July 2025
The Trees
Percival Everett
This is going to be a short post, as I don't want to plot spoil.
Ann had recently read this genre-defying book and had been unable to put it down, and very much wanted to discuss it with us all. Taking its title from the Lewis Allan/Billy Holiday song, 'Strange Fruit', it is based on a startling idea. In the small racist town of Money, Mississippi, brutal and mystifying murders are taking place, and beside each mutilated (White) victim is found what seems to be the corpse of a young Black man, Emmett Till, lynched sixty-five years earlier by the white racists of the town. Each time, the Black corpse somehow disappears into thin air from the grip of the local law enforcement, only to appear again at the next murder. Two Black detectives are sent from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to uncover the mystery, and what ensues is a pell-mell tale of knockabout verbal comedy and aching tragedy, as the seams of prejudice and brutal racism still existing to this day are revealed.
Like Ann, we all found it a breathless, gripping read. Part subverted detective story, part comedy, part supernatural thriller, it had us all in thrall as we read it. I said Everett's ability to deal with such searingly painful material with such a light touch was breathtaking, and everyone agreed. In a politically dynamic move, Everett, a Black writer, begins the novel with the racist family who will turn out to be at the heart of the history involved, and with a light, comic touch conveys not only their brutality but their humanity - in particular that of the women - which contributes to the poignancy of the underlying tragedy of racism. In short, snappy sections, the novel bats between the different parties involved as the murders go on: the family, the local law enforcement, the cynical bantering detectives from the MBI (who constitute a kind of send-up of the familiar tropes of the detective novel), and others who get involved - the local Klu Klux Klan, a local Black woman who is seen as a witch, her mixed-race waitressing granddaughter and the young White professor the granddaughter calls in to help, and the higher investigation officers who are eventually put on the case. Everett has a superb ear for dialogue, and all the characters are vivid and relatably human - apart perhaps from Mama Z, the so-called witch, who remains inscrutable to both the characters and the readers, and will be central to the outcome.
It is not really possible to report our detailed discussion, as it centred on points that would reveal the plot. Suffice to say that Doug was perhaps the most picky about the book. He said he found the depiction of the White racists a bit stereotyped, and when I said how great, and funny, I had found the meeting of the local Klu Klux Klan in which they try to pick up their lapsed game in the light of the murders, only to fall apart in incompetence and stupidity, he commented that he had found its stress on incompetent bureaucracy a bit cliched. I don't think any of the rest of us at all felt the same. I have to say that I was disappointed in the ending (though no one else said they were ), but won't say why as I don't want to spoil. It is true that once we got into a deep discussion we felt there were things about the plot that didn't make sense - or at least, that we didn't get - but in the end it didn't really matter, as this was a book intended to crash open the genres and blow traditional expectations into the air, and was so very engaging.
September 2025
By Night in Chile
Roberto Bolano
Clare suggested this novella narrated by Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who has also been a literary critic and poet. It is a deathbed confession, or more accurately an attempt at self-justification, as he recounts a compromised life in which he blinded himself to political atrocities going on around him by burying himself in literature - most notably Ancient Greek literature - and finally allowing himself to be seconded in service to the fascist Pinochet regime. Like Bolano's novella Distant Star, which we also read, it is deeply concerned with the role and place of literature in society and politics. While Distant Star depicts the way that art and literature can be used by fascist regimes and can itself be fascist, By Night in Chile is concerned with how literature - even leftwing literature - can be used by individuals as a smokescreen to hide from the reality of politics.
As a young newly ordained priest and aspiring literary critic, Sebastian is taken under the wing of the famous Chilean critic with the pseudonym of Farewell, and introduced to the leftwing poet and socialist politician, Pablo Neruda. Farewell, however, is conservative in nature and his literary interests apolitical, a landowner who is devastated when the socialist leader Allende is elected, and pleased at the return of his land after Pinochet seizes power. The young Sebastian, also conservative in nature and unsuited to the priesthood into which he has somehow drifted, flounders amid these conflicting influences, in awe of Neruda's greatness yet repulsed by the working people he encounters on Farewell's estate. Self-centred and inward-looking, he is no less lacking in insight or intellectual independence as his reputation as a literary critic grows, and, as the tale of his complicity with the fascist regime develops, his deathbed musings become more and more disingenuously self-justifying. 'A week later we would be back there again,' he says of the literary soirees held by the wife of a man who will turn out to have been a murderous agent of the secret police, adding quickly: 'By we I mean the group. I didn't go every week. I put in an appearance ... once month. Or even less often.'
Throughout the 'confession' he has referred to a 'wizened youth', a figure who throughout his life has dogged him from a certain distance, challenging and judging him, but is now there beside him, and is clearly his conscience or the shrivelled moral potential of his own youth.
Clare said she was very glad to have suggested and read this book. She commented on the fact that it reads almost as if it's written in one sentence - a stream-of consciousness outpouring lacking in paragraphs or pauses to mark shifts between events, with nested stories and disquisitions. Both Doug and John said they found tedious these apparent diversions, with which the first half of the book is heavily weighted, and which in fact are intended either to illustrate the impotence of art and literature or to show how Sebastian is sidetracking himself from important, contemporary issues. Margaret said she was finding the same, until she went back and read again from the beginning, after which she admired the book greatly. She noted, to my agreement, that these 'diversions', while deadly serious in intent, are at times wryly funny - such as Sebastian's tour of the churches of Europe where the bishops have taken up the elite and brutal sport of falconry (symbolic of fascism) to stop the pigeons - symbolic of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps of the congregations - from despoiling the church buildings, or this passage indicating Sebastian's retreat from the world after Allende is elected:
When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics... I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba... and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episode of The Right to Be Born was broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochus of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stechoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreaon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites)...
I said that I had started reading the book in short bouts on train journeys, which didn't really work for a book that is basically one desperate exhalation. Initially therefore I too had had much the same reaction as John and Doug. But then I too started again and read it all in one session, and found that the book worked and, indeed in the end gripped me. Most of us felt that we would have got more out of the book had we been more familiar with the political background, and both Margeret and Doug felt excluded by not knowing the Chilean writers Sebastian refers to. I said that I felt it wasn't actually necessary to know about the poets, many of them obscure, the point being that, like the above list of Ancient Greeks, the lists of Chilean poets are part of Sebastian's smokescreen against other, pressing political issues, and indeed his own moral culpability.
Margeret noted that there is a very old-fashioned feel to the world of the book, and it was sometimes hard to remember that it takes place in the mid-late twentieth century. I agreed, saying that I was sometimes brought up short by a contemporary reference, such as that to the soap opera above, and see this as an indication of Sebastian's atavistic retreat from the world.
Ann said that we ought to pay tribute to the translator, Chris Andrews, and we all agreed. I commented that the translation brilliantly captures the way the prose will sometimes suddenly drop, in a way that seems authentic, from the somewhat formal, sometimes high-faluting style of Sebastian's self-justifications to the deflating demotic of dialogue, and everyone agreed.
Finally, someone asked, so what was the message of the book? If it was a plea for left-wing literature, as I suggested, there was nothing in the book to indicate the possibility of its power. After all, as happened in life, the leftwing poet Neruda dies, and while (in life) it is suspected that he was poisoned by the regime, both Farewell and Sebastian swallow (or want to believe)the official line that he dies of the cancer for which he was being treated. And finally, the 'wizened youth', who has always challenged Sebastian, is defeated:
The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, pouting an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history's side.
A depressing message, we all agreed.
October 2025
The Heart in Winter
Kevin Barry
Doug suggested this lively and linguistically inventive novel set in late nineteenth-century Montana and featuring two reprobate but disarming protagonists who run off together, pursued by a hired gang: Irish poet Tom Rourke, doper and drunk with existential yearnings, and Polly Gillespie, hard-bitten ex-prostitute and newly arrived wife of a mining company captain. Told in Barry's signature insightful prose - lyrical yet earthy and often comic - it traces their progress through the Montana forests and the dead of winter on their stolen horse and with their ill-gotten money, and charts their love for each other.
Clare and others said that they found the opening a little difficult. The author brilliantly employs the technique of free indirect discourse, slipping fluidly between a narrative voice and perspective and those of a character, with often a mix of the two within a sentence. At the start the prose adopts the baroque poeticism of Tom as, not yet having met Polly, he wanders the 'stations of the cross' - ie the bars along the main street of the mining town of Butte - wondering depressively if he will end up 'old and mad and forgotten on the mountain': 'He was appalled at the charismatic light '; 'He walked as charity. He walked under Libra.' However, the moment Polly appears with her new husband in the photography studio where Tom works as an assistant, things take an earthier, more ironic turn. Clare picked out as an example this sentence describing Polly, chiefly from Tom's point of view, but with a sly authorial injection: 'Eyes of wren's egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively'. Soon after, we are inside the cynical, demotic verbal world of Polly as we learn how, herself purporting to be something she wasn't, she has unwittingly married a self-flagellating religious fanatic. Ironically, indeed hilariously, it is a situation in which Tom has had a huge hand, since, as a literate man, he provides a service for other, illiterate immigrants, writing for them disingenuously romantic and courteous offers of marriage, with misrepresentative promises of a comfortable life. From this point on, we all agreed, the novel is a compelling read, and most of us read it in two sittings.
To begin with, we didn't really have a lot to say about it apart from the fact that we had liked it so much, how brilliant we thought the narrative voice, and how, in spite of Tom's criminality and Polly's hardness, Barry makes us understand and care for them, and want them to escape and succeed in the end. I said I wasn't too sure that the novel was about very much more than love - that existential connection which the pair have, and which for Tom is the only thing worth living for, and for which he would be happy to die. Doug said he did think that was exactly what it was about, and no one demurred.
Ann, however, had said very little up to this moment, and now she said that she was obviously going to be the dissenting voice about the book: she hadn't been taken by it at all. Very surprised, we asked her why. She said that perhaps it was because she read so many Westerns when she was a teenager, but she felt it was cliched - the whole scenario of outlaws with hearts of gold on the run and coming across various quirky others on their travels.
We thought about this. Clearly, the distinctive prose sets the novel apart from others, but it occurred to me also that Barry was consciously using a well-known template (in which, as Ann herself pointed out, there's always a hero, and always a happy ending) and subverting it. The real interest of this book, unlike that of the traditional Western, is psychological, concentrating on Tom's existential longings and fears and Polly's more realistic though no less moving grasp on the world, and the telepathic emotional connection between them. Clare added that, in contrast with the heroic mode of traditional Westerns, the novel also exposes the hardship for immigrants in such mining towns - the cultural barrenness, the sense of scraping a living, the drugs, and above all the violence. Someone noted that there is no sense in the novel of the presence of Native Americans, but we felt that that was probably historically correct - they would have been long driven from such places.
All in all, a novel the group generally very much enjoyed.
November 2025
Mother Night
Kurt Vonnegut
I suggested this novel which takes the form of the confession of Howard W Campbell Jr, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison after the Second World War. His war crime has been to have made broadcasts in Germany for the Nazi regime, whipping up vicious hatred towards Jews. In fact, however, Campbell was an American agent, and his broadcasts contained coded messages for the Americans. His problem now is that this was so secret that there is no one to come forward and vouch for him and save him. The US government 'neither confirms or denies I was an agent of theirs.' Resigned to his fate, he writes his memoir-confession. Here he describes how, as an entirely apolitical playwright of German-American origin living in Germany, whose plays are enthusiastically patronised by the Nazis, he is approached on a park bench and recruited by an agent, Frank Wirtanen (whom the American government now denies ever served in any of their branches). Witanen suggests that he uses his Nazi connections to gain a position of influence in the regime. What follows is a tale of double-dealings, in which Nazis can turn out to be undercover Jews, a wife can turn out to have been replaced by an imposter who can then turn out to be a Russian agent, and a post-war leader of a right-wing cult with rabid hatred for Jews, Catholics and Black people can blindly recruit members from those very groups, all prefaced by a section in which Campbell describes his Israeli prison guards, some of whom turn out to be ex-Nazis.
All of this is told in Vonnegut's own wry, wise voice, rendering the deadly tragedy via black comedy. Introducing the book, I said that I consider it brilliant. I love Vonnegut's voice and the book's concern with moral ambiguity and its message that fascism does not die, which makes it very relevant to today. Everyone agreed. Ann said she thought that the fact that the book is blackly comic - thus engaging the reader - made the book particularly powerful and its message all the more chilling, and again we all agreed.
There was quite a lot of discussion of Campbell's attitudes. I said I thought that the book was a condemnation of apoliticism and political unawareness, and a warning of their dangers. It is Campbell's apoliticism which allows him to be recruited in the way he is (and for which he was probably recruited): he says he did it simply because he thought of himself as a 'ham', an actor. But there are terrible consequences: in bleakly comic and tragic scenes, Campbell discovers that people took up the racist suggestions in his broadcasts. Someone in the group noted the connection with Bolano's By Night in Chile, which we read recently, in which the protagonist blinds himself to the political atrocities around him.
While much of the novel operates as dark comedy, there are moments of deadly serious authorial passion, such as this vivid depiction of the totalitarian mind:
...a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random... The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined... The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases ... The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information ...
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
A stunning book, we all agreed, and went on to discuss our own political situation, which only goes to prove its contemporary relevance.
