2025 Top Ten (10-6)

 It’s been a great year for reading. I may not have read as many books as usual (or, if Goodreads is correct, as many pages) but I have still enjoyed some really good stuff.

All the books I read this year are to be found here

At number 10

The Amazing Dr Darwin

I initially talked about this book here

A fun counterfactual romp, a little like the X-Files cousin of the Samuel Johnson: Detector series. In these, Erasmus Darwin takes on medical frauds and curiosities, taking everything in a slow, thoughtful way and having as many big dinners as possible. 

In at number 9

The Swallowed Man

The Swallowed Man is a strange and melancholy book that tells Geppetto’s side of the Pinocchio story. Despite being an English writer, Edward Carey originally wrote the book in Italian.

It begins with Geppetto being swallowed by the beast. It’s like a horror story, having Geppetto grope his way around the inside of the fish, discovering the contours of his land and being surprised by the large wooden structure than becomes his new home. Trapped in this purgatory, he remembers his life, particularly his past loves, unravels his relationship to Pinocchio, creates art, slowly goes made and counts his existence by the number of candles he has left.

In this, Geppetto was not always poor. He was born in Collodi (see what you did there) where the main industry was the creation of famous and uniform plates. His family were in charge of the plates’ decoration and they stick to one pattern which the young boy must learn. But he can’t learn it. No matter how he tries, the pattern becomes distorted. Because of this, he is spurned by his family and the town’s only industry dies. It was interesting for Geppetto to have a backstory with a disappointing father, when Pinocchio serves as a disappointing son.

He creates artworks of the women he’s loved in his life. Some were banned youthful dalliances, others poor women dying from the embalming fluids she uses in her work. His last love was a hallucination brought about when he was slowly being poisoned by a badly fitted gas pipe. This last woman, and the one dying of cholera were both blue women to him, linked to the fairy with blue hair in Pinocchio.

It was the grief of losing this lost love that drew him to creating his little wooden boy. But the boy won’t be contained, he is “loathe to follow the rules of objects.” It’s strange how little time Geppetto and Pinocchio spend with each other, yet it sends Geppetto to stalk the world looking for his lost son. He also creates artworks, paintings and sculptures of him which get progressively darker and stranger. (The book contains photos of these works and they are strange, especially the white ones supposedly carved off mushed up ship’s biscuit). 

One of these artworks, one made in a drunken haze, comes to life as the dark boy. A figure of terror, madness and death that stalks him around the ship. He also imagines a story of a china boy called Otto, who he then makes. As well as all these, he becomes imaginatively invested in the photos left behind by the previous captain of the ship.

It’s a story about a man who can’t help himself but create but his imagination and creativity eat at him as much as it sustains him. Creation is not an unconditional good because he loses parts of himself to create, much as he loses parts of the ship to create carving, or parts of his food supply to sculpt ship’s biscuit sculptures.

There’s a cheeky Disney reference, where he says, “I wish I may, I wish I might” on the subject of ending it all. In the film, Geppetto says this when wishing on a star - the most saccharine element of the Disneyfication of the story.

The Swallowed Man, is an uncomfortable book, trapped in a world where the thing that brings salvation is the same thing that brings destruction. It’s a book that’ll linger. 

At Number 8

Great Expectations

Wow does Great Expectations start.

From the opening details of how Pip got his name to his imagining of his dead parents and siblings resembling their epitaphs in some way to the escaped convict coming out of the mist - it grips. Pip is placed so small in the marshes as “a bundle of shivers” and then this hulking brute comes, escaped from the hulk, with all his wetness, filth and deprivation described over a whole page. He’s terrifying, and the book being from the young child’s view, his obvious lie about a young man who removes gizzards is even scarier.

So Pip goes home to steal the file and food. His home life is so brilliantly set up, with his anger, bitter sister “raising him by hand” - the walloping of one. We are also introduced to the safety of Joe, who Pip sees as another child and promises the ‘larks’ they will have in the future, working at the forge together.

Even worse, it’s Christmas day and they have visitors who stare at him and make him feel guilty, especially the wonderfully named Uncle Pumblechook (who never quite develops into one of Dickens’s truly despicable characters, but comes close). Again, Joe makes this dinner bearable by the liberal pouring of gravy.

After all this is dealt with, and a little of Pip’s poor education at the Dame School, the book makes a sharp turn in tone and genre with the introduction of Satis House and Mrs Havisham. She’s an absolutely astonishing character, pitiful and frightening, a bit like a large but weedy spider. She’s accompanied by the cold, purity of Estella.

Then the book shifts again with Pip’s expectations and the move to London. The book is never quite as good as it was in the beginning after this, but there are lots of fun parts and characters.

I love the moral griminess of the lawyers office. With Jaggers being a formidable holder of everyone’s secrets, a lifeline to the most desperate but also a hard businessman, never a comforting figure. He’s so stained by his job he carries a perfumed handkerchief and constantly washes his hands. His assistant Wemmick, solves this problem by having two versions of himself, the tense-jawed, postbox, office self and the warm, quirky self who lives in a cottage-castle with his aged P.

Herbert Pocket is also enjoyable in his ineffective way. I found it interesting in how pointless being a gentleman really is, with their stupid Finch club. At one point Dickens says, “there was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves”, remind me of university. Everything about his London life is horrid, his love affair with Estella which only humiliates him, his feelings of worthlessness and shame.

It’s a very grim novel. The plot hinges on two old people using young people as puppets to play out their fantasies and get revenge on a man who never feels that revenge, it only hurts he young people themselves. Then there’s the fact the book is narrated by an older Pip who only looks back on his life with his embarrassment and shame, the whole thing aches with regret.  

It’s a great book. I loved Joe, was fascinated by Estella, pitied Miss Havisham and Magwitch - but it wasn’t a world I wanted to spend more time in like David Copperfield was. A fantastic book though.

Number 7’s book is…

The Pillow Book

I wrote more about this book here.

This is a fascinating book, similarly both private and public, relatable and alien. There’s always this element of performance in the book but also one of a diary - it’s a wonderful contradiction, full of life and energy.

In at number 6

The Turn of the Screw

I read this coming up to the end of October but I should have read it in December as The Turn of the Screw is an instalment in the brilliant tradition of Christmas ghost stories.

I love the set up, not just people gathering round a fire telling tales, but one with a tale so dark and intricate that they’ll have to send home for the manuscript - adding a few days postal service into the build up. What’s more the manuscript is a letter written to him, so it’s coming to the reader third-hand.. and what’s more ghostly than hearing the tale through a chain of people?

I am most aware of the set up to this story because of a parody of it called ‘The Turn of the Knob’ from the brilliant radio series, Tales of the Mausoleum Club. This is my first Henry James, and the rumours are true, the man loves a comma. I didn’t find his style distracting though, if anything, they lend to the breathless nature of the tale being told.

A governess answers the advert of a mysterious London gentleman. She is to look after his niece and nephew and is, under no account, to bother him about them. She goes down, expecting the worst (a real Agnes Grey scenario) but finds the housekeeper is lovely and the little girl quite angelic. The boy is being sent home from school under a cloud, he’s been expelled, but he is, if anything, even more perfect than his sister.

The governess starts to see figures, she asks about and determines them to be the ghosts of sinful servants who were spreading a baleful influence on the children. Are they trying to continue that influence beyond the grave? What’s more are the children in on it? Are they helping or slowly being possessed? … Or is the governess going mad and her obsession is he biggest threat to the children?

What’s brilliant is that all interpretations are on a knife-edge. James manages to keep all options open all the time and the story becomes a different kind of horror depending on the reader’s focus. At face value, it may be about evil pernicious ghosts who are after the children. Or it could be about an increasingly crazed governess whose desire to protect the children is the real harm. It could also be a tale of two creepy children who summon the ghosts or cause the madness. (Those children are too perfect, and why is the eight year old girl in a highchair with a bib?) 

Gripping, strange and unnerving by the sheer lack of certainties, it’s a very successful creepy story.

Find the rest of list 5-1, here.

Review: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

 

I used to have a workmate who told me I really had to read The Count of Monte Cristo. She’d tell me often and pester me frequently and for that reason, I didn’t pick the book up. Now I work somewhere else, so I chose it as my longer winter read.

My long summer read, The Tale of Genji took me just under three months but The Count of Monte Cristo, which is of a similar size took me just under three weeks. While I couldn’t say I found Monte Cristo to be a better or more satisfying book than Genji, it was easier and more immediately gripping.

The story is pure swash and buckle, introducing the character of Edmond Dantes and showing how bad his luck is. He is not locked away and forgotten in the Chateau D’If because of a huge conspiracy but because a number of people (one in a position of power) find him inconvenient and another is too scared to speak out. For these (mostly) petty reasons, he loses everything and the reader loses everything with him. It’s the smallness of the motives and the scale of the loss that makes it a tragedy. After that we watch him fester in the dungeon, before growing under the tutelage of the Abbé Faria. I put the book down to sleep after Dantes made his escape, which was the mother of all cliffhangers (or at least, cliff-tossers).

The reader is then introduced to Franz D’Epinay, who seems like he’ll be our point-of-view for the foreseeable future. He goes on a sailing holiday and finds himself on Monte Cristo, where he meets a man known as Sinbad the Sailor, who lives in a lavishly furnished grotto and serves some really strong hashish. Franz goes back to Rome, meets his friend Albert and the two are upset they can’t find a carriage for carnival. The Count of Monte Cristo lends them his and is generally a swell, upstanding guy - although he does get a little intense whilst watching an execution. What’s more he seems to be in with the local brigands and is even able to command the release of Albert when he his captured by them. All he wants in return is an introduction into Paris society.

It’s fascinating how different the book would have been if it had started with Franz D’Epinay. If that had been the case then Sinbad/Monte Cristo would have been a truly mysterious character, appearing from nowhere with vast amounts of knowledge, wealth and charisma, clearly aiming at some sort of goal. As it is, the reader is aware that he’s Dantes, that he found buried treasure and he is after some sort of revenge. What the book lacks in that mystique, it gains in dramatic irony, the reader knows more than anyone but Dantes. 

It feels wrong to call the Count Dantes, as there is very little of the naive, innocent sailor in the cynical, almost superhumanly prepared Count. After reading the book I watched a recent TV adaptation of the book and, while a lot of it was accurate (it even has the bandits and the absurd poisoning subplot) the man playing the Count always played him as Dantes. In the book, The Count of Monte Cristo is abstracted from common humanity, he is something both more and less, he’s unflappable to everything but human kindness and has a plan for most occasions. The series didn’t capture that.

The tension/enjoyment for the rest of the book is to see what kind of revenge Monte Cristo has planned for his betrayers and to see it come together. There were many times in the course of the novel when I asked myself if this was ‘that kind of book’. Would the Count kill Albert and Mercedes? How far was he prepared to go and where were his red lines? Did he really have everything as meticulously planned as it seemed or was there room for error? Traditionally, revenge tales are full tragedies, the revenger is always subsumed by their revenge, would this happen here?

While the book ends in a somewhat happy way (if you are rooting for Dantes… but why would you root for Villefort?) but not everything goes to plan. There are moments where the Count’s subsumed emotions are awakened and parts of the plan do go too far. It’s also reasonable to say that he doesn’t carry out his whole plan, Danglars is free to live at the end, largely because the Count miscalculated with Mrs Villefort and because he has found the capacity to love. (Though all the Haydee slave stuff teeters far over the edge of queasy).

While this book is painted in broad strokes and bright colours, there are interesting snippets of psychology and motive, but lots in the book is simple, pure, exuberant fun. I love how Monte Cristo gathers up others with vendettas against the same people as him but leaves them in the dark. I loved the way the Count made himself strange and exotic with his eastern affectations and was compared to a vampire. I loved how he made a lurid spectacle of the mansion where the baby was buried, only to use the baby as part of his plan to ruin three of his betrayers (if you include Canderouse). I thought Monsieur Noirtier was a brilliant character and remembered how Jean-Dominique Bauby used his blinking code as inspiration. Dangler’s clearly lesbian daughter was also a hoot. (I also found it interesting how all the characters disdained Italian cuisine, how very French).

The Count of Monte Cristo balances the pain and darkness with a camp, high energy that is very appealing. I think the world could do with more moustache-twirling heroes. 

Review: Moll by Siân Rees

 

I was a little unsure about what Siân Rees’s Moll was. At first it appeared to be a biography of the fictional protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, then it seemed to be a group biography of women who inspired her story. In the end, it’s a book that uses Defoe’s novel to structure a wide-ranging look at life in the late seventeenth century, especially looking at the lives of women.

It starts off by saying how all adaptations of Moll Flanders (even my favourite Alex Kingston adaptation) have misunderstood it. Moll Flanders is a historical novel, narrated by a 70 year old Moll in 1683. She’s a seventeenth century gal, not an eighteenth one - she’s not swigging it up amongst the prostitutes of Covent Garden, she’s living through the civil war, the puritan commonwealth and the restoration. What’s more, our vision of her as a happy-go-lucky prostitute is definitely against her desires in the book, in that, all that she wants is a happy, stable life but it takes a long time for events to go her way for long.

We start off with Moll being born in Newgate. When a woman was convicted of a capital crime, she could buy time by claiming to be pregnant. The state gave itself the right to kill a convicted criminal but not an innocent foetus, so making that claim could stretch out the sentencing. When this claim was made a council of ’12 matrons’ had to be assembled, usually by pulling them out of the courtroom and off the street, to verify the claim. They’d invasively prod and poke the woman, looking for ‘quickening’, the foetus moving inside the womb, which was regarded as when a soul entered a child. It could be possible to stack this council with friends to vouch for you, and there was a whole underhand service of turnkeys and inmates providing women prisoners with babies.

Moll is born one of these babies and, after she has weaned, her mother is transported. When Moll is born, transportation is only beginning to be an option and Moll’s fictional mother would have been one of the first people to be given it. However, transportation wasn’t far off a death sentence, there was only a 50% chance of living a few years in the colony, especially as an indentured servant - essentially a slave with a time limit.

Moll is taken in by a family in the puritan town of Colchester, where she becomes a companion to the daughters of a wealthy mercantile household. In many ways she is lucky, most children taken out of Newgate were put into backbreaking jobs as general maids. There was also a growing industry in kidnapping street children and sending them to the colonies.

The next few chapters deal with the thorny issue of respectability in the seventeenth century. While a man (especially one with means) can happily sow his wild oats, a young woman has to remain chaste, or at least seen as chaste, until she marries. The teenage Moll has to be very careful with her dalliances with the ogling older brother and actually is quite lucky in marrying the blander older one. When he dies, she leaves the children behind and sets off for another husband. I think it’s Moll’s habit of just leaving her children behind which strikes the modern reader so strangely.

Her second marriage is to a merchant who lives beyond his means. As a woman, she has no real control over the family finances. What’s more, if she wants to follow convention, and the guidebooks on how to be a good wife, she has to follow the head of the family and allow him to make all the decisions. Because of this, he is bankrupt and feels to France, while she flees to and area called The Mint, south of the river Thames. 

The Mint sounds like a wild place. There’s a brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, which is situated in an old moated mansion and even pulled up the drawbridge when it was raided by the authorities. The Mint is skint city, a place where bankrupts gather together and beat up any encroaching debt collectors until they are forced to call themselves rogues. It’s not a place to find a rich husband though and she moves down river to snag a ship’s captain.

The man she ends up with is an American and this allows Rees to talk a little more of how the colonies have been developing. They’ve been growing, fighting wars with the natives and enforcing different religious and moral laws in the territories run by different groups. They’ve discovered the wealth in tobacco, but the intensity of its production has started to create a black, slave underclass. Where there had been black workers who had become landowners, the distinction is becoming racialised, with the children of black slaves also becoming slaves. Of course, things don’t work out for Moll, because she’s inadvertently married her half-brother and so she hops back to England.

As Moll Flanders becomes darker, so does Moll. There’s a grim chapter about baby farming, the profession of being paid to take babies off the parish or secretly from mothers. This children were often starved, worked to death or sold to be shipped off to the colonies, though the colonies are even less welcome to these poor children than they had been. Moll arranges an unwanted child to be looked after, but pays a premium to make sure it is.

There’s a fantastic chapter on Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, a woman who set up a service to return stolen goods to their owners. Like the later Jonathan Wilde, she also built up the information needed to direct thieves, though she wasn’t one to impeach those who got in her way. In her youth, she’d dressed up like a man  and won a bet by riding in men’s clothes through London. To make herself even more noticeable she did it whilst blowing a trumpet and riding a famous performing horse called Marocco. 

In modelling this book on Moll Flanders’s fictional life, Rees manages to make a broad and entertaining history that often reads like a novel, yet also ground the novel in properly researched aspects of history. However, I don’t think the casual reader should be blamed for not realising Moll Flanders is set fifty or so years before it was written, Moll’s life is untouched by any of the historical events she witnessed. She doesn’t mention the Civil War or restoration, nor is the story affected by the great plague of 1665 or the great fire of 1666, Defoe didn’t provide the historical context but focussed purely on Moll’s ups and downs. Having read Siân Rees’s Moll, I will approach Defoe’s novel differently when I come to re-read it, and it actually prompted me to read another Defoe novel - though that is a story for another day. 

In which I meet the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands

In the last weekend of November, I had the great pleasure of going to see a colony of seals. These animals have their pups in a place called Donna Nook on the Lincolnshire coast and, for the few weeks they are there, are a popular tourist attraction in the area.

It was a rainy day. An extremely rainy day. A so-rainy-it-soaked-through-my-boots-and-leather-jacket day but it was also quite a magical one. The car sloshed into the field used as a car park and we squelched up to the sand bank. As we climbed it, we heard this peculiar noise - was it seals, birds or people? It was hard to tell. I’d brought binoculars in case they were hard to see. These were not needed.

We came over the sand bank and they were there. Hundreds of seals, all slumped over the beach, some sleeping, some suckling little white pups and some groaning and hissing. There’s a fence to stop the people wandering around the seals (as they formally did) and some seals were right up to it, scratching themselves on the wire. They are the most wonderfully ridiculous animals, belching out their strange calls and flopping around like someone stuck in a sleeping bag. 

There was something magical about seeing these strange creatures, patting each other on the back with their flippers, seeming to have belly-flop races and hissing at another seal who tried to take their spot. I’d always thought of them as cute, but the way their faces seemed stuck on the top of their bodies reminded me of blemmyes, the mythical people with heads in their stomachs. 

As I stood there, soaked to the bone, it was also quite clear to me how ridiculous we humans are. We’d all schlepped out to the middle of nowhere, paid parking charges for a field of mud and shivered out in the pouring rain to see these other creatures who were fine and comfortable as they were. The fact is, seeing seals during birthing season is seeing them at their worst - they aren’t good on land but they are amazing at sea. They sleep upright in the water like buoys, with self closing nostrils if they dip down. They can dive for 200 metres and stay under water for half an hour. They swim hundreds of miles between colony sites. Laying on the beach, half-starved, worn out from childbirth, they still managed to be captivating and interesting creatures.

As usual, when I have a little animal adventure, I like to go to Goldsmith’s History of the Natural World. I was surprised to find the seal listed amongst the mammals, whales, dolphins and turtles are lumped in with fish. It’s a long entry, and it feels like Goldsmith may actually have seen seals because he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, not just copying from an encyclopaedia.

His description conveys how odd a seal looks, with some elements like a quadruped and some like a fish. He describes them having a round head like a man, broad nose like an otter and teeth like a dog. He describes their skeletal structure, like other mammals but covered in fur and membranes to create a fish-like shape.

He also feels that, while seals are not more cunning than many land animals, they are more cunning than fish - which gives them an advantage. He describes how they hunt in groups, gathering on large shoals of fish, and how they are largely social. He talks about their different calls (and we could tell different calls in the seals we met) but he didn’t know how much of their communication involves slapping their fin-arms. 

My favourite section of any Goldsmith animal entry is the one about whether they are tasty, or useful to humans in any respect… it’s such a self-interested thing to have in a natural history book. He says the skin is good for making waterproof waistcoats and that they have been regarded as a good meal, with Edward IV eating one at Archbishop Nevil’s house.

He finishes by describing their migration habits, the reason why we had to go to Donna Nook to see them when we did, rather than wait for better weather.

However, Goldsmith is not the only one of my favourites to mention seals in his writing. Christopher Smart did as well.

The first time I read Jubilate Agno, one of the things that stuck into my head was the phrase, “the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands”. It turns out these were seals.

Yes, he’s done what I was expecting Goldsmith to do, lumping them in with fish, but he’s done so with such brio that I have to praise him for it. In the poem, Smart lumps the seals in with Psalm 98;

“Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.

Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy”

So, for Smart, it’s the seals who will be the sea’s chief clappers of hands and I think it’s worth applauding the seal.