book review - unconditional surrender

At the end of this trilogy you have several thoughts about the overall lessons that can be learnt from the experiences Evelyn Waugh’s characters have in the Second World War.

If there is an overall take-away from this final book in the Sword of Honour trilogy it has to be that war along with fate produce their own winners and losers. As the war enters its final phase there are several key characters that develop a sense of fatalism that is referred to by those around them as a death wish.

One of the first to get her wish granted is Guy’s ex-wife who is remarried to her former husband as he is the only one who will bring up the child she is expecting after her liaison with Trimmer. A V2 rocket does for both Guy’s ex-wife and Uncle.

Another character determined to die before the fighting stops is Colonel Ritchie-Hook who decides to try and storm a rebel outpost in Yugoslavia and receives a bullet in the head for the trouble.

But key among those that seem to have slipped into a state of taking whatever life throws at them – unconditional surrender – is the main character Guy. Churned through the system until he is eventually posted out to be a liaison officer with the rebels in Yugoslavia Guy loses heart as he starts to see the way that Jews are being treated by their liberators and how corrupt the post-war regime is going to be, displaying signs even in its infancy.

The results of his neutral attitude is not only to be widowed as his wife dies but to return to an England that he has mixed feelings about. He sells his property in Italy and remarries and in the final scene is seen to be one of the winners of the war.

As he meets his brother-in-law, who has since lost his seat in parliament in the great Attlee victory, he is referred to as lucky because of his marital happiness and the money he has received from relatives and the sale of property.

The irony is of course that Guy wished for none of those things and it was possibly because of that situation he was granted some of them when more competitive contemparies aimed high and lost out.

Over the course of the three books there is nothing gripping you making you read on and although Guy is a pleasant enough character his semi-strict Catholicism and background of relative luxury are things that do undermine your support for him.

But this is not so much a trilogy about one particular character or war story but of a time and a generation and social set that went to a war that often frustrated them, hadn’t got a place for them and ultimately tore some of them away from the positions of privilege they had enjoyed pre-1939.

The story is told with subtly and it is only in the last few pages you get the chance to make that conclusion and pull it together. As a result the second book feels a bit like treading water and the third takes a while to get to its conclusion.

Unconditional Surrender - post IV

For a moment it feels as if this book should have been called The Death Wish because as a theme it is one of the strongest throughout. But of course the title refers not just to what happened to the Germans but also to Guy.

He makes an unconditional surrender not just to the prospect of facing death but also to whatever life might throw at him. Guy left widowed by Virginia’s death sits in Yugoslavia waiting out the war as he watches those in a rush around him either literally bursting into flames or in the case of Ritchie-Hook crawling up to the enemy and getting shot.

Guy ends the war with a new wife, two sons of his own and plenty of money. As he meets his brother in law Box-Bender there is bitterness and jealousy. But Guy won by being prepared to lose everything and of all those around him he played no political games so perhaps justice is done.

A review will follow soonish…

Unconditional Surrender - post III

With hindsight it was perhaps not the wisest thing to read both Powell and Waugh’s military novels at the same time. It not only gets slightly confusing but there are also incredible similarities.

Having been sent back to rest at his uncle’s with a damaged knee a desperate Virginia sets her sights on remarrying her husband. She hopes she can charm him but Guy admits he no longer loves her and instead steps up to the altar after she has admitted that she if pregnant with another man’s child.

The child is born but the marriage is short lived as a V2 falls on Guy’s uncle’s house and kills Virginia. Guy is told the news in the Balkans where his is working as a liaison officer with the Yugoslavian partisans.

One of the many odd people he meets informs him that he has a death wish. Something that Virginia seemed to have wishing the bombs would fall on her and something that Guy also appears to possess.

Quite what the title refers to other than the capitulation of the Germany Army is still possibly open to interpretation. With the marriage to Virginian Guy surrendered himself to pit but is he also capable of surrendering himself to love, possibly in the form of his son Gervase?

More tomorrow…

Unconditional Surrender - post II

Poor old Guy. He is all set to get the chance to parachute into Italy and fight for freedom but cracks his knee and then gets pushed to one side because of his age and dodgy track record.

Waiting as a consolation prize as he struggles to get better is he ex-wife Virginia who is pregnant, without any money or a willing abortionist and keen to sponge off her old lover. Guy has no idea of the hidden agenda but it doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm so far.

The final stages of the war begin with the Germans on the run in Russia and the Brits able to record successes in the desert.

Mind you even now, with just 100 odd pages left in the trilogy this still feels like a book that has passed me by. Do you ever get that feeling that you have somehow missed the point of it all and just seen the surface? For some reason it feels like that with unconditional surrender and it is not a pleasant sensation.

More tomorrow…

Unconditional Surrender - post I

Just as Powell sets his war years rolling the conclusion of the Sword of Honour trilogy see Guy Crouchback in much the same circumstances as he spends time in training waiting for a chance to get back to the action. His age is used against him and it looks like as he celebrates his 40th birthday he has been left behind. But his Italian saves him and he looks set to be sent into Italy to help in the final push to liberate that country.

Meanwhile his ex-wife is broke and pregnant by the hairdresser come hero Trimmer and looking for money for an abortion. Guy’s father dies after expressing fears about the morale of his son.

But back in London life in pockets seems to go on as normal and for those with connections the war can be played out on their own terms. For poor old Guy, and this is also the same to a degree for Nick Jenkins, age and lack of military contacts leaves them gathering dust in officers rather than on battlefields being covered in glory.

More tomorrow…

book review - Vile Bodies

There is a distinct moment in this book where the mood changes quite dramatically. After reading the introduction you realise that was the point at which Evelyn Waugh had to cope with his wife walking out on him.

Up to that point in the book it has been a story following Adam as he returns from France with the dream of having his book published to finance his marriage. But the book is burnt by customs and then for a while it is a question of will he manage to get the money he needs to make his bride financially secure. Against a background of 'The Bright Young Things' a world where money is casually given away, but never to Adam, a generation seems intent on upsetting the establishment.

At the heart of the story there is a hollowness that comes to the fore once the mood of the book changes. Everything seems to have been cheapened by the bright young things with life and death something lost without comment, fame and fortune lost overnight and loyalty not worth anything if it could be turned to financial advantage.

Adam doesn't get his girl and the group he has been part of keeps chasing its own tale gossiping in newspapers about each other while the rest of the real world passes them by. These people are shown to be sad and often desperate people that end up challenging the status quo but never having the real stature to carry out any change.

You wonder though how it might have turned out had Waugh’\s wife not run off because there are some amusing moments when he tries to convince his possible future father-in-law that he should give him money to fund the wedding with his daughter. But that humour changes and disappears towards the end.

It is replaced with a sense of futility – easy come and easy go – and of betrayal. Adam is left out of the world of the gossips and his girl runs off with someone with money. The laughter, that never really was, finally stops for good with the outbreak of war.

Where this book tries to provoke reactions it does so almost effortlessly. So the moment when the Prime Minister wakes to find his home has been used for a party and as a result is embroiled in scandal shows the rigid inflexibility of the generation the bright young things were reacting against.

But likewise the moments when a failed gossip columnist decides to gas himself in an oven or when a girl who has suffered a motor crash goes downhill and dies their lives are just footnotes in a gossip column.

In some respects it makes you think of the likes of Amy Winehouse and company who might be so shocking to certain sections of the establishment but would be just another celebrity page entry if they died of their drug abuse.

In Waugh’s day the drugs were alcohol and freedom from the strict expectations of a society that had featured debutantes and a strict society calendar. But the shallow and instantly forgettable nature of the bright young things was there in the 1920s and 30s and is there again now. There are still vile bodies being caught on camera and filling columns of newspapers.

“…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting parties in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…Those vile bodies…”

Version read – Penguin paperback

book review - Officers and Gentlemen

You spend most of your time reading this second book in the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh wondering just who are the title words about. The story lurches from disaster to disaster as the lead character Guy Crouchback gets closer to the theatre of war.
The story starts with Guy returning with a black mark against his name for something that was largely not his fault. But the ramifications of it are that he struggles to find a place again to settle sown and start attacking the business of developing a military career. He resorts in the end to the tried and tested way of using friends to get him back in. But even then there is only so much they can do and there are various moments when although pushing it some considerable distance Guy comes up against the line that keeps the army in check.

In the end he manages to get to Egypt with the commandos because not so much of his friendship with Tommy Blackhouse the unit commander but because they are short of men. Once there he spends more time waiting before being put on a boat and shipped into the chaos of Crete. The island is on the brink of falling to the Germans and those sent into keep up the defences find themselves falling apart under the strain of fending off the inevitable.

Guy manages to make it back to Egypt, only just, but is then sent back for the good of his health and again finds himself out on the drill square back where he started.

Waugh manages to convey the waiting and the anxiety and in a scene where the officer Fido Hound manages to mentally and physically collapse in various stages, he also provides a good idea of what can happen in the stress of battle.

But there is a lot that is left unsaid in this book, which you hope the final volume will answer for. Where is the anger at the complete shambles that is the British war effort? What is Guy really fighting for now he keeps getting knocked back by bureaucracy? But more importantly what direction is the conclusion going to come from? Obviously the war ended in a victory for the British but where is Guy's life going - that is the fundamental question.

Any hope that it might be heading in a direction where his former wife takes more of a part seems to be unlikely after she has an affair with Trimmer, an ex hairdresser who is used by the propaganda department to become a hero to boost morale.

The persecution and changed circumstances surrounding Guy's father, with the old man under attack for taking up two rooms in the boarding house, also illustrates that the life that might be worth defending has already been largely defeated with the impact of the war.

You also sense that as a modern reader you are being kept in the dark because of your ignorance of the times that this book was written. Names are clearly used as clues to readers to indicate the nature of a character with politicians names mixed up with the clearly methaphorical, Fido Hound might be one that causes a smile but there are others that probably should but you miss them. That is a shame because it is a device that Waugh also uses in Vile Bodies and again without reading the introduction the consequences of feeling excluded from the joke are the same.

Officers and Gentlemen is a test for the reader because it offers few of the characters that the first book had with Colonel Ritchie-Hook and Apthorpe and it fails to indicate if the quest for some sort of self fulfiment that Guy is on is anywhere nearing a successful conclusion. Only the final book in thr trilogy can do that and the test is whether or not after that one you feel that Waugh has delivered a complete story.

Version read - Penguin paperback.

Vile Bodies - post III

There is a shift in the book that is after you read the introduction influenced by real events, that turns it from gaiety to bitterness. Adam finds that his fiancé has fallen in love with another man who has more riches than himself and from that point on the book moves towards its ending on a battlefield with the guns booming.

Several times in the text Adam remarks to Nina that he feels it all has to stop at some point and as he chases the drunk major who tells him that he has £35,000 waiting for him if he could only manage to get round to collecting it the fun drains out of life. Another of the characters is involved in a car crash and as she slowly loses her reason all her friends can do it party in her hospital room and hurry on her demise. There is something intended by the title and at the end the shallow and ultimately hurtful world of those vile but beautiful; young things has been well and truly punctured by Waugh.

A review will follow shortly…

Vile Bodies - post II

“…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting parties in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…Those vile bodies…”

Although the feelings are still largely superficial between the characters with an easy come and easy go attitude there is a sense that Adam does care about the prospect of marrying Nina. He wants to marry her and needs money to be able to afford her.

He manages to get a job as Chatterbox on the Excess newspaper as the former gossip society columnist gives up and admits failure putting his head into the oven. Adam is very good at the job inventing characters that then start to set their own trends. But he allows Nina and his friend Ginger to write the column in his absence and they cock it up and he loses his job.

He admits he cannot marry Nina but no sooner has that happened than he is off again on a jaunt with some more of the bright Young Things.

More tomorrow…

Vile Bodies - post I

This immerses you immediately in the social world of pre-war London with a group of passengers crossing over on the cross-channel ferry from France to Dover. Among the passengers are several Bright Young People and Adam Symes who is heading home to get married and make it as a famous novelist.

He manages to lose his manuscript to the furnace at customs as they decide its falls foul of decency laws but then gets invited by a young socialite to a party and he never looks back.

The parties are frequented by gossip columnists, who are them selves part of the landed gentry, writing about the antics of the friends. Money comes and goes and love is something to be enjoyed but not an issue to get ‘too intense’ about. Symes is the focus of the book so far with his on-off engagement being dictated by his fluctuating fortunes with money. He is given £1,000 pounds in a bet but promptly loses it being drunk.

The humour comes thick and fast and there is a great scene where the Prime Minister’s daughter ends up on the front pages after inviting people back to number 10. One of the gossip columnists gets the splash despite the potential to lose friends. But in a hedonistic society where no one seems to care about money or anything serious who really cares?

More tomorrow…

Officers and Gentlemen - post IV

The latest stage of the war ends for Guy with him again being sent home slightly against his will. After the collapse of Crete he drifts in the sea for days and is picked up and saved but as a result is confined to hospital for weeks. When he is released he is sent home and back to his original regiment.

He is not in disgrace, unlike a fellow officer Ivor who fled and let colleagues be taken prisoner by the Germans, but it feels odd. Insistent doctors inform his superiors that he has to leave the warm climate of Egypt and so a blitz ravaged London awaits.

Just as the ending of the first book you are left wondering if that is the end of the war for Guy. In the scramble to get off Crete he failed to shoot a weapon in anger and make much of an impact. Perhaps that is the true distinction of an officer and a gentleman that they stood alongside the men prepared to face whatever came at them.

A review will follow soon…

Officers and Gentlemen - post III

Waugh is expert at describing the confusion, fear and fatigue that settles on soldiers as they actually enter a war zone. After weeks of mucking about in Egypt Guy and co. are put on boats and shipped out to Crete.

The idea is to hold the island but when they get there, after an eventful journey where the officer in charge Tommy Blackhouse breaks his leg, they pull into harbour and into chaos.

The island is falling and in rapid retreat and Hookforce gets deployed in confusion and in some cases with disastrous consequences. Guy and the officer who takes over, Hound, struggle to get to grips with the situation and are parted in the confusion.

Waugh then interestingly takes up the story of Hound leaving you wondering what has happened to Guy. In a brilliant couple of pages he describes Hound crawling into a culvert and falling a sleep after days without sleep and food. Despite the real prospect of being overrun by Germans and left behind on the island the solider cannot keep going.

It makes you think about those people that drop by the wayside on marches through the desert and the snows of Siberia.

The madness of war is the waiting, confusion and the randomness of death – all elements that Waugh manages to mix up expertly.

More later…

Officers and Gentlemen - post II

One of the real achievements of both the first and this book is the way that Waugh manages to convey the sense of waiting that comes with the war.

At one point Guy muses on the idea that soldiers should be given a drug that allows them to wait without any side effects. The commandos, now known as Hookforce because they are led by Colonel Ritchie-Hook, are finally deployed to Egypt.

Guy seems to spend most of his time simply getting on with it while the rest of the troops kick their heels. Meanwhile back in London the case against Guy, started after a mistake in an Italian restaurant, gathers pace as the disturbed boss of the secret service starts to plot a worldwide conspiracy that involves Guy.

It doesn’t help that leaflets encouraging Hitler in a mistaken belief it will aid Scottish nationalism are attributed to Guy rather than the unhinged niece of the laird of Mugg, the island where the commandos are carrying out their training.

But this is that sort of book. Fuses are lit to explode in laughter at various points with some going off quickly and others being timed to be detonated much later in the trilogy.

More tomorrow…

Officers and Gentlemen - post I

Sometimes the break between two books the follow each other can be used as a chance to introduce some more back story or to roll out some fresh characters.

In a comforting way Waugh just sticks with picking up where things left off. The opening pages set Guy against a backdrop of a London being torn to bits in the blitz and although he is meant to report back for a hearing no one seems to know what is going on.

As before the war the real jobs worth having are being given out at clubs between friends and Guy is advised to hang around if he wants to get involved with something interesting.

But wherever Guy goes he seems to be unwanted. A bit like his father, who is under pressure to give up his comforts in the boarding house, the war seems to be all about displacing people.

The limited number of characters are all roughly reunited with Guy being sent to the commando training camp run by Tommy Blackhouse, his ex-wife’s former husband. Meanwhile the ex-wife is in Glasgow down on her luck and prepared to enjoy a few days being pleasured by Trimmer her old hairdresser.

Guy meanwhile is just focused on finding a role and getting stuck back into the war.

More tomorrow…

book review - Men at Arms

When you pick up an Evelyn Waugh you expect a satirical novel that will be well written but also amusing.

Having read Helena it is no surprise that to that mix you can add some religion and with the novel starting in Italy there is instantly a Catholic feel to things that is carried through with the religious views of the main character Guy.

This is the first of a trilogy about the second world war so you pick it up half expecting the action to start from the first page. But this is before things start to happen and as the main character shuts up his Italian villa and heads for home his driver tells him no one wants war.

Once back in London there is nowhere for him to go so he has to use contacts to get drafted into to a regiment that still appears to operate on a friends and contacts basis. But this is still the phoney war and even when things start to get formal with Germany it is still all about exercises and drill for Guy and his fellow would-be officers.

But then things get suddenly serious and before Guy and his colleagues can even get there the Dunkirk escape has happened and France has fallen. They are left defending against rumours before being shipped out to the African coast. Once there they are dissuaded from taking any action. But Guy is led into attacking the coast by a mad Brigadier and that combined with accidentally contributing to his friends death by giving him alcohol in hospital lands him on a boat heading home for a court martial.

The satire is subtle with it being more about the military establishment and a certain class of people more than happy to appear in their clubs in military dress but equally as keen to keep away from any real action.

But there are two great figures in this first volume. Firstly, fellow elderly officer candidate Apthorpe. With his thunder-box, a portable latrine he used to avoid catching syphilis from fellow soldiers, he manages to provoke a battle with the officer in charge for the use of the device. Then he also manages to confuse his rank and overstep his authority on numerous occasions.

Colonel Ritchie-Hook is the other great character. He seems intent on leading his own war in a sort of bayonet charging way and in the end leads Guy into trouble for encouraging him, and then joining him on a landing on the coast that descends into a grenade throwing match. He represents the old army but also a type of attitude that is lacking in those hanging around the bright lights of London.

This does evoke a picture of London on the outbreak of war and there is also an insight into the apparent unpopularity of Catholicism very few people seem to want to worship along with Guy. Where there is humour it is directed at the system and the attitude of certain types of people. But there is also fear, buried underneath the Ritchie-Hook bravado but nonetheless there all the same.

No doubt that fear will surface in the second book. But where Waugh differs from some trilogy writers is that he does leave not just the main character on a cliff hanger – will he be court martialed – but also the entire state of the war.

Version read - Penguin paperback

men at Arms - post IV

The first part of the trilogy ends with Guy being shipped back to London in disgrace facing a potential court martial for a couple of offences.

The first one is almost forgivable because after training in Scotland and then being moved around from here there and everywhere the men are finally packed onto a ship and head out towards Dakar.

Once in sight of land they get told that they are not going to be allowed to go ashore and the frustration is palpable. By this time the British forces have been expelled from France with Dunkirk being the last act of the expeditionary force. So the troops have pent up energy. Colonel Ritchie-Hook instructs Guy to take a secret mission onto the beach to prove that it can be done.

The problems start when Ritchie-Hook is shot in the leg after he manages to behead a native to prove he has made it ashore. The result of the botched raid is hard to hide.

But then once docked in Africa he compounds his error by taking some whisky into the hospital where Apthorpe is ill and manages to help kill him as a result.

Once Ritchie-Hook is well both him and Guy are put on a boat and sent home to face the music.

This manages to convey the frustration and need for constant patience that must have been the case for those watching on the sidelines as France fell. Where could they fight once the nearest battlefields were lost? When could they put their training into operation? And how could they prove to themselves and their country that they had courage and wanted to die for the cause?

A review will follow soon…

Men at Arms - post III

Meant to post on this last night but you know how things go. Still it gave me more of a chance to think about the humour deployed in the novel.

There is a passage that is promoted on the back as one of the highlights from a humorous point of view about Guy’s fellow aged officer Apthorpe and his desire to keep his own toilet – the thunder-box.

He argues that it is essential he can use it because of the fears of catching a sexual disease from other soldiers but the Brigadier has the same idea so a game of cat and mouse begins with Apthorpe and Guy moving the thunder box around trying to get it away from the Brigadier. Eventually the thing is blown up and the matter ends there although the legend lives on in the ranks.

The humour is subtle but not laugh out loud. But it does show the desperate need that there was for some levity to lighten the misery as they went through the motions of training to get ready to go and fight in France.

The news coming back from France is not good with the troops running away and the losses mounting. As a result the probationary officers are made permanent and squads are announced and the national service men arrive and it all starts to get very serious.

More tomorrow…

Men at Arms - post II

Waugh’s style is to set the story in a serious and totally believable framework and then work in some clever moments of humour that never become just hollow comic moments.

The politics of the army divide not just between rich and poor, officer and probationary office but also along age lines. With his knee damaged Guy feels even older than he is and as they move to Southend-on-Sea for training he feels lonely and isolated from the rest of his fellow soldiers.

He meets his ex-wife and seems to slay that ghost but all around he is trapped by his past, to a certain extent by his rigid Catholic faith as well as his sense of sleepwalking through to face the war in France.

More tomorrow…

Men at Arms - post I

Surfing on the web the other day to browse some more information about Anthony Powell I stumbled across a review by Max Hastings of a Powell biography. In a piece that makes it clear he not only doesn't like the sound of Powell as a person he also states that he was overshadowed by Evelyn Waugh. They were of course contemporaries and so it is natural to make comparisons between them. But it would be good to think there was a place in the world for both of them.

The Sword of Honour trilogy is on the list of 110 books you should read that was in The Sunday Telegraph list yesterday. The reason for starting it though was not that list but a sense that this would complement Powell in the sense that as he nears the war here is a trilogy set just a couple of years ahead.

Having said that it starts in Italy not London and with a rather confusing family tree that you try to get through to settle on a central character. After a few pages Guy Crouchback emerges as the focus and he shuts up the family home in Italy and heads back to London to join up and make a difference. On his way out of Italy he is reminded everywhere of Mussolini’s image but his fascist supporting cab driver believes there will be no war because nobody wants it on either side.

Back in London it does feel a bit like Dance to the Music of Time with Guy doing the rounds of the clubs bumping into old acquaintances who are all in uniform. he finally manages to get into uniform and then the fun starts. There are a couple of comic moments where some real characters are introduced into the story. leading them with his monocled stare and blood thirsty stories of war is Colonel Ritchie-Hook, who seems determined to train his soldiers to die as quickly and gloriously as possible.

More tomorrow...

book review: Helena

The blurb on the dust jacket warns readers that this is not going to be the type of satirical book that they might have come to expect from Evelyn Waugh. It is described as a story within the agreed boundaries of a legend and then the reader is left to go exploring on their own.

It is hard to try and second guess what the intention was but you start to feel it might have been to paint a picture of the power that Christ still managed to evoke in people three hundred years after his death. At this critical stage in the history of the Christian church as the Romans decide to adopt it as a faith rather than persecute it the chase is on for relics.

Leading the charge is Helena, the daughter of the British King who has been wed and divorced mothering in the process the emperor Constantine, who goes on to establish Constantinople.

Helena takes inspiration from her namesake from Troy and spends the first few years of her life hoping to achieve her aim of travelling to Rome. Through her marriage and then abandonment, as was the Roman custom, along with her introduction into the brutal politics of the empire, that usually included death for those at the top of the tree, her illusions fade.

In her twilight years Helena converts to Christianity and then becomes determined to find the cross that Jesus was crucified on. She tracks it down thanks to sheer determination and a dream and then starts to fade away with her life’s work complete.

Helena is on some levels a fairly two-dimensional character that never really displays much of an attempt to cause change within an establishment she clashes with. But perhaps that is the idea that she only becomes someone driven once she is converted. It is hard to know quite what the true aim of this book is without knowing Waugh’s own views on religion.

As a read without a great deal of knowledge about the motivation it is enjoyable but perhaps frustrating. More meat on the bones around the interplay between mother and son and grandson would have been good and the story of her slave tutor who becomes a priest is one kept at arms length. Surely that would have been an equally powerful illustration of the way religion can change the established order? Depends of course on the objective the author was aiming to achieve.

Version read – Penguin paperback