The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes is a 2019 history of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century period in France, known as the Belle Epoch. It features a huge cast of characters, all arranged around the figure of Samuel Pozzi, an eminent and pioneering French surgeon and gynaecologist, who on a visit to London with two aristocratic friends gets his portrait painted in a red coat by John Singer Sergeant. Pozzi is an ideal central point for this account. Everyone, whether they are famous or obscure, rich or poor will eventually get sick and need a doctor.

And just as Pozzi meets a lot of different people, he also personifies contrasting aspects of society within himself. He is a very good doctor, with a celebrity clientele. At the same time he is democratic in his outlook, believing that good health care should be for everyone. He has a high regard for women, insisting on care and consideration in their medical treatment, declaring that ‘chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance’. Yet his view of marriage runs along old aristocratic lines, as in a wife for stability and family, other women for the more fun aspects of relationships. And beneath gathering nationalist storm clouds that would end the Belle Epoque with a terrible war, Pozzi stands out as a cosmopolitan internationalist, seeking the expertise of specialists from all over the world, and treating people with the same humane openness – a lesson for us there.

Julian Barnes does a great job of taking all the contradictions in Pozzi’s personal and wider worlds and concentrating them in Singer Sergeant’s painting of the enigmatic doctor, wearing an oddly unclassifiable red garment, maybe relaxed dressing gown, maybe oddly formal, expensive coat.

I’d like a coat like that.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel about a mysterious portrait of a young man, where the painted figure ages, while the youth himself lives on unblemished.

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray at school. Now on this re-read I’ve somehow reached my sixties. Inevitably there have been changes in your reviewer. It’s difficult to remember what I thought about the book as a teen. Maybe it was a matter of taking youth for granted. Now, having to be mindful of pulling a muscle while stretching in the mornings, the issues explored in The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more pertinent.

We start out with the straight-forward idea that the passage of time is a journey taking us from a golden age towards a fallen state. Dorian begins the book young and beautiful, feeling that time will only dull his charms. Meanwhile in society at large, there’s a sense that after living through long centuries when they knew what was what, people are entering a darker and more uncertain era. Religion is not the force it was, slipping away along with the moral code it once supported, replaced by the cynicism of Lord Henry, and of Dorian himself who blithely makes his selfish way through life without consequence.

But in a sort of equal and opposite reaction, there are aspects of the book that portray the past as a backward time out of which we are slowly emerging. Take the character of Lord Fermor, for example, a retired diplomat who grumbles that these days one has to sit vulgar examinations to be accepted into the diplomatic service, rather than relying on the tried and tested method of noble birth and smart-set contacts. It’s hard not to see progress rather than deterioration in moving on from the heyday of a dinosaur like Lord Fermor.

“Whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us,” says Fermor’s nephew, Lord Henry.

In the end, there is no real sense of youth’s passing as an irrevocable loss. The book grows away from decay, towards development. Dorian eventually comes to see his gilded youth as “a green, an unripe time”. Now maybe we feel that the secret of staying young is to allow ourselves to grow older, to change, to move into new phases of life. Youth, after all, is about the new, not the old.

I’m glad I re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray at this point in my life.

So, Ulysses by James Joyce. The best novel ever written, according to many of the authorities who compile lists of best novels. I had to read this book at some point. But it was an intimidating prospect, maybe requiring me to know Greek, Latin, French, German and endless literary references. No wonder I have left it until my 60s.

These are some of the notes I jotted down as I went along.

We start at breakfast on an ordinary day in Dublin in the summer of 1904. Young men share digs in a former military tower by the harbour in Dublin. Much religious imagery is mixed with mundane morning routine. There is a reference to changing of water into wine, but in this case, water changes into tea via an anecdote about an old woman who likes her tea strong, because she likes water to be water and tea to be tea, even if tea is still almost entirely water.

The conventions of academia and fancy literature come in for the same treatment – revealed in many ways to be tea, which is actually still plain water in disguise. Maybe there was nothing here for me to feel intimidated by.

Ulysses combines the intellectual and the everyday. It’s a book respected in academic circles, but maybe best read by skimming along and not worrying too much. When the going gets tough I suggest reading out loud in an Irish accent, just for fun.

In chapter 15, the central character Leopold Bloom muses on his failings, cooking up self-lacerating fantasies of condemnation and trial by jury. He then goes to the other extreme and imagines himself as a great and wise leader loved by all. But as he hands out gifts and gives freedom to his people, he accidentally introduces “a free fox in a free hen roost”. Then things turn around and Bloom is hated again. Meanwhile, outside his fantasies, back in normal life, he continues to live between extremes, neither particularly loved nor violently hated, not brilliant or useless, just an average chap on an ordinary day in Dublin.

There’s a wonderful scene towards the end of the novel where Bloom turns on a tap to fill a kettle with water. And then we go on the incredible journey which water has taken to reach that tap. Tea might remain water, but water is an amazing thing.

So I drank tea while reading Ulysses, a book I found a funny, ethereal, sometimes distasteful, often confusing, frequently compelling, brew.

The Chequerboard Floor is my new collection of nine short stories, originally written for competitions, one of which I managed to win. Here I am at the Control Tower of what was once West Malling Air Field, reading a short section from the opening story, Piece of Carrot Cake…

The second chapter of Infinite Jest involves a man waiting for a woman to arrive with a marijuana delivery. This is absolutely the last time he is going to use marijuana. To make sure that this last time is really the last time – unlike all the other last times – extreme measures are called for. He is going to smoke so much marijuana that the very idea of the stuff will become disgusting. This debauch will be a heroic and disciplined effort. He’ll keep smoking, when every instinct is telling him to stop, and so finally win freedom from marijuana.

Infinite Jest is similar to this upside down approach to drug rehabilitation. Discipline is required to make your way through hundreds of thousands of off-kilter words, and a wandering plot about a film so compelling that anyone seeing it has no choice but to watch again and again. On the other hand, the reading experience is like retreating into hedonism, giving up on your job, the chores, not posting any reviews on your blog for weeks, just to read through these endless pages.

I suppose in the end, Infinite Jest is about good books, as in what they are and how they work. A book is often considered good in making a reader feel they can’t put it down, becoming like an addictive drug in that sense. But we all know that addictive drugs are very bad for us, physically and mentally – with reminders of the hazards, if we need them, provided by the many scenes in Infinite Jest involving drugs. So maybe a good book is one you really can put down for some reason, maybe because it’s cheap sensationalism and not worth your time, or conversely because it’s a challenging read, requiring effort and thought, and giving opportunity for demanding essay topics. Infinite Jest is at times unputdownable, over-the-top and hilarious, at other times so horrible, in both subject matter and textual difficulty, that it begs to be put down. In fancy, intellectual terms there are references to Bertolt Brecht and his idea that an audience should be pushed away from a beguiling, hypnotic, theatrical experience, to think for themselves. Infinite Jest remains both chunky, sensationalist entertainment and an austere Brechtian production, insisting that the reader take a fair share of the heavy lifting. This might be the best book, or the worst book, but is rarely anything inbetween. I was both sad and hugely relieved to get to the end of something that was like a drug with its own built-in antidote.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published in 1996 and is on the Time Magazine list for best novels in English 1923 – 2005.

Love in a Cold Climate is Nancy Mitford’s famous satire of the English aristocracy in the 1920s and 30s. Fanny is the narrator, a young woman who has spent her childhood with relatives, while her wealthy parents travelled and had love affairs. She watches as Lord and Lady Montdore of Hampton try to marry off their beautiful daughter Polly to someone suitable. Polly’s eventual choice of husband causes such shock and family turmoil, that the ageing Montdores disinherit her. For the purposes of the lavish Hampton legacy, they turn to a distant male cousin. Enter Cedric, dandy and aesthete, who quite turns Lady Montdore’s head.

It is interesting that Cedric modifies his dandified chit-chat to fit whatever audience he is seeking to entertain at any given moment. With Lady Montdore it’s all gossip and beauty tips. In the company of an Oxford don, it’s ‘burial custom in the High Yemen’. Love in a Cold Climate is a bit like that. You can read it as a fun soap opera, full of over the top characters. But if someone with intellectual presumptions were to accidentally pick it up, then the book can oblige there as well. After all, the title suggests a comparative study of love in different cultures. And in a strange sort of way that’s what Love in a Cold Climate is. Polly and her parents have recently returned from India where Lord Montdore was Viceroy. There is definitely a suggestion that love was freer under the topic sun. On the other hand when it comes to marriage, the cultural expectation in India was one of families tending to arrange unions to suit their interests. There is, of course, a similar tradition amongst the British upper classes. All the pressure of Polly’s situation comes from the fact that her parents want an alliance that will bring benefit to the Montdores, while Polly wants to follow her heart. She eventually succeeds in doing this but the consequences are less than happy. While arrangement can put two incompatible people together, a choice based on unpredictable human emotion hardly provides a reliable alternative.

This book certainly would not claim to be a comprehensive sociological study of love customs in the Home Counties – just as it can’t be considered a monograph on burial custom in the High Yemen. Nevertheless, when you’re dealing with something that involves deep emotions and superficial self-interest, hurt, joy, passion, easy companionship, hair primping and dressings-up, then maybe the unemotional academic approach is not the best way to understand the subject under consideration. Maybe you can learn something from a rom-com like Love in a Cold Climate.

Project Hail Mary is a science fiction novel by Andy Weir, shortlisted for the 2022 Hugo Award.

A bloom of space algae called astrophage, invades the solar system. Using sunlight for energy, astrophage causes the sun to start cooling, threatening disaster for Earth. A high school science teacher, and former hotshot scientist, Ryland Grace, is recruited to address this crisis. He is sent off in a space ship to investigate a nearby star that shows signs of astrophage infestation, but for some reason has not dimmed. Maybe an answer to the Sun’s problem lies with this star.

The main thing I enjoyed about Project Hail Mary was the relationship between Grace and an alien he meets on his travels. Their working together was fun, moving and interesting, in the sense of exploring the truths that might form the common ground for communication between humanity and alien life.

The main ‘truth’ in the book does not really involve the periodic table or scientific concepts, although there is plenty of all that. The truth that comes up repeatedly is the idea that problems contain their own solutions. Astrophage is both a really big problem and an equally big opportunity. This life form has evolved to store huge amounts of energy. Grace’s space ship actually uses astrophage for fuel, allowing him to get to the star where the answer to controlling astrophage might lie. This book really is one problem after another. The sequence was – problem, anxiety, solution, the answer typically deriving from the difficulty.

Did the idea that problems contain their own solutions come over as a universal truth, or as trite cliche? Maybe something can be a cliche because it is true. People are always looking for answers, but don’t find satisfaction with the same ones over and over again, even if they are correct. One way or another people want to keep moving on, and their favourite solutions are the ones that contain interesting new problems. So yes, I did feel the book explored something with a wide relevance. Maybe the repeated pattern of problem, anxiety, solution did get a little monotonous at times, but this was certainly an interesting story.

Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume is one of the 20th century’s best selling German novels, winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the PEN Translation Prize for the English edition by John Woods. It’s about an eighteenth century Parisian man, born with a superhuman sense of smell, and a lack of any normal moral sense. He will stop at nothing in his efforts to make the world’s greatest perfume.

I will tell you right away that this is a weird and dark book, its creepiness deriving from the fact that we are in the realm of smell. Smell, as I have learned with a bit of background reading, is the most ancient of senses, evolving from the primeval ability of early life forms to understand the chemical make-up of their environment.

A book set in an aromatic world is in tricky territory because reading is a visual, or auditory, experience. A ‘smell book’ would be very revealing in some ways, reaching places that the other senses could not, while also having the ability to trigger all sorts of emotions and memories. But the structure of the narrative would be all over the place. Smells linger and merge. Chapter one might not really end on its last page, but potentially persist into all the chapters that come after. And the last chapter could very well waft into the first. Also the book would be very short on thought and analysis. You smell things like manure and roses, not justice or the law. Old books smell, literature does not. We are talking something elemental here, which does not recognise abstractions. Smell is like an ancient world, which survives into the present day as a kind of Jurassic Park. Actually, the novel Perfume could be compared to that film – a fanciful portrayal of a reborn primeval force, sometimes beautiful, often scary and violent, with a terrifying T. rex central character who cannot be confined, despite the cheery confidence of Richard Attenborough. Very interesting, but approach with caution, and don’t expect to find the experience entirely pleasant.

The Story of the Lamp (and the Candle) is a history of artificial light, by F.W. Robins, published in 1939. I read the book as research for a novel I am writing which involves candles.

This book has a lot of detail about individual types of lamp and candle through the ages. But it’s also good on the big picture, of how fire and light have influenced human history. The evolution of technology, from pottery, metal work, and all other related crafts, to engines – whether that’s steam, internal combustion or rocket – through to the generation of electricity and everything that comes with it, derives from the control of fire. This breakthrough also had the effect of greatly expanding the time available for people to do things. Not much can be done in the dark, but people had the ability to turn night into day. Given the revolution this represents, it is not surprising that a veneration of fire and light has echoed down the centuries. The Story of the Lamp was very good at tracing these echoes. As just one example, the centre of ancient societies was the communal hearth. At some point someone discovered you could take a small portion of that light and heat into the surrounding darkness, in the form of a burning stick, which became a taper, then a candle; or it became a lamp, burning the fat that came from cooking, done on that same communal hearth. These separate flames could go off and wander about, even set themselves up in new communities, while always maintaining their link with the original fire. They were small parts of the whole. As just one example of the echoes that remain of this long lost primal camp fire, the epilogue suggests we think about the tradition of the Olympic flame, lit every five years at Olympia, and then taken off to wherever the Olympic Games has set up its new camp.

The Story of the Lamp shows how the present is a mirror of the past. All the aspects of our complex world can be traced back to people sitting next to a camp fire they managed to start and maintain. That is rather comforting. At the same time, the book serves as a reminder that ancient people saw danger in the seemingly miraculous gift that made their lives so much better and brighter. This fear was part of respect they felt for what they had been given. Maybe we could do with some of that

The Wall is a 2019 novel by John Lanchester, taking the rhetoric of Brexit to its metaphorical extreme by imagining a dystopian future where Britain is surrounded by a concrete wall. This barrier has a dual role, holding back both rising sea levels and migrants who are trying to escape climate disaster further south – known as Others in the book. The narrator is Kavanagh, a newbie wall guard, doing his obligatory national service.

The sections I found most interesting were the passages where Kavanagh is just hanging around on the wall. There isn’t much to do except think. We get some subtle sense that a wall is never a simple barrier between us and them. Who are we and who are they? Have a look at this short passage, for example, where Kavanagh thinks about his opposite number on the Wall duty roster:

When you came on shift you always hated the person you were relieving. The fact that you knew the other set of emotions so completely, that you knew exactly what the other person was feeling, made it worse. Your shift twin was a person you met twice a day, about whom you had very strong opinions, who you didn’t really know.’

In a way, the other you, your twin who does what you do for the twelve hours when you’re off duty is as unknown as the Others out there beyond the wall. Given a slight twist of fate you could easily exchange places with them. Maybe you are one of them already – as we see in the case of a senior officer on the Wall who used to be an Other.

There is a lot of that sort of thing. At one point we encounter a group of ruthless people who are really bad people, who act selfishly for nothing but their own gain. Are they truly the Others who we have to keep out, or are they a reflection of a people who refuse to help others on a national scale?

There is action in the book. It’s not all a young man hanging around thinking. But I would say the real action goes on inside Kavanagh’s head. Personally I would have had less action and more of Kavanagh mooching about. As Anthony Powell once wrote

“Action might have confused the issue by proving too exciting. Action is, after all, exciting rather than interesting.”

But that’s just me.

This book is an interesting reflection of its times, using a highly unsubtle, simple-minded caricature of an answer to national issues, to explore them in complex ways.