A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan

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I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work, ever since a copy of her second novel leapt off the shelves and into my hands due to its title: Let Me Alone.

At last! I thought. Someone who speaks my language.

This, her first novel, published in 1929, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents—Dr. Deane who has ceased to practice and spends his days among his books and autocratic Mrs. Deane whose only friends are two elderly sisters who live outside of town—has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults.

At the beginning of the story, Ronald, the spoiled, feckless son, has gone off to London to work and is much envied by the lively, independent Beryl, while her older sister Olive has become a melancholy mouse. Beryl no sooner decides to ask her brother to help her escape to London than she finds he’s returning home, bored with having to earn a living.

At the same time, two young men enter the family’s closed sphere: a sculptor whom Ronald met in London comes for a weekend and the nephew of the two elderly sisters who has come to the area to take up farming. Between them, they offer opportunities for the sisters and raise the stakes for any potential escape.

It is the language in this psychological novel that intrigues me: precise, cool, and brusque. Kavan’s Spartan prose style contrasts with the stuffy, ornate atmosphere of the vicarage, thus increasing the tension around the family. It also sets the reader up for the different sort of life Beryl might discover in London.

Slipping out of the grasp of a controlling parent is a theme that always interests me. The post-war period of the 1920s, like the 1960s, was a time when women were doing the same with society’s expectations for them. As they try to assert their independence, both Beryl and Olive continue to surprise throughout this story.

Their father insists that they—and the rest of the family—will always fail, saying:

There is some defect in us all, some flaw, some canker of the soul that holds us back from fruition. Life is too hard for us. We yearn and struggle and rebel, but in the end we are always vanquished because of that obscure disability. We cannot succeed because we are not free. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds us, from which we can never escape.

Kavan’s prose is unusual in that it is forthright in this way. She plumbs the motives of the characters, their feelings and unspoken words and then tells us straight out. Using an omniscient point of view, she inhabits the characters in turn, giving the reader a full picture of their psychological states and the reasons for their actions.

While I usually prefer a single point of view and more subtlety in fiction, I found this story refreshing. I also felt confident that I was in good hands with this author and surprised by her skill in this first novel. In her later novels, Kavan moves from this realism to a more experimental style.

If you’re looking for something a little different, I recommend this book. Its breezy style and brief chapters make it almost fly by. And it’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

Do you enjoy a novel more when you identify with one of the characters?

Lessons, by Ian McEwan

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The story begins in May 1986 with 37-year-old Roland Baines worrying about how the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster might harm his infant son in their London home. Sleepless, he remembers being 14, at boarding school, and the experience that changed his life.

McEwan’s latest novel gives us that life. All of it. The novel clocks in at 448 pages, which is way too long to spend in the company of someone who is not particularly interesting. I would have abandoned it early on if it hadn’t been my book club’s choice for the month.

Some in the book club found Roland boring, and most of us considered him passive, someone who drifts through life, reluctant to make a commitment. The few decisions he does make are self-destructive, twisting his future away from achievement and accomplishment into the morass of surviving on low-level dead-end jobs.

When we meet him in 1986 he still thinks of himself as—potentially—a professional poet, but is working as a tennis instructor and piano player in a lounge, while caring for his son. “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life,” he thinks.

The story skips around in time, too much so according to some in my book club who found the narrative hard to follow. We learn that his German-born wife left him to bring up their newborn son as a single parent while she goes off to become the successful writer he aspired to be. Far from resenting her, milquetoast Roland thinks she did the right thing because her novels are so good.

My book club discussed the idea that not everyone does great things; there are ordinary people who just deal with their circumstances and go on. There have been many great novels about such people. This is not one of them. It’s too long-winded, and the main character too dull.

Roland’s passivity leads to a reluctance to commit himself: to a career, a partner, a skill. The only commitment that doesn’t waver is to his son. That is the best thing I can say about Roland. He changes the diapers, takes him to the playground, does the laundry and cooking. Not a small job, of course, but are we supposed to think him extraordinary because he does what women everywhere do to no applause?

The book is set in motion, in a sense, by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Convinced he is about to die, young Roland makes a choice that turns out to be disastrous for his future. Throughout the story, the events of his life are tied to events in the larger world. He is present for the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see how he is affected by the Suez Canal crisis, the attack on the World Trade Center, Margaret Thatcher’s reign, Brexit, and finally the Covid pandemic.

Having Roland be a microcosm of an entire generation—the privileged one that enjoyed the post-war boom and surge in educational opportunities—feels insulting. The author comes across as a chiding teacher, saying that we Boomers, like Roland, have never lived up to our potential. Well, perhaps we haven’t, but we are not all such failures.

My book club has read several of McEwan’s books. We agree that his writing is excellent, but unfortunately his characters too often are not interesting and even unpleasant. Also, as here, female characters are not developed well. From Roland’s predatory piano teacher to his narcissistic ex-wife to his Earth Mother girlfriend, they are one-note characters. Of course, in this case we are seeing them through Roland’s eyes, which perhaps says more about him.

As a writer I was most interested in how the author brilliantly integrates current events into the story. They are not tacked to add context, but function fully as part of Roland’s story. I find much to admire in McEwan’s writing and have loved some of his books. This one needed an editor.

Have you read a novel that failed to live up to its potential? Where do you think it went off course?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

The Pavilion in the Clouds, by Alexander McCall Smith

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This stand-alone novel takes place in 1938, already setting us apart from the characters because we know what is coming.

Bella Ferguson is eight and lives on the tea plantation in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, owned by her father. She leads a charmed life: lessons with Miss White, servants to attend to her needs, a beautiful home in the clouds, where she doesn’t have to see the terrible working and living conditions of the plantation workers.

Henry and Virginia, her parents, embody the English empire, somewhat to Virginia’s discomfort. She wonders by what right they should own this land that historically belonged to the indigenous people of the island, and if indeed the British would one day be driven out.

We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe, and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet nobody seemed to see.

Empire, colonialism: these are weighty subjects, but barely touched upon here.

Meanwhile, Bella has come to believe that there is something worrisome about her governess’s relationship with her father, a concern that she confides to her mother.

I’m a huge fan of Smith’s novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series with Mma Precious Ramotswe, and the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie series, but this one—no. A trite situation: a woman suspects her husband of cheating. And the characters are boring: he is barely present, and she does nothing day after day. She had been teaching her daughter, reading her poetry, but now they have hired the English governess, so she has nothing to do but to wander about and occasionally lunch at the club. And imagine what might be going on.

Maybe I’d have been more interested if there’d been more about Ceylon besides the initial lovely but brief description of the tea plantation. Maybe if the characters hadn’t been so predictable. Maybe if several story threads had been satisfactorily tied up rather than left hanging.

Still, I appreciate Smith’s humor, his moral universe, his gentle philosophical ruminations. My favorite parts of the book center on Bella, with her dolls, Li Po and Po Chü-i, named after Chinese poets. She carries on conversations with them and attributes distinct personalities to them, while they advise her out of their great wisdom. I love the way they participate in scenes like any human character.

I may be the only person aside from Li Po who is skeptical of the ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but really! Well, perhaps I am too cynical. Time for another dose of Alexander McCall Smith’s world.

What is your favorite Alexander McCall Smith book?

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

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In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him.

The world of this remote area of Siberia is brilliantly brought to life. We learn that it is a time of great change in Soviet Russia, leading characters to say things like:

“This could never have taken place in Soviet times.”

“You girls can’t imagine how safe it use to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made”.

“Now we’re overrun with tourists, migraines. Natives. These criminals”.

Bounded by mountains and the sea, there is no way the kidnapper could have taken the girls off the peninsula without being caught, thus creating a locked-room mystery, as the author says in a Paris Review interview.

However, this is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories—twelve, one for each month of a year—about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, some of whom knew the girls and some who did not. It is about how they are affected by what we know is a kidnapping, though the police are pressured to call it an accidental drowning to quell panic.

In this way we learn that an indigenous girl also went missing a few years earlier, but there was no investigation, no posters or campaigns such as for the two Caucasian girls. The police assumed the young teen ran away.

We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia. These pressures and the various kinds of violence affecting these women’s lives are recognisable to women in the author’s native U.S. and elsewhere. The author has studied Russia extensively, as shown by her brilliant evocation of this place and its people, and lived in Petropavlovsk for two years. Still, I can’t help wondering how natives of Kamchatka would describe their lives.

Some readers are thrown by the nontraditional structure of the book, with each chapter introducing new characters and seeming to stand alone. I loved it, though, recognising immediately the similarity to one of my favorite novels: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, which also starts with a missing girl.

Reservoir 13, too, is not about solving the mystery of the disappearance, but rather describes the effect on the community. Each of 13 chapters details a year in the life of the village, with seasonal celebrations coming around, life going on or not, and the way the missing girl echoes down through the years. In McGregor’s book, the village is the main character, while Phillips centers each chapter on one woman. The advantage of McGregor’s structure is that we are not introduced to a new cast of characters with each chapter.

I listened to the audiobook of Disappearing Earth, and only later realised the print and ebook versions included a cast of characters and a map. I would have found both very helpful, as I had trouble remembering characters from previous chapters. Still, Phillips’s novel is a brilliant debut that introduced me to a part of the world I knew nothing about. More importantly, it immersed me in the lives of these women, their dreams, their constraints, and their strength.

Have you read a novel with a nontraditional structure? What did you think of it?

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

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This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two women. With the stunning invasion of France, a pregnant Violette in London immediately starts campaigning to do some kind of war work, despite her father’s discouragement, a campaign that takes fire when her husband in killed in North Africa. Meanwhile, Virginia elects to remain in France with her beloved husband, invalided out early in the war.

Alternate chapters follow the two women as they find their way forward, Violette doing various kinds of war work before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret UK intelligence agency, in the hopes of being sent to France, Virginia and her husband sheltering and helping downed pilots and escaped POWs.

Beautifully written, full of stunning scenes that we discover in the historical note at the end actually happened, this is one of those books that you simply cannot stop reading. It’s a fantastic addition to our understanding of what was happening beyond the battlefields during this showdown with fascism.

You might think that I would have had enough of women Resistance fighters after reading nonfiction books about Virginia Hall, one of the first British spies in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who also ran a Resistance operation in France, supplying critical information to MI6, the UK’s Special Intelligence Service. I thought so too until I read reviews of this book by Robuck, whom I know slightly.

Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it. Remembering the heart-breaking realities of fascism is especially critical today when the radical right, funded by amoral one-percenters, are waving swastikas and trying to persuade people in this country to do away with democracy and embrace fascism in order to fulfill their white supremacist dreams and fantasies of a nation with no freedom of religion.

In her Author’s Note, Robuck tells us how Virginia and Violette’s stories came together, “showing the different ways that women, in particular, are called to serve, how each of us has a vocation, and we cannot have peace until we become who we are meant to be. Also, ultimately, they show us that none of us can operate alone. We are all called into a community of people working together for good.”

Virginia and Violette—their courage and integrity—are an inspiration for us all.

Have you read a history—fictionalised or nonfiction—that has inspired you?

Violeta, by Isabel Allende

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I haven’t read all of Allende’s novels, but I’ve read a few and enjoyed most of them, so I was glad when my book club chose her most recent (2022) novel. It is the story of a life, written as a letter from Violeta, now 100 years old, to Camilo, whose identity only becomes clear as we get fairly far into the book.

She begins with her birth in 1920, the year when the influenza pandemic which began in 1918 in the battlefields of the Great War finally finds its way to her unnamed South American country. Reaching the end of her life as the COVID pandemic takes hold provides a neat framework for a story whose characters try to determine their own fate, especially the strong-willed Violeta, but are often stymied by world events.

The beginning is full of warm humor, like the best Allende novels. Violeta is born after a raft of boy children—we never learn all their names and even their mother can never remember their ages. Her mother “loved her sons, in theory, but in practice she preferred to keep them at a comfortable distance” and “felt doomed to bear only sons, like a curse from the Devil.” So she doesn’t believe her sister when she says the baby is a girl.

Then there’s is the English governess imported to tame the spoiled little girl, who turns out to be anything but the matronly, old-fashioned woman they expected. Miss Taylor is Irish and only in her twenties, dressed in the latest English fashion and wearing makeup, who soon meets a local woman who recruits her to the Suffragette cause.

However, events move quickly—we do have 100 years to get through—and some things get dropped, such as the maternal grandmother who sits silently in the conservatory and is never mentioned again, though she has somehow disappeared a few pages later. There were incidents that I wanted to hear more about, but they are briefly narrated along with everything else.

I think the narration—pure exposition with almost nothing in the way of dramatic scenes—is the main reason the people in my book club began to lose interest in the book after the beginning. For me, an additional reason was that it all began to sound very familiar.

I’d recently read Allende’s memoir Paula, a letter written to her comatose daughter as Allende sat by Paula’s bedside. I thought it would be about Paula, but it is Allende’s life along with her memories of her parents and grandparents. It is also narrated and covering the same period, the same events as this book. Harder to read, though, because the paragraphs go on for pages, unbroken.

Similarly, Violeta was started in response to the death of Allende’s mother at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The two had exchanged letters daily whenever they were apart throughout Allende’s life. The author has said in interviews that her characters start with a real person whom she then modifies to become the character for a story, adding a dollop of herself as good writers do. Having read the memoir, though, it seems to me that, while this book supposedly is based on her mother’s life, it is much more about Allende’s. Hence my feeling that I’d already read this book.

One thing I found interesting about it is that, instead of following a traditional (in Western literature) story structure of action in pursuit of a goal that rises to a climax, Allende employs an episodic structure. The most famous example of that kind of structure is Don Quixote, but the difference is that Cervantes’s novel has an overarching theme, where this one does not seem to have one. Nothing ties the episodes together except that they are all part of Violeta’s life. I may be missing something.

Each episode is narrated—told, not shown—sometimes engaging and sometimes not. One person read aloud part of a section dealing with a political event that, as she put it, sounded like something out of a political pamphlet. We also felt that the references to it being a letter to Camilo felt like they’d been dropped in here and there after the book was finished, rather than being an organic part of the story.

Some people didn’t finish the book; others did and enjoyed it but, as one person said, forgot it as soon as she turned the last page. We agreed, though, that based on our love of other books by Allende, we would be willing to read her work.

Do you have a favorite novel by Isabel Allende that you would recommend?

Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.”

Since we were talking about setting and how to describe it through the perceptions of your main character, we speculated as to how someone from one of the tribes displaced by the colonial powers would describe the same setting.

In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve, remembers:

. . . it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours.

Told he’s going on a visit with the man he’s been taught to call Uncle Asiz, a wealthy trader, Yusuf later learns he has been given in payment for his father’s debts and that Asiz is his seyyid or master, not his uncle. The boy is put to work in the store under Kahlil, an older Indian, also collateral for his father’s debt, who introduces him to the complex society of precolonial urban East Africa.

Yusuf’s story unfolds gradually. He begins volunteering to help the elderly gardener in Asiz’s gorgeous walled garden. When he’s 17, Asiz takes him on a trading trip to the interior, leaving him for years with one of his trading partners in a small village, before returning to take him even deeper in the hills. It becomes an epic journey into the heart of a country on the verge of change. They encounter disease, raging rivers, and hostile tribes, as well as a gorgeous waterfall that is said to be the gates of Paradise. Later Yusuf is brought back to town and the garden he loves, yet which becomes his undoing.

The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Although Yusuf is a slave, this is not structured like a traditional slave narrative which is about escaping to freedom. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story in which Yusuf seems to make the best of each new adventure. Terrified at times, he doesn’t rebel against being a slave. He doesn’t complain about his exile from each of the homes he’s found or try to escape, even as the dangers grow and the risks more terrifying. Then, as the walled garden turns into a place of danger, the rumored encroachment of the German colonizers becomes a reality.

It appears to be a retelling of the story of Joseph in the Koran, at least in part. Published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

What book have you read set in East Africa?

Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov

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This is the first book in Asimov’s classic Foundation series, though he wrote it after five of the six novels in the series. It is meant to be a guide as well as a prequel. Asimov says he hadn’t planned for his first Foundation short story, published in 1942, to grow into a multi-volume series, so had decided a better introduction was needed.

Hari Seldon, a young mathematician, delivers a paper at a conference held in Trantor, capital of the empire, and thus comes to the attention of young Cleon I, whom we are told is the last Galactic Emperor of his dynasty. Cleon is mostly a figurehead, somewhat like the British royal family, relying completely on Eto Demerzel, his brilliant and somewhat mysterious advisor.

Cleon is intrigued because it sounds as though Seldon has worked out how to predict the future. When they meet, Cleon is disappointed that Seldon’s work is all theoretical and unlikely to yield practical results. However, whether Seldon’s so-called psychohistory actually works is less important to the Emperor than the possibility of using the process to issue rosy predictions about Cleon’s successes, thus calming the restive planets in the far reaches of the empire.

The next day, as he’s preparing to return to his home planet, Seldon meets a journalist in the park. Chetter Hummin alerts Seldon that Demerzel will try to detain him and offers to use his connections to take the mathematician to a safe place. Thus begins what’s known in the Foundation books as The Flight.

I read some of the Foundation novels in my teens, at a time when I was reading a lot of science fiction. I certainly thought they were interesting enough to keep reading the ones that were available then, but now I remember nothing about them, unlike some of the other SF books I consumed back then. A writer friend suggested I read this Prelude.

The story certainly flows well and has plenty of suspense and potentially interesting characters. However, it shows its age. Don’t get me wrong: Asimov was amazing. What an imagination! However, in the following decades—the first Foundation story was published 80 years ago—SF has changed.

An obvious area that’s improved is world-building. Asimov uses two methods of conveying information about the people, culture and settings of the story. One is to preface each chapter with an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica, directly providing information to the reader. The other is that Hari, being new to every world he travels to in the course of The Flight, must have everything explained to him. We have no access to his thoughts, but he obviously doesn’t pick up things on his own; someone must tell him.

As a result, the story is more talk than action, and it’s awkward, stilted talk at that. In today’s SF novels, world-building is much more subtle. It’s incorporated into the story. A particularly effective example is the beginning of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which starts with action and the thoughts of the protagonist Katniss. We’re never lectured on the way that world works; instead it becomes clear through what’s going on.

Another area that’s improved in today’s stories is the characters. Hari and the other characters are flat. We don’t learn much about them as people; they are just there to serve the plot. None has the character arc we’ve come to expect in modern novels of every genre, where the person actually changes during the story, as a result of what they experience. Today’s authors get to know their characters as fully rounded people and then set them free to act and react naturally as the story progresses.

This is not a criticism of the Prelude. Plot dominated in most early SF stories. It was a rare author whose characters came alive; Ursula Le Guin comes to mind, though she was writing somewhat later than Asimov.

I’m grateful to be reminded of the enormous strides in quality that SF has made, specifically here with world-building, dialogue, and characterisation, but also thrilled to see again the strong plotting that made these early stories so interesting.

Have you gone back to read a novel from the early days of science fiction?