"The Ambassador" by Tom Fletcher

An audio book.

A prologue introduces many people -

• Ed Barnes, the UK's ambassador in France. His wife, Lady Emma, works in a bookshop - Hemingway and Co. Their's wasn't a love which began with hot passion. It's fading. Ed thinks she might be having an affair with a bookshop worker.
• General Max Crawford (embassy security)
• Lynn Redwood - foreign secretary. Ed and her had an affair.
• Orelee - Algierian-born lawyer, nicknamed "sparrow"
• Lenny Goddard - butler. He's been there 20 years. Caribbean
• Aula Fitzgerald - Le Monde reporter
• Amena Joshee - an Indian who's become an embassy resident. She'll die in an hour

A week before, Magnus Pederson meets a fat Russian, Chirkin. Pederson has lots of compromising info on public figures, including Ed Barnes. More people are introduced -

• Sophie Rawlings - a new speechwriter
• Alem - Brown's deputy, a woman married to a woman.

It's post-Covid - life has changed. Amena, a friend of Emma at Oxford, criticises governments online. When she asked for asylum at the embassy, it couldn't be refused. While Ed gives a speech, her throat is cut. A camera's been installed in herroom. The French police arrive. Ed soon sends them away. He's worried about the safety of his daughter, Steph. Pederson leaks his info about several people - their browser histories, etc. Spies, prospective US governors, etc are exposed, leading to suicides and wrecked careers.

Ed wants to run the investigation - something at last that he can be committed to. And it might impress his wife. He doesn't think it was a suicide (people say that Alema had a martyr complex). He wants to know if there's a connection between Danish Anarchist Pederson and Amena. The Dissenters tell people to protest outside UK embassies. One of them sets himself alight. There are other suicides. Ed sees that the bloodied knife at the death scene has been swapped.

He's told he has to go to London. There he’s dismissed by his boss. His wife uses the opportunity to move in with her lover. Ed goes to Oxford to follow a lead. He discovers that Taythan is researching into sentiment analysis. He finds Aula there, following the same lead. She receives a death threat. She’d been in close touch with Pederson and Amena. Amena had planned suicide and Aula was supposed to report her last words to spur the campaign. But something went wrong. Maybe Lenny had been Amena’s messenger. Did Pederson think that Aula had tried to talk Amena out of suicide? The 2 of them go to Wales to hide out in his cottage. In the dark, someone lurks outside. Max Crawford appears, saying he’s killed someone (American, he thinks) and wants Ed to help him bury the body.

They decide that the cottage isn’t safe. Ed goes to Copenhagen to find Pederson. He turns up armed to Pederson's warehouse HQ and find him. It's so easy he assumes he's expected. He and Pederson debate the future of civilisation. Pederson is about to release more secrets. Pederson tells him that Aula did indeed fail to follow plans, and Lenny had been helpful. Crawford was working for the Americans. Pederson says that there was another helper within the embassy. Pederson's about to show Ed Amena's final video when the warehouse is raided. Pederson's killed. Ed survives. The warehouse is blown up by a US missile that the president announces as a strike for freedom.

He goes to Lebanon to meet Russians - they have a video of Amena's last minutes. Negotiations fail, but he learns from Aula why Pederson hated him - Steff was the only woman he ever loved. Were Taythan and Emena working together? Did the Americans consider them a threat?

He returns to Paris. He learns that the next set of leaks will reveal that Lynn had had an abortion (his child). Crawford and Aula have disappeared. He fears that Lenny is in danger, knowing too much. He finds out that Aula and his wife were much closer friends than he thought. He talks to his daughter, who tells him that she was there at the end. Lenny is found dead - looks like suicide.

He understands why Taythan's work is useful - predicting people's wants is a useful tool of control. He's still puzzled about why Crawford saved them, and why the knife was swapped.

Steff had told Crawford to protect him from news about her that might upset Ed. He tried to destroy the evidence etc. He died in the Copenhagen bombing?

In the epilogue, months later, we learn how the cast of characters have fared. Taythan is on a super-yacht. Ed and Steff are living in a big house in England. Emma is living with a new (female?) partner.

I assumed that Steff was involved, though Ed didn't consider it. When he did find out, he wasn't very shocked. Nor was he stunned to learn that his wife had dreamed of raising a family with Amena. And Steff talks calmly about how she assisted Amena's death.

I like the diplomatic chit-chat -

• "master of the weaponised anecdote"
• "I think you're a rebel, but you don't yet know what you're rebelling about"

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera

An audio book. I read this years ago, and remember liking it.

Tomas (his 3rd person PoV), 33, a brain surgeon living in Prague, reads Nietzsche, and wonders about his idea of eternal return. If we only live once, we have nothing to compare with when we make decisions. If life endlessly repeats, it's heavy. But also "einmal ist keimal". He's been married and has a son. He's decided not to see them again. Teresa suddenly appears in his life. They live like a married couple though he keeps sex-only lovers. She becomes a photographer. When the Russians invade, she takes photographs which end up being more useful to the Russians than the Czechs. They leave for Switzerland. She returns to Prague without warning. They've been together 7 years. He feels light again. Then he returns to Prague.

The author explains that the characters were born from phrases, not flesh. We learn about Teresa's family, the amazing coincidences that led to their meeting. Coincidences aren't what distinguish novels from real life, we're told. Sabina, Tomas's long-lasting lover, an artist, helped her become a photographer. They took nude photos of each other.

Teresa thinks that Tomas left her because she was too serious, treating body and mind as a unit. She tries sleeping with another man just for sex. It turns out to be a trap so that she can be blackmailed into being an informer. Tomas refuses to retract a published article and is effectively sacked. He becomes a window cleaner, enjoying the "blissful indifference" of the work. He's had 100s of lovers, The new job gives him access to many more. He seeks in them the tiny detail that makes then different to any other woman. His son (who he's never spoken to) turns up with an editor asking him to sign a manifesto. He refuses.

Franz (a married man with a grown daughter and a wife who threatened to kill herself if he left her) and Sabina are together. Then he goes with a student. He goes to Cambodia, is mugged, and dies back in Europe

Teresa and Tomas live in a farmer's cottage. Their dog is Carenin, who dies - the saddest part of the book. Teresa apologies to Tomas for causing him so many problems - "but haven't you noticed I'm happy?" he replies. He discovers that his son (Simon, for sake of argument) broke contact with his staunch communist mother, deciding that religion is the way out.

There's some meta-writing - when a character does something strange the narrator says "I can only suggest ..." Later, he says "Now we are in a better position to understand..."

"Pet" by Catherine Chidgey

An audio book.

Justine is visiting her demented father in a home, with her daughter Emma. The helper Sonia looks familiar. Justine was school age (at a Catholic school) when her mother died. She's mildly epileptic. Her best friend was Amy, whose mother came from Hong Kong. Amy gets picked on. They fall out. Her favourite teacher was Mrs Price whose husband and daughter died in an accident. She became teacher's pet. When she collected Mrs Price's prescription, the chemist says he can no longer provide the pills. They're morphine. Justine know that morphine's still in her house, so she gave the pills to Mrs Price. We get brief forewarnings of trouble ahead. Her father owned an antiques shop. He drank. Justine helped there. Mrs Price offers her a cleaning job. Things are being stolen at school. Amy's suspected by her schoolmates. Justine did nothing to help Amy, though she had evidence that Mrs Price was stealing. Her father started going out with Mrs Price.

I like the cryptic/poignant messages in invisible ink that her mother left around.

Amy fell off a cliff. She left a note whose contents we don't discover until later. Amy's parents blame Mrs Price and also Justine.

When Justine was first pregnant, she had an abortion without telling Dom (who wanted a family). The second time she had the child and didn't regret it.

The stealing starts again. She and Dom are friends at school. Dom's parents are campaigning Pro-Lifers. There's a locked room in Mrs Price's house. When Justine finds the key and looks in, she sees lots of the stolen items. She has a siezure and passes out, either inside the room or after she locked up again. She's found by Mrs Price. With the marriage a week away, she's told she's going on a honeymoon cruise with them. She makes the headmaster look into Mrs Price's locked room. It's all but empty. She sees Amy's note, which makes her think that Mrs Price killed Amy. Mrs Price tells her that she (Justine) killed Amy then had a siezure - Mrs Price says she made it look like suicide to save Justine. Justine kills Mrs Price in self defence.

Sonia looks familiar because she's Mrs Price's daughter.

I liked the writing, though a little too much of the plot (the empty spare room, the identity of Sonia) is predictable.

Other reviews

• Catherine Taylor (Chidgey’s examination of sexual politics is ruthless, with the girls crudely ranking each other in terms of prettiness and thinness and avidly watching beauty contests on TV. At school, the children are primed for a morbid fascination with death, from the cruel treatment of the classroom’s pet salamander to the shocking events that play out later in the novel. Lessons on the Indigenous history of Australasia, meanwhile, simply reinforce colonialism. Amy, from a Chinese family, is systematically bullied and ostracised. ... Less successful is the rather camp acceleration of the plot into high-octane thriller territory, and the book’s too-neat denouement, set decades afterwards in 2014. Despite this, Chidgey’s grasp of the slipperiness and self-delusion of memory – from Justine as an increasingly unreliable narrator, to her father’s later dementia – is faultless.)
• Meredith Boe (The novel makes many connections under the theme of memory. Justine’s mother lost memories as she was dying, and thirty years after the heart of the story takes place, Justine cares for her father who has dementia. Justine doesn’t remember what happens right before a seizure, and because stress can cause them, some of the book’s most pivotal moments happen within these spaces of lost memory.)
• Hephzibah Anderson

"The infernal garden" by Gregory Leadbetter (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Poetry Birmingham, Bad Lilies, Under the Radar, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court, etc.

The trilogy of Self, voice/sounds and the written word appear in several of the poems, especially at endings. Sometimes it is Nature's voice (rather than a human's) that appears from a void -

• Then, as the river turned to flow, it was real and what the broken water said, I heard. It rose, as if a wish had kept its word, to breathe the earth - submerged, and let the river heal. (p.38)

• I try to call down the contours of sound whose words are like those of a bird ... The air and its instrument alphabet, the neume that calls back to the bird. (p.43)

• It doesn't matter who I am, nor that my lips speak and close before you see them move. (p.47)

• the glass cell of spoken thought: a self uttermost inside a space as far as a human voice is thrown. (p.51)

• And so, in his words, the dark speeds from his throat as the silence that breaks to surround his tongue. It is where he listens: the rift where the speaker enters his speech - where the I is heard and hidden. (p.59)

• Let us slip the habits of ourselves and reap the silence that of its nothing grows (p.85)

Some other poems end with a statement about the failure to express -

• The nests that sowed the world with young are empty, and the young are lost on wings too new to know, calling for the broken heaven of the speckled blue egg I keep as a secret and cannot let go (p.25)

• The rain has sifted pale Saharan dust in desert powders ghosting water's trails across the sun-drowned day's midsummer crust. The air remembers how to move but fails. (p.27)

• Trees half-spoken in a winter mist start to walk in a distant speech that stills again when they are seen a few steps nearer to the ear they reach (p.73)

• The bunting has vanished into the art of its plumage but, like the cry out of sight, is nonetheless real unseen, for being both feather and veil. The man in the hide, out of reach of his language, is blown on the notes that rise through the reeds to the ear (p.77)

The language is usually elevated, with a wide vocabulary -

• Those figures at work in the wound of a fen I see from a train have cut the skin of the several worlds with the same precision as the sacred geometry of the first propylon (p.18)

• Weird as a withered human foot once held to be that of a saint - refuse from a reliquary pillaged for the jewelled slipper it had worn - this fallen oak, all bole, its branches long since lopped by the dead for the dead, lies like the uncut hull of a Bronze Age boat on the lost shore of its flickering field. (p.37)

• had not been seen since human fires burned so low they let the night etch the mind with all its stars (p.74)

"Selected Poems” by Kate Clanchy (Picador, 2014)

Poems from Ambit, Magma, Poetry Review, Rialto, etc. collected from her 3 books - "Slattern", "Samarkand" and "Newborn".

First, some generalisations -

• In "Speculation", an eclipse is due - a dark "counter for the highest stakes" is about to slide over a brighter one. The persona's been told for safety's sake to watch backwards, in a mirror. This is compared to a relationship - "I thought of how it is with us - I stare, you turn away and flush." So the title refers to predictions about love as well as about gambling and the eclipse. Like many of her pieces, it's an extended metaphor.
• "Speculation" is 4 5-lined stanzas. Like most of her poems, it's made of equally sized rectangles. In this well-crafted poem I think the stanza-breaks are significant, as are many of the line-breaks. Hoever, most of the poems have fairly arbitrary shapes - line-breaks have to be ignored otherwise they're distracting. "Mendings" for example is printed as 22 short-lined triplets, but could have been couplets or prose.
• She's good at snapshots of relationships - the poems on p.18-21 capture moments. And there are moving (or soppy) soundbites - "Patagonia" ends with "When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant// skies all empty aching blue. I meant/ years. I meant all of them with you."
• "Grace Ethel must have heard it fall/ and thrash: a rush like love, at first,/ then a nagging, migrainous pulse,/ then a flutter like a faulty value/ in the chimney's hidden ventricle" (p.68, about finding a bird's skeleton up a chimney). There are many things "like love" in the book, even if they're not labelled as such.
• In my comments on 'Samarkand' that I wrote in 1999, I ended with "If she started writing short stories I fear her poetry production might cease." Maybe I had in mind poems like "The Bridge Over the Border" which starts with "Here, I should surely think of home -/ my country and the neat steep town/ where I grew up: its banks of cloud,/ the winds and changing, stagey light,/ its bouts of surly, freezing rain, or failing that,// the time the train stuck here half an hour./ It was hot, for once"
• Many of the poems from "Newborn" deal with situations common to new parents, situations that are often written about. All of the poems have something to say, but I don't think it always needs a whole poem/page to say it. The first ultrasound scan of the foetus is often awe-inspiring for parents, and poem-inspiring for poets. It's hard to believe there's anything new to say on the topic. "Scan" doesn't do a bad job considering, but it doesn't do enough. An exception is "Miscarriage, Midwinter" (a companion piece to "One, Two"), where a mother is playing with her toddler outside - "For weeks we've been promised/ snow ... I'm trying to scrape/ some together, to mould just/ the head of the world's smallest/ snowman, but it's too cold/ and it powders like ash in my hand"

Now some miscellaneous comments -

• I like "Slattern" and "Raspberries" (a loose sonnet) most
• I like "the child who trailed her sister like a slow-to-take-off kite" (p.56)
• I can see that some poems have more to them than I can comprehend. "Deep Blue" for example, may have allusions to "The Seventh Seal". I know that a famous chess computer was called "Deep Blue", and the poem is dedicated to John Blau (i.e. Blue).
• I like "you/ are putting me on, easily,/ the way a foot puts on a shoe" ("One, Two"). The persona is a woman sensing her ten-celled embryo.

"The Venetian Venture" by Suzette A. Hill

An audio book.

1950s. Rosy Gilchrist has been sent to Venice by her boss at the British Museum, Dr Stanley, to find a book of Horace translations annotated by Bodger. While she's there she discovers that an eccentric has offered $1 million for it, and a vase goes with it. Oxford (a descendent of Bodger) want it too. They send Edward Jones (24, from a good family but short of money) to look for it. He has a sister Lucia who lives in Venice. She knows Professor Cedric Dillworthy and Felix Smythe (a florist) who are in Venice to look after Felix's cousin's dog Caruso. Bill Hewson, an American painter is there, and Carlo Ricardo - once in an English PoW camp.

A bookseller is killed. Edward is found struggling in a canal. Bill jumps in to save him, in vain. Cedric thinks that Bill's efforts look more like trying to drown than save. Lucia, Edward's sister, isn't too upset - he'd always been a pain. Rosy thinks she's found the book but it's identied as a fake. The vase has been seen at Bill's studio. An unsent letter to Bill from Edward is found, which looks like a blackmail threat.

Felix and Guy are tied up. Bill threatens Rosy. Bill is the baddy, The bookseller had helped make a fake. Guy and Felix save her. Guy and Bill die. Felix disposes of the bodies using a gondola. There's a paragraph where Rosy recalls the episode as an 80 year old in a care home - strange. There's a funeral, and Rosy gets the book in the end for nothing.

Too many of the characters come straight from a farce cast. I'd like some of the characters to feel something. And I'd like more of the atmosphere of Venice to come through, not just some details.

Other reviews

• Radmila May ()

"Roundabout of death" by Faysal Khartash

An audio book set in Aleppo, Syria, 2012.

1st (Jomaa, once a teacher) and 3rd person. Intellectuals and coffee bars, whores, soldiers, black-marketeers, children from raided villages.

Snipers from minarets, carbombs, fighter planes, suicide bombers, Russian rifles.

Streets which change allegiance overnight. Trouble visiting his mother. Bribes.

His son is arrested, abused, released. Jomaa goes to Raka, hoping to rent a house there, to get away. It's changed since he last visited. ISIS have taken over. A man come on his bus, asks each woman who her guardian is (one of them is being accompanied by her 12 year old daughter), cuts fingernails of the passengers if they're too long, threatens the bus driver who should have checked. 3 heads hang from the clock-tower. He meets Baha by chance, a friend he first met in Paris, who once dreamt of a film career. They have a meal. Next morning he's disappeared on a Jihad mission - he's been trained. Jomaa decides to go back home.

He feels lumps on his head - something to do with sex. Strange. The translator tries to explain them in their notes. I'm not convinced.