In his autobiography Hitchens recommends this. I was rather enjoying it but then got disrupted on my travels. Twice I tried to read it and twice I put it aside. Second time I didn’t even get to the first point I abandoned. Can’t quite see what Hitchens sees. Is it the young successful and famous protégé of the more seriously good poet? I found the prose in the end dull and it was easy to forget. I know, it must be me.

1960’s paperback edition of the 1933 novel which I found in the Library of Friar Park when my selected travel books proved disappointing. My third go at this novel and this time I really enjoyed it. It seems so honest and real. About Doctor Diver the psychiatrist and his wife the schizophrenic Nicole. It begins at Gausse’s Hotel in Juan Les Pins, where we are going shortly…

A prototype novel. With many common themes and characters but none as fully developed or as successful as they will become in her later work. The lead character Catherine Morland is ridiculously naïve and entertains Gothic visions of her lover’s father murdering and locking up his wife – which border on the insanely paranoid – although we are assured she is only parodying contemporary Gothic novels which were then all the rage. Only the bitchy hypocritical wonderful self-justifying utterly selfish character of Isabella Thorpe successfully comes to life.

The problem is not that it isn’t good but that it is the same. Things happen, new people are introduced but the story doesn’t spring forward – we know precisely the same thing about Jomier – that he is old, that he is still bitter about his first wife betraying him thirty five years later! Also when given the opportunity for a younger lover he would far rather live alone than share a Viagra life with her. In the end his relentless self-disparagement convinces you that he is an uninteresting old whiner. So for all the early acute perceptions of feminism and the DNA role of the male, and his delightful skewering of the American pro-Zionist right, you are less than interested in his tale.

Not so this one which I preferred to Conrad! I know – heresy! It’s just he writes so well and also informatively about a ship stuck in a hurricane in the West Indies. You could lift his description of the cause of hurricanes almost verbatim. It is the best scientific prose description of a physical phenomenon I have ever read. By the Author of High Wind in Jamaica, which is another exceptionally fine read.

I really like her, but there is a certain kind of Muriel Spark book that fails to interest me. Almost invariably they are about cults or semi religious bodies, usually involving sex, pregnancy and religion. None of them grab me. Iris Murdoch is the same. Why do they do this? I may well have tried to read this before and simply got to the same point and ejected.