Material Witness

Dickens, Hard Times, and the books you should read

Sometimes the books you don't read because they're the books everyone tells you that you have to read turn out to be the books you should read. So it was for me with Dickens (and George Eliot and others) but having started during Covid I'm now sorry to be nearing the end of his novels.

Hard Times is a short story by Dickens' standards, and very unusual in that it is set out of London in Coketown, a fictional northern mill town. It's the perfect setting of course for a Dickens polemic on the exploitation of the working man, as it partly is, as well as an exploration of the absurdities of the  human condition, in this particular case the utilitarianism of Mr Gradgrind and the faux humility of Josiah Bounderby. 

Dickens has fun at the expense of both men. Bounderby, the "bully of humility" who could have been the inspiration for Monty Python's famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch in which they play a game of competitive poverty. "I hadn't a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty," Bounderby lies, to anyone who will listen. Gradgrind, a character so sharply defined his name entered the dictionary as  "one who values factual knowledge at the expense of imagination and feeling", is not quite so grotesque but is not a man you'd want to go for a pint with.

A sense of fun is not something I'd expected to find in Dickens, but it's on full display here. Character names are always an adventure - Tulkinghorn, Sweedlepipe, Uriah Heep - but here M'Choakumchild, a teacher in the Gradgrind school of reason, is the standout. It's clear Dickens was enjoying himself, and throughout this book, which is not always the cheeriest the playful, clever and often barbed language can be funny and entertaining. 

And the more I read Dickens, the more convinced I am that nothing ever really changes. In December I read Oliver Twist, which was perhaps the most unsettling of the novels so far as its depictions of childhood poverty and deprivation as well as domestic violence, chime with modern narratives of the UK in 2024. There may no longer be workhouses or children sold into lives of slavery by unscrupulous parish officers, but they are learning in classrooms so cold they cannot hold pens, and more than ever face food poverty. 

There is tremendous power in the arts and literature, as Dickens showed in his own time, and that we have seen recently in victims of the Post Office scandal finally receiving recognition for the injustices they faced, and hopefully reparation.

Dickens today would probably be written off by Tories and the right wing press as 'woke'. But that's because he tells important and inconvenient truths. And we should read his novels, not just because they are wonderful and entertaining, but because they are a powerful reminder that real change takes courage, determination and persistence.

REVIEW: Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler

One of the great disadvantages of Kindle - and there are many - is that the browsing experience is terrible and certainly doesn't touch the joy of spending an hour in a bookshop. I don't think, for example, I'd ever have found the novels of Eric Ambler on Amazon. 

Last year, I spent an hour in the paperback fiction section of Waterstones Piccadilly, looking only at the green spines of Penguin Modern Classics and the red spines of Vintage Classics. I came away with a bagful, including Ambler's 1938 espionage novel, Cause for Alarm. 

At a time of renaisance in the craft of spy writing, led by Mick Herron, Charles Cumming and others, it was a good time to find a man who is perhaps one of the forgotten early masters of the art.  

Cause for Alarm tells the story of Nicholas Marlow, a recently engaged engineer who loses his job and in desperation takes on a commercial role for the Spartacus Machine Tool company of Wolverhamption that requires him to live in Milan where the machines are used for the manufacturing of weapons.

It is immediately apparently that Marlow is out of his depth in fascist Italy on the eve of war as he finds himself torn between the machinations of two agents with differeing political agendas seeking intelligence about the use of Spartacus machines and much else besides. 

The set-up - the ordinary man thrown into an extraordinary situation - feels very modern, and offers a very different espionage experience to the world of smoke and mirrors of George Smiley or the fast cars and tuxedos of James Bond. Ambler's language and pacing is understated but perhaps more powerful for that, as he builds tension beautifully and creates an oppressive, atmospheric Milanese backdrop for the novel. 

Through Marlow's innocent eyes we see behind the scenes of the unravelling of European peace and the hidden work of intelligence agencies. 

Cause for Alarm is a smart, taut novel and it was no surprise to discover that Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre, among others, acknowledge Ambler's influence on their own work. He was successful in his day and deserves a broader audience now among those who enjoy spy fiction. 

 

REVIEW: The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell

"The greatest lie that humans ever told is that the Earth is ours, and at our disposal," writes Katherine Rundell in her magnificent and magical book The Golden Mole, which tells the story of 21 of Earth's most fascinating creatures. "It's a lie with the power to destroy us all. We must cease from telling the lie."

Rundell describes The Golden Mole as "a wooing", calling on its readers to be dazzled by the glorious and fragile biodiversity of our shared home, and to stand up against those who would continue its reckless pillaging. 

It's an astonishing and captivating book. Each of the first 21 chapters describes a single creature, from the spider to the Greenland shark, with a combination of biology, history, geography, cultural significance, and its current state of endangerment. There's so much to enjoy here, brought to life by Rundell's exquisite writing. Not long after starting the book, I began to note the passages I might quote in a review. I soon stopped for fear of copyright issues. You'll have to buy your own copy, and I strongly recommend you do.

The wombat, a podgy looking marsupial can run at 40 km/h and sustain that speed for 90 seconds! Coconut hermit crabs may have eaten the remains of Amelia Earhart, using their claw grip that can generate 3300 Newtons of force. (The human jaw by contrast generates somewhere between 500 and 700.) The Easter bunny started life as a hare. Wolves regenerated Yellowstone's population of aspen, willow and cottonwood trees that was being steadily dismantled by elk, by halving their numbers. "If you want to nurture a forest, plant a wolf," Rundell writes.   following their  by 

Each chapter is wondrous and fascinating, but each comes with a mighty kick to our destructive and complacent selfishness. The number of hares in Britain has declined by some 80 per cent in the last century as their habitats are torn up and built over. There's a similar statistic for most of the other creatures that have been driven out of their habitats, hunted for sport or for their dubious medical value, or been poisoned by pesticides. Climate change is accelerating this process. 

The 22nd chapter is devoted to The Human in all its short-sighted foolishness and relays the story of the Sybilline books. I urge you to read it, but the nub of the issue is laid out by Rundell in the exntinction threat facing the Borneo elephant: "They are one victim of a far larger conundrum: that we have not risen, as a human species, to the concept of that which we cannot undo." 

The Golden Mole is a treasure, both a n impassioned call to action and a loving homage to beauty and the miracle of life.  

While you're here, a word about the extravagantly gifted Rundell, who is not only a prize-winning children's author but also wrote the fabulous and hugely surprising Super-Infinite, the biography of romantic poet John Donne, which won the Bailie-Gifford prize for non-fiction in 2022. I say surprising because I didn't think there was anything in the world that could persuade me to read a biography of Donne, let alone like it. A friend pestered and pestered and I gave in. Super-Infinite was one of the best books I read in 2023, one of the best biographies I've ever read. Rundell, it seems, can even do the impossible.

 

REVIEW: Antarctica by Claire Keegan

Does any other writer do as much with as few words as Claire Keegan? Her three novellas - Foster, So Late in the Day and Small Things Like These - were among the reading highlights of 2023. Each ran only to a few dozen pages but delivered stories of incredible power and emotion in which not a single word was wasted. Small Things Like These, which at 128 pages is a veritable epic by the Irish writer's standards, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and many people's favourite. 

Keegan made her name initially as a writer of short stories and Antarctica was her first published collection. The stories all come with the power of her later work and this is a fine, balanced collection of tales largely set across rural landscapes in Ireland, the UK and the US. Most feature strong and fearless women, many of whom are nevertheless forced to confront the imblance in power in their relationships with men. 

The title story opens with a married woman travelling to a nearby town with her mind set on sleeping with another man for the first time. Its ending, even though it is signaled, comes as a punch to the guts and sets the pattern for a number of breathtakingly tense narratives that consider murder, kidnapping and other less ostentatious sins. It's not surprising the compilation, first published almost 25 years ago, lacks some of the polish of the later works, which flirt with perfection. But they do have an incredible raw energy as well as Keegan's searing insight into human beings, their relationships and their motives.

I devoured this brilliant collection in a little under 24 hours - Christmas and New Year is a good time for reading - and the first thing I did when I was finished was Google to see if there's any more where this came from. Her second collection Walk the Blue Fields beckons. 

REVIEW: Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart

The most obvious response to Rory Stewart's thoroughly satisfying political memoir Politics on the Edge is what a tragedy it was that when this thoughtful, diligent and serious politician put himself forward as the next leader of his party in 2019, his Conservative colleagues chose instead the moral abyss that is Boris Johnson.

At the time Stewart himself warned of the complete unsuitability of Johnson for the role, during a campaign in which he briefly became the favourite Tory of non-Tories. In his memoir he frequently refers to Johnson's "staggering willingness to insist on the untrue" as well as his less appealing characteristics.

What Stewart makes clear in his book, however, is that a large proportion of the first electorate in the Tories' two stage process  - 300 members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party - knew this full well too. For a range of reasons from naked self-interest to cowardice, they decided not to do what was best the country and voted for him anyway, with entirely predictable results.

Stewart then found himself on the outside looking in, losing the Conservative whip in Boris Johnson's great purge of the sane and sensible in September 2019 and then out of Parliament altogether after the December general election. He returned to a semi private life, as a fellow at Yale University teaching politics. And he also become half of one of the UK's most successful podcast duos, joining Alastair Campbell in The Rest is Politics. 

And he set about writing this book, which is a hugely entertaining and revealing read that takes us through one of the most turbulent periods in UK politics from the coliation victory in 2010 to Johnson's electoral triumph in late 2019. During this period Stewart held a number of minsterial posts, covering everything from the environment to international development and prisons. In a political world increasingly in thrall to the 24 hour news cycle, with many politicians more interested in spin than substance, Stewart reveals himself as a serious and diligent public servant, desperate to leave things better than he found them.

The parts that cover his time as Prisons Minister in the Department of Justice is perhaps the most interesting.  The UK's overcrowded, crumbling and often stil Victorian prisons are dirty and full of violence and drugs. While Stewart finds the prison service and its officers trying to do their best in a very bad situation, many senior officials are disillusioned and fatalistic about ever being able to solve their problems in the face in the face of severely constrained budgets. But Stewart sets out with energy and determination to get back to brass tacks to rid prisons of violence and drugs, and in 2018 during a radio interview says he will resign if he failed to show results in pilot schemes run in 10 difficult prisons in 12 months. He succeeds. 

Anyone currently despairing of the quality of political life in the UK - is anybody not? - will find little here to cheer them up. Stewart paints a portrait of a system in which almost every single element is in decline and badly managed, from the cabinet, to parliament and to most departments. He finds vain and foolish politicians where we need titans and geniuses. His depiction of three of the four Tory PMs he served under - Cameron, Johnson and Truss - will reinforce every negative perception of them.

The compensation for the misery is that the book is funny, fascinating and important. It is stuffed full of entertaining anecodtes, astute insight and perceptive commentary. In the hands of another politican it might have been inusfferably smug. But Stewart is charmingly self-deprecating and that gives him licence to document the weakness of others.

Five stars.

 

INTERVIEW: Amanda Craig on Twitter, comparisons with Dickens and writing literary fiction for the minimum wage

Whenever anyone asks whether any good still comes of the battlefield that is Twitter, my first response is always, "books". A steady flow of great book recommendations has come from Twitter, often leading me to titles and writers I might otherwise have missed.

First among equals of these books is The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig’s 2020 entertaining and revealing novel that took the plot of Strangers on A Train and transplanted it to modern Cornwall. There she took her sharpest scalpel and set about dissecting some of modern Britain’s most dangerous and divisive fault lines.

Immediately captivated by Craig’s approach to the state-of-the-nation I spent the rest of the Covid summer working steadily through a back catalogue that takes its mightier-than-the-sword pen through issues from rural poverty and the iniquities of immigration to public schools, publishing, journalism, the class divide, the gig economy and beyond.

At about the same time I discovered Craig’s books I was also making my first forays into Dickens, and the parallels between her work and his that many had recognised before me were plain to see. The Three Graces has also drawn Shakesepeare comparisons. Isn’t that a bit scary, being compared to these luminaries, I ask her during a video interview arranged on Twitter.  

“It's ridiculous,” she says. “And it's enormously ridiculously flattering. I mean, I'm really thrilled if people think that I'm in any way like these great geniuses.”

It really isn’t ridiculous though. Just as Dickens gives us a snapshot of what life was like growing up poor in Victorian London, Craig has painted a rich and detailed portrait of life in modern Britain a couple of centuries later. It’s a world where a mother needs to work three jobs just to keep her child fed, residents of Cornwall have been priced out of the housing market in their own towns and an army of unloved and demonised immigrants are the glue that holds the economy and society together.

"I don't believe in this endless gloom."

The books are beautifully written with that easy flow that disguises the challenge of delivering great prose. They are also acutely observed, funny and, despite dealing with important and sometimes upsetting issues, they are optimistic, a trait she shares with a certain 19^th Century novelist, as anyone who has read the endings of Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities will know.

“I do very much hope that one of the things readers get from me is a sense of joy and healing and optimism, because I really don't see the point in writing tragedy, unless you have genius of the order of Tolstoy. I don't believe in this endless gloom. I find it terribly dismaying that it remains so fashionable.”

The optimism only tempers the darker themes, however, as Craig doesn’t shy away from conflict or difficult issues in her writing, something she believes led to the creation of an unhelpful dividing line between genre and literary fiction.

“Everybody knows that bad things happen. So the other thing that makes me hopping mad, and I am permanently angry about a lot of things, as you've probably gathered from Twitter, especially to do with fiction, but for much of my early adult life, there was this idea that we won the Second World War. Everything was permanently peaceful and nice. Forever and ever. Amen. And if you portrayed anything violent or horrible happening in your fiction, then you had to be cast into this kind of ghetto of writing, thriller, or crime, couldn't possibly be literary,” she says.

Her work is often described as literary fiction with plot and genre features, and it’s a good summary. Her most recent novel, The Three Graces (my review) primarily explores “age and female friendship” but there is a shooting early in the book which brings a combination of mystery and urgency to the plot.   

"We're all on less than the minimum wage..."

That her books stay on the literary line of the genre divide puts her in a category of writers for whom the rewards of publishing are lower than readers might expect, both for authors and editors, who she says publishers are “haemorrhaging”. This is another theme Craig returns to repeatedly on Twitter.

“I was terribly, terribly lucky in that I began my career as a novelist right at the very tail end of a time when you could just about get a mortgage as a debut writer and you know, a tiny mortgage for the one up one down literally, but you could do it. Now you just can't and that's infinitely dismaying,” she says. “We're all on less than the minimum wage and I think when you say that to readers, they're absolutely amazed. Because from their point of view, the ones who are going into bookshops or buying online, they're paying us a decent whack, but it's not filtering through to the people who are actually producing it.

Craig points to the influence of Amazon – “a disaster for us” – and publishers not passing on enough of their profits to their writers.

That brings us back to Twitter, where the author/reader community is, mostly, an oasis of generosity, friendliness, and calm in a vast sea of rancour, and where books can find support.

“Really, books sell if publishers push them and without that push, you barely have a prayer,” she says. “This is one reason why I'm on Twitter a lot because Twitter I think very slightly improves the odds in your favour. And authors can do that. It's like having a second job.”

"They've sat on this cloud of success..."

Craig is very supportive there of books she has enjoyed, and in particular of female writers. “I'm not supportive of anybody, probably what you see me praising is about a fifth or a tenth of what I'm actually reading. But I do feel that if anybody's good and has talent and originality then you should support them,” she says.

She is grateful for the support of the generation of female writers ahead of her – both Rose Tremain and Penelope Lively gave glowing reviews for The Three Graces - but scathing about the lack of support offered to male writers by their “golden generation” of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan, “who have just sat on this cloud of success”.

Another avenue for finding new readers is television, but despite a style that feels perfect for the intelligent Sunday night drama, and all of her novels having been optioned, her work remain stubbornly untelevised.

When we speak though she is energised by a deal recently struck following a three-way auction for The Three Graces with producer Alison Owen, whose credits include Tamara Drewe, Small Island and the forthcoming Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black.  “She's absolutely terrific, so I'm very excited about that.”

"I was thrilled to find these recurring characters..."

If the project gets off the ground, it could be the start of a loose series. Craig’s stories follow a roman fleuve style, a “novel stream” in which a minor character in one book returns later as a major character. It lends the books an intimacy and familiarity, while not tying the author down to one narrative direction.

The inspiration for this direction arrived in the most unlikely form of a “ratty, circulating beach library” in Thailand where the least unappealing book on offer was a “relatively pristine” Penguin Classics copy of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, “the ones with those beautiful black covers”.

“I picked up this incredible book about a young poet who comes to Paris and the corruption of the literary world. I was already having a tiny bit of exposure to that, and it absolutely electrified me,” she says. “So, I then went and read The Human Comedy, and I was thrilled to find these recurring characters and this whole life that was not just about the high life, but also the low life of Paris and the provinces.”

This led her to another exponent of the art: Trollope. “I am convinced Trollope learned this from Balzac as he was a prodigious reader and could read French. And so when I started to write I thought I should do that as it’s such an interesting thing and it’s fun for a reader and it makes it more fun for you as a novelist and plotter.”

And suddenly we are back where we started, with book recommendations, as I reveal that for the second time in a week I’m guiltily assessing the life choices that have led to me not reading any Balzac and am gently admonished and told “never to read something because you feel guilty”.

Craig then tells me about the book she has been reading, The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, a book that has been getting a lot of Twitter airtime and that follows Somerset Maugham - a writer we both admire but whose work is sadly out of fashion -  on tour in Asia in the 1920s. “It’s exquisitely written,” she says, “and I’m just waiting to see how it develops.”

That’s good enough for me and The House of Doors joins my groaning to-be-read pile.

“I just think it’s a wonderful thing to spread the news and the enthusiasm of someone you discover and enjoy,” she says.

And so it is. And once again I’m grateful that Twitter led me to the work of Amanda Craig, and like her, I’m just waiting to see how it develops.

REVIEW: The Dordogne Mysteries series by Martin Walker

On a hillside outside of the bastide town of Beaumont-du-Périgord sits a renovated farmhouse with incomparable views of the walls and 13th Century fortified church of this medieval settlement. It is beautiful, peaceful and eternal.

I've spent countless blissful evenings on the terrace of the house eating flambéed duck and drinking the wines of Bergerac in the company of family and friends. Sunday lunchtimes are reserved for oysters from the market at nearby Issigeac, a bottle or two of Muscadet and rotisserie chicken to follow. The food and the wine are magnificent and the view nourishes the soul.

This is La France Profonde and a rural almost mythical way of life dominated by agriculture and food and a culture tied to this most beautiful land. It is here that I first came across Bruno, Chief of Police, the first in a series of novels set in the fictional Perigord town of St. Denis in a stack of books left for visitors by my aunt and uncle, voracious readers and former owners of the farmhouse.

That was about six or seven years ago. Last week I finished the 15th and most recent book in the series, To Kill a Troubadour, and as I was doing so felt a great sense of loss, because every one of the novels is evocative of that glorious landscape and all its riches. I couldn't read one without wanting to visit Monpazier, Domme or Monbazillac or to open a bottle of Pecharmant wine from the Chateau du Tiregand. 

Martin Walker's books feature contemporary thriller stories that confront many of the most important geopolitical themes facing western democracies - from the Catalan nationalism crisis in this most recent book to immigration and Russian cyber crime - but also lean back into the controversies of France's past, including war time secrets of the resistance. They draw on the Périgord's rich heritage of prehistoric art and its modern status as a retirement departement, attracting a retiring population to the sun. And the books work well on this level, exciting and well-paced stories, even if the sheer frequency of international intrigue and espionage in the Vezere valley stretches credulity somewhat. 

It is not that that makes these books so enjoyable though, rather it is the celebration of the Perigord and its way of life. Bruno, or Benoît Courrèges to give him his full name, lives in a converted shepherd's hut. He keeps chickens and geese and is more or less self-sufficient with a bounteous vegetable patch. He coaches rugby, is a part owner of the local vineyard and a keen hunter. Two of the early books feature crimes in the local wine and truffle industries - and they are marvellous. He patrols the town market with his basset hound, is an impressario of sorts for local entertainers and an extraordinary cook. Each book reveals at least one indispensable recipe for duck and a minimum of two feasts with his friends and colleagues that also serve as a guide for local wines.

The Dordogne Mysteries bring the region vividly to life, each issuing a welcome and a reminder that it's a mere seven hour drive from here. Just around the corner really...I could be there for a late dinner. 

Those who already know and love the Périgord will enjoy settling into Bruno's bucolic life. For those who have never been, there is a rare treat in store. And even if the travel is not for you, the books provide entertaining and mystery. 

 

 

Why The Bear should be your next binge watch

It took me two hours to watch the final episode of season two of The Bear. The show itself is about 40 minutes . The additional 80 were mostly spent not wanting the season to come to an end and hiding behind the sofa from its dramatic tension.

It's an unusual premise: celebrated Michelin chef Carmy returns to his hometown of Chicago to run The Beef, the sandwich shop left him by his brother. Early episodes - most episodes you learn eventually - depict the chaos and conflict of the restaurant and the chaos and conflict of Carmy's tempestuous extended Italian family. Carmy tries to impose some of the discipline of his haute cuisine experience on his motley crew of cooks and cousins in The Beef, while also trying to bring financial order to the debt-ridden money pit. There is no prospect of bringing order to the family. 

I liked The Bear instantly. It is noisy and busy, with whipsmart dialogue and intense, exhausting performances. It is beautifully shot, moving seamlessly between the wide-angled beauty of Chicago and the close-up hostility, emotion and rawness of The Beef. It also changes up the pace of the narrative nicely, chopping between chaotic restaurant scenes that might as well be fight sequences and more considered time spent with individual characters, taking time to make them real. 

And although the first season, and the first half of the second, make for innovative, compelling and entertaining viewing, The Bear achieves genuine greatness in the final three episodes of season two, perhaps the best three episode snap I can recall.

The first is a retrospective examining the dysfunction in the Berzatto family. The second takes a member of the crew on a journey of discovery and redemption. And the third, and season finale, takes us inside the restaurant on an important night and places several of the team under the most intense scrutiny.

These episodes features two memorable cameos, and I won't name those involved because they come better as surprises. The episodes are not only tours de force in their own rights, but there is also a balance between them that gives the series power. And finally they strip back yet more layers of the onion of each of the series main characters, whose motivations, emotions and stories have been under the microscope across 20 breathless episodes. 

Jeremy Allen White as the shy, repressed and traumatized culinary genius Carmy is irresisitble and the camera loves his uncertainty and vulnerability.  The Bear is defined by Carmy and his relationships with "cousin" Richard, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and sous chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri).  Moss-Bacharach brings anarchic energy to Richard, for whom anger and potential disaster is rarely more than a hair's breadth away. And Sydney brings balance to the screen, a rare island of relative calm in a sea of frenzied movement and noise. Edebiri is a born scene stealer. 

Elsewhere, there are tremendous supporting performances from Abby Elliott as Carmy's sister, permanently exasperated and worried by her brother's choices, and Oliver Platt as a mafioso uncle bank-rolling the thing.

It's vibrant, smart, challenging television, made with care and great craft and beautiful music and it tells fascinating and intimate stories. I'm hoping that a season three awaits. 

REVIEW: Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane blesses us with new novels all too infrequently. Small Mercies, published in April, is the first in six years and a powerful reminder of just what we've been missing while he's been in Hollywood writing, among others, the screenplays for Black Bird, The Outsider and Mr Mercedes. 

Small Mercies takes Lehane back to his roots in South Boston and to the violence, secrets and claustrophobia of a closed, intense community being opened, very much against its will, to an outside world it distrusts and hates. It is 1974 and the eve of the busing crisis brought about by the forced desegregation of the Boston school system. As South Boston fries in the heat of a sweltering summer its citizens boil with rage as the City prepared to mix the pupils of its predominantly white-Irish school with those of the predominantly black Roxbury High School, three miles and a world away. 

One of those selected to go is Jules Fennessy, a 17-year-old reluctant to take the bus. But Jules doesn't make it to the first day in Roxbury as she goes missing shortly before, following a night out with friends. On that same night a young black man from Roxbury is killed in a Southie subway station. 

The disappearance of Jules spurs her mother Mary Pat into a desperate search for her daughter that brings her into conflict with friends, family, the Boston Police Department and the Irish mafia that controls the city's streets. Having already lost two husbands, her son and her own self-worth, Mary Pat, a chain-smoking profane alcoholic, clings ferociously to the last thing of any value to her, and in her anguish upends the balance of a neighbourhood never far from discord and violence. 

Mary Pat will haunt your dreams. As she confronts the loss of Jules, she undergoes an exhaustive and traumatic self-appraisal, revisiting every aspect of her life that leads her to this crisis. Even as she does so, she finds unknown reservoirs and strength and determination, as her anger, disappointment and spirit dominate the story.

Loss, disappearance and the sins of the past are a familiar theme in Lehane's novels, and Small Mercies evoked two of his best known works, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone both of which centred around the search for lost children and which were made into good movies by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck respectively. 

Like those novels, Small Mercies relentlessly examines the ties of family, friendship and kinship. And if Mary Pat is the book's soul, its heart is South Boston, around which a mythology arose in which a community of poor working class Irish Catholics told themselves and everyone else the neighbourhood was safe and good as it looked out for its own. Lehane, as he and others have done before him, exposes the flaws in the story, showing a social fabric that is being strained by violence, crime and corruption that comes from within, and in which it is dangerous to step outside of the myth. 

The weaving of Mary Pat's tale with the unfolding desegregation crisis that explores the city's racial politics is a master stroke. Southie's gangsters and other vested interests can point to an external threat to their way of living and create enemies of politicians, judges and black students, and in doing so solidify their strangle hold over the real dangers to people's lives that they propagate from within: prostitution, drugs, protection rackets. 

The book's third key character is Detective Michael "Bobby" Coyne, who leads the investigation into the young black murder victim, Augustus Williamson. Coyne, a survivor of Vietnam and a similar upbringing to Mary Pat, represents a combination of hope and decency, the chance that Boston's downtrodden souls on both sides of the racial divide can put aside their differences and build a better future, although at every turn Lehane makes clear the size and challenge of the obstacles. 

Small Mercies is a gut punch of a novel. It will take your breath away with its early salvoes and hold you in its thrall as Lehane takes you on a journey through dark side of humanity. The story-telling is fast and furious, its violence raw, its sense of time and place strong and convincing - South Boston is a living, breathing monster, largely devoid of comfort and compassion. And yet there are moments of tenderness and humour, even for Mary Pat in her pain, and there is great insight in Lehane's fine tight prose. It's as good a novel as I've read this year. 

It also reminded me just how much I enjoyed his early work, and the Kenzie / Gennaro private investigator series, of which Gone, Baby, Gone is a part, which launched with A Drink Before the War (did ever a crime novel have a better title?) way back in 1994. It's time to revisit them and hope that Lehane doesn't keep us waiting another six years for new material. 

REVIEW: The Burning Time by Peter Hanington

There's no bad time to read a new book from Peter Hanington, the Radio 4 producer turned thriller writer who forced his way into the top tier of British spy novelists with his first William Carver novel in 2016.

But the searing heat of a brutal Spanish summer is the perfect moment for Today journalist Carver to be on the trail of a climate change conspiracy. The brutal oppressive heat of the plain helped to give a pacey tight narrative a sense of urgency and importance. 

Carver is tipped off by a source in Downing Street that he should look into Clive Winner, an Australian climate scientist and entrepreneur close to the Prime Minister. Carver, working with a new, young producer, quickly establishes a pattern of young climate scientists disappearing or dying all over the world. 

There are three great strengths to Hanington's novels: character, plot and topicality. They are all on display in The Burning Time, which is a thrilling addition to a terrific series.

It's character that I found most interesting here. This fourth novel brings an important change for Carver, a man for whom change doesn't come easily. But with usual producer Patrick unavailable as he convalesces from the events detailed in the previous novel, The Cursed Place, change is forced upon him. His new, young and ambitious producer Naz brings energy and renewal to the series and exposes a different side to Carver. Here he steps into the role of mentor and teacher, reluctantly forced to train Naz on the job, testing her to his own exacting standards and eventually accepting her work ethic and new perspective, as well as acknolwedging her talent. 

The plot fizzes around the globe with ease - from London to Cadiz and Sydney and byeond - as Carver and Naz seek to nail down links between seemingly unconnected events. Carver's old-fashioned dogged journalism combined with Naz's energy and facility with technology eventually start to give shape to a story: that there are those out there who would seek to influence the climate debate in favour of the status quo. In favour of the power and financial success of the fossil fuel industry. Shocking, I know...

Once again Hanington has hit important an important theme and with Carver as his agent seeks to expose the dark arts, denialism and danger of the carbon lobby and adds another fine and important thriller to an exceptional series.