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Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights, by Essie Fox

As the publisher puts it:

With a nature as wild as the moors she loves to roam, Catherine Earnshaw grows up alongside Heathcliff, a foundling her father rescued from the streets of Liverpool. Their fierce, untamed bond deepens as they grow – until Mr Earnshaw’s death leaves Hindley, Catherine’s brutal brother, in control and Heathcliff reduced to servitude.

Desperate to protect him, Catherine turns to Edgar Linton, the handsome heir to Thrushcross Grange. She believes his wealth might free Heathcliff from cruelty – but her choice is fatally misunderstood, and their lives spiral into a storm of passion, jealousy and revenge.

Now, eighteen years later, Catherine rises from her grave to tell her story – and seek redemption.

Why I enjoyed it:

The strapline on my proof copy is ‘Nelly Dean told only half the story’: Wuthering Heights, with its chinese-box-like structure of narrators (so different from Jane Eyre telling her own story!) is just asking for another writer to step in. Essie Fox’s seventh novel does just that - and quite apart from more literary considerations, it’s hard not to like a book which looks so gorgeous, spredges and all.

As far as I can tell (full disclosure: it’s decades since I read WH) Fox follows the original faithfully - this is no spin-off or riff - but with a crucial new lens: what if we look at Catherine’s human drives and disastrous choices with an understanding how limited her options were, as a young woman of her time, class, circumstances and personality? And what if her ghost doesn’t just haunt Lockwood, but gets to tell her own story, and simultaneously see into the mind of the daughter she didn’t live to see grow up? It’s a project which chimes beautifully with our own, twenty-first century desires to tell history “from below”: to give voice to the voiceless and the victims of circumstance.

One of the most important joys of historical fiction is how the imagined and invented intertwines with what we know as real, making the real come imaginatively alive, and the imagined feel more rootedly real. Of course WH is itself fiction, but classic fictional stories occupy a similar place in our cultural memories as the classic stories we are taught as real history. When they’re used as the basis for new fiction, either can open up similar pleasures: the strange being made familiar and the familiar strange. Catherine works so well with the same kind of pleasures: here are the people and voices we feel we know - Fox isn’t afraid to quote Brontë directly - and the heightened, Gothic world we can sink back into, the intense sense of tragedy-in-waiting - but always with the sting of the new and vivid.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. If you’re drawn to the haunted halls of gothic in historical fiction - as reader, writer or both - Essie Fox really knows her Gothic. Her background is in design and illustration, and for many years her blog Virtual Victorian was a go-to for lovers of material culture. Here on substack, her new podcast is full of delights - and that pedigree shows in Catherine.

2. As a project, Catherine must have been challenging, because following the plotting of Wuthering Heights would, I imagine, have left relatively little room for manouevre - but Fox’s attention to her source feels precise and well-judged. Her previous novel, Dangerous, imagined the disgraced and exiled Lord Byron as turning detective to clear his own name. It’s a fascinatingly different take on the same central writerly conundrum: how imagine outwards from a story the reader already knows, and still make a coherent, self-standing narrative out of it. Well worth studying.

3. One of the challenges for any story which is as much about ‘then’ as ‘now’ is how to handle the moves between different pasts and presents, making sure the reader never feels unmoore, or reads some thought or action as belong to the wrong time. Essentially it’s all in the switches and the tenses - and Fox’s experience shows in this, handling it all very deftly; for more about non-linear narratives, click here.

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Like all writers, I was a reader first and still go back to reading for rest, refuelling and working out writing problems. Like all teachers of writing I’m always going on about ‘reading like a writer’ for the same reasons - but it’s also important to stay in touch with reading ‘like a reader’. And although I don’t review professionally, like all authors I sometimes get sent new and forthcoming books.

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So I’m delighted to have finally launched Book Post. In this special section I’ll be exploring books I’ve read, from the very old to the very new, through the Itch of Writing lens: what they are, why I enjoyed them, and why they could be useful to a writer.

Do note that when I say ‘exploring’, not every book I write about will be one I think is perfect, but I shall be focusing on its merits, not its failings. I honestly believe that we learn as much from thinking about how things are working, as how they’re not working - and besides, only the gods are perfect, and not all of them. On This Itch of Writing, imperfection is just part of the human creative condition. As Anne Enright puts it, ‘In the long run we’re all dead, and none of us is Proust’.

Obviously there are only a few posts there so far, but over the weeks and months it will build. If my post makes you want to read a book, any good library should be able to get hold of it - and if the author is alive and your library system is civilised, they should benefit from Public Lending Right or equivalent payment.

Having said that, this seemed a good moment to launching my new Itch of Writing Bookshop, based on bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops, authors and organisations. There you will find all the books I’ve already got lined up for future Book Posts, a few others that I am constantly recommending here, and my own books too. Each post will link to buy the book there, and if you do buy anything via links on the Itch, a small commission also helps to support the Itch - so thank you!

Practicalities:

All Book Post posts will be available on the Itch of Writing website to subscribers, supporters, super-supporters, followers and casual passers-by.

As with the main Itch of Writing, if you’re a subscriber you can also choose whether to have new Book Post posts emailed to you, or just read them online.

• New subscribers will automatically be subscribed to receive both emails. To change what you do and don’t receive just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

• Existing subscribers have not been automatically subscribed to receive Book Post emails, as I know lots of extra stuff in your inbox is irritating. If you would like to receive them, just go to go to Settings > Subscriptions > pick This Itch of Writing and slide the toggles.

I do hope you enjoy browsing in Book Post, and have a good weekend!

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Truth Like Water by Carys Shannon

As the publisher puts it:

This is a story of lost women – some who can be found again, and some who can’t.

In a small estuary village on the Welsh coast, Catrin is mourning the anniversary of her mother’s drowning when a teenage girl disappears on the same mudflats. Terrified of history repeating itself and driven by unresolved grief, Catrin becomes obsessed with finding Emily.

Her search dredges up dark revelations from the village’s past and present, uncovering secrets about Catrin’s own family. Secrets that her parents had never wanted her to discover.

Why I enjoyed it:

Any novel which opens ‘The first dead body I ever saw was my mother’s’ is either going to draw you immediately in, or have you gently deciding that you’ll need to wait for the right day. That’s a compliment, by the way: Truth Like Water is powerfully atmospheric, ‘Welsh noir at its best’ as one reader describes it - but it’s far from being a routine whodunnit. It’s ’s debut as a novelist and it’s as atmospheric and evocative as the scent of the salt marsh itself. The story that unfolds - both the narrative of the present, and the dredging up of the past - intertwine to make something quietly devastating.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. The story is very atmospheric. That’s partly because the action of both past and present is well-rooted in the physical geography of the estuary, so events and setting feel bound together with a sort of inevitability. But also, crucially, there are no great swathes of ‘description’, no rich embroidery over the fabric of events. The atmosphere mostly comes from the vivid particularity, the specifics within ordinary-seeming sentences about characters’ actions and reactions in that setting.

2. As an internal narrator, Catrin combines narrator and viewpoint character, and we know who she is - and who she was, and would like to be - through how her narrative embodies her story. Using a first-person narrator for a story which is all about uncovering a mystery can help to make the writer’s options manageable, but it can still make it hard to judge how and when the character discovers things. But if there was any sleight-of-hand going on, I didn’t spot it, so the story unfolded very naturally.

3. It’s very well written. I am increasingly unable to be bothered with so-so prose unless I have other strong reasons to want to keep going with a book, but this is a great example of prose which direct and uncomplicated, but supple, always working precisely as the storytelling needs it to. It’s present tense, which can be an awkward fit with an internal narrator, but it never seems clunky. And the dialogue is great: it feels alive and true, both when I mentally read it with a Welsh accent, and when I switched that off and just read.

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I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, by Dodie Smith

Cassandra Mortmain is seventeen, and has decided to keep a journal to practice her speedwriting in the hope of being able to get a job. It’s the 1930s, and she, her older sister Rose and schoolboy brother Thomas live in a tumbledown castle in Suffolk, which their writer father moved into in happier times, after the succès d’estime of his Finnegan’s-Wake-like novel. Then he succumbed to writer’s block and the money ran out, and now they quite often go hungry: even the towels are so threadbare ‘we have to shake ourselves dry’. The girls have been neither bred nor educated to earn a living, but nor do they ever meet anyone to marry. Their stepmother Topaz, ex-artists’ model, just about keeps everyone fed and clothed, when she’s not communing with nature or playing the lute; only Stephen, the lad who grew up with them and has always been embarrassingly devoted to Cassandra, brings in any money at all.

And then one wet night Simon Cotton, the young, anglophile, American man who’s unexpectedly inherited the estate, turns up with his brother, all-American Neil. They make friends with clever Cassandra, their glamorous mother lionises Mortmain, while Simon fall in love with astonishingly beautiful Rose. Cassandra observes the progress of their courtship, the faultlines in her father’s marriage, and her own indifference, curiously: ‘I know all about the facts of life,’ she writes, ‘And I don’t think much of them’.

Why I love it:

‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’ is possibly the best opening line ever, and every sentence of this post could have been illustrated with an equally good one. And it’s not just funny: it also sets the reader up very precisely for how this novel is going to work. Cassandra starts observing their lives just as everything is about to change, and the journal/novel is partly formed by what she observes, but also by how the events change her, ‘poised’ as she is ‘between childhood and adultery’, as Valerie Grove puts it in the introduction in my Virago Classics edition. Refracted through the needs of a very different project, the structure was a big influence on the structure and narrative setup of The Bruegel Boy.

I Capture The Castle is a minor classic of the growing-up story, and the years of its demotion (as some would see it) to Young Adult fiction avant la lettre must have kept it a secret from many adults: currently the only new physical edition I can find has possibly the most awful cover of any book I’ve ever seen, which is why the one I’ve pasted in above is the ebook. That’s a shame, because the novel is centred on one of the great human tragicomedies: the deal we all make in gaining knowledge and experience is also a loss of innocence. Both Anna in The Mathematics of Love, and Una and Mark in A Secret Alchemy owe a sizeable debt to the book.

Although the evocation of the Suffolk seasons (by a painfully homesick Dodie Smith, writing in wartime Hollywood) are quite beautifully done, the book is never saccharine. ‘It’s not a very good game,’ Cassandra thinks almost at the end, contemplating the patterns of love, sex and self-deception that have yoked each of the characters to someone else. ‘The people you play it with are apt to get hurt’.

Three reasons for a writer to read it

1. It’s a good example of how the writer can convey things through a character-narrator that the character themselves doesn’t think. Cassandra loves Rose unconditionally, for example, while we see her from another angle. Mind you, when I first read I Capture the Castle as a teenager myself, I took much of the story at Cassandra’s face value, as it were. Returning to the book in my thirties, I saw more of the satirical edge, and admired Smith’s skill in allowing us to pick up the satire through observant and detached but essentially un-satirical Cassandra: different readers (and different ages of reader) will read different things between the same lines.

2. That structure. I’m always going on, here on the Itch, about the question of ‘Where is the narrator standing, relative to the events of the story?’, and the answer in this case is ‘very close’. But this is not a brain-download: it’s a brilliant example of the value of using past tense and the storytelling mode. This is no would-be movie-script, present tense, first-person, all about the moment. The small but built-in distance that diary-form brings means we know very well that this is Cassandra’s take on her world and, literally and figuratively, her construction of what happened. Indeed, the journal and Cassandra’s writing of it become part of the plot/route, as well as part of the story/journey: she (and we) are aware that how she feels in the ‘now’ of the writing affects what and how she writes. Nor does that seem complicated and self-conscious, because diary-form come so naturally in reflecting the kind of awareness that we all bring to our lives, especially as teenagers.

3. Interestingly, the film of I Capture the Castle is really rather good, even though the book’s form and structure is so – well - booky. Although I Capture The Castle was Smith’s first novel (long before The Hundred and One Dalmations), she was already a highly successful playwright: the structure of the story conveys the randomness and boredom of ordinary country life while in fact the narrative drive never slackens. The dialogue, too, reflects Smith’s playwriting expertise, and you could argue that so does the voice of the journal, being both vivid and immediate, and yet convincing as a written thing. Even the dog, Heloïse, and Abelard the cat, are part of the pattern, as gradually everyone is drawn into a complex dance. It’s Cassandra’s own story that turns out to be a funny, vivid, painful process of growing and maturing.

And did I mention that it’s also very, very funny? It’s one of those books that, if you meet a fellow fan, can guarantee companionable giggles: the legless ghost, the bearskin coat and then the bear, the crinoline, Leda Fox-Cotton, the shaving scene … I’ll stop there; you’ll just have to find the rest yourself, and join the club.

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CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Churchwell

Murder, Mayhem and the Invention if The Great Gatsby

What is it?

Just as the young, rich(ish) Mid-Western writer Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were packing for the East in 1922, a very ordinary, young married woman and her lover were discovered in New Jersey, shot through the head. The murder case became a national sensation, and Fitzgerald followed it as he and Zelda settled in Long Island, drank, drove and danced their way to and from New York, travelled to Europe, came back to America with their marriage on the rocks … and all the time, Fitzgerald was, inch by inch, working on the novel that he was determined would be in a different league from anything he’d yet done in its ambition and seriousness.

As Churchwell puts it, Careless People is ‘an histoire trouvé about what was in the air as Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, including the unfolding of a remarkable tale of murder, adultery, class resentment, mistaken identity and the invention of romantic pasts.’

Why I enjoyed it:

At first I thought I would avoid Careless People. So much writing about the ‘true’ origins of novels and other art is in some way reductive. Publicity urges you to read a novel because it isn’t really fiction; Author’s Notes appease the reader who resents not being able to tell which parts of the novel are “made up”; articles focusing on the “real story” of what happened end up explaining away the complexity and fascination of how the fiction happened. I love and admire Gatsby too much to have my experience of it reduced like that.

But then I got fascinated by the New York and Long Island that Churchwell describes. Seen from Europe, it’s both extraordinarily modern and fast-moving for the early 1920s, and astonishingly primitive, frontier-like and undeveloped. The book plaits together the story of the murder and the investigation; the wider world of bootleggers, prohibition, poverty, ordinary people and extraordinary money; the Fitzgeralds and their friendships; and the strange, alchemical transmutation that goes on when a great writer takes the stuff of the real world, and of the imagination, and spins them into something better and more satisfying that a mere ‘true’ story ever could be. Instead of explaining away what Gatsby is, Careless People makes you want to go back to it.

Three reasons for a writer to read it

1. Churchwell reviews for The Guardian and elsewhere, but she’s also Professor of American Literature and the Public Understanding at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Both of these skills show in her ability to unpick, most clearly and delicately, exactly how Fitzgerald’s storytelling works. It doesn’t read as formal literary criticism, faithful though she is to academic standards of explanation and proof: her skills are put to the service of illuminating the alchemy that goes on between the world which Fitzgerald lives in and observes, and how the story ends up working on the page.

2. The portrait of the trials and complications of trying to survive as a writer both creatively and economically – even a bright, new, young, celebrated writer in the glory days of newspapers and magazines – is oddly warming. Fitzgerald seems like such a golden boy in both talent and charm, and it’s easy to see his breathtaking alcoholism as sheer self-indulgence. And yet he still struggles, still has to break off to write other things for quick money, is still derailed creatively by his emotional life going wrong, and still minds desperately that his ambitious new novel should succeed.

3. Do you need a reason to go back to The Great Gatsby? If you do, then think about what you might learn from it: about how a narrative may not be the internal narrator’s story; about how to drop scraps and hints of information not as bafflements, but as sweets dropped in the forest to lead us on; about how some of the best prose to come out of the USA in the first half of the 20th century actually works; about how a story in which no single character is likeable or endearing in any of the normal ways can still make you (all right, me) feel at the end at once so sad, and so happy.

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THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS by Andrew Taylor

What is it?

It’s the late eighteenth century, and bookseller John Holdsworth has fallen on sad, hard times, with bankrupcty, the death of his child and the suicide of his wife, both by drowning. To help the crazed son of a possible patron he must find the truth of the ghost of a drowned woman which has been sighted in Jerusalem College, Cambridge.

But this is the time when the Enlightenment has reached some minds but not many institutions: the Master is dying, the rich students are debauched and ignorant, poor students are servants to the point of accepting money to write essays, debts will land you in prison and sex is a commodity which can kill. (Did I mention that there’s a satirical streak too?)

Why I enjoyed it:

Here is the enclosed world of the classical detective story: its hierarchies and tensions, the limited circle of suspects, the reasons for innocent people to lie, the stranger in town – or in this case, in College. So in one sense it’s a classically-built ‘varsity crime novel: if you know your Sayers, Morse, Imogen Quy, or C P Snow, then it’s fun watching the same conflicts and dynamics, snobberies, self-deceptions and fears refracted and reflected in a gilded, filthy, time-spotted roccoco looking-glass.

And yet that’s only a small part of it; while never letting the tension slacken, and providing twists galore not just in events but in characters, Taylor also meditates on loss, grief and love, and weaves a delicate and moving tapestry of John’s slow, hesitant, un-looked-for growth into some kind of hopefulness.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. It’s set in a very specific time, in one sense, between the American Revolution and the fall of the Bastille: the Englightenment turning-point in all sorts of ideas about how minds work, how they fall ill and how they mend, and what, if anything, the supernatural consists of. And yet I never felt that the project was to demonstrate these, or explain things, or do anything that a history book would be doing. They come along, wholly naturally, as part of how people are, and why things happen … which is much harder to do than you’d think. Maybe it helps that Taylor started as a crime writer, not an historical writer.

2. The prose is perfectly pitched. While there’s scarcely a sentence – period details aside – which would seem out of place in a contemporary-set novel, whether it’s the hallucinations of bereavement or a brutal initiation ceremony, the pace and shape of them are infused with their setting: again they’re the natural embodiment in this writer’s voice of a fully-imagined and inhabited world.

3. It never does any harm to read books that have won prizes, and The Anatomy of Ghosts won the CWA Diamond Dagger for 2009. Plus, Andrew Taylor is hugely experienced, has been very highly regarded since his debut, Caroline Miniscule, knows exactly what he’s doing, is currently in the bestsellers’ lists with A Schooling in Murder, and has won more Daggers than most of us have steak knives. He’s a writer to learn from, as well as to enjoy.

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TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, by John le Carré

What is it?

1969, or thereabouts: a damaged man arrives at a run-down West Country prep school. A minor Secret Service thug, posted as a defector to Soviet Russia, turns up in at the house of the government’s chief minder of secret services - with a nightmare of a story about London Circus.

The only people who are – probably – sufficiently alienated from the new regime of London Circus to be trusted to investigate are George Smiley, the sacked, superannuated senior spy who lost his job thanks to that same nightmare, and Peter Guillam, the younger man who found in the Service the father and mother he lost, and doesn’t want to know that he’s been betrayed.

This post does contain PLOT SPOILERS so don’t read on if you’ve never seen either the classic TV series or the excellent film, nor read the novel, and would like to. BBC Radio 4 also produced a Complete George Smiley Radio Drama series of dramatisations, starring Simon Russell Beale, which I can’t recommend too highly.

Why I love it

If a cynic is a disappointed romantic, then le Carré’s take on the world is that of a cynic, but it’s always, in the end, about love: for friend, child, lover, colleague, Service, country, class or creed. Love is betrayed, or drives someone to betrayal, and fear is there too – and hope and hopelessness.

He has a shrewd gaze for the comedy and catastrophe caused by little empire-builders, creeps, absurdities, worshippers of ‘the Cousins’, and survivors-at-all-costs. Although I wouldn’t go to le Carré for an education in writing women, his are better-written than many of his contemporaries, while Smiley’s relationship with his wife is much more complicated and interesting (for the reader, that is) than the mere failing-marriage of your average thriller-hero.

The books also have all the non-fiction pleasures that I’ve written about à propos Dick Francis: making the reader feel we’ve been admitted to specialist knowledge of a very particular world, and in this case a deliciously secret one. The real secret world is no doubt more cheerful and more pragmatic than le Carré’s , but his is so fully-imagined, and the way it works so deftly touched in for the reader, that it feels utterly convincing. And, at his best, in le Carré there’s a gallantry in recognising that we will never win, but to give up trying would be worse.

Three reasons for a writer to read it

1. It’s an object lesson in how to make a compelling novel out of a story which is as much about the past as it is about the present: in how to keep a thriller moving when your protagonist is a short, fat spy well over retirement age, the ex-fieldman for whom in some senses, at some times, ‘the file is the only truth’. It might sound odd that his best plots remind me of Ibsen (but maybe not, since le Carré’s native heath is in many ways the Baltic): he starts the story as just enough soil has been scratched away from above a long-buried land-mine, that when the next careless person treads on it, it will blow up and take us all too. Oh, and the passages at the prep school are an object lesson in how to use an ‘inadequate focalisor’: they’re told largely through the viewpoint of a child, who sees everything but can’t analyse it.

2. Le Carré doesn’t get as much credit for his prose as he deserves. It’s subtle, easy to read in the best sense, and supple to his purpose, and he catches different voices brilliantly too. Le Carré himself is a wonderful reader of his own work, (he does some of his own audio-books) and it shows in the music of his prose. After Tinker Tailor the books do get longer, as he is more prepared to take time to explore ideas and intricacies, and develop the wider world and settings. You either like that or you don’t, but the recent success of The Night Manager shows how potent the best of his plots still are.

3. It’s a perfect demonstration of five-act structure. This is the barest summary, so you’ll have to trust me (or read the book) that all the protagonists do change in the pattern that John Yorke describes in Into the Woods, that the smaller plot-threads also explore love and betrayal, and it all knits together quite beautifully:

   1. Act One – Mysterious Prideaux arrives to teach at a prep school. INCITING INCIDENT: Smiley is fetched by Guillam to hear Tarr say there’s a Russian mole in the Circus. Will Smiley come out of retirement and find the mole?

   2. Act Two – TURNING POINT: Smiley accepts the commission. For a while all goes well: Smiley digs in the archives and interviews people, and Guillam works secretly inside the Circus, and find threads that lead in many directions. Someone is looking for Prideaux, and seems to be getting closer.

   3. Act Three – Guillam gets warned off by the Centre: MIDPOINT: proof that someone at the Circus knows something, but now whatever Smiley & Guillam do they may give themselves away: the stakes have risen. Prideaux is found by Smiley and may have crucial proof.

   4. Act Four – The two stories come together. Because of what Prideaux reveals, Smiley realises how the mole operates. But Prideaux disappears: will he wreck everything? They have to risk everything by turning someone at the heart of the Circus onto their side: a deliberately-caused, high-risk CRISIS which leads to

   5. Act Five – TURNING POINT: They use that Circus insider and Tarr, to try to trigger the mole into revealing himself. Everything is at stake in the CLIMAX. Will it work? It does. Prideaux supplies the final resolution.

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THE DEVIL IN THE MARSHALSEA by Antonia Hodgson

What is it?

Tom Hawkins is your classic young man who’s kicked over the traces of the safe career to which his family want to harness him. But in mid-eighteenth-century London the gambling and whoring that is so much more tempting all too easily leads to a debtor’s prison. And even if you’ve got enough in your purse to keep you in the relative comfort of the Master’s Side for a few days - coffee house, alehouse, rampant smallpox, psychopaths and all - if you can’t solve the puzzle of who murdered Captain Roberts before the money runs out, you’ll be thrown into the death trap which is the Common Side and be dead in a week or three.

Antonia Hodgson’s debut won the CWA Historical Dagger award for 2014, and she has gone on to write more cracking books, including more about Tom, both crime and more recently fantasy.

Why I enjoyed it:

Tom is very engaging: it’s a bildungsroman, in some ways, and has more emotional depth than thrillers are sometimes given credit for. I found myself thinking of Tom Jones as much as The Beggars’ Opera. In a novel peopled largely with extremely dubious characters busy double-crossing each other, I found I really did mind what happened to quite a lot of them, as well as Tom. The grim and gruesome is well-pitched, and balanced with just enough wry humour, and good things - present or latent - that I didn’t feel as I do sometimes with historical fiction, that the writer is smugly determined to make things as miserable and revolting as possible. And the ending had some genuine surprises, with those twists and jump-scares feeling fully earned.

Three reasons for a writer to read it:

1. The sense of the Marshalsea as a world-within-a-world is strong, not info-lumpy. Hodgson has done her research, but in the novel it’s embodied in the real, urgent business of storytelling. It helps that Tom is almost as new to this world as the reader is.

2. The plot is complex - all that double-crossing, and things and people not being what they seem - but it’s very well worked out, with no loose ends dangling that I noticed. When reversals came along in the nick of time, there was always a good underlying bit of plot to cause them. And the stakes rose, and the danger increased, steadily - or, rather, in satisfyingly dramatic leaps.

3. Tom’s voice as narrator is effective - fresh and attractive - and the dialogue is well characterised. There’s no attempt to channel the actual prose of the time,  but Hodgson works well with the vocabulary and the mindset, so that the narrative never undermines the convincing world that she has created.