Category: British Literature

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Irish writer Sally Rooney

A few hundred pages into the novel I was struck by the narrative format; actually Rooney employs two narrative formats.

This is the story of two brothers and their bumpy relationship following the death of their father.

Peter, 32 is a lawyer and Ivan, 22 is, well, nothing much but a wiz at chess but scraping a living from his checkered passion is not easy.

Peter has two girlfriends; Ivan has one. Peter seems happy but Ivan is happy. I feel sorry for Peter but I love Ivan. 


Sally Rooney is quite a literary phenomenon. Most of the action goes on in her character’s heads. She is a digger of truth about what goes on in the human mind which is often at odds with the way people behave. Especially men. So eager is she to explore our mental shenanigans, she sometimes overdoes it a bit. That’s a minor criticism.  

But back to the double narrative styles: for the chapters about Peter the narrative is almost stream-of-consciousness. Short sentences. Shorter phrases. Even just one word followed by a full stop. They all tumble over each other. It pretty much reflects Peter’s state of mind: full. His two girlfriends, his high pressured job, what to do about his under-achieving brother, and did he love his father. Enough? Ivan’s chapters are more conservative, the third person narrator is more conventional: long sentences, precise grammar, at a slower pace. This is Ivan. He’s a simple soul not much concerned with material matters but he knows love when he feels it. Although I’m not a fan of stream-of-consciousness narration it works here; it works for Peter. Another grammatical technique binds the narratives together. The dialogue, there’s a lot, isn’t punctuated. A modern trend. But it is easy to follow. When you listen to an audio book – another modern trend – the punctuation is not read yet it is always clear who says what to whom. 

I am almost to the end so I cannot tell you what happens. It’s a great read. I’m loving it. If you haven’t already give it a go.    

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Friendly Fire by Patrick Gale

British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall

In my attempt to find and read all of Patrick’s fiction works – only a few to go – I’ve hit some barriers: some of works are not easy to find. This one, Friendly Fire (2005), has been elusive but I discovered it on my sister’s bookshelf; she found it in a second-hand bookshop.

Sophie is fourteen, an orphan, and in a home, Wakefield House, not the horrible cliched narrative of harsh and sadistic masters in an old grey and foreboding stone mansion, but a warm and caring environment run by a childless couple, Margaret and Keiran, who although they keep their emotional distance from the children who might on any day be adopted they have formed a much closer bond with Sophie who has never sought to leave. According to Gale, “her life is changed through literature.” She is a bright student, even-tempered, and curious and earns a place at a much admired boarding school, Tatham, where she is attracted to and befriends two male students, Lucas Behrman and Charlie Somborne-Abbot. Their developing lives, friendships, sexualities, and their place in the world, home and away, form the book’s narrative. The boarding school trope has been used countless times as a metaphor for society, politics, nations, and even the world. Here it feels more like a family, a benign and nurturing one, but like every family there is unexpected tragedy. Learning doesn’t only happen at school.

Society’s rules, inconsistencies, trivialities, secrets, prejudices, both religious and financial, and, of course, hypocrisies make up the steeplechase that Sophie must navigate, jumping and sidestepping, calling for help, or facing head on, but also falling splat! on her face. Gale is an expert at pacing and plotting; his plot points, both soft and dramatic, sometimes sneak up on you. The climactic moment is dropped into a seemingly casual sentence in such an unassuming way that I had to stop and re-read it to make sure I had read what I thought I had. As a reader I felt buffeted by the narrative but at the same time confident that I was in safe and expert hands. That’s what I like about Gale’s work and why I’m seeking to read everything he has written, and will write.

You can buy the Kindle or paperback edition here.

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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

British writer, Julian Barnes

This book from 2011 has been sitting on my bookshelf for some years, winking at me. I have never been sure if I had read it, so I did. In a book world dominated by thick tomes, a novella like this can be a god-send. Claire Keegan, Foster (2010) and Small Things Like These (2021), an Irish writer, has been lately championing the novella as a legitimate art form.

This is a story about memory: what we remember and what we think we remember. Tony Webster, the first person narrator, is in his latter years and he tells us about his school days when he was nerdish, oh-so clever and amusing and, with his two mates Chris and Alex, a little ahead of the pack – so they liked to think. This gives Barnes a delicious excuse for self-deprecating witticisms about his youthful behaviour as seen from the distance of his much older self.

A new boy arrives, Adrian Finn, quite a bit ahead of them in intelligence and maturity, but who attaches himself to the three friends, which surprises everyone especially the trio themselves. Flattered though they were.

Later at university, hoping that his life will soon begin, he meets the enigmatic Veronica and does all the right things, as prescribed by his conservative and very British culture, which, in reality, is nothing much, just waiting for things to happen. They don’t. However, Veronica does invite him to meet her parents, and brother Jack for a weekend. Jack, in an aside, says, ‘I suppose he’ll do.’ And that seems the belief of Veronica as well. And still nothing happens. But Veronica’s mother, quite likes him, and he quite likes her. You get the impression that she is attracted to her daughters ‘young men’.

Finally Veronica ‘comes across’ but only after they break up.

Life continues, he and his friends drift apart, he finishes university, ages, gets married, has a child, gets divorced but keeps a close relationship with his ex-wife Margaret. He then hears from Adrain Finn via a short letter that he and Veronica are now a couple. Tony is furious.

Part One concludes with the news that Adrian Finn has killed himself, diagonally slashing his wrists (apparently that is the best way to do it) in a hot bath, and left a letter explaining that his suicide was planned and philosophically justified and so no one needs to be upset. He also leaves an apologetic letter for the paramedics and hospital staff that had to deal with his corpse. Adrian Finn; first class honours, first class suicide.

Part Two opens with the elderly Tony receiving a certified package in the mail: he has inherited £500 … and a diary, but there is no diary in the the package. Astoundingly, the deceased is Sarah, Veronica’s mother, who in her accompanying letter tells Tony that Adrian, before his death, was quite happy.

This entertaining, intriguing, and very well written novel takes us through Tony’s attempts to winnow through his memory and re-engage with people he hasn’t seen in decades to answer so many bewildering unanswered questions. Why did Adrian kill himself? Why did Sarah have Adrian’s diary? Why did she leave it to Tony? (Why was it her’s in the first place?) And why won’t Veronica, still enigmatic as ever, tell him what he wants to know? What did he miss all those years ago? AND, where is the diary? Was he so stupid, so unengaged? Did his mistakes then as a young man have anything to do with his mistakes as an older one? Maybe. He was alone then; he’s alone now.

I’m sure that any reader over 50 will see themselves, to some degree, in this book. I loved it even if Barnes throws up some very unflattering mirrors at me.

And last night I watched the 2017 movie version with a stellar British cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walker, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery, and Billy Howle.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

And here is a short video with Julian Barnes on The Musings of a Novelist.

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The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne

John Boyne has never been shy to include historical people and events in his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh et al in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018), the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), and here in The House of Special Purpose (2009) where he places a fictitious character in the household of the final days of the reign of the Romanovs, in Russia, 1917/18.

However it is the adult life and love story of the fictitious character, Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev that is the focus here and dominates the narrative.

It opens in 1981 when Georgy (pronounced YOR gee) is an old man, a retired librarian in London, and his wife, Zoya, is gravely ill. Each chapter swings back and forth from Georgy’s youth as a peasant in rural Russia, the extraordinary event that puts him in the path of a bullet meant for the Tzar’s cousin, his subsequent position as bodyguard for the 11 year old Russian heir, the haemophiliac, Alexei Romanov, and his life, and love, in the Romanov household, to his life in exile after the revolution, Paris first, and his eventual settling in London working at the British Library.

It is a first person narrative in the voice of the protagonist. Of course, Georgy and his wife, suffer discrimnation and hardship, like all émigrés in post revolution and war-torn Europe, but the real drama of the work, and what stimulates the reader’s interest is that the reader, assuming they have even a modicum of knowledge of European history, knows what is going to happen to the Romanovs; Georgy, and of course the royal characters do not. This writerly format, where the reader knows more than the characters, is always a generator of novelistic tension. Here, in this work, it is intensified by the reader’s wonder at how the situation of the young Georgy, in the thrall, and in the service of the Tsar and his family, and in love with one of the Tsar’s daughters transitions to the situation of the elderly Georgy living as a retired librarian with his ill wife in London.

Of course, this is resolved, very neatly, dramatically, and believably even if Boyne uses an existing trope .. erm … but no spoilers here.

In my quest to read all the works of John Boyne, and I only have a few to go, I have yet to find one that surpasses his best – in my opinion – The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) but this earlier work has a lot going for it: history, romance, revolution, and a fitting climax. Highly recommended.

Here you can watch John Boyne talk about, and read from, the book at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC in 2013.

And here is a shorter, but only audio, interview with Boyne about the book.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

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The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian writer, Tan Twan Eng

Every week, on a Wednesday, I get the ‘pink’ Weekend Financial Times and I open it first to the culture section. That’s where I found a review of this book. What first attracted me was the mention by the reviewer, Michael Arditti, of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, a favourite of mine, although now he is very much out of fashion. I am always interested in novels that include real writers as characters (biographical fiction). My favourites of the genre are Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and David Lodge’s Author Author (2004) both about Henry James and his failed attempt to become a playwright, as well as Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014) about E. M. Forster and his life leading up to the publication of his masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924). 

I was also prompted to read this book because its author, Tan Twan Eng, was on the Booker Prize short list in 2012 for his second novel The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). Reading a Booker Prize short listed writer has sometimes proved far more satisfying than reading the winner. 

The House of Doors (2023) is the story of Lesley Hamlyn, her husband, Robert, a successful lawyer in the Straits Settlement on Penang Island (the author’s birthplace) in 1921 and her affair with a local doctor; they meet in a large house where her lover keeps his collection of doors, hanging from the ceiling. Its’s a beautiful image and a symbol of the possibilities for all Tan’s characters. The Hamlyn home, Cassowary House, is the focal point of the local society and passing through are Dr Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary seeking money and support to transform his country, and the British author, W. Somerset Maugham, an old friend of Robert’s, and Maugham’s ‘secretary’ – read ‘lover’ – Gerald Haxton who are guests in the house.

At the same time Lesley’s best friend Ethel Proudlock, living in Kuala Lumpur, is accused of murder and Lesley becomes involved in emotionally supporting her friend even though Ethel has admitted to the crime; she emptied a pistol of its six bullets into the body and head of a man on her verandah one night.

This famous case was the subject of world news and became the basis of one of Maugham’s most famous stories: The Letter, which first appeared in his short story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926) and became a very successful stage play in 1927 and, even more famously, a Hollywood movie in 1940 starring Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall. 

Most reviews concentrate on the Maugham element in their reviews but the book is a lot more than that: revolution in China, the colonial way of life, and fidelity. The later is particularly strong since Lesley’s affaire weighs heavily on her conscience even though she knows her husband is having his own. Her conservative social sensibilities, brought into focus when she finally realises the true relationship between Maugham and Haxton, and the effect on her marriage and on the society in which she lives, should the affair be discovered, create a dilemma for the woman but her sense of her own worth wins through. She is very careful and maintains her marriage, family, and social position while at the same time quite enjoying Maugham’s company. W. Somerset Maugham was not a very likeable person, but Tan portrays him as a kind and soft man, if somewhat aloof, but completely in the thrall of Gerald Haxton. 

Tan uses an anonymous omnipotent third person narrator interspersed with the first person, Lesley Hamblyn, which gives the work a stronger verisimilitude had it been completely told in the third. Tan has also moved the action of some of the true events to meet his novelistic needs as well as successfully mingling real and fictional characters in a known place juxtaposing the political and the romantic, against the suspense of a murder trial and the whispered prejudices of the British society sipping their G&Ts while sweltering in their linens. 

Tan is completely in control of his material and ideas. It is a very enjoyable and satisfying read. 

Here you can watch a short video of Tan Twan Eng talking about The House of Doors.

You can buy the book in various formats here. 

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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.

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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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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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