Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

"If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply ..."  With these words Blackmore's honest narrator and protagonist, John Ridd, begins his intriguing story of love, hatred and endeavour.

The "simple tale" begins in Somerset and Devon in the 1670s.  King Charles II has been the king since the monarchy was restored in 1660.  The tumults of the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorship are over but their consequences are still being felt.  

The Doones, formerly lords in the north of England, now landless after the war, have become a clan of outlaws and brigands on Exmoor in Devon and Somerset. Operating from their fortified hideout in the inaccessible valley of Badgworthy Water, they pillage the countryside for food, money and wives.  When John Ridd is still but a child, his father is murdered by one of the Doones.  Despite this calamity, John and his mother carry on business at the family farm and John is able to gain an education.  As he grows, John encounters a beautiful girl near the headwaters of the moor: she is Lorna, the granddaughter of the Doone clan's patriarch.  It is love at first sight for the pair, but are they destined to become star-crossed lovers?  How can John, a lone and virtuous youth, ever hope to wrest Lorna away from the murderous Doones?

In the course of the tale, which spans some fifteen years, we meet a host of memorable characters, including John and Lorna; John's nervous mother; Lorna's eloquent and unscrupulous uncle (known as the Counsellor); Tom Faggus, a dashing highwayman; Jeremy Stickles, the King's hungry and loquacious messenger; the capricious and blood-thirsty Judge Jefferys; and the sadistic Carver Doone.  Love, tenderness, honesty and goodwill are by turns set against violence, deceit, double-crosses, and political uprisings.

The narrative provides the reader with action and respites in pleasing proportions.  The characters, while tending to be a bit (or sometimes more than a bit) one-sided in their virtues and failings, are believable and engaging.  The natural world is evoked through charming and beautiful descriptive passages, providing a solid and memorable setting for the story.  John Ridd, for example, has his emotions stirred by the beauty Lorna's 'care and diligence' has wrought in her cottage garden, and he says to us:

Even the breathing of the wind, soft and gentle in and out, moving things that need not move, and passing longer-stalked ones, even this was not enough among the flush of fragrance, to tell a man the reason of his quiet satisfaction.  But so it shall forever be.  As the river we float upon (with wine, and flowers, and music) is nothing at the well-spring but a bubble without reason.

At over 600 pages, Lorna Doone is a long book; however, the pleasure to be had from this lively romance set on the English moors makes the tale all too short.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

It would be fair to say that we have all wished to be invisible at some time or other, for various reasons and purposes.  But have we ever thought through the practical problems of invisibility?  Would invisible retinas, for example, render us blind?  What would be the mechanism for turning invisible and back again?  What would the moral implications of invisibility be?

Tolkien used invisibility as a device in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  In the former, invisibility helped the protagonist avoid capture, rescue his comrades, gather information and to steal.  In the latter, it was mainly used to avoid capture, although invisibility brought with it metaphysical implications that endangered the protagonist on the physical, spiritual and morals level.

In The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells explores the implications of invisibility.  First, there are the practical problems.  The process of becoming invisible, explained in terms of a chemical transformation within the body, is one that is irreversible.  Second, while the protagonist, Griffin, is invisible, his clothes are not - so he has to go about either stark naked or covered head to toe in hat, gloves, clothes and bandages.  Third, there are social consequences: invisibility, or the disguising of it, leads to social exclusion.  Finally, Wells explores the psychological and moral impact invisibility has upon Griffin, and it turns out the effect is baneful rather bountiful.

The tale is told in a breezy and fluid manner.  The action is set in motion and is propelled along at a brisk pace with brief interludes of introspection and explanation.  The fantastic premise of invisibility occurs in a realistic setting, allowing the reader to more readily accept its possibility. The lightness of the narrative style provides a welcome contrast with the darker aspects of the story's content.  As with the some other H.G. Wells' novels (The First Men in the Moon and The Time Machine), the author places an emphasis on the human capacity for evil and injury to others.  All this makes The Invisible Man an enjoyable-to-read but morally challenging novel. 

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

What a crashing disappointment this one was.  A Booker Prize winning book with glowing reviews, extolled as a comic novel: it turned out to be a play with two miserable acts and a happy intermission.

Julian Treslove is a sorrow junkie.  Luckily for him both his best friend and his best frenemy are Jewish.  The former is an elderly ex-Hollywood gossip columnist of mittel-European origin, the latter is a celebrity populist philosopher, á la Alain de Botton.  Their heritage (and the fact that both are recently widowed) provides an ocean of sorrow for Julian to splash around in.  And he does.  He is perfectly miserable (and loving it) until he meets Hephzibah.  Julian falls in love, is happy as happy can be, and then seeks out the means to make himself miserable again.

On the whole, the characters in this novel are unattractive, especially Julian Treslove and his frenemy Sam Finkler.  Perhaps it is Hephzibah and her uncle Libor that bring any kind of sympathetic redemption to the dramatis personae, but it is far too little to rescue the story.  And in the end, why would you care about the cast or their situation?  In this respect The Finkler Question reminds me of that great Aldous Huxley misfire Those Barren Leaves.  Whilst Jacobson may be a great prose stylist, his skill is not enough to redeem either the characters, the story or its content.  Perhaps this is a satirical novel, but is the kind of satire that is lost on me.  Also, a few puns sprinkled here and there do not make this a comic novel, despite what the reviewers say.     

The Finkler Question supposedly explores what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century.  It would seem it means being filled up with all manner of unpleasant neuroses, if one assumes Jacobson to be an honest broker on the subject. In addition, there is the problem of Israel.  How are Jews meant to feel about the way Israel is behaving in the Middle East?  It is a question that is raised but not really examined or answered to any extent.

I found The Finkler Question both unenjoyable and unedifying. Most definitely not recommended. 

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Imagine a novel without a plot.  Imagine a novel without a plot that happens to be a great pleasure to read.  Then you have imagined Cranford.

The genesis of this novel resulted from Charles Dickens inviting Mrs Gaskell to contribute short stories to his periodical Household Words.  Over the course of three years she provided Dickens with a series of eight stand-alone short stories featuring the village of Cranford and its inhabitants.  It was only afterwards that any thought was given to reworking these stories into its current form as a novel (this would explain the apparent lack of a plot) which was first published in 1851. 

What we do have is a collection of charming and loosely-linked vignettes about the ladies of Cranford as told by the narrator Mary Smith.  The story is set in the 1830s.  We are introduced to the central characters:  Miss Matty Jenkyns and Miss Pole, two aging spinsters; the Honourable Mrs Jamieson an aged and sleepy widow; and Mary Smith who divides her time between the village of Drumble where she lives with her father, and Cranford when she visits Miss Matty for extended periods.  Although the book starts out by asserting that the women of Cranford are Amazons, male characters do feature in the stories - ironically as stalwarts or saviours.

Thematically, Cranford deals with the vanishing way of life that was the English rural village.  By the time of the novel's first publication, industrialisation was well under way in Britain and there was an increasing migration of the population from the countryside to urban centres.  

It is a testament to Mrs Gaskell's skill as a writer that she is able to produce a loving portrait of English village life while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and wistfulness.  Subtle, gentle and easy to enjoy: give Cranford a whirl. 

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? ... You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.

That is Philip Marlowe speaking.  A private eye in 1930s Los Angeles, Marlowe is the narrator of The Big Sleep.  He is hired by a dying rich man to investigate a blackmail attempt against his youngest daughter. One thing leads to another, and the case grows to involve first a missing person, then an abduction, and finally several murders.  All this despite the fact that Marlowe wants to investigate the blackmail case only.  Yes, indeed, and against his will, Marlowe became part of the nastiness.

The Big Sleep is the first of Chandler's novels to feature Philip Marlowe, it is also the first piece by Chandler I have read.  Frankly, I was until now only familiar with his work through parodies, so I was pleasantly surprised to find Chandler's writing has a greater quality than I had been led to believe.  The plotting is complex, the pace of the story is pleasingly brisk, and Marlowe is an amiable narrator (despite the tough mask he wears) with a great turn of phrase.  For example, on going to meet a prospective employer, he says:

I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Or, on being hung-over:

I woke up with a motorman’s glove in my mouth ...

Or, describing the natural world:

The sunshine was as empty as a head waiter’s smile.

Chandler uses phrases like this sparingly, but they come often enough to keep the prose lively and to show the reader how Marlowe's mind works.

I had great fun reading The Big Sleep.  Even now, so many years after its first publication, the story is still fresh and intriguing.  Marlowe's world is long since dead, sleeping the big sleep, but its spirit is alive and well in these pages.