Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, tells the story of a young Missouri boy growing up in the 1830s. With no mother and a drunken, abusive father, Huck is on the cusp of feral child and school boy. Maybe he is a bit like his country, which is moving out of its frontier phase into a more settled existence. This ambivalent position underlies the conundrums of the book. Huck’s guardian, Widow Douglas tries to ‘sivilise’ Huck by sending him to school, which can feel restrictive and false compared to Huck’s freewheeling former life spent out in the woods. On the other hand Huck’s father Pap, a drunk, coarse, and violent man, hardly suggests the virtues of a simple life close to the land. Then there’s the presentation of books and learning. Books might be the guiding light of Huck’s friend Tom Sawyer, but they appear to be as misleading as they are illuminating. For Tom, if it’s in a book it must be true, an idea that leads to all kinds of nonsense as the boy tries to apply the stuff he has read in books to real life. Finally, there’s conceptions of justice, which might be the complex business of law embodied in the upstanding character of Judge Thatcher; or the ‘natural law’ of an individual’s conscience. Here things get murky as we see Huck’s ‘conscience’ manipulated by a kind of social indoctrination. The young boy has always seen slaves as possessions. Huck does end up helping a slave find his freedom, but he feels his actions in doing this are the result of personal weakness rather than the dictates of his conscience.

The book is written in an apparently plain, homespun, but carefully constructed vernacular style – Huck’s narration falling somewhere between wild and civilised. The story is, in many ways farcical, the bigger picture saved from silliness by the sense that the plot’s crazy twists and turns, often cooked up by Tom Sawyer from his reading, represent the uncomfortable meeting of books and reality. I sometimes found the knockabout business rather hard work to get through, but there were always interesting ideas bubbling around beneath the surface.

Overall The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deserved classic, and an interesting road marker on the road of America’s development as a country.

Western Lane is a 2023 novel by Chetna Maroo, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s in the tradition of stories where children with issues are straightened out by the discipline and purpose found in sport. Described like this the book might sound formulaic, which it’s not. The children involved here are three generally well behaved, quiet girls, struggling with the death of their mother. They have been brought up in the UK, but are very much part of the tightly knit London Asian community in which they live. The three girls are only ‘wild’ when viewed through the perspective of their highly traditional aunt, who thinks wearing shorts and running qualify a girl as ‘wild’.

The story focuses on the youngest girl, Gopi, who responds best to her father’s coping mechanism of playing squash. Attending a local sports club called Western Lane, she enjoys the discipline and focus of squash, becoming fascinated by the sports personalities. Playing with a promising boy, with whom she develops a close connection, Gopi makes rapid progress, so much so that she is entered into a tournament. But hanging in the background of this positive story is the threat that with her mother gone, Gopi might be sent away to live with her Aunt Ranjan, the same aunt who thinks the wearing of shorts is a definition of wild behaviour.

Sport in a story is generally a metaphor for trial and eventual redemption. This is true here, with squash uniquely fitting to the situation of Gopi. Players are tightly confined in an enclosed court. Gopi lives in a tightly knit community, with Aunt Ranjan representing its most conservative aspects. Squash is about discipline, and in a normal sports story this is what a troubled youngster would probably need most. In Western Lane there is, ironically, a compelling sense that rather than self control, Gopi essentially finds freedom through the game. It’s this tension between freedom and restriction that really drives the story. The contradiction is explored in such a way that you might even end up feeling that the universe is a big squash court with the stars as smudges on the walls.

With some books there’s a worry in reviewing them that you might give away what happens at the end. Will Gopi be allowed to play squash long term? Will she get together with her training partner boyfriend? I can’t give away the end in this case, because even in reading the book I don’t know what happens, so enigmatic are the final pages. But by then, you do feel that whatever restrictions life brings along, there is the possibility of making them into a squash court, and whacking balls off the walls in fascinating ways.

Western Lane is an excellent sports book, using a familiar idea to explore unfamiliar territory, both social and philosophical. It’s also a rarity these days in being a story with children as central characters, which doesn’t see itself as only playing to an audience of children. The walls around the classification of this novel are interestingly transparent. Bravo.

Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in America as The Last of Mr Norris) is a 1935 novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. An unassuming English tutor, William Bradshaw, describes a friendship with Arthur Norris, a furtive man of refined tastes and straightened circumstances who he meets on a train.

Bradshaw is a quiet observer of Berlin life. He notes how the political powers-that-be are increasingly classifying people as in or out, worthy or unworthy. By contrast, Mr Norris Changes Trains is a work of observation rather than judgement, seeing people as an intricate mixture of attributes. The book is too enigmatic to have a moral as such, set in a world where, ironically, a black and white conception of good and bad has led to moral collapse. You could, however, in a roundabout way, say that Mr Norris Changes Trains is an argument for accepting that life is complicated. It doesn’t shout its message’, and if the bag search in the opening train scene had found Mr Norris Changes Trains, it would scarcely have merited a glance. Only in this manner could the book cross the border and in its own sly way, inform us of how things are. The book takes a different approach to the much more in-your-face articles of the journalist character, Helen Pratt, who gets the publication she is working for closed down, before she swans off to continue her hard-hitting journalism in America.

I have read that Christopher Isherwood ended up losing faith in Mr Norris Changes Trains, which is a shame. I thought it a great book – engaging and fun, as though P.G. Wodehouse decided to indulge his darker side. Norris makes me think of a Bertie Wooster figure, presented here in later life as a kind of con artist making a feckless living using his smart contacts, while Jeeves metamorphoses into Schmidt, a self-serving thug who intimidates his master. And yet the book is also serious and relevant, both to the times in which it was written, and to any situation where people believe in simple solutions to complex problems

Enter Ghost is a 2023 novel by Isabella Hammad, telling the story of Sonia Nasir, an actress of mixed Palestinian/Dutch ancestry, working in London. With her career and personal life at a crossroads, she visits family in Haifa, Israel. Here she meets a theatre director, who persuades her to get involved with a local production of Hamlet.

Hamlet famously recruits a group of players to portray the crime that he suspects his uncle Claudius of committing – murdering his father and then marrying his widowed mother in a scheme to usurp the throne of Denmark. Hamlet tells his actors that the purpose of a play is ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature’.

Mirrors are a thing in Enter Ghost. Sonia mentions them a number of times – in a late night scene when she mistakes a reflection of herself for an intruder, and in the climactic performance of Hamlet, when stress seems to provoke an out of body experience. A mirror reflects you back to yourself without judgement, showing rather than telling, like a good play or novel. But, while a mirror does not judge, nether does it flatter.

Enter Ghost refuses to come to a verdict or ‘take sides’ in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. While apparently told from a Palestinian perspective, we have a clear idea of the social soup which lies beneath the false certainties of national or racial badges. Reading about a person of Dutch Palestinian descent, brought up in London, hassled at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier who turns out to be from Leeds, you begin to wonder how people find it within themselves to become so bitterly divided. And yet, while the book declines to pass judgement, it does serve to hold up the sort of pitiless mirror that refuses to allow anyone the luxury of fooling themselves. The story culminates with the performance of Hamlet, where a group of Israeli soldiers arrive and then lurk with unknown intent. Are they here to shut the play down? Instead they watch, as Hamlet stages the performance in which he hopes his uncle Claudius will see his own misdemeanours. ‘The play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of the King,’ Hamlet declares. The soldiers are not judged but they are invited to judge themselves. On this occasion at least, they seem to take the point, and withdraw.

Enter Ghost is more about ideas than action, but there is still excitement, tension and emotion. In particular, I found the production of Hamlet, with the soldiers hovering close by, to be very powerful. This is not an ‘issue’ novel, but neither is it escapism. It really finds a balance between a novel that takes you away, and a relevant book that engages with the world we live in. Enter Ghost is fully deserving of its various prize nominations. Highly recommend.

White Noise is a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. It describes a period of crisis in the life of Jack Gladney, an American professor, working at a pleasant college campus in the small town of Blacksmith.

The first part of the book describes Jack’s daily life, his work as a leading exponent of Hitler studies, and his home life with his wife, and array of children and stepchildren.

All trouble seems to happen far from the College-on-the-Hill, disasters watched on television, terrible histories studied in rooms beside leafy quadrangles – until an accident at a nearby railway depot involving a cloud of toxic gas, changes Jack’s perspective.

White Noise is about the numerous problems we face in looking at things. At one extreme, there’s low brow news media, and prescient scenes showing rumour and disinformation accompanying the gas cloud crisis. Meanwhile, at the academic end of the scale, we’re asked how a subject like Hitler can be meaningfully studied in a tranquil college environment. An inability to understand the world extends from National Enquirer readers to academics.

In trying to review this book I kept coming back to the idea of ‘the most photographed barn in America’ which is supposed to stand picturesquely in the countryside near The College-on-the-Hill. Jack Gladney and one of his colleagues, comment on the fact that it’s impossible to see this barn for what it is, framed now as America’s most photographed. A book review is similar. White Noise might not be the most reviewed book in America, but it is relatively famous, establishing Don DeLillo’s reputation as a successful writer, winning a place on Time Magazine’s list of best modern novels. A book is tricky to review when it kind of pulls the rug out from under your efforts – suggesting that the more a book is reviewed the less likely we are to really see it – the weight of its reputation changing how we react.

Is this review pointless? I’m in two minds. Considering White Noise was written in 1985, the portrayal of misinformation spreading during the gas cloud crisis did feel forward looking. But the book was for me unnecessarily negative in suggesting that there was no reliable information anywhere. This was misleading in itself. We could include books of biting satire like White Noise in the misinformation category, since satire involves exaggeration, and exaggeration means distortion. Giving in to the idea that reliable information does not exist means accepting truth as whatever gets the most traction on the internet. Still, I don’t want to be negative myself. I did find White Noise an interesting book. It is certainly worth reading as an expression of concerns about trust in information – but I do think it could be seen as an illustration of the problem, as well as a commentary on it.

Rabbit Run, published in 1960, established its author, John Updike, as a major American novelist. The novel tells the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star, who finds himself in his mid-twenties, marooned in a mundane marriage and a boring sales job. We follow him for three months as he struggles to transcend the limits of his life in Brewer, Pennsylvania – which in practical terms means leaving his pregnant wife, getting his girlfriend pregnant, going back to his wife after she has a baby, and facing eventual domestic tragedy, caused in part by his flaky carry on.

The book, while consisting of the most intimate and closely observed details of human behaviour, has a detached tone. We float above events, seeing them from the perspective of different characters, sometimes switching viewpoint over the space of a paragraph. Although this could be confusing, I did see it as fitting to the story. Harry tries to rise above ordinary life that drags on him. The narrative style reflects Harry’s aspiration. Maybe he would like to be an omniscient author, up above events, describing them in the present tense, like John Updike.

So is Harry’s quest valid, given all the hurt it causes? About half way through Rabbit Run, we get an example of a man who has actually succeeded in leaving the mundane aspects of life behind. Jack Eccles is a young priest who is trying to help Harry repair his marriage. Unsure of what to do, Eccles goes to his boss, Fritz Kruppenbach, for advice. The ‘advice’ Eccles receives is to leave tedious, worldly complications to work out for themselves. The job of Church ministers is not to involve themselves in the ridiculous business of parishioner’s lives, but to demonstrate faith, as it exists above humanity’s petty affairs. Kruppenbach is smug and aloof, only serving to demonstrate that standing above life is not attractive, not something that anyone would reasonably seek to achieve. Eccles storms out of the meeting and continues his best efforts to help Harry. And good for him, you think. Now, mundane details look different. This is where true meaning and compassion can be found. Incidentally, the name Eccles serves as a reference to Ecclesiastes, a story in the Old Testament, where the narrator famously declares that ‘all is vanity’ in human affairs, and people should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, which are a gift from God.

I think the book continues to be relevant today as a commentary on efforts, both ancient and modern, to rise above everyday concerns. Traditional methods are represented by the book’s various religious characters. In a more modern vein, I’ve read that Updike wrote Rabbit Run partly as a reaction to Kerouac’s On The Road, where self-involved young people drive around America, searching for themselves, with no thought for those they leave behind. Rabbit himself tries an ‘on the road’ escape early in the book, after walking out on his wife. He drives all night, gets lost, buys some fuel and ends up right back where he started the following morning.

Rabbit Run expresses a desire to transcend ordinary life, while also suggesting – in the manner of Ecclesiastes – that the only meaningful escape available to us lies in ordinary things. In the end Rabbit Run does not promise any kind of silly nirvana, but it does suggest a more liberating and interesting way of looking at the non-nirvana in which we spend our days.

The Guest is a 2023 novel by Emma Cline. It tells the story of a young woman called Alex, a hustler trading on her looks. As the story opens, she’s about as close as she’s going to get to settling down, playing the role of dutiful girlfriend to Simon, a wealthy older man. They live at his house in a smart, Long Island beach resort, until a moment of unguarded exuberance at a party has Simon asking Alex to leave.

I soon abandoned my initial assumption that The Guest would be something like Pretty Woman. Do you remember that scene in Pretty Woman, where Edward mistakes Vivienne’s innocent flossing for drug taking? In The Guest there is no innocent flossing. And while Pretty Woman ends with Vivienne winning her rich man, The Guest starts with the rich man dumping the girl. Ejected from his house, she wanders around the local area, surviving on her wits, hoping for a reconciliation at Simon’s traditional Labor Day party five days hence.

I really enjoyed this book but found it hard to review – as in to describe what I liked about it. I was engrossed, as if reading a thriller, every page a cliffhanger. And yet this tension could arise from Alex milling about at boring, pretentious parties, causing very minor damage to valuable paintings, sitting in restaurants telling various men what they want to hear, pretending to be different women depending on the context in which she finds herself.

Maybe I found this book hard to write about, because a review seeks to tie a book down, while Alex, as a character, seeks to escape such a fate.

In her wandering on Long Island she adopts all kinds of roles as part of her little scams. Student girl, rich girl, respectable young lady, child minder, femme fatale. She wants the security of any of these roles but instinctively does not want to become marooned in them, as she was whilst living her seemingly perfect life with Simon. In reality that idyll involved lonely days on the beach while her middle-aged boyfriend pursued an obsessive exercise regime and worked long hours in his home office.

Just before Simon tells her to leave, Alex goes for a swim. Caught in a current, exhausted by futile, splashy efforts, she saves herself by giving up and drifting. This happens to deliver her into safer waters. Alex staggers out of the sea, onto a beach populated by people having a vaguely summery time, unaware that a life and death crisis had just occurred.

This sums up the book really, the combination of peace and danger in one scene. Life at Simon’s house was a lost Eden, and a hazardous quicksand of boredom and loneliness. Any of the other roles into which Alex dips her toe during the book might offer security, or become a trap to be escaped. In the end the security she seeks and the danger she flees are combined. There is a kind of peace in The Guest, like the misleading tranquility of a billionaire’s mansion:

‘So much effort and noise required to create this landscape, a landscape meant to evoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.’

The Guest is beautifully written mediation on the nature of security in a dangerous world. Bravo.

The Corrections is a Jonathan Franzen novel from 2001, winner of awards and much critical praise. It tells the story of the Midwestern Lambert family – Alfred Lambert, a railway engineer, his wife Enid, and their children. The narrative moves between each main character, and between the family’s past, and turn of the millennium present. The sprawling story focuses on Enid’s efforts to persuade her adult children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’.

Correction is the process of righting things that are wrong. So, did The Corrections win awards for suggesting solutions to problems? That would be a no. Do I recommend you read this book because it will help you with shortcomings in your life? Once again, the answer is no. Like good fiction in general it won’t really correct anything. So why would I recommend you read it? Here’s why.

About half way through the book, during a section describing the Lambert siblings’ childhood, there is a long account of a terrible family meal. Alfred has just returned from a trip inspecting a decrepit railway network that his own efficient railway network is looking to buy. He gets back home and all the things that make him a brilliant railway engineer – practical competence, analytical lack of emotion, self discipline, decisiveness – metamorphose into the rather scary characteristics of an overbearing, stubborn figure trying, and failing, to be a good husband and father. Life has so many different scenarios and sets of circumstances. Whales are wonderful at swimming in the ocean, not so good if they ever had to live on land. Does that mean a whale is a good or bad creature? Does life allow for such judgements when it poses such varied challenges, requiring different attributes?

Anyhow, the family meal – Alfred, Enid, and their two young boys Chip and Gary sit down to a meal of liver and bacon, with a root vegetable called rutabaga. Gary eats with relish, proclaiming the food delicious. Meanwhile poor Chip, who seems to have some kind of food issue, can barely even look at the mess on his plate.

The book is like that meal, presenting people and their lives not as disgusting on one hand, or delicious on the other, but somehow both at the same time. It’s not even as simple as saying the characters are a mixture of good and bad. They are both of those things, to the exclusion of the other, depending on circumstances, or from the angle you look at them. That’s the irony of The Corrections. Deficiencies to correct, and qualities to celebrate, are never clearly defined.

This contradiction is explored in a long, painful and funny book, as Enid Lambert tries to persuade her grown up children to come back home and enjoy that one last Christmas. There is an end-of-an-era feeling, as we follow Albert and Enid into old age. But we also feel there are no straight forward answers and neat endings to problems. There is no last Christmas in this vague situation. There will always be another.

The Corrections is non judgemental in a judgemental age. Whether you consider this neutral quality good or bad is up to you. But I would ask this question – would you prefer a book that provided a final correction, or another Christmas?

Atonement is an Ian McEwan novel from 2001, shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. The initial scenes take place at a country house in 1935. Briony Tallis, a young girl with a talent for writing, witnesses the beginning of a love affair between her elder sister Cecilia, and Robbie, the clever son of a family servant. She misinterprets what she sees, which leads to misunderstandings, accusations and disastrous consequences. Events are then picked up five years later in 1940, around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. Finally there is a short postscript where Briony on her 77th birthday looks back at the book she has written about Cecilia and Robbie.

You can read Atonement in two ways, first as a good story, a who-dunnit, a powerful page turner, particularly in the 1940 sections; or as fancy, multi-layered, self-referential work about novels, their history, limitations and potentials.

Which would we prefer? One sounds entertaining. The other sounds interesting but hard work. Maybe one doesn’t exclude the other. Atonement seems to link them together in Briony’s own writing efforts. In 1940, she submits a story based on Cecilia and Robbie, to Horizon magazine. She writes this in Virginia Woolf mode, adopting a trendy stream of consciousness style, eschewing the artificial conventions of plot. But then we get the more traditional entertaining approach when Briony sees that her story gains realism and authenticity once she accepts that her behaviour in 1935 had cause and effect. You could say these events became more real once they have plot, rather than floating around in their own disconnected universe. They also become more readable.

Novels are a fiction, a distortion, intrinsically misleading. Life is not arranged like a novel, and yet life does involve plot-like cause and effect, deception and efforts to reveal hidden secrets. I came to see plot as both an artificial device, and a reflection of reality. Maybe that’s the atonement novels in general have to make. They have to take their artificial nature, their entertainment value, and atone for it with the truth. This one does that very well.

Orbital is a novel by Samantha Harvey, published in November 2023. It describes one day in the life of a fictional crew aboard the International Space Station, orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, moving through sixteen dawns and nightfalls.

The International Space Station is a highly technical piece of equipment. Let me suggest a parallel – Orbital is a highly technical piece of writing. I think it fitting we take off an inspection panel marked ‘Danger – Fiction Technique’ and have a look at some of the workings.

After reading articles by the excellent Emma Darwin, I have recently been thinking about an aspect of writing known as psychic distance. This sounds like some kind of new age spiritual practice, but it’s actually a description of how close a reader feels to the characters they are reading about. Are we looking at them from the outside, or are we actually in their heads? Writing tutor John Gardner breaks down the spectrum of distance as follows:

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

3. Henry hated snowstorms.

4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

The idea is, with each step, a reader goes further and further into the head of Henry J. Warburton. We go from an omnipotent author telling us about him, to shivering along with Warburton in the snow.

Interestingly, Orbital is mostly at number 1 in this scheme. The ISS floats over Earth just as the writing style floats over its subject. Occasionally we plunge down to number 5, like a capsule engaged in a flaming re-entry. But generally we float with great peace and wonder, hundreds of miles high, at number 1. There is no plot to speak of. Our desire to read on does not come from identifying with a particular character and wondering what will happen to them. We are above such things. This is very unusual for a novel, and allows for some remarkable descriptions of Earth, space and humanity. Not confined to the point of view of a single character, it’s possible to drift about the universe.

The price for this lies in reduced involvement. We can go anywhere but maybe care less when we get there. Is it a price worth paying?

Consider this. When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut. One day I was hunched in the back seat of a Cortina with my two brothers, on a long journey to Swansea to see our grandparents. We had been driving for hours. Everything was scratchy and crowded. It suddenly struck me that astronauts would feel like this. There were three of us, just as there would be three crew on an Apollo mission, trapped in a similar amount of space. Why does our experience of travel always have to be so cramped? Orbital is very much about this sort of contradiction. The book has a great feeling of floating freedom, but also takes us into the narrow, metal tunnels full of kit, clothes, laundry, miscellaneous luggage, and jumbled electronics that make up the ISS. We explore space through the medium of claustrophobia, experiencing the endlessness of the universe through one short day, travelling on a vast journey that goes nowhere, orbiting around the same but constantly changing Earth. These ironies seem to be part of all our journeys, through space or otherwise. This writer makes the best of the limits of her approach, like children accept a Cortina, or astronauts accept a capsule, to get to Swansea or the moon. It is a simple truth that limits ironically make exploration possible, no matter what sort of journey you take, earth-bound or space-bound, real or literary.

Anyway, that’s enough work for today. Let’s put the inspection panel back on, and go down to the observation cupola and enjoy the wonderful view.