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.

So the plan was to go to Ashdown Forest over the April bank holiday weekend, and record a video of me reading scenes from my novel Secret Street set there. It was freezing cold, blowing a force eight gale, but we did our best. Thank you to Sharon, producer, director, camera operator, location catering manager and motivational coach 🎥

Ubik by Philip K.Dick is a science fiction story, published in 1969, now considered a classic. It appears on Time Magazine’s list of best novels since 1923.

The book imagines a version of 1993 where people with telepathic powers use their skills to gain access to valuable information. They are like psychological computer hackers. Individuals with ability to block these hackers form themselves into what you might call antivirus companies, known as prudence organisations. For a fee they will block the telepaths. There is a constant tension between these two sides, which reaches a crisis point when the anti telepaths are lured to a base on the moon, where, apparently, their leader Glen Runciter is assassinated. Then, under pressure from competing mind-bending powers, time seems to slip backwards as the anti telepaths fight for survival. Our threatened group is helped by a mysterious substance called Ubik, which appears in all sorts of guises, ranging from hair products to medicines – a kind of all-inclusive useful stuff, whose name derives from the word ubiquitous, meaning everywhere.

Alright. Let’s take a moment. A tricky, complicated story. What to make of it? There’s a kind of amorphous quality that invites theories, which many readers have duly provided.

For me, I suppose I made sense of it in the virus/antivirus comparison. Antivirus companies wouldn’t be necessary if people didn’t make viruses. And most of the time you have no idea if a virus is threatening your system, requiring the protection you are paying for. There is an element of unreality about the whole situation, cooked up between two opposing sides, who after much expensive trouble, end up back where they started when there was no virus. Everyone expends a lot of energy to get precisely nowhere. And the medicine to make it all better is ambivalent to say the least, coming in many forms, with warnings of side effects if not used as directed. After all, the one thing that an antivirus company needs to keep it going is a good supply of viruses to protect against. You might imagine an antivirus company, short of things to do, cooking up its own threats, the medicine becoming the poison. Ubik, the book and the substance, is a bit like that.

‘Could the prudence organizations be, in fact, rackets? Claiming a need for their services when sometimes no need actually exists?’

This is not the most straight-forward of reads, jumping around in viewpoint and setting, with a kind of spare writing style that leaves much of the work of imagining scenes to the reader. But there are interesting ideas that save a potentially chaotic project. You have this fascinating struggle, deriving from ancient dualities of good and evil, presented in a modern story about data theft. For me, Ubik was a book that seemed better in retrospect, thinking abut it afterwards. It kind of took me on a bizarre and confusing journey only to bring me back to where I started. This could have felt like a waste of time and effort to get nowhere in particular. Instead it was more like a crazy trip before the relief of home-coming.

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966, is about conspiracy. While the internet has become a Petri dish for conspiracy, people have long been attracted to the apparent presence of hidden controlling influences in life, whether they actually exist or not.

The setting for The Crying of Lot 49 conspiracy is, of all things, the postal service. A woman named Oedipa Maas, while acting as executor for Pierce Inverarity, her hugely rich former boyfriend, seems to stumble on the existence of the Tristero, an unofficial postal service with roots going back to the Holy Roman Empire. At first the idea of a postal system conspiracy seems merely quirky, as we explore the niche arcana of stamp collecting and postmarks. But then you begin to realise that because the postal service was for centuries the means by which society communicated on a wide scale, control of the mail becomes a way of controlling society. If that sounds far-fetched, remember that even in the age of electronic communication, there have been controversies about politicisation of the U.S. Postal Service, and the effect this might have on postal voting.

So, we follow Oedipa on her tortuous, confusing and sometimes very funny path towards revealing the existence or otherwise of the Tristero. What the outcome of this investigation might be is a tricky thing to reveal, even if I wanted to provide a spoiler.

Personally, I think you can find a clue to the enigmatic truth of this book in the twists of its language. Characteristically, a sentence will seem to be going in one direction, before going off somewhere else. As a general illustration, look at the word ‘God’ which consistently appears as an exclamation doing double duty as a proper noun. Some examples:

‘Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts.’

In this sentence, if there were a full stop after ‘God’ it would be a name for a deity. But we then skitter on into the ‘knew how many parts’ bit, causing the word to slide into an exclamation of confusion.

‘That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void.’

Once again God can be a noun, as in Oedipa appealing to God, while also serving as an exclamation of frustration at the absence of any such thing.

‘Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she had come on it by accident.’

Same again. The presence suggested by God as a noun disappears into a throw-away exclamation.

Finally have a look at this passage, where we get the God as noun/exclamation trick twice in quick succession.

She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said “My God.”

“And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,” said Mr Thoth, “and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.”

“Your grandfather?”

“No, my God.”

For me, this characteristic use of the word ‘God’, reveals much about the enigmatic nature of hidden controlling influences in The Crying of Lot 49. As soon as shadowy forces become real enough to be named, they disappear again, provoking an exclamation of shock and surprise.

As I was reading my way through all of Pynchon’s twisty sentences, there were times when I did wonder if I was actually enjoying the experience. But by the end I could only feel impressed. The Crying of Lot 49 is very interesting, in a rarified, philosophical way, and also in a more down to earth sense, surprisingly relevant to twenty first century political and social concerns

Greek Lessons is a novel by the Korean author Han Kang, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s about a woman who can’t speak, developing a relationship with the tutor of her Ancient Greek class, who is losing his eyesight.

This is a book about the contradictory development of language.

If that sounds abstruse as a topic, then I would agree.

There’s one chapter which opens with two Ancient Greek words which look almost identical on the page. Forgive me if I don’t reproduce them, but my keyboard doesn’t stretch that far. I’ll just quote the comment that follows them:

‘These two verbs mean ‘to suffer’ and ‘to learn’. Do you see how they’re almost identical? What Socrates is doing here is punning on these words to remark on the similarity of the two actions.’

Does learning necessarily involve suffering? Well, to an extent the answer is yes. It does take some effort and discipline to learn anything. There are occasions, however, when you can learn without too much pain, maybe even enjoy the process. This sort of learning is a less visible achievement, and is less likely to win a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why P.G. Wodehouse never won a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why comedies rarely win Oscars, though it would be hard to argue that the best comedies are not deserving of such an honour, or that comedy does not have lessons for us.

Greek Lessons was very interesting, and I’ve thought about the book a lot after reading it. The way language evolves, from pictograms, becoming sophisticated, moving into bewildering abstraction, leaving behind the experience it was meant to be communicating, and then evolving seemingly backwards in a simpler direction. The book has a rarified quality about it, and more down to earth moments, as language circles around from naivety to complexity and back again. But while I admired all that, overall I have to admit finding the book fairly hard work to read. My personal feeling is that a book like this reveals much about how we view achievement in literature. To be good it has to teach us something, and to teach us something it has to be hard work. Is that how literature should be? I don’t know. But my feeling is that it’s just as much an achievement to create something that seems like fun but is quietly teaching you things anyway. Novels developed as a diversion and an entertainment, and that flaky, showbiz history has to be part of their work, even when people study novels at university. It’s that grey area between goofing off and getting it together that somehow gives the novel as a form its particular fascination. And in a sense that’s the grey area that Greek Lessons explores as it follows language from simple to fancy and back again. Maybe in the case of Greek Lessons the work was a bit too overt. But don’t let a slacker like me put you off. Greek Lessons is an interesting book and worth reading.