner tries to recruit Wala to help in a scheme to break into Fort Knox and steal the stock of nothing which he believes is kept there. The plan is then to use this nothing as a weapon, negating whatever a super villain wants to negate.

When a book considers an unfamiliar topic, I sometimes do a bit of background research before starting a review. I didn’t know much about nothing, but was vaguely aware that people are studying the subject at MIT. So I tried to do an internet search on that, which turned out to be a bit tricky. A Google search for ‘Are scientists at MIT studying nothing?’ resulted in one of those AI summaries which announced indignantly: ‘No, scientists at MIT are not studying nothing, they are studying a whole range…’ with subjects listed. Next I tried: ‘Are scientists at MIT studying the concept of nothing?’ A mollified AI then did a U-turn, telling me about the MIT scientist Daniel Harlow and his studies of profound absence. So, no people are MIT are not studying nothing, and yes they are.

All I can say is that nothing, which might seem to be the simplest of things, as in the absence of any complications whatsoever, turns out to be very complicated. It all started with Otto von Guericke who in 1654 invented a pump that could suck the air out of a hollow copper sphere. In a demonstration of the power of nothing he had two teams of horses trying and failing to pull apart two halves of his copper sphere containing a vacuum. Since then researchers have defined other types of ever more rarified nothing. I won’t go into details. Suffice to say, a subject that seemed simple is really not.

Dr No revolves around these head spinning paradoxes, which makes for a funny, surreal, and philosophical read. This is a book about nothing. You could write a great deal about that; or you could leave it there. Nothing is fiendishly complicated and reassuringly simple. You can take both from Dr No, a spy story with all the easy cliches, which also takes you on a mind boggling journey through the contradictions of nothing which seem to lie beneath everything.

I reserved Miranda July’s All Fours at the library after hearing it was a road trip book, and had been included on the Women’s Prize for Fiction list.

I soon realised this was not a road trip book. A woman, who has had some sort of successful, unspecified artistic career, reaches her forties and feels herself at a turning point. She decides to go on a solo road trip across America, but only gets as far as a motel about half an hour from home. Here she has a kind of highly creative breakdown, employing her significant personal wealth and febrile imagination to turn her humble motel room into luxury accommodation over three days of intense effort. She then spends the next few weeks in her special room, enjoying the company of a younger man. Their affair is described in the sort of detail that Henry Miller might have used in Tropic of Cancer, if Miller’s protagonist had been a neat and tidy Californian woman rather than a seedy New York man living in Paris. Anyway, following her motel sojourn, the woman returns home and desperately tries to carry on with her normal life, pretending to her husband that her state of acute distraction is due to the menopause. And then, as if fate is having its fun, a routine medical check-up reveals that she is actually approaching this time in her life.

Rather than a road trip, All Fours is about women dealing with the menopause. Although I did wonder at this point if I was the intended audience, I kept reading. Partly this was to learn something about an experience that was not my own. All Fours is very much about the specificity of experience. As well as facing the menopause, which is specific to women, the narrator also recalls suffering a very rare complication during the birth of her child, which causes almost all of the baby’s blood to drain back into the mother. Against all odds the baby survives, but this traumatic experience stays with its mother, so that she is always looking for the few people in the world who would understand what she had been through.

So is this book actually for woman who have suffered the rare birth complication known as fetal maternal haemorrhage?

To answer that question, notice I have not mentioned the name of the narrator. This is because she isn’t given one. The lack of a name goes along with her mysterious job, never fully described. There is a lack of specificity here – like the narrator is ‘Everywoman’ or something. It makes you wonder if the fact that we all experience life slightly differently constitutes our common ground.

The trend in fiction writing is towards fragmentation, with different books designed for different groups of people. Of course people have always read novels to take them outside their normal experience, just as they’ve always wanted to go on road trips to new and unfamiliar places. But every road trip eventually brings you home again, and a novel, if it’s good, will still reflect something that we all tend to recognise as familiar. And maybe that sense is more important than ever. All Fours does both specific and general in a very interesting way.

The book might not be to everyone’s taste, but it still manages to take the individuality of taste and make you think about it, combining sparky wit with affecting emotion, particularly in the first half. I’m glad I read it.

The Wizard of Earthsea is Ursula Le Guin’s 1968 novel about a young wizard.

We now know that young wizard stories grew up into a bit of a monster, but here we see the idea in its innocent infancy, and perhaps notice some revealing differences. Later versions saw the wizard world becoming a kind of elite, secret society, fed by a school seemingly modelled on Eton. I remember reading this kind of story with my daughter, feeling uneasy about the fact that most people are classified as boring and non-magical. Hang on a minute, I thought to myself, while wizards are flying around on broomsticks, ordinary, non-magical folk have worked out how to fly to the moon. Why present magic as something denied to most people?

The Wizard of Earthsea actually accommodates such reservations. Rather than taking a secret train to a clandestine school, Ged, a promising, young Earthsea wizard, takes the oars alongside non-magical crew on a boat, as he sails to a well known magic school on the island of Roke. After completing his education, he and his fellow students then go to various jobs around the Earthsea archipelago. Like GPs, school teachers, or vets, they are part of their communities, respected (usually) but not fundamentally different to other people. At one point Ged uses a spell to keep a shoddy boat together, but makes it clear a competent shipwright would do a better job of repairs.

This was an important aspect of a book which characteristically presents different elements of life, as complementary parts of a whole. Magic is about a balance. You can stop the wind by magic in one place, but that will make wind blow harder somewhere else – a bit like the real weather really, where you can’t have high pressure without a corresponding low. And the central struggle of the book is young Ged’s battle with the dark side of himself rather than with some external enemy.

I would suggest later versions of the young wizard story lost something when magical GPs, who used their particular skills to help humanity in general were replaced by wizards going to a secret school, divided into competing, self-regarding houses, educated to work for their own closed society. A sign of divided times perhaps, or at least authors with different outlooks. Similarly, Le Guin did not see her apparent children’s story as just for children. She didn’t really believe in such literary pigeon-holing. Since the 1960s, fiction writing has become highly fragmented into different categories of stories for different categories of people. However, in Earthsea, magical and non-magical people do not seem to have different songs or stories. The fact that a child or adult would have an equal chance of enjoying the Wizard of Earthsea is a reflection of what this book is about.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a nineteenth century novel, first serialised to a huge and enthusiastic readership, before being published in book form in 1846. And while the name Alexandre Dumas is on the front cover, Dumas was actually less author, more boss of the sort of studio writing room you might see in Hollywood television and film production today.

The book produced in an unexpectedly modern manner, also has a modern feel. Once I read past the opening chapters, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with, of all things, the Batman franchise.

A promising young sailor called Edmond Dantes is wrongly imprisoned after being implicated in an anti-government plot by two men jealous of his professional and personal success. A corrupt judicial official realises the charge is baseless, but for personal reasons allows Edmond to go to prison anyway. During long years of incarceration, Dantes meets a brilliant fellow prisoner, who provides both an education and the promise of a hidden fortune. Although the friend dies in prison, Dantes himself eventually escapes, travels to the island of Monte Cristo, where in a cavern, he finds the fabled riches he was promised. Dantes swears vengeance on those who wronged him, using the resources now at his disposal. It was at this point that I started thinking of Batman – a brooding, powerful, fabulously wealthy man, operating incognito from a secret underground lair, determined to bring justice to Gotham City.

Batman inhabits a world that tends to lack moral certainties. He fights crime as an individual, dealing out arbitrary justice, acknowledging no authority but his own, a dark and threatening vigilante of the night. Edmond Dantes in his new guise as the Count of Monte Cristo is similar. Wronged by the justice system, he does not acknowledge the law’s authority, setting himself up as judge, jury and potential executioner all in one. Like Batman, the Count, despite the apparent righteousness of his cause, is another vigilante of the night, his skin left permanently pale by all those years in a dungeon.

Nineteenth century France, like Gotham, is not a stable moral universe. Just as Dantes comes to realise that the awful ordeal of prison was the making of him, he discovers that trying to punish people for past crimes, or reward them for past services, is complicated by some recipients benefiting from punishment, or suffering from reward. A poor man given a diamond is left vulnerable to suspicious gendarmes, or jealous acquaintances. A rich family losing its wealth sees some family members gaining a new freedom outside the former gilded cage. There is one section where a lot of poisonings take place, and interestingly these scenes serve to demonstrate that a poison is not intrinsically a destructive thing, when the only difference between a poison and a medicine is the dose. As someone who works in a pharmacy I could appreciate that sort of medicinal philosophising.

Edmond Dantes goes on a very long journey in taking his revenge. He might initially have been critical of God for not doing a good enough job with dealing out justice, apparently letting evil triumph and virtue suffer. However, like most jobs, it turns out to be a bit more tricky when you have a go yourself.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a huge, epic, gothic adventure, with a gift for its reader. It won’t make you a billionaire, or solve all your problems. However, it does provide a fascinating insight into the ambivalent nature of reward and loss.