1950

Murder Included by Joanna Cannan – #NovNov Day 5

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A murder mystery is a fun choice for my novella-a-day challenge, because I always wants to finish a murder mystery in one day – and it’s only the length that stops me. Quite spontaneously, I took Murder Included by Joanna Cannan off the shelf this morning. It was published in 1950, though seemed to me to be set a decade or two earlier. Confusingly, it has also been published as A Taste of Murder and Poisonous Relations, which could be handy information if you want to track it down – and I recommend you do, because I thought it was really excellent.

Perhaps the title has been changed because it isn’t instantly obvious what it means, at least to more modern eyes. It refers to the idea of ‘breakfast included’ or ‘baths included’ – whatever features and facilities might be mentioned by somebody advertising rooms. Because the setting is Aston Park, a palatial ancestral home that has recently opened up to ‘paying guests’. I.e. it’s a hotel retaining a veneer of titled pride.

Sir Charles d’Estray lives there with his new wife Barbara, known as Bunny, a fairly highbrow novelist. They haven’t been married long, but it’s long enough for Bunny to realise that an overhaul is needed to avoid bankruptcy – so she spearheads the paying guests venture. Both halves of the marriage have at least one child – Sir Charles has three, all horsey and disdainful, while Bunny’s daughter Lisa is the main reason she has agreed to a marriage that never particularly appealed. She wants stability. They have lived in France for a long time, poor and with an unsalubrious crowd, and seeing Lisa expertly resurrect a drunken man at the age of twelve has convinced Bunny to take her to English respectability.

All has been going well, with various fairly long-term paying guests – some relations of the d’Estrays and others strangers – when one of them is found dead. Elizabeth – one of the relatives; a cousin – has been poisoned.

A death in a crowded country pile is hardly a novelty for the murder mystery, but there were various things that made Murder Included stand out for me. One is the cleverness of the solution, which naturally I won’t spoil – but it does include a neat trick that I don’t remember seeing used anywhere else. But the main reason I loved this book is Cannan’s writing. Here’s the police detective, Price, arriving at the scene:

He had kept silence as a loutish local constable drove him through the October dusk over hills to wrought-iron gates, yew hedges, and Elizabethan gables. A doddering parasite of a butler had shown him into this large, over-crowded, shabby, so-called study, where Colonel Blimp, after nearly wringing his hand off, had turned ‘Susie – little woman’ out of a chair and expected him to sit down in it. Now, fussing about with cut-glass decanter and silver cigarette box, he was doing his best to turn an important conference into a cosy chat.

(Susie, for the avoidance of doubt, is a dog – and Colonel Blimp is a reference to the archetype, not a character in Murder Included.) Price has been sent in from Scotland Yard because the local police are too biased in favour of the respected family and the house’s servants, many of whom are related to police officers. And Price doesn’t have any time for this sort of set up. He has his prejudices about rural people, titled people, and more or less anybody who isn’t a left-wing urbanite like himself.

Cannan can be very funny, and she spears characters so mercilessly well. That means she can make us really like the people we’re meant to like, such as Bunny and Lisa. But others are definitely victims of her pen. I’m not sure if we are meant to actively dislike Price, and she apparently did use him for other murder mysteries, but he definitely isn’t the sympathetic detective hero that many novelists would use. Here he is questioning teenage Lisa…

‘I’m sure you’re a very clever little girl. I’m sure if anyone – even a grown-up person – annoyed you, you’d get the better of them.’

Lisa looked puzzled. ‘I’m not in the least clever. I’ve never got the better of anyone. Actually if someone annoys me I answer back, but I generally get the worst of it.’

‘And then do you brood over it and think out your revenge?’

‘Good gracious no! I’m not a character out of Wuthering Heights,’ said Lisa, laughing merrily.

Elizabeth isn’t the last person to die in the story – it would hardly be a classic murder mystery if she were. And perhaps the book is published a little late to truly be of peak Golden Age, though it’s up there with the best examples I’ve read in terms of economy, style, and plot.

In fact, I would give it that great accolade, which is all too rare of detective fiction: I’d have loved it just as much if there hadn’t been a murder at all.

British Library Women Writers #6: Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

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When I was first asked to suggest titles for the British Library Women Writers series, one of the first titles that came to my mind was Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. Some authors are loved because they are great prose stylists. Others because they have something profound to say about contemporary society. And then there are people like Mary Essex who just know how to write a rattlingly enjoyable story. I say Mary Essex – her real name was Ursula Bloom, and Mary Essex was one of a handful of pseudonyms she used for her hundreds of books. Truly, an extraordinarily prolific woman.

I’ve read a few of the books she wrote as Mary Essex, and this was the first – back in 2003, I think. I bought it because of that wonderfully beguiling title, which I’m hopeful will also attract book shoppers when bookshops are open again.

The novel is about David and Germayne, who decide to open a tea garden in a village just after World War 2. David has some experience in teashops – albeit the business side rather than any hands-on experience – and Germayne is willing to come along, though obviously a little less enthusiastic. They met when she was married to someone else, and Essex is very witty about their coming together – how Germayne wanted somebody spontaneous and more exciting than her first husband. It’s that spontaneity that leads to this ill-fated plan.

The village are not very pleased to have these outsiders coming in, and they have to try and placate various other people – from the doyenne of the village to the pub owners who claim the tea garden is stealing their business. Many things in village life have not changed since 1950, when this book was published, and I certainly recognise a lot of the sparring. Things only get more animated when Mimi is hired as a cook. She is a refugee from Vienna, and not above using her feminine wiles to get attention. As the narrator drily notes, her English gets more broken the more she wishes to charm her interlocutor.

Essex handles the whole thing wonderfully – it’s just a joyful romp, with quite an unexpected ending that I shan’t spoil here. It was quite difficult to find any contemporary issue to write about in the afterword, so I chose to write a bit about rationing. But this isn’t in any way an ‘issue novel’ – rather, it is a dollop of fun in a year that needs all the fun it can get.

Uncle Samson by Beverley Nichols

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I was looking through my Beverley Nichols books, trying to decide which one to read next – and only one of them was eligible for Project Names. And so that’s the one I chose! Step forward Uncle Samson (1950), which I hadn’t even heard of until I found it in an extremely disorganised bookshop in Cheltenham earlier in the year.

Apparently it is a sequel of sorts to the excellently-titled The Star-spangled Manner and, like that former book (which I have not read), it is Nichols’ impression of America. And those impressions are certainly varied and interesting!

America is, of course, an enormous country. Nichols can’t hope to encapsulate everything there is to say about it, or even a hundredth – but the selection of chapters he writes are certainly fascinating. It’s worth starting by saying that this is not primarily a funny book. Nichols is a delightful humorist, but in Uncle Samson he is much more in journalistic mode. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the odd moment of levity in his phrasing. I particularly enjoyed this, from when he goes to visit a funeral home of the sort that Evelyn Waugh pastiches in The Loved One:

It would obviously be impossible to encompass all these attractions without exhaustion, so I contented myself with a brief visit to Lullaby Land, and then went on to the “Mysteries of Life” garden, containing a large statue by Ernest Gazzeri, which suggested that though the sculptor might have known a lot about the mysteries of life he knew little about the mysteries of anatomy.

A glance at the American death industry comes after sections on religious cults, including a notable one led by Father Divine (I had to Wikipedia it, but it’s definitely interesting!) and on the horrors of socialism.

The most animated Nichols gets is the section on race. While many of Nichols’ views were not particularly progressive for 1940s/1950s England (particularly as regards class), he was certainly ahead of the curve on racism compared to the lawmakers of 1940s/1950s America.

Every year 30,000 light-skinned [African-Americans] “crossed the colour-line” and began a new life as whites. If we were told that every year 30,000 Americans broke the barbed wire of concentration camps and regained their freedom we might sit up and take notice, for America is a great democracy and does not incarcerate her citizens unless they have committed a crime. Yet America runs the greatest concentration camp the world has ever seen, and the only offence of its occupants is the crime of having been born.

I think he writes more about race than anything else, and he is baffled and angry about it – recounting his own embarrassment that he hadn’t considered the obstacles that would be in the way when he tries to meet up with a black friend. America still has a terrible problem with racism, and a President who is openly racist without seeming to suffer from his voting base – but Uncle Samson does remind us that at least some progress has been made. And I’d have written a rather more hopeful sentence there under the previous President, as opposed to the one who thinks black American women should “go home”.

Let’s move onto cheerier things. He meets Walt Disney! That is rather an enchanting chapter. I don’t know how accurate it is as an overall portrait of Disney, but Nichols certainly seemed won over by him – particularly his childlike enthusiasm for Fantasia – and tells of employees who are similarly devoted. I hadn’t expected an interview with Disney when I started reading Nichols’ work, but why not?

Another surprise, and a fascinating section, is Nichols visiting Alcoholics Anonymous – as an observer rather than a participant. He writes glowingly about what a wonderful initiative it is, and wishes that something similar existed in the UK.

What a curious and beguiling set of topics Nichols addresses! It’s interesting to compare this with modern-day America, and the topics that Nichols would write about now. Race and the movies would both still be there. Funeral homes probably wouldn’t (while guns and the lack of a national health system certainly would). Some things have changed a lot and some things don’t seem to have changed at all.

I was a little disappointed when I started and it wasn’t a comic work, but I was quickly won over. It doesn’t rank up there with Merry Hall, but it’s very good in a different mood. Nichols is a great journalist/essayist – nothing here pretends to be objective, and it’s all the better for it. For a very singular trip to mid-century America, track down a copy now.

Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald

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It’s been a while since I listened to all the Betty Macdonald books on audio, courtesy of review copies from Post-Hypnotic Press, and every now and then I remember to write about them. Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) is the third – after The Egg and I about chicken farming and The Plague and I about life in a TB hospital. This is the most general so far, and also my favourite of the four autobiographical books Macdonald wrote.

It takes place during the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce and Betty is desperate. So desperate, in fact, that she takes the advice of her go-getter sister Mary. Mary insists that anybody can do anything, and specifically that anybody can get any sort of job. Which is how, in the era of very little employment, Macdonald manages to secure (and lose) a vast number of jobs.

As usual with Macdonald, she meanders around the topic for a little too long before getting into it – each of her books would be slightly better with the first chapter lopped off – but once we’re in the sway, it’s hilarious. She works as a photo tinter, she works a stenographer, she works as a typist. She has various office jobs, she gets involved in a pyramid scheme, she organises the offices for a mining company – and gets in trouble for putting all the maps in size order, rather than by place or contract. Often we don’t see quite how she leaves these jobs, but there are dozens of them – each time, Macdonald describes her own ineptitudes extremely amusingly. She has self-deprecating down so well that you’d swear she was British.

This does all eventually lead to her sister forcing her to try writing, so there was definitely a happy ending. But the pinnacle of the book is a lengthy section that is creepy rather than simply an amusing catastrophe. It concerns a woman whose name I can’t remember but was something like Doritos. She turns up a shift of folding papers and putting them in envelopes (if I recall) and talks wildly, roots through Macdonald’s bag, and later starts stalking her. That doesn’t do this section justice – she is built up like something in a suspense novel, and it shows an element to Macdonald’s writing that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Masterfully done, and leaves us with nervous laughter rather than the empathetic, happy laughter of the rest.

Macdonald’s personal life is curiously absent from the page. Her time in the TB clinic is glossed over in a sentence (understandably, given the amount of time she spends on it in The Plague and I), but she also acquires a husband almost incidentally – and her children are scarcely mentioned at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to dilute what focus the book does has, but it is bizarre to remember that they exist, in the middle of some amusing exploits in an office Macdonald is comically ill-suited to.

As before, Heather Henderson does a brilliant job narrating this – I can’t imagine Betty Macdonald in any other hands now. Heartily recommended.

As Cooks Go by Elizabeth Jordan

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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.

Cinderella Goes To The Morgue by Nancy Spain

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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!

Ten Days of Christmas – G.B. Stern

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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!

Some Tame Gazelle – Barbara Pym

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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.