Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

What happens to us when we enter a story?
 Where do we go?
 How is time stopped?

A long short story about reading a novella… can that work? Well, yes, it can, because stories are all about the way you tell ‘em, and this one, mirroring the techniques of its model, offers a series of nested narrations and interlinked mysteries that echo the “Chinese boxes” to which the original author compared his tale.

A young man-about-town in 1894 – an unidentified “you”, for the tale is told in the second person and the reader encouraged to identify with him – is leafing through the newspaper in a café (“The Empire seems in good shape – Matabeleland has just been occupied”). His eye falls on a review of a book just published:

“The book is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained.”

Naturally attracted, our protagonist rushes off to buy the book: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. He is not disappointed; reading in front of the fire he is soon hypnotised first by Machen’s place-description, creating the countryside of the Welsh Border, then by the strange tale of the girl who sees Pan. Pausing to stoke the fire, he begins to muse:

“Of course, Pan is everywhere and, as yet unbeknownst to you, will be extremely fashionable for the next twenty years or so. He is stalking the cities and woods and libraries of Britain, half-man, half-goat, a hybrid being, lord of animals, bringer of madness. He has perhaps come back out of curiosity, because surely there is nowhere further from his sylvan glades than the dark streets of Pimlico and Soho?

And yet his devotees move among the throngs of London.

Fauns, naiads, dryads, centaurs. The architecture of the city is rich with carvings, gargoyles, herms. All these huge new self-important buildings, these offices, museums, department stores are infiltrated by their mocking or spying faces. How often have you glanced up and seen against the sky some secret sphinx or solemn caryatid?”

The young man reads to the end of the book, “tea going cold, the butter congealing, the fire forgotten”. He knows that if he discusses it with his friends later, he will dismiss it as “overheated. Sensational. […] hardly literature”. Fisher is an admirer of Machen and in the paragraph that follows, her own authorial stance comes over very clearly:

“Such books as this are not in the world of literary awards and prizes, of fine criticism, of high-souled and earnest discussion […] Such books and those who write them are not lofty or enlightening, they do not raise the soul.

In fact they take you down. Down into the deepest layers of the psyche, into dread, into fear, into the things that are so terrible they can only be hinted at.

Into Pan’s world of mischief and joy and panic.

Is that not also part of the human experience?”

Our young man later runs into Machen himself in a pub, not entirely by accident, and so do we in the sense that his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan is appended to this story. Machen is very interesting on how the landscape in which he grew up inspired the novella, and indeed on his ways of working in general: “I had acquired that ill habit of writing, that queer itch which so works that the patient if he be neither writing nor thinking of something to be written is bored and dull and unhappy. So I wrote”.

The publisher Three Impostors Press is a Newport firm specialising in “producing high quality, scholarly versions of interesting, rare and out-of-print books, along with other related new writing”, and as their name implies, their first projects were all connected with Arthur Machen. The series London Adventures, of which this is one, are individual short stories having some connection with London and produced in limited numbered editions of 250 for £10 each, which doesn’t seem a lot in the circumstances.  There are three so far. If you’d like to lay hands on The Yellow Nineties , Iain Sinclair's House of Flies or Xiaolu Gu’s Alice of London Fields, I recommend no delay. I can testify that The Yellow Nineties fulfilled its intended purpose in that, having previously had no special desire to read Machen, I went off to Gutenberg’s handy online resource and read The Great God Pan.

In 1776, David Hume, near the end of his life, speculated on excuses he might give to Charon when invited to step into his ferryboat: “If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition”. But Charon would then reply, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant.”

Hume belonged to a generation of thinkers who “tended to see themselves as postwar generations. Between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries Europe rarely saw a year of peace. The Enlightenment began when these religious wars ceased.” To his mind, fanaticism and bigotry had been replaced by tolerance and calm, with opposing parties able to argue rationally instead of attempting to outlaw or kill each other. What concerned him as he awaited the ferryman was the fear that old times might be coming around again, but in a different guise.

Hume had once thought that increasing commerce between nations would of itself make war less likely – trade flourishes best in peacetime, and states which may heartily dislike each other’s politics and religion will nevertheless maintain at least polite relations for the sake of their mutual profits. But in fact trade wars had replaced religious ones, and states were empire-building through war to protect and expand their trade, and to satisfy the appetite for luxury goods that this trade created in the populace. The mutual dependence of governments and merchant companies worried philosophers and political economists like Adam Smith; “Merchant companies made their own interests sovereign, he argued, to the detriment of indigenous peoples who became only a source of profit, and to domestic governments, who became their fools”.

Nor had fanaticism vanished; it had simply moved from the realm of religion to that of politics. Hume “believed that British politics had become increasingly polarized between camps that portrayed those with different views as beyond the pale, as supporters of despotism or anarchy”, and it is hard to disagree with him when one reads rhetoric like Burke’s on the “wicked principles and black hearts” of men like Richard Price and Lord Shelburne, who, however much they may have disagreed with him, were demonstrably neither unprincipled nor black-hearted. They would have classed themselves as moderates, as indeed Burke classed himself; it is remarkable how politicians and thinkers on all sides of the argument saw themselves as moderates and their opponents as fanatical zealots. Politicians, particularly the Whigs who had been in power for most of George II’s reign, also tended to confuse their own interest with that of the nation; when they lamented that the country was going to the dogs, what they generally meant was that they personally were out of office.

Almost none of them, indeed, had any faith in the ability of the general public to elect the right men, manage affairs, or cope with any kind of power. Shelburne, an amiable sort who genuinely desired the “Happiness of Mankind”, also confessed to being ‘sorry to say upon an experience of forty years, that the public is incapable of embracing two objects at a time, or of extending their views beyond the object immediately before them’. He, and others, felt that democracy led to the public being bamboozled by jingoistic demagogues (and if they were alive today, they might well feel vindicated in that view). Wollstonecraft, who had once thought people were naturally virtuous or could soon become so, wrote in 1796 that she had ‘almost learnt to hate mankind’. Obviously some of this was owing to disillusion following the chaos into which the French Revolution had descended; it does not seem to have occurred to many that the excesses of the previous monarchy had in large part caused this violent swing. Burke, fulminating about ““a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and famished people”, gives no hint that this had been exactly the case under the old regime as well. It might have been supposed that regimes elsewhere would learn not to imitate Bourbon intransigence, but in fact they became ever more illiberal out of fear for their own privilege and landed interests. Gibbon was convinced that any concession to political reform would be fatal – “if you do not resist the spirit of innovation in the first attempt, if you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary system, you are lost”. He “shuddered” at the plans of Charles Grey, who would go on to steer the 1832 Reform Bill to success.

This study, which would take an essay to review in detail, records and analyses the reactions of thinkers including Hume, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Gibbon, Shelburne and Brissot to the end of the Enlightenment years and the American and French revolutions. It also sees this period as analogous in some ways to our own, in that now too, political discourse and much else seems to be polarizing, fanaticism and intolerance to be on the rise and a spell of relative peace coming to an end. In many ways it is less a history book than a book about theories of history, which could easily have been unreadably dull; fortunately it is written with great clarity and allows the characters of its fiercely intellectual protagonists to come across, often via their own words. Even Wikipedia, that fount of knowledge-substitute, gives no hint that the phrase “the silent majority” did not originate with Nixon or Coolidge, nor yet as a humorous Victorian description of the dead, but may be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the poor of Britain as “a silent majority of misery”.

"Strangely, though I was flattered by my employer’s decision to have my likeness taken by Mr Gainsborough, my mind was very much elsewhere. I had come so far in my turbulent life to this point. Gazing upon me in my finery (a costume, after all), these folks could have no idea how I came to be in this fortunate position."

I’m stepping out of my custom here, which is not to review books that don’t need any extra publicity. But in this case, it struck me that some of my friends who like litfic and hist fic might miss out by mistaking the kind of book it was. Seeing the name of a famous actor as author, plus endorsements from the likes of Stephen Fry, might lead some to think “oh, another celebrity who thinks he can write novels”. And that would be an error on their part, because this one most emphatically can.

Our protagonist-cum-narrator is Charles Ignatius Sancho, c.1729-1780, writer and musical composer, also, from time to time, butler, valet and shopkeeper, active in the abolitionist movement, which was hardly surprising as he had been born to a captive woman on an Atlantic slave ship. Orphaned soon after birth, he was a Londoner from the age of about two and overcame his somewhat shaky start to become, among other things, the first known British African to vote in a general election (for Charles James Fox, huzza!), the first to publish a collection of letters and the first whose obituary was published in the British press.

Joseph could presumably pick up Sancho’s spoken idiom from the man’s letters, but it is not just the voice he has hit off so convincingly; it is also the whole ambience of Georgian London. It’s a period and place in which I have done some immersing myself, thanks to Mike Rendell’s histories, and I have not seen its streets, coffee-houses and inhabitants better brought to fictional life. It is done so subtly that quotation will not work to illustrate it: Sancho does not indulge in poetic description of his surroundings; he just knows them, with an assurance that communicates itself instantly to the reader.

In many ways the story is of Sancho working out exactly who he is and where he belongs. Despite having spent almost his whole life in London, he never feels completely at home there and always resents its native inhabitants both for their attitude to him and for what they have done to his people. Yet, brought up as a sort of domestic pet among white people and with many more white than non-white acquaintance, he also for a long time feels estranged from, and resented by, the non-white community. In some ways, as he recognises, they are right to see him as privileged; he has known poverty but ends up able to cast a vote because he is a male householder who fulfils the necessary financial conditions, which lifts him above all women and about 87% of men at the time. His consciousness of this estrangement is part of what leads him to be, in later life, a campaigner for abolition, and his development in this direction is skilfully done, never more so than when Sancho, himself a musician and composer in the European tradition, hears African music for the first time in the Black Tar Tavern:

"The music that struck my ears was at first difficult to assess. Percussive sounds that moved in a time signature I was unfamiliar with – there seemed to be more than eight beats in each bar and the bars were not clear to my unaccustomed sensibility. It was as if one of Handel’s liveliest dance pieces were subject to an urgency that rendered the melody secondary to the rhythm – constant – imperative – wild. But there was something else to the music – something other than just the beat – the richness and detail of the harmonic layers created a sense of abandon.”

For a debut novel, this is astoundingly assured and in control of its material. I would guess it is based on the play Joseph wrote earlier about Sancho, and that it has benefitted from this earlier incarnation. This author is not a celebrity who thinks he can write; he's a writer who happened first to become famous in another field.

Lance-Corporals of Love

Who knew? That the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, when not prying into people’s private affairs, destabilising marriages and generally messing up lives, met to study the sonnet and produce anthologies of poetry? But then, as Oltermann points out “the history of the GDR is a book usually read back to front”. We all know, indeed some of us saw, the latter days of the paranoid gerontocracy, trying to make fear do the work of the enthusiasm they could no longer engender. But it is easy to forget that some of those who first set it up were imbued with genuine idealism and a desire not only to reclaim Germany’s impressive cultural heritage but to make it more available to the masses than it had ever been.

Johannes Becher, returning from Russian exile to postwar devastation, gave up his own writing to become a political fixer and give art - “the very definition of everything good and beautiful, of a more meaningful, humane way of living” - an honoured place in the new republic. Though he died in 1958, his dream of bringing artists together with workers survived him. “Theatres and opera houses handed out a proportion of their tickets to factories and educational institutions. A 1973 decree prescribed that larger factories must have an on-site library.” And the “Bitterfeld Path” programme sent writers out to run workshops among workers. “Within a few years every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle, by the end of the GDR in 1989 there were still 300 of them.” Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann and Erik Neutsch all wrote famous novels while on such placements.

However things finally turned out, these initiatives were clearly laudable. So what went wrong? Becher’s own view of the sonnet may give a clue. He saw it as the artistic expression of dialectical materialism, with the octave as the thesis, the first four lines of the sestet as the antithesis and the final couplet as the synthesis. But things just aren’t as tidy as that, nor do artists of any calibre generally feel at ease as part of a political establishment and singing its tune. It didn’t help that the government censors were hugely distrustful of the poets, feeling that the artful fellows were taking advantage of their ignorance of poetry to sneak sedition past them, as indeed they were – Uwe Kolbe’s subversive poem “Core of my Novel” got past in 1981 because the censors didn’t know enough to look for acrostics.

Their solution, typically, was not to give up trying to censor writing, but to employ spies better versed in these techniques, and the leader of the Stasi writing group, the really rather obnoxious Uwe Berger, was regularly writing intelligence reports on his students. Also, of course, their work was being directed into what he saw as useful channels. In the group’s early days, the younger students especially were keen to write love poetry and at first this was tolerated, until it became clear that this tended to political incorrectness:

“One young member of the secret police fantasised in free verse about being kissed by a young maiden unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a ‘lance-corporal of love’. ‘Patiently I wait’, the lusty teenager wrote, ‘for my next promotion/at least/to general’. Another young soldier imagined in a sestina writing the words ‘I love you’ into the dark night sky with his searchlight.” The energy, humour and inventiveness of these poems was promising.  Alas, when the young poets began expressing the wish to have the beloved all to themselves, “never to be nationalised”, they were hastily guided into duller channels.

When they did manage to express genuine talent without interference, it was sometimes because they themselves were also working undercover for the state. This was the case with the group’s most talented poet, Alexander Ruika, though it also sounds as if he was not only coerced into it but produced reports his masters must have found singularly unhelpful.  The three-way conversation between Ruika, Oltermann and the novelist Gert Neumann, on whom Ruika had gathered intelligence, is fascinating, as is the way Neumann baffled the government, not only because they couldn’t for the life of them understand his prose but because, though a constant thorn in the establishment’s side, he showed no desire to leave for the west and indeed worried that if he did a western tour, as some writers did, he might not be allowed back in. It never seems to have dawned on them that criticism did not necessarily mean rejection.

I’d have loved to see some of the poems from which Oltermann quotes reproduced in the original German in an appendix, which could have been a real asset. But this is otherwise a most informative, balanced and thought-provoking book.

It was impossible to go back to what they had been, the river only running one way.

This is a new edition of Christopher Meredith’s debut novel, first published in 1988 but set a decade earlier at the end of the steel industry in Wales. It centres on a group of men employed at a steelworks faced with imminent shutdown, their work not only arduous and dangerous but, now, intrinsically useless:

“The drums had been shoved one after the other under the leaking grease pipes until the maintainers eventually came round to repair them. Lew Hamer had shown Jack and Kelv the job, telling them to manhandle the drums out and chuck them on a spoilheap. They had sat and looked at the drums for a while. Jack dimly recalled myths about Greeks being set pointless and impossible tasks.”

Jack is a returner, come back to the place of his childhood having failed to make a go of things elsewhere; he is about to learn the truth of Cavafy’s remark that messing your life up in one place generally means you will do the same anywhere. His friend Keith, more rooted, is trying to make sense of his life and work in the valley by studying the local history that led to the steelworks in the first place, though hampered by the fact that he has no Welsh and cannot read the gravestones and documents that hold the information he needs: “The notes Keith held were in a language that was his own, but that he could not understand.” Robert, an obsessive, asocial bachelor, is “Robert” at home but “O”, a nothing, at the steelworks.

In many ways this is true of all the men who work there, whose individuality is not needed when on shift. But though they may not enjoy the job, it defines them, and its loss threatens to leave them not only insolvent but no longer knowing who they are and what their place in the world is. The women of the valley have more chance of work, but are no better off for job satisfaction:

“She was a widow, and worked in a factory from eight to half past four. The factory made electrical components, she told him, but she didn’t know what they were for.

She explained to him once that if she fitted together twice as many of the little pieces as she was meant to fit together for her basic rate she got a bonus of thirteen pence per hour. It only made you tired, she said, if you thought about it.”

Three things come through the writing very clearly. The first is the contrast between the natural and built environment these characters live in, a contrast that tends to surprise those seeing the valleys for the first time. The house where Keith and his wife Judith live has a “cracking view” across the valley, but like Gus Elen, you are better off ignoring the characterless ‘ouses in between, not to mention the factories and spoil heaps. The second is the sense of imminent danger just below the surface in the steel mill, where there seem to be umpteen ways to do oneself a mortal injury:

“Without looking down, Willy sidestepped a pool of slime in which a mangled steel cranesling lay contorted like a writhing snake. Suddenly he stopped, turned, and raised a warning finger. ‘Mind’ he said inexplicably. ‘Look here.’ He pointed into the gloom. ‘Know what these are?’ Jack strained his eyes and saw a bank of filthmantled metal boxes fixed along the wall. ‘Fuseboxes’ he said wondering if it was a trick question. ‘Thassright’ Willy said. His face relaxed for a moment but then the earnestness returned. ‘So be careful where you do piss. It ’ouldn’ be a nice way to go.’”

The novel is set at a the time of a seismic “shift” in the South Wales economy, and the third thing that comes across is how ill prepared people are for it and how little they can do about it. Some, on the mill’s closure, opt for similar jobs elsewhere in the country, which, given that the whole industry is doomed, merely postpones their problem. Some move on with no very clear idea of where and to what they are going. Some stay where they are and try for other jobs in the area, though it is women who have the best chance of factory assembly-line work. Meanwhile Keith’s observation about history – “it’s not something you can escape from” is borne out when a film crew arrives at the moribund factory and the men find they have themselves become historical exhibits:

“All the men were issued with hard hats, and some ingots were filmed as they were rolled into slabs. Jack laughed at the nervousness of the crew and the way they jumped when an ingot boomed and cracked out sparks as it hit the rolls. Wayne asked one of them what it was for. He was vague about the answer he got, but it was something about archives. Jack stood next to an old rigger wearing huge leather gloves and a metal helmet and they both tried to edge into the shot. But the rigger was watching the mill. He told Jack they were watching history and Jack, trying to look solemn, said nothing.”

The energy in the novel comes from its unusual setting, and the author’s assured familiarity with it – he had himself worked there. But the assurance of the prose, in a first novel that never sounded like one, was down to pure talent. Jack’s sudden sense of transience at one point is a typically sharply-conveyed moment:

“It struck him that everything sat lightly on the hillside. The cars, the pine trees on their shallow plates of roots. Looking at the stepped roofs of the houses, he could imagine them slipping and fanning down the hill like a tipped shelf of books.”

As Diana Wallace reminds us in the foreword, Shifts, from when it first came out, has been “the classic novel of de-industrialisation in Wales” and it is good to see this new edition from Parthian.

a newfound lingua franca —the common tongue of our possible land.

So Paul Malgrati, in a foreword, describes the exhilarating mash-up of Scots and French (with a few other languages periodically surfacing) in which he has written this dynamic first collection. He feels obliged to add, possibly in anticipation of criticism, “The following poems were written in Scots by a native French speaker. They are not an attempt at Scottish mimicry. Nor do they belong to any recognisable kind of Scottish patois.” Any such criticism would be both mean-minded and misdirected, for what we have here is an idiolect, the voice found by a man who was born into one culture and has adopted another. It never sounds forced or affected; what it does sound is massively energetic, a language continually straining at the leash and urging both writer and reader on. In “Tae ma Dundonian jo” he articulates the personal circumstance that helped to bring about this happy fusion:

        je t’adore mair nor the drums o Montmartre
       wi upbeats o brangles an beaten barricades;
       je t’adore mair nor a dram o sunkiss,
       when the Law Hill skyres, uprisen at tea time;

         je t’adore mair nor the Covenant within,
        that uplifts oor mystère an maks siccar the lift;
        je t’adore mair nor la mia patria,
        fir a countra was born in the tryst o oor hames

It isn’t just two languages that come together but two histories and sets of cultural references, as when “Rousseau bumped intae Hume” (“Forêt de Montmorency”), or when in “Champs-Elysées”, a failed revolt bumps into a sell-out Union:

      Ah!  ça ira!’—t’was whit they said
      the last risin o Misérables
     agin the rotten rottans’ rale,
     —yon scunn’rin crew—
      that’d sell awa Marianne
      fir Darien shares.

Or when, in “Drount Cathedral”, inspired by a Debussy prelude, he exports “La Cathédrale Engloutie” to Scotland…

   in the cranreuch o yer bairnheid,
   when yer maw grinned at ye thro the haar,
   ayont the firth an the tangible moor,
   there, yonder, in the parlour,
   where elders shivered o ayebidin wae,

Times collide and mash too, in the long poem “Siege o Dundee, c, 1651”, where a brutal Cromwellian sack somehow synchronises with modern times so that a contemporary street busker with mental health issues morphs into a timeless chorus to the action, and the rebuilding afterwards ends up as the kind of reconstruction that followed quite another war:

   “Wheesht!” they say —“Hearken tae the Provost’s plan:
  a Brutalist, Le Corbusist, béton-
  holic, Kumaian, criss-crossit, bald
  33 square-gane, car-pairked, bingo-
  perkit conurbation!” —“Hear! Hear! A toast,
  braw gentleloons! Gie’s a tart o concrete!”

And I suspect the same conflating of times in “Leith Harbour”, where the ostensible speaker is Mary Stuart returning to her birthplace from the France where she had grown up, but in which one can surely also hear the voice of the emigrant poet:

     Let me luve ye like hame, will ye? new land that’s grown wild
    intae me wi sharp, ill-manly bliss an staunch, hard,
    yet delichtfu howps that godly virr rove here.

   Are ye mine, unco patrie?

It should by now be clear that this is a poet completely unafraid to do what he pleases with language, and I wish it were possible to quote online from “Mapamound”, which is basically a land/word/scape that periodically breaks up into different contours or streams. Unfortunately I can’t reproduce the formatting. When he wants to, however, he can also execute conventional formal poems perfectly, as in the sonnet “Wallace o Arc”. Although he doesn’t say so, I am sure he is here writing about the Kelpies of Falkirk, that statue of the fey horses which tempt people to ride on them, but you mustn’t, for they will head unstoppably for water and drown you (We have them in Shetland too, but since our mythology is more Nordic, we call them njuggles).

    At stake, in war-cried noons o quarters past,
   they lure ma watch wi watergaw-bewasht
   ambuish. Their huifs, aloof, entice the route
   tae auld Orleans — yon drawbrig their moustached
   satyr o maidenheid cuid force — an Ah
   wad fain find them an ride alang, were Ah
   nae feart tae hug their schiltron o horns.
   Ah’ll bide here, syne, an let their beauty gang.

   See —they rise up yet, wi eldritch panache.
   Fantoush pastiche, their sonsie miracle
   relichtens faith in ma patrol. Ah’ll bide
   alert, ma watch awauken, nae fir faes
   but ferlies queer; the likes Ah’d kill
   tae keep in sicht, fir they’re the kythe o grace.

Reading a poet who uses language so freely and inventively is a bit like riding a kelpie: exhilarating in the extreme, though hopefully not ending in a loch. I have not found a new collection, or a new poet, so exciting in a while.

Fierce punishments were a way of compensating for the low chance of detection, rather in the way that a huge jackpot compensates for the low chance of winning the lottery. There simply were not enough resources to do anything more than make a terrifying example of those few criminals who were apprehended.

This quote illustrates what Toner is best at: making telling comparisons with our own time but without judging a very different society by our own. He also knows when to be sceptical of written sources, especially famous ones, who in an age of low literacy were invariably educated and upper-class and whose viewpoint is necessarily skewed by their own experience. The likes of Tacitus and Suetonius were most interested in high-profile treason and murder cases, but ordinary folk were far more concerned about thieves, street muggers and con artists, just as they are now. By “Rome” in the title, Toner means the whole empire, not just the city, and he uses many examples of petitions and cases from the wider empire, notably Egypt, to illustrate the kind of crimes that bothered people and how they might use the law to redress them

The problem with doing so was, firstly, that the chance of catching criminals was small (the vigiles, or Watchmen, were mainly concerned with looking out for fires) and secondly, that if a criminal was caught, it was not usually up to the state to do anything about it, unless his crime was a political one. There were certainly laws against civil crimes like theft and violence, but it was for the victim to press charges, collect evidence and go to court with it, all of which might cost more money than the loss warranted, particularly if one factored in bribery and corruption in the legal profession. In one of the Egyptian petitions, the complainant, who seems to have been a fair amateur detective, explains that the thieves “broke through a window which overlooks a public street and which had been blocked up with bricks, probably using a log as a battering ram”. They had then, he deduced, removed his barley by means of a rope, whose traces he found on the windowsill. Nobody was going to deduce this and present it to a court unless he did.

There was therefore a disconnect between the ideals Roman law set out (many of which still underlie modern European law) and what it could actually do. This disconnect also applied to the large body of law concerning private morals. Ever since Augustus, emperors had been using the law to try to eliminate excessive consumption, luxury among the common people, adultery and whatever the emperor of the day regarded as sexual depravity. Most folk, predictably, regarded their tastes in food, dress and sex as none of the law’s business and ignored it.

Inevitably, the law’s practical shortcomings led to discontent among crime victims who saw no chance of redress, but Toner suggests that such discontent may have been mitigated by the fact that they had low expectations of the justice system in the first place. The number of curses against thieves, written on lead sheets and found all over the empire, notably at Bath, suggests that many had little hope of recovering their property except by divine intervention - and if even that failed, they could console themselves with the thought that at least the offender might be visited with the unpleasant symptoms specified in the curse. These are always way out of proportion to the crime, which may indicate not so much the victims’ intrinsic cruelty as their frustration at not being able to right their wrongs.

What was causing crime was, as might be expected, poverty and inequality, the latter particularly in cities like Rome, where poor and rich lived close enough to compare each other’s lifestyles. As much as anything, the law was there to uphold this status quo, which contained elements of built-in inequality that feel alien to us, notably slavery. Slaves had very few legal rights, though some emperors would intervene on their behalf against excessively cruel owners (Augustus prevented one such from feeding a slave to his moray eels for breaking a vase). Since they counted as property rather than people, it was, for instance, impossible in law for an owner to rape a slave; he was simply making use of his possessions. This strikes us as shocking, but as Toner points out, things have not changed as much as we like to think and there is still a disconnect between what the law asserts and what it can do, not to mention who is in a position to make use of it:

“We might like to think that the modern world has improved because slavery is now illegal in every country, but according to one estimate, there are almost thirty million slaves in the world today, a far higher figure than Rome ever possessed. […] A Roman would probably argue that the modern Western lifestyle requires similarly drastic inequalities in order to be maintained. Over 70% of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day and half of global wealth is held in the hands of the top 1%. The eight richest men own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion. It is a level of inequality that is, if anything, far worse than existed in the Roman world. We in the West simply keep our low-cost producers out of sight, housed in factories in faraway countries. At least the Romans faced up to the social hierarchy that helped generate the wealth and leisure that allowed them to enjoy themselves at the baths and games. I suspect the Romans would feel that their values and ours were in many ways the same; a belief in the pursuit of personal fulfilment and wealth, regardless of the cost to others.”

This is a provocative and challenging statement, but hard to dispute. And though readable and accessible, this is a properly scholarly study with all the necessary apparatus behind it — Toner is after all a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Churchill College, Cambridge.

“Soon after I finished my doctorate in 1990 on the production of lepton pairs in proton collisions in a particle accelerator in Switzerland, I discovered something that was more exciting than physics: language.”

Well, heaven knows I would never argue about that conclusion…. Having recovered from this false start as a particle physicist, Johansson became an MPhil in linguistics and began researching the origins of language, in particular why such a complex spoken language evolved among humans (and indeed changed their own physiology in the process) when it did not in other species. This is a contentious subject which many in the field will not go near, because it necessarily involves much speculation. Those who do indulge in it have argued hugely and sometimes acrimoniously with each other’s theories.

Johansson outlines and discusses all these theories, from those supposing grammar to be an innate brain function that evolved all on its own in one go, to those who see it as a social and communicative function that developed in tandem with the co-operative instinct of humans and over a considerable time. He discusses them with suitable academic detachment (though I have to say, after reading this, or indeed many books on linguistics, you’d be hard put to it not to conclude that Chomsky’s views on the innate grammar module are round the bend). I don’t actually want to go into his arguments and conclusions in detail, which would be a bit like giving away the plot of a detective story. Suffice it to say that I found his method of summarising the conclusions of each chapter in italics at the end very helpful; also his knack of finding illuminating analogies when talking about such things as brain function, which don’t form any part of most readers’ knowledge. One great example of this is when he describes a major difference between the brains of other primates, as compared with humans and birds:

“Primates are completely incapable of imitating sounds. This is largely because they have only indirect control of their vocal tract. In mammals these organs are normally controlled by a particular little brain module deep down in the older parts of the brain. That module is pre-programmed with the normal sounds of the animal and affords no scope for making new sounds. […] In people – and in songbirds and other animals that need to use sounds creatively as well – new ways of making sounds have developed […] there are a number of nerve cables that circumvent the sound module and link the conscious brain and the vocal organs directly. You could liken this to an old computer equipped with a very basic sound card that can only produce a number of standard sounds. It might seem as if the obvious thing to do would be to upgrade to a better sound card with greater range. What evolution has managed instead, in both humans and songbirds, is to let the old sound card remain in place while running cables past it directly from the CPU to the speaker outlet.”

He also, necessarily, uses many examples and analogies from other species, and from human children. This is unavoidable, because the way children learn anything has implications for how humans originally learned it, and I can see why he uses his own children as research material; they are after all his closest source. But I’d rather he anonymised it a bit; “my daughter” somehow sounds more professional and less anecdotal than using her name, and I certainly didn’t need to know that he had named his unfortunate son Faramir.

I think he also, in his preoccupation with why our language abilities are so far developed beyond those of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, rather skates around the problem of marine mammals, who are also clearly a long way in advance of chimps. And while I am sure he is right about the basic unsociability of chimps, they do sometimes hunt in packs, which surely requires both forethought and communication to some degree.

But this is a very readable foray into a subject that could have been made far less so. I like the way it raises questions we seldom ask about things we thought we knew – eg, if the purpose of language is to communicate information, then the listener, who learns something new, benefits more than the speaker, so why do we all prefer talking to listening? It was also fascinating to see how human physiology has altered to accommodate speech, sometimes with attendant drawbacks in other areas. I can’t imagine a more absorbing field of research than how we became the kind of animal we are, and speech was absolutely central to that evolution.

In 2014, Stephanie Brett, reporter on a local West Country newspaper, is unexpectedly made redundant, which leads her to do two things: take in a friend as lodger to make ends meet and revisit an old story, a young girl’s disappearance in 1979 which was never solved. Stephanie, then a trainee, had made mistakes in her reporting of the case; also the missing girl and her older sister had been acquaintances of hers at school, so the case still nags at her mind. She decides to take it up again and her old boss suggests she make a podcast for local radio. Initially she jibs at the thought of yet more change in her life – “stuck in the rhythms and routines of the newspaper, she didn’t want a change” but decides to go along with it for want of anything better.

From here on, the story develops along two lines and in two separate times, Stephanie’s enquiries and interviews for the podcast, narrated in close-third person, and the thoughts of Carolyn Russell, the disappeared girl, in the months before she went missing. This strand is told in first person by Carolyn herself, an interesting narrative choice given that the reason her disappearance was never solved was that nobody knew what was really going on in her head, or indeed her life, at the time. The reader, therefore, for most of the time knows more than Stephanie does. At one point, in fact, one of Stephanie’s interviewees tells what we already know must be a lie, but Stephanie has no means of knowing it.

We also sometimes know more than Carolyn does, for her narrative is that of a sixteen-year-old girl who is apt to interpret things amiss, particularly when she deludes herself that her maths teacher is in love with her. The way a teenage girl thinks and talks is very convincingly mirrored in the writing – “A group of girls had gone nearer to the fence but we didn’t want to get close. They were the sort who knotted their shirt ends into a bra top and showed off their flat stomachs while they sunbathed.” Nowhere is this thought process better handled than in Carolyn’s fantasy about the unfortunate Mr Simmons:

“I stood there watching him miraculously correct the blinds and they slung into place. As he adjusted the strips to shade the room, I knew I had to act quickly or miss my chance.

‘I’ll get my things.’ Dropping down to pick up my bag, I rose again and bumped his arm. He acted startled and pulled away. I knew it was a little joke between us.”

If much of Carolyn’s life is a secret from others (including the reader, for we shall find by the end that we knew less about her than we thought, or rather, we dismissed some clues that did not seem to fit the image we were forming of her), Stephanie’s is the reverse. I did occasionally wonder if we were being told more of the minutiae of her life than we needed to know – “Stephanie allowed plenty of time to arrive at the meeting with Janine. Trains ran twice an hour and she knew Warren town centre was a fair walk from the station. With twenty minutes to spare, Stephanie took a detour around the streets. When she reached the church, she sat on a bench and appraised the squat grey building. The origins were Norman, but the addition of a porch and a tower made it appear quirky.” None of this actually turns out to be relevant, and so much scene-setting can slow the pace down. There is, however, admittedly a case to be made for stressing the contrast between Stephanie and Carolyn; Stephanie herself sometimes sees parallels between them but in most ways they couldn’t be less alike, and Carolyn would not notice the church or recall the first thing about it.

The other minor quibble I have is with a stylistic tic whereby sentences often start with a participial phrase – in this paragraph four out of eight sentences do so:

“Sitting at my desk, I fanned the index cards from Sim and admired the lovely pastel colours. I tossed the yellow ones aside, needing no reminder of Mr Canary. Closing my eyelids, I blocked out the image of him leering towards me. Not for a moment had I imagined he’d try something on. Thank God I’d escaped in time. Squeezing my eyes tighter, I extinguished the memory and my heart settled to a regular beat. It was a relief he hadn’t returned to the shop since. He was an utter waste of space compared to my one true love. Choosing a red biro from the pot, I gripped the end and prepared to write.”

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this device, it becomes predictable and occasionally the opening phrase, separated from its governing noun, dangles comically: “Formerly a tobacconist shop, Beth was the talented baker who put the café at the top of TripAdvisor reviews.”

Since the plot hangs on a mystery, it would be wrong to reveal too many details. Enough to say that it’s definitely a page-turner, not just because we want to know what happened to Carolyn but because we are also invested in Stephanie and whether she will succeed in turning her life around via the podcast. Interestingly enough, this turns out to depend less on whether she can solve the mystery than on whether she can put it, and other aspects of her life, behind her. The characters are well drawn, particularly Beth, the lodger, Doug, Stephanie’s ex-boss and Mrs Russell, Carolyn’s mother. The central investigation is always gripping and its final result a refreshing variant on the usual “missing girl” plot.

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage […] a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.”

Blackstone’s Commentaries, explaining succinctly the nature of legal “coverture” and why the best, in fact almost the only plan for a woman in the Georgian era who wanted to make a success in life was to be unmarried or a widow. Many of those here discussed were one or the other, and those who were married often had husbands who left them, drank their profits or were otherwise more of a hindrance than a help. Women like Anna and Elizabeth Fry, belonging to the Society of Friends, were fortunate in that the Friends were far less apt to see women as adjuncts of men.

The other huge disadvantage women faced was their relative lack of education.  By a deft if immoral circular argument, men dismissed the importance of education for women on the ground that they had no role in affairs, while denying them such a role on the ground that they were not educated for it. As the anonymous “Sophia” wrote, “The Men, by thinking us incapable of improving our intellects, have entirely thrown us out of all the advantages of education, and thereby contributed as much as possible to make us the senseless creatures they imagine.” Most, though not all, of the successful women here discussed had a better education than was usual for their time.

One of the most admirable, indeed, was Jane Marcet, with the advantage of a Swiss father of progressive ideas who had her educated alongside her brothers. When she married a physician and chemist, she developed an interest of her own in science, absorbing knowledge by attending scientific lectures. But her real innovation was to hit on the idea of writing a basic science textbook aimed at children, girls in particular, in the form of a conversation between two girls and their teacher, Mrs Bryan. “Not only was it intended to be read by girls, but it introduced to those girls the idea that the person imparting the scientific knowledge could be female.” It was not only girls who read it, though, as that most generous-natured of scientists, Michael Faraday, acknowledged; “Mrs. Marcet’s ‘Conversations on Chemistry’ ... gave me my foundation in that science […] hence my deep veneration for Mrs Marcet.”

Widows often took over their late husband’s business and there showed their aptitude for another field supposedly outwith their capabilities. Hester Bateman became a noted silversmith and established a long-lasting family business; this happened quite often in silversmithing families. Mrs Clements, another widow, developed a new and highly profitable method of milling mustard. Anna Fry, after the death of her husband Joseph, carried on the family chocolate business. Many wives, like printer and printshop owner Mary Darly, must have been equal partners in business with their husbands, but because of coverture we do not know of most of them, whose husbands were not as honest as Josiah Wedgwood in admitting their debt: “I never had a great plan that I did not submit to my wife”.

However, one of the most outstanding female successes of the Georgian business world stayed single. Eleanor Coade tapped into the growing market for an artificial stone that could be used to mass-produce architectural details like scrolls and carvings and which would withstand weather. Previous attempts had failed. Eleanor was a keen clay modeller (she had exhibited at the RSA) and may have experimented with her own mixes. At any rate, she came up with a product she named “lithodipyra” – twice-fired stone. It wasn’t the most catchy name, but architects like Adam and Nash could not get enough of it. It was light, easy to work and extremely durable, so much so that it can still be seen in features on Buckingham Palace and the Brighton Pavilion. It was also exported, going as far as the USA, the West Indies and St Petersburg. It became known as Coade stone, which seems only fair, and though over 650 items in it have been identified, thousands more exist; they simply have never had occasion to be repaired. She was also a good businesswoman and died wealthy: “Eleanor left much of her money to various charities, and to specific female friends on condition that the gifts were not to be controlled by their husbands. It revealed the feminist beliefs held by Eleanor – she regarded coverture as iniquitous.” No wonder she never married.

There are more famous examples recounted here – Hannah More, Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Fry, Mary Wollstonecraft – but in some ways the less well-known, like those above and others, are the most fascinating. But I’ll let you meet them for yourself.