June 17th 1972, saw a break-in at the National Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate building, a sprawling office and apartment complex in Washington D.C. Over the next two years a number of journalists in New York, Los Angeles and Washington worked to reveal this event as part of a ruthless programme of political spying, sabotage and intimidation, directed by President Richard Nixon and his top White House aides. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post would be central to the press investigation. All The President’s Men is an account of their work during the Watergate period.

A number of things struck me about the book. First there were the similarities with political events of the 21st century. A ruthless cabal, interested in power for its own sake, elbows its way into government and then sets about portraying institutions that might hold it to account as arrogant “elites”. Departments of government and justice, are politicised, with the ruling group attempting to put their own people in charge, while systemically attacking anyone who gets in their way.

So far so similar. But the differences were also striking. Back in 1972, the investigation of conspiracy was very different. The media, as described in All The President’s Men, had tight control of editorial standards. We read a fascinating account of Woodward and Bernstein working day and night to make sure their reporting is accurate, gathering information from multiple, cross-checked sources. It is true that sometimes we see our reporter heroes bending the rules – trying to talk to members of a grand jury, for example. But the rules they bend are noticeably rigid. Washington Post editor Ben Crowninshield Bradlee is a formidable presence who will not accept sloppy reporting.

Today, by contrast, conspiracies flourish in a media environment that is a chaotic free for all. Watergate was a proper, no messing around, government conspiracy. It was exposed by diligent journalistic effort. But what do we get in the 2020s? We get conspiracies like Q-anon, mind control through vaccination or aircraft contrails, and a belief that the Earth is flat. Amateur Woodward and Bernsteins of social media generate misinformation rather than exposing it. Modern conspiracies are difficult to investigate rationally because their unreality pushes them into the realm of cult belief. The pesky ethic of accuracy no longer applies. Deception can be mass produced by disaffected individuals looking for a sense of importance. This gives the current equivalent of Nixon governments a chance to jump in and hide real corruption behind the prevailing barrage of nonsense. For example, consider the attempt to hide a staggeringly cack-handed conspiracy to manipulate the 2021 U.S. election, behind the fantasy that the Democrats were organising a sophisticated conspiracy to manipulate the election.

Reading All The President’s Men in the 2020s is a compelling and thought-provoking experience. The disciplined, conscientious writing process it describes is a salutary lesson for the world five decades later. The only reason I am able to share this review with you is because of new media freedoms. The contrast with the world of 1972, makes it clear that these freedoms have come at a price.

The Goblin Emperor is a 2014 fantasy novel by Sarah Monette writing under the name of Katherine Addison. We find ourselves in an early industrial society of goblins and elves. The emperor and most of his immediate family have been killed in an airship crash. Destiny travels a long way down the line of succession, arriving at the door of young Maia. This unfavoured son has been living in an internal exile with a cruel guardian, after the former emperor cast his mother aside in favour of a new wife.

While the story’s setting is firmly in the fantasy realm, there are many parallels with the real world. Historically, I was reminded of the White Ship disaster of 1120 when a voyage across the Channel went horribly wrong, wiping out most of England’s royal family. Henry I was not aboard the doomed vessel, but the heir and most of his royal siblings all drowned. Mathilda, one the King’s daughters, was left to inherit the throne. Henry tried to get Mathilda recognised as heir, but the nobles weren’t having any of it. England had never had a queen and was not ready to accept one. A period known as the Anarchy followed.

The scenario in The Goblin Emperor is similar, but more positive. Maia, of mixed goblin and elf parentage, is young, inexperienced and lacks training, which all puts him in a rather Mathilda-like position. Inevitably there is a threat of anarchy, which does come close. But as I say, Maia’s story is generally a positive one. Much reading pleasure is derived watching the young man growing into his role, under the guidance and protection of advisors and bodyguards. Maia is no revolutionary, but in just being who he is, a decent and friendly person who has seen the problems of ordinary life, there is real hope for positive change, despite aggressive attempts by the powers-that-be to maintain the status quo. This sense of potential is centred on a project to build a bridge across a large river dividing east from west. In scenes reminiscent of the controversies of Brexit, wealthy and powerful figures want to maintain their monopolies. It is the many ordinary merchants who stand to gain by bridging divides. And it is these people who are given renewed hope by their young emperor.

The Goblin Emperor is a warm story, with a highly sympathetic central character, which has much to say about politics and leadership generally. I admit I did find the names confusing – characters can be referred to by first or last names, or by their titles, all of which might involve many syllables, umlauts and accents. This did leave me feeling a bit lost on occasion. But then Tolstoy had a habit of doing a similar thing and it didn’t do him any harm.

A heartening read with interesting relevance to real events.

The Bridge Of San Luis Rey is Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel about a group of people who, in the summer of 1714, happen to be crossing a Peruvian rope bridge when it collapses. A scientifically inclined friar witnessing the disaster, is so traumatised that he sets out to research the victims’ biographies for reasons explaining their seemingly random fate.

Novels have a contradictory history when it comes to morality. There is a tradition where fictional characters are rewarded or punished according to their choices. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded of 1740 is an early example. But authors are not always fussy school teachers giving marks for good behaviour. In 1748 John Cleland published Fanny Hill, an exact reversal of novels which emphasise virtue – describing the life of a prostitute, who learns to enjoy her work, and use it to find freedom and financial independence.

So, is the God of Thornton Wilder’s book more of a Samuel Richardson or a John Cleland? The Bridge Of San Luis Rey suggests the Almighty could be both or neither. For a start, the vices or virtues of an individual often depend on who you talk to, or what particular aspects of an individual you are considering. And the ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’ is equally ambivalent. Are the victims of disaster good people called to heaven early, or bad people cast into the abyss? Judgement of people is never as straightforward as it seems. The image of the bridge in Thornton Wilder’s novel is an apt one, since instead of easy categories we get a sense of opposites existing together, with a fragile link spanning the gap between them. In a figurative kind of way, maybe the bridge collapses when people stop trying to make a leap of understanding. The Catholic Inquisition looms behind the action in this book, an illustration of human behaviour at its most cruelly judgemental.

This all makes for an intelligent and moving novel, relevant for our own times when there is still a temptation to judge behaviour rather than seek to understand it.

The Penguin Book of Dragons is a fascinating collection of writing referencing this famous mythic beast, with examples dating from about 1500BC, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

When I was at university in the 1980s, one of my courses covered what was called ‘agitprop’, a kind of aggressive, black and white theatrical style used to push a political agenda. Dragons started out in life with a starring role in what you might call religiously inspired agitprop. Heroes of all religious shades, wishing to acquire an impressive reputation, required a formidable enemy to defeat. The scarier the enemy, the more impressive the chosen one’s triumph. Drawing perhaps on an instinctive fear of snakes, a ferocious, fire-breathing serpent evolved to take on the task of symbolic enemy. For millennia this super snake was a tool, actually more a blunt instrument, used to build up heroes, run down opponents, or maintain discipline – in the ‘go to bed or the monster will get you’ sense. The Loch Ness Monster derived from accounts of this kind. In a more general context the dragon became a symbol of temptation or greed. While Genesis had a serpent persuading Eve to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, later more secular incarnations were characteristically portrayed as guardians of cursed treasure hoards.

So pervasive was dragon imagery, so tied into primeval desires and fears, that early scientists bent themselves out of shape trying to make a mythic animal into a real one. In the case of the Loch Ness Monster, scientific investigations continued until quite recently – a 2019 DNA study of the loch showing a large eel population.

Slowly as the centuries went by, with people became at least a little more rational, these ferocious creatures began to lose their power. Though one scurrilous eighteenth century journalist suggested there were dragons living near Horsham, Sussex, their habitats were generally located in conveniently distant, inaccessible locations, the kind of places that were progressively squeezed away by the advance of knowledge and technology. By the early twentieth century, dragons had been tamed into cute characters in children’s stories, by writers such as Kenneth Grahame and Edith Nesbit.

And yet, all the human characteristics which gave birth to dragons still survive. People remain greedy, vulnerable to temptation, and are still prone to an irrational simplification of complicated situations into an easily digested agitprop. We might be more scientific these days, but irrationality in many ways is still a potent force, as seen in modern conspiracy theories and misinformation. Perhaps The Penguin Book of Dragons presents the trajectory of its narrative a little too neatly. There remain, after all, echoes of former dragon powers in Tolkien’s Smaug, and in the hatchlings of Westeros, which, in the Game of Thrones books, mark the return of a long-lost species of a fire breathing reptile to the world. Perhaps that return in George R.R. Martin’s hugely successful book series is instructive. Maybe dragons continue to lurk, not now in dark corners of the world, but in dark corners of the human mind from whence they originally emerged.

Howards End is E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel about three families: the wealthy, materialistic Wilcox clan, the somewhat less wealthy but much more cultured Schlegel siblings, and a working class couple, Leonard and Jacky Bast.

They are all brought together by circumstances, a chance meeting on holiday, or at a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The story of their goings on together raises a number of topics, such as the nature of art, or the need to see life with an open mind. But overall, the subject of change seems to be the most important theme. In some ways we get a picture of a world that really needs a shake up. Leonard Bast is a promising young man with artistic ambitions. But limited means make it very unlikely he will achieve his potential. Helen Schlegel tries to help him, with less than ideal results. Talking of Helen, women have yet to get the vote. However, despite this portrayal of a world in need of development, the book is also about the sadness of change. Old, well-established places represent a steadying distillation of human experience, which cannot be recovered once lost. The book is a constant struggle between a desire for stability and a need to move into the future – all focused on a rambling and attractive former farmhouse on the outskirts of London, called Howard’s End.

Howards End is Mrs Wilcox’s special place, where she was born and has lived all her life. Now facing her death, she decides to give the house to Margaret Schlegel, whose London home is soon to be demolished to make way for modern flats. However, when the time comes for Mr Wilcox to honour his wife’s wish, he ignores it.

As the ramifications of this decision unfold, I eventually got the feeling that a rather impossible compromise is required to keep people happy – their lives have to change but also stay the same. This tricky demand is behind Margaret’s house-hunting request, which would challenge even the most creative estate agent:

“We merely want a small house with large rooms, and plenty of them.”

Margaret wants the cosiness of a small home along with space to expand and develop.

Howards End deserves its classic status. After all, people continue to want small houses with big rooms and plenty of them.

The Fear Index is a 2011 novel by Robert Harris describing the fictional background to a stock market crash of 2010. The book describes a scenario where a brilliant American physicist, Alex Hoffman, sacked from his job developing artificial intelligence for CERN starts a new career, stock market trading in Geneva. Building on experience at CERN, he creates a computer system, called VIXAL, which looks for signs of global anxiety, via gloomy news reports, or any other internet source. The system then uses this data to make predictions about what will happen to stock markets, buying and selling in them accordingly.

Hoffman’s computer system is designed to take the scary uncertainty out of trading. VIXAL decides what to buy and sell without fear, or any other emotion. It simply uses measures of anxiety to make logical judgements on what the stock market might do. But this lack of feeling actually creates a frightening situation when the system achieves independent control of itself. First VIXAL starts using the internet to try to engineer situations to provoke fear in Alex Hoffman – since it has been programmed to seek out this emotion. The machine is a bit like a ruthless writer working to provoke scary thrills in a reader, since this is a good way to sell books. Then the system sets up a stock market crash to generate massive profits from betting on a downturn.

It is precisely because the system cannot experience emotion that its evolution to self awareness is so potentially threatening. VIXAL does not know pity or empathy, and will simply act to protect its own interests. The parallels with Frankenstein are interesting, another Monster created on the shores of Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley’s story is concerned with lost innocence. Similarly, VIXAL, in a sense, is innocent. It doesn’t mean any harm. However, the lack of malice is part of an unfeeling nature which makes the machine all the more dangerous.

In many ways this is a cerebral book, with its Frankenstein parallels, and quotes from Darwin and other thinkers introducing each chapter. But the thoughtful elements are combined effectively with a sense of emotion. Perhaps this is what novels at their best contribute – a view of the world which combines thought, and that other vital component in any understanding of human behaviour, emotion.

Go Tell It On The Mountain is James Baldwin’s 1953 novel about a critical time in the life of a 1930s Harlem teenager. John is a bright boy, trying to come to terms with turbulent family life, and the expectations of future leadership placed upon him by the local African-American Pentecostal church. We also hear much about the background of John’s father and mother and other close relations.

So what will John do? Will he become a preacher as his family expect, or will he embrace secular life? Whatever decision John might make, a biblical quotation hangs over him. One night, John goes to his church, to help out with an evening service. Only a few people turn up, which causes one of the devout congregation to complain about the lack of commitment shown by youngsters these days:

‘The Lord ain’t going to bless no church what lets its young people get so lax, no sir. He said, because you ain’t neither hot or cold I’m going to spit you outen my mouth. That’s the Word.’

The Word seems to require that you settle on one thing or the other, but not wobble in the middle. Ironically, I’ve always thought the sign of a good novel is the way it wobbles in the middle. If you want hot or cold on their own, then you should maybe go for political or religious writing of the more fundamentalist kind.

Go Tell It On The Mountain prevaricates, in all kinds of novel-like ways. Just a few examples – preachers, who are supposed to be examples for their flock, are deeply flawed, hypocritical individuals, while ordinary people who lack outward respectability, running dodgy bars perhaps, have great qualities. There are graphic descriptions of injustice perpetrated by racists, set alongside the seemingly inconsistent theme that there is no black and white where justice is concerned. Fittingly, given the importance of that quote about God spitting fence-sitters out of his mouth, the word ‘mouth’ appears repeatedly, 47 times I discovered – excluding all the many additional mentions of lips and tongues. The mouth is an image of temptation, argument, communication, deception, peace – overall an image of contradiction, which runs throughout Go Tell It On The Mountain.

Go Tell It On The Mountain was an interesting, sometimes harrowing read, which demonstrates what good novels might give us – an appreciation of subtlety in the face of everything that wants to paint the world in black and white. Novels are really the antithesis of sermons, showing rather than telling it on the mountain.

To Say Nothing Of The Dog is an award-winning science fiction novel from 1997 by Connie Willis. It’s a time travel story where people from 2057 end up in a late Victorian world, highly reminiscent of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat. Jerome’s novel is one of my favourites, about three young men enjoying the early days of tourism, taking a rowing jaunt on the Thames.

The journey described in To Say Nothing Of The Dog seems rather different to a boating holiday. Oxford University historians travel through time using ‘The Net’. They run into the fiendish complications of time travel, where changing any detail of events causes an ever-widening ripple effect. The plot revolves around efforts to stop unintended changes to the past causing a disastrous unravelling of history.

Now the plot is complicated – concerned with restoring Coventry Cathedral and saving cats. I won’t go into it. Suffice to say there’s a sense of desperate chasing about, trying to get details lined up, when all such effort is repeatedly thwarted. A better approach seems to involve allowing history to fix itself. This is reminiscent of the holiday taken by Jerome’s three Victorian gentlemen, who attempt to sort out various tangles involving tin openers, or aggressive steam launches, while in the background, the peaceful river runs on regardless. This allows for laughs, as well as philosophical reflections on fate and free will.

Connie Willis’s book has some very enjoyable and amusing sections, particularly once it finds itself on the Thames in the 1880s. That said, I did get the feeling that the writers who acted as influences – Jerome, and also P.G. Wodehouse, would have condensed the 490 pages down to an elegant 200 or so. Nevertheless it doesn’t really matter what I say. To Say Nothing Of The Dog has been very successful, winning multiple prizes and readers. It is now simply part of sci-fi history. Comments that it could do with tightening up, are a bit like saying the Wars of the Roses might benefit from some editing. You can’t change history. It’s best to go with it. Do that and there’s a good chance you will enjoy To Say Nothing Of The Dog.

The Heart Of The Matter is Graham Greene’s 1948 novel about a senior colonial police officer working in a west African country during World War Two. Henry Scobie prides himself on his honesty. However, his unhappy wife, Louise, wants to escape from their stultifying colonial community and take a solo break in South Africa. To pay for Louise’s passage, Scobie compromises himself by accepting a loan from a dodgy business man, when the bank refuses him credit. While his wife is away, Henry falls in love with another woman. This results in much self loathing and inner turmoil, made worse by his Catholic faith which condemns adultery as a mortal sin.

In some ways The Heart Of The Matter reminded me of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a book about a nineteenth century Nigerian chief living his life according to local social expectations, running into the values of European colonial missionaries. Scobie is constantly beating himself up about adultery, when the people he lives amongst don’t seem to know what adultery is. When a local person refers to their sister or brother, Scobie asks the standard question, “same father or mother?” He has got so used to the prevalence of half brothers and sisters, that he doesn’t give a second thought to the possibility of eternal damnation for their adulterous parents. And in his own culture, adultery is actually much more accepted than might be expected for a mortal sin. Scobie encourages his wife’s relationship with a sympathetic man friend because it lightens his emotional load. One part of his mind sees adultery as beyond forgiveness: another part doesn’t really mind if Louise has an affair as long as she’s happy and stops stressing late at night when he’s trying to sleep. And when Louise disappears off to South Africa, she hears about Scobie’s affair from a friend and decides she’d better stop being an absent wife and go back to sort things out. Louise is a devout Catholic, but the theory of adultery as a terrible crime fails to match her level-headed approach to the reality of her relationship problems.

The whole book revolves around this conundrum of the relative nature of vice and virtue, and Henry’s increasingly desperate attempts to balance one against the other, when it isn’t always clear which is which.

There is some interesting use of point of view in The Heart Of The Matter. The book actually opens not from Scobie’s perspective, but from that of a socially awkward undercover officer called Wilson, who has been sent out to check on the work of the police. In a traditional detective story, Wilson would have been the central character uncovering Scobie’s wrong doing. A rather peripheral character would have been the heart of the matter. But in this story there is no such centre. There is no authority to which all questions can be referred. Instead there is a pervading confusion, which in an arbitrary way, can condemn, or confer forgiveness on anyone.

This is an intense read, about an intense, kind hearted, highly self-involved person. But there are a few lighter moments. I enjoyed Scobie’s struggles to entertain a young boy in hospital, when the only books available in the library are heavy, worthy religious tomes. He does an admirable job of improvisation, turning a missionary’s dull autobiography into an adventure story about pirates.

The Heart Of The Matter does a similar job, turning a heavy tome about spiritual and moral crisis into a novel that might help its readers step back and see things in a lighter and more forgiving way. For the missionary types in this African town, novels are a vice. The Heart Of The Matter turns them into a virtue.

A Swim In The Pond In The Rain is a book version of George Saunders’ Syracuse University course on fiction writing, taught via a selection of short stories by nineteenth century Russian authors who serve as models for how it should be done.

I’ve read a number of ‘how to write’ books, and many of them warn against things like inconsistent point of view, or the liberal use of adverbs. A Swim In The Pond In The Rain is not so literal. It does have guidance on what makes a good story – give mind to escalation, try to make one thing cause another. But all this is sometimes contradicted by the Russian stories used as illustration. Both causation and escalation are, shall we say, enigmatic in The Nose by Gogol, where a man’s nose takes on a life if it’s own.

Even though it might seem that this book has no straightforward prescription, there is one piece of advice it gives consistently. A writer of fiction is often told to show not tell. The Russian authors we read here are very good at showing complicated situations or characters from all angles, rather than telling a reader what to think about them. Chekhov’s Gooseberries, a story about the nature of happiness, has George commenting:

“The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.”

Our Russian mentors show that good writing, in accepting contradiction, does not push readers to focus on one side of an argument to the exclusion of the other. To me, showing rather than telling, is a straight-forward way of describing the light touch, naturally tolerant nature of good fiction, providing for thought and reflection rather than a set of conclusions.

I really enjoyed this book. I valued the description of writing as a process of many decisions about a sentence, giving the best chance of arriving at a good sentence. This certainly chimed with me. Early in my writing efforts I thought the need for endless fettling meant that I was a hopeless incompetent – but the encouragement here to revise, revise, revise reminded me of the relief I felt coming across a remark of Somerset Maugham. He was talking to M.M. Kaye, at that point a struggling writer, who admitted to spending entire days bogged down on single sentences. Maugham replied: “My dear young woman, that’s the only thing you’ve said to make me think you may be a novelist one day.”

The tone of this book is friendly. The author is someone leading a collaborative thinking effort, rather than telling us what to think. I had a similar tutor at university. She told us that Shakespeare, for all his fame as a great writer, is not actually saying anything. As with Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, Shakespeare shows us complications but does not tell us what to think about them. Her classes came to mind as I read A Swim In The Pond In The Rain.