While Pears’ ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ (published 1997) tells its story through the voices of four people and is set in one time period, ‘The Dream of Scipio’ (published 2002) and his ‘Stone’s Fall’ (published 2009) combine multiple protagonists over different time periods.

All three periods in ‘Scipio’ are set mainly in Provence, in and around the towns of Vaison and Avignon. In the 5th century the Roman Empire was coming to an end, its power and influence waning rapidly without the resources to maintain control over its territories. The Christian Church was building its own power.

In the 14th century, Avignon was the seat of the Catholic Pope Clement VI. Bishops and cardinals contended for personal power; heresies challenged the Church’s teachings.

The 20th century saw the rise of fascism, the outbreak of war and the German occupation.

These periods are linked in the book by three characters, each with an interest in Cicero’s ‘Somnium Scipionis’ (‘Dream of Scipio’). In the 5th century Manlius, a Roman nobleman who is appointed Bishop of Vaison, writes a commentary on Cicero’s text. In 14th century Avignon a young scholar, Olivier de Noyen, is obsessed by Manlius’s work and other old manuscripts, and in the 20th century a student, Julien Barneuve, is in turn researching the life of the 14th century scholar.

Other threads link the three periods. In the Roman period Sophia, a female philosopher originally from Alexandria, has a strong influence on Manlius. Her Neo-Platonic ideas challenge the conventional teachings of the early Christian church. By the middle ages she has become Saint Sophia with a chapel outside Vaison dedicated to her. Olivier de Noyen knows the chapel well: a close friend paints a fresco in the chapel. Olivier himself is obsessed with Rebecca, the servant of Gersonides, a Jewish Neo-Platonist who challenges his thinking. Julien Barneuve has an enduring relationship with a strong and independent Jewish female artist (painter) who similarly challenges his view of the world and who for a time lives as a semi-recluse in St Sophia’s chapel.

And in each period the characters’ world faces a challenge – attacks on the rule of Rome by the Burgundians and the Goths; the Black Death; the rise of Fascism, the second world war and the German occupation of France.

Several of the characters are genuinely historic: the Jewish philosopher Gersonides, Pope Clement VI and the Burgundian King Gundobad for example. Others have close historical parallels – Pears’ Manlius is a close match to the 5th century Neo-Platonist Macrobius. The Wikipedia article about the book has more information on this aspect.

What of the book itself? For me it was a tough one to read, at least to start with. The first and easily the longest of its three parts I found particularly dense. Pears skips rapidly from one period to another in a succession of short episodes, demanding a lot from the reader to follow each thread and understand what’s going on. By half-way through (and still in Part 1) I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish. But when I finally reached Part 2 the episodes lengthened, the pace quickened: it became clear that there was a story to be told about each of the characters. And in Part 3 events in each period come to a climax. Some of the action is violent.

So this is a book that is gruelling, fascinating and astonishing. You could say it’s about Neo-Platonism and the battle of ideas. It’s about antisemitism. It’s about what it means to be a ‘civilised society’. But I ultimately see it as about power; how it is sought and wielded by the powerful and how it affects those who suffer under it. It implies that the actions of individuals, sometimes powerful, sometimes close to power but not themselves powerful, can lead to events that determine the course of history.

In summary, if you decide to read the book be prepared to settle in for the long haul. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it at the time but I felt it was a challenge, and in retrospect I’m glad to have read it. It’s an impressive achievement by the author, and I’ve learned some history along the way.

Well, it finally arrived – the third and final volume of the ‘Book of Dust’ trilogy. Parts 1 and 2 are reviewed here. I was critical of the third book of the ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy (review here): would Pullman pull it off this time, I wondered? Well …

Story-telling is an important part of Lyra’s character and a pervasive theme in both series, so I assume it’s important to Pullman himself too. And like ‘Dark Materials’, this is a good story. There’s plenty of intrigue, action, fantastic creatures old and new (notably gryphons), a return of the witches, scheming, friendship and betrayal played out by some familiar and some new characters.

But I feel that if ‘The Rose Field’ and its two precursors were ever to be studied as part of an English Literature syllabus there would be many faults found. Some episodes covered in detail disappear like water in the sand and are never followed up; new characters enter the narrative, are described in detail and then dropped; some seemingly important concepts (‘good numbers’ and the disembodied voices who first mention them, for example) are referred to and discussed but never appear again. Of course it’s a story, a fantasy, and not everything has to be explained or resolved; after all, that is part of the world in which it is set. Mysteries are allowed! But I can’t help thinking that Pullman has indulged himself by bringing in some ideas that he finds intriguing, like quantum mechanics, number theory, or the strange ‘wandering lake’ of Lop Nor (a real thing), purely because he wants to write about them. Consequently the story sometimes loses focus, leaving the reader thinking “What was that all about?”, or “Why did we have all that stuff earlier?”

But despite all that, and repeating my views on ‘Dark Materials’, I think most readers will be carried along by the pace and excitement and not worry too much about these problems. It is after all a cracking good tale!

Isherwood’s story set in Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic is a fictitious account drawing on his own time there and featuring characters based on real people. It is entertaining and amusing, but don’t expect to be shocked either by the decadent society he describes or the violent upsurge of the Nazis. Isherwood treats these matters lightly to make a palatable story – a choice he later renounced:

What repels me now about Mr Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The “wickedness” of Berlin’s night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an over-crowded market. … As for the “monsters”, they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy.

Source: Wikipedia, downloaded 17/02/2026; quoted from Fryer, Jonathan (1977); “Isherwood: A Biography” pp 146-7; Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company; ISBN 0-385-12608-5

Having admired and enjoyed Pears’ ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost‘ and ‘Stone’s Fall‘ I came across ‘The Portrait’ by chance when I was looking for his ‘The Dream of Scipio’ in my local library catalogue. But while ‘Fingerpost’ and ‘Stone’ are both multi-layered historical mysteries, ‘Portrait’ is something very different: a continuous, sustained, first-person monologue like nothing else I can remember reading. There are no chapters, just section breaks.

The setting is an artist talking to his sitter – someone he has known well in the past but not been in touch with for some time. The publisher’s blurbs on the cover give away that there’s a crime involved, but even well over halfway through the book I had no idea where the story was going. From the start there is a slowly growing sense of menace as events in the past begin to coalesce into a narrative which comes to a dramatic head in the final few pages of the book.

A classic I should have read long ago. It bounces up and down along the surface – entertaining, amusing. Then with the introduction of Bernhard Landauer you find you’re slithering and bumping down the crumbling cliff until you end up in a bruised heap at the bottom.

It’s just over ten years ago that I first read a full-length novel by Dave Hutchinson. It was the first in his ‘Fractured Europe’ series, and I’ve been a fan ever since: ‘The Essence’ is now the ninth I have read.

If I were to choose one word to describe to all these novels it would be ‘weird’. In some the weirdness is dialled up high with time-shifts, alternate realities and sci-fi technology. In others, including ‘The Essence’ , the weirdness creeps into the narrative almost by stealth. The story opens with its protagonist, Michael Brookes, in a hospital which

was not, strictly speaking, a hospital. It was more of a rest home for fuddled gentlefolk. It occupied a big house in several acres of grounds tucked away at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac on the edge of Mill Hill. (p7)

It turns out that the not-hospital is run by the security services: Michael, who worked as an economist in a fairly insignificant part of MI6, is there because he had some kind of extreme breakdown at work which seems to have ended with an office room being trashed, but Michael has no memory of what happened. The nice people in the hospital are doing their best to look after him, rehabilitate him and bring back his lost memory. So far so normal. The plot seems fairly familiar.

Michael makes steady progress. His medication is down to two different pills once a day. He’s allowed – encouraged – to make independent excursions first to the local shops, then further afield. At last he’s allowed to go home. He still feels mentally fragile, but they have given him a friendly social worker who visits every few days and he seems to be coping. He’s not back to work yet, but HR want to see him to discuss his work situation. He goes in, and surprisingly finds they want him to go to the Netherlands to find out why there’s been a problem between the British and Dutch intelligence services. He doesn’t feel he’s ready but it seems he’s the only person who can do this. Just a quick visit, out and back, one day. Two days at most.

And so the weirdness begins to build. An attempt to kidnap him is foiled, and he finds himself mixed up with a group of people – they call themselves ‘essenceheads’ – who believe there is some mysterious phenomenon which they call ‘The Essence’ which manifests seemingly at random and interferes with the known laws of physics.

No more spoilers; you must read the book for how this plays out. The action happens in the Netherlands and Poland, both of which Hutchinson knows well. As in his other novels there’s a good cast of characters to keep track of as the story unfolds, and it all moves at a good pace with plenty of action. While the final plot reveal may not come as a complete surprise, the ending itself is completely consistent with Hutchinson’s practice of leaving some things unexplained for the reader to puzzle over and imagine what might happen next.

And in case you’re wondering if it really is weird – does The Essence exist? – you’ll have to make up your own mind. All I’ll say is that there’s a teleporting dog in the story.

Set in the time of the Great Depression in 1930s America this book tells the story of the Dunne family and their neighbours. They, like many others, had been tempted to move west to farm in Oklahoma only to struggle and eventually be brought to despair by the dust storms caused in large part by the farming methods they themselves adopted. You think you’ve read this story before? You’re probably right; it’s also the plot of John Steinbeck’s great novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. But more on that later.

The Dunnes’ story unfolds in two parts; the first set in Oklahoma, the second in California as the Dunnes and others abandon their farms and move west in the hope of being able to make a living. Throughout, the characters are written with care and compassion. They are supportive towards each other and act with dignity even as they despair over their struggles with the weather, unreliable harvests, increasing debt and banks foreclosing on their land and property. Through all this they are trying to live normal lives: young couples fall in love and wonder how they might be able to set up home together; parents want their children to go to school; old people worry about the futures of their children and grandchildren.

And then come the dust storms. The fine dust and sand fills everything, filtering into barns, houses and lungs, covering and suffocating new crops, killing animals and people. Babb’s description is powerful and harrowing, telling the full horror of what the community had to endure.

Inevitably the time comes when they have to abandon their farm and head west. In the second part of the book they join thousands like themselves working as itinerant crop-pickers in California, moving north and south with the seasons. Treated hardly better than slave labour they are ruthlessly exploited by the big corporations who control agricultural business in the state. Unions try to organise and fight for better conditions but face strong and often violent opposition.

At the end of the book there is no resolution, no happy ending. The story has been told. Some have survived, others have not. Life goes on.

So who is Sanora Babb, and why did she write a different Grapes of Wrath? You might do well to turn the question round and ask why Steinbeck wrote a different version of Babb’s story.

Babb was born in Oklahoma in 1907 grew up as a child in Oklahoma and eastern Colorado in a farming family that faced the struggles about which she writes. Graduating from high school she was able to find work, eventually as a newspaper and magazine reporter and as a teacher in a rural school. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to join Associated Press as a reporter just in time for the stock market crash.

For almost the next ten years she made what living she could writing articles and stories for a variety of magazines, papers and journals. Then, quoting from the foreword to the book*,

… in 1938 she went to work as a volunteer for the Farm Security Administration … helping organise camps for the dispossessed farmers. … she kept a diary of her experiences and began a manuscript of her first novel. … Tom Collins, the founding manager of the Weedpatch migrant labour camp in Arvin … asked her to keep notes and later … [requested] a copy of them for another writer who was visiting the camp to research a novel. That writer was John Steinbeck, whom Babb reports she met twice.

No prizes for guessing what happened next. Babb sent four chapters of her her novel to Random House in New York who accepted it for publication and invited her to New York to finish it, which she did. But before it could be published, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ was released and sold 430,000 copies in its first five months. Random House understandably and regrettably decided that given the success of ‘Grapes’ there was no room for another book on the same subject and abandoned publication.

In the foreword to the book and the publicity blurbs on the cover Babb and the publishers are careful not to accuse Steinbeck of plagiarism, so what Babb might think privately we do not know. Neither, I believe, does Steinbeck acknowledge Babb as a source. It’s so long ago that I read Steinbeck that I can’t say whether ‘Unknown’ is a better book on its subject than ‘Grapes’, but it has made a strong impression on me and I suspect that if I re-read Steinbeck I would find Babb’s account more empathetic and be inclined to say it is the better of the two.

* I have anglicised the spelling

The story is set in Iceland but could have been set anywhere – only the names of the characters and places show the connection. The book feels like it was written to be adapted for a TV series. It gets better as it goes along. As the writer’s first novel I rate it

☆         rubbish
☆☆       poor
★★★     OK, more or less
☆☆☆☆   pretty good
☆☆☆☆☆ excellent

These are the first two books of Pullman’s second trilogy about Lyra, the mysterious substance called ‘Dust’ and the attempts of the powerful and sinister Magisterium to suppress all knowledge of it. The third book hasn’t yet been published. The two books are set in Lyra’s world which was introduced in the first trilogy, ‘His Dark Materials’ but this time there is no crossing over into other worlds.

The first book, ‘La Belle Sauvage’, tells Lyra’s origin story; her birth, parents, and how as a baby she came to be accepted into ‘academic asylum’ in Oxford’s Jordan College. Some characters from ‘His Dark Materials’ appear as they were some eleven years before those events; other important characters are introduced for the first time.

The second book, ‘The Secret Commonwealth’, takes up Lyra’s story about ten years after Dark Materials. Now she is a 21-year-old student at St Sophia’s College in Oxford, but she has changed as she grew older and she and her daemon Pan are hardly on speaking terms. Meanwhile the power of the Magisterium is growing and Lyra’s life is at risk, though she doesn’t realise this at first. Many of the characters who have been part of her earlier life are caught up in her story.

Pullman is a great story-teller and both books carry the reader along at a brisk pace. I found it easy to gulp them both down in big chunks over a short time. Although ‘La Belle Sauvage’ has its darker moments, ‘The Secret Commonwealth’ is much darker and more violent than anything before; enough I suspect to keep it off the ‘young adult fiction’ library shelves where ‘La Belle Sauvage’ is sometimes filed.

As for the outcome and any resolution, we must wait for the third and final book due, according to the author, in late 2024 (or, I suspect, more probably in 2025).

After I found the second book in this series a bit disappointing (see ‘Dead Lions’) I was slow getting round to reading the next ones. Happily, ‘Real Tigers’ and then ‘Spook Street’ lived up to the promise of the original ‘Slow Horses’.

The shabby antihero Jackson Lamb is a constant but Herron isn’t afraid to drop some characters and bring in new ones, which gives the series so far the feeling of a continuing saga. Fast-paced, intriguing, and full of people with untrustworthy motives – both books are a good read.