Still Life is a novel by Sarah Winman, published in 2021.

Ulysses, is a young soldier in the British Army during World War Two. Like Homer’s Ulysses, we first meet this man fighting battles in the Mediterranean. The parallels continue as Ulysses returns home to London in 1945, to find that Peg, the wife he left behind has a few suitors – Col a publican, Cress who works in Col’s pub, and an American soldier called Eddie. At this point Still Life and The Odyssey diverge. While Homer’s Ulysses engages in vengeful killing of suitors, Col and Cress remain good friends with Ulysses, and with Peg. Peg has Eddie’s baby while Eddie himself never returns from the war. Ulysses helps bring up Peg’s little girl.

Also we don’t actually get the feeling that Ulysses has reached home in returning to London. When he is left money and property in Florence by an Italian man whose life he saved during the war, he decides to make his home in the place where he fought. Cress and the little girl go with him. In Odyssey terms it would be as if Ulysses teamed up with one of the suitors, while adopting the child of another, and went off to live in Troy.

Interesting.

I think the point has something to do with not being too fixed in how we see life. Still Life portrays life as something that isn’t still. Home is not a definite place making all other places foreign. You might dream of reaching home, but then home might end up in the faraway land where you fought your war. The narrative is structured in a way that jumps around in place and time, as if neither of these things are entirely stable.

Following a time of war where friends, enemies, home, foreign fields are all starkly separate, we learn perhaps that letting go of these fixed concepts might be a way to find peace and forgiveness. There is no need for vengeance on suitors, or foreigners. Foreigners can be your family, as Ulysses discovers in his new life in Florence. Suitors and husbands can be friends. Hope for the future can be a return to the past.

This was a fascinating twist on the Odyssey story. Thinking in terms of the Odyssey, a parrot character called Claude, who not only mimics human speech, but offers opinions and apposite Shakespeare quotes, kind of makes sense, as do the sentient trees that pop up occasionally. These are the equivalent of Homer’s deities.

At times I did find the writing a bit overly sentimental. However, the book held itself together with some great ideas, and I ended up enjoying and admiring it.

And finally, why did I choose a Van Gogh still life to illustrate this article. Because I particularly like this painting. I like the way it is a typical still life kitchen scene with jug, cup and some lemons. But the jug contains a profusion of flowers instead of milk. The lemons seem soft and shapeless as if they are on the turn. A sprig has either fallen out of the packed flower display, or is waiting to be included in the arrangement. There is a great deal of movement in this still life. It displays beautiful flowers in what we might think of as a utilitarian container not apparently meant for flowers. I thought this fitting for Sarah Winman’s book.

Titus Groan is a novel by Mervyn Peake published in 1946. It tells the story of Gormenghast Castle, the ancient seat of the Earls of Groan. Titus has just been born, son of Sepulchrave, seventy sixth Earl of Groan. Does this event mark a new beginning and direction, or another heavy link in the chain of unending Groans? This question looms over the rest of the book. Do people control their lives? Are they playing out a role, decided by fate, or ancient tradition? The Groan royal family includes a pair of twins – twins serving as a reminder that our decisions might not seem so much ours after all, when someone else who looks just like us ‘decides’ to do the same thing as we do, at the same time. Titus Groan reminded me of Hamlet – set in a castle, dealing with weighty themes of destiny and freewill. And as in Hamlet, there is a schemer character, disguising his own self-interested plans as twists of fate.

On a different note, the book also reminded me of something I happened to stumble upon while reading the book – the 1980s police drama Hill Street Blues, of all things. A picture of the cast appeared on my Facebook feed. Facebook knows I am of a certain age, and has a plan lying behind the apparently random appearance of photos depicting the cast of 1980s police shows. I went to YouTube and watched the famous opening sequence. Just as in 1981, a tired woman’s voice says, “Dispatch, armed robbery in progress, C-Surplus store, corner of People’s Drive…”

A police car emerges from behind a garage door, before sliding off through slushy snow on another cold morning. Then you get that music by Mike Post, reflective, sad, rising to a sigh of steady violins. Another morning, always the same with every episode, the same armed robbery, the same slush and cold, which somehow remains reliable, peaceful and reassuring. I reminisced for half an hour – the show was on during my university years. I bought a book about it in the university bookshop. Anyway, I had some reading to do. Focus Martin. I went back to Titus Groan, and felt in an odd way that my digression hadn’t taken me far from Gormenghast Castle after all.

My Friends, published 2024, is a novel by Hisham Matar, long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Khaled, the narrator, is not an action hero by any stretch of the imagination. He’s a quiet, intellectual young man, a Libyan student studying English at Edinburgh University in the mid 1980s. At that time I was a similarly less-than-heroic student studying English at Warwick. Sometimes people would knock at the door of my campus study bedroom, asking me to go on demos. I would politely decline. Khaled’s instinct would be to do the same. However, in April 1984, his more radical friend, Mustafa, persuades him to attend a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in St James’s Square, London. You can see why Khaled might take a deep breath and decide that attending one demo might be the decent thing to do, given the recent execution of student activists by the Libyan government.

Inexperienced in the ways of protests against dictatorial regimes, Khaled and Mustafa get to London and realise they need some kind of face covering to protect their identities from Libyan spotters. After locating a couple of black polyester balaclavas in a sex shop, they make their way to St James’s Square. Khaled plans to just do a quick bit of shouting, before slipping away to find lunch in China Town.

He doesn’t get to do this because someone inside the embassy points a machine gun out of a window and starts shooting, wounding eleven protesters and killing a young police woman called Yvonne Fletcher. I remember watching reports on the news.

This part of the book is very dramatic, particularly scenes at Westminster Hospital where a badly injured Khaled is taken. His life changes from this point on. He is a marked man and cannot go home to Libya. Politics is not some student game anymore. How will Khaled and his friends react? What form will their ‘growing up’ now take?

Responses vary between joining armed militias, to vaguely hoping that if only people would read more books and let things work out for themselves, life would go better. This all takes place against the backdrop of London, presented as a natural place of exile, a place of buses to Marble Arch, of fog and cosy restaurants.

My Friends does not have a prescription for good government, or how we should respond to bad government. What it does is personify different prescriptions in the characters of a group of devoted friends, who are both uneasy, and deeply admiring, of each other. The relationship is the thing, rather than one of them winning. Ultimately, however, I would point out that the narrator of this novel, the hero if you like, is the one who lives a bookish life in London. He is the novel’s quiet central government. Chaos rages around him. And if there is a lesson in My Friends, it might have something to do with that.

Headshot is a novel by Rita Bullwinkel published in 2024, long listed for the Booker Prize. The action takes place over two days at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno Nevada, where the eight best under-eighteen girl boxers in America take part in the Daughters of America Cup.

Already my description is a bit off, which reflects how tricky this novel is to pin down. It’s not really confined to two days. The disembodied narrative spins off into past and future. We find out about the competitors’ childhoods and later lives.

This is a book about boxing. The girls are clearly defined as individual combatants. But the book really gets interesting in using boxing as an unexpected metaphor for togetherness, and feminine togetherness at that. Boxing is a sport where you look your opponent in the eye. There is no sense of running your own race in boxing. You are in it with your opponent. From that sense of robust sharing, there is a comprehensive breaking down of demarcations, categories, individuality, to explore a shared experience. Boxing is paralleled with girls’ clapping games, hair braiding. It’s cleverly done, using a tough sporting event in a grubby boxing venue to explore the boxers’ lives, and then life in general as a battle that is also, somehow, a collaboration.

I came out of the book with an odd feeling of reassurance that people’s endless capacity to fight is combined with an endless capacity to work together. In the wider boxing match of life, which all the girls have come from and will return to, there is the same opportunity. I admired the book. It is both a challenging punch in the eye with its originality, while still capable of putting a friendly arm around your shoulder. Rita Bullwinkel is a professor of literature at Leipzig University – and maybe this sense of challenge combined with collaborative help is a good one to describe teaching. I hope I was a good student in this boxing class.

Glorious Exploits is a novel by Ferdia Lennon, published in January 2024. It is set in the aftermath of Athens’ invasion of Sicily in 412 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. Defeated Athenian soldiers have been rounded up and herded into quarries – concentration camps essentially – near the city of Syracuse. Two local, unemployed potters, fans of Athenian theatre, get it into their heads to find actors amongst the prisoners who would be willing to stage a production of two plays by Euripides. The story follows their efforts to stage the plays, and ultimately find friendship with the enemy.

Through the lens of the present day, past culture often takes on a shiny polish, becoming the sort of thing studied in schools and universities. In their own times, however, posh classics were still in the category of show business. How to recreate that more authentic, contemporary feel? Glorious Exploits takes the initially surprising decision to have its characters speak in Irish vernacular, where good things are ‘cracker’. After about a chapter I just accepted that Fifth Century BC Syracuse was like an episode of Derry Girls. It worked very nicely in setting the right tone, a way of correcting the focus of that lens of the present.

So, the two potters, after some ups and downs, actually manage to stage Euripides’ Medea, and The Trojan Women in an improvised quarry theatre. Inevitably, in working together, Sicilians and Athenians gain an understanding of each other.

And this is where the Euripides plays themselves become interesting. While the process of staging the plays fosters a feeling of forgiveness and togetherness between the Athenians and Sicilians involved, the plays themselves are definitely not fluffy. Euripides is not the sort of writer to give advice about being kind. In fact, his plays show people at their most unforgiving. In Medea, the hero Jason comes back from an adventurous trip having won the Golden Fleece, a success that owes much to his gifted wife Medea. And how does he thank her? By planning to divorce her and marry a younger woman. Medea is not impressed and plots terrible revenge. She murders Jason’s girlfriend, the girlfriend’s father, and even her own children, as a way of hurting Jason in the most profound way possible. The same pitilessness is evident in the next play on this dark double bill, The Trojan Women. After conquering Troy, victorious Agamemnon takes Cassandra home as his trophy wife. His old wife Clytemnestra responds by murdering both her old husband and his new wife.

These are plays of vengeance not understanding. But that might be the point. During the performance we see the audience encouraged to see situations from the point of view of the most entrenched positions.

‘One moment I’m with Jason, the next Medea, and it swings this way and that, like the battle in the great harbour…’

So we get an unvarnished view of the reality of conflict, where there is no way the combatants will reconcile. And yet looking on, it’s possible to see both sides. Seeing both sides is described in terms of a battle. Maybe the final tragedy is that understanding doesn’t necessarily bring peace. When a wronged Sicilian takes his revenge on Athenians, our understanding of his motivations does not stop him lashing out.

Glorious Exploits is funny, hard edged, and taking its lead from Euripides, relentlessly unsentimental. It does not promise that people will get on and be nice. But like Euripides it does suggest that understanding can be present in the bitterest of divides. A play is like a battle to understand, the argument swinging from one side to the other. If we are destined to face battles, the battle to understand is the best one to fight.

When I was a young writer starting out, I read The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which made a significant impression on me. Based on the work of Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the book suggests that all stories derive from what it calls the Hero’s Journey, a kind of ancient training for young men, who will soon have to leave the camp fire and venture forth in search of resources, territory and discovery. This idea seemed compelling to me. In fact, once you see the journey laid out in its various traditional stages, it’s difficult to unsee.

Early on in his book, Vogler describes some objections to the idea of the Hero’s Journey. One of these is the suggestion that it is unsuited to the experience of women, who are perhaps less likely than men to move between one external goal and another in a linear way. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping might serve as an illustration of this objection, because apparently it’s about staying home in a women-only household. How will a story work in that scenario?

Fittingly, we start with an accident that gets rid of a man. Edmund Foster lives in the remote town of Fingerbone, Idaho, a restless soul, who takes a job working on the railways. He dies when his train crashes from a bridge into the vast lake beside Fingerbone. With male influence removed at this early stage, direction seems to disappear from the lives of the wife and three daughters he leaves behind.

‘With him gone, they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, supper time, lilac time, apple time.’

With men out of the picture, the story confines itself to home and domesticity. However, we are not in the situation suggested by Christopher Vogler of female-being opposed to male-doing. Sylvia Foster, might lose her sense of direction after the death of her husband, but she also demonstrates that men don’t have a monopoly on seeing life in simplistic journey terms.

‘… she conceived of life as a road down which one travelled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning,’

Sylvia, after a few years of routine, man-free housekeeping, finds that her three daughters leave home. After a few more years, middle girl, Helen returns to Fingerbone with two daughters, Lucille, and Ruth – the story’s narrator. But Helen only drops off the girls at grandma’s house, before promptly committing suicide by driving into the lake, leaving Sylvia to look after her granddaughters. When Sylvia herself dies, Lucille and Ruth are looked after first by Sylvia’s stick-in-the-mud sisters-in-law, and then by her youngest daughter Sylvie, who returns to Fingerbone after living a rootless, hobo life, drifting around America.

We now seem to be asked a question – is life drifting from day to day at home in Fingerbone, really any different from an itinerant life, wandering from town to town by jumping on freight trains? Neither has any sense of direction. Sylvie is a ‘transient’ who never really settles in Fingerbone. Nevertheless, it is repeatedly made clear that Fingerbone is itself transient, a town that floods yearly, burns down occasionally, prey to all kinds of natural and economic hazards, enduring only due to the inertia of its unadventurous residents.

So, going back to the Hero’s Journey idea, in Housekeeping the experience of women who stay home overlaps with that of those who wander on endless journeys. I’m reminded of a song that was in the charts the week I myself left home, to go to university – Paul Young’s version of Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).

I don’t know if Marilynne Robinson wrote this book to take on Joseph Campbell and his Hero idea. But in her essay collection, When I was a Child I Read Books, she does refer to Joseph Campbell, saying his scholarship ‘does not bear scrutiny.’ After reading Housekeeping it’s difficult to see much difference between getting out there and staying home. Both are equally non-linear experiences. This is a denial of the Hero’s Journey – though ironically, it could also be something of an ironic confirmation of its relevance. After all, Housekeeping is another book about journeys, even if they are contradictory, enigmatic, with a sense of being rather than doing.

Housekeeping was published in 1980, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, and now makes regular appearances on best novel lists.

Open City is a novel by Teju Cole, published in 2011.

I didn’t know what to expect when I borrowed Open City from the library. I’d discovered that Teju Cole was, amongst other things, a writing professor at Harvard. What would a book by a Harvard writing professor look like? Fancy, I thought. Would it be the kind of fancy that makes the reader feel fancy too, or the kind that makes them feel inadequate?

I started reading. Julius is a young doctor working in a New York psychiatric hospital. He has recently split up with his girlfriend. When off duty he listens to classical music, reads high-end literature, or goes for long walks in the streets of New York, visiting cultural sites. His mind drifts over his German/Nigerian childhood. He takes a holiday in Belgium with the vague hope of finding a lost grandmother. Returning to New York, he wanders round some more, gets mugged, learns something dark about his past, and goes to a concert.

Open City is not driven by plot – clearly. Instead it’s a book of thoughts and ideas, with its central preoccupation being identity. As a man who is part Nigerian, part German, Julius seems to be looking for a place in the world.

The book defines identity in all kinds of ways – by race, ethnic group, religion, age, even by the particular illnesses an individual might suffer. Actually, you could also define identity by the books you read. If reviews on Goodreads are anything to go by, people who like Teju Cole’s Open City form their own little tribe, cutting across international borders. This is one of a huge overlapping Venn diagram of identities. I put myself in the Open City admirers group. Others may not feel it’s a place for them, preferring cosy crime maybe. But then again, there will almost certainly be Open City readers and cosy crime readers who share the experience of having, for example, eczema. This is a book where we are all divided in some ways, while overlapping in others. I would suggest giving Open City a chance. It’s clever, but not in a way designed to make readers feel small. Yes there’s name dropping of European authors, and attendance at performances of Mahler symphonies given by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. But even if this is not apparently your thing, I think you will still find some common ground somewhere in Open City.

One last point. I enjoyed the way Cole set the story at a time when the world of books is changing. Julius goes to bookshops just before they go out of business – record shops too. This is the moment when the old analogue culture moves to digital. This shift serves to break up human contact, ending the physical experience of going to a shop with other people. There is a definite sense of loss. At the same time, there are new potentials for communication. Back in the heyday of bookshops this review would never have been written. I would have had to leave it to someone working for the Times Literary Supplement or The Guardian. Now anyone can put their review of Open City out there, and look to overlap with someone else’s literary Venn diagram.

My advice would be to consider joining the Open City tribe. In fact, in one way or another, you’re already a member

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published in 2000, won the Booker Prize for that year. Set in Canada, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of the Chase family who made a fortune manufacturing buttons. The 1930s sees the button market in a precarious state. Norvel Chase, the company director, a well meaning but traumatised war veteran, makes a last desperate effort to save his family from financial ruin. He persuades his eldest daughter, Iris, to marry a wealthy and, as it turns out, deeply unsavoury, Toronto businessman. The consequences of this ill advised plan become the subject of the rest of the book, as told by Iris in her old age.

Iris tells her story, in a kind of top layer to the book. She also describes writing a book about her experience – a second layer. And within her book there’s a further story – a sci-fi tale written by Iris’s boyfriend who makes a living submitting material to pulp magazines. The resulting Russian doll of a novel suggests ambitions to comment on the nature of storytelling. It isn’t the most straightforward of reads, but neither is it as precious as it might sound from this description. According to The Blind Assassin, writing is often a less-than-heroic business, misleading, prone to exaggeration or simplification, distasteful, silly, whether we are talking about pulp sci-fi, or Virgil’s Aeneid, which through the eyes of Iris appears as a violent melodrama.

With all that said, fiction is still credited with special powers in revealing truths. Iris is able to say things in fiction that are impossible to say in her real life.

This book is a mixture, sometimes an uneasy one, of the literary and the low-brow. It’s knowing and arch – unable to fully commit to a straightforward story because it wants to remain above such things. The author holds the story at a distance, which also describes the experience of reading it. The Blind Assassin is undoubtedly interesting, but maybe more interesting than enjoyable – easier to admire than to love

Bird by Bird is a book on writing by Anne Lamott, published in 1994. It is well known enough to get a mention on Ted Lasso. I’d never seen the title on any ‘how to write’ book lists, so decided to take a look.

We start with advice to write by advancing step by step. It’s no good imagining you will hold an entire story in your head before you begin. Write small pieces and put them together. If you have to prepare a piece about birds, take it one bird at a time. Other topics covered include finding a writing partner, taking notes of things around you, discovering your own voice, and how to avoid getting sued by the people who you might use in your writing.

Fairly soon after beginning the book I started to feel uncomfortable. This is why:

Bird by Bird’s building block approach is also the suggestion of a more recent book by George Saunders, called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where good writing is explored through a selection of Russian short stories. Remembering A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, I realised Bird by Bird does not use examples to show good writing in action. The quotes we get are the pithy wisdom kind, amidst much biographical material from the author’s life. When Bird by Bird mentions what it considers bad writing, namely ‘the comics’ and ‘formula films’ once again there are no specific examples. Which comics exactly? All of them? Just because writing is in a comic doesn’t mean it’s bad. And which films? Do you mean the ones that follow mythic structure like Star Wars, explored in such a fascinating way by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey? The lack of specific examples left the book’s advice, even if often sensible, feeling anecdotal rather than substantive.

Then there was the intrusion of the author’s religious beliefs into the book. I think the religious references were designed to give a sense of the big picture that a writer is supposed to be considering. For me, they revealed a certain outlook which can be as limited as any other point of view. For example, the author goes with her church group to a nursing home. She doesn’t want to go, old people and their health issues making her uncomfortable. How can God allow people to live in this state? There might be a sense of personal honesty in the way these less than flattering feelings are described, but I did not admire how they were then rationalised. There is mention of a medieval monk, one Brother Lawrence, who opines that the presence of leafless, winter trees must demonstrate a God who loves all things unconditionally. Otherwise why would such useless things exist? Similarly, says Anne Lamott, the presence of God’s unconditional love is demonstrated by people who ‘are no longer useful in any traditional sense of the word’? I sat back. Did I just read that? Seriously?

I thought of an observation made by the secular Shakespeare who tells us, ‘reason not the need. Our basest beggars are in the merest thing superfluous’. Who’s to judge what is important and useful? Not Bird by Bird I would suggest. Maybe think of the high esteem in which elders are held in other cultures – Native American culture for example. Why not have a look at Story Writing in a Nursing Home, A Patchwork of Memories edited by Martha John – a book resulting from story writing classes conducted by a volunteer teaching service. Older people are a treasure trove of memories and overlapping lived experience, causing one of the older participants in Martha John’s book to suggest that, ‘we’re a sort of patchwork quilt’. A patchwork quilt, a sense of something that has grown over time, giving a warm sense of continuity and stability, is a much better image for older people than a leafless tree, so useless that it can only be loved by a particularly forgiving and accommodating deity.

On a practical level Bird by Bird is out of date in the sections dealing with publishing. There is not even a hint that a vibrant self-publishing scene might exist in 1994’s not too distant future.

For me there are much more useful books on writing. I’ll finish by listing a few that have helped me. Whatever kind of writer you are, even an elderly one (!), good luck.

How To Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey

The Writer’s Journey by Cristopher Vogler

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

Writing From the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo

Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, is a novel by Christopher Isherwood set in Berlin in the early 1930s. Isherwood himself is the central character, a diffident young Englishman, vaguely trying to write, while language tutoring to pay his rent.

Isherwood is mild-mannered, easy-going, inclined to be lazy, preferring observation over judgement. His one completed novel has sold five copies. He is drifting along without much obvious ambition. Meanwhile the society around him is increasingly riven by political zealotry on both left and right.

Is a policy of muddling along, not getting too exercised about anything, an answer to extremism? Maybe this is a book about unremarkable events in a young man’s life, serving as an antidote to the fanatical. On the other hand, it is difficult to claim that Goodbye to Berlin presents aimlessness as an ideal. There’s an interesting scene towards the end of the book where Isherwood gives English lessons to Herr Brink, a master at a reformatory for problematic boys. Brink remarks on the challenge of giving the boys a clear direction and purpose in life. A local engineering firm where many of the reformatory’s charges used to eventually find work is closing down, a victim of the dire economic situation. Without this chance of employment, crime is the next most obvious career option. On a wider level, a society struggling with economic collapse sees millions of people out of work. The aimlessness and frustration that results is a fertile ground for radicalisation, as people flail around for something to give their lives purpose.

So the answer to extremism is not to live a directionless life. After all, Isherwood had the gumption to write a novel about his Berlin sojourn. The book that resulted does not give easy answers. There is no black and white, only shades of grey – quite fitting really for Isherwood’s down at heel Berlin experience. Next time life seems drab, I will recall Christopher Isherwood’s book and start looking for some interesting nuances in the grey situation. These might take on the appearance of colours in the down at heel, gaudy Berlin night club where Christopher meets Sally Bowles.

While answers and clear advice are not what this book is about, there is perhaps a suggestion we take on the difficult job of finding purpose and identity within ourselves rather than going for some easy, ready-made external political or nationalistic option. Write a novel rather than wave a flag.