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!

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 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.

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr

_{Diogenes the Cynic}

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a clever and imaginative exploration of human frailty, environmental destruction, and the importance of fiction.

Four narratives set over two thousand years apart tell the story of Diogenes’ lost novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, supposedly saved from the burning ruins of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, and rediscovered and translated in the twentieth. Diogenes’ tale of a mad shepherd transformed into a donkey, a fish and finally a bird is at the centre of Doerr’s novel. The shepherd wants to fly into the air and soar amongst the constellations. He wants to enter the city in the sky where the wine never runs dry, and find the magical book that can tell you everything you could ever want to know. The “lost” tale of Diogenes, created by Doerr, is a fable about wisdom, foolishness and the cruel hand of the gods. And it is at the core of the three interlocking subplots of the novel Cloud Cuckoo Land.

First, in a small town American library an eighty year old man and half a dozen children prepare to perform a play based on the man’s translation of Diogenes’ rediscovered tale. Downstairs a bomb is waiting to go off.

Then in 15th century Serbia a harelipped male child is exiled from his mountain village and joins the great Muslim army en route to the siege of Constantinople. Inside the city sisters Anna and Maria are seamstresses. They sew golden threads into the ornate ritual vestments worn by the Greek Orthodox priests. Beaten and mistreated, somehow Anna learns to read, and finds solace in the fictional world she discovers. When, as a kind of punishment, her only book is thrown onto the fire, Anna seizes the chance to enter an abandoned library. Many of the manuscripts she finds there are disappointing, and she sells them to venturers from Florence who are in search of classical wisdom. But there is one she values more than all the rest. It is Diogenes’ story of the foolish shepherd, and when Constantinople falls and she escapes the city she takes it with her.

Late in the twenty first century a spaceship hurtles towards the nearest habitable planet. It will take generations to arrive, but earth is dying so there seems to be no choice. The ship’s computer is a library that contains all the knowledge in the world, information that Konstance, a teenage girl, will need if she is going to stay alive. But everything will change when she stumbles on Diogenes’ lost fable.

Those are the bare bones of Doerr’s novel which opens the gates of Constantinople and invites you to visit Lakeport, Idaho where the sanctity of owls is sacrificed on the altar of low wages, and children watch the mighty dollar turn ancient woodlands into a concrete and plastic desert.

I loved the ambition of Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr is a great story teller. Relax and enjoy the journey whilst he whisks you away to strange and sometimes violent places where children dream of freedom and parents fear for their future. Like his earlier novels All the Light We Cannot See and Saving Grace Doerr’s focus on dramatic events that affect the lives of children gives a significant emotional edge to his writing. His approach to fiction is unique, full of imagination and untrammelled by the clichés of genre.

Trespasses – Louis Kennedy

The setting is Belfast during the Troubles. Cushla is a Catholic primary school teacher with a part time job in her brother’s bar. The clientele are a motley bunch of witless half fits along with a few occupying soldiers, but when Michael comes in she realises he is something else again.

Trespasses tells the story of their relationship set against a background of sectarian violence and cruelty. Cushla’s obsession with an experienced older man who has a distinguished record of infidelity leads to a series of romantic encounters. She is given the key to his city pied à terre where they meet frequently for intercourse and breakfast. There is a trip to Dublin and a hotel peopled by Catholic priests which Cushla declares is like a seminary. Michael shows her the city. Back in Belfast he introduces her to his coterie of middle class friends on the pretext that she is there to teach them Irish – but they all know what is really going on. They have learned to tolerate his infidelities.

These glimpses of middle class life are a stark contrast to the poverty Cushla witnesses amongst the Catholic children she teaches. She gets involved with one family in particular, paying for their child’s school meals and dropping him off at the end of the day. That is when she witnesses the boy’s older brother being bullied by the protestant lads on the estate. Eventually the family’s house is firebombed, and they become homeless. Cushla shelters them for a night but her brother makes it clear how dangerous it is for him as a bar owner to be seen helping a Catholic family that has fallen foul of the Protestant gangs. In the end she drops the family off at the edge of the Catholic “ghetto” where they will be condemned to live in cramped conditions with family members.

Michael may love Cushla – at least he claims to – but when she bumps into him at a restaurant with his family he ignores her, and his true loyalties seem clear. She swears not to see him again, but drifts back to the apartment where she discovers papers connecting him to the defence of several Irish political prisoners. He is a barrister, idealistic about the ability of the law to defend the accused, but the men themselves refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the English court, and end up interned in Long Kesh prison.

The outcome of the relationship is of course tragic. In Cushla’s mind it links the two subplots, though that may just be her perception. The whole story is in the form of a flashback, though that part of the plot structure does not seem necessary to me.

Trespasses is an easy read – the sentences are short and the dialogue is fast and simple. The characterisation is interesting – Michael as a type of idealistic lawyer, Cushla similarly idealistic as a teacher. The context of the Troubles adds an interesting dimension: chapters often begin with a list of news events that Cushla shares with her primary school class, and that give the reader background information about the bombings and other atrocities taking place. But there is not a great deal of moralising – the writer lets the story speak for itself.

If you like love stories with an added political and moral dimension this could be the book for you. I quite enjoyed its exploration of the human condition, though found many of the descriptions unnecessary, and chose to skip or skim read them.

The Trees – Percival Everett

There was a time when you could count on a novel nominated for the Booker Prize to be a serious literary attempt to shape your imagination and sharpen your sensibilities. Don’t go looking for that sort of thing in Percival Everett’s The Trees. There’s nothing subtle about it.

The novel opens in Money Mississippi at the home of a redneck family introduced to the reader in a few sarcastic brush strokes. Unemployed, unfit and ignorant: Trump supporters one and all. The men are worse of course: Wheat lost his job driving for the Piggly Wiggly chain of grocery stores when he drove his truck over the edge of the Tallahassee bridge, and was just able to escape, still clutching a can of beer rescued from the crate on the seat beside him. The men and the women are all fat and stupid. They plan to keep pigs in a swimming pool that got broken when someone knocked a hole in it with their fat ass.

It’s fun to patronise the great unwashed and the opening is one of the best bits of this novel. But we get a hint of what is to come from Granny C, now in a wheelchair, who regrets telling a lie that ended in the lynching of a young black boy.

It’s not long before the bodies begin to pile up – all white men suffering from gruesome injuries – often with barbed wire wrapped around their necks and always with their testicles removed. And always, next to them, a dead black man holding those testicles in his hands. It is the blackest of black comedies. And I mean that literally.

The local law enforcement team are not up to much and things get worse when the body of the black man keeps on disappearing without trace or explanation, only to reappear beside the next victim. The author has some fun presenting us with incompetent mortuary guards and hopeless policemen. A couple of fat black detectives are called in from the capital to lend a hand.

Soon there are bodies piling up around the country- always the same scenario. We meet 103 year old Mama Z who has spent her life collecting news clippings of lynchings: there are filing cabinets full of them. Gertrude, who might only be a waitress, is very close to her. A black researcher from a northern university whose career has been mysteriously stymied begins to list the victims.

We meet more redneck hoodlums including the Reverend Doctor Cat Fondle who attempts to resurrect the Ku Klux Klan. His gang set fire to a cross on the hill above the black part of town then he pops home to his fat wife to eat pizza and moan about Obamacare. More bodies are found, and more crazy white people, as well as more injustices, are brought to our attention.

The Trees is an easy read if you can handle the violence which is cartoonish rather than ghoulish and shouldn’t bother you too much. The book will make you laugh. But don’t expect it to make too much sense: the gruesome deaths of southern rednecks obviously represent a belated form of justice or revenge, and it’s all a metaphor from the start, a kind of fantasy. Don’t go looking for a logical explanation or a sensible denouement.

You’ll have to enjoy The Trees for what it is, not what you want it to be. The further I got into this book the less I got out of it. In the end there are only so many stereotypes of stupid white people. There’s a diminishing return too, when it comes to comically macabre death scenes as they cease to be a surprise and become, dare I say it, a little boring.

Inland – Tea Obreht

Inland must have lain in the remaindered section of my local bookshop for years, its pages slightly yellowed and its cover looking like it was designed by a Dulux dog convinced it’s the reincarnation of J.M.W Turner.

For nearly two hundred pages it unwinds like two tributaries of a slowly meandering river. You will need effort and patience. The two parallel narratives are quite distinct until the final fifty or so pages, so it’s a long wait. One is especially opaque. It concerns the relationship between a camel and its Muslim rider crossing Arizona in the 19th century. This section is told by the camel rider to the camel in a series of reminiscences. Don’t laugh! The story goes that the rider arrived in America with his father, who died shortly afterwards so he knew nothing about his background or identity.

It unfolds in a series of weird and macabre adventures. First he is a grave robber, then a thief, then part of an outlaw gang on the run. Sherrif Berger is his nemesis, intermittently chasing him across the continent, turning up unexpectedly at key points and driving the rider in the direction of different western settings as he tries to escape: the gold town, the prairie, the settler, the saloon.

He finds a home with camel riders, brought to America to work in the desert with the US cavalry, but it doesn’t end well.

The parallel tale concerns the wife of a newspaper editor looking to eke out a living in a small Arizona town. Her husband and two elder sons have gone missing leaving her with the youngest boy, plagued with a wonky eye, and his disabled grandmother. The boy is terrified of monsters, a fear exacerbated by a young girl who has been welcomed into the family and claims to have psychic powers.

I found this story the most interesting of the two. It is simpler to understand, and takes place in one day of the woman’s life, though there are some flashbacks. There is a distinctive human interest in the relationships that are explored in this section. The events concern the power politics developing around two small towns vying for prominence, and the personal and romantic feelings surrounding the key players – a local sheriff, a doctor and a rancher who all appear at the woman’s house during a day that will change all of their lives forever.

I really admire Tea Obreht as a writer. The plot of Inland is complex, mythic and mystifying. It is beautifully written and psychologically real and compelling, taking elements of the western genre and giving them a contemporary twist by telling the story from the point of view of a woman and a protagonist of Turkish or Arab descent. I could never invent something as minutely detailed and with such a complex narrative as this.

Nevertheless Inland is not for the faint hearted. It’s long and slow and at times confusing- perhaps I didn’t give it the concentration it deserves. But the final pages are almost worth the wait as the tension builds and we see further into the psychology of the woman who is at the centre of the novel: she is a perfectly imperfect heroine.

Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart (and some more stuff)

You won’t read Snuggie Bain for fun, that’s for certain. It’s a book that is so full of pain that it can make even The Daily Telegraph believe there is such a thing as society. Their review called it:

An astonishing portrait, drawn from life, of a society left to die – forgotten by those who didn’t believe in society, and told it to care for itself.

To be honest I find that pretty hypocritical for a newspaper that supported Maggie Thatcher to the hilt and promoted Boris Johnson’s lies about Brexit and the European Union – after all what is the EU but a society that cares for its own, as we’ve been finding out since that memorable vote? Now we are not members there are lots of things we can’t do that we would like to. We’ve turned our backs on the most significant project for peace in modern history, and its greatest economic achievement.

Shuggie Bain is a young boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s and 90s: significantly the novel ends five years before the Labour government tried to improve the lot of the working classes by providing sure start support for disadvantaged children. Shuggie’s mother is an alcoholic and his dad is a philanderer, but neither of those things are his fault. That’s why you can’t have a laissez faire, Tory economic policy. You can’t leave it to parents like that. Shuggie needs a chance but he’s too busy looking after his mother to get an education. He’s scraping together every last penny so he can feed himself after buying her the cans of Carlsberg Special she sups by the bagful. Strong stuff that!!

That’s not to say that socialism would cure Shuggie’s mother’s alcoholism. Nothing could do that. There will always be dysfunctional families and mental illness, and those human problems will always leave some children with a mountain to climb. But that’s not to say we should not try. Helping the Shuggie Bains of this world take care of themselves and their families is the cheapest thing to do in the long run, and the most humane, but our government seems more interested in providing tax breaks for rich people and making sure well to do old people stay that way.

Shuggie Bain is set in a landscape that is defined by economic failure – the pits are closing and there is nothing to take their place. Rents are high and mortgages out of the question for the unemployed. He shares a small flat with his grandparents, his parents and two siblings, and that is not conducive to a comfortable family life.

Skilled work is just not there in Shuggie’s world. His father is a taxi driver, a hand to mouth occupation. He is out at night cruising around pubs and nightclubs with drunken customers, and has women on the side. When he gets the chance to move to a flat on the edges of the city he grabs it, but set loose from her family home, and isolated on a bleak estate miles from friends, Shuggie’s mother enters a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that severs the final cords that tie her and her husband together. When he abandons her for another woman things go from bad to worse.

The sectarian divides in the city don’t help Shuggie’s mother cope with her isolation. His sister Catherine marries and moves abroad as soon as she can, abandoning Shuggie and his brother Leek. There is a moment when it seems his mother has saved herself from final ruin, though it has been a roller coaster ride. But not everyone understands what it takes for an alcoholic to remain sober and Shuggie’s mother needed all the help she could get.

Douglas Stuart takes you to the heart of his characters and helps you feel their loneliness and isolation, the heartbreak, the hopelessness of watching the mother you love drink herself to death. He offers a panoramic view and a microscopic examination of the emotional and physical poverty that blighted Glasgow in the Thatcher years, and no doubt contributed to the growth of Scottish nationalism.

Shuggie Bain deservedly won The Booker Prize in 2020 for its courageous portrayal of Shuggie, despised and abused but capable of heroic feats of love.

Treacle Walker – Alan Garner

Treacle Walker is a story that will enthral and frustrate you. It is a beautifully written tale set in a mythical countryside of woods and bogs and cottages, with characters drawn from Garner’s childhood comics and his experiences of Manchester’s streets and the beautiful Cheshire countryside.

Treacle Walker is a rag and bone merchant like the one I remember driving his horse and cart up North Street in Openshaw in 1957. Any old iron was the call as the horse trundled up the street and my mother hurried me indoors away from his unsavoury influence. After all the man was dirty and unkempt. His job was to clear the junk from Manchester’s terraced streets, loading old lead piping and broken furniture onto his ramshackle cart. Who knew what childhood illnesses lurked in the old prams and smelly bedsteads he had picked up?

But when Joseph Coppock is woken by Treacle Walker crying Rag bone! Rag bone! Any rags? Pots for rags. Donkey stone, and rushes downstairs to swap an old pair of pyjamas for the mystical treasure in Walker’s chest, it is not the stink of Treacle Walker that he will remember the most. After all Joseph’s pyjamas are pretty smelly too.

Treacle Walker is old and young at the same time, like an old post card that changes as you move it through the light. He lives with boggles and bogarts; he knows the man in the oak and the spirit buried deep in the still mere. He is familiar with the bonacon, a legendary beast, half horse, half bull. And in exchange for a pair of smelly pyjamas Treacle gives Joe a round jar with Joe’s own name engraved on the lid, and a carved bone from a man who could sing the sweetness of the world itself.

When Joseph invites Treacle Walker into his three roomed cottage Treacle brings with him a magical world cloaked in a whispering silence where the cold snow is melting to tears. Everything will change, and Joe will not escape until he has entered the world of the mirror, danced with the comic characters that spring to life from Knockout, The Dandy and The Beano, and sorted out his stupid eye. That silly thing won’t work, so Joe, who wears a black patch and reads the eye test charts like they are a magic spell, can never be sure what is real.

In Treacle Walker Garner evokes the essence of a natural world before city streets or cars or mobile phones. It is beautiful and chaotic, and beyond Joe’s control. Cuckoos sing across the valley and mosquitoes whine where the meadow and the alder lie close to the river bank.

Treacle Walker brings the myths and legends of Garner’s earlier work such as Elidor, The Owl Service and The Wizard of Brisangamen to a fitting end. This book is richer and darker, but also as light as a feather. Don’t expect it to be a neat parcel, wrapped up in a cute ribbon. Enjoy it for what it is – if you can work that out.

Amor Towles – The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway is a carnival of a novel, a dance with death that riffs on Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale. It’s a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, a senseless tribute to the American Dream.

Count the references to the cannon. Emmett comes home from prison: his crime is manslaughter. The family farm is bankrupt, so Emmet and his brother Billy decide to set off to California: The Grapes of Wrath.

But it’s not that easy. The two young boys share the journey with the Parson and a boy called Duchess, both snake oil merchants and all round frauds straight out of Huckleberry Finn.

Woolly, Emmet’s former cell mate, joins them en route. He is the third or fourth generation of an upper crust family with social connections, and has already been expelled from three East coast prep schools. The only person who understands him is his sister who lives in Manhattan. She is in despair when she finds that Holden … er sorry! Woolly has run away again: The Catcher in the Rye.

I loved these throwaway references to three of my favourite American novels, and I loved this book.

Towles orchestrates the characters but Duchess orchestrates the plot, turning up unannounced as Emmett is about to leave for San Francisco. Woolly’s trust fund is hidden in a safe somewhere in upstate New York and Duchess is determined to get to it. If we have read Chaucer’s tale we know their search will end in disaster, and that’s enough to pique our interest. But Towles’ ability to surprise us again and again with characters that spring out of the page is what sets him apart from other writers and carries us joyfully through the first three quarters of this book.

When Duchess steals Emmett’s car and heads to New York, Emmett is forced to go after him, taking his eight year old brother Billy along for the ride. Hair raising episodes and wild characters follow thick and fast. Duchess has plans to balance the scales and metes out anarchic and sometimes violent justice wherever he goes. But he is driving Emmett’s car….. and the New York police are not far behind.

Billy’s favourite book is Professor Abacus Abernathy’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers and Intrepid Travellers. It is his guide to survival on their epic journey. Billy’s brother Emmett is Hector, a victim of his own raging temper, and The Compendium‘s stories echo through the pages of The Lincoln Highway as the facts of this fictional world and the fictions of our factual one collide in this post modern fable.

Towles is a magician of a writer who entertains with shocks and surprises, and there is indeed magic in the pages. Duchess is the son of an itinerant actor, and is an impresario with charm and wit. He tells stories of theatres and magicians, of clowns and circuses and is not slow in pulling tricks of his own – rabbits out of hats, women dressed in pink silk, circus rides – all that jazz.

But let’s face it the impresario here is Towles himself, and The Lincoln Highway is simply a bravura performance.

As for the last quarter of the book? Towles creates wild and imaginative characters better than anyone whose work I have read recently, but the novel has to end – and there’s a winding up. But you should read this book. Definitely.