Max Dunbar

The Oxbridge education is overrated. Or so it must feel to Hannah Jones. Ten years on from beginning her degree in one of Oxford’s best colleges, she is working in a bookshop, worried about money, pursued by journalists and living with a handsome but distant husband.

It all held so much promise. Ruth Ware says that ‘writing about Oxford is a particular kind of challenge – it’s been novelised so frequently and so well that it feels slightly hubristic to add to the pile of books about the college experience.’ Yet the Oxford parts of the novel are among some of Ware’s best passages. The students are recognisably 2010s students, modern and idiosyncratic, but they do not seem grafted on to the old-time college with its buildings, landscape, traditions and rules. The relationship between town and college is deftly drawn, and there’s a sense of ancient magic you must have felt if you ever studied at such a place – something that mixes in with the everyday quotidian murmur. This is Hannah getting back to accommodation on a rainy night:

Under the arch of staircase 7 she folded her umbrella, shook off the worst of the water, and made her way slowly up the stairs. Behind each door was a different sound. The silence of study; the laughter of friends congregating; the quiet thump of someone’s music, the volume just slightly too low for Hannah to recognise the song.

Hannah’s time at college was brought to an ugly close by the murder of her best friend, April Clarke-Cliveden. April is the ‘It Girl’ of the title and another of the book’s strengths. There is a tendency in crime fiction to freeze the victims in the moment of their death – the body is found in the prologue, you never get to know them as people, they are basically wall martyrs. But April is a vivid presence throughout. She is vivacious, funny and smart. She is the legendary undergraduate who can go out partying until dawn and still be fresh for the seminar room. When Hannah revisits Oxford ten years later, she finds that their old rooms have been turned into office space. But you can still feel traces of April’s personality there.

April can be arrogant, entitled, even cruel. But there is a heart to her. She puts real effort into her friendship with Hannah – who, frankly, can be a drag and a bore – but April adopts her, encourages confidence in Hannah, builds her up, with no real vested interest in doing so, for no more reason than that she sees things in people. And when April is killed, it’s like part of Hannah dies with her. She retreats to her childhood bedroom, spends years reading letters from her contemporaries, her own drives and ambitions shrinking.

April’s murder is a classic locked room mystery: she is killed in the ‘set’ (a kind of bedsit she shares with Hannah) that has only one way in and out, through the stairwell. A porter named John Neville is convicted of her murder on the strength of Hannah’s testimony – she saw him exit the stairway at the time of her death. Day to day, Neville is an irritation and a creep – he is always messing with Hannah’s head, coming into her room on small pretexts, seeing how far he can push the boundaries. He dies in prison protesting his innocence, and as much as Hannah disliked Neville, she’s always been haunted by the possibility that she sent him to jail, unjustly. 

In a murder mystery there must be the sense that things are going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about. The little Pelham college is crowded and incestuous, you think you can see all the betrayals and love triangles that are going on, but it’s unlikely you’ll know the whole truth, not until right at the end. Ware understands how to convey secrets and lies inside small, intelligent groups. The college itself seems to have more secret passages than a Cluedo board. Pelham is walled, but there’s a place you can climb over. There is a fine eerie touch to the stairwell Hannah and April use to get into their building – its lights run on sensors, so after sunset you have to walk, and climb into the dark for a moment, before the light recognises your presence and clicks on. 

The It Girl is a long book, perhaps too long, and earnest and ponderous sometimes. But there is a real storytelling engine here, that kicks in so quietly you don’t notice it, then builds to a good, confident pace. Our goody-goody protagonist Hannah has nothing to go on except her intuitions and doubts, and the narrative reflects that, meandering from place to place. But Hannah turns out to be made of stern stuff, and a fine detective in her own right. The end, and how she gets there, is a genuine shocker. Death waits in the garden, but glory is waiting there too.

(Spoiler alert for entire series of Better Call Saul)

‘The obvious road is almost always the fool’s road. And beware the middle road, the road of moderation, common sense and careful planning.’

– William Burroughs

‘Seriously, when the going gets tough, you don’t want a criminal lawyer… You want a criminal lawyer.’

– Jesse Pinkman

Somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico, there is a marquee tent in a field after darkness. Crowds of people stream towards and around it, a certain kind of crowd that loves life after dark. The hustlers and ravers, bikers and goths, drug fiends and lost souls. Inside the tent itself there’s no circus, just a man in a sharp, colourful suit, an attorney who up until recently practiced under the name Jimmy McGill. After a year’s suspension he’s reinvented himself as ‘Saul Goodman’ and has erected his tent to give away drop phones and pitch his business to the night crowd. He establishes rapport with potential clients, brags about his legal victories, grossly exaggerates them – the scene is something out of a dark carnival on the edge of town: something wicked this way comes.

At the end of the night, his bodyguard Huell says: ‘Well done, magic man.’ Saul replies: ‘We’re just getting started.’

Breaking Bad was about the persistence of magic in the modern age. The villain of Stephen King’s The Stand is described as ‘the last magician of rational thought.’ That’s an apt phrase for Walter White as well. His story is a bitter one about pride and unused talent. Yet even though he’s a failed scientist and high school chemistry teacher, he can do things that seem impossible – build a car battery out of nothing, cut through reinforced locks, synthesise poison from coffee beans. He has an uncanny ability to turn the tables even from an impossible position. He is an accomplished manipulator, who can change others’ perception of reality. Magic is sometimes alluded to in the series. Jesse Pinkman entertains Andrea’s son Brock with magic tricks, and then tells him: ‘That’s science, yo’ – but to Brock it’s indistinguishable from magic. Skyler admits to Walt during a furious marital row that ‘I don’t have your magic’. The very state of Mexico, of course, is known as the ‘Land of Enchantment’.

While he can’t match Walter’s meticulous nature and scientific expertise, Saul does have one thing his client lacks: charm. Even his disapproving older brother Chuck must admit early on that ‘Jimmy has a way with people.’ And Jimmy is equal with his charm, everyone deserves a good impression from him, whether they’re a prisoner in courthouse lockup or an old lady on a coach in Amarillo (‘Edison – like the inventor?’ ‘Beautiful penmanship – a lost art!’) Chuck is suspicious of Jimmy’s charm in part because he could never replicate it and also because he knows that charm has a dark twin – persuasion.

Charles and Jimmy McGill have the legal profession in common but not much else. Charles is everything that Jimmy is not: disciplined, rule-bound, grave and meticulous and successful. Law has the same defining, shaping meaning in Chuck’s life as science did for Walter White: it is like the gas lantern that Chuck carries around his house, a guiding light in a dark world. The law is sacred – Jimmy just can’t be trusted with it. ‘I know what you were, what you are,’ he says. ‘People don’t change. You’re Slippin’ Jimmy. And Slippin’ Jimmy I can handle just fine. But Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun. The law is sacred! If you abuse that power, people get hurt. This is not a game.’

Chuck must know there is plenty of scope for persuasion in the day to day practice of law. We have known for this for a while. In his History of Europe, Richard Evans writes about the development of law as a profession:

Not surprisingly, lawyers were constantly campaigning against unqualified hucksters, known in Germany as Winkeladvokaten, or street-corner advocates, and in Italy as faccendieri, fixers. In the 1880s the Naples hall of justice was said to be like a flea market, with would-be lawyers advertising their services at every corner.

It seems that the regulation of legal practitioners, from its very early days, was drawn up with people like Saul Goodman in mind.

The respectable world seems to share Chuck’s opinion. Betsy Kettleman says it explicitly: ‘You’re the kind of lawyer guilty people hire.’ Jimmy can make people laugh in the legal world, but he can’t make them respect or approve of him, to them he will always be ‘Chuck McGill’s loser brother’. In the final series he’s ostracised by courthouse staff completely, the DA puts the word out: Jimmy has crossed a line that turns him from semi-tolerated guest to pariah. The resentment obviously fuelled his transformation into Saul Goodman, and there’s a moment in Breaking Bad when he strong-arms a more established attorney into selling his client’s house for less than half its value: you can see on Saul’s face how much he enjoyed outsmarting the conservative, disdainful older advocate.

Persuasion is all about the game. Persuasion is what got Socrates killed. Persuasion is how Jimmy McGill got his start as a small time conman – persuading people to hand over money for items that turn out to be worthless or even nonexistent. Persuasion is about creative interpretation, twisting the rules, dancing up to the line without quite crossing it. And persuasion brings in another concept Jimmy is fond of: showmanship. Showmanship is the suits, the ring, the LAWYRUP car, the inflatable Lady Liberty, and all the accoutrements of the Saul Goodman identity that Jimmy accumulates on the way. These things are not glammers (although they are that too) they are marks of Saul’s talent. And talent, Stephen King says, wants to be used.

This is where Kim comes in. As an attorney she seems more built in the Chuck mode: diligent and professional and quietly outstanding. But she shares with Jimmy a love of persuasion and mischief, a streak of something wicked that becomes the basis of their brief, passionate love affair. When interviewed by a new firm she relates her early life growing up in a small town in Nebraska. ‘What do you want?’ asks the law partner. ‘More,’ says Kim. She wants something that’s commensurate with her talents and the conservative blue chip ABQ law world is never going to offer that. The passion Jimmy and Kim have in common is the passion to be their own person, to work for themselves, not for a firm, a bank, a corporation or a cartel. Like Boyd Crowder in Justified, they are outlaws rather than criminals. The important thing for Jimmy and Kim is never to give up their independence – and they have a cautionary tale in Howard Hamlin, their boss at HHM, a comical, derided and ultimately tragic figure. 

The Game is not a hard thing to get into. During the first series – I mean, after Tuco’s calmed down – there is not much criminal activity at all. One episode begins with Jimmy sitting in a police station, there as Mike’s attorney, his back against a wall of fugitives. We pan down the wall of faces, knowing Jimmy’s likeness will one day be among them, and we linger on one: a guy called William Hill. Later, this same man rudely pushes past Jimmy to exit a cafe bathroom. The underworld is not obvious… but we always know it is there. 

The practice of law intersects with The Game of the criminal world. There are very few morally uncompromised people in Better Call Saul, and those minor characters – Ernesto, Irene Landry, Manuel Varga. Even Chuck is not above the dark arts. He spent years quietly undermining Jimmy before actively trying to drive him out of the profession in series two (which, of course, makes Jimmy all the more determined to hold on to a legal career that he’d considered giving up in the past.) Chuck is as devious as Jimmy and as proud as Walter White: he won’t admit he is mentally ill because he can’t face any potential threat to his intellect, the brilliant mind that built his success in life and won him the respect he felt cheated of by his more loveable little brother. Even the thought that he might have made a transposition error in client documentation sends Chuck into a tailspin. At the heart of it is pride but also a kind of terrible tough love. Chuck is convinced that Jimmy will do great harm to himself and others, and of course he is right… but whether this is fate or just determinism is something for us at home to puzzle over.

The road to hell is a crooked one. A common criticism of Better Call Saul is that it was too slow moving. Jimmy McGill doesn’t make a clear conscious decision to get into The Game. There is no great fall but a crooked path with plenty of switchbacks, do-overs, false starts and dead ends – a slow, fascinating meander. Donna Bowman of the AV Club also identifies what makes the show more interesting and more tragic: the absence of innate evil in Jimmy’s world. While there was always a dark heart to Walter White, for his lawyer the internal soundtrack is less intense: freestyle jazz.

But there is also a sense that Jimmy was doomed from the moment he tried to scam the Kettlemans, which put him on the cartel radar – and also gave him a grounding in trauma and violence, enabling him to push through the horror as it escalates and therefore helping him survive the Game. Mike tells him:

We all make our choices. And those choices, they put us on a road. Sometimes those choices seem small, but they put you on the road. You think about getting off… but eventually, you’re back on it. And the road we’re on led us out to the desert, everything that happened there and straight back to where we are right now. And nothing – nothing – can be done about that.

Mike Ehrmantraut acts as a kind of Zen counsellor to Saul and others. As the above quote shows, he’s a fatalist, and a hard man, particularly on himself. Nothing fazes Mike – he meets even his own violent death with a deadpan equanimity: ‘Shut the fuck up, Walter, and let me die in peace’ (and Walter, incredibly, does.) After his son’s death, for which he blames himself, for Mike life is all epilogue. Hank told Mike that ‘your departure from the Philadelphia police was… dramatic.’ We now know just how dramatic that departure was. But revenge doesn’t seem to have satisfied Mike. He’s still haunted by guilt and loneliness, and he can’t tell the difference between justice and vengeance. So why do we love him? Because Mike makes us laugh, as a laconic foil to Jimmy, and because of his stubborn belief that there are rules and ethics to the Game, things you do and don’t do. Jimmy is heading into the darkness. Mike already lives there.

The road is not just for Saul and Mike. Albuquerque is full of criminal dilettantes – the Kettlemans, Dan the steroid nerd, Gale Boetticher, even Werner Ziegler the engineer – who think they can get into the Game without negative consequences for themselves. They all pale in comparison to Walter White, the ultimate criminal amateur, who upends the ABQ underworld entirely and leaves scorched earth. As Mike rants to Walter in Breaking Bad: ‘We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch!… We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork…. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up.’

The story of Heisenberg was about bitterness and pride but also regret. Even in the last episode of Better Call Saul Walter is still going on about the company he formed in graduate school, convinced that his college friends scammed him out of billions. Walter wants a legacy but he also wants to live the life he believed was denied him (he keeps Jesse around because he sees the younger man as his missing third child, the son and heir Walt never had). Walt bares his soul – as much as he ever bares his soul – to Saul about this, only for the lawyer to tell his own most profound regret: injuring his knee doing a slip-and-fall. To this Walt just says: ‘So you were always like this.’ 

Yes, he was always like this: an ordinary guy from a small town with a taste for mischief. And this is the story, the story of an ordinary man who grew up in the small town of Cicero, a man with a good heart and a streak of something wicked to him: a man who could have done anything he put his mind to, but who ended up, after a string of criminal adventures, serving life in federal prison. And it is the story of his one, brief, true love, a brilliant young woman who was equal to him in both law and persuasion, a woman who could have done amazing things and still might.

Series creator Vince Gilligan has ruled out a return to Albuquerque, so it’s goodbye to that world as well – ‘quite a ride,’ as Saul says. It really was a land of enchantment, and an immense pleasure to spend time there.

‘All this happiness on display is suspect,’ thinks Henry Perowne in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, set during the 2003 march against the Iraq war. ‘Everyone is thrilled to be together out on the streets – people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other.’ 

I felt something similar when the first COVID-19 lockdown was declared in March 2020. Obviously, people weren’t out on the streets hugging each other, but there was the same kind of performative merriment, an atmosphere McEwan described as ‘innocence and English dottiness.’ Sourdough bread, Joe Wicks, handwashing songs, working from home in your PJs… all this happiness on display is suspect, I thought. 

For most people in the media, on social media, the greatest hardship of lockdown was having to homeschool the kids. But what about the people who weren’t invited to the Zoom party – people living in substandard accommodation in tower blocks or damp-infested council terraces, people isolated from green spaces and meaningful activity, people for whom work is a refuge and the pub a haven? 

Nancy Jo Sales in her dating book Nothing Personal reflected that ‘When shelter-in-place orders were issued for COVID-19, the news became filled with stories about a rise in domestic violence all over the world. I couldn’t stop thinking about the women and children who were trapped inside with their abusers.’

Which leads me in a roundabout way to Catherine Ryan Howard‘s brilliant concept thriller 56 Days. It starts in Dublin in the runup to the first Irish lockdown. Ciara is new to the city, doesn’t know anyone, but by luck she meets handsome and professional Oliver in a supermarket queue. The two click instantly, a whirlwind courtship ensues, and she moves in with him… just as the government declares lockdown. What could possibly go wrong?

It is a marvellous premise of two people who click but don’t really know each other, who find themselves overcommitted to each other… only, one of them is a sociopath. Oliver won’t talk about his past at all, or family, or friends: he prefers, he tells Ciara, the blank slate. He follows the COVID-19 rules to the letter, because he doesn’t want to get in trouble, doesn’t want to be hospitalised by the virus, because this is a man who wants nothing to do with the state, in any form. He even bans Ciara from sitting out on the balcony. 

When lockdown ends, the police break into Oliver’s flat to find a dead body inside it.

Howard writes in her afterword that ‘In the early days of this pandemic, many writers took to social media and elsewhere to vow that they would never write about this in their books, that once this was over no one, including them, would ever want to think about it again.’

In several ways this is a good thing. I remember a lot of publishers and literary journals closed their lists to anything COVID related, because everyone was sick of living this thing, never mind reading about it. And it takes time for great events to be mediated in imagination and memory. ‘You must let it weave and trickle through you,’ Martin Amis said.

But it would be a real shame to miss Howard’s marvellous displays of observation, of how people gradually accommodate the unseen killer. The dance of social distancing when you walk past someone on a narrow pavement, the jolt of fear when you touch a pedestrian crossing, the knuckle callouses of constant hand-sanitising, the slowly emptying cities, the new, small, learned behaviours – Howard brings those shaky early months of the pandemic to life. It takes time. On Patrick’s Day the bars are open but the parade’s been called off and there’s ‘a guy in his late teens wearing a mask, holding his phone in front of his face while he spun around to offer the lens a three-sixty view of the streets behind him. In what sounded like a German accent he was narrating the scene, pointing out that he was the only one wearing a face-covering. At the time, he’d struck Ciara as a bit of an alarmist.’

Howard deftly captures the Dublin of young professionals. When temperatures soar, Oliver and Ciara walk along the canal for a picnic: ‘The waterside paths are thronged with people and pets strolling, and wherever there’s a patch of grass or somewhere to sit and swing your legs out over the water, pale limbs and heads thrown back in laughter have already gathered around collections of supermarket bags filled with cans.’ You almost start to believe in the lockdown fantasy of bourgeois Instagram. But round the next bend of the river, they find a navy ship, with people in hazard moonsuits ‘using the spraying devices on their backs to hose down surfaces with what has to be disinfectant.’ They are making a morgue, a Flying Dutchman of COVID-19. 

56 Days is a baggy novel in the crime fiction style and the breathless present-tense style doesn’t always hold with the length of this story. But there are enough twists to keep your attention as the ugly truth of Oliver and Ciara’s relationship is slowly revealed, like a gradually looming iceberg. It’s also fun to watch the exhausted, bickering Garda detectives try to make sense of the whole messy mystery. 

If we do have another lockdown – I expect, and hope not – Catherine Ryan Howard’s novel would be a great way to kill a few days of it.