"Cloudless" by Rupert Dastur (Fig tree, 2025)

Catrin (46, a piano teacher) and John (who left school at 14) run a farm in Wales which is struggling. Their relationship is struggling too. They've 2 sons. Rhys is 16, and Harri, a soldier, has just started a 6 month stint in Iraq having got a degree from Bangor. Their dog Flint is getting old. Catrin's widowed mother Alice still lives in the house where Catrin grew up. She's always thought that John wasn't good enough for her daughter. John's dad died after a tractor accident and later his mother died. The farm's been in the family for generations.

So the scene is set for wife/husband aspirational conflict, with the sons as pieces in the game as well as observers. Sections are mostly Catrin's or John's 3rd person PoV. They begin with quotes from "The Report of the Iraq Inquiry". On p.25 for example it says that Fallujah "was 'littered' with IEDs which would need to be located and made safe before reconstruction could begin in earnest" which could be an analogy for their relationship. Landscape and rural life form an expressive backdrop - there are sections where knowledge about farming, fishing, or hunting shows.

John is drinking and gambling - the banks are sending warning letters. Tim is an old friend with a much bigger farm. Catrin asks if he'd buy the farm off them. She sees Matt in town for the first time in years. They were at school and Uni together. He was an artist and they'd thought of sharing a creative life together before he'd left for London. They start having sex. John tells Catrin about his gambling.

John and Rhys ride in the last hunt before the ban. Matt is separated, with two daughters. "Catrin catches Matt watching the young man as he walks away and she wonders if the rumours that had circled at university had any substance".

On p.135 we read that the Iraq situation "could destabilise the Middle East, create a safe haven for international terrorists and damage the reputation and morale of the UK defence forces". John is angry that they can find no weapons of mass destruction. Harri's letters home are full of nostalgia.

Bailiffs arrive. They go off with her much loved piano. She phones her mother for help only to find that she's already given John £8k. John hints to Steff that he knows about her affair. So they both feel guilt.

Harri returns for 2 weeks - his 3rd-person PoV. During his stay he gets his father to go to Gambler's Anonymous (by telling him about far worse experiences in Iraq), talks to Rhys about his school behaviour (Rhys says it was caused by rumours about Harri), pays off bits of his father's loans, and continues his long-felt passion for farm-hand Simon.

When Matt returns to London he invites Catrin down for the opening of his show, suggesting she should stay the night. At the show there's arty-chitchat and bitchy comments about Matt - that he'd sleep with anything that has two legs. His wife slashes a painting. Steff leaves immediately. Her menopause is starting. They meet some weeks later at Llandudno. He tries to explain himself. She breaks it off. When he gets in his car John gets in too, with a sawn-off shotgun. He scares Matt, then leaves.

He accepts Tim's generous offer for part of the land. The dog's dying. Catrin and John ride horses together while The Grand National is on, to distrast him. She feels a little better - maybe thing will work out. He and Alice have got her piano back. While she plays a piece she's being composing during Harri's time away, the phone rings.

It's years later. We're led to believe that Harri is dead. Rhys (who's about to marry) and Simon are helping with the farm. They've opened a Rehab Centre for Soldiers, and accommodation. Harri is in a wheelchair. Everybody seems content. The farm and family have survived.

Other reviews

• republic of words (Books on recent history need to tread a thin line between over-familiarity ... and avoidance ..., and Dastur attempts to do both by quoting from contemporary sources on the Iraq War to give a sense of what those at home would know of what was happening on the ground. It doesn’t quite work, leaving much of Harri’s tale on the cutting room floor, but it does offer the sense that his parents are in a purgatory not of their own making.)
• Goodreads

"The Killings at Badger’s Drift" by Caroline Graham

An audio book set in 1987.

Miss Emily Simpson (80) sees 2 people having sex in the woods. Later when she's at home she phones the Samaritans. There's a knock at the door. Next day she's found dead. Her friend Lucy (also a spinster) is suspicious (she reads whodunnits) and goes to the police.

Detective Tom Barnaby (who likes gardening) has a wife who does AmDram but can't cook, a daughter Cully who's at Cambridge doing a degree, and a colleague Troy. Because there are doubts about the professionalism of the local doctor (Trevor Lessitor), Barnaby gets a PM done and finds Simpson died of Hemlock poisoning

Barbara Lessitor, 40+, is pretty. She began shoplifting make-up and clothes when 15. While a virgin, she attracted a boss at work who got her pregnant. When he gave her money to get an abortion she left her job and become an escort. Then she found a widower, Trevor Lessitor, in a supermarket. They married, but Barbara has never been liked by Judy, Lessitor's plump daughter. Barbara is having an affair and for some reason needs £5k.

Catherine Lacey, pretty, is about to marry Henry Trace - a wheelchaired widower who owns a farm. Her brother is Michael, an artist (who Henry's supporting? Who Judy fancies?). The farm manager is attractive David Whiteley, separated, with a son he's not seen for a while. Phyllis is the live-in house-maid (and sister of Henry's first wife), who'll have to leave. Henry's first wife died in a shooting accident. Barnaby researches into it. Michael was one of the beaters. Denis is gay - his mother's nosy.

Trevor frequents an up-market brothel because his wife doesn't like having sex with him.

Denis's mother is violently killed. She's been keeping notes about goings on and has been blackmailing people. Phyllis is arrested for the death of Henry's first wife. She confesses (she wanted Henry), and is found dead in the night in a police cell. A bloody knife is found in Michael's house. He's arrested too. He says he sketched Judy for 2 hours when the 2nd murder happened, and the knife was planted. Barbara admits to having an affair with Whiteley (whose wife says is violent and over-sexed). Trevor says she can stay if she submits to his conditions. She rejects his offer.

In the end Michael and Catherine are the guilty ones. They were in an incestuous affair. Tom debriefs to Lucy.

Other reviews

• mysteriesahoy (The heart of the novel though has to be the mystery and I am disappointed to say that in this respect I found the book a little lacking. ... Too much hinges on discoveries about personal lives, while our understanding of the case itself felt a little static.)
• Cat Eldridge ([the characters] feel like simple and not terribly interesting plot devices, not real beings. ... Kudos to the TV series’ writers for changing Barnaby and Troy from less than appealing characters into individuals worth knowing!)

"The continental affair" by Christine Mangan

An audio book.

A woman sees a man in a train. They act as if they're strangers. They met 2 weeks before. There had been problems in Belgrade. They're on their way to Istanbul. It's the 1960s.

Henri was born in Algeria to a French father (Marseilles) and Spanish mother (Granada). He went to university and became a policeman to make them happy. When they died in a car accident and the political situation in Oran was difficult, he went to Spain, doing undercover deliveries/pickups for his family. On a job to collect money at the Alhambra he sees a woman drop money and another pick it up. He follows her towards Paris.

When Louise Barnard's invalid father died, he left £40. She decided to spend it on a holiday to Alhambra rather than on his funeral. She's 28, a factory worker - tall, strong, thin. Her mother had left for Paris years before, sending just one letter back. When she'd found the £5,000 she'd been almost penniless. She decided to head for Paris by bus. She can speak French.

She finds out that her mother died. She catches a train to Istanbul. He follows. She tells him about her father and the money. She wants to change her life. At Istanbul they realise that they're being followed by a man - one of Henri's Spanish associates. They can't lose him in the Grand Bazaar. She ends up with a gun and the follower is wounded. She escapes, claiming she's lost the money.

In the epilogue she's at Oran years later hoping Henri will pass by.

Other reviews

• Janice Ottersberg (The structure of the novel is complex and requires close reading. Pivoting on a mysterious event in Belgrade, the narrative switches between two legs of the journey – before Belgrade and after.)
• Kirkus reviews (The book is front-loaded with too much backstory, but a patient reader will quickly be rewarded by an unconventional heist narrative that is equal parts moving and thrilling. ... The novel is a smart riff on a familiar genre, with complex protagonists and a cliché-defying love story.)
• RoughJustice (The Continental Affair has an unusual structure, which at first is a little confusing, but ultimately serves the story well. Each chapter begins with the pair sharing a train carriage not far from their final destination. These scenes are followed by a flashback, told from their alternate points of view, bringing the story forward to the present.)

"A User's Guide to Make-Believe" by Jane Alexander

An audio book.

Cassie visits some kind of addiction meeting. She hasn't been for a few months. She sees a man there, Lewis, who she senses has the same problem as her. They talk. They'd both been addicted (and banned from) a VR product create by Imagen. She wants to sleep with him. He's half-hearted, saying he's just left a relationship (later he says that his partner had a VR-related death). They sleep sexlessly together.

By the time Cassie was 16 her mother had died and her father was planning to start a new life in Australia. She began living with classmate Alan and his mother Vanessa, who has just died. She attends the funeral. When she was sacked by Imagen she became poor. She started a company offering support to students (essay-writing, help with deadlines, etc). Nikol, one of his employees, is a tech-wizard. Imagen finds that their clients' VR logs give helpful info for targetted advertising.

She visits Alan in a lock-up ward. Who's paying for his treatment now? Who's his next of kin? He doesn't remember her. She has a sister Meg who has children Ella and Finn. When they overnighted with her once she neglected them, losing all track of time on Make-Believe.

Imagen, based in a grey tower on campus, was spun off from the university. Its genius is Prof Morgan. Because it received government funding - a flagship project - there's pressure on it to succeed. There was hope that Make-Believe would one day be a shared world, useful for education, mental therapy, and sex entertainment. Cassie talks to Morgan, who tells her that some users can connect longer than the allowed 2 hours/day, and that shared worlds can't happen. There's a section from Morgan's PoV suggesting that she's worried about Cassie's questions. Cassie goes to an exhibition about Make-Believe (a way to deliver an info-dump - there are also FAQ section). Bioware is inhaled and an earpiece used to connect to secure 6G network. She connects to Make-Believe though she's been banned. She meets Alan there - or is it her imagination? Imagen bring her in - she's broken her agreement. They explain that they want to stop users interacting with each other - it's a bug. Their plan is to update her bioware so that it will spread among other users and fix the bug. If she agrees, they'll give her back her job. She agrees because if she passes the upgrade onto Alan he'll suffer less (she thinks he's a victim of the bug). She's been suspicious of Lewis. Now she finds evidence that he's working for Imagen.

She breaks into Prof Morgan's house. Morgan says she had a partner who she lost because of Make-Believe. She's privately been working on a real remedy. Imagen are planning to do product placement in the VR world. Cassie tries the remedy. She wakes in Meg's house. She reads that Imagen's share values are sinking - Prof Morgan has been whistle-blowing? She visits Alan (in VR?), who remembers her now (his expenses have been paid by Imagen). The "campaign for real life" has gained pace. She realises that her VR meeting with Alan are in her imagination.

Other reviews

• thewallflowerdigest (I did find the first half of the book stronger than the latter. Some things were easy to see coming, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with where the plot went but I did I like how the unreliability of Cassie’s point of view was played with.)
• The Only Gaijin in the Village

"Hedonism" by Chris McCabe (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from London Magazine, Poetry Review, etc.

My favourite is "A poet & two translators". "Lockedowne Aventure" is the one I least like. Most of the others are beyond me.

Other reviews

• Carol Rumens (It confirms a prodigious talent for the assimilation of ideas, and for letting them loose in forms that are variously experimental, and use the full muscle and gristle of lived language)

"The cult of the avant-garde artist" by Donald Kuspit (CUP, 1993)

It concerns the artist's role in society - how the maladies of each affects the other - and the artist's use of past art. Duchamp, Mondrian, Warhol, Beuys, Schnabel, etc. 113 pages followed by 57 pages of notes.

Compressing the main points below - the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, influencing his public's perception of that art. The postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, mocking innovation by turning the new into a cliché. Fame is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure.

• "These, then, are the basic articles of faith in the avant-garde artist: he is more spontaneous - primordially expressive - than anyone else because he is more absolutely integrated than anyone else, and he can experience in a more primordial way than other people because his sense perception is not bound by symbolic functioning ... To put this in Whiteheadean language, it is because the artist does not accept society's symbol systems that he is able to sense with unusual directness what is fundamental" (p.7)
• "In its decadent appropriation of avant-garde art, the neo-avant-garde is narcissistic, however much the avant-garde art produced under the auspices of the idea of art for art's sake seems to be narcissistic as well. If art for art's sake implies narcissism, it is secondary or defensive narcissism, rather than the consummate, cynical, self-celebratory narricism of neo-avant-garde art" (p.8)
• "Fear of decadence and the wish for rejuvenation haunt - indeed, terrorize - modern thinking about art" (p.9)
• "The artist is able to revive the decadent audience's will to live" (p.11)
• "The artist's deliberate will to create art stops the drift to decadence, and the advance of art embodies the reversal of this drift" [Nietzsche] (p.11)
• "unless art is made for an audience in desperate need of transfiguration, of control over the chaos in itself, of form, then art is merely the expression of vanity" [Nietzsche] (p.12)
• "Until the present state of postmodernist disillusionment, belief in art's profound healing power ... was the cornerstone of belief in avant-garde art" (p.12)
• "[postmodernism] exploits its audience's susceptibility to art, its unconscious hope for transfiguration by art, but offers little in return" (p.12)
• "Art today has reached a new extreme of decadence, in which it dialectically incorporates all the past signs of artistic rejuvenation ... while denying their contemporary possibility" (p.13)
• "For the neo-avant-garde artist, the avant-garde past is not a land of milk and honey, but a desert with half-buried, broken, dubious treasures, to be excavated with ironic curiosity. He incorporates these fragments in his art the way medieval church builders subsumed the stones of ancient temples, and thus the gods these housed" (p.16)
• "Avant-garde art climaxes in the belief that every member of society can be an innovator, that is, can transform himself through the therapeutic practice of art, from a wounded decadent into a healthy Overman" (p.19)
• "[The neo-avant-garde artist] restablishes the traditional, easy reciprocity between society and artist denied by the avant-garde artist and destroyed through his self-imposed ostracization ... A major symptom of this new artistic worldliness is the explicit use of artistic innovation to win fame and fortune" (p.20)
• "modern art's manneristic "fondness for far-fetched connections," [] in fact acknowledges profound disconnection" (p.22)
• "The basic contention of this book is that the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, an intention that not only informs his art but influences his public's perception of that art" (p.28)
• "Fame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure" (p.28)
• "Avant-garde art, as I have suggested, involves a wish to regress to the primordial beginning to escape the decadent end" (p.29)
• "avant-garde art's melting forms are simultaneously symptoms of disintegration anxiety and indications of a process of creative reintegration of the self. The notion of "breakthrough" conveys this double meaning" (p.29)
• "Fame is a provocative trap and distorting mirror - ironically, like the artists' objects" (p.35)
• "many modern artists turned to distortion as the promised land of primordial creativity ... These artists are less creative - less astoundingly original - than they think" (p.42)
• "Traditional society was protected from the sense of decadence by belief in the meaningfulness of transcendence, embodied in religion. Abstract art re-embodied it for modern society, which is one reason the first abstract artists felt imbued with a sense of religious mission" (p.56)
• "the geometricist is also schizoid: his geometry is an intellectual defense against the frustration of empty feeling (against which the expressivist has no defense at all) ... Like many intellectuals, the abstract artist is acutely sensitive to his own inner processes, but he is insensitive to - indeed, cut off from - those of others" (p.59)
• ""total spontaneity of expression," as Breton said, is the most direct avenue to the primordial unconscious ... Both the surrealists and expressionists want to make art spontaneously. The former seem to think one can learn to do so" (p.60)
• "Where the modernists were forward-looking psychic revolutionaries, the postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, even if they have ironic insight into the status quo of art and the society" (p.66)
• "disbelief in art's therapeutic power defines post-avant-garde art, which mocks innovation by turning the new into a cliché" (p.66)
• "[Beuys'] shamanism was an attempt to bring the human and scientific together again, as in primordial art" (p.91)
• "Hitler was a failed artist, and Beuys, it should be recalled, was a successful politician, a founder of the Green Party" (p.91)
• "Beuys is the grand climax of a long line of self-contradictory avant-garde narcissists in conflict with a society they want as their audience" (p.98)
• "The real tragedy of the avant-garde artist is that he wants to heal a society that has a vested ironic interest in his pathology" (p.98)
• "Appropriation art is informed by the decadence syndrome: the sense of the decline and impending death of art" (p.106)
• "Art is indeed a confidence game in that it gives the audience confidence in itself. This is why the audience rewards the artist with fame and fortune, giving him, in turn, confidence in the significance of his creativity. Art fuses artist and audience in a mutual narcissism" (p.111)

"My Good Bright Wolf" by Sarah Moss

An audio book - memoir.

She writes that she's trying to be truthful except when she's hiding identities. A voice interrupts when it suspects that there's a deviation from the truth. She's the daughter of Owl (American) and Jumbley Girl. She's the sister of Angel Boy. She was a late reader and felt fat - the bullying was worst when she was 9. She thinks about how the books that she repeatedly read as a child ("Swallows and Amazons", "Little Women", "Little House of the Prairie", "Pilgrims Progress", etc) affected her, giving them a feminist interpretation - she mentioned some of them in her PhD. She's interested in the author/heroine's attitude to food, and the author's approach to truth. She recalls reading "The Bell Jar".

During covid, now a prof with teenage kids, she moves the family to Ireland. She over-exercises, under-eats. By the time she goes to A&E she's on the edge of organ failure. She's 46. Still she refuses sugar, following the advice of the "men of science". She has trouble distinguishing between "care" and "control". She finds she can't write fiction while fasting. She's told to prioritize recovery by giving up work, but she goes on book tours etc - they're not a problem. Her husband and kids do European hikes for holidays. Water is an issue more than food. That becomes a source of arguments too.

She reads about Dorothy Wordsworth, and how she balanced her creative work with domestic chores. She reads about Mary Wollstonecraft and how she coped with male attitudes to female thinkers. She assesses whether these female characters are like 1st or 2nd wave feminists.

She talks about her suicidal thoughts (Mary Wollstonecraft tried, Virginia Woolfe succeeded). On a walk she sees a wolf. Was it a female?