Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler

There is something rather wonderful about choosing and reading a book while knowing very little about it. I knew nothing at all about James Schuyler or his 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere when I picked it up in Hay on Wye last year - all I knew was that I loved NYRB Classics (and this one, from 2001, shows just how timeless their designs are - looking beautifully fresh 14 years later. Even though I can't find out what the painting is). Not being a poetry buff, I didn't realise that that was the arena in which Schuyler made his name - but I do now know that he had a knack with words that was rather extraordinary.

The eponymous Alfred and Guinevere are children who are sent to stay with their grandparents. Most of this slim novel is given in their dialogue, excerpts from Guinevere's diary, and letters that she writes. The novella probably says their ages, but I must have flown past that section. Guinevere is the elder; Alfred is pretty unschooled in reading and writing.

Undoubtedly the greatest achievement in this novel is Schuyler's ability to capture the cadences of children's conversation, particularly the back-and-forth of sibling arguments, which leap from battle to truce to battle, weaving in long-standing disagreements, I-know-something-you-don't-know novelties, and (most beautifully captured of all) snatches stolen from the conversation of adults around them, and novels the children probably shouldn't be reading. This is a trick Schuyler uses throughout: they borrow idioms and metaphors that sound extremely out of kilter with their childish bickering, because - of course - that is exactly what children do do. Perhaps particularly those who feel adrift from the adults around them, and uncertain of the events that have occurred (more on that soon). Here's an example from a letter Betty writes to Guinevere, her erstwhile friend:

Dear Guinevere,Thanks for the note. It is a shame boys make so much trouble and go around tattle-taling and spoiling intimate friendships. Of course your knocking me down like that made a permanent wound in my feelings which is slow to heal but it is not you at bottom I blame it is them. It was not me or Lois who told her mother or my mother what my mother told your mother she said you said. It was Stanley who told his mother and she told the other mothers. So you see how it goes.It is a shame what happens but I guess you have to take it as it comes and not spoil your life with vain regrets.More in sadness than in hate,Elizabeth Carolanne House

And there is this...

"You're scared to walk across the bridge and look. I can tell you're scared when you try to look like Mother.""I'll run away and leave you in the gathering gloom at the mercy of reckless drivers and we'll see who's scared.""I'll throw myself in the gutter and get sick and die, then you'll be sorry.""No I won't. I'll go to your funeral and say, 'Doesn't he look sweet in his coffin,' and cry, then everybody will feel sorry for me and give me things. I'll wear a black dress with black accessories and a hat with a black veil. Black is very becoming and makes you look older. Then I'll take your insurance money and go on a trip and meet a dark, interesting stranger."

Lest you think that this is a cutesy book, I should say that - behind the well-observed dialogue - there is an indistinct darkness. I suppose Guinevere's macabre callousness might already dismiss ideas of Brady Bunch levels of cuteness, but there is a much darker subtext. The children briefly discuss having found a dead body. At one very poignant moment, Guinevere blurts out "I'm sorry Daddy hit you", but it is not explored further than that. Schuyler gives just enough shade to make clear that all is not sunny.

But, at the same time, this is a very funny book. It is the sort of humour that stems almost entirely from acute observation - and that, if coupled with a slight (slight) heightened tone, is probably the thing I find most amusing. In only 126 pages, Schuyler combines humour and darkness in a really exceptional way.

Alfred and Guinevere is deceptively quick and simple. But, oh, there is an awful lot going on - not least an authorial restraint and style that I heartily applaud. If I had to pick any other novel that it reminded me of, I would pick another NYRB beauty - Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi.

Have you read this? Do you know anything about James Schuyler? I now want to find out much more!

As Cooks Go by Elizabeth Jordan

Note the 'Invalid Fruit Tart' postcard from my friend Clare...

I don't remember where I heard about As Cooks Go (1950) by Elizabeth Jordan - please let me know if it was from you! I dimly remember reading about it somewhere, either a blog or a footnote in a book, but I have been unable to trace the source. What I do know is that it arrived in my house on 13 October last year, and that I was sold by the title coming from one of my favourite Saki quotations:

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

That was enough to have it winging to my door; that, and the fact that there was a cheap copy going on Amazon. I'm very glad I did, as it's right up my street - and I think almost all regular readers of Stuck-in-a-Book would also find a lot to love here.

It took me a page or two to realise/remember, but this is non-fiction; it is Jordan's account of becoming a cook. If the spectre of Monica Dickens' glorious One Pair of Hands is in your head, then it was also in mine - and remained there. As Cooks Go certainly isn't as amusing as One Pair of Hands, and isn't really trying to be, but it is a lot more informative about the day-to-day life of a cook - and also has the virtue of being an account of necessity, rather than a frivolous experiment. For Jordan needs the money, essentially.

As Jordan explains on the first page, she hires a charwoman because she so loathes cleaning and cooking, and must find a way to pay for this. And decides to do so by becoming a cook. This may seem (aptly enough) like jumping out of the frying-pan and into the fire, but it is monotony that Jordan wanted to avoid. In her new role, she would cook (and sometimes serve) elaborate dinner parties, but in different houses on different nights of the week. She starts off working for two bachelor brothers in one house, a friend and her husband in another, and so on.

As the memoir continues, we see Jordan in various different settings. She tries her hand at cooking in a restaurant, in a hotel, and as the chef in a large private house. She undertakes a series of cooking lessons, hitchhiking to Scotland every weekend to see her children (more on them anon). In each situation, she recounts tales of the people she has to work alongside - sometimes complimentary and affectionate, but more often wearied. Although the book is not first and foremost a witty one, I did love the odd moment of dark humour:

Mrs Blackmore both owned and managed the hotel. She was a widow, and as I became better acquainted with her I envied her late partner for a release which can only have been welcome.

More impressive than her memory of dozens of people is her recollection of the foods cooked and meals served. As Cooks Go could almost serve as a recipe book, and I think would greatly entertain anybody partial to recipe books. She details many of the meals she cooked, giving tips as to seasonings and flavourings, unusual combinations of ingredients, and the most efficient ways of cooking anything from trout and potato to Bondpige Med Slor and Chou Farci Maigre. This is all the more impressive, given that she was working with rations. I don't recall any dates appearing in the text, but it was published in 1950 and the war is not mentioned, so I assume it all takes place between 1945 and 1950? Some foods now considered commonplace (rice, for instance, and gnocchi) were new and exciting to Jordan - while some sections proved that there is nothing new under the sun...

During the first week-end in Scotland I started to read The Way of All Flesh; when I left the Oak Hotel I had reached page seventy-five. Later on I started to read it again quickly, hardly able to put it down. It was a relief to be able once again to read, to enter into the stories of other lives recounted with humour and sensibility. It is monstrous to me that, except during a short time of crisis, people should have to work so hard that they have no time to think of anything but the trivial everyday worries of material existence. Many times have I heard the boast that there is no time for anything but expediences. I think rather that it is something of which to be ashamed: it is certainly a disease of modern life.

Jordan focuses almost entirely on her career in As Cooks Go - which is, of course, her prerogative. It does make it slightly unsettling when she mentions, in passing, that she and her husband have separated, and their children are living with her parents. There is a space of a year where she barely sees them at all - and although the whole process documented in the book is leading towards Jordan being able to live with her two daughters, the emotional turmoil of her romantic and maternal life is determinedly put to one side. As I say, entirely her right to do so - but it is still a slightly unsettling background to the day-to-day anxieties of cooking.

But, besides this small issue (and an extremely abrupt ending), As Cooks Go is a really great read. It isn't screamingly funny (for that, do turn to Monica Dickens and One Pair of Hands), nor is it remotely charming - instead, it is realistic and engaging, refusing to sentimentalise or satirise, but simply to show the life of a cook in various places. Anybody with an interest in domestic life and working women in the late 1940s will find a great amount to fascinate from a seldom documented perspective.

My Family and Other Animals

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll already have seen me raving about this one (oh, yes, I have Twitter - @stuck_inabook - tell your friends) but I loved the latest Slightly Foxed memoir My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

And, indeed, I have written about it at Shiny New Books. Even if you don't usually like clicking from one place to another, do go and read more about this one, because I'd be surprised if this can be beaten as my book of 2015... (strong words for a book read in January!)

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

I'm over at Vulpes Libris today, sharing my love of the glorious Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) - which is also, shockingly, my first addition to A Century of Book in 2015. And a re-read at that...

Anyway - review here!

In praise of Ivy Compton-Burnett...

...longterm SIAB readers know that I love Dame Ivy, but I'm spreading the joy over at Vulpes Libris today. It's also sort of about A Heritage and Its History (1959) which is the latest one of hers I've read - and which has the glorious opening line: “It is a pity you have not my charm, Simon.”

Cinderella Goes To The Morgue by Nancy Spain

Image from here.
Sadly no d/w with my copy.

In amongst all the excitement of a new issue of Shiny New Books, I've remembered about a little pile of books that have been waiting a while to be reviewed. Most of them are books I started before my reader's block, and staggeringly finished some time later - such as Nancy Spain's Cinderella Goes To The Morgue.

I posted about Nancy Spain back in April, after coming across mention of her in a re-read of Ann Thwaite's wonderful biography of A.A. Milne, and asked if anybody had read her detective novels. There was quite a lot of interest, and Scott was even reading one as he wrote. Karen later followed up with a lovely review of Poison For Teacher, but I was lagging behind. I bought a copy of one of her books which filled a gap in A Century of Books, and eventually managed to finish Cinderella Goes To The Morgue (1950), which came somewhere in the middle of her detective novel output.

It stars her 'detective' (not much detecting seems to go on), the lovely Russian Natasha DuVivien. We know Natasha is lovely because we are told so more or less every time she does anything - and she does a lot more of crossing and uncrossing her lovely legs than she does anything else. She is a rather enchanting mix of naive and worldly-wise, never nonplussed but also a little detached from the doings of lesser mortals. And, being a Russian in a 1950 novel, she is always having the most curious syntax:

"I am so sure," said Natasha, "that you are right. But what motive could anyone ever have for killing another person? It is always worrying me. Unless, of course, they are mad people," she added vaguely, looking out of her window. 

Her breath made a little fog of its own on the glass, within the world, yet not of it. 

"Oh," said Mr Atkins briskly, "jealously, ma'am. Jealousy and passion and hate. And greed. The usual things." 

"The Seven Deadly Sins," said Miriam gently. "Lust and anger. Any of them, in fact, barring sloth."

This excerpt hopefully demonstrates the archness of Spain's writing (I love that 'within the world, yet not of it' - a sort of paraphrase of John 17:16 - and how many authors would say it of foggy breath on glass?) and also serves to introduce us to Miriam. She is Natasha's slightly more worldly (and, it has to be said, slightly less lovely) friend. And it is she who gets them tangled up in the local pantomime.

The title is a bit of a red herring. Early on in the book, it is actually Prince Charming who pays an unexpected visit to the morgue - and Miriam steps into her shoes. She isn't the last body to be carted out of the theatre (the show must go on), but the murder mystery plot is really incidental to the novel. It's not an Agatha Christie situation, where whodunnit is paramount - and brilliant. In Cinderella Goes To The Morgue it is neither. The solution is cursory and unconvincing, but that really isn't the point. My favourite sections, indeed, were those which didn't deal with the murder mystery, such as:

Outside some shrill little voices were suddenly raised in screaming and breathless information about 'Good King Wenceslas'.

"How odd it is being," said Natasha inconsequently, "that this old man who is once looking out of a window and that is absolutely oll I know about him."

"He was deep and crisp and even for a start," said Timothy.

"No, no," said Natasha. "That was his page."

I loved these interludes, and only wish there had been more of them. Spain often sneaks in unexpected words or slightly silly descriptions of things, in the middle of a police questioning or a discussion about potential murderers, which are easy to miss if one isn't careful. I'm going to keep coming back to that word 'arch', but it describes Spain perfectly.  I'd have quite liked her to take it up a notch or two more, so that the novel was a step nearer farce, but she still has plenty of fun satirising the detective novel ("Look at her now! She deserves to be murdered") and the theatrical world. Although my dramatic ventures have gone no further than the village stage, I still loved her riffs on people who abuse the limelight:

"Hampton," said Tony Gresham suddenly. "Hampton has given Mic and Mac carte blanche to ad. lib. in the Baron's Kitchen. Isn't it dreadful?"

Miriam paused in the act of tucking her hair into a superb white wig with side curls.

"No!" she cried horrified. "You can't mean it. Well, we'll be lucky if this pantomime is over by one in the morning. Very lucky."

There are a whole host of characters I've not mentioned at all, from angry producers to the delightfully appalling 'Tiny Tots' (and their aggressive Stage Mothers). All the ingredients are there - I have to confess, though, that the novel didn't quite live up to the sum of its parts. I very much enjoyed it, but had hoped it would become a book to add to my 50 Books List... I don't want to add on a negative note, and I can't pinpoint any reason why this isn't an all-time favourite, but I also don't want to oversell it!  But anybody with an interest in arch detective fiction and mid-century silliness could do a lot worse than tracking down Nancy Spain. Do report back if you do!

Shirley Jackson - The Sundial, Hangsaman, and The Bird's Nest

Oh, this has been a difficult bunch of books to keep quiet about.  And I haven't really managed it, looking back, but I could have been much less restrained.  Now that Shiny New Books is unveiled, I can finally start linking to my Century of Books reviews - and I have to kick off with the Penguin Classics reprints of Shirley Jackson's novels. (Incidentally, they tick two dates on my Century of Books list.)

Best among them is The Sundial.  If I didn't already have a Shirley Jackson title in my 50 Books You Must Read list, then this would be on it.  Annoyingly (and these are the sorts of things I keep quiet from Shiny New Books, but can't hide from you, dear friends) I'd spent a mini fortune on a copy of The Sundial three years ago, back when it was very scarce... and yet hadn't got around to reading it until the reprints came out.  Oops.

So this is what I'll do with my links to SNB reviews.  A little bit of intro, and then the first line or two of the review, to hook you in... click on the link to read my review of Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, and The Sundial.

"You can more or less divide readers’ familiarity with Shirley Jackson’s works into separate levels"...

Here Be Dragons - Stella Gibbons

I've been very excited about Vintage Books reprinting Stella Gibbons' lesser-known novels (perhaps following the lead Virago started with Nightingale Wood, which I still haven't read) and I have been impressed, in part or in whole, by Westwood and Bassett.  (Clicking on those titles will take you to my reviews.)  I have to admit, part of my joy at the series is the beautiful covers, and I asked Vintage if they'd send me a copy of Here Be Dragons (1956), partly because Sue recommended it at a Possibly Persephone? meeting, and partly because of that beautiful cover.

Well, that'll teach me to judge a book by its cover, because when I asked Vintage for a copy of Here Be Dragons, they (quite rightly) sent me one of their print on demand copies, which doesn't have a picture on its cover at all.  (Maybe this is Kindle only?)  It was also very hard to hold open for long periods of time - being very tightly bound - which is one of the reasons it took me about six months to finish it.  The other reasons, I will come to...

I am a sucker for a novel where someone opens a tearoom, which sounds quite niche but is stumbled across quite often in the 30s-50s.  Nell, the heroine of Here Be Dragons, doesn't actually get around to opening a tearoom - but she works at one, and she intends to open one soon, and that'll do me.  She is the daughter of a slightly eccentric upper-class family, and as the novel opens her clergyman father has decided to leave the church - and they are all bundled into a flat (which is really most of a sizeable house).  Nell - bravely catching up with the past two decades - decides to enter the world of work.

First she is a typist in an office, where a constant battle is waged over whether a window is, or is not, left open.  The work is dull, the old men are patronising, and she is tempted away with the promise of £16 a week (including tips) should she become a waitress.  This she does, at the Primula, and I loved the scenes where she finds her feet in the café, learns to get along with the curious staff, and starts to plan her independent tearoom career (even if she can't imagine being beyond 25 without this.)

Sadly, that's pretty much all I liked in this novel.  I think it's called Here Be Dragons because Nell enters a world which had previously been unfamiliar and alarming - as with maps which used to use those three words to delineate scary foreign lands.  And Nell's scary foreign land is the world of bohemian layabouts, to which she is introduced by her monstrously selfish cousin John. This is the sort of thing he does/says:

Sometimes he would lecture her about being a waitress, saying that she never had a moment to spare for him; that she was necessary to him, like the sights and sounds and smells of London; and that her 'so-called work' took up too much of her time; that she was hardly ever there when he wanted her.

This was sweet to hear, but like most of John's statements it bore only a tenuous relationship to the facts, which were that often saved him an evening or a Monday afternoon and never heard a word from him throughout the whole of it.

"Of course.  I didn't want you then," was his usual petulant comment when asked casually (Nell's own temperament, as well as a kind of deer-stalking instinct, prevented her from asking in any other tone) what he kept him or prevented his telephoning?  And he would add, "You see, you must be there when I want you, Nello."

Nell is not blind to his faults, but she is still in love with him, despite him having no discernible good qualities.  I can't work out whether we are meant to find John intellectually charming, or if he really is supposed to be as ghastly as he comes across.  (That 'this was sweet to hear' worries me.)  Whenever I think that a character is self-evidently dreadful, I remind myself that some people, somehow, come away from Wuthering Heights thinking that Heathcliff is a romantic hero, so...

But I could just about forgive Here Be Dragons having the world's most awful character - and unashamed selfishness is the vice which irritates me most in fiction - if he had been interesting.  I'm afraid I found huge swathes of the novel just quite boring.  There is a subplot about a fey young thing called Nerina which didn't grab me at all; Nell's father losing his faith is mentioned occasionally, but quite half-heartedly.  The whole thing, in fact, felt a little half-hearted.  Enjoyable enough to pass the time, but uninspired - particularly when it could have been so much better.

So, I am still excited about the reprints, and I will keep trying Stella Gibbons to see what gems lie in the rough - but I don't think, on the whole, that Here Be Dragons is one of them.

Ten Days of Christmas - G.B. Stern

I don't usually do much in the way of seasonal reading, but I draw the line at reading anything with 'Christmas' in the title at any other time than Christmas itself.  So it was that I spent Christmas Eve and the next few days reading Ten Days of Christmas (1950) by G.B. Stern, very kindly given to me by Verity last December.

I forget exactly what the process was between me finding out about the book and being presented with it, but I'm pretty sure it started with spotting Jane's review in 2011 (my eager comment is there below it).  Verity couldn't have known, when she passed on her large print copy, that it would be exactly what I needed in my cold-ridden post-Christmas haze - not only because it was a rather lovely book, but because my eyes couldn't cope with any smaller font size.

The novel opens with a vast number of characters and (ominously) a family tree.  I decided - as I always do when confused by characters at the beginning of a novel - to ignore all of this and plough onwards, reasoning that they would fall into place sooner or later.  And they did.  It isn't important, for this review, to disentangle first marriages and second marriages, half-siblings, step-siblings, and cousins - but rest assured that they do all sort themselves out.

The central thrust of Ten Days of Christmas is the nativity play which the various children intend to put on for their family - and to raise money to replace a displeasing picture in the church.  I will cross oceans to read a novel about theatrics, and enjoyed all the to-ing and fro-ing this bunch of believable (if occasionally a little too wise) children go to in deciding who will take what part, which play to choose, and all that.

It was all shaping up to be an enjoyable and simple family-oriented story, but for one incident.  Rosalind - who, at 17, has forcibly transferred herself from being considered a child to being considered a grown-up - is given a pre-war 'duck ball' toy by an eager and proud cousin... and then given an identical one by someone else.  She believes she has handled the situation beautifully...

It is this simple incident, which could so easily happen, which spirals out of control to cause two painful arguments - one among the children, another among the parents.  Stern expertly shows how children and adults can feud in very similar ways - and how the variations often make the adults more childish than the children.

But, fear not, all is not dissent.  There is plenty of happiness sprinkled throughout.

Look, the influence of Jane's recommendation is making me blog with her short paragraphs!

One thing I could not shake from my head throughout was how very, very similar it all felt to the premise of an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel.  How very easily she could have taken these characters and these incidents and crafted one of her works of genius!  The many children and adults, interrelated in curious ways; the single incident which becomes so immensely important; the back-and-forth discussions which spiral round and round.  G.B. Stern was friends with Sheila Kaye-Smith (they wrote these two celebrations of Jane Austen in collaboration) and Sheila Kaye-Smith (as we know from the very brilliant bibliophile-memoir All The Books of My Life) was a devotee of Dame Ivy - could I be right in concluding that Stern was also a fan, and that Ten Days of Christmas was her attempt to follow in Ivy Compton-Burnett's hallowed footsteps?

Well, G.B. Stern doesn't have anything like Ivy Compton-Burnett's talent, and Ten Days of Christmas doesn't come close to the quality of her novels, but (to my mind) that is true of all but the tiniest handful of novelists.  Setting Ivy aside, Ten Days of Christmas is a very good, insightful, amusing, and (despite the arguments) extremely cosy novel.  Perhaps it is too late to recommend a Christmas novel now (although, of course, neither the twelve days nor the ten days are over) - but for future festive fireside reading, I do heartily recommend indulging in this treat of a book.  Thank you, Verity!

The End of the Affair - #GreeneForGran

Remember in the dim and distant past when Simon S organised a #GreeneForGran reading week, in commemoration of Granny Savidge who prized Graham Greene so highly?  It was keenly taken up by bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers etc., and I was one of the number who joined in, picking up The End of the Affair (1951).  And then my blog break happened, and now it's months late... oops.  But I thought the novel was amazing, so I'm going to write about it now.

And, first, can we talk about how great this Penguin cover is?  It's a 1962 edition, and it is those 1960s Penguin covers, with layering and elements of the surreal, that I love the most.

The End of the Affair is the third Greene novel I've read - you can read my review of Travels With My Aunt, should you so wish, but apparently I never got around to writing about Brighton Rock.  In broad brushstrokes, they were funny and violent respectively.  I loved the former, and didn't enjoy the latter.  Well, The End of the Affair is neither funny nor violent, but I am ready to state (even without having read almost everything Greene wrote) that it is his masterpiece.  I don't see how he could have done better - at least not in the line which the novel takes, which is melancholia. Except it's altogether too British for that word, which conjures up images of dreary French novels like Sagan's Sunlight on Cold Water; despondence is perhaps a better description.

The novel concerns, as you might have guessed, a love affair.  Maurice Bendrix is the narrator, and his affair was with the wife of a friend, Sarah Miles (based, apparently, on the woman Greene himself had an affair with.)  The title suggests that the novel documents the end of this affair, but, as Bendrix says towards the end:

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I'm beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end.

I usually hate it when novels include the 'If I were writing a novel' gimmick, but I'll forgive Greene this instance because it raises a useful point - The End of the Affair does not document the end of an affair, but rather the aftermath of an affair - and, in flashbacks, the affair itself.  There is no clean break; there is uncertainty and longing and Sarah continues to dominate Maurice's mind throughout.  Sarah's husband Henry asks Maurice whether he thinks Sarah is having an affair (at this point Maurice's affair is over); in response, Maurice hires a private detective to follow her, and report back.  He is driven, of course, by possessive jealousy - but there is little rage and bluster in him; he is no Othello.  Instead, he is simply unhappy.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.  In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other.  But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Books about lovers usually bore me to tears, as do books about unhappiness, perhaps because both have been written about so very often that it is difficult to write anything original, but Greene's prose is quite astoundingly good.  Par example...

She had often disconcerted me by the truth.  In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth - that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry.  I wouldn't have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself.  But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude... I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, "I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again."  Well, she hadn't known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.

Every page of The End of the Affair was written exquisitely, which meant it couldn't be a quick read - and, similarly, its depiction of despondence was too well done to make for easy reading.  Somehow unhappiness is woven into every word, and the tone is heavy-laden but realistic.  No histrionics or wailing, simply stating, recording, responding.

And yet, in the midst of this, is a fantastic comic character - in the shape of the hired private detective, Alfred Parkis.  The End of the Affair contains one of the most wonderful detectives I've encountered in fiction, and had Greene chosen to take that route, I could envisage a fantastic series of novels featuring Parkis (note to self: craft a spin-off series).  He is delightfully dim, and a curious mixture of eager, officious, and melancholic.  It is a dark comedy, because he is continually afraid of looking foolish in front of 'his boy', who trails around silently after him at all times - and invariably he does look foolish.  But he is also a very sympathetic character, and I would have loved more of him in the novel.

I am aware that I am one of the last to the party on this one, and that I'm hardly uncovering a forgotten classic, but I was bowled over by how tautly good The End of the Affair was.  The blurb to my copy says that it is 'distinct from any other major novel by Graham Greene', which is a curious way of phrasing things and gives me hope that perhaps some of his minor novels (whichever they might be) run along similar lines?  I'll certainly try more Greene, waiting to see what else he can do - and will metaphorically raise a glass, or literally raise a book, to Granny Savidge when I do so.


Others who got Stuck into it:

"[It] is a dark, intense little gem of a novel, as wintry and stark as the post-war January landscape in which it takes place" - Victoria, Tales From the Reading Room

"This is an incredibly moving story that brims with pathos and anger throughout." - Kim, Reading Matters

"Greene is often bleak but not often this bleak." - Catherine, Juxtabook

Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym

I wasn't intending to join in with Barbara Pym Reading Week, which I've seen everywhere around the blogosphere (well done Thomas and Amanda!) and, it seems, I might be late to the party - because I hadn't spotted that the week ended on a Saturday.  Oops.  Well, hopefully they'll let me sneak in as a last minute participant, because I have just finished Some Tame Gazelle (1950) - Pym's first novel - because I realised Mum had given it to me, and thus it would qualify for Reading Presently too.

This isn't my first Pym - although it is only my second.  The first one I read, back in 2004, was Excellent Women.  I'd rather expected to love Barbara Pym devotedly, and was a bit nonplussed by my lukewarm response.  I certainly liked it, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting - it was set in London, for a start, which wasn't at all what I envisioned Pym being like.

Some Tame Gazelle, at any rate, is set in the countryside.  That helped me get in the right frame of mind.  It has the same "three or four families in a country village" that Jane Austen recommended as the perfect novelistic topic (for her niece at least, and to many Pym is a figurative niece of Austen) - more emphatically, it reminded me of the close-but-carping rural communities inhabited by Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson's series of novels.

The families in question are really households, I suppose.  I shan't write too much about the plot, because there have been so many reviews of Some Tame Gazelle in the blogosphere this week (scroll through Thomas's blog to find all Barbara Pym Reading Week links), but I'll give a brief precis.  Belinda and Harriet Bede are eldely sisters living together, and we see most of the goings-on of the village through Belinda's eyes (although Pym often gives a moment or two from perspective of other characters, which gets a bit dizzying.)  Neither are immune from the arrow of Cupid - the title, indeed, derives from the poet Thomas Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!

 Harriet develops a love for every curate she sees - a love somewhere between maternal and romantic - while Belinda is more constant in her love.  It's for their local vicar, an Archdeacon, who was with Belinda at university, is unaffectionately married, and gives sermon which were 'a long string of quotations, joined together by a few explanations'.  Indeed, a less lovably man would be difficult to create.  He is selfish, snaps at everyone, quotes self-importantly and at length at the drop of a hat, neglects most of his vicarly duties... and yet I get the idea that we are not supposed to think Belinda foolish in her affections.  Is he in the same boat as Jean-Benoit Aubrey, Heathcliff, Rochester, and all manner of other literary romantic heroes whose charms entirely pass me by?  Belinda, on the other hand, is very lovable - as, indeed, is Harriet, despite one being cautious and the other impetuous.

But I suspect Pym is chiefly read for her tone.  As I mentioned, she is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Jane Austen - recently by Thomas himself - and while (from my limited experience of two Pym novels) I would say she has neither Austen's genius nor her tautness, Pym is certainly a worthy successor to Austen's love of irony.  And now, of course, I can find no examples.  But time and again the narrative voice says something which coyly suggests - oh so innocently - that the character is foolish, or doesn't know as much as they pretend, or in some other is not being honest.   This narrator is far too polite to say so outright, and isn't so common as to wink, but... raises her eyebrows a touch.

As for me?  I still like Pym.  I liked Some Tame Gazelle rather more than Excellent Women - it was funny, affectionate, moving without being heavy-handed.  As the son of a vicar, I relished reading about church families, even while it all seemed rather unlikely from my experience. It even felt like the 1930s novels I love so dearly (although published in 1950, I couldn't work out when it was meant to be set - everyone has servants, and levels of propriety are decidedly pre-war, but I suppose these things were both true for some 1950 villages).  But I still don't love Pym.  I love Jane Austen, and (later) E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and other authors who laid out the blueprint Pym picked up - but I still felt as though I were reading at one remove from the originals.  And, of course, even Austen was not an original - if I'd read Pym before I'd read Austen, perhaps I would love Pym more.

If other people did not love Pym so wholeheartedly, then I think I would sound very enthusiastic.  I think Pym is a very good writer, and Some Tame Gazelle is a lovely novel - but it will not be on my top ten for this year, I suspect.  Perhaps I am still too young?  Perhaps I am too familiar with the generation above Pym. When so many people rate her as one of their absolute favourites, even my very-much-liking of Pym feels a little bit like a failure.

What I really do love is the cover, and indeed all the covers of these Virago Pym reprints.  But curiously I can't find any information about the designer or artist on the book jacket - I hope I'm just being dozy, because otherwise very poor show Virago.  Very poor show indeed.

Ring of Bright Water - Gavin Maxwell

You know how I don't shut up about Miss Hargreaves?  (Have you read it?  It's great.)  Well, Hayley is (in a rather better mannered way) equally enthusiastic about Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water.  Since Hayley and I often enjoy the same books, I've been intending to read it for ages - but every copy I've stumbled across in charity shops has been rather ugly.  I wish I'd seen the beautiful cover pictured.  When Hayley lent me her copy (as part of a postal book group we're both in) I was excited finally to read it.

Well, I say 'excited'.  There was a part of me that was nervous - because I rarely read non-fiction when it's not about literature, and I have no particular interest in wildlife rearing.  If it didn't come with such a strong recommendation from Hayley, I doubt that I'd ever have considered reading it.  And I would have missed out.

Gavin Maxwell doesn't really structure Ring of Bright Water in a traditional beginning-middle-end sort of way, which I imagine the film adaptation probably does - it isn't encircled by the life of any single animal, or his occupancy of his remote Scottish home, but instead meanders through many of Maxwell's countryside adventures.

I'm going to concentrate on the ones which made Ring of Bright Water famous - the otters - although (cover aside) you wouldn't have much of a clue that they were coming for the first section of the book, which looks at the flora and fauna of the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and such matters as whale fishing (Maxwell is strongly against, despite having run a shark fishery - there is a constant paradox between his love of his animals and his killing of animals).  The only cohesion (and it is quite enough) is that it's Maxwell's opinions and voice, and connected with marine and rural life.

And then the otters come along.

The first otter only lives for a day or two, but after that comes Mij.  He is really the star of Ring of Bright Water, and the high point in Maxwell's affections.  I can't give any higher praise than to say that someone like me, interested in the animal kingdom chiefly when it concerns kittens, was entirely enamoured and captivated, and briefly considered whether it would be practical to get a pet otter.

Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing.  That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play or other activity.  If there is no acceptable toy, or if they are in a mood of frustration, they will, apparently with the utmost good humour, set about laying the land waste.  There is, I am convinced, something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel.

Er, maybe not.  Maxwell sets out to tell you how incomparable the otter is as a pet - cheerful, companionable, spirited - and only slowly does he reveal that they are completely untameable, very destructive, and occasionally (if repentingly) violent.

But Mij is still a wonder - or, rather, Maxwell is a wonder for the way he tells his story.  He is certainly a gifted and natural storyteller, and the reader is easily lulled into similar levels of affection towards Mij, and a complicit sympathy with Maxwell (and never for a moment what a novelist would subtly ask - that we would pity the loner, or wonder at his isolation.)

I don't want to spoil the high-jinks (yes, high-jinks - and tomfoolery, mark you) of the book, and I don't think I can capture Maxwell's tone - so I will give my usual proviso for books I didn't expect to enjoy so much: read it even if you don't think you'll like it!  (And if David Attenborough is your bag, then you'll probably love it even more.)

It is a beautiful book, for the rhythm and balance of its prose alone, quite apart from the topic or the setting.  I'm really pleased that, years down the line, I've finally taken up Hayley's recommendation - even if she had to lend Ring of Bright Water to me to make that happen.

The Foolish Immortals - Paul Gallico

I don't think I've read any author whose work is as disparate as Paul Gallico (and I probably start all my reviews of his books by saying that.)  I started with the novel I still consider his best, of the ones I've read: the dark fairy-tale Love of Seven Dolls.  Then there is the whimsical (Jennie), the amusing and eccentric (the Mrs. Harris series), the adventure story (although I've not read it, The Poseidon Adventure surely falls into this category.)

I started The Foolish Immortals (1953) hoping that it would be in one category, it shifted into another, and then it revealed a whole new facet of Gallico's writing arsenal.  Confused?  I'll try to explain...

The concept of The Foolish Immortals immediately appealed to me, because it sounded like the sort of topic which could easily be given the Love of Seven Dolls treatment, revolving (as it did) around manipulation, wilful delusion, and a touch of distorted fairy-tale - the last of which seems to be the ingredient which appears, in some form or other, in all the Gallico novels I've read.

Hannah Bascombe is rich, old, American heiress, who has successfully invested the money her business man father left her to make herself one of the richest people in the world.  There is only one aspect of her life over which she does not have ultimate control - and that is its span.  She has, she notes, reached her three-score-and-ten, and cannot have many decades left to live.  And yet... and yet, she hopes that money and power might be able to secure her immortality.

Enter, stage-left, Joe Sears.  He is a poor man and a chancer, clever and manipulative, and sees an opportunity.  Having enlisted the dubious help of a young (but visually ageless) ex-soldier called Ben-Isaac (in case Gallico didn't signpost it well enough, he's Jewish), Sears manages to get an appointment with Hannah Bascombe.  To do so, he has to get past her beautiful, utterly dependent niece Clary - but, having manoeuvred his way to Hannah, he recognises her vulnerability, and thinks that it could be a good way to make himself some money...

"What if you were able to duplicate their years?  Supposing you were able to outwit the Philistines waiting to trample your vineyards by outliving them, like Mahlalaleel, Cainan, Jared and Enoch, generation after generation down through the centuries until no living man would remember when you were born and not even unborn generations of the future could hope to be alive when you died?"

He offers Hannah this possibility, based on the ages to which people are described as living in the Old Testament (often many centuries) - suggesting that he knows where they can find a food which will give Hannah the same longevity.  And it's in Israel.

A bit of persuasion later, and they're off.  Nobody really trusts anybody else on this venture, and everybody is out for themselves.  Things grow even trickier to decipher (for the reader too) when they stumble across a man purported to be Ben-Isaac's missing, much-beloved uncle - a much-lauded academic who is, it turns out, working on the land.  Sears is, naturally, suspicious of this stranger, particularly when he takes over and Hannah appoints him the leader of their venture.  Who is scamming whom?

And this is where Gallico's other genres come into play.  There is a sizeable amount of what I admired in Love of Seven Dolls, but Sears is never quite as credible a villain as Monsieur Nicholas - in neither a fairytale nor a realistic way - simply because Sears is quite an inconsistent character.  Which matches the change in genres - in Israel, things turn rather 'adventure novel' for a while, as they caught up in a shoot-out.  I know this sort of thing is supposed to be very exciting, but I find it unutterably tedious, and ended up skipping most of that section.

So we come onto the genre I'd yet to encounter in Gallico's novels - the spiritual or religious theme.  As you might know, I am a Christian, but I don't often read novels which feature faith - and, I have to say, I was a bit nervous to see how skilfully Gallico would handle it.  And, I've got to say, I was quite impressed - both the Jewish and Christian characters experience direct or indirect encounters with God while travelling through Israel, and these sections were moving (although, it must be conceded, entirely out of kilter with the rest of the novel.)

There are a few more twists and turns, a few more rugs pulled from under feet, and The Foolish Immortals concludes.  It is a very interesting, but maddeningly inconsistent novel.  Not inconsistent in quality (perhaps), but in style and tone.  It's as though Gallico wanted to write a novel which took place in Israel, and couldn't decide whether it should be about faith, boyish adventure, or unsettling manipulation - and so threw all of them in together.

Yet again, this is a book I'm criticising for not being written in the way I'd hoped it would be - but with, I think, greater justification than with yesterday's post on Consider the Years, because in the case of The Foolish Immortals, it started off in the way I'd expected.  With this ingenious idea, Gallico could have written one of my favourite novels.  As it turns out, he's written a good book, which I find quite intriguing, a little bewildering, and not insignificantly disappointing.

The Easter Party - Vita Sackville-West

Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn't hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski's Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I've only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West's The Easter Party (1953). I couldn't get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn't an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose's dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter's witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario - and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn't wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage - or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with "I will not pretend to be in love with you," which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other 'Pudding', and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By 'poor' I mean, naturally, 'only has one bathroom' - they're not on the streets.)  It's not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush - it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn't been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing - here is Gilbert's faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don't believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.

She is a wonderful character when she arrives - garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul - because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments...

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original - and stand above similar novels.  I don't know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about - it's so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it's my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that's not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West's exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.

But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you're worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not - their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that's coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot...

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It's a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off - but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn't trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual - somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!

Room at the Top (a pleasant surprise)

If you read my recent appearance on Danielle's blog, taking you on a tour around my bookshelves, you might have noticed this picture:

Being observant people, you will have spotted all sorts of things.  Half the Queen's head, on my breakfast tea mug, perhaps.  David's eye (David being the teddy bear), maybe?  A little bit of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, if you're very astute.  But what you won't have missed is that book slap-bang in the front of the photo - one which scarcely seems to accord with my reading tastes.  It was, in case you hadn't guessed, a choice for my book group.

Could there be a less promising cover?  A louche man in a trench coat; a cover design which combines the worst excesses of ClipArt with the block capitals of a child learning to write; worst of all, the tagline (which mercifully you wouldn't have been able to read on Dani's post): 'The famous novel of the drivingly ambitious, sexually ruthless Joe Lampton, hero of our time.'

It sounds absolutely ghastly, doesn't it?

It's fair to say, dear reader, that I approached Room at the Top with some trepidation.  Yes, it was given to me (so it's on the Reading Presently list) but by a man who, inexplicably, had about two dozen copies in his garage, and I don't think had read it.

But - but - as with A Confederacy of Dunces, another book group choice, I misjudged it.  Although Room at the Top isn't in the same league as John Kennedy Toole's superb novel, every moment of which I relished, it's certainly much, much better than I'd dreaded from the cover, tagline, blurb...

I think Room at the Top compares interestingly with Francoise Sagan's Sunlight on Cold Water, which I savaged recently.  Both novels are about men sleeping with various women, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, and trying to discover their futures - but somehow Braine's was engaging, while Sagan's was an overly-introspective bore.  If I were to describe the plot of Room at the Top in detail, I really don't think it would appeal to many of my readers.  A recently demobilised soldier works his way through fairly menial financial jobs, feeling bitter about the rich and lustful about their daughters.  He falls in love; he falls out of it.  He seeks parent-replacements.  And he has a fair bit of sex.

So why did I like it?

Basically because John Braine can write well.  He's in that school of writing which I always think of as the Orwell-school, simply because he was the first author I read from that stable.  The similarities aren't in topic or genre, but in the use of language.  Orwell has a prose style that is somehow both beautiful and plain.  Sentence by sentence, it seems serviceable, even a little utilitarian, but it builds up into a richness which is hard to pinpoint.  At its best, every word is just right - without the elaborate tapestry of a Woolf or even an Elizabeth Taylor, or the entrenched humour of a von Arnim or Austen.  Of course, the only excerpt I noted down is rather more ornamental than most of Room at the Top, but... well, here it is.  Lampton is visiting the bombed-out house where he and his parents had lived:

I stepped forward into the bareness which had been the living-room.  I was sure about the cream valance, the red velvet curtains, the big photograph of myself as a child which had hung over the mantelshelf; but I couldn't be quite certain about the location of the oak dining-table.  I closed my eyes for a moment and it came into focus by the far wall with three Windsor chairs round it. [...]

The walls had been decorated half in fawn and orange paper and half in imitation oak panelling.  The paper was reduced to a few shreds now, the imitation oak panelling was pulped with dust and smoke and weather.  There had been a pattern of raised beads; I struck a match and held it close to the wall and I could still see some of the little marks where as a child I'd picked the beads off with my fingernails.  I felt a sharp guilt at the memory; the house should have been inviolate from minor indignities.

My predominant impression is that John Braine was too good a writer to write this sort of book.  He was one of the Angry Young Men, but the anger in Room at the Top feels rather tepid - and as though it has been put on for show, trying to join in with the big boys.  Lampton rails against the corporate system for a bit, and talks about 'zombies' in all areas of life - people from his despondent hometown who hopelessly go through the motions of living.  But I never really felt that his heart was in it.  What Braine chiefly wants to do, it feels, is write a good novel - regardless of the topic or the didactic rage of Angry Young Men.  Well, this was his first - I have no idea how his other novels turned out.  Perhaps he took the unassuming beauty of his prose and turned it to topics I'd find more palatable.  Perhaps not.  Either way, Room at the Top was a very pleasant surprise.

We Were Amused - Rachel Ferguson

Thanks so much for the wonderful suggestions on my art post the other day; I'll reply individually soon.  Some of you also liked the pictures I'd found, which was lovely - I really have fallen in love with Korhinta since I posted it, despite not much liking anything else I've turned up by Vilmos Aba-Novak.  Right, books.

Anyone who saw my Top Books list for 2012 will know that I love an autobiography, particularly if it's one by an author from the interwar period.  Rachel Ferguson seems such a complex, interesting novelist (and an actress to boot) that I was excited to read her autobiography We Were Amused (1958).  Well, it was definitely an interesting, involving read - and it's made Rachel Ferguson seem more eccentric and complex than I could ever have imagined!

I've only read a couple of her novels - The Brontes Went to Woolworths and Alas, Poor Lady - which could scarcely be more different.  The former is a madcap tangle about a family who have no boundary between fact and fantasy; the latter is a sombre examination of the fate for aging unmarried women in the period.  Both are excellent - you might all be more familiar with The Brontes Went to Woolworths, and tomorrow I'll be posting a longer excerpt from We Were Amused which relates to that novel.

Truth be told, I was a bit anxious after the first chunk of the book.  I often write here, when reviewing memoirs, that the author mentions miserable events without creating anything remotely like a misery memoir.  Well, Rachel Ferguson gets close... with her love for the dramatic and heightened, she describes her mother's childhood as utterly miserable, and her maternal grandmother as a tyrant.  Here's a typically bizarre Ferguson paragraph:

'Cumber', as our Greenwood cousins called her ('because she cumbers the earth'), was, as Annie Cave, a member of what Wells has termed that essential disaster of the nineteenth century, the large family.  Having married Dr. Cumberbatch, she herself produced five children who lived, a sixth who had the sense to die in infancy, plus at least two who never even succeeded to cradle status.  And all this without anaesthetics, in an era of tight lacing.

Details of Cumber's ogredom palled a little, and I confess that I couldn't wait for Ferguson to set aside childhoods - her mother's and her own - and get to the business of living.  More particularly, living as an aspiring dancer/actress and, later, writer.  These sections were rather wonderful.  Ferguson takes her haphazard life rather casually - all the opportunities and achievements which came her way are thrown in without much explanation, so she'll suddenly be working for Punch, or having her first novel published, or going on a theatrical tour, without much notice.  It's definitely better than labouring all these points, but it's a curious division of spoils considering how many pages she devotes to her experiences judging cat shows...

For most of us, I think it's this middle section of the autobiography which will most appeal.  It's so full of intriguing details and behind-the-scenes information (come back tomorrow for background info on The Brontes Went To Woolworths!) which is invariably interesting to those of us who have never published a novel or appeared on the stage.  She does expect a lot of knowledge of interwar actors, dancers, and journalists which I am (alas) unable to provide - but I need no prompting when she talks about E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and Violet Hunt.

Even if Rachel Ferguson had no creative career upon which to reflect, We Were Amused would be special for her striking, surreal turn of phrase.  Here is a couple of examples:

Our hall wallpaper, which for some reason was not replaced when we moved in, was a real caution and an abomination in the sight of the Lord: it suggested fir-trees and pineapples in a very bad thunderstorm indeed.

and

Socially Teddington was still of the epoch which invited its doctors to dinner but seldom, if ever, its dentists.

Very amusing! But, if only one could believe that Rachel Ferguson were sufficiently detached!  Perhaps it is foolish to expect an author to be detached in their autobiography, but her moments of irony and satire are weighed down by her equally peculiar outlook on many topics.  Yes, she may have written that twist about dentists with a grin on her face, but she is deadly serious when she suggests the working class have got too big for their boots and are 'overpaid'.  Complaining about the lack of live-in servants feels madly outdated for 1958, she seems faintly insane when writing 'the only cathedral town that doesn't tire one out is York' (what can she mean?), and I lost the thread completely when it came to the chapter on ghosts.  Ferguson assumes a level of credulity (not to mention a familiarity with famous hauntings of the 1930s) which left me entirely cold towards her my-sister's-friend's-cousin-heard sort of anecdotes about poltergeists and phantom footsteps.

Even stranger, to me, is her total fixation upon London - well, Kensington.  She describes a period spent in a different area of London as though she'd been exploring a South American country, or taken a voyage to Moscow.  She has no time at all for any of Britain's other cities, towns, and villages.  Life begins and ends with Kensington for Ferguson - she'll often assert that somebody is a Kensingtonian, and consider it credentials enough to satisfy the reader.  I shall never understand the London-centric mind, and I should probably give up hoping I ever shall.

So, it's a curious mix.  It's almost all fun and interesting, but the selection and apportion of pages - not to mention the tone and turn of phrase - certainly mark out Rachel Ferguson as an eccentric.  If you'd wondered how much of a departure she found The Brontes Went To Woolworths, well... if anything, she seems to have toned things down for the novel.

The Winds of Heaven - Monica Dickens

Firstly, just thought I'd let you know that I'm back in the blogosphere (after two or three days of not reading much) and have replied to all recent comments, including all the wonderful and interesting comments on the On Commenting post.

Having recently got all excited about Persephone publishing their 100th title, I decided to check my unread Persephones against my A Century of Books list, and see how many blank spaces could be filled.  I have loved doing A Century of Books, but there's no denying that some of those blank spaces are frustratingly elusive.  However, this cross-referencing did fill up two gaps - which happened to cover the whole cross-section of Persephone's ethos.  Today's book is at the light, frothy end of the scale - the book I'll review tomorrow is serious and important.  I'm very glad to have read both.

My parents gave me The Winds of Heaven (1955) for my birthday a year or two ago, and it's been on my large pile of books I'm looking forward to reading - especially since I am already a huge fan of Monica Dickens' semi-autobiographical, very hilarious One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet.  But haven't yet, somehow, read Mariana.  Anyway, The Winds of Heaven is very different from those - gone is the humour, gone is the absurdity, and present instead is one widower's lonely, awkward life, bustled from pillar to post (those pillars and posts being represented by three rather selfish daughters.)

Lest we be in any doubt that those heavenly winds of the title be metaphorical, the opening paragraph is this:

When the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes, and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.

Louise Bickford is certainly of the creep-about variety.  She is recently a widow, left with enormous debts by an unscrupulous and selfish husband, and must spend her days living with one or other of her three daughters, on rotation.  In this novel, Monica Dickens draws her characters with broad strokes.  Having recently read V.S. Pritchett's complex and brilliant delineation of his father, it was even clearer that Louise's husband Dudley is essentially a cartoon villain.  Louise is downtrodden by him, and throughout the novel he looms in her memories like a bogeyman, apparently unkind and cruel from their honeymoon onwards.  Indeed, nobody would read The Winds of Heaven for its range of subtle character portraits - every marriage in the novel has at least one 'bad'un', and sometimes two.  On the flipside, some characters are just hopelessly nice.  Here are the various daughters and families:

1.) Miriam - sharp, pre-occupied, but not cruel.  Husband Arthur - cross, irascibile.  Daughter Ellen - sensitive, withdrawn, kind.  Other children Simon and Judy - young, excitable.

2.) Eva - bohemian.  Lover David - unreliable.

3.) Anne - lazy.  Husband Frank - adorable.

I'm being a little unkind to Monica Dickens, and I should point out that none of this prevented me enjoying The Winds of Heaven to the utmost.  It just isn't a finely-drawn, perceptive novel - it's light and broad and completely, wonderfully entertaining.  It reminded me a great deal of Richmal Crompton's novels, which I love but which (I now recognise) are far from great art.  Indeed, the relative staying with various families is a plot Crompton uses more than once, and to great effect in Matty and the Dearingroydes.

Having called this novel entertaining, I should add that its themes are often sombre.  Chief amongst these is Louise's situation - being loved but unwanted by her family, an awkward imposition wherever she goes.  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor this would be a subtly crafted, very moving story - in the hands of Monica Dickens, it is moving but never heartbreaking.  Serious themes do not a serious novel make.  Indeed, the novel is still more entertaining than it is cautioning or saddening.  In fact, I'm trying to work out why it was so fun to read, when there is almost no comedy in it, and the events are all rather melancholy - from miserable affairs to accidents with farm machinery.  I think it's the same experience one has when watching a soap opera - the events are so over the top, and the characters embodying individual traits (Anne might as well just be a sign saying Selfish and Lazy) rather than complex personalities, that it's impossible to feel distraught for them, and instead you can settle down to guiltless enjoyment of the spectacle.

All of which sounds like I'm damning Monica Dickens with faint praise - but I have admiration for authors who can create an action-packed, page-turning novel, with underlying seriousness, and still produce a credible narrative.  Dickens' writing is never poor, and Louise herself is rather a well-drawn character - just one surrounded by characters who aren't particularly.  And which of us lives on Elizabeth Taylor alone?  It is no mean feat to produce a loveable, engaging novel.  It's the light end of the Persephone scale, but it's perfect for a winter evening when you want something relaxing and enjoyable, with just the right amount of thought-provoking paragraphs laced into the mix.  Thinking about it, The Winds of Heaven is the literary equivalent of The Archers... and that, my parents would assure me, can be no bad thing.

A few little reviews...

It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books... oops, didn't work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read - but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I'm going to rush through five of them today - books that, for one reason or another, I didn't want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man - she has only seen his back - and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan't give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children's book felt, despite being a hundred years old - a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I'm not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don't feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett's Lady Into Fox - which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me - I'd always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way - my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I've just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now...)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published - but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library - so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker's own penned changes.  It's pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I'm a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn't read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It's a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW's life.  About halfway through I thought, "this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation."  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I'll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that's five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?

Guard Your Daughters - Diana Tutton

41. Guard Your Daughters (1953)

What a heavenly book!  What a glorious find!  It has gone into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  There was never any question that it wouldn't.

Occasionally I started a book and, after a page or two, know that I will hate it *cough* Mary Webb *cough - less frequently, it takes only the first page to tell me that a book is astonishingly brilliant (step forward Patrick Hamilton.)  Rarest of all is the book where, before the end of the second page, I know I will read and re-read it for many years to come.  We all recognise the difference between a book we admire and a book we love.  Often these overlap, but there are very few novels which feel like loved ones, so deeply are we attached to them.  Guard Your Daughters is on that list for me, now.

First off, I have to acknowledge how similar it is to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.  I mentioned that the other day, but I don't think I can really write a review without acknowledging it again.  Guard Your Daughters was published five years after I Capture the Castle, and I think Tutton must have been influenced by it - or perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist?  (Disclaimer: I'm going to make two big assumptions - that you've read I Capture the Castle, and that you love it.  I won't give away any significant spoilers, but my references to Dodie Smith's novel might not make complete sense if you've not read it.... ok, disclaimer over!)

Here are some of the similarities: The narrator is a young girl (Morgan Harvey is 19, to Cassandra's 17) who lives with her eccentric family in the middle of rural nowhere.  Her father is a writer (although Morgan's father is a successful and prolific detective novelist, not an avant-garde sufferer from writer's block) and there are posher folk living nearby.  Tutton even seems to make reference to Rose's disastrous attempts to dress up for her neighbours, when Morgan and her sisters are preparing to visit theirs:

Luckily, if you bother to read a few illustrated papers you can always find out what to wear when, so that we didn't make any crashing faux pas, such as wearing long dresses or flowers in our hair.

The most significant similarity is the feel of the novel.  Just as I Capture the Castle has a warm, nostalgic feel to it (don't ask me how), so Guard Your Daughters feels like a novel one read repeatedly throughout childhood, even though I hadn't read a word of it before this week.  Without being like those mawkish Edwardian children's books where everyone Learns A Lesson, Tutton has created a wonderful family of people who love one another and, somehow, make the reader feel included.  'About fifty years out of date', as one sister cheerfully confesses, and 'living in a completely unreal world' as another admits, but this isn't a realist novel.  This is a novel which glories in its own delightful eccentricity - but not without serious undercurrents.

Right, the family.  While Cassandra was blessed only with one sister and one brother, Morgan has four sisters.  Dreamy, shy Teresa is the youngest (at 15) - she warmed my heart by her forthright hatred of sports.  Next is Cressida, the only one of the unmarried sisters who craves a normal family environment - she rather blended into the background, but that turns out to be important.  Morgan is the middle sister.  One year older than her, Thisbe is dry, sardonic and loves to make visitors feel awkward - the only thing she takes seriously is her poetry.  Oldest is Pandora, recently married and thus absent from the home.  When she visits, her perspective on life has changed...

"The thing is--" said Pandora.

"What?"

"I realise now - I never did before --" She hunted for words and I turned and stared at her.

"What are you trying to say?"

"I realise now that we're an odd sort of family."

"Well of course we are."

"But I mean - Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!"

"Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.  However, dearest, we'll do our best."

It is obvious that life cannot be normal for these five - but Guard Your Daughters isn't self-consciously wacky or absurd.  The events are entirely plausible - there are very amusing scenes where Morgan and Teresa try to run a Sunday School lesson, or Morgan and Thisbe attempt to negotiate a cocktail party, or the girls try to put together a meal for a visiting young man while subsisting on rations (and finer things illegally given by a nearby farmer.)  The various relationships between sisters aren't unlikely either - except perhaps the standard of their conversation and wit.  What makes the Harvey family eccentric is their detachment from the outside world, and their complete absorption in the feelings and doings of the family unit, to the exclusion of almost everybody else.  (The family unit is completed, incidentally, by their father and mother.  No Mortmain-esque step-parents in sight.  The father is only mildly absent-minded, and the mother... well, she has sensitive nerves... it's not all easy-going in this household or this novel.)

But, despite Pandora's fears, they do manage to meet a couple of young men.  Gregory's car fortuitously breaks down outside their gate (remind you of any novel?) and, later, Patrick offers Morgan and Teresa a lift in his car while they're on their way to a nunnery to learn French... Aside from owning cars, these young man share bewilderment at the Harvey family, and both become objects of desire for one sister or another.  Unlike I Capture the Castle, the romance plot never becomes of overriding importance.  Far more important is the family, their love and rivalry, and definitely their comedy.  There are many very amusing scenes, and a few quite moving and difficult ones, but the main wonder of the novel is the family, and Morgan's voice.  She is not so self-conscious as Cassandra, but has an inviting, charming, slightly wry outlook on her sisters - coloured, of course, by her love for them.  I have no idea how Tutton has created such a lovable character - if I knew, I'd bottle it.

These aren't the sisters in the book, of course... but they could be.
(picture source)

It's so difficult to write about a book when I have simply loved it.  I want to shelve any critical apparatus (not that I usually drag it out on my blog) and substitute rows of exclamation marks and smiley faces.  Guard Your Daughters is so warm, so funny, so lively and delightful.  It's a warm blanket of a novel, but never cloying or sentimental.  Basically, if you have any affection for I Capture the Castle, you'll feel the same about Guard Your Daughters.  I'm going to go one step further.  I think it's better than I Capture the Castle.  There.  Said it.

Bizarrely, unbelievably, criminally, it is out of print.  But I've seen the edition I have (the Reprint Society, 1954) in lots and lots of bookshops - I think they may have overestimated the demand!  I would love people to read it, so I'll probably buy up copies when I see them, and force them on friends and family... if it's languishing on your shelves, then go and grab it asap.  I'm so grateful to my friend Curzon for initially recommending it to me, and later Nicola Humble (author of the absolutely essential The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920 to 1950s) for reminding me about it at a conference earlier this year.  It's probably my book of 2012 so far, and if you manage to get a copy, please come and let me know what you thought.

Oh, what a heavenly book!