The Midnight Library is a kind of philosophical fantasy, set in a half-way house between life and death. This place takes the form of a library where a troubled young woman called Nora Seed gets to look at all the lives she might have led if she had made different decisions.

To read a book is often to experience a different life, and I think it’s always better to see the good things about a book rather than look for negatives. This is also the message of The Midnight Library. So we seem to be off to a good start. Stretching for the positives, I did think that to some degree The Midnight Library found a version of Groundhog Day wisdom – taking the one life you have and seeing it in a better way. The subject of the story is interesting and gets you thinking.

But I have to admit there were aspects of this book I did not enjoy. Whereas Groundhog Day has a neat and charming central concept based on recognisable daily routine, the metaphor of The Midnight Library is a convoluted mishmash of quantum physics and parallel universes, no less. Basing your fictional universe on something like quantum physics is a bit like basing it on religion, something so abstruse as to be unchallengeable. You just have to trust in the author’s higher power. A simple reader like myself can hardly object to something he doesn’t understand. Well, respectfully, I would like to object. I do wonder how much a fiction author can really know about the outer reaches of physics. In one of the various lives lived via the library, Nora finds herself in a study where a few books on popular science are described as sitting on a shelf. Personally I think those books are somewhat reflective of the scientific knowledge in The Midnight Library. I’ve read a few popular science books too, including A Brief History of Time – thank you – but I don’t think that would qualify me to start getting metaphorical with quantum physics. And although I don’t know much about the subject, I do feel that whatever the universe is about at the quantum level, it probably doesn’t involve giving people lots of lifestyle options. That just didn’t make sense to me. It came over as a strained plot device.

The retrospective imagining of different possibilities was a good premise for a story. We can all identify with someone looking back over their life and imagining how things might have gone with different choices. But all the complicated underpinning just lost me. It would have been much better without it.

I suppose, there is also my personal feeling that life isn’t an endless series of choices leading in countless directions. Yes there have been turning points in my life where things could have gone this way or that, but the idea that I could have infinite other lives by making different decisions just doesn’t seem reasonable. For a start if I were to be a specialist in Latin ballroom dancing, or a pilot in an aerobatic display team, then I would have to be a totally different person with hips that move and eyes that aren’t short sighted. I recall reading Tolstoy’s War And Peace in a confused period after university, when it was difficult to know which way to go. War And Peace is a long study of peoples’ ability – or lack thereof – to make decisions about the direction of their lives. Tolstoy portrayed human choices as in some way fated. Perhaps that influenced me at a crucial moment, and informed the rather laid back view I have had of choices ever since.

This book wasn’t for me. Physics might be about objective truth, but fiction is about ringing true, which is a bit different, more subtle, and more prone to individual experience. So if it worked for you I’m glad, because it is always better to enjoy a book. But it didn’t work for me.

Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson. Published in 1919, all the stories are set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio, based apparently on Clyde, Ohio where Andersen grew up. Although the stories feature a range of characters – farmhands, troubled school teachers, clergymen tortured by guilty lust, for example – the book as a whole is loosely centred on George Willard, a young journalist.

This is an unusual book, especially for its time. The writing is economical and straight-forward, when most authors were taking a wordier approach. There is very little plot, more the describing of atmospheres and psychological states, corresponding with periods of crisis or turning points in people’s lives. The linked short story structure was innovative.

The whole book seems to be about transitions rather than neat and tidy endings or beginnings. Winesburg stands part way between a rural past and an urban future. People look for definite things to believe in, but always end up with partial truths. The stories tend to peter out rather than concluding with some definite point. The railway is mentioned constantly. People go somewhere else before coming back again. And yet for all this sense of transition, Winesburg seems to be a place that is very difficult to leave.

The book culminates with George Willard, the young journalist, deciding to escape. He gets on a train at the station, determined to start a new life elsewhere. But as he does so there are indications that escape will be more difficult than he imagines. George may think he is leaving, but from the point of view of Tom Little, conductor on George’s train, Winesburg’s physical borders are fuzzy to say the least. Tom spends his working life in a kind of elongated ‘town’ which, starting with Winesburg, is made up of all the places along the track.

‘He knows the people in the towns along his railroad better than a city man knows the people in his apartment building.’

Unlikely as it may seem, I found myself thinking of the surreal 1960s TV show The Prisoner, where a British secret agent finds himself trapped in a mysterious seaside village. Big white balloons keep thwarting his escape attempts. Winesburg is tiny, but somehow, no matter how far you go, you can’t seem to get away from it. Some of the stories show Winesburg as beautiful, others as ugly, cold and bleak. There was the same ambivalent feeling in The Prisoner, where the mysterious village is deeply unsettling and also charmingly picturesque. Recalling the series, I can imagine that instead of getting stressed out trying to escape, I might settle down in one of the colourful apartments with a word processor and a pile of good books, one of which could be Winesburg, Ohio. Anyhow, I digress. The fact that I digress about a 1960s sci-fi television show, indicates the strangely modern nature of this selection of stories.

In 1642, civil war broke out in England. King Charles I and forces loyal to him, faced a rebellion led by Puritan religious fundamentalists. The rebels captured and beheaded Charles I in 1649. His son, Charlies II, continued the fight for two more years, before fleeing into exile. Oliver Cromwell then established his Protectorate, which endured, rather shakily, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Robert Harris sets his historical novel, Act of Oblivion, in the aftermath of these events. With Charles II back on the throne, his government passed the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which issued a general pardon to anyone who had fought against the royalists. However, a small group of people were exempt from the Act, notably anyone who had signed the death warrant of Charles I. These ‘regicides’ were to be tracked down and executed. Some were captured immediately, others handed themselves in, hoping in vain for clemency, while a third group went on the run. Act of Oblivion is an imaginative reconstruction of the lives of regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who spent years evading capture in the American colonies.

In some ways the relationship between this book and actual history is loose to say the least. The character around which the story revolves, Richard Naylor, fanatical regicide hunter in-chief, never existed, although someone like him might have done. But before we get too purist, it’s worth remembering that creating any kind of historical narrative requires choosing some events and not others, which inevitably denies the messy nature of what actually happened. You could say that Richard Naylor is a personification of this artificial shaping process, a fictional centre around which historical events can be arranged.

Another typical way to arrange history is to choose events likely to resonate with present-day readers. In this case, potential readers live in a world where national division has increased in various major countries, and where extremists have become more prominent. The Civil War, it goes without saying, was another time of national division and extremism.

So a story playing fast and loose with history, actually tells us much about how history gets written. Richard Naylor as an artificial shaping device, lurks in every history book, whether he is acknowledged or not. And as for the resonance of the chosen subject for contemporary readers, this book offers its audience the chance to explore the complexities of conflict and fanaticism at one remove. Act of Oblivion makes it clear that divisions, of even the most vicious nature, hide a reality where enemies have more in common than they realise. Robert Harris doesn’t have to make up facts about people on opposing sides in the Civil War being friends, or that moderation and zealotry were present in both the rebel and royalist camps. Overall, this compelling historical story is truthful about the contradictory nature of human relationships, rather than about the exact nature of events, which we can never fully know anyway. That’s what makes this a good novel, rather than a dodgy history book

Reading a couple of novels by Henry James recently – The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors – I’ve been trying to work out exactly what I think about his books. They are fascinating, often beautiful, but massive and hard work to read. They must have been hard work to write. What exactly drove him to do it? A better question might be – why did Henry James write in the way he did, using that ornate, layered style, which obscures as much as it reveals? Was it affectation? Was something else going on?

I did some background reading. Biographers like Lyndall Gordon, prevaricate, but others, Kosofsky Sedgwick for example, suggest that James was almost certainly gay, which during his lifetime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a serious crime. Sedgwick wonders if this contributed to the obscurity in James’s writing. It certainly makes sense of the focus, in his most famous books, on hidden relationships. There’s the affair in The Golden Bowl between Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, and the secret liaison between Chad and Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors.

And then there’s The Wings of the Dove, which I found myself thinking about in terms of hidden relationships. Writing it, James was probably in the position of having to hide part of himself. The risks were frightening and no one was safe. Not long before The Wings of the Dove was published in 1902, Oscar Wilde’s status as a massively successful playwright, could not protect him from prison, from which he emerged with his health ruined, his wealth gone, fit enough only to sit around in Parisian pavement cafes.

Ironically, given all this, the first part of The Wings of the Dove seems to present a surprisingly positive picture of people united wherever and whoever they are. This hopeful first section begins in early twentieth century London, Kate Croy has lost her parents. Her mother is dead, and her father has been lost to drink. Kate finds herself in the guardianship of wealthy Aunt Maud, who makes it her mission to marry off her charge to the most eligible bachelor she knows, Lord Mark. Unhelpfully, Kate has secretly fallen in love with Merton Densher, a clever chap – a writer of all things – who works on a newspaper and has none of Lord Mark’s cachet. Densher gets posted to America soon after he and Kate declare their inconvenient, and concealed, love for each other. Meanwhile, in America, a young woman called Milly Theale, has inherited great wealth, various maladies having carried away all the other members of her rich family. Not knowing what to do with herself, she decides to take a trip to Europe with an older companion, a widow called Susan Shepherd. And who should Milly meet and befriend before she travels to Europe, but Merton Densher. This sets the scene for travels in a world sometimes portrayed as a vast place in which it’s easy to get lost, on other occasions appearing as that kind of ‘small world’ where you might unexpectedly bump into someone you know. One minute we might see Milly sitting on an Alpine cliff edge staring into an endless abyss, the next she’s in London, discovering that Aunt Maud and Susan Shepherd were at school together. Milly and Kate become close friends, the young American quickly accepted as ‘one of us’. Milly even discovers that she has a spooky likeness to a portrait of a long lost girl in the family of Lord Mark, which hangs in his ancestral home. You might say the first half of the book is about the hidden closeness of the human family.

Then we get to the second part, set in a dramatically depicted Venice, where Milly becomes mortally ill. The feeling changes. Kate cooks up a scheme for Densher to get close to Milly, partly to console her during her illness, partly in the hope that some inheritance might come Densher’s way, allowing the secretly engaged couple to marry. Kate is forced into this deception by a society that values a feckless lord far above a clever, down-to-earth, working writer. Kate pretends to be distant from Densher in a ruse to be close to him. Densher is close to Milly, while he is secretly engaged to Kate. It’s very dark and twisty. If the first half of the book was about the hidden closeness of the human family, the second half is about the deceptions that hide beneath the surface of relationships.

Henry James describes all this in his ornate style of long sentences, with sub and sub-sub clauses. Ironically the writer depicted in the book is someone who you don’t feel would write in this way. Merton Densher is uncomfortable with stuffy tradition. There is a kind of dark humour in watching a straightforward chap caught up in both labyrinthine paragraphs and the lies they describe. Caught in these toils, Densher struggles to work out if he has behaved well or badly. Henry James is considered a modern, forward-looking writer in the sense that values are unstable in his books, rather than tending to the religiously-centred certainties of previous centuries. Perhaps he was helped to this position by seeing people he admired, by seeing himself, judged by society, as criminal. Henry James wrote in a style of heightened respectability, when ironically, his writing expressed a sense that respectability is precarious and fragile. Judgements of value have no firm basis, like a golden bowl that might appear expensive, only to turn out, on closer examination, to be a piece of glitzy junk.

The way people treat each other is a tragedy really, but despite the dark second part of The Wings of the Dove, the hopeful first part is still there, depicting a human family linking the most far-flung of people. Reading Henry James’s books is a bit like being part of that family, sitting down to Christmas dinner with a posh uncle who might talk too much, but is fascinating nevertheless. I, for one, am very glad he was invited.

The Trees by Percival Everett, shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is about the history of lynching and racist violence in America. The book imagines an ever-widening pattern of retribution for past atrocities. Trouble starts in the town of Money, Mississippi, investigated first by local law enforcement, then by Mississippi state police, finally by the FBI.

This sounds like tough subject-matter, and it is. But unexpectedly the book is very funny. Some of the dialogue, particularly amongst the denizens of Money, is hilarious. This incongruity is an introduction to the way the book challenges categories.

For example, there are categories of race, where bitter divides become increasingly meaningless:

Braden looked back at Dixie. “I heard tell that Dixie got a drop in her.”

“We all got a drop in us, you stupid peckerwood.”

Since humanity first evolved in Africa, this is undeniably true.

The trees of the book’s title are a symbol of lynching, in the sense that they were the site of these dreadful events. But trees also have very different connotations. The book uses the image of family trees to describe tangled patterns of relation that blur all kinds of apparent division, between black, white, rural racist, urban sophisticate, or whatever it might be. Family trees don’t suggest violent division so much as the links between us all.

What if a group sets out to avenge the awful behaviour of racists of the past, through retribution visited on their children or relatives? No doubt some of those relatives are just as bad as their lynching forebears, their true nature barely held in check. But family trees make it difficult to know where the limits of retribution should lie. Would you call a halt at grandchildren, nephews, nieces, or cousins three times removed? Where along the six degrees of separation does separation become wide enough? If retribution kept following family trees along every branch, would it end up coming back to the people who were abused in the first place? A hidden, mixed parentage of some of the characters, and the book’s shocking denouement, suggests this would be the case.

Actually the idea of a family tree could even link an entertaining, subtle, funny novel, to a highly sobering, uncompromising book about human relationships. The overall result is The Trees – funny, deadly serious, straightforward in its writing, highly sophisticated in its thematic structure, unsparing and humane.

An ambassador is a representative of home in a foreign country. The ambassador in this book is Lambert Strether, despatched by wealthy Mrs Newcome of Woollett, Massachusetts to track down her son Chad, whose year off in Paris, seems to have turned into a prolonged, and perhaps corrupting, residence. Mrs Newcome wants Chad to come back and face his responsibilities managing the family company. What the company produces is not entirely clear. It’s some kind of extremely mundane item, the nature of which Strether is hesitant to reveal. The ‘urinal cakes’ which made the fortune of Niles Crane’s social-climbing wife Maris, in Frasier come to mind. Anyway, if Strether can get Chad to return home to supervise continued profitable ‘urinal cake’ manufacture, the ambassador’s reward will be marriage to Mrs Newcombe.

Strether is at a difficult point in his life, in his mid 50s, a widower who has also lost his only son. His buttoned-down personality is a product of his background in wealthy, small-town America. Now, he finds himself in cosmopolitan Paris, trying to fulfil his mission with Chad, which turns out to be a lot more complicated than he bargained for. In the company of European friends, it transpires that Chad has not been corrupted, but improved. Strether comes to see that dragging the young man back to Woollett might not do him, or the people he has met, any favours. So what’s to be done? Helping him with this tricky question is a woman he met on the ship coming over, Maria Gostrey, and an old friend called Waymarsh. There is something relevant in the names of Strether’s companions – Gostrey, which is very close to ‘go astray’ – and Waymarsh, with its suggestion of a treacherous route through marshes on a misty evening. Maria Gostrey personifies the joy of wandering off the well-worn path, while Waymarsh is there to warn of the dangers.

Paris often serves as an enigmatic symbol of freedom for Americans. From Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, to Netflix’s Emily in Paris, Americans visit Paris to loosen up. The Ambassadors predates all these other American trips to the City of Light. It is true that Strether’s reach for Parisian freedom is nothing like Henry Miller’s in Tropic of Cancer. There are no tumultuous relationships with wild Russian aristocratic women, pursued in apartments where no housework gets done. Strether’s hotel suite is very tidy, and his wild behaviour is limited to eating tomato omelettes beside the Seine with charming lady companions, or – in a particularly beautiful section – taking a day-trip in the countryside near Paris. Nevertheless, within the tight confines of his life, I felt the joy of Strether’s unfamiliar liberty.

This book took me a long time to read. The prose is dense, the sentences long. I do have a tendency to try and get through a book so I can get on to the next one. With The Ambassadors I relaxed. When the library loan period elapsed, I renewed. Hanging around in early twentieth-century Paris, in a peaceful spring and summer before world wars, was lovely. If you think about it, any good book is ambassadorial. There has to be something unfamiliar and foreign about the book’s territory to tempt you to explore: and there has to be a feeling of home within its pages, to recognise and resonate with. You open a book hoping for all kinds of new experiences, and then head for the nearest embassy, or British bar or shop selling Heinz Baked Beans, or whatever it is that reminds you of your particular home. In this sense The Ambassadors is the perfect book. I enjoyed all aspects of it – from the exciting sense of travelling to new places, to the reassuring sense of recognising experience – that experience of the competing attractions of risk and security, the new and the old, which we all face in one way or another. This is the kind of book that takes you away, or brings you home, depending on your needs. In reality we need both. In providing both in such a neat diplomatic package, The Ambassadors is now one of my favourite novels.

In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare.

“You talk of Anthony and Cleopatra in a detached manner, Mr Jones,” said the languid interviewer. “Tell me, would you die for love?”

I didn’t get in.

At this point my fate diverged from that of the people who populate the pages of Chums, young men and women, mostly men, who attended Oxford in the 1980s and then went on to top jobs in government. Author, Simon Kuper, who was an Oxford undergraduate at that time, describes the background of these people, and how their university years influenced later careers.

The picture portrayed is not a pretty one. In many ways what happened to those youngsters during the 1980s haunts us now in the 2020s.

First, there’s the interesting historical background of the time, which tended to push forward entitled youths from a privileged background. The 1980s marked a reversal of the general trend to a more egalitarian society, which had been gathering pace from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1979, British income inequality reached its lowest point ever recorded. Then Margaret Thatcher came along. Following the economic privations of the 70s, inequality widened again, the upper classes regained confidence, and started indulging in romantic fantasies about a lost Britain. Fittingly, a 1981 television production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was very popular. Young Jacob Rees Mogg, who was to enter Oxford’s Trinity College in the late 80s, even took to dressing up as an Edwardian gentleman.

This was the atmosphere into which Etonian Boris Johnson arrived at Oxford in 1983, the same year I was there for my interview. After getting accepted, Johnson and others like him spent their university years honing peculiarly British political skills, which involved treating politics as a game. The Oxford Union debating society is set up like the House of Commons chamber, though Union debates never result in real policies with real consequences. When not fantasy debating, the youngsters would have fun trying to get themselves elected to the few administrative positions on offer at the Union.

Many then took the idea of politics as a game into their subsequent parliamentary careers. Some commentators, like the academic George Steiner for example, feel that historically, a traditional lack of political seriousness has acted in a positive way, as a protection against extremism in Britain. On the other hand a lack of seriousness, and often basic administrative competence, can have disastrous consequences when something like a pandemic comes along. Then it’s people who learnt their trade many years before amongst jolly japes of the Oxford Union, who have to coordinate a complex, society-wide response.

And that’s the overriding feeling of Chums – of people who have led protected lives, bringing about very painful and real consequences through their carelessness. When those Oxford boys grew up, game players like Boris Johnson, imbued with fantasy visions of Britain’s past, messed around with the fire of nationalist sentiment, simply to further their ridiculous desire to climb the greasy pole as an end in itself. It was all part of a game, which had disastrous real world consequences, destroying a system of international cooperation which, as Kuper points out, brought unprecedented prosperity to Britain.

From a personal point of view, I think back to that interview and that rejection. The young men and women who got through tended to see themselves as chosen. But the special place they entered – well that’s riven by a constantly churning sense of who’s in or out. There’s nothing very golden about the golden circle of the British establishment. I don’t know if it even exists when most of those in it seem to act out of a bitterness that they are supposedly excluded. That’s how I felt getting to the end of Chums. Thinking in terms of whether you are in or out is not healthy. You are where you are, and it’s best to make that the place where you are meant to be.

Soul Music is a Terry Pratchett novel, one of a series set in Discworld. This is a mythological vision of a society of humans, dwarves, elves and wizards, living on a flat disc planet balanced on the back of four elephants who are themselves standing on a turtle.

Discworld sounds like a strange and remote concept, consigned to the distant past. Nevertheless, there are many people who, with the help of YouTube, continue to believe in a flat Earth. More generally, people continue to struggle with new ideas coming up against old ways of thinking. With this in mind, you might say that Discworld can be a place to explore aspects of humanity’s historic, and current, world view. I admit, this might sound overly cerebral for a series of books famous for their humour. In the Soul Music instalment of the Discworld saga, we are told interlinking stories involving Death’s grand-daughter taking over his duties, and a group of musicians accidentally stumbling on rock music. Most of the plot might seem like an excuse to make punning references to various pop songs and musicians.

But beyond the jokey stuff, it is undeniable that this book deals with ambitious topics – things like life, death, the nature of the universe, and how people come to grips with matters beyond their comprehension. All this is quite something to take on. The difficulty involved in these themes can be compared to people living on what they think is a flat Earth trying to make the conceptual leap to seeing themselves living on a globe floating in endless space – and only having a comic novel with which to do it.

In this particular comic novel, a completely new type of music serves as an example of a challenge to how people think. Sometimes there are interesting, amusing and thought provoking results from collisions of world views. At other times, I was left confused by a mass of disjointed ideas and stretched metaphors. This was not helped by a lack of the usual conventions that orientate a reader, like chapters, or any kind of sign that you might be switching between different threads of the story.

Personally I don’t know if Soul Music can be considered wholly successful, since parts of it are so chaotic. But I still admired the basic Discworld idea, and the effort to take on topics that would humble any writer who, with a nod to Douglas Adams, works far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy on an utterly insignificant, blue-green planet orbiting a small, unregarded yellow sun.

Late at night, after finishing a book the day before, I was flitting around the Kent e-library looking for something to read. I have this scheme – classic book alternating with recently published book. It was time for the recently published book, which is always more tricky to find than the classic.

Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends popped up on the ‘available now’ list. Her name was familiar – television productions of her novels came to mind.

I had a look. This accidental introduction turned out to be quite fitting for Conversations With Friends – which is about chaotic relationships, as narrated by Frances, a young woman studying ill-defined arty subjects at university in Dublin. Recently she has ‘broken up’ with childhood friend, and performance poetry partner, Bobbi, though they still hang out together all the time. A journalist called Melissa wants to do a profile on the poetry duo, which leads Frances into an affair with Melissa’s husband, Nick. This entanglement is on, then it’s off, then it’s on again. Meanwhile, Frances has hassles with finances, her family, psychological state, and health. She has high-falutin’ discussions about human relations with Bobbi who fashions herself as an aggressive left-wing intellectual. Bobbi considers marriage to be capitalism’s way of controlling people in the interests of money. Then Frances writes a story inspired by her unconventional love for Bobbi, which earns a handsome fee of 800 euros!

The book is written in an oddly plain style. There is minimal conventional punctuation – no speech marks. Paragraphs are split into blocks rather than bothering with indents – more like a blog than a novel. You also get the feeling that this lack of convention is carefully planned. This seemed part of the feeling that lack of convention can actually be conventional – as is the case with youngsters who think they are rebellious when in fact it is just normal to be young and rebellious.

This was a sometimes intense, sometimes flippant book about the way people live together. I was going to say it’s a ‘study’ of this subject, but that’s not the right word. For all the intellectual pretensions of the literary scene/university setting, the characters’ relationships refuse to be categorised or analysed, and kind of just happen in front of you.

Perhaps in the end, the relationship I found most interesting in the book was the one with the reader. While Frances, Nick, Melissa, Bobbi and the rest, dodge around each other, revealing or concealing this and that, Frances tells the reader everything, even things she keeps from her own mother. Sometimes I was thinking, ‘too much information, Frances’. Nevertheless, I was trusted to hear all of these revelations, like a best friend. And the irony is, this patient listener is unacknowledged, as though a relationship with an entirely absent reader is the only one where the narrator can be honest – which is typical of the contradictory way people interact in the book. The only person you can be truly honest with isn’t even there. Everyone else gets gradations of honesty.

Overall I would say this was a conversation that had its ups and downs, but ultimately came out as a very worthwhile chat

In his book, The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler suggests that stories may have evolved from fireside tales designed to help youngsters prepare for their first journeys out beyond the safety of the tribal hearth. Young Lonigan, published in 1932, is the first volume of James T. Farrell’s trilogy, about an Irish-American boy, William ‘Studs’ Lonigan, growing up in early twentieth century Chicago. It’s a story about a youth preparing to set out on the journey of adulthood. We begin in 1916, with Studs graduating from his Catholic elementary school, aged fourteen, and then follow him through the summer as he waits to go to high school in the autumn. Studs hangs around his local area trying to act tough while quietly thinking poetic thoughts inspired by nature and his sweetheart, Lucy. Sadly, Studs’ more sensitive side tends to fall out of view as the weeks pass. Finer feelings are stamped on by the influence of unsavoury friends. The future looks difficult for this young man.

We could ask whether, in the Writer’s Journey sense, there is help and advice on offer here. Is the book saying, for example, that you should live for the moment? The most beautiful scenes involve Studs simply appreciating his present moment, an ecstatic yet peaceful swim in Lake Michigan, and an afternoon sitting with Lucy up in the boughs of a tree in a Chicago park. However, despite Lake Michigan and the tree, the delayed consequences of eating all your sweets at once are very clear. ‘Advice’ about behaviour is similarly ambivalent. There is certainly no sense that the moral of the tale is that youngsters should behave well and do as they’re told. The values of all parents and authority figures in the book are suspect. Studs’ father has settled for a rather empty life, where sitting on his porch reading about violent crimes in the newspaper seems to be the highlight of his day. The Church is just a mess of hypocrisy and nonsense. There is one ‘cool dad’ who seems to understand and support young people – a Mr O’Brian. But he is really the worst role model of all, a disgusting, racist bigot. He is only popular with the boys because he would rather encourage their prejudices than challenge them.

So, if we can’t say the book advises good behaviour and respect for our elders, is it advising that the young overthrow convention? Once again the answer is no. The fighting and petty crime with suggestions of graduating on to more major crime, gives no sense that defying convention is the right course. Besides, defying convention in one sense is to be highly conventional in another. Rebellious youth might seem to challenge social pressure to conform, only to find itself bowing to the equally malign forces of peer pressure.

What then does a young person, or any reader, take from this? I think they might take a feeling that life is not about simple answers and advice. You have to plan for the future and yet live for today. You have to be yourself, follow your own instincts, and yet respect the views of others. As Kipling says in If, his poem of advice to a young man, you have to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. As in If, the only consistency in the advice of Young Lonigan lies in its continued contradictions. And if that lesson seems complicated, well that’s often the way it is with lessons.

And if you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run
Then yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son