Author: Michael K Freundt

I'm an Australian writer living in Bali. I recently took the plunge to self-publish, and to blog which was liberating, to say the least. Writing has never been so immediate and so rewarding.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche who recently was awarded a Chieftaincy Title by the traditional ruler of her hometown, Abba.

Purple Hibiscus (2003) is the story seen through the eyes of a young girl, Kambili (KAM bi lee) of a small Nigerian family, her older brother, Jaja, Mama, and her wealthy and very Christian Papa, told in deceptively simple English. Most stories have a villain and this story certainly has one: him. And some stories with a villain have a villian’s mate: a second-in-command, or a side-kick, or, as in this case, a manipulator, here it is the Christian god. The two of them make a formidable pair.

Papa is a prominent citizen and a fundamentalist Christian. Everything about the Christian god to Papa is good and right. If it is right to thank god briefly for the food they are about to eat then it must be better to thank him for twenty minutes. Although from humble and heathen beginnings, he now owns several biscuit factories and a radical newspaper that puts him and his family in danger from the military autocratic government. Yes, He’s not all bad.

It is the time of political unrest in Nigeria and opens with the boy, Jaja, being castigated strongly by his father for not taking communion, that Sunday, Palm Sunday. It is the first time the boy has openly defied his father. ‘The priest keeps touching my mouth and it nauseates me,’ Jaja explained tersely. His father said, ‘You cannot stop receiving the body of our Lord. It is death, you know that.’ ‘Then I will die,’ came the boy’s calm reply. His father is speechless and so throws the prayerbook across the room. That was when ‘things started to fall apart’. That line opens the book. It is reminiscent, and likely in honour of, Nigeria’s literary hero, Chinewa Achebe, whose debut novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) became an early beacon of postcolonial writing – giving ‘the other’ a voice – depicting the tumultuous and destructive effect of colonialism and Christianity on the proud Igbo nation.

Kambili does not know the world, or domestic chores; she does not talk much, afraid the words would not come out, and if they did, afraid they would be the wrong words and Papa would be angry. She comes 2nd in her school exams when she usually comes first. Papa is very angry; he makes her stand in the bathtub and pours boiling water over her bare feet. She does not look at people’s skin below their necks, Papa would be angry. During Papa’s twenty minute grace she can not move, Papa would be angry. She can not speak to her grandfather, Papa Nnukwu, because he is a heathen; she closes her eyes so she won’t see her brother Jaja touch their grandfather; so Papa won’t be angry at her. The revelation of Papa’s violence sneaks up on you. The first morning bruises on Mama’s face are described as innocently as one might describe a waking woman yawning and rubbing her eyes or the morning rays of the sun through the mango trees dappling the lawn in front of the house.

Kambili’s life is dominated by the Christian god and Papa’s unflinching devotion to him. It is implied that Kambili doesn’t think of god as her god, but Papa’s god.

There are similarities here with novelistic depiction of Irish domestic life, like the stories and novels of John McGahern: a dominating, god-fearing and violent father who punishes children and his wife for perceived Christian misdeeds, punishment to make them see that their deeds takes them away from god, punishment for their own good, to bring them back to god. A self-defeating idea.

This all changes when, because of a military coup, he allows the two children to spend a few days with Papa’s sister, Aunty Ifeoma, and her three children in a poor village some distance away. Aunty Ifeoma is also a Christian but her pre-meal grace is a comfortable number of seconds. Kambili is shocked, but even more shocked when Aunty Ifeoma ends her grace with a prayer for singing and daily laughter. Papa would be angry. Kambili did not know that laughter was something you could pray for.

Aunty Ifeoma is a lecturer at the local university but she is poor: lecturers have not been paid for many months. She and her three children eat a lot of boiled yams and her daily routine is dictated by the usual scramble for fuel for her rusty car.

Eventually Kambili and Jaja are forced back to their father’s estate; all their dreams and friendships they have to leave behind, but they return with the knowledge that family life can be soft, adults can be kind, Igbo songs can be sung while peeling yams, laughter can be allowed without punishment, and that the moist sticks of the purple hibiscus from Aunty Ifeoma’s garden carry their hope that they will take root, grow, and produce their magnificent purple blooms in the garden of Papa’s austere mansion.

You will have to read this book to find out if all or any of these things do indeed ‘bloom’.

One of the joys of fiction is that it takes you to different places, cultures, times, and beliefs. This one certainly does.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here is a video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche giving the 2019 Yale Class Day speech. Also you can watch the video of her speech at the graduation ceremony of the Harvard class of 2018.

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Re-editing Author’s Work

The French novelist Eric Chevillard once wrote: “Literature, more than the zoo, makes it its mission to be a conservatory of animal life…”


When I read that quote in the London Review of Books, the quote and the author were new to me, I didn’t at first understand it; Chevillard, one of the ‘most inventive writers working today’ was referring to literature conserving the names of animals. However, I was drawn to a connection between the words ‘literature’ and ‘zoo’ although it wasn’t clear to me what it was.

(This post is an example of writing something down in order to know what I think.)

That connection became relevant with the following rephrasing, considering the recent brouhaha about changing past writer’s work as in the re-editing of the works for children of Roald Dahl:


“Literature, more than the zoo, makes its mission to be a conservatory of …” its own evolution.

Just like a zoo can conserve species and show us the workings of evolution, so too can literature do the same thing with language.


We may think now that calling a short round woman, even affectionately, a Tallow Ball – or to be more contemporary, Butterball, as in Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) – is misogynistic but literature in order to get to where we are now needed to say that then.

We can only understand the nuance of language we use by knowing how that language has changed over time, and it does; it always does.

Re-editing the work of literature’s past writers because the language they used is now thought of as ‘bad’ is like erasing history just because it isn’t now considered nice or convenient. That’s what autocratic rulers do.

If we are worried about children getting hold of ‘bad’ books, being exposed to misogynistic ideas, there are always guides to help them through: parents and carers.

This issue seems to have faded from public view, and rightly so.

Changing past writer’s work is wrong.

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The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale

British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall

Patrick Gale’s literary strength is families, their function or disfunction, coping with disasters, or not, or just getting through each day to the next. His 2009 novel, The Whole Day Through is no exception. However, its structure is a little different in that the action takes place over one single day. This also means that there is a lot of back story. In other words, you get decades of stories all thought about by the main characters over the span of one day interspersed with the action of that day.

Basically, it is about four people. Laura is a work at home book keeper keeping mostly artistic types away from their shoe-boxes of random receipts and allowing them to get on with their artistic lives. She is also single and a carer; caring for her academic mother, Professor Jellicoe, a semi-retired virologist whose body is increasingly letting her intellect down. She is also a naturalist and so spends a lot of time at home without any clothes on. Perfectly natural thinks mother and daughter.

Ben, a sexual health doctor is working at a local men’s clinic, locally known as GUM, short for genito-urinary medicine, having forsaken a career in virology to move away from his wife, Chloe, to care for his younger brother Bobby who suffers from the Mosaic variant of Down’s Syndrome. Although ‘suffers’ isn’t quite the word: he has a job in a shop, he’s almost independent, gay, and promiscuous, and it’s entirely possible that he may be embarking on a relationship with a burly train-driver.

Laura and Ben meet accidentally. Even though they are now middle aged, they recognise each other from their hedonistic student days thirty years before when they enjoyed an overwhelming and glorious love affair. So what now? Ben has fallen out of love with his beautiful wife, who, by the way, still loves him, and he is totally amazed at the re-eruption of his love for Laura in all its gloriousness.

But they are now older and wiser. Wiser? They have responsibilities for other people; people who can’t cope on their own. Family. The couple’s decision is to clear the slate, no-matter how painful it might be, tell the truth, and think of themselves. They have to; they love each other so much! Hope gives them succour; regret they’ve had and don’t want it again.

I’m sure Gale spent exhausting hours getting the timing right: juggling the drama of past thoughts with the drama of the present action so that everything fitted into the thoughts and actions of four people over the course of one day. However, it wasn’t really necessary as it all, past and present, swirls around like a rainbow ripple cake you can enjoy without knowing which part comes from or goes where.

It is an example of familial love clashing with romantic love when ultimately they should be both sides of the same page. The plot point around which the ending depends snuck up on me like a naughty younger sibling. Fiction doesn’t always make me gasp but I love it when it does.

You can buy the ebook, and Audiobook – read by Patrick Gale himself – here.

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Next of Kin by John Boyne

John Boyne appeared at the 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Irish writer, John Boyne.

Half way through this fourth novel of John Boyne’s, Next of Kin (2006) I thought, ‘What a grubby little tale.’ That turned out to be quite unfair. It’s a crime novel but not a crime mystery; well, it is to everyone except the protagonist and you, the reader; it’s not a ‘who-done-it’ but a ‘will-he-be-caught’. One of Boyne’s major themes in all his work is family, whether it be happy ones or unhappy ones; this one is definitely of the latter.

Set in 1936 in London and the Montignac’s estate, Leyville, it’s a story of an orphaned boy taken in by his wealthy relatives and brought up as one of the family, in fact, the most favoured one, but of course, nothing goes to plan, except the crime. Or does it? No spoilers here. Owen Montignac is a clever handsome man made all the more so by a head of startling white hair. He is conspicuous wherever he goes. He runs a contemporary art gallery, and does quite well, even though his contempt for the overpriced scratchings of the mediocre artists he exhibits is j-u-s-t kept in check by his paper thin charm. He, along with his cousin Stella, are the sole survivors of the Montignac dynasty, Stella’s brother Andrew having been killed in a shooting accident many years earlier and the story opens at the funeral and wake for Stella’s father, Owen’s uncle, Peter Montignac.

This opening scene is a test for the reader. The cast of characters at the funeral is extensive since a lot of the significant backstory and attitudes to the deceased and, of course, the inheritance are exposed via the conversations of the mourners. If you are a reader who usually skips over names you’ll get yourself into serious trouble here. Boyne doesn’t make it easy for you: there are two characters at the wake called Marjory Redmond and Margaret Richmond, one is a minor character, the other a major one, but you don’t know that then. Stay alert! And, as if to test your memory for names, this early scene is juxtaposed with a court case where you will meet more people, the well-respected Judge, Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC, his wife Jane, always on the lookout for social advancement, especially if it involves The Palace, and their lay-about son Gareth.

What sets this novel above others of its ilk is the important sub-plot of King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and the dilemma for the country, and in particular, for the constitutional judiciary, that the King places everyone in: will he or won’t he marry her?

Boyne has never shied away from incorporating real historical people into his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Tzar Nicolas and the Romanov’s in The House of Special Purpose (2008) and Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018).  

How the plot-lines of the Montignacs, the Bentleys, and the future of the English monarchy are interwoven around a crime, its motive, delivery, and resolution is what keeps the reader enthusiastically turning the pages. It’s. Very. Well. Done.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

by Categories: 20th Century Crime Fiction, Book review, British Literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker. The winner that year? Iris Murdoch’s The Sea The Sea.

Irish novelist and playwright, Jennifer Johnston

There is so much going on on Johnston’s Page 1: The protagonist, young Joe NOT paying attention in maths class; writing a daring poem about hating his father and wishing him dead; Miss McCabe, the frustrated teacher, squeaking her chalk to demonstrate the glories of the equilateral triangle – each image illuminating an unwritten, but acknowledged, back-story. Joseph Logan has such a miserable home life (a ruined, bitter, and abusive father and a disappointed, sour, but high-principled mother) but dispite his dour life, almost McGahern*-ish, the writing is so vivid. Everything is so clear. Johnston puts sound (squeak squeak of the chalk), thoughts of the characters (Because I hate you so), little telling actions (Hot fat spotted the floor) into the narrative, as well as comments from the narrator (The conversation wasn’t exactly swinging). You have to be vigilant and take notice of the tiny singular quotation marks: it’s important that you know what is said and what is thought, and who thinks it. It’s a rich and full tapestry of little black marks, full of meaning, that make up a page of narrative. But the most telling and useful writer’s tool she uses is dialogue. I know of one Australian teacher of creative writing who advises her students (or used to) to steer clear of dialogue. What a misguided and anti-creative piece of advice! Dialogue is one of the most effective, useful, and versatile tools a writer can have. A line of speech can paint a character more effectively than a paragraph of description. Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely; more than half of this text has people talking, with very few adverbs. It’s clear, by the words they use, how they are spoken.

The story is set during The Troubles, in the early 1970s, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. There’s always gunfire in the distance. Joe sees a young woman sitting on a wall. He’s noticed her before but one day he sits down next to her. Her name is Kathleen, she’s a teacher, a chain-smoker, and family-less. All three attributes alien to the boy. This meeting and their growing relationship provides the catalyst for the narrative. His older brother Brendan comes back from England but what he does when out at night remains a mystery. The father lives on his past triumphs as a fighter against the British, but now that his health is rapidfly declining it’s only his memories, or fantasies, that sustain him. The mother is stoic and sour, bitter about her lot as bread-winner and carer of a useless man but diligent in her responsibilities. Love seems as alien as good weather. And the British soldiers and gunshots get ever closer.

And then one day Brendan meets Kathleen… no spoilers here.

I was convinced that the narrative would end tragically, and yes it doesn’t end well but quite differently to what I expected.

My book-fairy (an Irishman retired to Brussels who comes to my island home bearing books twice a year) introduced me to Johnston via her 1974 novel How Many Miles to Babylon?, a WWI tale of class, affection, and betrayal. I now want to read more. Her last published book was Naming the Stars (2015). She lives near Dublin.

Some years ago, I received an email from an English writer; she obviously found my contact details on this blog. She wasn’t having much success with getting her work published so she founded her own publishing house. She was impressive and obviously determined and entrepreneurial. She asked me to review her novel and post it on my blog. I was happy to oblige. My expectations were misguided. The writing was long-winded and verbose. It appeared the writer’s main aim was to impress the reader with her vocabulary and lengthy sentences. I read the prologue twice; there was tension in the text, but still I had no idea where the two characters were nor what they were talking about. I replied to her carefully but pointed out that simple and clear sentences were the best way to tell a story. I ultimately blamed myself telling her that ‘I was not the reader for her.’ I should recommend this book to her.

The BBC filmed it in 1980, directed by Jim O’Brien with a screenplay by Derek Mahon.

Here is a short, but surprising, clip of Jennifer Johnston talking about writing.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

*John McGahern (1934 – 2006) the Irish writer famous for his bleak settings: the squat Irish homes of the rural poor, usually dominated by a deeply religious, unforgiving, and brutal husband and father.

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Lessons by Ian McEwan

It’s going to be difficult to talk about this book, Lessons (2022) without giving away too much of the plot; no spoilers. I’ll try.

The story is about Roland Baines and with a title of Lessons, it’s appropriate that it begins with a lesson: a piano lesson, but this one has lifelong repercussions.

The story isn’t linear but it progresses like a complex cable-knit from that piano lesson when he was 14 years old right into his early 70s.

The writing is dense and not conducive to the one and a half page read in bed before you go to sleep. This book demands your time and attention. It’s also a bit of a history lesson as world events impinge on Roland’s life from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, through the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 to the lockdowns of the 2020 pandemic. Roland was born in 1948, a real Baby Boomer, but only a few years before me; there’s little bits of my history that match Roland’s and those little bits are mainly reflected in his mistakes. It’s Roland’s mistakes – or, if you like, the lessons he didn’t learn – that lay down the path of Roland’s life.

For readers of Roland’s age you too will, I predict, see little bits of your own history as we all can’t be immune to the world and what goes on in it.

Roland’s life, in its teenage beginnings, has enormous potential as a pianist, a tennis player, and as a writer. What he does with that potential and how those choices affect him and those around him make up the spine of the story.

There is, of course, the piano teacher, Miriam, then his first wife Alissa and her German family, his only child, Lawrence, his second wife, Daphne, and an unknown brother, Robert, are all dragged along by the history around them; some do well, others do not.

After his trite little book, Nutshell (2016), which I thought was way below par, so much so that I didn’t bother with his next one, Machines Like Me (2019) Lessons is a return to the classic standard of his Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), and The Children Act (2014). It’s not a return to his early work which was full of darkness and the macabre, but it’s a mature and serious work that delves into what it really takes for a person to fulfil their dreams and how easy it is for those dreams to turn to smoke.

The complexities if its timeline annoyed me a little in the first third, but there is a rhythm there you need to tap into but once you do the book rollicks along to its conclusion; well it did for this reader, anyway. I loved it! (But, please, make time for it and attend to it wholeheartedly)

Lessons is his most autobiographical work, about a quarter he says, and you can hear him talking about the book and his writing life here, in a short but fascinating video from the CBS Sunday Morning program.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

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This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham

Australian writer Sophie Cunningham
Australian writer, Sophie Cunningham

If you find Virginia Woolf fascinating, as I do (Don’t be Afraid of Virginia Woolf), it’s almost impossible not to find Leonard Woolf fascinating too. That is what drew me to Sophie Cunningham’s book This Devastating Fever (2022). She wanted to tell the story of Leonard Woolf and she’s been trying to tell his story for 15 years. Then along came Covid19 and the parallels between the Woolf’s trying to be writers during a pandemic (The Spanish Flu of 1918), and Cunningham’s own troubles writing during a pandemic were too good to resist.

This Devastating Fever has two narratives: then, the story of the Woolfs, of course, and now, the story of Alice, a writer writing the Woolf story; both stories deal with similar themes. The pandemic, mental illness, and writing. It’s a novel structure and a very interesting and effective one. Alice while globetrotting for research, and then in lockdown, sends excerpts of her Woolf novel, also called This Devastating Fever, to her Australian agent, Sarah, who keeps urging Alice to include more sex, and given the group of people the Woolfs were part of, The Bloomsbury Set, including more sex wouldn’t’ve been difficult. Bed-hopping and fence-jumping were rife.

However, sex concerning Virginia Woolf was problematic. It’s entirely possible that the Woolf’s marriage was never consummated, yet their relationship was loving, strong, and long-lasting – her suicide note is proof of that! Virginia found sexual release with women, and – possibly – Leonard did too.

Cunningham’s metafiction story of Alice is very modern, but Virginia’s writing, in her own era, was also very modern. Virginia’s mental health, always tenuous, is explored against Alice’s attention to the woman that once cared for her but is now demented and in care. There are parallels galore.

The most effective and moving parts are when Virginia and Leonard are together. Cunningham’s imagined dialogue is wonderfully evocative, intriguingly revealing, and utterly believable. Fiction at its best.

I only have one complaint. Cunningham has Leonard and Virginia ‘appear’ to Alice in her story and the resulting conversations are wonderful and enlightening. However, she calls them ‘imaginary Leonard’ and ‘ghost Virginia’ as if us readers wouldn’t understand what was going on when Leonard appeared and spoke in a chapter headed 2021. Annoying, but a minor gripe.

I highly recommend this unique novel.

Here is The Wheeler Centre interview with Sophie Cunningham from late 2022.

You can buy the Kindle or paperback editions here.

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Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

American author, Elizabeth Strout

I’m not sure why, yet, but I don’t have a lot of American writers on my shelf and in my line of interest. However, Elizabeth Strout has been there on my literary horizon ever since I saw the film version of her novel Olive Kitteridge (2008) starring the magnificent Francis McDermott. And I’m not sure how but the sequel, Olive Again (2019) is in my pile of books on my bedside table. Then my sister, an avid reader, praised Strout’s Oh William! (2021) – shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize – and a visiting friend left me this one, Lucy by the Sea (2022) when she returned home. I read it.

It’s my first pandemic novel. By that I mean it’s the first novel I’ve read that, to some degree, is about the pandemic. Lucy, and her ex-husband, William, leave New York and set up a home in a small house on the Maine coast. He was worried about her and wanted to get her away from the danger.

It’s written in the first person and it reads like a journal. Lucy shares her inner feelings and expectations, usually unfulfilled, along with what she did, who she met, and what she said. It wasn’t long before I realised that she isn’t a very easy woman. I always admire a writer who can create an unlovely character through a 1st person narrative. (The last time I experienced this was in Tim Winton’s Breath (2008)) However, she is self-reflective and so knows not to voice her dislikes too much. She dislikes most things. But she likes Bob, a near neighbour, but not his wife, Margaret. She certainly dislikes the house William has brought her to, the weather, most of the furniture, the grey light, and the loneliness. Lucy’s life is her family: two daughters, their husbands, one she likes, one she doesn’t, William, of course, her ex, and her late second husband, David, whom she misses dreadfully. William also has an ex-wife – she left him taking their daughter – and a half-sister he’s only just met. Needless to say Lucy’s family world is complicated.

Lucy is also surprisingly unaware of the seriousness of the pandemic, even when friends and New York neighbours die because of it. She feels displaced, uneasy, and wonders when she can return to her New York apartment. Set against this general feeling of displacement is the narrative of the events around her and her family told in very plain, uncluttered, and conversational language.

It’s a soft book, and a handsome volume.

By the end she is slightly more aware and accepting of her situation even though her life has changed dramatically.

Strout has written about these characters before in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), and Oh William! of course; even Olive Kitteridge makes a small appearance in this one.

I enjoyed it, yes, but the interest is solely due to the character of Lucy: how will she deal with hardship, what will she say to her daughter who is mad at her, and what will she do with William after she’s put her nightie back on?

You can buy the ebook or hardback version here.

Here is an interview with Elizabeth Strout about Lucy by the Sea, if you can manage to forgive the rather verbose interviewer.

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All the Broken Places by John Boyne

Irish writer, John Boyne.

Yes, this, Boyne’s latest novel, is a sequel, of sorts, to Boyne’s incredibly successful 2006 YP novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – 11 million copies sold world wide – but All the Broken Places (2022) is a novel for adults.

The story follows the adult life of Bruno’s sister, Gretel, post WWII and up to the present day, in her 90s.

Until the devastating climax of Part 1 the tension propelling the reader’s interest, keeping it bubbling away, is almost solely due to the secret Gretel Fernley holds and we readers understand; if you had read this book’s prequel, that is. The narrative begins in Paris 1946, when Gretel is 12, and also in London 2022, where she is in her 90’s. But it’s the Paris story that takes you into her nightmare. There is also tension in the London plot too, again fuelled by Gretel’s secret: her real identity, but I thought when reading it that the payoff would be the book’s climax too: at the end of Part 3.
No. I was wrong. The book’s climax was totally unexpected, to this reader, but delivered in the most unsensationalist way: almost as an aside. It’s novelistic decisions like this that set apart great writers from the rest.

Although Gretel’s post war story is basically in three parts: Paris 1946, Sydney 1952, and London 1953, her present story, London 2020, runs along with them, and following her throughout is her past and the guilt she feels because of it. It’s the defining theme of all Gretel’s life decisions and the major theme of the book.

After the fantastical saga, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom (2020) which followed a cast of the same characters over 2000 years, and the almost, slapstick humour of Boyne’s last, The Echo Chamber (2021) – soon to be a TV comedy series, scripted by Boyne – I can happily report that Boyne is back at his narrative best which, for this reader, was his 2017 book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

Boyne almost always leads you confidently along his narrative path hand in hand, but with … Furies, and now with ... Broken Places he grabs you by the scruff of the neck.

It would be impossible to relay the plot without giving away the book’s major surprises, of which there are three, and which occur solely when Gretel’s past breaks through, or threatens to break through, into the present. Yet towards the end of her life, it is her own incredible decision, not one forced on her, that finally gives her peace, the redemption she so desperately needs, and the home she believes she deserves.

Here you can purchase the book in various formats.

And here you can buy the audiobook for free by signing up to Audible.

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Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) British novelist, playwright,
& short story writer

I used to have a serious crush on the works of W. Somerset Maugham. I’ve read most of his fiction, novels, and short stories and always find something fresh on re-reading them. I usually don’t mention this past-passion: Maugham is very much now out of fashion. However, a recent conversation with a student about short story writing sparked my interest again and serendipitously I discovered this novel Cakes and Ale (1930) in my local second hand bookshop. I bought it.

Modern short stories tend to be more like anecdotes. Maugham’s stories are very neat, some would say old-fashioned: with a definite beginning, middle, and an end. So, to anyone interested in writing, especially short stories, I would highly recommend reading a lot of W. Somerset Maugham.

In his day Maugham was the most famous, the most successful novelist and playwright. His early success was in the theatre. In 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously on the West End. After writing thirty two plays he abandoned the theatre in 1933 to concentrate solely on writing fiction, many of which have been produced for film and television. His greatest fiction masterpiece, some say, is Of Human Bondage (1915), the film adaptation (1934) – the first of four – featured a then unknown actress called Bette Davis.

Cakes and Ale (1930) with an alternative title, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, is a satire on the literary world of Maugham’s day. The 1st person narrator is a writer and ex-medical student called William Ashenden – a name Maugham had used several times when writing autobiographical flavoured fiction.

The plot swings around a noble writer, Edward Driffield who has reached the lofty accolades of his literary career and is considered the ‘father’ of British literature. However, he came from very humble beginnings which Ashenden can attest to as he knew the Driffields, Edward then an unknown writer, but more importantly he knew the first Mrs Driffield, an ex-barmaid and very forthright woman called Rosie. The story opens with the literary rumblings about who will write Driffield’s biography now that the grand old man of British letters has died. It is Ashenden’s recollections of his student days when he knew the Driffields that provide the background and understandings of the great man’s past, and especially the skeleton in his cupboard: Rosie.

The book created a furor when it first appeared as is was believed it was a blatant jab at the recently deceased British writer, Thomas Hardy. “Trampling on Thomas Hardy’s Grave” and “Hitting below the Shroud” were only two of the vindictive reviews that appeared at the book’s publication. Maugham denied the association, of course. He asserts it began as a short story about a notable writer whose famous works were all written while he was married to his first ‘common’ wife but whose second wife, his secretary, ‘made him into a figure’.

Maugham took his title from a line of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Cakes and Ale were literary symbols (thank you Aesop, whoever you were) for the good life.

It’s written in the literary style of the day and despite the often self-deprecating remarks from the narrator Ashenden, he (Maugham) comes across as a self-serving sarcastic ponse. Yet, the highlight of Cakes and Ale is the character of Rosie. Maugham was particular good at creating ‘common women’. He gave them self-awareness, honesty, and the ability to undermine the pompous men who usually sought their company.

It’s as entertaining as any of Maugham’s work but doesn’t quite meet the standard of his most famous, his novels The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Razor’s Edge (1944). The curious characteristic of both these novels is that they are both about someone who isn’t there: in the former it’s about a painter (based on Paul Gauguin) who is dead, and the latter is about a young American, Larry Darrell who is always abroad searching for the meaning of life. Their stories are told by those who were left behind.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here is the link to the W. Somerset Maugham page at The Gutenberg Project where you can find most of his novels, plays, and short story collections, all ebooks and all for free.

The BBC dramatised it for television in 1974 starring Michael Hordern and Judy Cornwell.

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