Babylon Revisited (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my absolute favourite writers, both for the economical beauty of his style and for the sense of slow burning tragedy that ghosts through the pages of his books, a kind of prophetic spirit warning that fast times cannot last forever; sooner or later, somebody has to pay the bill. However, I'm far more au fait with his novels ('This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned', 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Tender Is The Night') than the huge array of short fiction he produced between the early twenties and his premature death in 1940. It was therefore entirely serendipitous that I discovered this collection of three of his most bittersweet stories in the book cupboard at school and decided to take it for the for the train journey home a couple of weeks back.

The titular story concerns the aftermath of the Lost Generation's sojourn in Paris during America's boom years. During this time, Fitzgerald reminds us, tips of hundreds of francs were thrown to waiters and bell hops with gay abandon, and life was one long boozy lunch that never ended. The crash in 1929 has changed this as the protagonist of the story, Charles West, returns to Paris, sober and now living in Prague, where he has gone into business. His daughter, Honoria, has been under the care of his wife's sister and her husband since his wife died as a consequence of one drink filled night too many. Fitzgerald masterfully rouses the reader's sympathies as a contrite Charles spends a heroic amount of energy trying to convince Helen and Lincoln to grant him his daughter back. Nobody will believe he has changed, not them and ironically, not his old drinking buddies, Richard and Lorraine, who spend the entirety of the story trying to get him back into bad habits. The whole story is a masterpiece of subtle and controlled tension.

'The Cut Glass Bowl' concerns a marriage gone wrong, society beauty married to a careless and brusque older man. The tension inherent in the partnership is symbolised by a wedding gift, an enormous cut glass punch bowl which becomes a motif of pure ostentation and excess, and ultimately a vehicle for tragedy, as it claims something from each of her beloved children. This story is perhaps less subtle and more direct, but it captures the feeling of entrapment in domesticity and societal convention very nicely.

The final story, 'The Lost Decade', absolutely reeks of poignance, with a man being shown around an office he used to work at and wondering at the advancements in architecture since he first left the company. Fitzgerald elucidates the feeling of dislocation felt by the man concerned and also the confusion of the youngster showing him around, until it becomes clear that the new/old man lost an entire decade to alcoholism, a fact that is especially poignant given that Fitzgerald himself fought and lost a battle against the bottle himself.

These three stories give an incredible insight into The Jazz Age which is the backdrop to all of his literary works. What I found most interesting was the parallels between the post-crash years presented here and the current financial crisis our own world finds it in, all of the soul searching and reflection on the wastefulness of the boom years. These stories are the flip side of 'The Great Gatsby', tales of diminishing returns as opposed to ostentatious largesse; small tragedies as opposed to giant ones.

Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Jonathan Wilson)

You may notice, if you've been reading this blog for a while, that I have so far reviewed only fiction. However, I have catholic tastes when it comes to reading material, and so, having had a brief internal debate about whether I should include non-fiction reviews or not, I decided in the affirmative. I love football, therefore I read about football, and thus, I am writing about football.

Sports writing has been on the up and up for some time now, with a whole host of academic, scholarly, meticulously researched books hitting the shelves and catering for us sports afficianados who want, as the epigraph of this book has it, to "understand the causes of things". Anybody who thinks that sports journalism is all raving red top articles will be swiftly disabused if they read a text like Jonathan Wilson's 'Inverting The Pyramid'. 

Narrative poems, during the Renaissance, would precede the poem itself with "the argument" a short summary of the poetic matter about to be presented to the reader. Wilson's "argument" in this book is that the game of football is less about players than the systems they perform in. Throughout the history of the game, a well drilled side of average players has almost always beaten a side of stars with no direction. In pressing this line of argument, Wilson traces the entire history of player formations and the tactics encouraged by those systems, and from this comes the title of the book: in football's early years, teams played a 2-3-5 formation which formed, when viewed from above, a pyramid. In these early days, defending was viewed as negative and contrary to the spirit of the game, and so only two outfield players, the "full backs" were tasked with defensive duties. However, as time has gone on, more players have been added to this defensive unit, so that the pyramid has been "inverted" (when the British press bemoaned Terry Venables' "Christmas Tree" in the run up to Euro 96, this is what they were railing against, a continental system adopted in preference to 4-4-2).

Wilson's analysis of the trends and historical antecedents of parts of the game we now take for granted takes him across the footballing world. He starts in Victorian England and then moves on to Montivideo in the early Twentieth Century as he traces the genesis of the pyramid system. He then progresses to café culture Vienna, where the "Wunderteam" first experimented with players shifting positions to confuse the opposition. Meanwhile, in England, Arsenal's Herbert Chapman shifted a man back into defence, thus creating the "W-M'" formation (so named because of the shape the players made on the pitch) which soon became ubiquitous. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hungary became the best side in the world, humbling England 6-3 in 1953 as their players effortlessly shifted into areas England did not expect them to. Brazil was the home of the next tactical change, as 3-2-5 became 4-2-4, leading to their world cup triumphs in 1958 and 1962. Alf Ramsay, in 1966, created his "wingless wonders", an example of what Wilson terms "The English Pragmatism", while the World Cup of 1970 turned out to be the last time a team rolled their best players onto the pitch, told them to play, and triumphed. Total Football is the next subject on the agenda, a chapter Wilson shares between Ajax, Holland, Dynamo Moscow and the Soviet Union, as the principles of this vision of the game seemed to develop independently in two different locales. The comprehensive historical survey of the game's tactics ends with a discussion of the inevitable move back towards attacking players who can unlock massed defences.

One of the biggest strengths of 'Inverting The Pyramid' is its ability to move from continent to continent. Wilson has a particular affinity with Eastern Europe, and his discussion of Valeriy Lobanovski's Dynamo Kiev is particularly enjoyable and comprehensive, while he also goes to great lengths to explain the development of football in Argentina and Brazil. Another strength is his illumination of the great characters behind the tactics, from Jimmy Hogan, the great exporter of football expertise to Central Europe to Helenio Herrera, master of Catenaccio, the defensive system whose influence on Italian football persists to this day. Wilson's insights into all of these diverse characters give the book a real humanity, a warm beating heart beneath the cool, sophisticated skin of the prose.

For anybody who loves football, this is a must read. Not only is it brilliantly researched, well written and full of wonderful detail, it sweeps across a hundred odd years of football history while never losing sight of the argument made in the preface- that tactics are everything. Once you've read 'Inverting The Pyramid', you may well find yourself agreeing.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John Le Carré)

One Christmas a long while ago, perhaps the Christmas before I went to university, or perhaps the Christmas of my first year, BBC repeated the seminal television adaptation of John Le Carré's Cold War spy yarn 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'. My parents, who had watched it when it was first on television in 1979, were tremendously excited by this. I was lukewarm in my enthusiasm, but I sat and watched it with them and was enthralled. I didn't have time to read the book sadly, as I was either in the middle of A levels or in the first year of an English degree with an extraordinarily lengthy reading list, but it was one of those books I always wanted to get around to. Finally, the motivation came in August, when, at a screening of 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes', I saw the incredible trailer for the new Working Title cinematic adaptation (see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TvdqRvCwGg) and in a fit of excitement and anticipation, immediately ordered the novel from Amazon.

The plot is notable for its gritty realism; like noir writing, this form of literature relies on tension and a patient build, and 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' is absolutely masterful on this count. Le Carré totally swerves reader expectation by beginning his tale in a minor public school, where a new French master, a man named Jim Prideaux, has been hired. Witnessed through the eyes of his young charges, it soon becomes obvious (though not to them) that he is a former spy. We then cut to a day in the life of forcibly retired spy George Smiley, a middle aged book lover whose wife has left him. After a frustrating day in which he lost a prized book at his club, he is suddenly recruited to track down a mole who has penetrated the heart of the Circus (the London headquarters of SIS) by Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service liaison to Mi6. This mole may have been responsible for the failure of the operation in Czechoslovakia that led to Prideaux's shooting, capture and interrogation at the hands of the Soviets, as well as the fall of Control, the former head of the Circus and Smiley's friend, who died soon after his removal from power. The Circus mole, Smiley surmises, must be one of four men: Percy Alleline (a dour Scot, heading up the Circus in the aftermath of Control's dismissal, "Tinker"), Bill Haydon (flamboyant, sophisiticated, intelligent, the darling of the Circus, "Tailor"), Roy Bland (a left wing academic in charge of intelligence gathering in Mother Russia itself, "Soldier") or Toby Esterhase (a Hungarian who aspires to be an English gentleman and is in charge of the "lamplighters" department, "Poorman"). Smiley's investigation unpicks every strand of Operation Testify until he is sure about the identity of the mole and contrives a trap...

Probably the first thing that springs to mind when writing about this book is that it is certainly not "genre fiction" or "low culture" in any way. John Le Carré is a literary master who just happens to have written about what he knows, which happens to be espionage during the Cold War. It is, from the start, beautifully paced and masterfully plotted (I expected this), but what was more unexpected is how subtle and nuanced the narrative voice is, an omniscient third person narrator who dips in and out of character's heads with the facility of George Eliot, filtering thoughts, feelings and perspectives to form a jigsaw of events which eventually, painstakingly, reaches a climax which is itself beautifully understated. The entire novel burns with a quiet intensity that demands attention. Meanwhile, large chunks of recounted monologue build the characterisation of the various protagonists, as well as filling in the labyrynthine backstory. The huge swathe of tradecraft jargon adds authenticity and colour to the narrative, and the dialogue makes each character's foibles apparent very cleverly.

 All in all, this is quite simply a classic, as far away from the crash-bang-wallop of James Bond as it's possible to get, a gritty tale made all the more poignant because of the defections of the real life "Cambridge Five", who Le Carré knew personally. The world-weary and cynical manner of the protagonists reflects a world of stalemates and uncertainties; this is not a book about heroism, it is a book about mental puzzles and one-upmanship, about ambivalent loyalties and bruised egos. Highly recommended.

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Back in the first year of my English degree, I was, like most undergraduates across the country embarking upon the study of the literary canon, required to read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. As I remember, that particular week was a reading week, and I read the novella on a coach between Exeter and London, and I wasn't greatly impressed by it, at first. It seemed to me to be a fairly dull travelogue based plot without much of a pay off. Two weeks of seminar discussion and essay writing failed to make me see what was special about this book many critics see as the first genuinely "modern" novel. Here's the thing about books though: sometimes their effectiveness takes a while to gestate. Such was the case here. With each passing year, my attitude towards the book softened, until I was pronouncing its genius and recommending it to students and friends. C'est la vie.

'Heart of Darkness' offers many possible avenues for discussion. It is a critique of colonialism (or not, more on that later), a look at the darkness at the heart of humanity, a satire, a masterpiece of tense, concise storytelling and the inspiration behind multiple works of film and fiction, not least Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling Vietnam epic 'Apocalypse Now'. The narrative is framed by an un-named narrator who begins and ends the novella upon the trading ship Nellie, which sits at anchor upon the River Thames. One of the sailors on board, an inveterate storyteller named Marlow, remarks that the Thames was once "one of the dark places of the earth", the end of the known world for the Romans who came here in the first century, inhospitable, strange, cold and filled with hostile, savage natives. This leads him to begin to discuss colonialism, how when one looks into the fact of it, there is much that is unpleasant, with only the idea of promoting civilisation to redeem it. All of this is preamble to a tale Marlow wishes to tell about his time as a river captain of a steamer for the Belgian Congo Company. It is this tale that makes up the majority of the novella, with the first narrator merely existing as a means of pointing out Marlow's unreliability as narrator.

Marlow, upon taking up his post in the Belgian Congo, finds that there are several obstacles in performing his role effectively. The other white officials are untrustworthy and conspirational, his ship is in need of repair, and everybody is talking about the charismatic Kurtz, an ivory trader of legendary status, popular among the natives and with a number of skills that seem rather apocryphal (it is claimed that he is a great painter, a journalist, and a musician, among other things). This section of the book contains many subtle criticisms of the colonial experiment: a French warship shelling an invisible enemy, a former company worker who beat a tribal chieftain with a stick in front of his family, the greedy intrigues of the men at the various stations. Marlow describes a veil of optimism and naiveté lifting from his eyes as he realises what he has gotten himself into. The next section takes place upon the mighty river itself and is a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere. The motif of darkness continually recurs, a metaphorical reference to the human soul as well as a nod to the unknown nature of Central Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Africa was, of course, known as "The Dark Continent" throughout this era). Marlow's mission is to find and retrieve both the mysterious Kurtz and his ivory, but when he finally arrives at Kurtz's remote station, things are not quite as anybody had expected...or perhaps others suspected and had not told Marlow...the denoument here is one of the most famous in literature and an absolutely spine tingling moment. I suppose it's indicative of the need of youth for instant gratification that I found the build to this irksome as a nineteen-year-old, but find it genius now...

'Heart of Darkness' has caused much debate in the academic fraternity over the years, not least due to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's assertion in the 1970s that the book was inherently racist, because it denied the black Africans in the novel both language and culture. He argued that they appear as a homogenous, savage mass, as background texture, as parody of the European idea of an African. While these criticisms are, to an extent, true, I still think the overall effect and intent of the novella is to expose the "scramble for Africa" as the hideous, cruel, greed driven enterprise that it was. Marlow's tone is scathingly ironic when he discusses the colony and its administration and Conrad himself remarked that the Scramble For Africa embodied the "vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration".

Ultimately, there's so much rich, metaphorical detail in the journey to the heart of darkness- physical and figurative- that Marlow undertakes. The language is enigmatic and open to interpretation throughout, the characters equally so. At the heart of it all- at the heart of the novella, at the heart of the jungle, at the heart of darkness- is Kurtz, too physically debilitated to confirm or deny what Marlow has heard about him, but an emphatically charismatic man even on his death-bed, taken out of the village he had made his home, the evidence of his reclamation of his own savagery all around him. It is a compelling picture, one that has stayed with the modern writer ever since. It was true all along: Conrad really was the instigator of modern fiction.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Each year, my second year A level English Literature students are required to undertake a Period and Genre Study as part of their coursework requirement, and have a great deal of free reign in selecting texts to focus on. Once they've chosen their focus texts, they have a summer to read and prepare notes, with the essay writing starting in earnest in September. The wonderful thing about this is that it forces me to re-read a great many classics so that I can properly advise my students as they write their responses. This year, two of my students have chosen to write about one of my favourite books, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', so without further ado, here are some interesting points raised by my recent re-read.

Fin de Siècle literature is full of seedy locations, corrupt aristocrats, heady excesses and supernatural events, and in many ways, Oscar Wilde's only novel has come to be seen as the archetype of this paradigm. At the beginning of the narrative, a talented portrait artist, Basil Hallward, is showing his new masterpiece to his friend, Lord Henry Wooton. The art work in question is a portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful young man named Dorian Gray. Lord Henry, a dandy and aesthete, is fascinated by the picture, and despite Basil's protests, proceeds to befriend him and corrupt him. Lord Henry makes two key interventions in Dorian's life which prove to be extremely fateful. Firstly, he makes the seemingly offhand remark that the painting will always be young and beautiful, while Dorian will age. This drives Dorian to make a wish almost reminiscent of a fairy tale: that all of the ravages and corruptions of time will be visited on the picture, not upon him. Soon after Dorian mistreats his innocent theatre actress fiancée, he notices the painting has changed. There is now, around the mouth, a cruel twist. Extraordinarily, Dorian's petulant wish has come true, but he should have been more careful, especially given Lord Henry's second intervention, which is the gift of the "yellow book", a French novel full of salacious questing after new sensations. Dorian embraces the philosophies of this book (which, although never named, is Huysman's notorious 'A'Rebours', which also fascinated Pete Doherty of The Libertines and Babyshambles, with similarly corrupting effects, some might say) and becomes more and more embroiled in secrets and scandals, which are darkly hinted at, but never seen "on screen" until fairly late in the piece (in this, Wilde's book follows closely the methodology of the novel it most closely resembles, 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson' which involves a similar identity displacement). Despite all of his crimes, Dorian remains the same physical specimen he was when Basil first committed his likeness to canvas. His soul, however, is a different matter.


The enduring appeal of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is not hard to understand. It is at once a social satire of Victorian polite society (though a rather darker one than any of his comedic plays), a Gothic tale of human corruption and an analysis of the dangers of obsessing too much over beauty and youth. The truth that Wilde hints at is that beauty and youth are powerful because they are fleeting. Extended into middle age, they become parodic and unpleasant qualities, and of course the activities Dorian chooses in pursuing his journey through eternal youth make him a great many enemies as well as causing the eponymous picture to corrupt in the privacy of the locked room it resides in. The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the danger and indignity of an obsession with one's own beauty, as evidenced by the myths of Adonis (who was loved by several quarrelling goddesses and then killed by a wild boar sent by the jealous Artemis) and Narcissus (who fell in love with his own reflection and died of starvation) and Wilde reminds the modern world of late Ninteenth Century London that this remains true.


Stylistically, the book is very far removed indeed from the stuffy tomes that held sway over the mid-point of the century. The prose is direct, striking and full of seductive irony, and the dialogue, particularly in any scene involving Lord Henry, is often laugh out loud funny, being of course full of Wilde's trademark epigrams. The characterisation is rather two-dimensional, with Basil being the sensitive and emotional artist, Lord Henry the ultimate Wildean aesthete and Dorian the corruptible innocent, but as the book is essentially a moral fable, this isn't too much of a problem, especially when one considers how radically and refreshingly different this approach must have been after nigh on seventy years of novels which essentially trace a single character's entire life journey from birth to marriage or death.


In concluding this little look at a well loved classic, I can only say that this is one of those books which is a joy to re-read, one that has had an enormous cultural impact on the past 130 years, and one which never forgets that examining morality and examining the essential absurdity of life are not mutually exclusive. I'm looking forward to seeing what my students make of it...

Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

This book blog was born in March and began with an analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'Devils', a book that I found compelling and ignited in me the desire to get to grips with Dostoevsky as often as possible. It is therefore entirely apt that five months of successful book blogging later, I've returned to the works of Dostoevsky, specifically, to the short novel 'Notes From Underground', which, like 'Devils', examines the way that Romantic Liberalism leads inevitably to Nihilism. In the case of 'Devils', this transition is metaphorically elucidated through a father, Stepan Trofimovich and his son, Peter Stepanovich, but with the earlier 'Notes From Underground', Dostoevsky has his narrator describe his current feelings of disgust at the futility of man attempting to build the symbolic utopian "crystal palace" through enlightened social consciousness and then move towards narrating three episodes which led to his current nihilistic world view.

Part one of the novel, then, is the ranting, self-pitying, diversionary "notes" of a nameless former civil servant of around forty. He attained the rank of Collegiate Assessor in the Tsarist civil service (a well-paid rank equivalent to the rank of major in the army), which he quit immediately upon receiving a hefty bequest in a relative's will to descend "underground", that is, separate from society and its stupidity, as he perceives it. He poses a number of questions in this introduction which he will come round to addressing in the anecdotes that form part two. Firstly, why do most people find revenge virtuous and just, and easily find the means to take it, when he struggles to find meaning in the act of revenge and only pursues it through meaninglessly spiteful and petty acts? Secondly, why do people find such pleasure in pain and in describing it to others? Thirdly, why are we struck with inertia at crucial moments? Finally, what is civilisation and what is our relation to it?

These questions lead into a series of episodes which occurred twenty years before, events which helped to turn the narrator into the Underground Man. The first episode, rendered by Dostoevsky with typical humour and irony, concerns the narrator obsessively attempting to take revenge on an officer who physically moved him out of his path without a word, only to find that the officer has no idea that the narrator's chosen method of revenge (a shoulder barge in the street) has even happened. The second surrounds a dinner some school acquaintances of his have for one of their number who is leaving town. Despite the fact that he hated them at school, the narrator inveigles his way into the gathering, only to behave towards them with scorn and contempt until they leave to visit a secret brothel without him. The third episode follows on immediately after the dinner, and finds our anti-heroic narrator visiting the brothel; his acquaintances are gone, but he strikes up a conversation with one of the prostitutes and unintentionally sleeps with her and then tells her his vision of society's ills. His behaviour in all three episodes shows a sort of bizarre juxtaposition of bravery and cowardice; bravery because he will not compromise just to fit in and cowardice because he never takes action in the way that he steels himself to. Alarmingly, I rather recognised myself throughout the narrator's misadventures! In any event, these reminiscences give the reader a succinct summary of why the narrator has separated himself from contemporary life.

What is most striking about this novel is the way the idea, tone and style have influenced so much of the literature that follows it. In interrogating Russia's flawed obsession with Determinism, the author anticipates his own 'Devils'. By charting the way that pleasure can be obtained by spreading one's pain, he lays the ground for 'Crime and Punishment', while Dostoevsky's critical response to Chernyshevsky's idealist socially utopian novel 'What Is To Be Done?' is a thread that runs through all of his late masterpieces. The figure of the man underground has been used by- amongst others- Ralph Ellison, whose 'Invisible Man' takes Dostoevsky's concept and applies it to the plight of African-Americans in the post-war United States. The absurdist humour and nihilist themes of Dostoevsky's book are used by Joseph Heller in 'Catch 22', particular in Yossarian, the air captain who points out the essential ridiculousness of the air warfare he's involved in: you'd have to be mad to fly, but recognising this fact simulataneously means you are sane enough to fly. Bret Easton Ellis uses a quotation from 'Notes From Underground' as one of the epigraphs to 'American Psycho' as a way of pointing out the fact that he intends to critique 1980s America in the same way as Dostoevsky critiqued 1860s Russia. Looking at the style, it is so strikingly minimalist in many ways, full of stark, short sentences and proclamations of disgust, self-aggrandisement, self-laceration and poetic social awareness. In Dostoevsky's chosen prose style and narrative voice, one can see how Camus, Sartre, Hemingway and Ellis were his successors and imitators. 

This is a truly important text in the development of modern fiction, and, indeed, modern consciousness. The Underground Man is a compelling narrator, utterly brutal in expressing his views, acting as both a vehicle for Dostoevsky to satirise Nihilism and also as a means to criticise Social Determinism, which he loathed. It's short, tightly focused, experimental and hugely enjoyable. Of all the many European authors of the Nineteenth Century, I feel that it is Dostoevsky who has most influenced the novelists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries. A grand claim, I know, but when one reads his books, one sees how truly influential they are. 

Taming The Beast (Emily Maguire)

For my first read of the summer, I decided to revisit a novel I bought and read four years ago. As well as the provocative title and cover image, 'Taming The Beast' possessed the kind of dark love story that habitually piques my interest. My recollection of my first read was that I genuinely enjoyed it. Strangely, second time around, I did not enjoy it at all, bar the odd passage. Funny how time changes one's perceptions. Perhaps there are some books that shouldn't be re-read after all.

The plot itself is rather clichéd, although attacked by the writer in a feisty and direct manner. Sarah Clark, a prodigy and a nerd, experiences sexual awakening in a high school English class in suburban Sydney, where Shakespeare and Donne lead her directly into the arms of her teacher, Daniel Carr. The prodigy takes to sexual studies the same way she took to academic studies, and soon enough their affair is all consuming and dangerously violent. Carr flees to Brisbane with his family, leaving Sarah only memories. This part of the novel is uncomfortable to read, but mostly well written, with the exception of the shoehorned quotations by prominent writers that make their way into the dialogue and narrative. Sarah is clear about the choice she is making, and her strength and conviction go a long way to making this a believable love story.

It is in part two that Maguire goes wrong, on reflection. The story picks up some years later, with Sarah now a twenty-one-year-old honours student at university with a reputation for sleeping around. Her affair as an adolescent has turned her into a rampant nymphomaniac who has no interest in tenderness or affection. She studies hard, screws hard and lives in a spartan flat filled with beer cans. Her life is balanced somewhat by her childhood friend Jamie, who has her best interests at heart, but his own girlfriend's pregnancy and his own feelings for Sarah lead to complications, even before the inevitable re-appearance of Daniel Carr...

The concept behind 'Taming The Beast' is promising, and part one gives the impression that Maguire has really thought about the controversial subject she is examining, but sadly this good work goes by the wayside as cliché after cliché is relentlessly rolled out, from the way that young men like Jamie get trapped into fatherhood at too young an age to the negative way that all of Sarah's friends view her carnality. The sex scenes occur with such regularity and with such depressing amounts of detail that they soon lose all power. You are literally anaesthetised to them after thirty pages, and yet Maguire never lets up- most of the book seems to be laboured descriptions of vaguely edgy sex. The dialogue and interior monologues of Jamie and Sarah are particularly excruciating, and upon his reappearance, Daniel becomes a pantomime villain rather than a genuinely complicated and ambivalent figure.

My guess is that Maguire wanted to tell us that true love is neither pleasant nor polite, that it is a raging, inescapable conflagration that destroys all in its path. Her implication seems to be that Shakespeare and his cohorts thought this too, and she rolls out a whole laundry load of quotations from the Sonnets and 'Othello' to prove her point. I hate it when writers try to prove their erudition by telling the reader what they've read. It hardly ever comes across well. The third person narrative is unbelievably embarrassing at times, with the filtering through the primary characters usually hitting the level of a mid-1980s problem page letter to Just 17. The prose style picks up again in the last few pages, but by then, it's too late.

I really wish I hadn't re-read this book. Although it was a nice easy read to get my eye in for a long six weeks of work free reading, going back to it spoiled the positive memory I had of it. I suppose that one's perception of a book is sharply bound up in the memories of the time it was read in, and four years is most certainly enough time for the rose tinted spectacles to be removed. So I can definitely tell my twenty-seven-year-old self that he was wrong for enjoying this book first time round. It starts promisingly and ends powerfully, but the long middle section is just embarrassing really. If you want to see this kind of storyline done well, try Zoe Heller's 'Notes On A Scandal', which I feel like re-reading to take the bad taste of this out of my mouth.