He told the following story:

A man out walking by the coast fell off a cliff. On the way down, after a couple of hundred feet a shrub or tree broke his fall. He managed to grab a branch, and there he was, suspended a thousand feet above a gorge, with only the branch preserving him from certain death.

In a predicament like this, he thought to himself, a prayer might be worth a try. He cried out, “Help! Help! Is there anyone there?”

A deep voice from the clouds replied, “Yes.”
The man looked around, couldn’t see anyone, and said, “Who is this?”
The voice replied, “This is God.”
After a moment, the man asked, “Can you help me?”
“Yes,” God replied; “Let go of the branch. About twenty feet below you is a ledge. From there you’ll be able to make your way down to safety.”

The man was silent for a minute, and then he called out, “Is there anyone else there?”

Your publisher asked for a blurb, but I don’t do those anymore having given thousands in the past, and thus having laid myself open to requests for thousands more. However, please count me among your great admirers. You are an absolute first-rate ethnographer in describing survival schemes within chaos which only politicians would be cynical enough to call a society. You have written an important book, and must know it — and must know, too, that you are in a ghetto. What are you? A writer of thrillers, right? Meanwhile, there are all these serious writers, describing America as it really is. Shall I name some of them? Would you like me to send you some of their wonderful books?

[The postscript:] Here’s a trade secret maybe nobody ever told you: The more highly educated and powerful your characters, the more popular your books will be.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Margarita began, and lay a heated hand on his closely cropped head. “There was once a lady. And she had no children, and generally had no happiness either. And so at first she cried for a long time, and then she became wicked . . .”

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was finished in its present form by the middle of 1938. The author died in 1940 and the novel was effectively suppressed until 1973.

It is a strange, surreal narrative, heavily influenced by Gogol, which traces the events let loose when the Devil himself alights on Moscow.

The depiction of the Devil is rich and complex, and that of the fearless Margarita even more so.

But the central fascination for me in the novel were the excerpts from the testimony of the man who assumed the role of judging Jesus Christ:

In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there emerged into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

More than anything else on earth the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses, and everything now betokened a bad day ahead, for that smell had been haunting the Procurator since dawn. It seemed to the Procurator that the smell of roses was being emitted by the cypresses and palms in the garden, and that mingling with the smell of his escort’s leather accoutrements and sweat was an accursed waft of roses. From the wings at the rear of the palace that quartered the Twelfth Lightening Legion’s First Cohort, which had come to Yershalaim (Jerusalem) with the Procurator, a puff of smoke carried across the upper court of the garden into the colonnade, and with this rather acrid smoke, which testified to the fact that the cooks in the centuries had started preparing dinner, was mingling still that same heavy odour of roses.

“O gods, gods, why do you punish me?… No, there’s no doubt, this is it, it again, the invincible, terrible sickness… hemicrania, when half my head is aching… there are no remedies for it, no salvation whatsoever… I’ll try keeping my head still…”

On the mosaic floor by the fountain an armchair had already been prepared, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and reached a hand out to one side. Into that hand his secretary deferentially placed a piece of parchment. Unable to refrain from a grimace of pain, the Procurator took a cursory sidelong look through what was written, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with difficulty:

“The man under investigation is from Galilee, is he? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?”

“Yes, Procurator,” replied the secretary.

“And he did what?”

“He refused to give a decision on the case and sent the Sanhedrin’s death sentence for your ratification,” explained the secretary.

The Procurator pulled at his cheek and said quietly:
“Bring the accused here.”

The Devil works with magic, he beheads people, he undresses women and makes them walk nude in the street, he drives people insane, he disappears others and tortures many. The references to Stalin’s repressive Soviet Union suggest themselves time and time again.

But the book, the work itself, surpasses all of the tricks of the Devil. It has so many layers and depths, is so fascinating, serious, and bizarrely funny, that I had the distinct impression I was reading several novels at the same time.

And far from distracting me, I found myself even more intrigued.

Perhaps this is one to read again? Or, if you haven’t yet read it the first time, put it on the list.

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

If you are a writer in the 21st century your main task is to break all these rules on a regular basis. Though you may find that someone got there before you.

Anyway, I’ll come back to that in a moment.
I’d been in The Greenhouse for breakfast, a place I usually avoid because I was once served an inferior and overpriced coffee there about six or seven years ago. I do harbour grudges . . . but not for ever.

This time the coffee was fine, no problem at all, but they were stingy with the bacon so I won’t be going back there for a while.

Next to the pharmacy to collect a prescription, but they were busy and told me to come back in fifteen minutes. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have started browsing the thrift shops.

I like second-hand books. I’ve listened to all the horror stories about them, but I still get a kick out of handling them, feeling and wondering (not too graphically) where they have been.

And I usually find something I’ve been meaning to read but which has successfully avoided me for the last several years.

But this morning there was nothing interesting among the books; more copies of McEwan’s Atonement or that Bridget Jones woman I do not need.

So I drifted along to the bricabrac section and poked about among the trinkets, knickknacks, baubles, gewgaws, thingamabobs and whatchamacallits.

The shop had metal shelves and up on the top was what looked like a porcelain butter-dish, blue, almost ultramarine, perhaps from one of the caves of the Pharoes (if they used butter?). I reached for it and as I brought it off the shelf the lid separated itself from the base and both parts leapt from my hand. I caught the base and clung onto it but the lid bounced back onto the shelf and dislodged a clunky wooden biscuit barrel, which fell to the second shelf down.

Two women, one on either side of me jumped with fright at the noise and walked down into the belly of the shop to dissociate themselves from me.

The wooden biscuit-barrel in its turn crashed into an oval meat plate which had been standing betwixt shelf and wall and this slid over the lip of the shelf and scrambled a pair of hand-carved stags with antlers.

By this time, though I was fully employed trying to quiet the carnage, I was aware that everyone in the place was wondering what would fall next.

The domino effect continued with the stags careering into an ancient and badly damaged squeeze-box, which leapt from its place, bounced off my knee and landed, playing some kind of cacophonous tune, dangerously close to a small pomeranian pup on the end of a tartan leash and attached to a large lady swathed from head to toe in electrified synthetics.

I believe the pomeranian pup was actually already close to insanity before the squeeze-box pushed it over the edge. It’s the way they breed them.

It quickly savaged the instrument and wound itself up in its owners legs. This had the effect of sending the large lady into a spin. While she span the dog found its voice and yapped away at full volume while trying to extricate itself from the tartan strapping and sending me threatening glances, from time to time making a run in my direction, only to be stopped abruptly by the limit of the leash or the spinning of its owner.

Throughout this whole scene the lank-haired volunteer who was obviously in charge of the shop did not so much as look up from her newspaper.

I thought of many things I could do to ease the situation. Primarily I would have liked to rearrange the items I’d caused to leave the shelves, secondly I thought of helping lady with dog, and somewhere down the list there remained a moment when I would apologise to volunteer for disrupting her shop and to the remaining customers for ruining their day.

But I just left.

“There are no more juicy parts amongst modern classics than Didi and Gogo – Vladimir and Estragon to you – the tramps who wait for Godot.” Ian McKellen

We were in Newcastle to see one of the 20th century’s most celebrated plays, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This most hyped production brings to the same stage Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup. It’s a hot number. All the tickets have sold out and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, it is a roaring success.

The production makes no apologies in playing for laughs, the humour, as always, underpinning a gulf of tragedy. But it also underlines a wealth of warmth and concern between the two protagonists – Vladimir and Estragon – who are presented rather convincingly as a double-act, often reminiscent of the music-hall, although to younger audiences they will be reminders of more recent popular television partnerships. On a slightly different level they are like an old married couple, held together by strands of affection and memory and habit, but tending to take each other for granted.

The two have known each for years and have known better times. But when we meet them they are homeless and destitute. Patrick Stewart’s Vladimir has accepted some responsibility for the welfare of his friend, and he works at it conscientiously, though it is a thankless task and one that is bound to fail. McKellen’s Estragon, on the other hand, is a world-weary man who would really like to disappear. He often brings up the subject of suicide, he has no boots that fit, and his nights in a ditch are always interrupted by a kicking from local thugs.

Simon Callow is Potzo; and Ronald Pickup’s hapless Lucky is anything but. Director Sean Mathias has a triumph on his hands.

(When Pozzo and Lucky have left the stage in Act 1):
VLADIMIR: That passed the time.
ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.

This is a play in which everyone is waiting, the characters who form the centre of the play; the actors who play them; and the audience. But towards the end of each act a small boy appears with a message from Godot. He is involved in a small exchange with Vladimir and then he departs. It seems that he is the only one in the entire theatre who is not waiting – this child.

From April 30, the play moves to the Theatre Royal Haymarket. I had more to say about the script in my last review.

POZZO: (suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.