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The intriguing error in an Australia history book and the true story of an all-female convict ship sent to Tasmania

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In one of the early chapters of respected historian John Molony‘s The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia (which I reviewed here), a seemingly incredible story is reduced to just a few sentences.

It’s the early days of the colony, 1813 to be exact and Molony writes about the convicts being sent to Tasmania, or as it was then known, “Van Diemen’s Land”.

Molony writes: “The first direct consignment of 200 male convicts arrived in Hobart in 1812, but a vessel carrying female convicts was captured by an American privateer. The women were put down on an island in the Atlantic on 17 January 1813 and never heard of again.”

According to Molony, an entire ship full of female convicts had been taken prisoner and deposited on an unnamed island in the middle of the ocean, their fates an unsolved mystery.

I was utterly intrigued by this strange and disturbing story, and eager to know more.

While Molony did not have the luxury of Google when he wrote his book (published in 1987), he was a renowned historian and academic being the Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University. So my immediate instinct was to completely trust his version of events. But still the sentence nagged at me. How could a whole ship of female convicts completely vanish? Didn’t someone try to find out what happened to them?

While Molony may have dismissed it as just a footnote in the history of Australia, I was keen to find out as much as I could about the Emu, the convicts on board and the events that had sealed their mysterious fate.

Entirely untrue

Very quickly, I found a lot of information about what happened to the Emu, and I have to report that Molony’s simple verdict that the convicts onboard “were never heard of again” is entirely untrue.

In a fact, an entire book has been written about the ship and the convicts on board titled: “Journey to a New Life: The Story of the Ships Emu in 1812 and Broxbornebury in 1814, Including Crew, Female Convicts and Free Passengers on Board” by Elizabeth Hook.

Hook (now Elizabeth ‘Beth” Kibblewhite} is a descendent of one of the convicts aboard the Emu, Jane Jones.

Jones, like so many of those sent to Australia, was convicted of a rather petty crime at a time when Britain was a highly unequal society, where the middle and upper classes lived well and the lower classes struggled to survive.

Aged just 17, she was convicted of theft in 1812 after she and a younger accomplice broke into a public house in London and were caught in the act of stealing a large quantity of food and money. Jones was sentenced to death, but because of her young age and being “of good character” (her father was a glassmaker) her sentence was commuted to transportation to the fledgling colony of NSW for life.

(You can read the entire Old Bailey trial transcript here).

She was put on the Emu, a merchant ship built in Liverpool which set sail in October 1812. Jones was one of 49 female convicts. Rather than never being heard of again – as Molony claimed – she did reach Sydney, but only in July 1814 and on a different ship, and after a hellish experience that lasted almost two years.

Molony was correct about the initial fate of the Emu. It was indeed captured by a privateer, the 18-gun Holkar, led Captain J. Rolland. A privateer was a US-government sanctioned ship whose task it was to steal British ships and their cargo.

The taking of the Emu occurred at particularly treacherous time to be sailing the seas as Britain was at war with the United States, a conflict sparked by maritime disputes and known as the War of 1812.

Journey to Cape Verde

As to that unnamed island in the Atlantic Ocean Molony says the crew and convicts aboard the Emu were dumped on, it was St Vincent (now Sao Vicente) in the Cape Verde islands, about 840 km west of Dhaka, Senegal. According to numerous trustworthy online accounts, the 22 crew of the Emu and the 49 female convicts were put ashore on January 17,1813 at Porte Grande.

View of downtown Mindelo, Bay of Porte Grande (Photo credit: ElsondeMadrid, Wikipedia)

Porte Grande is a bay on the North Coast of Sao Vicente, and is where the island’s main city of Mindelo is situated today. Discovered by the Portuguese in the 1460s, the Cape Verdes were populated by Portugese settlers who were allowed to keep slaves.

At the time the female convicts were put down at Porte Grande, the Portuguese-owned island was recovering as settlers returned following a devastating drought.

Final journey to Sydney

The female convicts and crew spent 12 months on St Vincent before being picked up by the Isabella and returned to Britain. Here they were put on a hulk (a floating prison) in Portsmouth Harbour for four months and then put on another ship, the Broxbornebury and transported to Port Jackson in the colony of NSW, departing in February 1814.

Elizabeth Kibblewhite, in her post on Convictrecords.com.au about her “3X great-grandmother” Jane Jones, notes that while there was no official record of what happened to the women convicts, their children and the crew during their stay on St Vincent, “an unverified report states that they were looked after by Catholic nuns. One of the women, Elizabeth King, died on the island on the 29th of January 1813”.

Illustration of a hulk or prison ship (Credit/source: The Museum of History NSW)

Kebblewhite writes: “They arrived back at Portsmouth England (via a journey to Bear Haven, Ireland), about the 12th of October 1813, only for the authorities to be told the women were “….in a state of nakedness and inadvisable of their being landed…” They were kept on board in the harbour for a total of four months until another ship was made ready for a voyage to the Colony, which was the Broxbornebury in February 1814, along with an extra eighty-five female convicts.

Kebblewhite continues: “Not all the thirty-nine remaining women from the Emu made the journey to New South Wales. Five convicts were transferred to the Captivity prison hulk ship in Portsmouth Harbour. Four of these women were granted Full Pardons and one died on the hulk ship. For the other thirty-four it had been a long voyage when they finally arrived in Sydney in July 1814, twenty months after first embarking on the Emu!”

After a long, exhausting and terrifying ordeal that lasted nearly two years. Jane Jones would have been just 19 when she arrived in the fledgling city of Sydney. She did, however, live long life in NSW, dying on the 24th of April 1868, aged 73. Her occupation is listed on convictrecords.com.au as “servant”.

The story of Jane Jones

I contacted Beth Kebblewhite to ask if she knew of Molony’s book and his error about the Emu.

She replied a few days later that she had never heard of the book I’d read “so did not know about the mistake regarding the ship Emu“.

She went on to say: “I first heard about the Emu in the mid 1980s when I started researching my family tree & found my 3X great-grandmother Jane Jones was a convict onboard. The story had been passed down many generations & about how she had met her husband-to-be, a free passenger, John Stilwell, on the ship Broxbornebury.

“At that time, I did most of my researching at the Mitchell Library [part of the NSW State Library] in Sydney, but it wasn’t until years later when I found I had many other relatives, free & convict, on the Broxbornebury, that I looked into it further & attempted to confirm the story of the Emu.

“This was confirmed in The Convict Ships 1787-1868 by Charles Bateson, page 191. Quite a long story about what happened & it was first published in 1959.”

That’s almost 30 years before Molony researched and wrote his Australian history book.

Beth added that she undertook further research online in 2000, which she incorporated into the third edition of her book, published in 2014.

After corresponding with Beth, I came across another entry about Jane Jones on a website called immigrationplace.com.au, which fills in quite a few blanks about her rather extraordinary life as does a detailed entry on People Australia (a website of the Australian National University).

It seems that Jane’s luck changed when she met John Stilwell on board the Broxbornebury. Stilwell was a steward of the surgeon Sir John Jamison who was also travelling to Sydney aboard the same ship.

It appears Stilwell used his relationship with Sir John to secure her a job as a housekeeper at one of his properties, the Westmoreland Arms Hotel, where Stilwell was installed as publican and manager. The alternative, had she not met Stilwell, was to be sent to another hellish institution, the “Female Factory at Parramatta” where unmarried female convicts lived like slaves and in solitary confinement in an imposing sandstone building on the banks of the Parramatta River.

Jane Jones married Stilwell, had five children with him and received a full pardon from Governor Macquarie in 1820. Rather than leave the colony as she could have done, Jones stayed in NSW, had another six children with another ex-convict John Webster (Stilwell ran into financial problems, abandoned Jane and their children and returned to Britain in 1825) and later moved to Goulburn, where Webster became a butcher.

“John died on 28th February 1842 aged 44 years. Jane died of ‘old age’ in her house in Auburn Street, Goulburn on 24th April 1868 aged 74 years. It is believed they are both buried in the Presbyterian section of the original burial ground, Mortis Road Cemetery,” according to Immigrationplace.com.au.

Mortis Road Cemetry, Goulburn, the final resting place of Jane Jones (Pic: https://www.goulburnhistoriccemeteries.org/mortis-street/)

Jones is just one of the 34 original Emu convicts who came to Sydney in 1814. There are fascinating stories of the other women who made it to Sydney aboard the Broxbournebury, some of which you can read here. Today hundreds if not thousands of the descendants of these brave women live in Australia.

Reconsidering Molony’s error

Returning to Molony’s error, I do wonder – given the fact there were texts available, and he was a very experienced historian – how he managed to get the story of the Emu so badly wrong. Charles Bateson’s book about convict ships, which Beth Kibblewhite used as a reference for her own book, was published – as I mentioned earlier in 1959 – and would presumably been available to Molony.

It remains a mystery as to what source material he relied on to come to the conclusion that the Emu and its crew were put down on an island somewhere and never heard from again.

He might be a bit embarrassed about that error were he aware of it, but I am certain he would have been utterly intrigued, as I was, by the story of what actually happened.

I’m currently reading a second, more comprehensive Australian history book, titled Great Southern Land by Frank Welsh (published in 2004) and am intrigued to see if the story of the Emu is given more prominence, and whether Welsh got the facts correct! Stay tuned!

Delving into the history of modern Australia

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There have been dozens of books written about the history of modern Australia since the arrival of the first fleet of English convicts to Sydney Cove in 1788.

The latest book hot off the shelves is Australia A History by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

I haven’t read it yet but have been delving into the story of European settlement via a much older book, which I bought for $2 at a book sale at the Athenaeum Library on Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD.

Seeped in history (the Athenaeum Library is one of Melbourne oldest cultural institutions), it seemed an appropriate place to pick up a copy of The Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia by the late historian John Molony.

Published in 1987, it traces the 200 years (199 to be exact) since the arrival of the first fleet and finishes with the prime ministership of Bob Hawke and the success of Paul Hogan‘s Crocodile Dundee.

While it obviously misses out on everything that happened in Australia from 1988 onwards, I found it to be a really good summary – in less than 400 pages – of the key events that shaped the fledgling nation since those first majestic-looking e ships, laden with convicts, sailed through the Sydney Heads towards what is now Circular Quay.

Molony, who wrote many history books, was Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University. He died in 2018 at the ripe old age of 91, meaning he was alive for 61 of the 200 years encapsulated in the book.

Interestingly, I was midway through the book, when I happened to be in Sydney and visiting Gap Park in Watson’s Bay. Here you can stand at the edge of a cliff face that plunges into the turbulent Tasman Sea below (an infamous Sydney suicide spot) and look out over the Sydney Heads, the series of headlands that market the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

It is through this 2km wide entrance that the 11 ships carrying 732 convicts sailed through and made anchor at Sydney Cove, now known as Circular Quay.

As Molony describes it rather movingly in the opening chapter of his book:

High summer saw a fleet of eleven ships take up moorings at a small cove in a noble and extensive harbour on the eastern coastline of the southern continent. A few dark-skinned people of the Cadigal band, whose ancestral home that place had been for age upon age, watched closely from nearby scrub. The date was 26 January 1788 and the newcomers called the cove after an English public servant named Sydney…The modern history of the world’s oldest continent had commenced with the coming of a new people.

(In fact, as Molony’s book explains, the fleet first made shore first at what is now Botany Bay (where Sydney Airport is) but due to the “infertility of the soil” and a lack of fresh water, it was quickly discarded, and the weary travellers travelled a few miles to the north to the “finest harbour in the world”

237 years later, as I looked out over the Heads towards the sparkling Sydney skyline, I was filled with a sense of awe imagining these wooden ships, laden with their weary human cargo, making their way into a vast and primitive land, with not a single structure in sight.

And what did the weary English convicts, after a gruelling eight-month voyage from the docks of Portsmouth, make of what would be for most their permanent home?

No doubt they were filled with dread and fear (as were their aboriginal onlookers) and a longing to return the urban environment of England; the busy streets filled with people and buildings.

Gap Park, with a spectacular view over the Sydney Heads

Over the next 406 pages, Molony tells the story of the birth of modern, mostly white Australia. There’s a lot to get through, but he does a good job describing in an entertaining, easy-to-read manner the key events and colonial personalities that shaped what became the Australia we are familiar with today.

Looking out over the ocean towards a city of some 5.5 million people, with the Manhattan skyline of its Central Business District, the modern wonders of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House and the densely populated suburbs around the harbour, it is a stunning visual reminder of the pace of development that occurred over a relatively short period of time.

And to think that nothing was here, not a single building was standing 237 years ago, whilst Europe and the colonial parent (the British empire) were full of teeming metropolises.

In many respects it’s a miracle that Australia thrived at all. As Molony describes it, the early years of the colony of New South Wales was full of great hardship and suffering: starvation loomed as crops failed and desperate convicts dreamt of escape. In one instance, a group of convicts headed off into the bush, believing they could walk to China. For nearly all Australia would be a life sentence.

At first it was a primitive existence, with public hangings becoming a common occurrence. The first person hanged in the colony was a 17-year-old boy named Thomas Barrett, for stealing.

But slowly, as Molony describes it, an agricultural-based economy is established, centred around the production of fine wool and wheat (a sector which still thrives to this day). Amid the search for arable farmland, the colony expanded into Parramatta and then other regions of the country. Tasmania developed a whaling industry, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were founded and settlers travelled west to establish Perth.

Then came a momentous event: the Victorian Gold rush, which turned Melbourne into “Marvelous Melbourne” and brought settlers from all over the colony, and abroad to make their fortune. This included the Chinese, who were the subject of a well-entrenched colonial racism. At its height- as I learnt – Victoria accounted for 40% of the world’s gold production.

Another defining moment, and one where Australia lost its innocence, was the Great War in which thousands of young Australian men lost their lives or came back injured and shell shock. The horrific, but courageous battle of Gallipoli that left nearly 9,000 diggers dead.

Molony writes of the end of the war:

It was Anzac Day, 25 April, the day of the landing at Gallipoli, that overshadowed memory and made all new and vital in significance for it was seen as the day on which the nation had shaken off the bonds of subservience and Australians had come to know themselves. [Prime minister] Billy Hughes saw it a little differently. To him victory in the war meant national safety, liberty and the safeguarding of the White Australia policy. Despite some signs to the contrary, Hughes was still convinced that Australians were ‘more British than the people of Great Britain’.

This long adherence to the White Australia policy, one borne out of British racism and fear of invasion from the East, is remarkable given how Australia changed into a successful, and vibrant multi-cultural society (notwithstanding the recent re-emergence of a wave of anti-immigrant feeling fuelled by a cost of living and housing crisis).

For so long Australia had been a land only for Europeans, and it took visionaries like Gough Whitlam to dismantle its final elements and welcome Asian and people of colour to our shores. Even so, by the 1980s, after nearly 200 years of European settlement, “the new nation [of about 16 million] was still predominantly white, spoke mainly English of the Australian variety, owed allegiance to the English Queen and observed laws derived from British sources”.

What I wanted to get out of the book, was a well-rounded understanding of the making of Australia, and Molony’s did a good job of that.

While it impossible to include in detail everything that happened over 200 years, I felt the story he told captured all the important elements without too much politicising, and with some sympathy for the plight of the aboriginal people, whose suffering was immense.

Most striking is his portrayal of the pace of development, how Australia so quickly build up its cities and towns, established a civil and well-functioning society that very early on and to this day, is among the greatest places to live in a troubled world.

It may be an old book, but the Penguin Bicentennial History of Australia is a great place to start for anyone wanting to learn the history of the country of their birth or – as in my case – of their adopted homeland.

The butterfly effect: Reading Penelope Lively’s ‘How it all Began’

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How it All Began by Penelope Lively begins violently with the mugging of retired and widowed schoolteacher Charlotte Rainford on a London street and then follows the lives of the people impacted by this random event: those both close to Charlotte like her adult daughter Rose and people she has never met like Marion, an interior designer and Jeremy, an antiques dealer.

Forced to recuperate at her daughter’s house, Charlotte introduces Anton, an Eastern European migrant into Rose’s life when she agrees to tutor him at her temporary home. Caught in a loveless marriage to dull Gerry, Rose develops strong feelings for Anton, who is funny, charming and sincere.

Meanwhile, in another part of London, the lives of retired diplomat and historian Lord Peters and his niece, Marion, are set on different courses by the mugging of Charlotte.

Rose works as the personal secretary to Lord Henry Peters. When she is unable to accompany him to give a lecture in Manchester because she has to take her mother to a doctor’s appoint, he asks his niece Marion to accompany him instead.

Without Rose by his side, Lord Peters forgets his lecture notes, and he gives an embarrassing performance that has him questioning his own relevance and embarking on a bizarre television project. Marion finds herself seated next to a charming, wealthy businessman, who at first seems to be the saviour of her struggling interior design business, but who turns out to be a conman.

Charlotte’s mugging also exposes an affair Marion is having with Jeremy, a self-centred married man who runs his own failing antiques business. Marion sends Jeremy at text message to say she cannot make a rendezvous, but it ends up being read by Jeremy’s wife, Stella. Stella engages a lawyer and files for divorce.

While this may sound like the makings of a rather gimmicky work of fiction, Lively, who is now well into her nineties and is a Booker Prize winner (1987 for Moon Tiger), does a great job of elegantly orchestrating events and drawing the reader into the heads of the characters as they navigate the unexpected challenges they must now navigate. The novel moves almost cinematically from one storyline to the next added by Lively’s beautiful prose and well-rounded characters.

Reading the book made me think of my own life and how random events that seemed inconsequential at the time, have had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life. An unexpected conversation, a chance encounter, a phone call missed or answered, an opportunity taken or not taken. All these things have set our lives on unplanned pathways. But more so, they have impacted the lives of others, people we know and those we will never know.

While I have not read any of her other books, I have read that the role of chance and “haphazard what-might-have-beens” (to quote a New York Times review) is a theme explored in other novels by Penelope Lively.

“Thus have various lives collided,” Lively writes in How it all Began, “the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next service station. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway — job done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.”

The butterfly effect, the notion that seemingly trivial events can set off chain reactions and generate unexpected consequences is a powerful concept and explored to great effect in How it All Began.

(It would also make a rather excellent television series, if well adapted.)

Reading “Too Many Men” and remembering my own trip to Auschwitz

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I’m nearing the end of Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical novel Too Many Men, or as it has been re-titled Treasure in keeping with the movie adaption starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham.

It’s the story of Ruth Rothwax (Lily Brett), a 43-year-old thrice-divorced owner of a letter writing business who travels from her home in Manhattan to meet her 81-year-old father Edek (Max), a holocaust survivor to accompany her on a trip around Poland visiting the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow and culminating in a trip to Auschwitz and the nearby death camp of Birkenau.

Edek, who survived the hells of the Lodz ghetto and Birkenau has travelled from Melbourne where he lives alone. His wife Rooshka, an Auschwitz survivor, died in her sixties from cancer. Ruth moved to New York many years ago.

The pair are close but frequently argue. Ruth is wracked with guilt and worry about her father (Is this trip too much for him?) while Edek, who has an enormous appetite, berates her for “eating like a bird” and being rude to Poles they meet on their travels.

Having visited the Lodz apartment where Edek and Rooshka lived before being march to the ghetto, they make their way to Krakow and then to Auschwitz. Here, Ruth becomes physically sick after they visit the very barracks where Edek “lived” during his barbaric imprisonment. The whole visit is a terrible ordeal for her as she struggles to comes to terms with the suffering of so many people and the fact that her own parents were subject to the degradation and humiliation within the grounds she walks. On her arrival she weeps as she sees the famous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”) that tricked arrivals into thinking they were being sent to a work camp. Ruth is enraged by a group of school kids eating snacks and fighting with each other, and in the taxi ride from Krakow to the Auschwitz she repeatedly corrects the cab driver for referring to their destination as the “Auschwitz Museum”.

‘It’s a death camp,” she tells the taxi driver over and over again.

Ruth is angered by the cleanliness and order of Auschwitz, the huge numbers of tourists and the lack of a visceral sense of the horrendous suffering enduring within its walls.

Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How could you feel people’s anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted barracks? But maybe nothing could ever replicate a fraction of the atmosphere, a fraction of the events that took place.

Nobody would come here, she thought, if this place was still covered in shit and piss and lice and rats and vomit and ash and decomposing corpses. The car park wouldn’t be full of tourists coaches. People wouldn’t be looking at the photographs and other exhibits on display in these rooms. These renovations were probably necessary. She had to stop being so judgemental, she told herself.

Ruth and Edek’s trip to Auschwitz made me think back to my own visit in May 2010, as part of a round-the-world backpacking trip I did with my wife after we got married.

I remembered the small minivan we took from Krakow to the death camp, a journey of about an hour through pretty countryside. I remember wandering the grounds of Auschwitz and seeing the rooms with the giant piles of shoes, glasses, hair and artificial limbs behind glass. I remember thinking I should feel more, or should be in shock, but perhaps like Ruth, I found it all too “neat” and “cleaned up”, too much like a museum rather than the remains of a slaughterhouse that treated people like insects to be squashed underfoot.

Then I decided to re-read the blog entry I wrote from the day of our visit, which I posted on our online travel journal.

How does one describe a visit to Auschwitz? A journey to the gates of hell perhaps? A place of unimaginable suffering and brutality? Probably all are insufficent. Yesterday we spent the day visiting Auschwitz and the nearby camp of Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). It’s a little over an hour by bus from Krakow. We travelled in this strange mini-van, posing as a municipal bus, which picked up people along the route so that by the time we reached the little town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis. Incredibly, the town now bares the inscription, Oswiecim: city of peace) it was packed to capacity and stifling hot. It was a pretty unpleasant ride, (despite the very pretty Polish countryside we passed), but it did make me think of all these people crammed into those windowless cattle cars and though nothing at all like the horror of those cramped conditions, it felt quite appropriate to not be comfortable.

The two camps are joined by a free bus service. We first went to Birkenau. Beyond the famous main entrance and watch tower, through which the trains passed, the most overwhelming thing is the sheer size. It’s enormous. At its peak there were 100,000 people living here under the most appalling conditions. Each of the barracks housed as many as 1,000 people. We listened to a guide tell a tour group that the prisoners were only allowed to go to the toilet twice a day and because there were so many, they only had about 40 seconds to use the latrine. Just one of many awful stories.

(In the scene from the book, Ruth and Edek examine the crude toilet block comprised of concrete benches in parallel lines with holes cut out of them the size of dinner plates. Thirty-four circles, inches apart from each other so that the prisoners could not help but touch each other while they urinated and defecated. Everyone sick with diarrhea, the holes below filling up almost to the top, the stench unimaginable. Then she starts vomiting down one of these holes and cannot stop.)

My blog entry continues:

A lot of the barracks are still standing (where they are not, you can see the foundations so it is easy to get a sense of the scale). At the far end of the camp, at the end of the railway line, are the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. They were blown up by the Nazis just before the camp was liberated. Despite the heaps of rubble, you can see the steps down which prisoners were led, the changing room where they were forced to strip before being led into the “showers”.,

Auschwitz main camp houses the museum in the brick barracks (it was formerly Polish army barracks) where prisoners were held. Unlike Dachau, where the museum assaulted you with information, here it is relatively succinct, leaving you to take in the exhibits. One of the barracks contains huge displays of what was taken from those before they were gassed: mountains of hair shaved off prisoners (the Nazis sold the hair to textile firms), spectacles, shoes, toothbrushes, and artificial limbs. There are piles and piles of these things, and this probably just a fraction of what was found.

The walls of the barracks were lined with photos of prisoners admitted to Auschwitz including their date of arrival and death. Some lived only a few days, some a few months and some more than a year or two. How to survive such a hell hole for a day let alone a year, I just cannot fathom.

(In the book, Ruth and Edek visit Auschwitz on a “dull, grey wet day” and is relieved not to visit it in the sunshine. But we were there in Spring…}

It turned out to be a very sunny day. There were purple and yellow flowers growing among the grass and shady trees that offered respite. But the overwhelming sensation for me was incomprehension, sadness and anger. Though as many of you may know I am not a practicing Jew, I did feel a strong connection with all those who were lost.

At one point I found myself humming the tunes of Jewish songs we sang at King David High School, songs that I had forgotten or buried deep in my memory. Then I remembered we had a school teacher, Dr Yageel, who was a holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and had a tattoo on his shoulder bearing his prisoner number. I remember him to be a short man, with a beard and a lined face. I think he may have taught our class on a few occasions. I never really thought about what he went through or took the time to chat to him. I recall thinking of him as a survivor as if he were an ex-football player or someone who had climbed a mountain. What I mean is, I don’t recall me or anyone else at school for that matter paying him the kind of respect he deserved. I wish now I could shake his hand.

The Joy of ‘reading’ Inspector Morse

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What an absolute joy and pleasure it is to read the Inspector Morse novels written by the late, great Colin Dexter.

I absolutely adored the television series and the wonderful portrayal of the curmudgeonly chief inspector by the imperial John Thaw, but the novels are marvelous in their own right.

I read three in quick succession starting with The Daughters of Cain (1994) followed by The Jewel That Was Ours (first published in 1989) and Last Bus to Woodstock, the very first of the Inspector Morse novels, published in 1975.

(In 2016, I read my first Inspector Morse novel The Wench is Dead (the eighth book in the series), a rather unusual book as Morse is recovering in hospital and spends his time solving a Victorian murder mystery dating back to 1859. You can read my review here).

Having first watched the TV series and then delved into the books (it really should have been the other way round), it’s impossible not to imagine John Thaw as Morse and Kevin Whateley as his lanky, Geordie crime-solving sidekick Seargeant Robbie Lewis.

In the Daughters of Cain, Morse and Lewis investigate the murder of Oxford academic Dr Felix McClure, found stabbed to death in his North Oxford flat, the murder weapon nowhere to be found. Suspicion falls on three woman – his wife, his stepdaughter and his wife’s friend (all with motive) – and it’s up to Morse and Lewis to correctly identify the killer.

In the Jewel that Was Ours, American tourist Lauran Stratton is found dead of an apparent heart attack in her unlocked room at the Randolph Hotel. Later a precious jewel that she was to donate to an Oxford museum is found missing from her handbag. Stratton is part of a tour group of American retirees visiting historic cities of England. It falls to Morse and Lewis to unearth who among the group of unmerry travellers committed the robbery and why.

Interestingly, The Jewel that Was Ours is the only one of 13 Morse novels, which was first a Colin Dexter screenplay (filmed with the title The Wolvercote Tongue) and then later novelised.

In Last Bus to Woodstock a young woman is found murdered in the parking lot of the Black Prince, a pub on the outskirts of Oxford, after accepting a ride from a stranger. Suspicion falls on the young, devious man who discovered the body and a philandering Oxford don. Amid his investigations, Morse falls in love with a young nurse and gets to know, admire and berate Seargeant Lewis.

I loved the slowly unravelling pace of the feature length TV episodes – a much more realistic depiction of how crimes are solved in real life I suspect – and this kind of meticulous unravelling of characters and motives occurs in a similar fashion in the books.

Of course, Dexter throws in plenty of red herrings – and even the great Inspector Morse comes to the wrong conclusions from time to time. In The Jewel that was Ours, Morse is convinced he has identified the killer, who he arrests at a train station and drags into an interrogation room, only to realise that he has made a blunder.

I love the fact that he is both a brilliant man, but also far from perfect. He is easily seduced by a beautiful woman, frequently drinks too much, can fly into a rage with little provocation, but is also compassionate, kind and empathetic. He is also very funny, in a mostly cynical way:

In this comic scene from The Daughters of Cain, Morse is talking to Ellie, a young woman he has become infatuated with).

“Don’t you ever eat?” demanded Ellie, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse, and draining her third glass of red wine.
“Not very often, at meal-times no.”
“A fella needs his calories, though. Got to keep his strength up – if you know what I mean.”
“I usually take my calories in liquid form at lunchtime.”
“Funny, isn’t it? You bein’ a copper and all that – and then drinking all the beer you do.”
“Don’t worry I am the only person in Oxford who gets more sober the more he drinks.”
“How do you manage that?”
“Years of practice. I don’t recommend it though.”

All three novels were adapted into episodes for the television series, but I could only vaguely remember the plot twists, and so the identity murderer came as a complete surprise in each book.

But even if I had remembered the plots, the great thing about the Morse novels is the wonderful writing of Dexter. He really is a joy to read.

Dexter is master of delving into the personalities of his main suspects and of taking us into the mind of the brilliant Morse and the not-to-be-underestimated Lewis. He is also brilliant at his meticulous descriptions of crime scenes, painting vivid pictures in the mind of the reader.

“The body had been found in a hunched-up, foetal posture, with both hands clutching the lower abdomen and the eyes screwed tightly closed as if McClure had died in the throes of some excruciating pain,” is how Dexter describes the deceased murder victim in The Daughters of Cain.

Interestingly, there is very little physical description of Morse in the first novel. Instead, he comes to light through his personality and mannerisms.

Morse makes his first ever appearance on page 15 of Last Bus to Woodstock after he arrives at the crime scene in the courtyard of the pub.

“Five minutes later, a second police car arrived, and eyes turned to the lightly built, dark-haired man who alighted.”

The hard-working Lewis is already there, having arrived with “commendable promptitude”,

“[Morse] knew Sergeant Lewis only slightly but soon found himself pleasurably impressed by the man’s level-headed competence.”

“‘Lewis, I want you to work with me on this case,’ the Seargeant looked straight at Morse and into the hard, grey eyes. He heard himself say he would be delighted.”

And so, begins one of the great fictional crime-solving partnerships, one that would spawn another 12 novels (published from 1975 to 1999), a television series of 33 feature length episodes (from 1987 to 2000) and two TV spin-offs, Lewis (42 feature-length episodes from 2006 to 2015) and Endeavour, featuring the young Inspector Morse (36 feature-length episodes from 2012 to 2023).

(I have watched every episode of Lewis and thought it an excellent sequel to Inspector Morse, but I have not watched any Endeavour, though I hear it is possibly the best of the three.)

That’s an incredible amount of television viewing created out of a rather old-fashioned, curmudgeonly, middle-aged detective,

Colin Dexter, who makes a Hitchcockian cameo in almost every episode of Morse (he died in 2017) began writing mystery novels during a family holiday in 1972 after a career as a classics teacher was cut short by the onset of deafness

He claims that when he first started writing the crime novels, he had little idea of what Morse was actually like. “I’ve never had a very good visual imagination. I never had anyone in mind,” he said in an interview with The Strand Magazine in 2013.

“The only thing that was really important to me about Morse was that he was very sensitive and rather vulnerable,”

Dexter also revealed that much of the things that bring pleasure to his otherwise grumpy detective hero, are things that Dexter himself enjoyed: classic English literature, classical music, cryptic crossword puzzles and real ale.

“People don’t realise this. The greatest things in [Morse’s] life were [A.E] Houseman and Wagner. These were the things he would go home and listen to and talk about and that was me I suppose, but that’s about as far as it went. I never even wrote plots for my books. I always made sure that before I started writing a story I knew exactly how it was going to end. I never had any idea about what was going to happen in the middle but I knew where it was heading,” Dexter said.

While each of the four novels I have read so far are classics of British crime fiction, with meticulously clever plots and sub-plots and wonderfully engaging characters, it is Morse himself who is central to everything. Brilliant, sad, hilarious and tragic, he is a marvel.

Now to find and read the remaining Morse novels (they are devilishly hard to find!)

The sad hope, but lucky life of Michael J. Fox

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Towards the end of his brilliant 2002 memoir Lucky Man, legendary actor Michael J. Fox recounts the testimony he gave to a Senate hearing in Washington in September 1999 as part of efforts to raise money to find a cure for Parkinson’s Disease.

“Scientists testifying after me stressed that a cure could come within 10 years, but only if there is sufficient financial commitment to the effort,” he writes. In footage you can find online, Fox talks about a “winnable war” and finishes by saying that in his 50s, “I will be dancing at my children’s weddings.”.

Twenty five years since that Senate committee appearance and whilst successfully raising tens of millions of dollars to fund research, it appears scientists aren’t any closer to finding a cure to Parkinson’s Disease.

“Parkinson’s disease can’t be cured, but medicines can help control the symptoms,” the revered Mayo Clinic says on its website.

“There’s currently no cure for Parkinson’s disease, but treatments are available to help relieve the symptoms and maintain your quality of life,” says Britain’s National Health Service, with a hint of optimism.

But while Michael J. Fox was unable to dance at any of his children’s weddings, he has remained a defiant, hopeful and inspiring figure to those suffering from Parkinson’s or any other incurable disease – as anyone who has watched his most recent Apple TV documentary ‘Still’ or seen any of his recent interviews will attest.

Indeed he has embraced his “Lucky” life, and made it a truly remarkable one.

He’s also an excellent writer and storyteller, who raises the often tedious celebrity memoir to a much higher plain.

While we often just want celebrities to “get to the bit where they were discovered” or to discuss the making of a certain movie, show or album, for Fox, remembering the key moments in his childhood is not just about nostalgia, but about piecing together the puzzle of his adult persona: how he became the talented actor, performer and later spokesperson for his cruel disease.

Re-watching home movies shot by his father – William Fox, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Army Signal Corps – Fox at first finds confirmation of the notion that “I became a performer because I craved love and attention” but on closer inspection of him as a young boy taking a garter snake he had captured “on an involuntary bike tour of the backyard” he comes to the realisation that “all these antics were done for nobody’s benefit but my own. First and foremost I am a boy out to entertain myself, completely undisturbed by the presence of the lens”.

This level of self-analysis is not to be found in your standard Hollywood name-dropping memoir, and as reader one feels like we are joining Fox on his journey of self-discovery. It is also evident the deep affection Fox feels towards his family, especially his clairvoyant nana “someone whom I loved, whose voice, touch and laughter were as familiar as my own” and who had a “rock solid belief” in his bright future.

While a naturally gifted performer, the title of the book is a testament to the very real “luck” he enjoyed along the way to fame and fortune. As he tells it, he came very close to packing it all in after ending up flat broke in Hollywood, where he set out to find fame and fortune following some early television success in his native Canada.

His big break came with hit 1980s sitcom Family Ties about a hippy left-wing couple where he played their uptight Ronald Reagan-loving Republican son, Alex P. Keaton. This is a show I vividly remember watching as a kid growing up alongside such staples as Growing Pains and The Cosby Show.

Before landing the part that changed his life, Fox was barely surviving in a tiny, litter-strewn, filthy apartment in Hollywood, where his nutrition came courtesy of Ronald McDonald. He was broke and on the verge of heading back to Canada when the role on the sitcom came up.

He only got the role after a series very fortuitous events, but it turned him into one of the biggest stars in the world, and earned him roles in the iconic Back to the Future series and a huge personal fortune.

Having this wealth, high profile and amazing support network (including the love and devotion of wife Tracey Pollard, an actress he met on the set of Family Ties) helped enormously in his personal battle with Parkinson’s and his efforts to raise money to tackle the disease through the The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

And while getting early onset Parkinson’s Disease at just 30 years of age was a terrible bit of misfortune, he has – after a long struggle within himself – come to realise just how lucky his life has been.

His gratitude for the live he has lived – and still lives – comes shining through in this exceptionally well-written memoir. I highly recommend it.

Reading Harry Potter at 50: should we cancel JK Rowling?

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It’s been a couple of months since – aged 50 – I finished reading the Harry Potter series, and I have been meaning to jot down some thoughts ever since.

The reminder to put pen to paper, if you can forgive that rather useless and inappropriate cliché, came from an unlikely source: the columnist and writer, Clementine Ford.

Scrolling through my Instagram feed, I came across a three-year-old post from Ford in which she attempted to tear JK Rowling to shreds. Ford labelled her books “badly written” fiction and attacked “Joanne” for making her hero a boy wizard, where a girl (Hermione) does mostly all his homework for him, but gets no credit for it. Even more outrageous, Ford says, Hermione has no female friends, is overshadowed by all the boy characters and that all the female characters are “parodies of womanhood”.

Ford then gets stuck into her real issue with JK Rowling, the author’s controversial views on transgender people. Ford calls Rowling a “fucking scumbug” for harassing transwoman and suggests “Joanne” open up her “stupid fucking” castle and invite all her transphobic friends to live with her inside.

Ford’s disgust builds to a crescendo where she wonders how in the space of 25 years Rowling went from charming children’s worldwide to become one of her most sinister fictional character’s the cruel, toad-like Minister for Magic Dolores Umbridge who torments and tortures Harry Potter at Hogwarts.

This reference to one of JK Rowling’s most famous characters (and in my opinion one of the best written and fiendish across the series) made me wonder if Ford, who had just turned 40 at the time of the post, had not secretly enjoyed reading the books when she was younger, before finding herself disgusted by the controversy over Rowling’s views on womanhood and her alleged attacks against the transgender community.

Did JK Rowling become a bad writer and the Harry Potter story an unworthy cultural phenomenon because the author launched herself into the culture wars via posts on social media?

The answer is obviously no. JK Rowling is not a bad writer and her holding abhorrent views (to some) does not make her one.

Of course you may decide to boycott her books because of the things she says online, but it would be hard to argue that Harry Potter is not a great deal of fun to read. These are books that have entertained and delighted readers of all ages since the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in 1997.

Reading all seven books as I approached turning 50 and really enjoying them was something I had not expected.

I started reading the series because my daughter, Edie (12) was huge fan of all things Harry Potter and I thought it would be a great way for us to bond. After I finished each book, we’d watch the corresponding movie and discuss our thoughts of the big screen adaptation, the actors chosen to play the fictional characters, the bits in the books the films left out but that should have been kept in, the way the filmmakers had created the magical scenes and if the movies were any good. Mostly I enjoyed the films, but they were not a patch on the books (And there is now a HBO TV series in the works that we are told will be a more faithful rendition of the novels, with a full season devoted to each book).

For someone who reads “serious fiction’ and hardly anything in the fantasy genre, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the novels. Whatever you think of Rowling’s views on gender, only a cynic would argue that Rowling is not a fabulous storyteller with the ability conjure up a complete magical world with a huge cast of living and breathing characters that have become cultural icons in their own right: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid, Malfoy, Professors Dumbledore, McGonagall and Snape (to name just few).

I also loved how the novels shifted between the fabulous wizarding world with its potions, ancient books and magic spells and the mundane “muggle” (human/non-magic) world inhabited by the wonderfully awful Dursleys (Harry’s relatives and tormentors).

But rather than write a lengthy review of each Harry Potter book – who needs another one of those? – my thoughts turned to the author and the culture wars she has sparked with her views on transgender issues and her strident defense of womanhood.

The controversy started back in 2020, when Rowling (rather petulantly in my view) took issue with an online article on Devex (a news organisation covering global development) about menstruation that did not in its opening pars mention woman, but instead used the gender neutral “people”. Later it refers to the 1.8 billion people who menstruate as “girls, women, and gender non-binary persons”.

Rowling responded to the controversy by saying: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” she tweeted.

Rowling argues that she has been empathetic to trans people “for decades” and that feeling kinship for woman and believing that sex (or gender) is real, does not translate into hate for the transgender community.

She goes on to say: “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”

Following the avalanche of abuse she suffered because of her social media posts, Rowling penned an article on her website explaining in great detail her position, her concerns for young people who may regret transitioning, her affection and acceptance of transgender people and her views on trans activists. whom she says are “doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class”.

“I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces,” she writes.

As a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, Rowling ask that the empathy for trans people “be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse”.

However, she has received the harshest condemnation from some in the trans community for suggesting that some people, especially younger people may be “persuaded” to transition to “escape womanhood” or to find a more caring community, rather than because they suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition referring to the distress a person feels at one’s biological or assigned gender at birth.

“The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition,” Rowling writes. “The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

Any position that questions the validity of a trans person’s existence will be condemned by many in that community, regardless of the reasons or concerns of those stating that opinion. It is, for many, a cardinal, unforgivable sin.

For her views, Rowling has been labelled by some a TERF’ – an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, implying hostility towards transgender people, a label she vehemently rejects.

“I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.” she writes.

What triggered her speaking out she says, was the Scottish government proceeding with its “controversial gender recognition plans, which removed the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a requirement to change gender legally and fast tracked the process for changing gender. For Rowling, this bill – which was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022, but vetoed by the British government in January 2023 – put woman’s lives at risk (allowing in her view a man to call himself a woman and walk into a female-assigned toilet) and was a “destroyer of women’s rights”.

“I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand,” Rowling says.

Despite, these attacks, she has refused to back down, donating money to campaigns opposed to the stalled Scottish gender recognition Bill. She’s also dared authorities in Scotland to arrest her after calling a number of transgender women “men” – in apparent defiance of a new Scottish Hate Crime law which came into effect in April this year and which creates a “new crime of stirring up hatred against someone based on their disability, race, religion, sexual orientation transgender identity. (No action was taken against Rowling).

Has Rowling been treated harshly? Or has she deserved the condemnation she has endured by many?

Weighing things up in my mind, I would argue that she is not transphobic (as she has publicly stated) but certainly opposed to some forms of trans-activism where, in Rowling’s view it erases the idea of womanhood.

I feel she is entitled to this view and don’t feel there is as any legitimate reason to cancel Rowling or to stop encouraging young and old people to read her books.

You may feel the need to analyse the characters in her novels and their motives in light of her views on gender, and come to all sorts of conclusions about the author’s motivations or alleged prejudices, but let’s be honest, Harry Potter is not high-brow fiction. I don’t actually think its worthy of deep analysis. These are not books that need to be studying at University in the way that I studied the novels of Margaret Atwood or JM Coetzee or EM Forster.

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books are simply brilliant adventure and fantasy stories and can be enjoyed as such without the need to read the subtext.

Reflecting on the all the controversy reminded me think of another famous children’s author, who has been vilified, partially re-written but thankfully never cancelled for their controversial views.

I’m referring Roald Dahl, who sold 300 million books and wrote some of the most beloved stories of all time: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, Matilda and Fantastic Mr Fox to name just a few.

These books entertained and delighted me as a child and have been enjoyed with glee by my kids, both in the original written form and as movie and TV adaptations.

On the scale of unpalatable views, Dahl certainly trumps Rowling by some distance.

He was a well known and unapologetic anti-Semite who in an interview in 1983 said there is a “trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews”.

In 2020, Dahl’s own family apologised for his anti-semitism, but thankfully did not call for his books to be banned or burned.

That – in my opinion – is as it should be. And the same goes for the composer Richard Wagner (another anti-semite), or Pablo Picasso (a monstrous misogynist).

We do not have to love the artist to love and admire their art.

Rowling and Dahl inspire the imagination. They delight their readers. They celebrate bravery in the face of evil. They encourage adventure. And yes, you can take great offence in some of the characters in their books, or the motivations for creating them, but that should always be a personal choice, not a movement.

After all, you can always stop reading.

Kafka-esque, but not his best: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘When We Were Orphans’

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It was both refreshing and a relief to read that even a great writer like Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize, did not think that highly of his strange detective novel “When We Were Orphans”.

“It’s not my best book,” Ishiguro said after it was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize.

Having demolished Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in a single reading many years ago (as near perfect a novel as you will ever come to read, accompanied by a fine motion picture adaptation) it is not hard to see why he made this observation.

It’s a very odd, disjointed and at times completely baffling book, with periods of rather logical storytelling following by very strange Kafkaesque episodes where things seemingly simple and straightforward – like travelling a short distance from one place to another – take on these long, slow, nightmarish journeys that never seem to end.

Not that there are not a lot of very interesting and enjoyable aspects to When We Were Orphans, plus there is that wonderfully precise and elegant prose of Ishiguro to keep you reading during the bemusing bits.

To summarise the plot, the book tells the story of Christopher Banks, who after being orphaned in Shanghai as a young boy in the early 1930s (when both his mother and father disappear from the city’s International Settlement in sinister circumstances), returns to England where he is educated and becomes a famous crime-solving detective.

Determined not be to be “diverted by the more superficial priorities of London life” Banks nonetheless falls for the charms of enigmatic socialite Sarah Hemmings – an orphan like himself – whilst becoming something of a minor celebrity for his ability to unravel cases.

The book weaves between Banks’ case solving pursuits in the English countryside, his intermingling in the upper echelons of London society, and with memories and flashbacks of his adventurous Shanghai childhood in the sheltered International Settlement. Here he remembers the times spent playing with his Japanese friend and neighbour Akira, with whom he forms a deep almost brotherly bond.

Banks also returns to recollections of the grand colonial mansion he lived in as a young boy and the events that led to first his father’s sudden disappearance and then soon after that of his feisty mother – a beauty in an “older, Victorian tradition, “handsome” rather than pretty.

Christopher’s father worked for a European shipping company called Butterfield and Swire, which was (according to the author) secretly involved in the flourishing Opium trade. Butterfield and Swire was a real company that transformed into a global multinational. Swire unsuccessfully sued Ishiguro in an attempt to get him to change the book, which implied the company turned millions into addicts and made vast profits in the process.

Before Banks’s father disappeared on his way to work, his mother had become vocal and outspoken about the activities of the company he worked for.

“Are you not ashamed to be in service of such a company?” he remember hearing his mother yell at his father. “How can your conscience rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?”

Twenty years later, and after having adopted an orphaned child Jennifer as his own daughter, Banks decides to return to Shanghai in 1937 at the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (and as a great war looms across Europe) to solve the most important mystery of his life: his parents disappearance. He believes grandiosely that solving this crime will have far-reaching repercussions including averting the coming world war catastrophe.

In Shanghai, mingling among the snobbish expat community, at dinner parties, the war appears to be just over the horizon and drawing nearer. Ishiguro builds up an oppressive atmosphere as machine gun fire and explosions are heard not far away.

“Another thunderous explosion had rocked the room, provoking a few ironic cheers. I then noticed a little way in front of me, some French windows had opened and people had pushed out to the balcony.

“Don’t worry Mr Banks,” a young man said, grasping my elbow. “There’s no chance of any of that coming over here.”

A tram runs through Shanghai’s International Settlement.

Against the backdrop of the looming onset of war, Banks somehow believes that his parents are still locked up in a house in Shanghai by an opium warlord, despite 20 years having passed since their disappearance. He eventually locates the house he believes they are being held captive in and then the book descends into this Kafka-esque nightmare, where the house Banks believes his parents are in can be sighted through the bombed out ruins, but reaching it appears a never-ending hellish journey.

“Then I came upon a hole in a wall through which I could see only pitch blackness, but from which came the most overwhelming stink of excrement. I knew that to keep on course I should climb through into that room, but I could not bear the idea and kept walking. This fastidiousness cost me dear, for I did not another opening for some time, and thereafter, I had the impression of drifting further and further off my route.”

In his review of the novel, the Pulitizer Prize winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that ‘When We Were Orphans “has moments of enormous power, [but] it lacks the virtuosic control of language and tone that made ”Remains of the Day” such a tour de force.

“Indeed the reader is left with the impression that instead of envisioning – and rendering – a coherent new novel, Mr. Ishiguro simply ran the notion of a detective story through the word processing program of his earlier novels, then patched together the output into the ragged, if occasionally brilliant, story we hold in our hands.”

Certainly, I learnt a bit about life in Shanghai before the war, and the strange existence of the “International Settlement”. Also, I knew little about the Sino-Japanese War, which ran for eight years between 1937 and 1945 and was one of the most bloodiest in history.

But the novel itself, was a strange mishmash of a personal story set within historical events given an almost surrealist makeover that never really jelled for me (unlike the Remains of the Day, which so elegantly meshes the blind devotion of a loyal butler to an aristocratic employer wishing to promote Nazi appeasement.).

“When Banks goes back to Shanghai, we’re really not quite sure if it’s the real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation,” said Ishiguro in an interview about the book.

It certainly baffled me.

Exquisite prose: reading ‘A Single Man’ and ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ by Christopher Isherwood

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If there was a poll of the finest writers of the 20th Century, surely Christopher Isherwood would be near the very top of that list.

Over the last few months I’ve had the pleasure of reading three of his novels, starting with the highly autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired the hit movie Cabaret and which I have already reviewed on this blog,

After that I read Isherwood’s short novel ‘A Single Man’ (made into a successful 2009 movie by fashion designer Tom Ford) and another set in Berlin, ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’.

It’s been a delight to read such a lyrical and psychological writer, who with a few beautifully formed sentences can bring a scene to life in the reader’s mind and recreate the inner mental workings of his protagonists.

This ability to penetrate deep into the psyche of his characters is evident in A Single Man, a short novel that chronicles the final day in the life of George, a severely depressed gay college professor mourning the loss of his lover Jim.

It’s set in suburban Los Angeles in 1964. Isherwood, who was also gay, emigrated to the US and moved to California in 1939, to escape the more repressive society in his native England.

The extremely compact timeline for the book allows Isherwood to really focus on the inner workings of George’s depressed, but also buzzing mind as he navigates the challenges of the day and deals with his grief and the people and places that trigger memories of Jim.

The opening of the book is quite startling, and reveals another strength of Isherwood’s writing: his creativity. It begins with George waking up in a discombobulated state – an “it” trying to identify the “I” – as he looks at his tired and sad self in the mirror.

“What it sees there isn’t so much a face, as the expression of a predicament. Here’s what it has done to itself, here’s the mess it has somehow got itself into during its fifty-eight years, expressed in terms of a dull, harassed state, a coarsening nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkly folds.”

It’s just one example of Isherwood’s marvelous descriptive powers and the poetry of his writing.

By the the time the “it” has gotten dressed, spent some time on the toilet from where he observes the quiet suburban streets and some of his neighbours below and eaten some breakfast, George is himself again and ready to set off on the first challenge of the day: the commute to the work.

Throughout the novel, there is a sense that George is trying to swim back to the surface of the here and now, to reconnect with people and the world, even as memories of the past and what he has lost drag him back down.

On his way to teach an English class at a community college, George’s thoughts drift elsewhere as he drives along Los Angeles’s busy highways on auto-pilot.

“And now as he drives, it is as if some autohypnosis exerts itself. We see the face relax, the shoulders unhunch themselves, the body ease itself back into the seat. The reflexes are taking over…”

As he is now free to direct his attention elsewhere, George engages in a fantasy that involves unleashing a virus against homophobes, and then going on a killing spree. Then his vengeful daydream is ended by his arrival at the campus as he “rapidly puts on the psychological make-up for this role [of well-liked, suave English professor] he must play”.

Amid all the despair, and the sense of hopelessness, there is also fleeting pleasure and the meaningfulness it means to George.

There is the homo-erotic pleasure of watching two young men playing tennis in the heat, the “exhilarating” pleasure of watching the students in his class smile back at him with those “bright young eyes”, the pleasure of conversation with a young, male student called Kenny (with whom he is infatuated), the pleasure of revenge, when visits the dying Doris, with whom the late Jim had an affair, and the simple pleasure of companionship and getting drunk when George changes his mind and decides to accept a dinner invitation from his friend Charley, a single mother and fellow Brit.

In a sense then, George’s story is life-affirming: through the veil of immense grief we can still find space to enjoy those moments that give life a quite rich meaning.

“I am alive” George says to himself as he drives back from visiting Doris to a workout at the gym.

“And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcass – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh.”

Mr Norris Changes Trains is a more traditional plot-driven suspense novel, but still showcases Isherwood’s ability to create fascinating characters that intrigue and beguile the reader.

Set mainly in Berlin, it tells story of the friendship between a young English tutor called William Bradshaw (the story’s narrator, and a kind of fictional alter ego for Isherwood whose full name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood) and Arthur Norris, a charming and rather posh older gent fond of using phrases like “My dear old boy”.

The pair meet on a train travelling from the Netherlands to Berlin when William encounters Arthur in a highly agitated state as they await the arrival of immigration officials and surmises that Arthur is mostly like a smuggler.

William soon learns that Arthur is entangled in all sorts of shady and clandestine activities amid the backdrop of a looming war in Europe

Like Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ much of the action unfolds as Berlin finds itself at the crossroads of two great epochs: the end of its famous decadent, free-spirited and Golden era of music, art and cinema and the rise of brutal fascism under dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement.

Bradshaw, who earns his living as a tutor, is drawn into Arthur’s exciting and dangerous world attending rowdy communist party gatherings, bearing witness to his strange business dealings (where Arthur is threatening by his evil business associate Schmidt) and joining Arthur’s bohemian entourage at Berlin’s rowdy bars and night clubs.

On one occasion Norris disappears from the party, and Bradshaw, goes in search for him only to find him engaged in a sado-masochist ritual, which he at first mistakes for Arthur (whom he can hear crying out “Nein, Nein! Mercy!”) being robbed.

“The first person I saw was Anni. She was standing in the middle of the room. Arthur cringed on the floor at her feet. He had removed several more of his garments, and was now dressed lightly, but with perfect decency, in a suite of mauve silk underwear, a rubber abdominal belt, and a pair of socks. In one hand he held a brush, and in the other a yellow shoe rag.

Olga towered behind him brandishing a leather whip. ‘You call that that clean, you swine,’ she called in a terrible voice. ‘Do them again this minute. And if I find a speck of dirt I’ll thrash you till you can’t sit down for a week. As she spoke she gave Arthur a smart cut across the buttocks. He uttered a squeal of pain and pleasure and began to brush and polish Anni’s boots with feverish haste.

Both comical and shocking, it’s one of the many delightfully entertaining episodes in the book that Bradshaw describes without judgement as he drawn deeper into Arthur’s intrigues, plots and plans.

Arthur Norris as I have since found out is based on Gerald Bernard Francis Hamilton, whose friends included Winston Churchill, the American actress Tallulah Bankhead and the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who was his landlord in London in the 1930s. Hamilton, who became known as “the wickedest man in Europe” – was a “fixer” for notorious communist Willi Munzenburg and someone who sold secrets for a living.

Hamilton was also imprisoned for bankruptcy and indecency. According to an article in The Spectator magazine, Hamilton lived a “long and disgraceful life” where everything he did was for money, rather than for political reasons.

Regardless of the nature of his clandestine activities, Hamilton clearly cast a spell over Isherwood who turned him into the more genial, but still Machiavellian wig-wearing conman Arthur Norris.

The novel was a critical and commercial success, but Isherwood later condemned it at making light of the suffering of the people he depicted in it.

Whether or not this is fair critique, is largely irrelevant in my mind as you can, like me, read ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ as if it were purely historical fiction and revel in the curiously fascinating character of Mr Norris and his affect on a young, naïve English tutor.

It reminded me of the British noir classic, The Third Man by Orson Welles. ‘No doubt Mr Norris Changes Trains’ would make a brilliant movie in the right hands.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart: a very long, but engrossing book about a lost boy and a small painting

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The Goldfinch is the third novel by American writer Donna Tartt, considered by many to be a literary genius.

Tartt’s two other books are The Secret History, an “inverted detective story” about a college murder, which was published to huge acclaim in 1992 when she was just 29.

This was followed by The Little Friend a mystery adventure novel set in Mississippi in the early 1970s that appeared in book stores in 2002.

The Goldfinch – an epic novel spanning 864 pages – was published in 2013.

By that you can tell that Tartt, who is now 58, painstakingly completed a book about once every 10 years (and we should expect no.4 soon!).

It also suggests an astonishing level of self-confidence and cerebral stamina – you really have to believe in what you are doing to keep going on with the same story and characters for a decade!

However, each monumental effort has paid off. Not only are Tartt’s books best sellers and generally admired by critics, but they have won numerous prizes: The Little Friend won the WH Smith Literary Award while The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart,” said the Pulitzer Prize judges of The Goldfinch.

It’s a pretty good summary of the novel, which begins in a hotel room in Amsterdam as 27-year-old Theodore Decker’s fever-ridden thoughts return to a fateful stormy morning in Manhattan 14 years ago and the last few hours he spent with is beloved mother.

When a storm descends on them, they seek shelter in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a terrorist bomb kills his mother a short while later.

Tartt’s description of the violent explosion and its aftermath are exquisite as she brings the terrible chaos and destruction to life on the page as if the reader is also there. Buried in the rubble, Theo finds himself in a “ragged white cave” with “swags and tatters dangling from the ceiling” and as the ground “tumbled and bucked up with heaps of a gray substance like moon rock”. It is descriptive writing at its finest.

Just as powerful and heart-wrenching are the scenes where Theo makes his way back to their empty, darkened apartment, to wait in vain for his mother, “her coffee cup, green glass from the flea market, with lipstick print on the rim” a reminder of her terrible absence.

Also a reminder of his mother, and a vital connection to his last moments with her is the The Goldfinch, a small painting by the 17th century Dutch painter Carel Fabritius that Theo has carried out of the wreckage with him.

The painting is of a “yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle”. Just before they were separated, Theo’s mother told him this little painting was “just about the first painting” she ever loved. There is also another parallel: Fabritius also died tragically young, caught in an explosion at the gunpowder magazine in Delft in Southern Holland.

I stepped back, to get a better look. It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature, with nothing sentimental about it; and something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself – its brightness, its alert watchful expression -made me think of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small: a dark-capped finch with steady eyes.

The Gold Finch

The intriguing little painting, which uses an art technique called “Trompe l’oeil” (French for ‘deceive the eye’) to create the illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions, becomes a kind of living and breathing character in the life of Theodore Decker as he navigates his way as a lost young boy through adolescence into adulthood.

The painting connects him to the last conversation he had with his mother, and so he holds onto it tight over the next 14 years, keeping it hidden as first he lives with the Barbours, the wealthy, dysfunctional family of his bullied school friend Andy, before his absent father – a failed actor who mistreated his mother – appears on the scene with his girlfriend Xanadu and whisks Theo away to a housing estate on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Here he experiences the vast desert skies and becomes best friends with another of Tartt’s marvelous creations. a delinquent, enigmatic Ukrainian boy called Boris who entertains Theo with tales of his time in Humpty Doo in Australia’s Northern Territory and introduces him to alcohol and drugs.

The Goldfinch by Fabritius

Written in the first person, Tartt’s ability to get inside the head of a guilt-ridden 14-year-old boy dealing with the monumental loss of his mother and his bumpy journey towards adulthood is truly remarkable.

Thankfully though at 864 pages The Goldfinch is not just the story about a boy and his obsession with a painting that reminds him of his mother.

It also focuses in on relationships, and how we need people to get us through trauma, be it the muddled advice of Boris, or Hobbie, the quiet and patient Greenwich Village antique furniture dealer and restorer who becomes a pseudo father figure and mentor to Theo, when he makes it back to New York, after yet more traumatic events.

The Goldfinch may be long, but like Hanya Yanagihara’s epic, “A Little Life” it’s never dull. Each adventure is part of Theo’s journey towards lifting himself out of despair and to the realisation that “maybe even if we are not always glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway”.