Winter Garden, by Beryl Bainbridge, 1980

Virtually every review of Winter Garden that I’ve found online says a variation of the same thing – ‘I am not sure what was going on’! Me too I’m afraid. I had the strong impression that if I had invested more time and care in reading the novel I would have found patterns and depths that I missed. But sadly this was one of those ’20 pages a day when the opportunity arises’ reads, rather than a focussed session which probably would have finished of the just over 150 pages in an afternoon. As a result I came away feeling a bit of a failure as a reader.

For context, the novel follows Douglas Ashburner, an everyman figure if ever there was one, setting off on an adventure. He leaves his wife tucked up in bed thinking he is going on a solo fishing expedition to Scotland. In fact, and quite improbably, he is setting off for Moscow as a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union. He is travelling (and looking forward to some extra marital sex) with Nina St Clair, an artist with whom he has been having an affair. The other two members of the party are Bernard, an uncompromising artist, and Enid, whose role on the trip is never entirely clear, or not to me anyway!

On arrival in what was still the pre-glasnost USSR, in some ways enemy territory, Ashburner’s luggage goes missing. Shortly afterwards so does Nina. The party’s interpreter and guide drives them through a series of increasingly uncoordinated and unlikely visits, some vaguely arts related, others more in the way of social visits. There’s a lot of drinking and a huge amount of ‘business’ about Douglas’s fishing rods, taken along to sustain the trip to Scotland story. The novel descends quickly into a increasingly Kafkaesque swirl of events few of which make any sense. For example one night Ashburner receives a sinister phone call:

“‘I am your brother’ shouted the voice. ‘It is Boris. Listen to me please. Tomorrow night there is an exhibition of Zamyotov’s work in the people’s Institute behind Bolotnaya Square. You will go there. I have fixed it all. Do not listen to them when they tell you something else is specified. Tell them to jump in the lake, yes? Beforehand there will be a lecture. Unfortunately I myself cannot be there until later. You will like the etchings, I think. Have you understood?’”

Is this a coded message? A wrong number? The incident is quickly forgotten as the party move on to the next stage of the tour, still without Nina, but similar incidents pile up. making it hard to follow the narrative thread. On a train to Leningrad Douglas has a disturbing sexual encounter but can’t be sure whether or not it was a dream. For no particular reason he is then taken to watch a brain operation. They go to the opera. He thinks he sees Nina several times, but each time she quickly disappears, and I soon found myself not really caring whether she finally emerged or not.

Just to give a sense of my confusion with this novel, there is a sentence in the penultimate chapter where Douglas uses an everyday phrase which reminds him of “his conversation with Tatiana’s husband in the forest”. There’s no point in being dishonest about this – not only did I not remember the conversation referred to, thereby losing any significance the comment may have had, but I also couldn’t bring to mind either Tatiana herself, or her husband. It’s conceivable that there was no Tatiana and this is just the author’s sense of a meta-joke; equally Tatiana may have been a significant figure that I just overlooked – I am certainly not going to reread to find out! The point of this anecdote is to underline how much I struggled to engage with the text in the way it needed to be read.

The novel ends with Douglas (and this reader) no closer to understanding what has happened to Nina. There is a suggestion that Bernard was using the trip as cover to sketch military bases, but this is thrown away in a sentence. The Flamingo edition I read has a quote from the Sunday Times on its back cover: “I wish it had not stopped”. So did I – I wish it had had an ending of sorts rather than just stopping!

Thematically Winter Garden could so easily have been written by Kingsley Amis, featuring as it does that stock Amis character, an unprepossessing, morose male central figure who is strangely successful with women but a bit of a failure at life. The late Soviet-era backdrop, dominated by drinking, confusion and cold weather would have been a classic Amis setting. If I had read this without knowing the author I would have staked a lot of money on it being by Amis senior.

It’s conceivable that one day I will reread it and all the missing pieces will fall into place, but for now I am happy to move on.

Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming, 1959

As I read Goldfinger with, I have to say, an increasing sense of dismay, I found myself playing a bizarre game of ‘bigotry bingo’:

Homophobia? As early as page 21 the narrator (from Bond’s perspective) refers to a bar-owner as “a pansified Italian“; later Bond lusts after Pussy Galore (who in the novel is a lesbian) and reflects on “the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men“! (279); of course Bond believes that every lesbian just hasn’t met the right man. He refers to Tilly Masterson as “one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well, and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women… as a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males”. (313)

Inevitably at the end of the novel this happens:

Bond said firmly, “Lock that door Pussy, take off that sweater, and come into bed. You’ll catch cold.”

She did as she was told , like an obedient child. She lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a Lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, “Will you write to me in Sing-Sing?”

… “They told me you only liked women”

She said “I’ve never met a man before”.

Pussy then goes on to explain she was only a lesbian because she was sexually abused as a child: “I come from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case I couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve.” (371)

(I feel bad even quoting this garbage, but in case you ever meet anyone who claims Ian Fleming’s novel’s have any merit whatsoever, remember that quote, making fun of CSA! )

Anti-Semitism? Check. On page 27 Du Pont answers Bond’s question on Goldfinger’s nationality by saying “You won’t believe it but he’s British. Domiciled in Nassau. You’d think he’d be a Jew from the name, but he doesn’t look it. We’re restricted at the Floridian. Wouldn’t have got in if he had been.” In other words Du Pont’s club bars Jewish people from being members.

Misogyny. Well where isn’t there misogyny in Bond? All women are referred to as ‘girls’ and all of them are liable to succumb to his charms. They are disposable and insignificant, suitable only for bringing coffee, typing up memos, and of course servicing his other needs.

Racism. Describing Goldfinger’s gold smuggling operation in the UK, the Bank of England chappie, Colonel Smithers, refers to “half a dozen Korean stevedores he picked up in Liverpool. They didn’t know a word of any civilised language”.(88) Later Bond refers to putting Oddjob and “any other Korean firmly in his place, which in Bond’s estimation was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy“.(257).

Obviously it is wrong to make light of the nasty, outdated attitudes reflected throughout this novel. Bond was a colonial anachronism long before the sun had set on the British Empire, a relic of a time when just being British was enough to guarantee one’s superiority amongst ‘foreigners’. I’ve written at length elsewhere about the difference between novels which simply reflect outdated views which were prevalent at the time the text was written (the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn, for example, or the anti-Semitism in Trollope) and the more active promotion of these views, where they are supported and presented as being right-minded. It’s not only hard to write about slavery without acknowledging the existence of racist views, or the Holocaust without mentioning anti-Semitism, it would also be both wrong and ridiculous. But it is completely possible to write a spy story without the spy being a dinosaur who always wins because he believes himself to be, and is, superior to all the foreigners he meets, and who has all the women he wants because he is simply sufficiently manly. Bond isn’t just a dinosaur in the twenty-first century, he had horrendously out of date attitudes and beliefs in the 1950’s.

The novel’s plot is constructed of a series of set pieces – the card game, the golf round, the car ride across Northern Europe etc which bear the hallmarks of research that Fleming was reluctant to waste. The superfluous detail and technical terminology grates very quickly. The novel also presents some mysteries for the reader to solve which are laughably easy – even for a disengaged reader like me who really wasn’t trying that hard! Just as an example, the novel open with Bond being employed to help find out how Goldfinger is cheating at cards. As soon as we are told he wears a hearing aid and that he insists on playing outdoors, facing the hotel (i.e. with his opponent having his back to the hotel windows) the solution is apparent to even the most casual of reader. Later the reader will have worked out how Goldfinger smuggles his gold long before it finally dawns on Bond.

As super-villains go, Goldfinger is very one-dimensional (in addition to being a deeply anti-Semitic portrait). His gold-smuggling regime is preposterous – it involves buying the gold at UK retail prices, melting it down and remaking it into car parts, melting it down again in Switzerland and remaking it into airplane seats, and then finally re-melting it down back into gold bars in India. As well as being ridiculously complex (and therefore expensive) this process introduces multiple points of failure into the process, when he could just simply bribe a handful of Indian customs officials. The decision to not kill Bond and use him in some kind of bizarre clerical capacity, when he is so obviously a law enforcement officer, is equally nonsensical. The finale, the raid on Fort Knox, is just about as mad as it gets.

Bond lives on through the immense success of the films and novels authorised by the Fleming estate using respected authors such as Anthony Horowitz. But I think this veneration of Fleming’s creation has gone on far too long. There is no need for a modern Bond (especially one who continues to treat women as disposable, as the Daniel Craig version of the character does) when there are better stories to be told. I hated Casino Royale and read Goldfinger with low expectations of any improvement. There was none at all.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, 2018

I think publishers around the world will be working frantically to find novels in which shy but brilliant young women live lives of hardship in isolated communities (preferably American, preferably coastal) and get involved in crimes of passion while at the same time pursuing an academic interest in zoology. Oh, and also writing her own poetry. Because that seems to be the magic formula for selling books if the extraordinary success of Where the Crawdads Sing is anything to go by.

BUT – spoiler alert – that doesn’t mean the novel is any good. In fact a recent Reddit post entitled “Always shocked to discover a bestseller is actually awful” summed it up for me:

“Read if you like migraine inducing romance, insipid mystery, sh*t dialogue, unrealistic flat characters, and enough plot holes to backfill a swamp dry. I envied Kya’s mother for walking out of this book on page 6 and not having to suffer through the rest of it like I did.”

Much of the novel is written in a folksy vernacular – y’all – which grated until either I got used to it or the author quietly dropped it. My impression is that it was the latter. Either way that wasn’t the main problem. To explain the central flaw in the novel I need to give a quick plot outline. Briefly it tells the story of Kya Clark, a young girl who lives in the North Carolina swamplands in the 1960s. She is abandoned by her family, and grows up almost entirely isolated from society, ignored by the local villagers who refer to her as ‘swamp girl’. In a parallel plot line set around ten years in the future, a local man has been murdered and Kya is a suspect.

For the novel to work in any way we need to be able believe in Kya, that she could survive on her own, and become an academic prodigy with the minimum of support. But this is asking too much – she is abandoned by her whole family at the age of six (or thereabouts) and manages to survive in a harsh environment on her own. The lack of intervention by the authorities – Child Protective Services or the 1960’s equivalent – is explained by Kya’s ability to hide; each time the school attendance officer comes out to Kya’s shack she hides in the swamp until they leave. After a while they give up. That just didn’t ring true. She goes into town once a week to buy groceries – usually just a bag of ‘grits’ – wouldn’t they have just waited for her there? Equally her transformation from an abandoned child to an academic expert on the local flora and fauna is utterly implausible. Learning is more than being able to read – surely that hardly needs saying does it? And once I lost any belief in the central character, the purpose of rest of the novel just dissolved away.

The parallel plot – the murder mystery – is even less plausible. I’m not going to spoil the plot by telling you why, but I just refuse to believe anyone will read this novel, find out the ‘answer’ to whether Kya killed the philandering sex abuser that tries to rape her, and be surprised at the outcome, however many red herrings the author introduces. Or maybe I will.

So apart from the ridiculous plot and unbelievable characters, is the novel well written? Of course not! It is totally overwritten. Some brief examples should suffice:

Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother“

“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”

“Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was…”

‘Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly’. No they bloody don’t! If ever a sentence was written to go on a bookmark or a t-shirt that was it.

I am really sorry if you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing – I appreciate you will hate this post, and find it mean-spirited. I also know the author’s primary purpose – to write a novel that helps protect the North Carolina marshland which is under threat from development – was well-intentioned, and I have probably over-stated the novel’s weaknesses without giving credit where it is due for its strengths. But my wariness over the popular fiction best-seller list remains as strong as ever.

The Twyford Code, Janice Hallett, 2022

The Twyford Code is several books at once. Don’t be misled by the Osmanesque branding – this is nothing like The Thursday Murder Club, apart from coexisting in the broad category of mystery/crime. The misleading marketing continues in the novel’s blurb, which claims “It’s time to solve the murder of the century...” even though the novel isn’t about a murder. What it is about is slightly harder, I’d admit, to define.

It opens with what seems at first to be a fairly clumsy framing device – a detective inspector sends some transcribed audio-files to an academic who specialises in cryptic codes, asking for assistance in tracing the missing person who made the recordings. That’s where the first warning signal should been buzzing away – why send the transcriptions rather than the audio files themselves? And why transcribe the files using a very poor voice recognition software full of mistakes when an audio typist could have transcribed the audio accurately? Of course there are answers to both these questions that we find out at the end of the novel when the big reveal takes place, although by then we have just accepted the premise.

The transcribed recordings form the bulk of the narrative. Some are straightforward dictation, others are recordings of telephone conversations, and a few are fragmented recording of conversations while the phone is in the character’s pocket, constituting in effect ‘overheard’ conversations. This gives the novel the immediacy of a story being told in the moment, although the device doesn’t always work. There are several points when the narrative has some catching up to do. The recordings are being made by Steven Smith, who has recently been released from a long prison sentence, and are directed to his parole officer, Maxine. They are an account of his life story, focussing on an incident from his schooldays. Travelling on a bus he found a copy of a children’s book. Thinking he might be able to sell it for the price of a bag of chips he took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, (throughout the novel her name is transcribed as ‘missiles’, which at first was mildly amusing but which quickly became irritating), who is fascinated by it. Eventually she explained to Steven her belief that the author was using the bland children’s stories to communicate in code, To whom, and about what, is unclear, but in pursuit of the mystery she organised a field trip for her class to the author’s family home in Bournemouth. At some point during the trip she disappeared, leaving her class to make their own way home.

Steven has become obsessed by this buried memory, and now free to pursue his investigation he contacts the schoolmates who were with him on the trip. Alongside the story of his investigation he recounts memories of his childhood and how he drifted into a life of crime.

Twyford is a very thinly disguised version of Enid Blyton. There is some clumsy commentary on how Blyton was cancelled in the seventies and eighties, which is very much not the case and glosses over the fact that there was problematic content in her stories. It wasn’t political correctness that caused Blyton to fall out of fashion but an increasing awareness that the outdated views on gender and race in her stories was potentially harmful to kids. But she was never banned and her books remained widely available and in print.

The mystery at the core of The Twyford Code is hard to pin down – the focus of the mystery keeps shifting. It’s not clear whether Miss Isles did go missing on the day trip to Bournemouth, nor whether the Twyford books do contain acrostics and other codes pointing to the whereabouts of stolen bullion hidden during the second world war. It’s also unclear whether the narrator is being pursued by mysterious figures throughout his investigations, as he appears to be, or whether these are figures of his imagination. He is an unreliable narrator and there’s almost nothing he says that can be trusted.

The resolution to the novel is well constructed and convincing, but it is a long time coming. You can read mystery/crime novels passively, knowing that each mystery you are presented with will be explained and resolved fairly quickly, or you can more actively engaged with the text and try and work out what is going on. This novel pushes that choice upon the reader quite hard – for example we are presented with large chunks of text from the Twyford stories and asked to decode them. I have no idea whether this is a confession or not, but I tend to read these popular fiction novels for entertainment rather than mental exercises, and I don’t try to work the puzzles out. I know that the author will usually have withheld key information making the working out element almost impossible, and Hallett is no exception. As an example, we are told that acrostics can be found throughout the Twyford stories between occurrences of the word ‘cat’. This is then modified to phrases where the word ‘cat’ appears as an acrostic itself, and then further modified to phrases where the word ‘cat’ appears close together in the text. Then it is finally revealed (minor spoiler) that cat isn’t the real keyword at all, and there is another keyword which we should have been looking out for all the time. That’s just cheating isn’t it? If the intention was to invite the read to go back over these passages and work out the puzzles than that’s a hard pass from me.

There are other instances where the puzzles in the text are impossible for the reader to decrypt. A picture in the background of a photograph is believed to contain clues relating to numbers of a dartboard. Subsequently a different version of the picture is revealed showing another set of numbers. So any effort invested in trying to discern the relevance of the first group of numbers – are the map references, dates, codes to a cypher etc – is pointless. That’s my excuse for not engaging with this element of the novel – it’s a matter of personal choice and if you enjoy trying to work these puzzles out then go for it.

I appreciate the fact that the author tried something different here rather than the conventional, narrator-led body in the drawing room school of cosy crime. She also includes some commentary in education in prison, and the treatment of children with special educational needs, all of which is very commendable. I am tempted to try Hallett’s earlier novel The Appeal which has received positive reviews, and to which by all accounts this represents a slightly disappointing follow up. Without wanting to sound too condescending, if you are looking for something diverting on a long train journey, this might fit the bill, but I doubt it will linger long in the memory.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, 1959

I am pretty ambivalent about horror as a genre, and The Haunting of Hill House has done little to change my mind about this one way or the other. While bad horror is virtually unreadable, good horror needs to tap into some primeval fear for it to make any impact at all and avoid the cardinal sin of being ridiculous. I wasn’t convinced that The Haunting managed to swerve that pitfall.

This novel is an unusual example of the genre in that is is without a monster – no aliens or creatures from the black lagoon. While other 1950’s American authors were being inspired by the Cold War, the space race and the march of technology (see for example Richard Matheson’s 1956 The Shrinking Man, or John Wyndham’s 1951 The Chrysalids) here Shirley Jackson falls back to one of horror’s earliest forms, the haunted house story.

Hill House is a mansion somewhere remote in the USA – a precise location is obviously never specified – which although relatively recently built, has acquired a reputation for being cursed or haunted:

“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Jackson, or her narrator, is clear – there is something about the precise architecture of Hill House that is evil:

“No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.”

and later

“Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”

Four brave/foolhardy souls decide to stay at the house overnight to investigate the persistent reports of the house being haunted: Dr. John Montague, an paranormal investigator; Eleanor Vance, a young woman escaping her oppressive family; Theodora, an artist; and Luke Sanderson, heir to Hill House. Eleanor and Theodora have been chosen by Dr Montague, who is leading the experiment, because they have had previous encounters with the paranormal. Clearly the assumption is that they will find something strange about the house – and of course they immediately do.

Apart from Dr Montague these are not the typical cast of characters found in a haunted house story. Eleanor is timid and an extremely unlikely ghost-hunter; Theodora is, it is broadly hinted, a lesbian, and while I am not suggesting for one second that lesbians can’t hunt ghosts, it is definitely not a typical piece of casting; and Luke – well to be honest Luke is not a very well developed character at all – he is principally there to make up the numbers. Only Dr Montague conforms to his eccentric scientist trope.

The cast assembles in the way that groups of people going to haunted houses do, and the scene is set for the haunting to begin, along with the obligatory creepy housekeeper. Strictly on cue the scary happenings kick-off. All of the inhabitants begin to experience ‘strange events’ while in the house and its grounds, including violently loud noises, freezing cold doorways, sinister messages being scrawled on the walls and spectral figures out of the corner of the eye.

Is this all really happening, or are the loud noises etc being produced by the residents themselves? Alternatively, are they imagining them? Maybe even both? The narrative carefully avoids any possibility of the reader knowing what is really happening, and this undermines the attempts at realism in the story. We can’t be scared of what we know is not real after all, and the willing suspension of disbelief needs a convincing appearance of reality.

Approximately two-thirds of the way through, as the daily routine of general spookiness is beginning to settle down, the novel is given a massive injection of life by the late arrival of the magnificent Mrs. Montague and her side-kick Arthur Parker, a no-nonsense headmaster. This pair are wonderfully comedic – Mrs Montague relentlessly and unreasonably hen-pecks her husband, and Mr Parker’s attempts at being the alpha-male are farcical:

I shall make my headquarters in the small room just this side of the nursery, well within shouting distance. I shall have with me a a drawn revolver – do not take alarm, ladies, I am an excellent shot – and a flashlight, in addition to a most piercing whistle…You may all sleep quietly I assure you.

The ending is sadly predictable, but after all the range of choices available to the author of horror stories are fairly limited:

a) Ghost are real;

b) It was the spooky caretaker/groundskeeper in a mask after all (i.e. there is a logical explanation of some kind to all the apparently supernatural activity); or

c) The horror is psychological – the haunting etc is all in the mind.

H. P. Lovecraft said of horror writing that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. Jackson picks up on this concept here:

“Fear,” the doctor said, “is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”

Jackson does a good job of keeping the threat imposed by Hill House largely unknown – it’s never really clear what is going on at any particular time. The confusing layout of the house, which leads to the characters getting lost all the time, makes good use of this concept. But I needed to be persuaded to willingly relinquish my grasp on reasonableness before experiencing anything like fear and I never quite succumbed.