Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

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.

Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, and action is plot. Henry James.

I have written about this question before in various posts (use the search tool at the top of the page to find them).

But I thought the story of how George Eliot came across and developed the story of Adam Bede, might be instructive.

The story was suggested by an event in the life of Eliot’s aunt, Mrs Evans, a Methodist preacher. Mrs Evens had spent a night in prison with a convicted child-murderer, a mere girl. Evans had sought to make the girl recognize her guilt, and had then accompanied her to the hangman.

George Lewes, with whom Eliot lived in an open-marriage, suggested that the night in prison would make a good scene in a novel – and Adam Bede was conceived with that scene as its centerpiece.

Eliot created a seducer – obviously necessary to the plot – who was a young officer, heir to the local squire. But as well as her seducer, the girl, Hetty, is blessed with a true lover of her own class; Adam Bede.

George Lewes suggested that the novel should end with Adam’s marriage to the woman preacher, and that there should be a clash of some kind between Adam Bede and the young officer.

Leslie Stephen tells how, while she was listening to Wilhelm Tell at the Munich opera, George Eliot was inspired to make the two rivals fight.

The aunt’s story is softened considerably, in that Hetty is not guilty of murder, but only of temporary desertion of her baby. And neither is Hetty hanged, but instead transported to Botany Bay.

I find it both amusing and instructive to have the ability to follow the mind of a great novelist and to glimpse how different people and influences impinge on the development of her story.

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.

The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

This is a remarkable book by any standards, and I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by its 900 pages, and took the time to read it.

Bolaño actually presents us with five separate novels and, with the exception of the last one, they can all be read without reference to the others.

2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. Archimboldi, rumoured to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize, is an evasive and reclusive writer who stays well away from the public eye. In fact, none of the critics who pursue him in this novel manage to track him down in person, though they seek him in several different countries, even traveling to a boom town in Mexico in their quest.

Bolaño’s subjects are writers and violence, and staying in the border town of Santa Teresa, we are introduced to Amalfitano, a professor of philosophy and literature at the local university. This text is quite different to the opening novel of the quintet, with an overt feeling of magical realism about it; Amalfitano leaves a book of geometry hanging on a clothesline in his back yard, and we slowly become aware that he is slipping into insanity. We also learn something about Amalfitano’s first wife, who ran off after a mad Spanish poet.

The third part of 2666 is entitled, The Part About Fate, and follows an American reporter, Oscar Fate, who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. There have been clues in the two preceding books, but in this one we are very aware that there are lots of cases of sexually-violated and murdered young women, their bodies found regularly in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the surrounding desert. The narrative throughout is that of hardboiled noir.

The Part About the Crimes, the fourth part of 2666, is a tour-de-force, one inexhaustible list of the hundreds of women and girls who are butchered in and around Santa Teresa. One of the characters in this section introduces us to the concept of gynophobia, which is fear of women. Bolaño describes the discovery of each body in forensic, even clinical terms, in some cases drifting over to the more hard-edged tone of the crime-novelist. As the body-count builds, and with no solution or hint of closure in sight, we begin to glimpse the extent of the deep misogyny which pervades our society and culture. Though a handful of these horrific crimes are ’solved’, most are shelved with little or no investigation taking place.

The final section, The Part About Archimboldi, ties everything together. We finally meet the German writer, follow him through his childhood and his time as a soldier in the second world war, witness the surrealistic horror of the twentieth century through his eyes as well as taking in his relationship to beauty and solitude. And we finally understand how all the other sections of 2666 relate to each other.

It is, of course, impossible to describe this novel; to understand it and what it is about there is no substitute for reading the book. So much of its greatness is in the language and in the bravado of the telling. Bolaño is a poet and his prose is always drifting, like the smoke from a cigarette; it weaves patterns in your mind and carries on working in the same way whether the book is in your hand or not. I believe it is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Roberto Bolaño was born 28 April 1953 in Santiago, Chile and he died 15 July 2003 in Blanes, Spain. 2666 was his final statement.

An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. The general plan of a fort in itself adds to the monotony – the huge concrete barracks, the neat rows of officers’ homes built one precisely like the other, the gym, the chapel, the golf course and the swimming pools – all is designed according to a certain rigid pattern. But perhaps the dullness of the post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the army he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him. At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.

McCullers addresses many topics in this short novel. Homosexuality is high on the agenda, followed quickly by sadism and voyeurism. But the author is also enthralled by the outsider in society, and the fragility of normal conformity is a central theme.

Beautifully written, as you would expect from an author of McCullers’ status, the novel is sometimes referred to as Southern Gothic, and individual sentences stand out like stars in the night sky. There is little in the way of plot here, but an underlying nobility of spirit and an intensity of suspense and poetic expression which more than adequately carries the narrative.

Five people in a peace-time army camp are obsessed with each other, and yet each of them is alone in a private and impenetrable world.

In less than 125 pages we sit and watch their destinies unfold like the silent spectacle of a Greek drama.

‘Annacleto wouldn’t have been happy in the army, no, but it might have made a man of him. Would have knocked all the nonsense out of him anyway. But what I mean is that in a way it always seemed to me terrible for a grown man twenty-three years old to be dancing around to music and messing with water-colours. In the army they would have run him ragged and he would have been miserable, but even that seems to me better than the other.’
‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said.

It wasn’t that his own schooldays had left him scarred with awful memories. It was just that his main memory was of spending more than a dozen years being constantly told to stop talking at the back. Talking at the back, of course, was the one thing at school he did really well. He’d have talked at the front if they’d let him, quite happily, he wasn’t fixated on the back. But schools, in his day and in his memory at least, were places where silence was the goal, if not the norm, and Shut up was the answer to almost every question.

Mat Coward has said: “Most people now realise that we’re entering a period of huge change – frightening, exciting, or both, depending on your point of view. But hardly anyone seems to be writing about our near future, except for doom-laden stories of total collapse.”

Mat Coward is, unapologetically, a political writer and one of his main aims with this book was to write something that was neither utopian nor dystopian, but which gives a picture of what society might begin to look like faced with the challenges of the modern world.

He gives us London in the near future. In a world of fuel shortage, food scarcity, and wars over water, the Commonwealth of Britain is struggling to turn necessity into opportunity and build a happier, more efficient, and more democratic nation. It’s a new society, with new rules; even the criminals look different.

I read very few crime novels these days, but I was in no way disappointed with this one. Mainly because the criminal side of the novel seems almost incidental to the main thrust of the story. The picture that emerges of the possible shapes of a post capitalist society is far more urgent and imaginative than the meanderings of the police officers or the turning and twisting of the criminals hoping to avoid detection.

And as such, it is a book which should spark discussion and bring some renewed hope to those who have dreamed of a society which might deal seriously with the nurturing of democracy, some measure of collectivisation of the economy, community life and general questions of poverty and equality.

I know of no other contemporary writer of fiction who is grappling with these urgent questions, and it was gratifying to find ideas of such import and imagination embedded within the covers of what would otherwise be an everyday genre novel.

This is one to read and think about.