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.