Review: The Canterbury Tales by Harriet & Sophia Lee

 I planned to have a fully eighteenth century December, gulping great quantities of works from my favourite century till I was a fat, satisfied lump. It started well, and when I got to The Canterbury Tales by Harriet and Sophia Lee, I felt truly on a roll. Then I hit a brick wall.

My copy of The Canterbury Tales is a selection from the full set, published by Pandora as part of their ‘Mothers of the Novel’ project. It contains one by Sophia (‘The Clergyman’s Tale. Pembroke’) and the rest by Harriet, taken from the four volumes given.

Although the introduction doesn’t make it explicit, it seems that the first two books had a different frame story to the second. The first involves a group of travellers stranded in Canterbury by the weather, forced into telling each other stories to pass the time - hence, Canterbury Tales. The second frame story has a landlady telling a gentleman about the stories of the house’s residents, as he tries to wheedle out of her the story of one in particular. Both these frame stories were fun (I preferred the second, as it added extra intrigue on the stories themselves). 

The first tale was Sophia’s ‘The Clergyman’s Tale.vPembroke’. This was a fun, free-wheeling story with a fondness for twists and coincidences, like a more developed version on early amatory tales. It begins with a man called Pembroke who found jolliness to be a “mode of felicity he had never the pleasure to partake”. Pembroke does something completely inexplicable, he goes for a walk in Wales and rescues a young boy who is drowning in a pool. Instead of bringing the boy back and telling the story of how he found him, he lets everyone think that he’s a bastard son. I never could understand the logic of this action, perhaps it was from fear the real parents would turn up and take him back.

This boy, Henry, grows up with a chip on his shoulder and a (seemingly illicit) fondness for his (supposed) half-sister. He becomes a soldier, fighting in Wolfe’s campaign in Canada, a setting I’ve not read before. There he meets the most interesting character, Carey, a misanthrope who had previously lived with brahmin in India and become a vegetarian. Unlike the other soldiers, who’d rather eat Bacon than read him, he’s cultured and peculiar. He, of course, has a tragic backstory.

After some war shenanigans, Henry is ill and Carey saves him. The two go back to England, where Henry introduces his friend to everyone else. Coincidences ensue, threads are tied up and everyone is left rich and happy - it’s a fun story that enjoys the convolutions of its plot and has a satisfying ending.

It was the second tale, ‘The German’s Tale: Kruitzner’ that slammed the breaks on my reading experience. Although I don’t judge the effectiveness of a piece of writing by how long it takes me to read it, I do find it an indication. This 150 page short story took me longer to read than the 15,000 page The Count of Monte Cristo.

It has a decent set-up, a husband and wife travel into a town with their child. They have no money whatsoever but it seems clear from their deportment that they did once, and that there are secrets in their past. The woman is astonishingly pretty and the town big-wigs plot ways to get the husband out the way so they can seduce her. This is made even more complicated when a rich gent rolls into town looking for the disinherited son of the Duke of Bohemia. Of course the man (Kruitzner) is he, and he knows the rich gent wants to kill or imprison him to secure the Duchy for himself. 

The couple had previously given their first son to Kruitzner’s father, the Duke of Bohemia, to be raised as his heir. This son turns up suddenly, followed by a shady tag-along. He arranges a plan to sneak the family out the town and towards their inheritance in Prague. Things go wrong and the rich gent, who was tracking them down, is murdered. He says that the shady tag-along did it but everyone will suspect Kruitzner, so he’d better flit quickly.

Kruitzner reaches Prague, where his father has died and he has become the new Duke. He works to redeem his previously profligate ways and to connect with that older son he gave away, but the relationship never coheres. During a celebration, he sees the shady tag-along in the crowd and has him arrested. Shady tag-along says that it’s actually his son who’s the murderer, and that he’d led a band of brigands, murdering many. What’s more, he may be plotting to murder Kruitzner and take the Duchy. Kruitzner kicks the older son out, who dies leading a brigand raid, and then dies of heartbreak himself. It’s a downer ending.

This story was one of Byron’s favourite, and there was a lot in the plotting and conception of character to recommend it. The claustrophobia of the hunted family in the little town, preyed upon by the town’s elders, was really intriguing. The twist of the elder son being a villain, and the heartache on Kruitzner, was a genuine surprise. But the writing was so difficult to read. The sentences could be half a page long and with so many clauses and sub-clauses and parenthesis that the beginning of it seemed lost in the annals of time and the meaning of it gone completely. I’m a Samuel Johnson fan, he loves a long sentence but his contain these elaborate weighing of ideas, these sentences just wiggled all over the map. I was worried that the rest of the book would be a fearful slog. It wasn’t.

‘The Scotsman’s Tale. Claudine’ was a pleasant love story about a Scotsman in Denmark doing business for his father and falling in love with a formally aristocratic woman who has escaped the French Revolution. He pledges his love to her, but then his Father goes bankrupt and he has to work his way up to enough money to secure a life for them both. He doesn’t, he inherits it from a rich uncle, but everything goes nicely for them anyway. 

‘The Landlady’s Tale. Mary Lawson’ was a fun, tricky little beast. Mary is seduced by an army captain and, pregnant and alone, decides to go to his family seat to worm her way back into his affections. There she discover’s he’s married and loses her own baby. The captain’s wife has a baby and is too sick to nurse her, so Mary becomes the wet-nurse to him, falling deeply in love with the child. She falls so in love with him that she steals him and spends the next ten years raising him and moving about.

She’s staying and a boarding house when she gets a message from her family that they are sick. Leaving the now young man behind, she goes to tend to them. During this time, the Captain, now a politician with gout, stays at the boarding house. His servants are a rough lot and one talks the son into stealing something. The Captain is furious and manipulates the law to get him sent to Botany Bay, with the boy dying on the way. Informed that the boy he transported was his son, the Captain spirals into depression and death, and Mary goes mad. It’s another jolly one. I probably enjoyed this story the most, the emotions were strong and the sense of inevitable tragedy heightened it.

The next story was the flimsier ‘The Friend’s Tale. Stanhope’. This was about an optimist and a cynic who but heads over whether life and people are anything worth knowing. The optimist wins and it’s all very nice. 

The last, ‘The Wive’s Tale. Julia’, was my second favourite in the collection. It starts the funniest, with a man congratulating himself on starting in life, at the age of fifty, when he marries a sixteen-year-old girl he can show off at parties. There’s a lot of fun poked at the age gap, the marriage market, and the way he only wants a wife he can display. The story gets darker and darker, as the relationship founders, as new attractions come along, and as the rich man’s money fritters away. It actually turns out that a boy/young man he has been generously providing for is not his bastard son, but a stronger claimant of the one bit of wealth he hasn’t spent yet - this boy/man also holds quite the torch for the rich man’s wife. Very peculiarly, it has a happy ending for the boy/man and the young wife, who marry and become wealthy - but only because of the fortuitous death of a small baby. Something that’s painted in the story as inevitable and ultimately, a stroke of luck.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this collection. Even ‘The German’s Tale’ had an interesting story, and only ‘The German’s Tale’ was a struggle to read. I won’t rush to read another Harriet Lee book soon.

Review: The Devil on Two Crutches by Le Sage, translated by Tobias Smollett

 

In reading this edition of Le Sage’s Le Diable boiteux, I’m getting an eighteenth century two-fer-one. A book written in French in the early eighteenth century, and a translation by Tobias Smollett in the middle of the century. This edition very specifically focuses on the question of translation and involves a whole raft of appendices and endnotes that dig into those weeds a little too far for my own purposes, I just wanted to read a good story.

While The Devil Upon Crutches didn’t exactly give me a good story, it did give me a patchwork of pretty decent stories, some just character sketches, some full narratives. I’m not quite sure it’s compelling enough to fight a duel over the last copy in a shop, as apparently some French people did with the original release, but it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.

Smollett translated this work when he was still in his hack-life, before he married into wealth and played the part of disinterested gentleman. It was written after Roderick Random and about the same time as Peregrine Pickle, and was seemingly written as a result of Smollett’s successful translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas but before his most prestigious translation work of Don Quixote.

There’s a preface called ‘Asmodeus’s Crutches’, which summarises the whole book, placed at the beginning before the reader has read any of it. It’s annoying. But then the book starts. A Spanish man with the extremely lengthy name of Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo is emerging from a lover’s window, where he is waylaid by a group of ruffians who want to force him to marry the woman or die. In his escape from them, he climbs rooftops and finds his way into a dusty attic full of strange, alchemical items. He hears a voice from a jar asking to be released. Despite the voice saying he is a demon, Zambullo releases him.

The demon is Asmodeus, he is not one of the top demons, he can’t poke kings or lawyers, but he has his own thing. He’s the demon in charge of creating silly fads and fashions (so thanks to him for Labubus), he’s also the demon in charge of prompting unsuitable love matches and general daft love shenanigans. He is utterly grateful to Zambullo and so decides to give him a tour of Madrid from a demon’s eye perspective.

They fly up into the air, where Asmodeus is seemingly able to take the tops of houses to see what’s inside “as a man sees what is in a pie when the upper crust is taken off”. He’s also able to read the inner thoughts and histories of the people and the two essentially go on a little tour, taking in the sights. As such, they get to see many of the things people sniggered at in the eighteenth century, people disguising their own infirmity and ugliness, cuckolded husbands and unfaithful wives, general deception and disguise.

I particularly liked the handsome beau, who comes home and takes out his teeth, off his wig, then his wooden arm and leg, sleeping with “what’s left of him”. In the same house there’s a beauty who once accidentally dropped her false rump at the altar during mass. The demon says that if were not a devil he’d “choose to be a father of the Holy Inquisition”, as everyone dotes on them. One 35 year old one has a mild cold and is inundated with widows bearing cough syrups.

They see a tragic poet who gives birth to twins.. or at least couplets, before having an argument with a comic poet about which form of poetry is the most difficult. This fight has them romping about in their underwear and looking silly. They visit a prison and see a highwayman receiving a file in a loaf of broad, follow Death on his rounds (frequently seeing how happy the relatives in for a payday are) and even dive into dreams. Asmodeus says that dreams are just wishes that the heart makes when we’re fast asleep and all have rational explanations.

Occasionally, Asmodeus finds people with a more involved story, and we get little interpolated novellas. There’s one about a rich man, Count Belfour, who wants Leonora as a sidepiece and corrupts her duenna onto his side. It gets complicated, with disguises, a brother coming back from university, and a whole lot of razzmatazz until reaching a happy ending. It’s a decent little amatory tale of its sort. The second volume has an even more involved love story, with a genuine love triangle, people being captured by Barbary pirates as slaves, kidnapping - and all that other stuff. The point of this tale, to Asmodeus, is the lasting friendship between two of the male characters, something that he says could not have happened if they were women because “women have no friendships.” Fair to say, the demon is not all-knowing.

There was a little action scene at the end of the first volume. A house was burning down with a young lady in it, and the father pronounces that whoever will save her can marry her. Asmodeus goes down, dressed as Zambullo, and rescues her, looking like Zambullo did it. At the end of the book, he takes Zambullo back to the family to claim his ‘reward’, and so everything ends happily - except for Asmodeus, who is summoned back into the alchemists chamber and presumably locked in a bottle again.

This is one of those eighteenth-century fictions where many of the parts are interesting, there are some genuinely engaging little snapshots and stories and some funny little lines, but it doesn’t build to much of a whole. As such, the time spent is enjoyable, but it doesn’t hold the imagination much afterwards. 

Review: Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe

 Daniel Defoe really seemed to luck out with Robinson Crusoe. He realised the narrative potential in Alexander Selkirk’s tale, sanded off the rough edges and created the archetypical desert island narrative. He even managed to create one of the most iconic moments in literature when Crusoe finds the footprint of another human on the beach. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton is less lucky in this regard but is probably a more entertaining book. 

It’s a typical Defoe novel in some ways, someone without the wealth to easily do good finds themselves committing crime, earning enough cash to repent of their evil deeds and live happily ever after. As usual, the actions of the character are more interesting before they repent and he better describes processes than he does characters. However, Captain Singleton does have some sly humour in the telling and Defoe does create a genuinely fun and likeable character - though not the one of the title.

Our protagonist starts off as a reasonably well off little boy who is kidnapped in toddlerhood from outside his Islington home. Siân Rees’s Moll, went into quite a lot of detail about the Mayor of London’s underhanded encouragement of kidnappers to rid his streets of waifs, strays and embryonic footpads (and the selling of them to the New World, slavery not yet being coded by skin colour). 

Of course the people kidnapping the young boy are ‘gypsies’, a peculiar racial myth that was the latter Victorian equivalent of quicksand in the eighties. His mother being soon hanged for “her good works”, a little sardonic note, and one of many that pepper this book and give it more character than other Defoe works.

He’s dragooned onto a ship and becomes the property of a Portuguese man. There’s a lot of Portuguese bashing in this book, just being in their presence teaches the boy (now named Bob) to be “an arrant thief” and (worst of all to the British mind) “a bad sailor.” These Portuguese are every brand of despicable, and they are defined by their underhandedness and cowardice, and, as we know every English person hates a coward. At one point, the Portuguese sailors go to a Spanish port and try to get the inquisition off their back by declaring him to be Muslim - something a quick foreskin check denies. 

His master takes his wages and beats him, so Bob is pretty keen to get out of his company. When a group of sailors mutiny, he joins that as the nearest way to get away. This leads him and the mutineers stranded on Madagascar. It’s genuinely interesting how the group of mutineers form themselves into a band and the roles they take within the group. Much like historical pirates, much of their planning is done democratically but there are voices that hold more sway. One of these is Bob’s, he’s young, brave, and has more of a knack for strategy than the weak, cowardly Portuguese - though Bob’s plans are usually the most violent option. Eventually they cobble together a raft that gets them off the island and into mainland Africa.

A big chunk of the book then tells the group’s travel across Africa to get to a safe port. Much of the continent was unknown to Europeans at the time and the journey attempts to be within the realms of possibility but bears no relation to reality. If possible, the group avoid inhabited areas, and they generally try to barter their ways through other civilisations with trinkets and gewgaws made by a very skilled metal worker. It’s interesting how Defoe tries to differentiate the people he meet, he’s aware of Africa as a place containing multitudes of people with many different languages - it’s not a non-racist view of the people, but it does allow for variation and difference. For example, the more aggressive Africans they meet are those who have met Europeans before, which is rather telling.

One of the first groups they meet have a misunderstanding, resulting in a battle where Bob leads from the front. The king of the group is killed and the prince injured. Because they have experience in bullet wounds, they heal the prince, who then pledges himself and a number of his people to carry the Europeans stuff. Again, we have the familiar image of the black people carrying the white men’s stuff, but Defoe gives the prince as much character and agency as he gives most of his characters. 

They reach the far coast, having acquired a fortune in gold nuggets and ‘elephant’s teeth’ and go their separate ways. Bob squanders his fortune in London and so quickly hops back on a boat, joining a mutiny and emerging as a pirate captain. 

It’s odd that when Bob becomes a pirate, the book loses a lot of it’s swashbuckle. These pirates are generally more into stealing beef than booty, and the book reads more like a merchant’s tally than a tale of derring-do. There’s a lot about tactics, about the right place for a pirate to ply his trade, and the right kinds of ships to rob - both for the goods within them, and the potential repercussions of robbing certain kinds of ships. There’s also a lot about how the pirates share equally and the level of trust they have for each other. One of the strangest parts of this book is when the crew besiege a tree-trunk, which is linked to a whole network of Vietcong-esque tunnels.

This is when Defoe introduces one of the most compelling characters in any of the works I’ve read by him, William the Quaker. As a Quaker, William is a pacifist, but he’s still a pirate. Not only that, he’s the wisest and wiliest character in the book, who would probably make a far better captain than Bob. He serves as a conscience, speaking against killing the slaves who took over their pirate ship, but he steps back when the pirates sell those slaves on. He’s frequently funny and reads situations better than Bob, or anyone else on the crew. There’s something compelling about this contradictory character.

After a while of sailing about and plunder, Bob is getting to the stage of the book where he has enough money to have a spiritual conversion and end the book. This is conveyed more organically than similar conversions in Defoe works, and starts with Bob’s profound sense of rootlessness and loneliness. Bob has no family, no place that’s ever been a home, and his life as a pirate has been partly a consequence of his lack of connection. William the Quaker prods him along this path, emphasising the belongingness in Christendom, learning to accept a brotherhood of man rather than everyone for himself.

This conversion is painful to Bob. He looks at his previous life and sees it as, pointless at best, downright villainous at worst. He’s even led to consider suicide. William convinces him to lay that aside and to join him in England, disguised as Armenians, where Bob eventually settles down and even marries William’s sister - leading to our happy ending.

Captain Singleton hasn’t had the cultural impact of Robinson Crusoe, or even Moll Flanders, but it is one of Defoe’s more engaging works, with themes of belonging and identity and an (albeit tentative) attempt at humanising the ‘barbarians’ of Africa. It’s not perfect, but it is worth being read more. 

2025 Top Ten (5-1)

 The Second part of the great books of the year. If you want to see all I read this year click here, and if you want to see the numbers 10-6 books, click here.

In at number 5

The Tale of Genji

I’ve written about this here.

This is a book that is already a wonderfully complex work compared to western works written at the same time but it becomes more complex as it goes on. The writer pushes the form and creates a book that is deep, complex and very interesting.

At number 4

Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper

I loved Mr Bowling buys a Newspaper, I found it funny, gripping and oddly sad.

 Mr Bowling was educated to be a gentleman but graduated into the Great Depression where there weren’t enough jobs so he has to make do with much less than he was expecting. He married young to a woman who refuses to engage with him sexually or romantically (an oddly common trait amongst the wives in this book, was it a hang up of Henderson’s?). He desperately wants to die, sees death as a merciful release from the mundanity if existence but won’t kill himself - instead, he’ll kill other people, be caught and be hanged. He has one problem, with the chaos of World War Two happening, no one seems to want to catch him.

I found the character of Mr Bowling to be an extremely pathetic figure. His motivations for murder are his dissatisfaction with life, but his dissatisfaction seems to come from his own shallowness. He grandiosely thinks himself a great artist who was born for a great love, but his compositions never really took off, and he married a sexless woman and he can’t imagine a life ‘worthy’ of him. It makes him both relatable (I also graduated into a world in depression and have artistic desires that have never translated to material wealth) but also more despicable. 

What’s more the book is incredibly funny. There are dozens of funny one-liners and moments. The farce of him moving a body in the manner of a three-legged-race made laugh, as did the fact that as sloppy as he was as a murderer, he simply couldn’t get caught. 

This book treads some similar ground as Patrick Hamilton’s novels, especially Hangover Square, with the same smoky, pub-laced atmosphere, but it manages to do so with a lighter touch, which veers on the flippant. I found it frequently surprising and entertaining. 

At number 3

The Bear’s Famous Invasion of Sicily

I was first recommended The Bears’s Famous Invasion of Sicily by Lemony Snicket, who has an appendix in the back of the edition I read. Being on a mini Italian children’s classic kick, having just read Pinocchio, I read this. I thought it particularly sweet to include a letter from author, Dino Buzzati to translator Frances Lobb recommending her translation.

There’s a wonderfully mythic tone to this book, found in the almost Bayeux Tapestry-like illustrations to beginning with a dramatis personae and location description. I loved the silhouette portraits next to the descriptions, along with the suggestions of spoilers. It all adds up to the feeling that this really is a famous tale I should know about already. Then there’s the inclusion of the werewolf, perhaps he does appear in the book somewhere, I haven’t found him. 

The book is told in a mixture of prose and doggerel, and it really is doggerel, rhyming things like ‘ramparts’ and ‘damp parts. This adds to the mythic/chronicle nature of the book, as if serious works and high flying epics have been created about the subject and are here mushed together. It’s also interesting how the most of the doggerel sections are within the part of the book that deals with the bears’ invasion, leaving just prose during their occupation and settling down, with a return to poesy with the song at the end.

The bears invade for a reason that many animals do encroach upon human  territories, they are hungry but they are also lead by the noble king Leander’s secret search for his more prosaically named son, Tony. The bears are expecting to be welcomed with open arms but are fought off, thus turning their encroachment into an invasion. On element I found really interesting about the illustrations was how it is only the bears that are shown to be bleeding in the battles. There’s even the detail of a bear red cross stretchering off an injured comrade during a battle. 

The illustrations are a key component of this book and I love them. I love the simple shapes of the bears, whether they are fighting, partying with ghosts, dancing in victory or indulging in gambling, drinking and suggested S&M. 

I also love the mythic nature of the story. How the bears fight their way into the city like the Israelites going into the promised land, their degeneration and corruption by luxury, the tragic death of King Leander and the march back to the mountains, reminding me of the children of Hamelin or the Elves at the end of Lord of the Rings. To have that myth, along with wry humour and a big dollop of bathos (like the end of the ferocious cat, Marmoset) and it’s a unique and wonderful thing.

I enjoyed the appendix by Lemony Snicket. I found the little textual and illustration nitpicks to be fun - pointing out that all the silhouettes face right, or that an illustration could be seen as two ghosts arm in arm or a ghost of a conjoined twin. He also pokes at some deeper troubling undertones in the book, how the human and bear communities seem segregated and Saltpetre’s summary execution by Dandelion. While in no way an essential part of the text, it was an interesting appendix. 

Number 2 is the highest ranked poetry book I’ve read.

A Portable Paradise

A Portable Paradise is probably the best poetry collection I’ve ever read. Easily the best one that isn’t an anthology of different authors.

Roger Robinson has a skill of finding a particular image or idea to make a poem from and then create that poem without under or overcooking it. Each one feels like an idea, plucked and presented well, without feeling like it’s complete, sealed and uninteresting, nor so open that is feels like it’s fraying at the edge. It feels whole without feeling done. It’s hard to describe. 

I think a key to each poem’s success is that they are built on something specific. I think the best poems have a clarity and specificity of meaning and intention - Wordsworth’s Daffodils looked happy and made him happy - that many poems seem to lack. It also helps that he is capable of writing many different forms and lengths of poem and sequence them so it never feels samey.

The book is split into five broadly thematic chunks. 

The first is about the Grenfell fire. A reviewer said it made him cry, I thought that was nonsense. Then I read the chunk, in public, on a sunny day by a duck-pond and I was very close to crying myself. I remember when it burned down, I lived not very far from it and the smell and taste on the air was something that will stay with me. The poems include one about the ‘lost’ posters being like a people’s portrait gallery, another about using sheets to climb out, another about a girl becoming her dead father and drinking cardamon coffee like him. The poems built into this full-seeming portrait of innocent lives lost to save a council a few quid. It was very moving.

The second section starts being about slavery and then about the lives of Black people in London (particularly Brixton- presumably because of the history of riots, Robinson’s from Hackney). I loved how there was a slavery limerick, I loved the one about black olives - it made me laugh. There were also some poems about racial profiling. The most impactful poem in this section was one about tension in Brixton before something kicks off. I lived in Harlesden, and there were days when you walked out the door and could just feel that energy crackling in the air and he captured it.

Section three contained poems by different citizens, bewailing and praising their London lives. To be honest, this was the weakest section for me but that’s probably more to my life experiences. I lived in the very gang-divided Harlesden, but the notion of ‘areas became ends’ didn’t ping for me because I had no part in gang life. I was very struck by the street names being named after slave owners (though the area I lived, the streets were named after naval battles).

Section four is about music and art. I can salute any poem that celebrates Sade, the Stubbs one was gruesome and John Coltrane reaching heaven on a mountain of cocaine made me laugh and wince. The darkest one was about his great grandmother.

The last section is about his premature son, and about health and sickness in general. I was a premature baby myself, and my Dad tells me about the prayers he made and how the experience of it turned him from a casual churchgoer to a believer. The disjointed poem about his prayers is heartbreaking, as is the picture of Grace, the nurse, who can thread a tiny vein like no one else. ‘Saints’ is an odd outlier, comparing prostitutes to them.

I picked the collection up from the Waterstones clearance for a pound (how I pick up most of the poetry I don’t already know) and I was blown away.

And at number 1

Beware the Cat

I’ve written more about this here.

I read this book at the beginning of the year and knew it would be a hard book for subsequent ones to topple. A peculiar melding of real people, satire on alchemy and science, and a collection of bedroom bawdy, all held together by the true secret about cats.

And that's all the best books this year, I hope next year is good.