Joseph O’Connor – My Father’s House

Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House is a quality thriller, short on violence, with a large cast of interesting characters and a compelling narrative.

My Father’s House is a fictionalised account of real events that took place at Christmas 1943 in Rome, a city occupied at that time by the Nazis, and run by the Gestapo. It’s a brilliant reconstruction of the events from a series of different points of view – diaries, interviews, letters or conversations that supposedly took place many years afterwards – and tells the story of Hugh O’Flaherty, a Catholic priest involved in helping Jews and escaped allied prisoners to find temporary sanctuary in and around the Vatican City, and finally to escape from the clutches of the Nazi regime.

The writer mixes fact and fiction in an unusual way. Hugh O’Flaherty was a real person, as were several of the other characters: some of them appeared on This is Your Life a popular British TV series in the 1960s. The author claims that in his version some characters are amalgamations of two or three different people, and it makes sense for a novelist to do that, but O’Connor gave the Gestapo chief the fictitious name Hauptmann, yet used the priest’s real name, and it seems odd to mix fact with fiction in that way. Perhaps he was happy to glorify the role of the priest, yet wanted to avoid doing the same for the original Gestapo officer. But at its heart My Father’s House is a great story, and the conflation of truth and fiction only made me more interested to find out what really happened. The events of the novel take place in just a few nights, and the people that O’Flaherty helped are shadowy figures, described very briefly. Curiosity about what happened to them was the most enduring thing I took from the novel.

O’Connor’s post modern approach, using different genres and points of view is effective in creating a sense of realism. The different narrators can only tell the story as they saw it, which allows O’Connor to control the way the plot unfolds for the reader, and though this is not a page turner, it never lacks interest, as the hero, O’Flaherty, is in danger throughout.

Perhaps the most interesting character in the novel is the city of Rome, its food, its music, and the city walks that are involved. But the other characters have a lot to offer too: the English ambassador and his cockney man servant go way beyond the conventions and clichés we might expect from a thriller, and the portrayal of the closed world of the Vatican is as dark and brooding as the setting – Rome in the few days leading up to Christmas.

The descriptions of Hauptmann’s family, and his estate on the outskirts of Rome, tell us something about life with and without a conscience, and there are flashes of inspiring Italian resistance. The lists of tortures and descriptions of cruelties are never enough to put off a squeamish reader, and fairly typical of this kind of fiction, as are the disguises and heroic chases around the city’s darkened streets: in these sections the lack of fine detail leads to an atmospheric rather than a realistic account. The climax itself is in fact as silly as could be, and I found it completely unbelievable, but that did not detract from the strength of this novel, which is its portrayal of hope and its evocation of a range of compassionate, brave and inspirational characters.

The Muse – Jessie Burton

The most interesting character in The Muse by Jessie Burton is the West Indian secretary who works in a high class London art gallery. Jessie Burton seems to catch the tone of this narrator’s voice. She is young and vulnerable, losing her close friend to a conventional marriage and finding herself alone in a strange city. She is reluctant to open herself to new experiences and unwilling to develop close relationships but finds herself drawn to two people who have very different views about a painting that dates from the Spanish Civil War.

This is one of those books that hops between time zones – a technique that many people, including my wife, find annoying. The story opens in 1967 when the narrator, Odelle, escapes the boredom of her Dolcis shoe shop and gets involved in the London art world. The scene moves to Spain in the 1930s where a middle class English girl opens a letter inviting her to take a place at the Slade School of Art.

In 1967 a painting is brought into the gallery by a handsome young man in a leather jacket. It appears to be the lost work of a Spanish artist and likely to be extremely valuable. Odelle becomes romantically involved with the painting’s owner, who is desperate for cash, and becomes ever closer to her female boss who seems to know more about the origins of the painting than she is willing to admit.

Back in the 1930s the Spanish Civil War is beginning and our English art student meets a Spanish communist at war with his fascist father and brothers. The student’s father is an adulterous art dealer with sexist views about who might qualify to be an artist. Her mother is neurotic and depressed. Both women become emotionally entangled with the handsome Spanish communist and his sixteen year old sister. Everything builds to a violent and romantic Spanish climax.

Meanwhile in England Odelle’s boss is dying of pancreatic cancer. Will she tell Odelle what she knows about the painting before she passes away?

The Muse is mystery story dolled up in the intellectual trappings of politics and modern art. It raises questions about the sexist nature of art criticism, and dramatises some fairly conventional political ideas. The Spanish Civil War has been explored in better and more interesting ways than this book manages, though it is a well written and fairly convincing account which brings the characters to life. The description is vivid and well imagined and the events dramatic enough.

Even so The Muse fails to convince. Odelle’s boss, Quick, is the key to the mystery but despite the writer’s inventive descriptions she is a shadowy character, and never really comes to life. The events in Spain seem well rehearsed and the relationships are not really compelling. The violence meted out to the young Spanish girl is the most dramatic moment, and reveals shocking depths of cruelty, but the gender issues raised, and the questions about the nature of art, are fairly predictable and seem to be aimed at a specific, mostly female audience.

Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate

When a young princess falls in love with a peasant boy because of his beautiful singing voice her father is not pleased. And neither is the boy’s friend, the son of the village witch doctor. A few magic spells later and the boy is whisked off to slavery in the Americas, leaving the witch doctor’s son to take his place. But the girl, broken hearted, and wearing a headdress decorated with sea shells, dies by the side of a lake.

The rest of Twelve Bar Blues follows the unravelling of this act of betrayal down the generations and across the world.

Patrick Neate won the Whitbread Prize for Twelve Bar Blues, which begins with this fairy tale about a princess, set in an African village in the mists of time, and takes in London New York and New Orleans before returning to the same village by jumbo jet.

It is a novel full of wit, humour and crazy characters. There is Lick Holden, the greatest jazz cornet player never known. When he is incarcerated for a childhood misdemeanour we discover that the warden runs the prison during the day, but at night the law of the jungle applies. It is a terrifying time for Lick, though the horrific and violent descriptions of clandestine bullying have an element of comedy that distances the reader from its cruelty. Lick finds his way to the prison band and impresses the bandmaster with his ability to blow the cornet with both his chops and his head. Playing at his mother’s funeral he unleashes his heart, and further trauma means there is more to come.

We watch Lick in Cooltown, Louisiana in 1908, then in Storyville, New Orleans where he teaches Louis Armstrong the hot new style. There are hookers, speakeasies and violent dives. Back in Africa a new village chief falls in love with a woman with ears like a monkey because he loves the jazz she plays on the hi-fi. He is living in a concrete hut, and worrying about his manhood when Corissa Pink, a black archaeologist from Detroit turns up with an African headdress that she found in the bed of a nearby lake. The seashells used as decoration intrigue her as Zambawi is many miles from the coast.

Back in London, Sylvia, a prostitute with Italian and African blood, leaves for New York to investigate her roots. The drunken English youth she meets on the plane may well be a cipher for the author of this story. He is one of the few white characters in the novel, and almost the only one portrayed in a favourable light. Together they search for Sylvia’s family in New York and Chicago. The people we meet during their travels are grotesque or amusing caricatures, and include a black evangelist driving a limousine and a seedy, slum dwelling eighty year old Italian uncle waiting for a prostitute to arrive and give him a blow job.

In Chicago they meet a wayward African witch doctor who is the reincarnation of the man who cast such a vicious spell in the opening chapter. His attempt to draw the story to its conclusion by making good his ancestor’s guilty deed takes us to the end of Twelve Bar Blues.

This was a great novel in so many ways. I loved the crazy characters, the wild and varied settings, and the way the plot seamlessly drew together such different times, locations and events. The African chief living in a concrete hut is perfectly drawn picture of a man in a middle age crisis. In him and other characters the author shows us human frailty, but there are depths of love and companionship that provide both optimism and humour.

I wonder how this novel – published in 2002 – would be accepted now, in a time when I have heard people claim only disabled actors can play the part of Richard 3rd, and only black men can play Othello? Cultural appropriation is defined as the exploitation of cultural traditions for profit: for example Exeter Chiefs rugby team using an Indian headdress and name as a slogan or logo. Neate is a white man who makes us laugh at black people by exploiting stereotypical representations of them, their ability to play jazz, and their role in criminal activities. Sadly, I can feel myself being sucked down into a woke quagmire!

Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon is now a blockbuster movie starring Leonardo Di Caprio, and this image from the film is on the cover of the edition I read. But I wonder if it gives a fair representation of the book? A movie in which DiCaprio, a handsome white man, marries an Indian bride to steal her share of the tribe’s oil rights is grist to the Hollywood mill. There are so many ways to bring in sex, seduction and violence.

But the non- fiction account I read is a drier affair, concerned mostly with the facts of several key murder cases, and the possible motives of different suspects. David Grann occasionally explains how the Indian victims might have felt, but rarely puts them at the centre of dramatic and exciting events. Yet there are so many incidents in this book that could be dramatised for cinematic effect: Indian houses blown up or set on fire so as to obliterate their owners; Indians plied with drinks until they are unconscious, then shot, execution style, in the back of the head; Indians fed poisoned alcohol, their death appearing to be accidental. Filmed in the saloons and bars of Osage County Oklahoma in the 1920s, then the richest place in the world, there would be nodding donkey oil pumps, plenty of wild characters, western sheriffs brought in to root out the corruption, and outlaws living rough in the fag end of the wild west. Bootleggers too! So much drama.

But the murders that match the tone of the book involve the slow administration of poison, or corrupt doctors, slowly betraying a diabetic. No one was sure if the Shoun brothers, both doctors, were really administrating insulin, or something a little more lethal, or if many other mysterious deaths were poisonings, and that’s the case in the whole of this book. William Hale was convicted of several Indian murders, and Ernest Burkhart coughed up in the end, wracked by guilt. But there was much more to the murders than this. So many remained unsolved, and so many deaths that might have been murders were overlooked, that we are left not with a Hollywood ending – death or redemption or whatever Scorsese chose to give us. Instead there are only unanswered questions, and sadness.

A glance at the cast tells me there’s not even a place in the film for Tom White, the Texas ranger brought into Osage County to sort out the truth from the lies peddled by corrupt politicians and local businessmen on the lookout for a quick buck. The film must contain nothing of this, or of White’s connection with J Edgar Hoover, who used these unsolved murders as a way to extend the power of the FBI at a time when the law was implemented by local officials, and might not always provide justice.

Of course Killers of the Flower Moon is a book about racism, about Indians driven from pillar to post, and left rot in the most desolate, least fertile part of Oklahoma. Only that turns out to be the wealthiest spot on the earth because it’s on top of massive oil fields. And because the Osage bought the land from the government it’s theirs, and so is the oil – though many are labelled as drunken savages, too weak to manage their riches and given only pocket money by their guardians.

Killers of the `Flower Moon was definitely worth reading – but don’t expect it to be anything like the film. The book is a leisurely, thoughtful and detailed account in which Grann deals honestly with the events, piecing them together like a true detective. He explores the history of the Osage tribe, and the impact of the murders on those who are alive today, and he shares their story with tact and sensitivity, not with Hollywood drama.

If that sounds interesting, this book might be for you.

Bad Actors – Mick Herron

Bad Actors is the next instalment of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, now a successful Apple TV programme starring Gary Oldman.

Herron writes about the secret world of spies, government ministers and civil servants, and the plots unfold against a background of contemporary political events. In Real Tigers a dishonest politician, someone quite a bit like Boris Johnson, created chaos the slow horses needed to sort out. In Bad Actors Sparrow is a kind of Dominic Cummings, ripping through the British establishment like a dose of salts. Cummings wanted to turn the civil service from a politically neutral bureaucracy, hard for governments to manage, as in the TV programme Yes Minister, into something more malleable, and directly controlled by Number Ten. He planned to introduce radical thinkers from different walks of life to challenge what he described as the inflexible civil service group think that was stopping the country from making its Brexit freedoms work. (Pass me a bucket please.) It would have been another Conservative step towards fascist autocracy.

Acting in the spirit of Cummings, in Bad Actors Sparrow employs a futurologist to join the cabinet and sort out the country’s future, but it turns out she is the daughter of a former KGB spy. She goes missing and it looks like Diana Taverner, head of the secret service, has set in motion a rarely used protocol that involves kidnapping and murder. Sparrow sees his chance to denounce her for unauthorised use of power and appoint a stooge of his own to run the service. He knows his friends in the right wing press will be happy to help him with free publicity.

Once again it’s down to the slow horses to sort things out. Sparrow employs Italian football hooligans to try to retrieve his futurologist from MI5’s rehabilitation centre – a stately home quintessentially and beautifully English – but the slow horses intervene. There are enough scenes of mayhem and violence here to satisfy most tastes, but the best thing about Herron is his ability to create a diverse range of amusing characters. The focus is on playing with the stereotypes of the genre by creating heroes who triumph despite their incompetence. Only Jackson Lamb is on top of his game, farting, drinking, smoking, grubby, and not much of a hero by Bond’s standards, but always able to get one over on Westminster’s chattering classes.

It’s not only the characters in Herron’s novels that challenge genre stereotypes. He creates images of twenty first century London – down at heel and deliberately unromantic, which set the tone for the series, though you could argue that Len Deighton got there first with Harry Palmer.

Herron is always willing to kill the slow horses, and that makes the novels unpredictable to some extent, but the latest to be rubbed out was a real loss – at the heart of all the previous episodes, and as near a hero as the format allows. It was hard to bear, though in fact the book was just as good without him, and there were a couple of tantalising appearances to suggest he might be back next time.

Even more reason to read the next episode.

Despite the unusual narrative structure – Act 2 comes first, followed by Act 1, then an intermission followed by Act 3 – Bad Actors is one of the best in the series and much easier to follow than some of the others.

Highly recommended.

Manchester Unspun – Andy Spinoza

There is a photograph of my class at Elysian Street infants school taken in about 1955. I am the one at the right hand side of the back row, head tucked forward as if taken by surprise. I am looking smart in one of my mother’s home knits. Behind me there is a railing, and behind that the corrugated roof of a chemical factory that made dyes for Manchester’s cotton mills. Both my grandfather and his father were labourers in chemical factories like this: one worked in an alum works, and the other for Halls, dyers, on Mansell Road.

Fast forward sixty five years, and the brown field site behind Elysian Street school is part of Manchester City’s Etihad Campus. Premier League fans, European cup millions and the Arabs’ black gold pay Mancunian wages these days. The cotton mills are silent, and the warehouses have been turned into flats, but every winter weekend thousands of visitors pour their hard earned cash into Manchester’s hotels and bars, turbo charging the city’s economy. One week they wear the blue of Manchester City, and the next United’s red. They come for the football, eat at the restaurants, fill up the pubs and probably drop by Salford Boys Club, or some other icon of the Manchester music scene, for a snapshot.

When I left Manchester in 1969 I never really went back. Though the city owns my metropolitan heart, I didn’t witness the music scene in the 1980s, or the huge transformation afterwards. But in 1979, when the threads that held me to the city were being stretched to breaking point, Andy Spinoza, author of Manchester Unspun, arrived at Manchester University ready to fill in the gaps. From 1983 Spinoza edited City Life, an alternative guide to Manchester’s entertainment scene. He moved onto the Manchester Evening News, then formed his own PR company, which was employed by the movers and shakers, people like Tony Wilson, founder of the infamous Haçienda nightclub, and key political figures, such as Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein.

Manchester Unspun traces the modern history of the city in a series of chapters describing the different aspects of Spinoza’s career, and his interactions with Wilson, Leese and Bernstein. Spinoza presents a series of reminiscences that tell the story of the city thematically, but the focus is on what he saw. He does not try to disentangle the contributions of the key players, or provide an overview of the city’s development.

The anecdotes give some interesting insights about the Haçienda and the characters that populated it. Manchester was notorious for its gangs and shootings, and there are stories about the drug fuelled dancing, and the invention of Madchester. I knew very little about gang leaders or characters like Tony Wilson, who broadcast on Granada TV, though it’s clear that his personality and the philosophies he adopted were significant in developing the music scene, and creating the Manchester we know now. A key moment was the Sex Pistols’ appearance on Wilson’s show, So It Goes in September 1976, when they performed Anarchy in the Uk.

But let’s not succumb to the Great Man theory of history. Granada TV was groundbreaking in the 1960s, before Wilson became prominent, and Manchester was always a radical force. Look at Peterloo, and Manchester’s historical connections with Engels and the suffragettes. The Manchester Guardian, now just The Guardian, is a testimony to the deep roots of left wing politics in the city. My old school was visited by the queen, had neatly trimmed lawns and a cricket square that bred an England captain, but morning assemblies included John Cage’s Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds, and rabble rousing speeches from John Steinbeck. We were presented with Mother Courage, Malcolm Muggeridge and Anouilh’s Rhinoceros and left to think about what they meant to us. That was Manchester in the 1960s.

I enjoyed Manchester Unspun but it did not give me the kind of insights I had hoped to find, because Spinoza is not that interested in what I wanted to know. I would have liked to discover more about the music and lyrics, perhaps find a comparison of the styles and approaches of different groups, but Spinoza is not that into poetry. He does write about Wilson’s counter cultural philosophy, touching on the ideas that drove him and groups like The Smiths and The Happy Mondays, but the music and lyrics are not explored in detail.

Spinoza witnessed the political wrangling in the city, and the way that the Labour council got in bed with Thatcher’s public /private enterprise philosophies, but he does not set out to deal with that as an issue either, it just bubbles upon every now and then as he tells us his story . He explains how the grants they gained set the city on the road to its current prosperity but makes few comments or judgements on the impact of the policies on ordinary Mancunians. The few relatives I have left in the area seem to have gained little: the city I last saw was like a dart board, its centre a high rise bulls eye surrounded by empty spaces, derelict terraces and boarded up shops.

Spinoza does draw some political threads together in a final summary but I would have liked to see more of that kind of political analysis, a more incisive examination of the way that Manchester exchanged its industrial and trade union roots for of a mess of skyscrapers, cheap hotels and football stadiums.

How to be an ex Footballer – Peter Crouch

It’s the third of Crouch’s books exploring the hinterlands of his footballing life. I enjoyed the first, How to be a Footballer, and the second, I Robot, and found this one was ok – a relaxing and easy read.

I doubt there’ll be another- it’s pretty clear by the end that Crouch has squeezed all the juice out of this particular orange. How to be a Footballer was brim full of gossip about the crazy escapades Crouch and his colleagues got up to as young men. Many of them were well known figures – and I’m nosey enough to be interested. And some of the tales – like the one about Stephen Ireland’s pink Range Rover – appealed because they were players from my club. The book was fresh and up to date.

In How to be an ex Footballer Crouch and his ghost writer Tom Fordyce have had to dig a little deeper. There’s a short bibliography of newspaper articles used as sources, and a few old pros that Crouch knew from his early days of football have chipped in by giving interviews and offering advice. There’s still plenty of entertainment, lots of anecdotes accompanied by Crouch’s usual pithy descriptions of footballing characters. He’s good at telling a joke, preparing the reader for the punch line or sizing a character up in a few precise and well chosen words, and the whole thing is light hearted, sure to buoy you up, and take you to a better place if life is getting you down. Caricatures and stereotypes abound, as in the first of these volumes, and that’s partly what makes them such an easy read: everything fits nicely into your preconceptions.

As before, the chapter headings group together different types of post football career – Manager, Pundit, Actor, Grafter and so on – and it’s interesting to see how these men, many of them quite familiar to soccer fans – ended up. By the way, they are all men!

The section on actors of course includes Cantona, one of the great characters of the modern game – and I say that as a Manchester City fan. And then there’s the serious side: stories about players like Lee Hendrie of Aston Villa, who lost all his money to cheats and hangers on, details about lives spent as plumbers or builders that show that it’s not all glamour and glory. To be frank some of these sections were a bit flat, and it seemed that Crouch, running out of ideas, was padding the final chapters out with well meaning but fairly banal comments about the dangers facing young players entering the game, and the problems faced by those whose careers are coming to a close.

I suppose the footballer who achieved the most when his professional career was over was George Weah, who became President of Liberia, but the ex-player who intrigued Crouch the most was Gavin Peacock. Crouch watched him from the stands as a teenager, and played on the same team as him at QPR. Later Peacock went on to become a pastor at Calvary Grace Church in Calgary, Canada, and Crouch devotes a whole chapter to him and other footballers who lived out their Christian faith in one way or another. He is clearly intrigued, dipping his toe into the water of religious faith. There’s a little less sarcastic humour here, and a definite respect for the choices these men have made, so let’s hope Crouch takes the next step.

Still Life – Sarah Winman

Still Life by Sarah Winman is a sweet, beautifully written and life affirming story that I enjoyed in many ways. But I was desperate to finish it so I could move onto something less sugary. It’s a literary novel which makes many specific allusions to, and was inspired by EM Forster’s A Room with a View. The ubiquitous presence of a parrot that can quote Shakespeare adds elements of magical realism, there is an idiot savant with a Romantic imagination, and a flowery literary style that obviously appealed to readers of The Sunday Times, and to BBC2, who in 2021 nominated this as one of their reading list for Between the Covers, the talking heads programme introduced by Sarah Cox.

The novel opens somewhere near Florence during the allied advance up Italy in the second world war. Ulysses, an army driver born within the sound of Bow Bells, meets a cultured and aged spinster with artistic credentials. He introduces her to Captain Darnley, and they discover hidden works of art looted by the Germans. For Ulysses this is a different world, and a life changing experience. His magical time in Florence ends as he rescues a man about to commit suicide by jumping off a roof.

Florence is a romantic dream, and portrayed as such throughout the novel. But the London that Ulysses returns to at the end of the war is also represented as a dreamlike or mythic location. The local characters are cockney gangsters or warm hearted mothers and the setting is a British pub in the heart of the city and next to a canal. Dirty Old Town comes to mind in some of the scenes. The pub is a mother, nurturing its working class inhabitants by opening its doors to their sing songs and love affairs, providing a stage on which their infidelities and their passions are played out, and providing shelter for the odd and disabled.

On his return to London Ulysses discovers that Peggy, his missus, has fallen in love with a Yank – overpaid and over here – and given birth to that man’s child. The GI disappears, leaving the girl to grow up, but Peggy dreams of him returning. She and Ulysses manage a few brief physical encounters in the years that follow: he is compassionate, loving and gentle, giving her the space to grow. She marries again- badly. Years pass as Peg’s daughter grows up.

Cressy is a half wit and a bit of a seer. He wins a fortune betting on Fanny Blankers-Koen winning a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics. Meanwhile Ulysses inherits a house in Florence as a result of his heroic actions in saving a life. Later Cressy wins another fortune betting the house on Geoff Hurst scoring a hat trick in the 1966 World Cup Final. Cressy, Ulysses and Peggy’s daughter head to Florence to live in the property he has inherited and London bleeds into Florence, or the other way round. Children grow up and become lesbians. The aged spinster, also a lesbian, returns and the novel ends with a flashback to her encounter with EM Forster in a pension in Florence, where he gained inspiration for his novel, A Room with a View, and she gained an inspiration for life from her affair with a beautiful, female Italian servant.

I don’t want to tell you any more about the story. It is at the same time absolutely beautiful and completely annoying. Please read it to save me the bother of continuing this review.

The Anarchy – William Dalrymple

The history of the East India Company is relevant today because its story is a damning insight into human cruelty and greed. The Anarchy can teach us a lot about that. But Dalrymple claims the East India Company is especially significant in our world of multi-national corporations, powerful enough to dictate national polices on issues like taxation and the environment, because it was the first of its kind to gain that kind of power, the first company to become more powerful than a country. It gained that power by corrupting governments and individuals, and went on to devastate the environment and control the economy of the whole of India. In this respect it was the canary in the coal mine, a forerunner of the tobacco and oil companies of today, which cross national boundaries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the national debate with lies and half truths about global warming and pollution.

Dalrymple begins in Elizabethan England, an impoverished outcast on the edge of Europe. A motley crew of investors from different social backgrounds gather to ask the queen’s permission to invest in a boat to trade with the Indies. He describes the traders’ first tentative steps, referring to a Mughal painting that shows the British King James as a minor and irrelevant figure begging at the court of the all powerful emperor in Delhi. As late as 1687 European troops bearing pikes were no match for the Mughal’s Indian armies, but rapid developments in tactics and weaponry during the wars of the eighteenth century gave European soldiers a significant advantage over the Indian forces. In 1746. Joseph-François Dupleix, Director General of the French Compagnie des Indes, seized Madras from the British without bothering to consult the local Indian rulers. He refused to hand it back to them, preferring to keep it for the French, and when Mahfuz Khan objected, Dupleix defeated Khan’s 10000 strong army with just 700 troops.

The writing was on the wall: it was around this time that an English soldier of fortune said it would be easy to conquer the whole of the sub-continent, and that India would be at the mercy of any ruthless and well organised European army.

The rest, as they say, is history. The French and English were at war for much of this period: the Austro-Hungarian War of Succession lead to a short time of peace, but British and French colonial ambitions created a rivalry that erupted in violence around the world, including Canada, and its effects were even more significant in India. The rivalry was intensified during the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars at the turn of the century, and by the end of them the fate of India was sealed: it was in the hands of the British.

But it was not just the Europeans who were squabbling, murdering and cheating for the sake of money and power. India had been ruled since the 1400s by Moslem descendants of Timur the Lame – himself a notorious builder of empires. But during the eighteenth century a series of internal rivalries fractured his descendants’ empire, and Persian invasions, organised for the sole purpose of looting the Mughals’ vast wealth, further damaged their power.

Dalrymple gives a blow by blow account of the Machiavellian machinations of British French and Indian rulers during the whole of this period. It is dense and detailed, but Dalrymple does a good job of moving from one theatre of war or diplomatic conflict to another without losing the reader’s interest, whilst keeping the main threads of the narrative clear. The pen portraits of each of the main characters at the front of the book are helpful in this respect. They divide the dramatic personae into several key sections, of which the British, French, and Mughals are perhaps the most well known. There are also the Nawabs, who took over Bengal in 1740 in a military coup financed by Indian bankers, the Rohillas, soldiersof the last Mughal emperor Shah Alam, who in the end betrayed him, and the Sultans of Mysore including the famous, Sultan Tipu who created a prosperous and well organised kingdom but had to cede half of it to Lord Cornwallis and the British. (You might know Cornwallis better as the general who lost north America to the yanks!) Finally, there were Marathas from the Deccan plateau who were a perpetual thorn in the Mughal emperor’s side.

The story of Shah Alam is especially tragic – the last Mughal emperor, a mere puppet on the throne for most of his life, kept in place by ever shifting alliances of British, French and Indian forces, cruelly blinded by a rebel from his own court, and subject to the whims of whatever breeze blew past his former stronghold in Delhi. The conquests of Clive of India, who committed suicide, and the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta are well known in England, but there is so much more to The Anarchy. Dalrymple, a resident of India, provides a balanced view of these epoch defining events, and many more, acknowledging different perspectives and often quoting large sections directly from the original source.

The Anarchy is not a book for the casual reader. The lack of detailed maps exemplifies this as much as anything: there are only three, so I had to make frequent references to Google to find out what was going on.

I really recommend The Anarchy, but you will probably need to read it twice, with an atlas of India open on your lap, to absorb even a small proportion of the detail Dalrymple includes. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to find time for that.

The Rabbit Hutch – Tess Gunty

The Rabbit Hutch is set in a post industrial mid- western town, and the hutch is a cheap housing block where residents are piled on top of each other like battery hens. Beyond the suburbs a natural valley filled with cotton tail rabbits is about to be redeveloped by out of town businessmen who offer meaningless reassurances about the environmental sustainability of their plans. This simple juxtaposition on the theme of rabbits is at the heart of a novel about loss of innocence and a failure to care.

Tiffany, aka Blandine, the main protagonist, is a gifted child who has been moved through a series of foster homes and now shares a flat in the Rabbit Hutch with three young men from similar backgrounds. All of them have been damaged by a lack of parental care.

Other residents include a mother who can’t bond with her baby – even looking into its eyes gives her the heeby-jeebies. Then there is an old couple talking about their children. The woman is unhappy and complains to her husband that the kids didn’t turn out right: we should have done something different – piano lessons or barefoot dancing or something. In both cases supportive husbands try to help the women accept that they love their child the best they can. Then there is Joan who monitors comments on an obituary website, deleting criticisms so that the dead are always seen in the best light. When she fails to remove a negative comment about a film star who has recently died, she finds herself in her boss’s office being reminded of her responsibilities. Joan tries to explain that the criticism was posted by the star’s only son: surely he has the right to have a voice? No – it can’t be allowed to stay, and so she deletes the comment again.

But the son, Moses, is absolutely right. We get to see the story from his point of view, and realise that his mother was incapable of loving him. He was mistreated and neglected. She was fickle in love, drank unwisely and was incapable of maternal feelings. The boy has spent his life on a psychiatrist’s couch, and is determined the truth should be known. When he discovers that Joan has deleted his comment again, he leaves the coast, boards a plane and heads to the mid west to sort things out.

Back to Blandine, whose academic gifts promised an exciting future until her education was derailed by an encounter with an abusive teacher. Now she roams the valley, watching the cottontail rabbits and the birds, enjoying the beauty of god’s green world. She reads the works of Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval visionary, and attends town council meetings where white businessmen pretend to have meaningful democratic consultations about their building plans, but she knows it’s all for show. Nothing will be changed, and the environmental protections they promise to instal at a later stage will never materialise.e

The denouement of The Rabbit Hutch brings these characters together in a dramatic and compassionate climax when Blandine takes home a lame goat she finds caught in a thorn bush down in the valley. Unfortunately she does not realise the boys she is sharing a flat with have begun slaughtering the mice they catch in traps, and are looking for bigger fish to fry. When she returns from the pet shop carrying what she needs to care for the animal, she stumbles on the boys, knives in hand. Meanwhile the old man has decided to return the dead mice Blandine’s flatmates keep dropping from the balcony above, and Moses, dressed in black clothes wildly decorated with luminous paint, is wandering about the Rabbit Hutch looking for Joan, and seeking revenge.

The Rabbit Hutch is a multilayered, ambitious and compassionate novel. Apart from the business men, who are only ciphers, the characters are well rounded, flawed and imperfect. The events are shocking at times, as the writer explores the consequences of emotional and economic poverty. But this is not a rust belt novel like Russo’s. Gunty is more surreal. Her imagination is given free rein and she uses different genres – biographies, letters, blogs, lists, cartoons, below the line comments – to give broader perspectives and points of view, so the book seems more like a collage than a coherent vision. In this sense she uses post- modern narrative approaches to great effect. The variety this adds, and the writer’s comic but sympathetic vision, and elusive use of symbolism, make The Rabbit Hutch one of the best books I have read this year.