Specifically, ‘The Line of Beauty’ is set between two national elections, both victories for the Conservatives, and particularly their leader, Margaret Thatcher. This was her high time. Our protagonist and chronicler—everything is seen through his eyes—is Nick Guest, fresh from Oxford with a First, embarking on a Henry James P.H.D. Nick is renting, provisionally, an attic room of a grand London house in Notting Hill owned by the parents of a Uni friend (and unrequited love object), Toby Fedden, whose father, Gerald, is one of Thatcher’s MPs and acolytes.

Setting up Hollingworth’s first subject: a forensic exploration of ‘80s Britain dealing, for the most part, with the aristocracy and their intersection with/role as the ruling class, elected and otherwise. The focus is still on London, but we also visit an ancestral spread and a provincial town, Nick’s birthplace. So there is some range, but Hollinghurst is basically fixated on the city aristos, and his knowledgeable exposé of their lifestyles recalls Evelyn Waugh, where, as here, satire and critique are occasionally underpinned by envy and even malice. 

Nick (the) Guest is well set up. His vague ‘duty’, as subsidised renter, and ill-defined family member, is to ‘look after’ the bi-polar younger sister, Catherine. A duty he manages fairly well until she runs off the rails towards the end. Meanwhile, he pursues his own agendas, hidden to the household.

Hollinghurst structures the book in three separate time periods: 1983,1986 and 1987. These periods each contain a sequence of set pieces, advancing the drama like acts in a play. They are all brilliantly realised, the observation of character and setting impressively accomplished in detail and perception. Hence the Booker. The abruptly shifting blocks give an impression of life lived on an accelerant which in this case is Nick’s, whose evolving experiences are Hollingworth’s second and main subject. Nick’s ‘doings’, combining with that of the aristos, swells the narrative to its two climaxes.

Initially Nick, bright, keen, inexperienced, drawn to a world of glamour, power and privilege, is collegiate with those romantic blades of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and all who followed in their wake. Poor, but with energy, charm and sexual charisma, climbing the greasy pole to the top. Save for one crucial factor here: Nick is gay. If you are not born into this world, to accede to it you must work a way to marry into it and this is not really possible for Nick. In short order he sees that what he wants here he can never attain, and this skews him into another direction.

In the gap between 1983 and 1986, there are unexplained changes in Nick’s character. Our endearing love-struck ingenue, just as the Lines of Beauty have somehow transformed into lines of cocaine, himself has somehow transformed into a sycophantic parasite, a cynical exploiter and even, at times, a kind of sexual predator and pimp. The sex that was once genuinely affectionate is now coldly transactional and wincingly sordid. What has happened here? For me, it can only be understood as someone, by acting, discovering their own nature. To use an extreme comparison, Macbeth is persuaded by his wife to commit a murder, thus finding out that he is a natural killer. Nick apparently turns into himself, and the result is not pretty. This is fully brought home in the novel’s first climax.

It is Nick’s hosts, Gerald and Rachel’s, twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and for the big bash, Gerald has triumphantly scored his idol, Maggie Thatcher. Hollinghurst’s dramatization of this party is a tour de force. We see the PM, like Elizabeth l, surrounded by all her fawning and scheming courtiers. So many horrible right-wing bogeymen, a few too many, but who knows, maybe it is as he tells it. Anyway, at some point, while all these upper-crust nasties are carrying on downstairs, Nick, upstairs, is also carrying on a threesome with one of the distinguished guests (his present lover and provider) and a waiter and the obligatory cocaine. The literary intention here is savagely satirical, blackly humorous, the wild contrast, the dark underbelly etc. but all I could think of was what an idiotic ingrate Nick has become.

The big night for his hosts, who invited him into their house to share their lives, treated him with respect and affection, whose son is one of his Oxford heroes and buddies. If Nick must indulge himself like this, can’t he do it elsewhere? Because of Thatcher, the house is packed with policeman. At any point, the drug-fuelled threesome might be revealed, which would destroy Gerald’s career and damage the lives of the family. At this point I lost any regard I still might have held for Nick, quite the opposite, and subsequently the novel hollowed out for me.

For consider, if the book, in its essence, turns out to have no moral referent, which one took to be Nick, then what is its purpose? What is all this brilliantly sustained societal satire being contrasted against?

Inevitably, with all the upstairs/downstairs seediness, the house of cards comes spectacularly tumbling down in the second climax and denouement. But really there is no high tragedy here, just a bunch of unpleasant people getting their various come-uppances. Which also, incidentally, partly devalues the real tragedy of AIDS.

The vacuous and unlamented inhabitants of ‘The Line of Beauty’ (we’ll except the wife, Rachel and son Toby), are finally seen skittering off to their individual dooms but by now, despite all Hollinghurst’s virtuosic literary skills, we really don’t give a damn. It’s pretty much good riddance and let’s move on.

Perhaps, but in ‘So Late’ it appears some can hardly get worse. Spelt out clearly for us in the dramatic climax (occurring before a crucial plot point of realisation for the reader), where Cathal’s fiancée, Sabine, thoroughly provoked, gives him both barrels: ‘a good half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and turn contemptible when things don’t go your way’. Immediately confirmed by Cathal thinking ‘that he would not have minded her shutting up right then and giving him what he wanted’. Which is pretty unlikely as Sabine continues: ‘to some of you we are just c***s…often hear(s) Irish men referring to women in this way, and calling us whores and bitches’. A little later, unsurprisingly, she breaks off the engagement.

Which brings me to the two related problems I have with this story. The first is with Cathal. Here Keegan stacks the deck. Not only is he a misogynist, he is also a skinflint, lazy, mean-minded, ungrateful, spiteful, has a bad diet, and doesn’t wash his hands after peeing. But all this wouldn’t worry me too much if from his experience in the novel, Cathal actually learnt something about himself. Here is a man who stupidly and selfishly throws away a possible chance of life-long happiness. Although he is vaguely depressed at the outcome of events, he appears to have no realisation of how or even that he has caused this. In due time he could quite ineptly repeat it with another woman. So we spend our time through this novella journeying with a man who learns nothing and who seems incapable of learning. There are people like this of course, plenty, but so what? Why is Keegan leading me on to invest in this deadbeat.

And then there is Sabine. Why on earth is she attracted to him? What does she see in Cathal to the point of agreeing to live out her life with him? Throughout, we are mostly inside Cathal’s dull head and we are given little insight into what Sabine is thinking except when she speaks. She willingly enters into a relationship with a man as described above, then agrees to marry him, then she breaks it off. These are weighty matters (the actual story, surely) but they seem to happen inadvertently, offstage, as do (coyly?) any sexual relations.

However, the writing of all this, the presentation, organisation of material, is masterly. Wikipedia tells me that Keegan won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, and it is this Anglo/Irish writer that came most to mind as an influence. Keegan has mastered Trevor’s pared plain prose that packs in a Henry James sentence. With deft observations we quickly gain a clear portrait of Cathal. The placing of narrative detail and gradual exposure, the build-up, is all subtly managed so that when we come to the turning point, the realisation of what this particular day is and what is happening, what has happened, it has that effect of revelation that all short story writers strive for.

But still, it is only a revelation of story and not of character. Keegan presents a highly polished surface, but really little more than that. Her great skill becomes a sort of sleight-of-hand. Crucially, psychological depth, and psychological progression, motivation, character growth and insight are not given and can only be guessed at. With Cathal at the end we are back where we started and none the wiser. And we are not much the wiser with Sabine as well.

In her ‘Small Things Like These’, Keegan gave us a short, but profound and deeply moving experience. With ‘So Late in the Day’, the lack of a like resonance seems incommensurate with her talents.

                Laing is a modern moralist, keen to anatomise the manifold sins of western capitalist consumerist society along with those rapacious individuals who over time have built this entity and presently enable it. Fine and dandy, but since Privilege is one of Laing’s many bête noires here, I couldn’t help but notice early on and throughout , except for a brief diversion at the end (also allowing that this is largely set in the year of Covid), Laing doesn’t seem to need to do any paid work, and has apparently deep pockets when it comes to re-creating Rummary’s vision, prolifically purchasing flowers, shrubs and trees, importing in topsoil and hiring various tradesmen for tasks big and small. Not that I don’t wish it were myself, I also possess a large garden and one of the many charms of this book, like in shows such as ‘Grand Designs’, is imagining what one might do with one’s own neglected spaces if one had sufficient time and means, like Laing.

                So we progress: through an analysis of the garden as Paradise, referencing poet John Milton, followed by the garden as planned parkland, the 18^th century enclosures with attendant misery and dispossession, referencing poet John Clare, then the far greater misery and horror of the slave trade that financially underpinned many of the aristocratic estates, leading on to the projects of colonisation (particularly pertinent to an Australian reader), then William Morris, the garden as utopia, as societal retreat, etcetera, all absorbingly brought to life with various historical figures. Meanwhile, Laing is herself selecting, planting and building her own little Eden. She cites British filmmaker Derek Jarman as an inspiration, his memoir ‘Modern Nature’, and writer W.G. Sebald, both in moral concerns and narrative form, Laing freely acknowledging Sebald’s influence, noting her part of England is also that which he traversed and contemplated in ‘The Rings of Saturn’.

                Towards the close we have a vivid recounting of a rich American/Italian heiress, Iris Origo, along with her aristo husband, their sympathetic management of a huge estate, La Foce, with its many villages, parks, woodlands, through the period of Mussolini’s rise, World War Two and afterwards. Laing’s point with this particular story, which she hammers home rather insistently, is that despite this couple’s humanitarianism, generosity and even selfless bravery, they always remain blind to the fact that they basically own their villagers, and are unpleasantly surprised when, post-war, these people, for whom they have done so much, nevertheless demand their political rights.

                I mention Laing’s insistence here for it started to get on my nerves, because of the one minor cavil I have with this otherwise excellent book and, I suppose, with the author herself.

                This particular summer of Laing’s, England suffers a mini-drought. Climate change is arraigned as part culprit, but sensibly, any place any time might be subject to a stretch of unusually dry weather. And it seems East Anglia is ‘the driest region of the country’ receiving ‘around half the annual rainfall’. So armed with this foreknowledge, what does Laing do? Plan and plant a totally inappropriate garden for the given landscape, because she wishes to re-create the original ideal of a man she much admires, Rummary, but also because this is the garden that she herself wants to make. So then she watches on in dismay as her dream wilts away. She stands by agonising over whether she should just ‘turn on the tap’, but of course, ecologically principled, as in all matters, she cannot bring herself to do this. So she suffers as her beloved plants suffer.  And then they die.

When rains do eventually arrive, a few perk up, and so Laing indulges in manic bout of replanting. But it seems no obvious lesson has been learnt, which is: if Laing had from the start created a garden that fitted the landscape, was adapted to it, she could then have watched on as her plants and flowers drooped a little in the dry, in the secure knowledge that they would all revive in due course. Because they are natives.  

So it would seem that Laing herself, albeit in a minor way, has also tried to mould a world to how she would wish it to be, a natural human desire, but with inevitably destructive results, a thing that in this instance, like the colonists, like the Italian aristos, even with the best of intentions, she also seems blind to.

                Set mostly in Mumbai, then Bombay, during the 1975-77 ‘Emergency’ enacted by Indira Gandhi as a cynical attempt (according to this account) to maintain power and abuse the law at will, Mistry unleashes a six-hundred-page-plus savage roar of moral outrage at the inequities of his homeland, gripping and horrifying, that leaves any reader of any modern democracy, whatever its shortcomings, pretty happy to be living where they are. Mistry’s literary models are Dickens and Tolstoy and the novel attempts an ambitious combination of these writers, breadth and depth tied to a strong social agenda.

                The very first scene clearly references ‘Anna Karenina’, and anyone who has read this novel will unfortunately be able to guess, like me, how Mistry’s novel ends. In Tolstoy, the long connecting line of Anna’s psychology is convincingly drawn; with Mistry you feel there is no such psychological necessity and so his ending feels melodramatically forced.

                Still, ‘A Fine Balance’ is compulsively readable and for the most part very powerful, however, unlike Tolstoy but like Dickens, Mistry is often too close to his material.  Also, he must tell you everything about India that he feels you need to know, and to achieve this he puts his poor two tailors, untouchables from the Chamaar caste, through every conceivable hell possible and a few more besides. The reader is a willing dupe here, because each of the extended episodes is so brilliantly drawn, but towards the end the credibility, and also the coincidences (more Dickens) start to wear thin.

                Ishvar and Om are Mistry’s device/vehicle of satire, and by satire I mean a type of fierce ethical anger reminiscent of Swift. This is an angry book. Mistry is angry at Gandhi (only referred to as the Prime Minister) but he is also angry at India itself. Gandhi is abusing her power, and the various ways this is shown, through the tailors’ ‘adventures’, demonstrates to what extent autocratic arrogance at the top affects those right down on the bottom. A fish rots from the head, but this is the case with any autocracy, not just India. However, the most coruscating section of the novel is when Mistry relates the story of Ishvar and his brother and their father back in their home village. This is well before Gandhi’s time and is not necessarily anything to do with bad governance. It is all about caste. Mistry graphically shows how the whole fabric of Indian society, the way it is rigidly constructed and has been for millennia, is appallingly unjust and cruel.

                So to me, this book seems to be about two slightly different things. One type of injustice is used to effect the other, but their relation is transactional. When the irresponsible commands come from the top the untouchables cop it more than anyone else, but they’re going to cop it anyway because everything is stacked against them already and nobody cares or ever have.

                Dina and Maneck (householder and student) are relatively well-off Parsis (as is Mistry), theoretically outside the caste system, but in reality no-one is, and partly as a result, they also suffer tales of woe. But also partly not as a result, and Mistry cannot help laying on the tragedies with a trowel. Bad things happen to these other two because of India, and also bad things just happen to them, over and over. And so many bad things happen to so many good people in this novel that you begin to lose sense of bad things happening because of India and bad things happening because of bad luck, and the latter starts to weaken the effect of the former. Which is a pity.

                Because Mistry has a great story to tell and a great reason for telling it and loads of talent. Like India, like Dickens, like Tolstoy, ‘A Fine Balance’ is bursting at the seams with life, characters, incident, colour, adventures. In my mid-twenties I lived for a year in India a little after this period and this novel brought it all back, the incredible energy and vibrancy of the place, its cruelties and its kindnesses. Am I sounding melodramatic? Difficult to write about such a country without being so. In India all the life is larger than life. And also it is necessary that bad leaders are called out and unjust systems exposed. If the whole shebang is somewhat contrived and the prose occasionally a shade purple, well these are forgivable defects compared to the importance of what Mistry so graphically presents to us here.

The entire book is Asle’s monologue, one very long sentence in fact, but again this is not difficult to read, with the straightforward speech and the repetitions, and of course one wonders why Fosse chose this form. What I think he is trying to do here is to cast a sort of spell upon the reader, a spell of a particular voice, and at times this works well, but at other times it just becomes boring, particularly towards the end when this reader had heard more than enough from this one man. Not that Asle is speaking to anyone. This is an interior monologue, an old man’s reckoning with his life, related, with long flashbacks, over three days preceding Christmas while he is struggling to finish what becomes his final painting, an abstract oil of St. Andrews Cross. 

There are two Asles: our protagonist, a successful artist, who at a certain point gives up drinking so he can fulfill his creative potential, and a second Asle living in nearby town, who persists in his drinking until it destroys his art and life. The path not taken. Fosse plays these two off against one another and I feel one of strengths of the novel is the intricate patterning involved here. Names, personalities and events reflect one another in the two lives and Fosse effectively employs this, along with the repetitions, as a sort of binding mechanism for his long rambling narrative. The two Asles are like Siamese twins. Asle One knows things about Asle Two that, logically speaking, he couldn’t really know unless he also lived that life. And I think, with this, and much else, the coincidences, mirroring etc. you have to take it as it comes. The pay-off for the reader is the building up of a unity of mood, of atmosphere, of a certain world and world view.

So then what’s it all about? Art and the artist, a portrait and explication of genius, and with this I feel Fosse is less successful, indulging himself too often in shop-worn Romantic myths. Asle is an idiot savant, an unwitting channel for the divine, updated here to an ingenuous hippy (a figure physically described like the author is himself) Asle is a one-off, an intuitive spirit, disclaiming rationalism, traditions, who is led by instinct and blind inspiration (even in meeting his wife we have, on both sides, love at first sight).

All this seems an unlikely career path for any artist, particularly in the modern era. Where is his context, where are his antecedents? His only personal referent throughout is Meister Eckhart, an obscure medieval religious philosopher. Norway’s most acclaimed artist, Edvard Munch, is never mentioned, even though Asle seems to paint a lot like him. The considerable religious and artistic philosophising is often insightful, but just as often wincingly banal. Generally speaking, there is far too much faux profundity, pop psychology and odd repetitive motes that don’t lead anywhere. And increasingly, incantation stands in for depth.

Furthermore, we have the flip side of the unity above mentioned: Asle’s world is one with no humour, no irony, no playfulness, intellectual or otherwise. Characters, with notable the exception of the narrator, and to some extent his fisherman friend, Asleik, are two dimensional, with little depth or complexity.

To sum up, although I found Septology, certainly to begin with, absorbing and compelling, as I kept on, the artist’s creative authenticity, or lack thereof, along with the repetitions, finally became a problem for me. You could perhaps look upon the whole shebang as one giant fable, some potent myth for our times, but for this interpretation to succeed Fosse would need to seriously condense and cut, two writerly virtues that I suspect he disdains.

Our guide through the Moskat maze is, for the most part, one Asa Heshel Bannet, passionate, contrary, moody, sexually magnetic, much like the protagonists of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, etc. fascinating because they are always doing, but perhaps not all that likeable or admirable. Asa is a disturbing, disruptive force within the family, but he is not alone in this. From the powerful old patriarch Meshulam Moskat right through to the relatively powerless young women, distinctive and forceful personalities abound.

In a Paris Review interview Singer remarked that he was not a fan of Thomas Mann, but ‘Buddenbrooks’ is the novel that stands squarely behind this one.  As with ‘Buddenbrooks’, we observe a generational decline and fall: a diminution, decay, even corruption, of moral matters and the disciplines and rules of behaviour that underpin and define the extended family structure.

Not being Jewish myself, much here was new to me. What I found most interesting was how complete this society was and how vital. Somebody remarks somewhere how it has survived with its customs and beliefs virtually intact for a thousand years, and within a different, often hostile, milieu. But not for long.

We know how it ends, but the characters don’t, and here is the key. We quickly see, despite all the differences, how much these people are like us, bumbling along with life and loves and losses as best they can, making it up as they go. Even viewing their actions through the dramatic irony of our terrible fore-knowledge we can’t help but emote and sympathise, live their lives with them, and perhaps our sympathies expand through this fore-knowledge.

Singer arrived in New York in 1935 at age thirty-one and stayed. He did not experience the Holocaust first hand. Although Yiddish was his first language, obviously by the time he came to write this work, he could have employed English, as did Saul Bellow, another Yiddisher. A larger audience, and why choose to write in a patois probably doomed to perish beyond a generation? Singer closely monitored his English translations (this was his first book published in English), but never did them himself. We’ll assume his decision is a political act as well as one of solidarity.

I also wondered whether writing in Yiddish he felt more naturally close to some of the literary traditions of that language, particularly its folk and parable idioms. Time and again Singer quotes traditional Jewish sayings and proverbs. Also many of his characters, although realistic, seem to have stepped out of a fable, or only one remove from that. Which gives the ‘whole’ a bit of a ‘lost world’ feeling that fits in with his overall purpose. And there is the underlying spiritualism. This world of his is contained within its Judaism, as it is in Bellow, but unlike Bellow, here we are always aware of the non-Jewish world outside and around, the powers that really control and determine matters. The Jews are finally dependent on the grace of others, which is no assured thing.

It could perhaps be charged against ‘The Family Moskat’ that Singer sacrifices depth for scope. He certainly employs a broad canvas, but I found the characters sharply etched. We never lose sight of who is who and where they fit. A remarkable achievement, in fact a great and deeply moving work.

What these two memoirs/novels (which together comprise a collective), read like, is a novelist’s first draft, which from Knausgaard’s account of writing them, is more-or-less what they are. So there is some excellent writing, and not so excellent, with many cliché weeds spotting the literary lawn, mundanities jostling with profundities, and all up an apparently intentionally undisciplined wild and rambling gallimaufry of language and life, at which Knausgaard’s editors presumably either tore their hair out or shrugged their shoulders. On instruction, one presumes.

Seemingly distrustful of fiction’s careful and prissy ‘manipulations’, Knausgaard throws selectivity out of the window, thus allowing almost everything else to rush in, such as page after page of windy philosophising with no clear relation to theme and character, plus numerous tell-all incidents, mostly from adolescence, that although maybe interesting in their own right, have little purpose or place in his overall design. Knausgaard boldly wants to convey the taste and texture of a whole life lived, the good the bad the ugly the forgettable, and in this he largely succeeds, but one inescapable correlative is that everything becomes flattened out, so that events that do hold the most meaning and drama are leached of these to a disproportionate extent.

His two literary mentors, whom he cites, are Dostoevsky and Proust. Now Dostoevsky’s novels, like Knausgaard’s, are long and discursive, but this is a fictional feint, as the Russian writer choses his subsidiary stories and characters with great skill so that they always in some way reflect back on his main themes, as does his characters’ philosophising. Knausgaard might argue that this is the worn falsity of fiction, and does, and also doesn’t, but anyway seems to have forgotten or ignored the critical commonplace that high fiction’s ‘falsities’ serve to highlight how certain truths in life have more importance and value than others, which is actually the way we experience life, not necessarily from day-to-day, but in retrospect. And of course, Knausgaard himself is broadly selective, he can’t literally show everything. Nevertheless, in these overblown overwritten volumes, if about a third had hit the cutting room floor, the two really compelling stories he needs to tell, that of his father’s death and its aftermath, and that of the birth of his first child as a climax of his love, which occurring centrally in each novel balance one another beautifully, would shine out with far greater power and clarity. As would his overriding theme which is the conjunction of these: the corrosion of wonder in the world as we age.

To my mind Knausgaard never seems quite to grasp that, despite all his rationalisations and protestations, he is really writing fiction not memoir. Proust presents his long work, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ as memoir, but makes no bones about the fact that he is really writing a novel. One result being that we have a succession of brilliantly constructed characters, such as Swann and Charlus and Madame Verdurin, whom Marcel closely ‘observes’ and so we watch them grow and develop, interact etc. In Knausgaard’s volumes, we only really have a clear grasp of one character, himself, presumably because he refuses to enter into fiction’s ‘false’ realisation of centres of consciousness aside from his own. These are people I know, so how can I possibly present them in that way? Well Proust does, and because Knausgaard doesn’t or refuses to, means that towards the end of one thousand plus pages we are tiring of what appears to be an overweening narcissism and solipsism. Even his beloved wife, Linda, shown in scattered first-hand impressions, and his best friend Geir (the same), seem minor figures in the drama of his interior life, which I doubt is actually the case (well, one hopes). Geir is allowed a full-length rave towards the end of ‘A Man in Love’, but still, it’s all about Knausgaard.

Time and again Knausgaard discusses the role of structure in art, only to seemingly ignore it in practice. It is interesting that, going back about a decade and inspiring much since, the two most hyped up literary ‘events’ have been ‘My Struggle’ and Elena Ferrante ‘s ‘Neapolitan Quartet’. Both works have been praised well above their worth with better less-celebrated novels published during this time. Because, in different ways, they are both ‘sensational’ ―Ferrante’s mysterious ‘anonymity’ and Knausgaard’s brave, scandalous ‘honesty’― and publishers can make much mileage out of these, and do so partly by praising the content. Here, to a certain extent, we readers are dupes of publishers’ carry-on, and not just readers. Many good writers also seem to have lost their collective judgements in the publicity adrenalin rush of literary celebrity. So amongst the pages of puff quotes that preface Knausgaard’s books we have, for example, this by Jonathan Lethem, a writer whom I admire: ‘A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. Quite.

If you don’t have a day job, or kids, and are by nature patient and indulgent, read these volumes, read beyond the two that I have, read the lot, for there are many fine things to be found I’m sure. However, also consider, it could be more worth your while to wait for the liposuctioned omnibus edition that Knausgaard will no doubt be encouraged to essay down the track, or indeed, the Readers Digest condensed version where somebody else will be employed to do the necessary hard yards on his prose, work that he himself, presently, disdains.

The inner flap of Tasmanian Richard Flanagan’s 20008 novel: ‘Wanting’.

In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end, Flanagan (in case we didn’t get it) informs us that his work is ‘a meditation on desire―the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs’.  Here Flanagan, uncharacteristically, undersells himself, for while ‘Wanting’ is certainly about this, it is also about much more. We all have thwarted desires and count the cost, but these are, for the large part, private and anonymous. But what are the effects of thwarted desires, or otherwise, of major public figures? Presumably any private cost must also be reckoned in the public sphere. The ramifications are political and historical, and therefore continuing.

In the opening of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler’s 1989 novel, ‘Solomon Gursky was Here’, ‘during the record cold spell of 1851’ out of the swirling snows surrounding the mill town of Magog emerges a ‘long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stands ‘Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip’. The locals gather with a few questions:

                ‘Where are you from?’

                ‘The north, my good fellow.’

                ‘Where… north?’

                ‘Far.’

Although he never admits it, what also emerges is that Ephraim has somehow escaped from Sir John Franklin’s final disastrous expedition to find the fabled North-West passage. No recorded survivors, but here is an unknown sailor, like most, and it is entirely plausible that this man has made it out, and so Richler has a free hand to chart his subsequent life and that of his descendants.

But let’s say Sir John Franklin himself came out of those mists. If he tells the Magogans who he is, Richler is at once constrained. The subsequent life he invents for Sir John must be conditioned by his known life to date and his status. What has happened to his crew? His boats? And he has a wife, Lady Jane, searching for him etcetera. The hand is not so free, still, there is room.

                The general convention for historical fiction is that the protagonists are the sailors, tailors, tinkers, folks like us, who can pretty much do what they like except that, unlike us, they have to live through the impact of known events, mostly caused by historical personages who have to do what they did. These giant shadowy figures are usually floating in the background or make the occasional guest appearance but with their ‘inner life’ being left where it was. There are exceptions: Tolstoy gives us Napoleon in War and Peace as a lucky bumbler, which could hardly have been the case, but suits his agenda.

                And Flanagan goes the whole hog in ‘Wanting’, a novel composed almost entirely of historical figures, inner life and all. They have to do what they did, but beyond this, the author does pretty much what he likes. Central to the story are Sir John Franklin, Governor of Tasmania (1837-1843) and his adopted Aboriginal child, Mathinna. But also we have Lady Jane Franklin, who is ingeniously linked, in a parallel story two decades hence, to Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Ellen Ternan and sundry others. All pretty fully realised according to Flanagan’s agenda. Is this credible? Does it matter?

                Let’s start with the language, which raises like issues. Flanagan has soaked himself in Dickens and his fellows and the tale is told in an anachronistic pastiche which might have purists tearing their hair out. But for the ‘ordinary’ reader it only matters that what is presented is consistent, so they can forget about the telling and fall into what is being told. And it is consistent, what’s more, it is highly accomplished, reminding me of Peter Carey’s Victorian novels, ‘Jack Maggs’ , ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’, and others where a completely convincing ‘type’ of English is invented over to suit each story.

                For this story the question becomes: being fiction of factual figures, is it credible within itself? Again, purists might demur, but surely it is only fair to grant the novelist his premise and see how it all pans out. As with the language, for the reader it really only matters if it jells, if it works as an artistic whole, and again for this reader, it does triumphantly. Even to the extent of having to accept a central crucial event which, upon any reasonable reflection, would not have occurred.

                In all of his novels, Flanagan’s characters are trapped in some vast machine. That machine is usually Western Capitalism, in various guises. In ‘Wanting’ that guise is Colonialism, one of the many dark roots of W.C. The general effect throughout his oeuvre is to foreground the machine rather than the individuals. Flanagan is an ‘issues’ writer. Here the issue is the evil of Colonialism and so he manipulates his characters, inner lives and all, to demonstrate this. In some other of his novels the manipulation feels like him climbing up onto a soapbox and haranguing us directly, but not here. In ‘Wanting’ all the pieces work neatly together without his intervention, including the secondary narrative.

                ‘Wanting’ is Mathinna’s story, and also Sir John’s, but Mathinna’s story is a truly terrible one, difficult to read, but read it we must, so to help us get to the end, Flanagan offers us periodic relief with the story of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Many writers employ this ‘sonata form’ device, but two that particularly come to mind, and Flanagan cites them so we can assume an influence, are the unlikely bedfellows of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Secondary narratives in these two writers regularly offer both relief and diversion, but of course beyond this they subtly continue and develop the primary narrative. For example, Dickens as a writer was, amongst other things, a crusader against the evils of rampant capitalism, also he performed in a play about Sir John and the arctic, and so on.

                Dickens relationship with Ellen is not the same as Sir John’s with Mathinna but does contain similar elements, so while we follow one, we are reflecting on the other. The biggest similarity is one of imbalance of power. Sir John can do with Mathinna whatever he wishes, which he eventually does, because he is the Governor and she is an Aborigine. Likewise Dickens is rich, famous and charismatic and so it is difficult, and imprudent, for Ellen to resist his desires. Interestingly, in stark contrast to Sir John and Mathinna, Flanagan points to a happy ending between the novelist and the actor, despite considerable collateral damage to Dickens’ wife and his relationship with his favourite child.

                But with poor abused Mathinna we witness Colonialism at its most pernicious. An indigenous race cruelly persecuted, rounded up and exiled to an unhealthy sanatorium, essentially a prison. Mathinna then plucked from this place as a plaything for Lady Jane gradually becoming an object of desire for Sir John who in a moment of drunken hubris commits an atrocious act (no spoiler, well flagged in advance) which destroys the young girl, whom the couple then abandon to destitution and death.

                With the exception of this act, and Sir John’s desire, this lamentable story is well documented and known, in fact most of what occurs in both stories is on the record. But Sir John’s ‘made-up’ relationship with Mathinna is absolutely central to Flanagan’s messages concerning Colonialism, the shocking black heart of his book. Because of this, the power of his conviction, and also of his writing, we accept this relationship as contiguous with the whole. Well I did.

                Sir John commits an evil, but he is not an evil man, not a psychopath. He is a weak man in a strong position, himself also a victim of the machine. It is important Flanagan engenders some sympathy for Sir John so we keep that machine in mind. Finally, the only way to escape himself and the machine is in the frozen wastes, where there is nothing: ‘There came to him a sense of his own horror. Cold was crossing his skin, invading his being, fine shards of ice were already webbing his lungs’.  A through passage perhaps for the innocent Ephraim, but not for Sir John.

‘Wanting’ is a fine historical novel of past sins and questionable legacies.

Her protagonist is Romy Hall, a woman definitely more sinned against than sinning, although I struggled to understand why she was so done over by the Californian justice system, two consecutive life sentences plus another six years for killing her creepy stalker in a fit of rage and frustration. Deep down she’s a good-hearted gal and there are extenuating circumstances, but I guess it’s important for Kushner that she has us right onside for her heroine so we accept this gross injustice as just one of those things that can happen to almost anyone who, as Stephen King says in one of the celebrity quotes bulking the front of my copy, ‘have fallen through the gaping cracks in American life’.

Romy’s tale is in first person, whereas all the other stories are close third person (with one exception). Normally change of ‘person’ in a novel irritates me but it works well here with Romy as the central thread and the others like beads strung along. There are connections, and connections of connections, so by the time we’re approaching the climax Kushner has presented us with a pretty broad spectrum of the experience of being incarcerated and the various ways this might occur, the agents in and out of the system. This gives the novel overall a documentary feel, Kushner has done extraordinary homework, all the stories, men included, are detailed and convincing.

Kushner focusses on women’s prison, but we get the odd peak into the men’s tribulations too. For a literary work ‘The Mars Room’ covers some spectacularly seedy characters and settings, the title is a lap-dancing club in San Francisco where Romy makes her living. There is even a ‘noir’ thriller aspect to some of the prose which is punchy and unadorned à la Hemmingway, Hammett etc. Of classical influences Zola comes to mind, but Kushner cites Dostoevsky throughout, particularly ‘Crime and Punishment’, the Russian novelist’s sympathy for the marginalised obviously a spur and inspiration.

In ‘Crime and Punishment’, amongst many other things, Dostoevsky presents an ironic view of St. Petersburg, the glittering Czarist capital, which for Raskolnikov and others is a big verminous slum. So Romy and San Francisco, the lauded beauty of the city irrelevant and unseen by those born to poverty, neglect and struggle.  Entering into the prison system― the novel opens with a long bus ride there―is like taking a trip down into the underworld, a sort of modern Hades. Once inside, we get a gripping up-close horror show of a self-contained territory that is largely out of sight and mind to relatively well-off middle-class readers such as myself. But chasing up the relevant stats in my own home town, Hobart, the scenario is not much different, so those cracks are not just Californian or American.

We accept that we need punishment for crimes against society, and incarceration, the taking of freedom, is an obvious answer. The problem is that once any system is established it becomes its own beast, and that beast’s purpose here is to crush any humanity out of both of gaolers and gaoled, which makes things wretched for everyone and does not serve society at all. So constant input is needed from outside, education, occupation etc. for the inmates, this is not news, but it does cost money, and there are no votes in it for politicians, whereas there are, unfortunately, always votes in beating a big law-and-order drum.

The same old story, we all know it, but we forget it or ignore it unless it impinges on our lives. And this is what Kushner seeks to do: wake us up to this particular inhumanity in our affluent nations, and maybe even somehow stir us into action. Still, whilst eliciting our sympathies, she is sensible to show there are actually bad people, in and out of prison, and not everyone is a victim. Amongst various portraits of undesirables, scattered at intervals is the diary of Ted Kaczinski (the exception), the Unabomber, just for an insight into a mind that is truly evil.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression is that of a widespread State-sanctioned injustice, lives and potential being crushed for no good reason, although the end of the novel, the climax and after, heart-stopping and heart-breaking, is oddly life affirming. In ‘The Mars Room’ Kushner has given us something that is genuinely chastening and literary to boot. Not too innovative or flashy, but powerful and accomplished.

She animates not only their psychological worlds, but also those of their families and loves and wives.  Hers is not a claim for a particular historical truth beyond source documents, rather a way of trying to understand history, saying something like: yes, we know what these men did, and so might appraise them accordingly, but here is one interpretation of why they did what they did. Which shows them to be not only actors in some grand dramatic pageant, as in Thomas Carlyle’s history, but individuals perhaps like ourselves, except caught up in historic events, and then by temperament and chance and opportunity becoming and creating those events.

Mantel has said that as she wrote the book, she liked Danton less and Robespierre more but―trust the tale not the teller―the central figure and hero here is surely George-Jacques Danton. For those who don’t know, we are told early on that he will die. We are not told the fates of the others, and I would urge readers who do not know the facts here to do no reading in advance and go with the story. The impact will be greater.

The first thing to be said about this novel is that it is long, 872 pages in my edition. And yet it is, as they say, ‘unputdownable’. It could have been cut, of course, and it could easily have been longer. But the accumulation of the pages gathers momentum as you read and, having spent so much time with these people, the end, the climax, even if you do know it, carries tremendous power. For although we might have foresight, these men cannot, and that ignorance, the ordinary ignorance of living a life, can generate tremendous tension and pathos, ‘dramatic irony’, as it is known in the theatre.

The second thing to be said is that, technically, the novel is a miracle of organisation. We are given a long list of characters at the start, which I needed, nevertheless there is never any problem in following who is doing what to whom and why. Mantel balances her large cast with such a sure touch you hardly notice. The obvious comparison here is ‘War and Peace’ and like Tolstoy, Mantel focuses on a couple of families and sketches in the others as she feels necessary.

There are sacrifices, deliberate ones, even in such a long work. Much circumstantial detail is omitted, broader description of place particularly. We know we’re in 18^th century Paris and surrounds, but for the most part, we could almost be in any city and its countryside. Similarly, with the exception of the finale, Mantel avoids potentially great set-pieces. The King is dispatched in a few trenchant sentences, the Queen has a couple of gripping pages, but little more. The mob riots, the frontier battles, the internal insurrections, are almost all conveyed indirectly, through conversation.

In fact, this is a book of conversation. There are a few internal ruminations, but it is mainly through conversation that this huge story is told, not successive dramatic monologues, as in Dostoevsky, but actual one-on-one exchanges, always pithy and pregnant with meaning and portent. This gives the novel a peculiar contemporaneity. Politics is, after all, a timeless human activity.

I mention above that our hero is Danton. Danton is a man who is morally compromised from the start and continues on that path throughout. He is your old-style politician, larger than life, trading, haggling, helping himself, helping others, immensely charismatic. But despite all of that, he is also throughout, and particularly at the close, a great moral force. No hypocrite, always true to himself, and true, despite all he does, to the high ideals of the Revolution. In stark contrast to the politically correct clerks who bring him down and destroy what had begun with such hope and energy. Perhaps, because like Cromwell, history has judged him a villain, and Mantel likes her underdogs, she strives to give Robespierre a better press than I think he deserves. Crucially, he betrays his colleagues through an invented incident. It is the only time Mantel skews history to her prejudice.

For this is the conundrum or great issue of the French Revolution: how something so idealistic and holding such promise could in so few years descend into terrible barbarity. Through successive conversations Mantel shows us the corrupting process; with this I would have liked a little more scaffolding, the charters, manifestos, so that we might observe more closely how they became perverted. And all those innocent beheadings, whole families, bystanders, one after another, Mantel relays all this, of course, but the moral effect of such mass evil seems somewhat muted when reported second hand.

The other hero of this book, a heroine, is, I assume, largely an invention, Camille Desmoulins wife, Lucille. While Danton pretty much remains Danton throughout his extraordinary journey, Lucille starts as a precocious spoiled brat, selfish and spiteful. Through her marriage with Camille and involvement in his affairs we watch her grow in moral stature until at the end, she is like some great figure from Classical French Drama or Opera.  The Revolution destroys so much, but it makes Lucille Desmoulins, enables her to realise her inner potential, rise into the woman she becomes, of which there is no notion, and certainly not to herself, to begin with. It is a wonderful piece of writing.

Why do it? This huge and hugely ambitious enterprise begun when Mantel was a poor ex-student shop assistant in Manchester and finished as a seriously sick teacher/housewife in a bush town in Botswana. A nine-hundred-page novel about the French Revolution. What was she thinking? What was she doing? I suppose she was doing what she felt she could.

And the meaning of the title? On p651 of my copy, well into the work, there is the following exchange:

                ‘Can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?’

                ‘The grave,’ Camille said. ‘The grave.’

What I believe Mantel is saying here is that life itself is inherently dangerous, more dangerous for revolutionaries than most of us no doubt, nevertheless that living fully involves making choices and commitments, saying and doing things we might prefer not to, sticking our necks out, both for ourselves and those we love and admire. The more we dare, the braver we are, the more complete our lives, even if, as a result, they might be cut off prematurely. Danton died a young man but lived a complete life, a great life, and placed his head on the block knowing this and knowing others would know it too. ‘Show my head to the people,’ he is reported to have said to his executioner. ‘It’s worth the trouble’. For Mantel, this was worth a book.  

The broader philosophical take here is that in times of crisis or upheaval, political and otherwise, evil men and evil itself will prosper when good men are passive. This is a thing we all know and history, particularly twentieth century history, has demonstrated it time and again. But still it is important that these great truths are occasionally brought to the forefront of our minds, pushing aside for a while the trivia of daily life, and this magnificent novel, amongst much else, surely achieves that.