He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

I was quite unprepared for the bizarre practices that persist in the selling of a book. Apparently, I must set a price for our books (that must end with 99p, obviously) and then offer a whacking discount to the trade. They then order a couple of hundred copies, hide them at the back of the shop for six months, sell two and send the rest back to me. This is regarded as so commonplace that no-one bats an eyelid, and the returned books are pulped and form the hardcore of motorways. Tell this to an ordinary reader in a Waterstone’s Costa outlet, and they will be utterly amazed. I was too, and also entirely out of pocket.

Helen Miles is the proprietor of Solidus, a small, independent, Stroud-based publishing house using print on demand technology to get up-and-coming writers into print.

1st March 1998
The other night at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed. I had heard most of it before, of course, there being few aspects of the Connolly business that Sheba has not described to me several times over. But this time round, something new came up. I happened to ask her if anything about the first embrace had surprised her. She laughed. Yes, the smell of the whole thing had been surprising, she said. She hadn’t anticipated his personal odour and if she had, she would probably have guessed at something teenagey: bubble gum, cola, feet.

When the moment arrived, what I actually inhaled was soap, tumble-dried laundry. He smelled of scrupulous self-maintenance. You know the washing machine fug that envelopes you sometimes, walking past the basement vents of mansion flats? Like that. So clean, Barbara. Never any of that cheese and onion breath that the other kids have.

Sheba, married and with children of her own, is obsessed with a young boy, one of her pupils. Barbara, a teacher at the same school, is single and lonely. Zoë Heller brings them together in this rather compelling novel of middle-class angst and personal insight. Two women who, each in her own way, are in deep denial and seem incapable of facing the truth of their lives.

As the novel progresses, the initial narrative of middle-aged femme fatale and grubby fifteen-year-old schoolboy is eclipsed by the realization that Barbara, our seemingly disinterested narrator, is in fact a predator herself, probably of a more dangerous hue than her colleague.

I enjoyed the novel and certainly found it compelling. But the writing is uneven, often transparent in quality, it occasionally disintegrates into a kind of self-conscious journalese. Nevertheless, the underlying power of the theme is maintained, and I find myself musing on these characters long after finishing the book.

“What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness – from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush’s tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.

It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness – embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is easily overlooked as we search, desperate in the face of war and apparently immovable power in ruthless hands, for some magical formula, some secret strategy to bring peace and justice to the land and to the world.”

All characters in this publication are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

And it’s nearly always a lie. Robert Liddell suggests that the passage deceives nobody and would be no protection in a libel action, and, he continues, one must suppose that the common explanation is the true one: ‘it is inserted by publishers so that illiterate booksellers’ assistants may more easily be able to distinguish fiction from biography, memoirs and the like.’

To muddy the waters even further, in recent years some people have declared that they are willing to pay to be written into this or that popular writers’ novels. And some writers have agreed to do this, accepting money for their favourite charity as payment. It seems that some among us are not satisfied by having both a ‘real’ life and a virtual life on the world-wide-web, but are thirsty for more and looking for further identity in some kind of fictional existence.

I suppose these people must recognize that life and art are quite different things, and that existence in one is strangely different to existence in the other? E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel, points out how free fictional characters are from work, and what a disproportionate amount of time they devote to love.

I can’t help recalling the words of Guy de Maupassant, when talking about fictional character:

. . . whether we are describing a king, an assasin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stall-holder in the market, it is always ourselves that we are describing, for we are obliged to ask ourselves the following question: ‘If I was a king, an assassin, a thief, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, a stall-holder, what would I do, what would I think, how would I behave.’

It reads like this:

In the fifth class I talked about Wages, Price and Profits and discussed the (Communist) Manifesto again. After an hour General Mendoza was sleeping soundly. Don’t worry said General Pinochet, come with me. I followed him to a large window, which looked out over the gardens behind the house. A full moon illuminated the smooth surface of a swimming pool. He opened the window. Behind us I could hear the muffled voices of the generals talking about Marta Harnecker. A delicious perfume given off by clumps of flowers was wafting all through the gardens. A bird called out and straight away, from somewhere within the walls or from an adjoining property, a bird of the same species replied, then I heard a flapping of wings that seemed to rip through the night and then the deep silence returned, unscathed. Let’s take a walk, said the general. As if he were a magician, as soon as we stepped through the window-frame and entered the enchanted gardens, lights came on, exquisitely scattered here and there among the plants. Then I talked about The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which Engels wrote on his own, and the General nodded at each stage of my explanation, now and then asking a pertinent question, and from time to time both of us fell silent and looked at the moon sailing on alone through infinite space. Perhaps it was that vision that gave me the nerve to ask him if he knew Leopardi. He said he didn’t. He asked who Leopardi was. We stopped for a moment. Standing at the window, the other generals were looking out into the night. A nineteenth-century Italian poet, I said. If I may be so bold, sir, I said, this moon reminds me of two of his poems. “The Infinite” and “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia”. General Pinochet did not express the slightest interest. Walking beside him I recited what I knew by heart of “The Infinite”. Nice poetry, he said.

Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix is a Catholic priest, a failed poet, a literary critic, and a member of Opus Dei. On his deathbed he attempts to justify his own complacency, condemning himself by failing to convince us of the goodness in his life. We perceive him as a quintessentially modern villain, one who is marked out by his silence in the face of evil.

There are wonderful images produced throughout the novel; our hapless priest involves himself in a programme to save the decaying churches of Europe from pigeon shit by the use of birds of prey, where it seems almost every parish priest harbours his own falcon. Pablo Neruda addresses the moon with his poetry. And in the final section of the book a literary soirée is held in the upper rooms of a house while a working torture chamber takes apart political prisoners in the cellar.

In this short novel Bolaño brings together church, state, and literature in a magical and extraordinary way. He is an astonishing writer.

The next case was a young man arrested for grievous bodily harm. He pleaded guilty. A policeman told the court that he had struck his wife in the face with a glass while under the influence of drink. Desmond entered a plea for leniency. He spoke in low tones so that Gordon had to strain to hear what he was saying. He said that the young man had been motivated by jealous rage, that the young woman had indulged in relations with another man. He called it an occasion of adultery. He did not wish to condone the young man’s behaviour but he had now forsworn alcohol and was involved in part-time duties with a Christian organization.

Gordon could see the man’s wife sitting in front of him in the public gallery. She was small and blonde. There was a vivid scar across her cheekbone and nose and she lifted her hand often to touch it. Her husband didn’t look at her. Desmond said that she had allowed herself to be seduced by an older man, a manager at her place of work. He said that her husband, an assistant in a hardware shop, had seen them together in a bar on Amelia Street. The small blonde woman looked at the ground as Desmond went back over the details of her affair as though she knew herself on trial on grounds of betrayal and subversion of a plain man’s yearning heart.

When the judge passed down a sentence of one year’s penal servitude suspended for two years, the woman rose and quit the court without lifting her head, although Gordon saw her lips move as she passed him. He thought she was counting, as though disgrace was a thing to be tallied and made account of, or that she had henceforth been pledged to a recital of the lonely offices of the unfaithful wife.

The novel is based around actual events: On a wet and misty night in November 1952 the body of Patricia Curran was discovered in the grounds of her family home near Belfast. The 19-year-old had been stabbed 37 times.

The murder of the judge’s daughter led to a major miscarriage of justice that saw an innocent man “fitted up”, as the establishment closed ranks and covered up the killing. The victim of this conspiracy was Iain Hay Gordon, a 20-year-old Scotsman who was serving his National Service with the RAF in Northern Ireland.

In the year 2000 Mr Gordon finally managed to clear his name.

It emerged that he was coerced into signing a false confession, was wrongly ruled insane, and that there were serious faults in the police investigation. In fact, Gordon was completely innocent and was the subject of a genuine miscarriage of justice.

Eoin McNamee’s fictional representation of these events concentrates on human weakness, guilt, innocence and mischief, and he delivers a consummate and beautifully written tale.

McNamee is interested in corruption – people who have been corrupted; and he is interested in death; but his over-riding obsession seems to be the atmosphere in which both of these strands are played out. He is an artist who feels that his task is to find and deepen a mystery rather than explain it; he looks for and discovers a kind of truth, but that is not revealed to us in the form of an answer.

Finally, The Blue Tango is a masterclass in observational prose.

Things haven’t changed much:

The Publisher’s Pudding.

This pudding can scarcely be made too rich. First blanch, and then beat to the smoothest possible paste, six ounces of fresh Jordan almonds, and a dozen bitter ones; pour very gradually to them, in the mortar, three quarters of a pint of boiling cream; then turn them into a cloth, and wring it from them again with strong expression. Heat a full half pint of it afresh, and pour it, as soon as it boils, upon four ounces of fine bread-crumbs, set a plate over, and leave them to become nearly cold; then mix thoroughly with them four ounces of macaroons, crushed tolerably small; five of finely minced beef-suet, five of marrow, cleared very carefully from fibre, and from the splinters of bone which are sometimes found in it, and shred not very small, two ounces of flour, six of pounded sugar, four of dried cherries, four of the best Muscatel raisins, weighed after they are stoned, half a pound of candied citron, or of citron and orange-rind mixed, a quarter saltspoonful of salt, half a nutmeg, the yolks only of seven full-sized eggs, the grated rind of a large lemon, and last of all, a glass of the best Cognac brandy, which must be stirred briskly in by slow degrees. Pour the mixture into a thickly buttered mould or basin, which contains a full quart, fill it to the brim, lay a sheet of buttered writing-paper over, then a well-floured cloth, tie them securely, and boil the pudding for four hours and a quarter; let it stand for a couple of minutes before it is turned out; dish it carefully, and serve it with the German pudding sauce of page 126.

Jordan almonds, 6 ozs.; bitter almonds, 12; cream, f pint; bread-crumbs, 4 ozs.; cream wrung from almonds, J pint; crushed macaroons, 4 ozs.; flour, 2 ozs.; beef-suet, 5 ozs.; marrow, 5 ozs.; dried cherries, 4 ozs.; stoned Muscatel raisins, 4 ozs.; pounded sugar, 6 ozs.; candied citron (or citron and orange-rind mixed), J lb.; pinch of salt; i nutmeg; grated rind I lemon; yolks of eggs, 7; best cognac, 1 wineglassful; boiled in mould or basin, 4J hours.

Obs.—This pudding, which, if well made, is very light as well as rich, will be sufficiently good for most tastes without the almonds: when they are omitted, the boiling cream must be poured at once to the bread-crumbs.

Poor Author’s Pudding.

Flavour a quart of new milk by boiling in it for a few minutes half a stick of well-bruised cinnamon, or the thin rind of a small lemon ; add a few grains of salt, and three ounces of sugar, and turn the whole into a deep basin; when it is quite cold, stir to it three well-beaten eggs, and strain the mixture into a pie-dish. Cover the top entirely with slices of bread free from crust, and half an inch thick, cut so as to join neatly, and buttered on both sides: bake the pudding in a moderate oven for about half an hour, or in a Dutch oven before the fire.

New milk, 1 quart; cinnamon, or lemon-rind; sugar, 3 os.; little salt; eggs, 3; buttered bread: baked | hour.