The Fur Person by May Sarton

I can't remember exactly how it came about - begging, borrowing, or stealing (or, y'know, a present), but when I stayed with Thomas in Washington D.C. about 18 months ago, he gave me The Fur Person by May Sarton. That was not even amongst the nicest things he did - he's a great guy, y'all - but it was definitely very exciting to get. He has been keen for me to read May Sarton for ages, and the one I did read (As We Are Now) never made its way to Stuck-in-a-Book - so, rather than strike out two for two, I'll be talking about The Fur Person now. Full disclosure: I loved it.

How was I not going to love it, considering that it's about a cat? Well, some cat-centric books have failed with me, one way or another. I wasn't enamoured by Jennie (Paul Gallico), and - while I did adore Dewey, it was for all the wrong reasons. But The Fur Person (1978) combines a strong understanding of cats with a complete lack of sentiment - in the best possible way. So, although the novella undoubtedly includes cat-lovers, the narrative is presented from the cat's perspective (albeit in the third person, if you see what I mean). He - Tom 'Terrible' Jones, no less - is pragmatic and selfish (like all cats) but willing to exchange affection and loyalty for the correct 'housekeeper', having realised that one cannot be a footloose, fancy-free young tom forever.

The story is simple, and supposedly based on the real life adventures of Sarton's cat. He experiments with various housekeepers, before settling on the admiration and respect of Sarton and her partner. In a chilling warning to such as me, Tom is not interested in the cloyingly affectionate:

The trouble was, as he soon found out, that as soon as he came into reach, the lady could not resist hugging and kissing him with utter disregard for the dignity of his person. There are times when a Gentleman Cat likes very much to be scratched gently under his chin, and if this is done with savoir-faire he may afterwards enjoy a short siesta on a lap and some very refined stroking, but he does not like to be held upside down like a human baby and he does not like to be cooed over, and to be pressed to a bosom smelling of narcissus or rose.

Which is understandable, but there is a certain pathos in the way Sarton presents the scene. Tom is intent merely on getting out of the house - by the common feline method of standing silently by the door until obeyed - but, in the background, this would-be owner is mournful:

"You're not a nice cat at all," she said, and she began to whimper. "You don't like me," she whimpered, "do you?"

In another sort of novel, this might have been a tragic moment in her life - but, in The Fur Person, it is one of many instances that occur while Tom is finding his way to the idyll at the end of his journey.

The Fur Person bounded up the stairs, and at the very instant he entered the kitchen, the purrs began to swell inside him and he wound himself around two pairs of legs (for he must be impartial), his nose in the air, his tail straight up like a flag, on tip toes, and roaring with thanks.

It's quite a sweet ending, but it doesn't fall over the boundary into saccharine. And the reason for that, I believe, is because Sarton has observed the behaviour of cats so precisely. Everything she described rang true. Perhaps not the ten commandments for cats (individually they were accurate, but I suspect cats do not repeat these mantras by rote), but certainly the movements of tail and paws, the stretching, the staring and waiting - everything it described with such precision and accuracy that any cat-lover (particularly those of us who love cats but don't live with any) will thrill to the reading experience.

Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine Stern

You know what it's like with book reviews on Stuck-in-a-Book - they're like buses; you wait a month for one, and then three come along at once. (If you've ever waited a month for a bus, then - please - just give up and get a taxi.) In the weekend last year where I coincidentally read a bunch of books I bought in America, one of them had the enticing title Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion (1997) by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern. (Who first told me about this? Was it YOU?)

I'm not the sort of man to walk away from a book about loving books, particularly one penned by older women, and so I was excited to read this. But it was quite a while ago, so I'm going to review this one in bullet points... let's call it an experiment.

• Leona and Madeleine take it in turns to narrate chapters, starting with their childhoods (perhaps unsurprisingly) and through the schooling and college education. 

• The main point of interest here is that one of them was refused her doctorate, mostly because her supervisor disagreed with her argument. (That is NOT acceptable supervising.)

• I could never really tell Leona and Madeleine apart from their writing styles, so their lives intertwined for me.

• They set up a rare books business together, buying and selling, and this is where my interest was piqued.

• They make catalogues! I could read about the preparation of catalogues forever.

• They're only interested in very old books, so my love of 20th-century literature was never really satisfied. But, oh well.

• And they discovered sensation magazine stories that Louisa M. Alcott had written under a pseudonym - which led to a minor sort of literary fame for them.

• I really enjoyed it! Reading about the books business, particularly in a time before the internet made book hunting both easier and less filled with surprises is always fun.

Here is my caveat (for which I have slipped out of bullet points). I love reading about readers; about people who hunt for books because they are desperate to read them. Rostenberg and Stern hunt for books for a living, and so (naturally enough) are concerned more with profit than anything else. Still, I couldn't help weary a little at the number of times they said how much they'd paid for something and how much they'd sold it for - particularly on the occasions when that effectively meant diddling a seller out of money, because the seller had sold a book for less than it was worth. Which made it rather a surprise to come across this paragraph in the epilogue:

We have become keen observers of the generations who have succeeded us. Every age is critical of the next, and we are no exceptions. Although we admire and befriend many young dealers who do not confuse value with price, we deplore the all too popular conception entertained by many dealers that books are to be regarded primarily as investments. Such booksellers go in for dollarship, not scholarship.

I wonder how they think they differ from this? Perhaps as bibliophiles, albeit bibliophiles who get money from their love, rather than simply gratification.

But, this quibble aside, I found it fascinating and fun. It's not up there with Phantoms on the Bookshelves or Howards End is on the Landing - the works of true booklovers, and lovers of 20th-century fiction into the bargain - and it's not quite the book that I thought it would be, but Old Books, Rare Friends will still retain its place on my books-about-books bookshelf.

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!

A review round-up

I've made my peace with not getting to the end of my Century of Books by the end of 2014 - that's fine; the rules are very flexible - but I will bolster out the list with some of the others I have read which don't quite warrant a post to themselves, for one reason or another...

A Painted Veil (1925) by W. Somerset Maugham
I read this in the Lake District, and found it rather enthralling if a little overdramatic and a touch sententious. But it was borrowed from a friend, and I didn't blog about it before sending it back...

The Listerdale Mystery (1934) by Agatha Christie
This was part of my Christie binge earlier in the year, but slipped in just after my other Christie round-up. This is a collection of short stories, some of which were better than others. It also has one with a novelist who complains that adapted books are given terrible names like 'Murder Most Horrid' - which later happened to Christie herself, with Mrs McGinty's Dead.

It's Too Late Now (1939) by A.A. Milne
One day I'll write a proper review of this glorious book, one of my all-time favourites. It's AAM's autobiography and I've read it four or five times, but have left it too late this time to write a review that would do it justice. But I'm bound to re-read it, so we'll just wait til then, eh?

Summer in February (1995) by Jonathan Smith
This novel is an all-time favourite of my friend Carol's, and for that reason I feel like I should give it a proper review, but... well, it's already seeped out of my head, I think. It was a good and interesting account of the Newlyn painters. I didn't love it as much as Carol, but it was certainly well written and enjoyable.

The Blue Room (2000) by Hanne Ørstavik
I was going to review this Peirene translation for Shiny New Books, but I have to confess that I didn't like it at all. But was I ever going to like an X-rated novel about submission? Reader, I brought this upon myself.

Making It Up (2005) by Penelope Lively
I wasn't super impressed by my first Lively, I have to confess. I heard her speak about this book in 2005, so it was about time I read it - but it's a fairly disparate selection of short stories, tied together with the disingenuous notion that all of them have some vague resemblance to sections of Lively's life or people she saw once on the train. Having said that, some of the stories were very good - it just felt like the structure was rather weak. Still, I'm sure there are better Lively novels out there?

The Man Who Unleashed the Birds (2010) by Paul Newman
This biography of Frank Baker (author of Miss Hargreaves) has been on my on-the-go shelf for about four years, and I finally finished it! The awkward shape of the book was the main reason it stayed on the shelf, I should add; it wouldn't fit in my bag! It was a brilliantly researched biography, with all sorts of info I'd never have been able to find elsewhere - most particularly a fascinating section on his relationship (er, not that sort of relationship) with Daphne du Maurier after he'd accused her of plagiarising 'The Birds'.

The Siren Years by Charles Ritchie

One of the greatest pleasures I have had in blogging is getting to know Claire's blog. We all know and love her as The Captive Reader, and I am lucky enough to have very similar taste to Claire - we have both followed up each other's suggestions, and have only had the occasional mishap. When I received Charles Ritchie's The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945 (1974) as a gift in the post, I was very touched - and a little nervous. I trust Claire. But... I thought she might have made a mistake. A book about politics? Me? And the cover did nothing to convince me... Lucky for me, I was wrong and Claire was right. Which makes a total of no recommendations from her that have turned out to be duds.

Ritchie often seems more like a society gossip than a diplomat, and that - you will not be surprised to learn - makes him much more up my street. He describes the people around him with a catty tone, albeit one au fait with national and international politics. Not to mention literature; Elizabeth Bowen was a large part of Ritchie's life, and he is a sensitive interpreter of people.

And who can fail to be moved by any war memoir? The experiences of war, even on the home front, are so foreign to those of most of us today that any description of life then is both fascinating and poignant. Indeed, it is perhaps more so on the home front - because the places, relationships, and roles are recognisable, but thrown into extraordinary relief.

Since it's been far too long since I read this wonderful diary, I shall just give you a series of quotations I noted down from it. After all, I am only going to say 'I love this' after each one, if I elaborate any further.

On public figures from Eton...
What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils and curling tongs.

On politicians
[...] a few senators and political big-shots whose faces give one a feeling of familiar boredom like picking up an old twice-read newspaper.

On work rituals
Being a Private Secretary is a busy unreal sort of life - unreal because it makes one's day such a programme of events. One does things in a certain order not because one feels like doing them at the time or even because this is the order of their importance, but because they appear in that order on the day's programme. This programme is dictated by the engagements of the Chief, who is in turn a victim of his engagements and spends most of his day in doing unnecessary things which he does not want to do. Yet neither of us is unhappy. We feel that the ritual of our lives is obligatory - we grumble but we submit with satisfaction to the necessity. A day of telephone conversations, luncheon parties, notes acknowledged, visitors received, memoranda drawn up. Exhaustion is merely staleness - we return with zest to the game. What an extraordinary amount of time is spent in saving our own face and coddling other people's vanities! One would really think that the people we deal with were a collection of hypersensitive megalomaniacs.

On war in London
Never has there been such a colourless war - not a drum, not a flag, not a cheer - just sandbags and khaki and air-read shelters and gas-masks and the cultivated, careful voice of the B.B.C. putting the best complexion on the news. London is waiting for the first raid like an anxious hostess who has made all the preparations to receive formidable guests - but the guests do not seem to be going to turn up. Every time the door-bell rings she thinks, "At last there they are," but it turns out to be the grocer's boy delivering a parcel. So the day pass. We look at our watches, turn on the wireless, pick up a novel and wait.

On Oxford, and a building I used to work in
The moment I stepped out of the station I smelt the familiar smell of Oxford. What nonsense the woman was talking the other day when she said that it did not matter if a city were destroyed physically, if its soul lived. Cities are nothing without their bodies. When you have destroyed Paris and Oxford what happens to their souls? Oxford rebuilt in this age! It would be easy to see what it would be like by looking at the new Bodleian Extension - that blankly commonplace hulk which they have dared to plant in the face of the Sheldonian. That is the most distressing thing about Oxford - for the rest the changes are temporary.

On Elizabeth Bowen
"Take it from one of the best living novelists that people's personalities are not interesting," Elizabeth said in a dry voice; "except," she added, "when you are in love with them." Her books show much that you would expect if you knew her only as an acquaintance, he intelligence, her penetrating eye, her love of houses and flowers. These things you would have gathered from talking to her in her drawing-room. But there are certain passages in which her peculiar intensity, her genius, come out, which would be hard to reconcile with this cultivated hostess. That purity of perception and compassion seems to come from another part of her nature of which she is perhaps not completely aware.

On wartime
We have long ceased to find the war thrilling - any excitement in the movement of historic events is gone. There is a vague but persistent worry in people's minds about the coming air raids this winter, but like everything else this is accepted as inevitable. The truth is that the war has become as much a part of our lives as the weather, the endless winter, and when the ice does break there will be no cheering in the streets.

The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars

A little while ago I got a very nice email from someone called Vicki, saying how much she enjoyed reading Stuck-in-a-Book, and asking if she could send me one of the books she loved as a sort of thank you. Well, I was very touched, and - not one to turn down a book recommendation or, indeed, a book - said yespleasethankyouverymuch. And shortly afterwards Betsy Byars' The Midnight Fox (1968) arrived.

I hadn't heard of it, but I think The Midnight Fox is well known in some circles. Yet again, having only read Enid Blyton for years on end means that I don't know that much about other children's classics. But now I have read, and very much enjoyed, this sweet and touching tale of a holiday on a farm.

The premise has a surprising number of similarities with Philippa Pearce's much-loved children's book Tom's Midnight Garden, published ten years earlier. In both, a boy named Tom must reluctantly go and stay with his aunt and uncle, and greatly misses a boy called Peter. In both, a certain midnight aberration becomes an obsession, and changes the stay into a much happier event; Peter is written to from a distance, and becomes an accomplice in the discovery. I doubt that Byars plagiarised the book, but the similarities amused me.

The story is simple - Tom is beguiled by the beauty of this unusual fox, who is entirely black. He starts to look out for her, and becomes increasingly keen to observe her playing with her small fox cub; he is almost bewitched by this elegant, elemental life lived near to him - and must find a way to stop his hunting uncle from trapping the fox.

What makes it such a special little book? The style, I think. It's not told with the gung-ho naivety of some children's books, but treats Tom's anxieties and concerns seriously - not least because we read it in the first person. Here is the opening...

Sometimes at night when the rain is beating against the windows of my room, I think about that summer on the farm. It has been five years, but when I close my eyes I am once again by the creek watching the black fox come leaping over the green. green grass. She is as light and free as the wind, exactly as she was the first time I saw her.

Or sometimes it is that last terrible night, and I am standing beneath the oak tree with the rain beating against me. The lightning flashes, the world is turned white for a moment, and I see everything as it was - the broken lock, the empty cage, the small tracks disappearing into the rain. Then it seems to me that I can hear, as plainly as I heard it that August night, above the rain, beyond the years, the high, clear bark of the midnight fox.

Thanks again, Vicki, for sending me this book; it was so generous and kind of you. I really enjoyed reading it - and I especially think this would be good to read aloud to a child, if any parents are on the look-out for something!

A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr

Quite a few of us in the blogosphere are fans of J.L. Carr's 1980 novel A Month in the Country - that gentle tale of a man who goes to help restore a rural mural. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that rhyme.) But I don't remember seeing reviews of any of his other novels - and had thought he might be rather a one-trick pony.

So, I was glad when my book group opted to read A Day in Summer (1963), Carr's first novel - and evidence that he was fond of A [Time] in the [Situation] titles early on. But, except for similar titles, these novels have very little in common - except, that is, for quality. Both are very good.

A Day in Summer sounds a very halcyon title, but this is belied by the opening few pages. Peplow is on a train, coming into Great Minden. He has an imaginary conversation with his Manager; one of several in square brackets throughout the novel, from different characters' perspectives, that give a very open access to their imaginations and projections:

["I wonder if you'd mind very much if I take Friday off?""I suppose not. Is someone ill? Is it urgent?"No - well, it is and it isn't. As a matter of fact I have to go off to a place in the country and shoot a man. Yes, that's right, a man. They call it Great Minden. Perhaps you know it?""Really! Great Minden! I had an aunt living near there. If you wouldn't consider it an impertinence, may I ask who - whom?""It's the man who ran down my boy last summer. He's with a fairground outfit, and on Friday he'll be at the Fair there I understand. So it would be very convenient.""Naturally! Shall we see you again on Saturday? Monday?""Well, no. I've more or less decided it would be better for me to finish myself off too. In comfort, on the way back, all being well. It would by-pass the embarrassing formalities that usually follow. I'm sure you understand."]

This isn't precisely the tone that the rest of the novel takes - although it would be rather fascinating to read a whole narrative in this style. He isn't really flippant about his action, and it is the thread that pulls the novel together, but Peplow isn't really the leading character of A Day in Summer. And that is because, more than any other novel I can remember, this is an ensemble piece. Once Peplow arrives in Great Minden, the narrative flits from character to character, weaving their stories together so that the baton naturally passes from person to person.

There is a lascivious young schoolteacher who is having an affair with the vicar's wife; the teacher is rightly terrified of the elderly spinster who runs the school with an iron fist. The vicar is desperate to hold his marriage together, but his wife despises him. There is a poor family with too many children, also with marital troubles; there is a dying man whose young son wonders why his mother left the family years ago. And, taking the cover on my book, is the man in a wheelchair, invalided by war, who happens to have been in action with Peplow.

There are, you see, too many characters to describe all that goes on; the plot is planned perfectly, and yet it feels less like a plot and more like observing villagers living their lives. Their unhappy lives, it should be said; misery is widespread, and marriages seem incapable of being content. Indeed, Peplow's paternal grief seems perhaps less vivid than the teacher Croser's sickness of being in a frustrating job, of the vicar's pain.

Throughout, Carr's tone is quite darkly witty, and I really loved it. Fans of A Month in the Country may find little to recognise, but this is by no means a weak first effort at novel-writing. Carr has a very impressive confidence even at this early stage, and handles a difficult tone and potentially unwieldy plot extremely well. Although A Month in the Country is a better book to curl up with for comfort, this is a stark, moving, and (yet) very amusing novel that is arguably equally good, in a very different way.

Land's End - Michael Cunningham

While I was cat-sitting for a friend recently, I read (or finished) five books in quick succession, and it wasn't until I got there that I realised that three of them were books I got when I was in Washington DC last October. I mean, I bought so many books there that I was almost inevitably going to find them about my person somewhere (I jest...). I wonder if it's worth keeping track of how longer I have books on my shelves before I read them, and see if 15 months is the optimum time...

Anyway, I bought Land's End (2002) because I've been wanting to read more Michael Cunningham ever since I loved The Hours back in 2003 or thereabouts. I've only got as far as watching Evening, the adaptation of Susan Minot's novel for which Cunningham wrote (or, rather, rewrote) the screenplay. I have to confess that I was also sold on the Cunningham because of this:

Thomas/My Porch informed me that signed Cunninghams are ten a penny Stateside (they have pennies in the US, right? Whilst we're on that, how confusing is the tax thing there? You just have no idea how much you'll have to pay when you get to the till). But this is something fun and rather special. And I had my fingers crossed that the book would also be fun and special...

It's a non-fiction book about Provincetown, Massachusetts - the very tip of Cape Cod. My horrendously inadequate geographical knowledge was, for once, approaching adequate - as I had heard of Provincetown, and knew of its peninsular qualities and unusual character. For why, you ask? A couple of my favourite vloggers (Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart) went there during their HeyUSA tour, as you can see here. From which I learned that Provincetown is full of creative people and drag queens (with, presumably, some overlap).

Cunningham's view of Provincetown is not as an insider or an outsider. He definitely defines himself in opposition to the tourists, who make the streets jam-packed during the summer months, so that getting groceries is almost impossible. But he does not live there all the year round, despite owning a house there; he prefers the anonymity of New York. Because Provincetown is apparently the gossip capital of the East, and everybody knows everybody. The year-round population (Wikipedia tells me) is around 3,000; this goes up to twenty times that number in summer.

I have trouble with travel literature. Visual descriptions don't work for me, and writers of travel lit often want to give purple depictions of flora and fauna. But a genre I do love is memoir, and Cunningham treads the line between the two - falling, thankfully, more heavily into memoir. Or, rather, he describes Provincetown through a personal lens, rather than the anthropologist's. If he is neither insider nor outsider to the town, then he is closer to the former than the latter.

The beautiful setting I read it in.

There is plenty for the anthropologist in Provincetown, though. Its character differs strongly from the surrounding area; it is (Cunningham says) the refuge of the outsider and eccentric. Some of those outsiders (and I now realise I've overused that word) are from the LGBT community, and - um - anything apparently goes in Provincetown. Cunningham very casually describes the beaches where you'll find men having sex in the undergrowth, and those where you won't. He mentions (and repeatedly re-mentions) this with such calm that it seems like a normal thing, to find people having sex when you pop down to build a sandcastle. Hmm...

But once we've left all that behind, I felt more at home in Provincetown - with its focus on art, friendliness, community, and (yes, I confess) gossip. Cunningham does a great job of explaining why he finds the town so special, more from the warm tone he uses than the facts he states. He incorporates the history of the town - did you know that the Pilgrim Fathers landed there first, before heading off to Plymouth Rock? - and its primary exports, but it is the affection with which he writes that really sells Provincetown.

I say 'sells'; I still don't think I'd go out of my to visit, still less live there, but anybody writing with wisdom and passion about their favourite place, and the experiences they have lived there, will win me over. From meeting his partner (and not forgetting his dramatic ex-partner) to the 2am gatherings outside a place that sells middle-of-the-night pizza, Land's End is a curiously charming and almost old-fashioned depiction of a not-at-all old-fashioned place. Here is an excerpt to finish with, and to give you a taste of how he combines the personal and the observational:

If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune grass running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, through the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune grass and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.

What a beautiful image, and moving reflection.

Anybody read this? Or been to Provincetown??

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.”

Marrying Out - Harold Carlton

You know that I love Slightly Foxed Editions - I don't shut up about it - and the latest one I read is up there with my favourites now. I pretty much read it all in one setting. It's Marrying Out (2001) by Harold Carlton, originally published as The Most Handsome Sons in the World!, a memoir about the fall-out in a Jewish family when one of the sons wants to 'marry out'.

More in the Shiny New Books review...

Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers

Time for another link to a Shiny New Books review. And this one is an absolute joy - any fans of P.G. Wodehouse or early Hollywood will love this one. It's the 1914 novel Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers.

As is my practice, I'll give you the first paragraph of the review, and then send you over to Shiny New Books if you'd like to read more...

It’s fun occasionally to read a book that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. And it would be impossible for Love Insurance (1914) by Earl Derr Biggers to take itself seriously for a moment – before a few dozen pages are finished, the reader has had to buy a number of extremely unlikely situations – but that all adds to the pleasure. It is unmistakably of its time (if A.A. Milne had written a novel in the 1910s, when he was still being guiltlessly insouciant, it might have been a lot like this) but that doesn’t mean it can’t still charm a century later.

The rest of the review is here...

Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford

Apparently I bought Pigeon Pie (1940) by Nancy Mitford in Clun on 15th August 2011. I have no idea where Clun is and no recollection of having gone there, but I suppose I must have done! I read the novel quite a few months ago, so forgive any patchy memory (I'm linking to some great reviews at the end!)

For all my Mitfordmania, I have actually only read one Nancy Mitford novel (The Pursuit of Love); despite very much enjoying it, and having lots of others on hand, I still haven't actually read any more. So I picked up this purchase from mysterious Clun, and started. The first thing I noticed was the author's note:

I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning - Nancy Mitford, Paris, 1951

Well! That's quite the start, isn't it? As Nancy warns, this novel is about the phoney war - that bit at the beginning of war where everyone prepared themselves for an onslaught, and not very much happened. And so she is able to be rather casual about the war, in a way that would look rather scandalous even by the time of publication. And the heroine of Pigeon Pie is nothing if not casual. Lady Sophia Garfield is a flippant socialite who has married for money, finds her husband a bore, and lives for the petty squabbles she has with the other doyennes of London society.

I do rather love this compact description of the phoney war:

Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy's Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn't play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain's Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except like Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.

The things that do begin, in Pigeon Pie, are rather extraordinary. A much-loved singer is killed, and Sophia finds herself swept up in an unlikely espionage and kidnap plot. None of it is treated particularly seriously - it is definitely silly rather than tense, and a wry eye is never far from the narrative. The denouement is just as unlikely as all the rest, and treads an awkward line between satire and failure...

I love Mitford's tone, and I love her observations about the in-fighting of the upper classes. In another novel, Sophia could have been great fun.  But I'm not sure that Pigeon Pie (for me) is ever more than quite good. And that isn't particularly because of insensitivity (although that warning was perhaps more pertinent in 1951) but because Mitford is turning her hand to a genre at which she is not an expert.

Others who got Stuck into this book

"The tone is maybe a little uneven, but when the wit works it really does sparkle." - Jane, Fleur Fisher in Her World

"It feels unreal and flippant; the language makes it seem a little like Enid Blyton for adults." - Karyn, A Penguin A Week

"A very enjoyable tale, filled with the usual Mitford acerbic wit, ridiculous characters and finely observed minutiae of upper class inter war life." - Rachel, Book Snob

The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

My book group recently read The Soul of Kindness (1964) by Elizabeth Taylor - I have a feeling I recommended it, although can never quite remember - and I don't think we've ever had a more divided discussion. Some thought the whole thing uneventful and boring; some thought it a brilliantly subtle novel about realistic people and the way they interact. Guess which I was?

Well, if you've read my previous reviews of Elizabeth Taylor - you can see them all by picking her from that dropdown menu of authors over on the left, should you so wish - you'll probably have guessed that I was in the latter camp. (As a character thinks: 'men, she knew, are very interested in detailed descriptions of ordinary things'. Curiously unlike the usual division of men and women in stereotype - the masculine grand epic vs. the feminine domestic hearth.) The Soul of Kindness is an extraordinary novel and, just like her others, almost impossible to write well about.

The first thing I have learned with Elizabeth Taylor is that you can't read her quickly. Well, you can - but so much is lost. Because not much happens, and it's easy to skim through the calm conversations and quiet movements, and miss the spectrum of emotion playing under the surface, so cleverly told by Taylor.

The novel opens with a wedding. Flora isn't paying much attention to her husband; she is feeding doves (note their influence on the beautiful cover to my 1966 Reprint Society copy):

Towards the end of the bridegroom's speech, the bride turned aside and began to throw crumbs of wedding cake through an opening in the marquee to the doves outside. She did so with gentle absorption, and more doves came down from their wooden house above the stables. Although she had caused a little rustle of amusement among the guests, she did not know it: her husband was embarrassed by her behaviour and thought it early in their married life to be so; but she did not know that either.

That lack of self-awareness and observation is the central thread of the novel. Flora is the 'soul of kindness' of the title - as another character says, "To harm anyone is the last thing she'd ever have in mind." She is a blonde beauty, doted on by her mother, surrounded by people (mother, husband, friend, housekeeper) who never dream of crossing her, and who do not see any darkness in her. For, indeed, there is no darkness in her. I thought the novel might be about a craftily vindictive woman, but Flora is just monumentally naive - with a naivety either born of selfishness, or a selfishness born of naivety. She wants to help people. She is (as Hilary notes in her fab review, linked below) not unlike Austen's Emma - although Flora is less meddlesome. She just suggests things and engineers things, without seeming to give any great effort, and... mild disaster follows.

A marriage that shouldn't have happened. A union between two friends that will never happen because the man is gay. The encouragement to a young man that he is a talented actor, when he is hopeless and will only meet failure on that path. Everything Flora does is well-meaning. There is a moment of crisis (I shan't say what), but... by the end of the novel, most people haven't changed enormously. Human nature doesn't follow a brief and convenient narrative structure.

For that is what Taylor observes and depicts so brilliantly: truthful human behaviour. Some people at book group found the characters poorly drawn, and I do agree that we see them chiefly from the outside rather than the inside - but that is an authorial choice and (I think) a good and acceptable one. There are wonderful scenes where she draws up the difference between what people say and what they mean - and what other people think they mean. It is so (that word again) subtle, and done extremely skilfully. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most agonising, where those between Patrick and Frankie - Patrick being in love with the youthful, callous Frankie, and anxious for any possible attention from him, taking what he is thrown so gratefully.

Oh, and Mrs Secretan (Flora's mother) is the best depiction I have seen of a hypochondriac - usually they are hysterical or selfish, but Taylor's portrait shows the terror at the heart of the true hypochondriac, particularly the one who dreads the doctor. I speak as one who knows...

I should add that there are moments of lovely humour. I enjoyed this a lot, about Flora (and that naivety):

She sat gazing in front of her. On a table at her side was a piece of knitting which had not grown for days, and the book by Henry Miller Patrick Barlow had lent her, which she was reading with such mild surprise. ('What does this word mean, Richard? 'Truly? Well I suppose it had to be called something.' How had she lived so long without knowing? he wondered.)

All in all, I thought The Soul of Kindness a brilliant example of an exceptional writer. There are, of course, different books for different moods. When I wrote about My Sister Eileen recently, I shouted my love for books that are unashamedly lovely. Well, this is not that. It's for a different mood. But, in the right mood, you could hardly do better.


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

"What I love about this novel is how subversive it is." - Hilary, Vulpes Libris

"I found the characters not entirely convincing and actually quite irritating." - Karen, Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

"The subtlety of Elizabeth Taylor’s writing is masterly." - Ali, Heavenali

The Literary Conference - César Aira

I guess my blog is, if anything, a bit of a celebration of well-written middlebrow, mostly English, mostly oldish, and mostly about tea cups and cats. Fair? Well, I also love to try things that are a bit different sometimes (especially - scholar that I am - if they are short, so the experiment needn't be all-encompassing). So, when I went off to a literary conference in the summer, I thought I'd take The Literary Conference (2006) by the Argentinian author César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver (one of three Aira novels sent to me by Hamish Hamilton a while ago, in a boxset of three with the cover designs below).

Somehow I got distracted, and only finished it recently - which, considering it's only 90 pages long, isn't very impressive, but it isn't because I didn't like it. I was delightfully baffled and bemused by the whole thing. It's surrealism mixed with postmodernism, with a dollop of science-fiction for good measure.

Our hero - and seldom has the term been used with less justice - has the same name as the author, and is off to attend a literary conference. We see extremely little of this. Instead we see his arrogance, his venom against rivals, and his determination to succeed. All are seen in the curious opening, where he discovers the secret of the 'Macuto Line' - a rope that has pirates' treasure on the end of it, under the sea, only nobody has worked out how to solve it. Guess who does?

But that is an overture to the main event. The protagonist wants to clone his rival, and has - since he is, he is willing to confess, a genius - devised a cloning machine, and secures a cell from Carlos Fuentes by means of a trained wasp.

Upon my return to the hotel, the excitement of the past few hours reached its anticlimax. The first part of the operation, the most demanding part for me, was over: I had obtained a cell from Carlos Fuentes, I had placed it inside the cloning machine, and I had left the machine to operate under optimum conditions. If you add to this the fact that the previous day I had solved the secular enigma of the Macuto Line, I could feel momentarily satisfied and think about other things. I had a few days to do just that. Cloning a living being is not like blowing glass. It happens on its own, but it takes time. Even though the process is prodigiously accelerated, it requires almost a week, according to the human calendar, for it must reconstruct on a small scale the entire geology of the evolution of life.

The climax of the novella is undoubtedly the way in which this clone goes awry. I want to say what happens so much - it is so strange, and yet extremely fitting (and goes back neatly to the beginning) - but I won't do Aira the disservice of spoiling the ending, in case you choose to read it.

I have no real idea what I thought about The Literary Conference. It did remind me of the two novels I've read by Adolfo Bioy Casares - in that it pretty much confused me, without alienating me. Perhaps it was more of a tourist venture into the tastes of others, but... it was fun, nonetheless.

My Sister Eileen - Ruth McKenney

There aren't enough unashamedly lovely books around. Too many modern books (it seems) feel they have to be either trivial or miserable, as though the only way to be literary was to be grim. There is a market for uplifting books, but these tend to be insultingly light reads (pastel-coloured romances) or forgettable books you buy from the pile by the till. Comedy, meanwhile, is apparently represented by arch or melancholic writers whose novels strike me as either entirely unamusing (I'm looking at you, Howard Jacobson) or tragedy decorated with jokes.

This is a broadbrush and uninformed portrait of modern literature, of course, but my sense is that we are experiencing a good decade for literary and experimental fiction with its serious face on, but missing out on well written joie de vivre. The exception that comes to mind might be David Sedaris' non-fiction, which is very funny, but even this is decidedly melancholic.

So, what am I suggesting as an antidote? It's every bit as lovely as Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages and Herbert Jenkins' Patricia Brent, Spinster - it's Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen (1938). You might have guessed that from the title of this blog post.

I bought it a little while ago, after seeing it fleetingly mentioned in a review of Joanna Rakoff's excellent My Salinger Year, and I was excited when a beautiful copy arrived. Still, it felt like an indulgence to be saved, and I didn't dive straight in. My recent holiday felt like a very good opportunity to treat myself. As I expected, it's lovely and funny and good.

It's non-fiction - of the elaborated and exaggerated variety, I imagine - and is mostly about Ruth and Eileen's childhood, although there are also some chapters devoted to their time living in an extremely dingy New York basement (and it is this section, I believe, that is used in the film version - which I have bought but not yet watched).

Their childhood is certainly played for laughs - it is very amusing. I wasn't especially sold on the first chapter, which is about crying at the cinema (and the sisters' demand that a story should be entirely tragic, or it barely counted as a story at all). But from the second chapter onwards I was completely sold. The second chapter ('Hun-gah') details the sisters' attempts at amateur performances.

Eileen's only 'bit' was playing a 1920s song called 'Chloe' (Eileen is 'absolutely tone-deaf and has never been able to carry a tune, even the simplest one, in her whole life. She solved the difficulty by simply pounding so hard in the bass that she drowned herself out.') The infant Ruth, on the other hand, had a foray into acting - via an experimental drama teacher who allotted her the part of 'Hunger' (which, incidentally, was also her only line - to be repeated). There is a wonderful climax in a scene where the sisters have been asked to amalgamate their performances into one for their assembled relatives:

Eileen played and sang first. Just as the final notes of her bass monotone chant, "I GOT-TUH go wheah yew ARE," and the final rumble of the piano died away, I burst dramatically through the door, shouting "Hun-gah! Hun-gah!" and shaking my matted and snarled locks at my assembled relatives. My grandmother Farrel, who always takes everything seriously, let out a piercing scream.

Glorious.  And so the tales go on. We hear how Ruth was almost drowned by a Red Cross Lifesaving Examiner, how the sisters' father was obsessed with experimental washing machines, how they enlivened a camp bird-watching, etc. When they move to New York, these adventures turn to the complexities of a basement window that drunks would yell through, a cheating landlord, and (the story that inspires the cover), the time when Ruth - then a reporter - was followed for a day by the Brazilian Navy. It's so wonderfully silly and delightfully told. If it were not true (or at least based in truth) it might be criticised for being all over the place - but truth is not neatly arranged in logical or probable order, of course.

The Eileen of the title, incidentally, has another claim to notoriety - she married Nathanael West, and also died in the car crash that ended his life. This was actually two years after My Sister Eileen was published, so naturally it is not mentioned - but it lends a certain poignancy to the collection (and may influence the two sequels - one of which I now have, the other of which seems ungettable in the UK).

That moment of pathos aside, I think any lover of the Provincial Lady et al would also delight in this book - I certainly did, and was very glad to have found it.

This Is The End by Stella Benson

A Shiny New Review from Shiny New Books - of an old book, now reprinted by Mike Walmer. I loved I Pose by Stella Benson (review here) and leapt at the chance of reading her next book, This Is The End. Even though I kept singing 'Skyfall' every time I picked it up...

Here's the beginning of my review:

One of the more unusual novelists being reprinted at the moment is Stella Benson. Her work is issued by Michael Walmer, a one-man publishing house that is reprinting various neglected novelists in the order their novels were originally published. This Is The End is Benson’s second (from 1917), and comes immediately before the one that is probably most remembered now,Living Alone, about very curious witches.

I want to say that This Is The End is not supernatural, but any definite statement about a Benson novel feels like a trap waiting to happen; the reader never quite knows which genre they’re reading, or what sort of response is required. Except that laughter will always be involved somewhere.

For more, keeping reading...

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Hope you're all having a good weekend! Mine is disappearing all too quickly... and I've read only 20 pages of the book I was intending to finish. Oops.

Slightly different from usual this week, as I'm going to be entirely egotistical in this miscellany... these things are all me elsewhere.

1. I wrote about Jeeves in the Offing by P.G. Wodehouse over at Vulpes Libris.

2. I made a cake to celebrate the 400th Very Short Introduction book.

3. And I appeared in this Oxford Dictionaries video (see the post for answers):

Margaret Kennedy Reading Week

Are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week? All the info you need is here on Fleur Fisher Reads, and it's all very exciting. I'd thought I would read Red Sky at Morning, because I started it months ago, but instead I read Kennedy's final novel - The Forgotten Smile, published in 1961.

It has just been reissued by Vintage Books, along with a whole bunch of other Kennedy titles (some of them POD) and I read it for Shiny New Books - so I'm going to point you over there. (And I actually did finish it this week - on Sunday afternoon.) I'll just say that she does such interesting things with chronology, and it works - and her characters are brilliantly realised. Read on...

So... are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week?

A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain - A.C. Ward

Back in April I read A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (1943) by A.C. Ward, very kindly given to me by the always wonderful Karen/Kaggsy, but I have only just got around to reading it. I can't remember where this first came up (maybe in person; before her lovely review anyway) but I was extremely happy to be presented with a copy. What a fascinating little book it is, and so perfect for somebody with an interest in the early 20th century.

A.C. Ward has a special place in my heart because of his book The Nineteen-Twenties (published, I think, in 1930 - so a very immediate retrospective). I was reading it at the beginning of my DPhil, just to get a sense of how somebody contemporary might have characterised the period. Lo and behold, he had a chapter on 'The Refuge of Form and Fantasy', where he discussed the vogue for the fantastic in the period. Since I'd already decided to write my thesis on this, it was wonderful confirmation that it had been significant in the 1920s - as well as providing an invaluable quotation from a talk by Sylvia Townsend Warner that doesn't appear to have been quoted anywhere else. Research mad skillz.

Anyway, in A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain Ward does exactly that, whether figuratively or not - he takes the reader on a journey through Britain, showing the literary sites that have been saved from bombing, or those that have been irrevocably changed by war. I can only imagine how poignant and moving this would have been in 1943; it is certainly moving enough now.

Plenty of his narration takes place in London, unsurprisingly - it was undoubtedly the area of Britain most physically affected by war - and in between commemorating Keats in Hampstead and Dickens in Doughty Street, he turns his attention to pre-war Bloomsbury (in a passage, incidentally, which would have been very useful in my first chapter):

After the last war 'Bloomsbury' became a synonym for intellectualist inbreeding and highbrow snobbery. But it is as difficult to define (or even to find) the pure 'Bloomsbury' type as it is to define or isolate 'Victorianism.' There is an old Punch joke, '"You can always tell a Kensington girl." "Yes; but you can't tell her much."' his, if given an intellectualist twist, might be applied to Bloomsbury in the nineteen-twenties. The authors who wrote and/or published their books in Bloomsbury then were not susceptible to instruction. They instructed. The hallmark of 'Bloomsbury' was a tart intellectual arrogance; and in their literary style Bloomsbury writers affected a dryness which was intended to have the vitrue of dry champagne, yet the product was, often, sandy on the palate. The Mother Superior of 'Bloomsbury' was Virginia Woolf, but, beside her, the rest were mostly novices lacking a vocation. Her one vice was preciosity; her virtues were legion.

I don't think I've ever read a more incisive and concise depiction of the Bloomsbury group.

Along with the text (and I should re-emphasise that he does sweep through other counties, and not just southern ones either) there are two types of illustration - pencil sketches and photographs. The photos are amazing. We see Westminster Abbey with rubble, Milton's statue knocked off a plinth, Canterbury ruins, etc. A trove of poignant (yes, that word again) images which bring to life a period that even the greatest description inevitably keeps at some distance.

Thanks, Karen, for sending this my way! A unique perspective on wartime Britain that I will really treasure.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Since I've got a review copy of Lila on my shelves (the third of Robinson's novels to concern the good people of Gilead), I thought it was about time that I read Home (the second, from 2008, after 2004's Gilead). When I read Gilead, I was completely bowled over. How could an elderly minister's reminiscences create such a stunning work of fiction? On the strength of one book, Robinson became the living writer I admired the most. A subsequent read of Housekeeping did nothing to diminish this, and reading Home has cemented her position. Nobody else holds a candle to her.

Home covers much of the same time period as Gilead, although it is not a requirement to have read the former before you read the latter. Indeed, it would be interesting to read all three of this series in various orders - it's been so long since I read Gilead that I have forgotten a lot of it, so it was a bit like coming to the characters for the first time. And, indeed, different characters take centre stage. While Gilead is narrated by the Rev. John Ames, Home looks at his neighbour's house. Ames' closest friend, Rev. Robert Broughton, is old and ailing. His wife has died, and he is looked after by the only child who has remained at home - Glory, a spinster who is kind, good, and a little regretful. The novel sees how they cope with the return, after twenty years, of Glory's wastrel brother Jack.

His return will be familiar to readers of Gilead, and Ames certainly did not approve of him, but seeing him through the eyes of his family is a different matter. Glory is some years younger than him, separated by several siblings, and never felt that she knew him very well. Robert has longed for him to return - their dynamic is very much that of the Prodigal Son and the Forgiving Father - but even his patience and hope have their limits.

It's very difficult to talk about great writers, or to pinpoint what makes them great. Home details the awkwardness of people who are biologically very close and emotionally very distant, but not through arguments or slamming doors. Instead (and no author does this better) Robinson shows us the silences - the emotions that family members cannot discuss, the past hurts they cannot confront, and the future hopes they dare not express. All the more impressive that this is done in the third person, so - although it feels like we know all three key players intimately - we are never actually taken into their perspective wholly. Being very close to my nuclear family, particularly my brother, I can't quite understand the awkwardness of Glory and Jack's relationship, but (being a family of introverts) I can understand the reluctance to discuss depths of emotions - and yet communicating them at the same time.

Like Gilead, there is a background of faith to the novel. But, where Gilead is a beautiful depiction of a life of faith, Glory is a little less certain. She seems occupied more with duty and goodness than with grace, try as she might. She sums up the theme of the book while musing on the Bible:

What a strange old book it was. How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance. "I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us." Yes there it was, the parable of manna. All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it mean to come home.

'Home' is, unsurprisingly, the biggest quandary in Home. What makes a home? What does it mean to come home?  For Glory, home is a place of safety and continuity, but also a place of disappointment and a sense of failure. For Jack, it is a mirage and somehow dangerous. For Robert, it is chiefly an ideal in his mind.

One of the loveliest things in both this novel and Gilead is the friendship between neighbouring ministers. Friendship is depicted so seldom in literature, and it is touching to see one that has proved far more constant and successful than romantic or paternal relationships. And for readers like me who dearly love Ames, it is a joy to see him again - albeit frustrating at how little we see of him! Not to mention illuminating to see a different vantage of a man that any reader of Gilead will know intimately. It's like hearing your best friend described by somebody who only knows them a little.

I quote this passage partly because Ames is in it, but mostly because it's a lovely example of how beautifully Robinson writes a domestic scene:

Then Ames arrived with Lila and Roddy, the three of them in their church clothes, and she took her father into the parlor with them, the company parlor, where they sat on the creaky chairs no one ever sat on. It had been almost forgotten that the were not there just to be dismally ornamental, chairs only in the sense that the lamp stand was a shepherdess. Ames was clearly bemused by the formality her father had willed upon the occasion. The room was filled with those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them - porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs - and Robby's eyes were bright with suppressed attraction to them.

Home has so many nuances and is so rich in insight that it would be futile to go much further. I don't love it as much as Gilead - perhaps because I missed the first-person voice that Robinson handles so extraordinarily - but I am still amazed by what a great work it is. Sometimes I wonder which writer from our time will be remembered in future generations and centuries. If there is any justice in posterity, Robinson will be among that number.