1950s

Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell

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When I saw that Manderley Press had reprinted Appointment With Venus (1951) by Jerrard Tickell in the beautiful new edition pictured, I decided I had to get my own copy off the shelf. Mine isn’t quite so beautiful (what could be?) but it’s got its own charm – one of those books from the Reprint Society where they covered the dustjacket with quasi-astrological pictures that aren’t very relevant to the plot. You might think it’s to do with the title, but my copy of Guard Your Daughters is the same.

It’s worth noting from the outset that the Venus of the title isn’t the planet, or even the goddess – it’s a cow. Let me explain. The action takes place on Armorel, a fictional addition to the Channel Islands (at one point the others are listed, so it’s not a stand-in). The population is about 300, in a close-knit community with a strong hierarchy. There is a Provost standing in for the Suzerain, the leader of the island who is away at war. Other inhabitants of the island include Lionel Fallaize, an artist who is a conscientious objector, various herdsmen, and others who are excluded from war work for being too young or too old.

(I will get to the cow eventually, promise.)

The island has been occupied by Nazi soldiers – as indeed happened in the Channel Islands. One of the interesting things about Tickell’s novel is how sympathetic it is to the soldiers – not at all to Nazism or to the idea of German victory, but these soldiers are men doing their job and doing what they believe to be right. Things like the Holocaust never come up; this is a question of nationalism alone. (Which is no good thing in my book, but it’s still notable that Tickell could create sympathetic and non-aggressive characters like Captain Weiss as early as 1951.) Even the unnamed German soldiers are not demonised.

The occupation of Armorel was carried out with unusual discretion. The German soldiers arrived without fuss and marched in silence up the hill to the commandeered hotel which was to be their barracks. One detachment went to the lighthouse, another to the telephone exchange. A sentry was posted at the gate of the hotel drive. He was a young man of about twenty, unarmed and smiling. The children gazed at him wide-eyed from behind the hedges, as he leisurely paced up and down in the sunshine. Soon the boldest of them ventured on to the road to stand and stare. The sentry stopped and felt in his pocket, found an apple. He said, still smiling: “You wish an apple?”

The islanders are still resistant to occupation, of course, ‘knowing, with a sense of bewildered resentment, that their beloved island was clasped in a loop of alien steel’. They are polite but clear – they are waiting for Britain to win the war, and will never collaborate with their invaders.

Back on mainland UK, interest turns to a curious quarter – to Venus, the eponymous cow. She is pregnant by Mars, a prize bull who is now deceased, having stepped on a landmine. Both Venus and Mars come from pedigree lineage, and their progeny is widely believed to be the perfect imaginable cow. Captain Weiss was a farmer before he was a soldier and recognises the calf’s worth – and wants to take him back to Germany. And so a plot is launched to sequester Venus and her unborn calf away from Armorel…

I can’t think of a more quintessentially British plot. The pluckiness, the underdog, the eccentricity. It feels like something that might have been an Ealing comedy – and it was indeed made into a film in the same year it was published. I haven’t watched it, but it’s all on YouTube (embedded below).

I absolutely loved Appointment With Venus. Tickell’s clever trick is never making the plot to rescue a cow seem silly. A few characters raise eyebrows, but broadly we are onboard with the priorities of the people doing the rescuing. All the characters are well-drawn and nuanced, and I particularly liked Lionel Fallaize. I’m not sure I needed the romance subplot, but such things are inevitable.

The book is a joyful experience, with enough realism about the experiences of living under Nazi occupation to prevent it feeling saccharine or sentimental. I wholeheartedly recommend that you make acquaintance with Venus and all those who love her.

Maigret’s Revolver by Georges Simenon (Novella a Day in May #25)

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Whenever Karen and I run a club year, there is a Georges Simenon – and every time I comment that I must read something by him. And as I was glancing around my shelves, I spotted that Maigret’s Revolver (1952, translated by Nigel Ryan) is really short – and why not? So I have now read my first Simenon, and finally met Inspector Maigret.

He is straight-forward man, more compassionate than he needs to be but also unlikely to fly into any sort of passion. He drinks an extraordinary amount, and finds the fact that he can’t get whisky in an English hotel before 11.30am absurd. He is determined to solve a mystery, but seem content to achieve that aim with measured and thoughtful steps.

The mystery, in this case, starts with the revolver of the title – a young man is waiting in Maigret’s study, but has gone before Maigret gets home. He discovers that his revolver is missing. The revolver itself was a gift that he has never used, but it is still fully functioning. He quickly learns that a young man matching the description of this mysterious figure (for Maigret’s wife met him, and could describe him a little) has been buying gun cartridges.

Along the way, after some fortunate policework, Maigret is led to the discovery of a body…

I really enjoyed reading this. It has a dry humour that I didn’t know would be there, and Maigret is a more interesting and likeable character than I’d realised. He is not hard-boiled or maverick – he is human and sensible, and engages with fellow professionals. Something I particularly liked in the writing was the treatment of women, who are frequently intelligent and not thrown by the strange circumstances they find themselves in. A lovely contrast to the common figure of detective novels from this era, where women fall apart in hysterics when questioned or when faced with difficult circumstances.

Here, for instance, is part of a questioning with one female character. I think it shows what I liked of Maigret’s dogged patience, and the quick-witted assuredness that Simenon gives women. In this novella, at least. I don’t know how much of an anomaly that is.

“You know your father’s ill?”

“He always has been.”

There was no pity, no emotion in her voice.

“He’s in bed.”

“Very likely.”

“Your brother’s disappeared.”

He saw that she was startled, that this piece of news took her aback more than she was willing to admit.

“That doesn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me.”

“Because I’ve seen too much. What exactly do you want from me?”

It was difficult to reply point blank to such a straight question, and she calmly took a cigarette from a case and asked:

“Have you a light?”

He lit a match for her.

“I’m waiting.”

“How old are you?”

“I presume it wasn’t just to find out my age that you took all this trouble. According to your badge, you aren’t a plain sergeant, but a Chief-Inspector. In other words, someone important.”

As for the plot itself – it’s a little flimsy as a mystery, but works well as a story. If Maigret’s Revolver is anything to go by, Simenon is more interesting as a novelist of characters than of puzzles. I’m glad I’ve finally read some Simenon, and it certainly won’t be my last. And do let me know if my conclusions based on this single book are wide of the mark or not!

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

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I will try to keep doing these daily, and I am reading novellas daily, but I had so little to say about Day 9 that I thought I’d better roll these into one…

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

One of the shortest Persephone books, I’d somehow started and quit this one before. And I thought I’d go back and… well, I can see why I didn’t much bother about it before. It’s about Hatty going away away on honeymoon with a much younger husband, Stephen. That’s the present day plot, but much of it looks back at previous journeys, previous relationships, and particularly her aunt Cynthia and Hatty’s ill-fated relationship with a man called Jasper.

Some people really love this book, but I found the whole thing both confusing and negligible. I often didn’t know which timeline we were in, as it flitted back and half between paragraphs, and there was nothing in it to capture my attention. The writing, in isolation, is precise and rather lovely – but in such a way that I never felt particularly keen to look at sentences out of isolation. As a whole, it felt like a stagnant 119 pages to me.

A Change for the Better - WikipediaDay 10: A Change for the Better (1969) by Susan Hill

I had much more success with today’s novella, which I loved. Hill was still only her mid-20s when she wrote this story of people in a seaside community – and if you are immediately reminded of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, then keep that comparison in mind. If Hill’s writing is not quite like Taylor’s, being here a little less piercing and a little more comforting, these characters and stories could easily have been lifted from a Taylor novel.

The canvas is a little less wide, and I think that is to the novel’s advantage – many books that take a small society as their scene end up cramming in too many characters. Here, it is really two households that are focal. One is Deirdre Fount and her mother Mrs Oddicott, who run the draper’s, and Deirdre Fount’s 11-year-old son from her brief marriage. The marriage had been impetuous and ended in a wise divorce, with the absent Fount mentioned as seldom as possible.

Deirdre Fount had never questioned her mother’s view of the whole affair, had been entirely influenced in her behaviour and beliefs by Mrs Oddicott. She found it hard now to separate what actually had happened from what her mother had always predicted would happen, and she could remember no conversations with Aubrey, no relationship, no intimacy, that was not intruded upon by her mother. It was as though, having used men to provide them with a status and offspring, to ward off the shames of spinsterhood, they were ready to discard them and sink back into their closed, female society.

As you can see, they don’t have the healthiest relationship – but Hill gives subtlety to the usual portrait of a domineering mother, because the power shifts back and forth between them. It even passes to the 11 year old. Each needs the others, but also needs freedom, and the uneasy dynamic never stays still.

The other household is an older couple living in a hotel – Major Carpenter and his wife Flora. He is one of the most realistically infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His life is spent in selfish complaining, but each complaint is phrased in a way that makes Flora seem selfish, thoughtless or hectoring. Throughout the book, but particularly in scenes with these characters, Hill is brilliant at dialogue. It’s impossible to refute what Major Carpenter says, because he uses logic like a weapon. But, oh, he is appalling. But even he is treated with some sympathy – part of his unkind and self-centred nature comes from a terrible fear of illness and death.

Alongside nuanced character portraits, there is plenty that happens in A Change for the Better. Nothing is static, even in lives that don’t feel like they are developing. It all reminded me a little of the ‘well-made play’ – characters neatly doing enough to make a good, solid plot. And I found it absolutely enthralling and wonderful, a perfect balance between event and observation.

The only thing I would add, which could be either criticism or praise depending on your point of view, is that A Change for the Better feels very like a novel by someone who has learned more from reading than from life. I suppose most of us end up learning more from reading, since it encompasses much wider experience – but this feels especially like a novel built from reading many other novels. A few details suggest that it’s set contemporaneously, in the 1960s, but without those I could easily have believed it 1930s or even earlier. All this means that it doesn’t quite have the vividness of lived experience, but that is a quality that I am willing to sacrifice for something as satisfying as A Change for the Better.

Four more #1954Club books I read

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Let’s rattle through some other books I read for the 1954 Club which possibly don’t warrant full reviews… they range from ok to bad, so come on a journey with me.

Doctor’s Children by Josephine Elder

Let’s start with the good-in-parts. This novel was reprinted by Greyladies, who bring back forgotten women writers in very limited print runs, so they sadly become forgotten again almost instantly. It’s both by and about a female doctor – not a new concept in the 1950s, but still not a commonplace, and Barbara (the heroine) faces quite a lot of disparagement and underestimation.

At the outset of the novel, Barbara’s artist husband has deserted her and their four children (aged between 19 and five). She needs income, she needs occupation, and she is trying not to think too much about her disastrous marriage. She manages to get a job as a GP in a job interview that is probably shamefully accurate about recruitment in the 1950s – i.e. she mentions that her uncle is renowned doctor Alderman Fisher, and that is all the panel need to hear to give her a job.

It is very interesting to see life as female doctor at the dawn of the NHS, and the subplot about her husband painting a picture that starts London gossiping is quite fun. Some of Elder’s observations on being a working single mother, and learning to deal with her children growing up and opposing her worldview, are engaging and show how little may have changed in 70 years.

The downsides… it is quite often an unsubtle polemic about aspects of the NHS, particularly about private GP practices being nationalised. A lot of the talk, inexpertly put into dialogue between various figures who exist only to discuss the topic, is focused on what this will be like for the doctors. There isn’t much about the patients’ point of view, or the inhumanity of refusing healthcare to those who can’t pay.

And – well, sadly Elder isn’t a very good writer. It’s not appalling, but it’s quite clunky and unconvincing at times. I never felt like I was reading the words of a gifted novelist, or even an averagely talented one – more that I was reading a doctor playing at being a writer.

 

Dishonoured Bones by John Trench

1954 is an interesting year for Golden Age crime, because the era was on its wane. Three decades had passed since the peak of detective fiction, and yet authors like John Trench seem to have stayed firmly in the mould that had been around for a long time.

This is the middle of three novels featuring archaeologist Martin Cotterill, though I’m not sure I’d have known he was the lead if it weren’t for that. When an old man is found dead at an excavation site, he is quickly identified as Lord Garnish – who, of course, is widely disliked. Murder victims in the early pages of these novels always are.

It’s not long before there’s another victim, and there are all manner of entanglements between local families that give us clues and red herrings along the way. I’ve said that this is in the mould of Golden Age crime, but in truth it oscillates between that and an adventure novel. There is an improbable scene of falling from a cliff and almost drowning, some rather silly chasing around subterranean darkness, and that sort of thing.

The eventual solution is ok, and could equally well have been almost anything else. Trench is good at drawing the more ridiculous characters, and there is one gossipy and flamboyant side character that I enjoyed and who got most of the best lines – but ultimately it was all rather flimsy. But good fun, as long as you know what you’re going in for.

 

The Cretan Counterfeit by Katharine Farrer

Somehow another one about archaeology! And, like Dishonoured Bones, it’s apparently the middle of three novels featuring the same detective – actually a legitimate policeman – Richard Ringwood, whose wife Claire pops up a bit and presumably plays a bigger role in other Farrer novels? Anyway, one morning they are reading the paper and see a very snarky obituary about an archaeologist, Alban Worrall, who has died. It is anonymous, but seems to be from a disgruntled colleague. The next day, a defence is written in the letter column by Janet, an unmarried woman who clearly admired him unrequitedly. And then she is attacked with a knife and left for dead.

There are some things to enjoy in this novel. The writing is fair, and I enjoyed the dynamic of Richard and Claire (albeit briefly). But overall it was difficult to care what happened, not to mention heavy doses of racism, antisemitism, and sexism. And Farrer either knows a lot about Cretan archaeological finds or went and did some research, and isn’t afraid to dump it on the page. I think any detective novel should rely on knowledge that any reader could be expected to have – it’s so much more irritating when all sorts of other knowledge is needed, or introduced in an expositionary way. There were a few Poirot-esque red herrings in the final gather-round-so-I-can-tell-you-who-did-it, though the answer is pretty offensive. One to miss. But not as bad as the last of these four…

 

Beside the Pearly Water by Stella Gibbons

We all know that, at her best, Stella Gibbons is wonderful. There’s a reason that nobody has reprinted Beside the Pearly Water, which is Gibbons at her absolute worst. It’s actually only the first 83 pages of this book, the rest filled with short stories of varying merit.

Throughout her writing, Gibbons is brilliant at oddballs and unlikely housing situations. She is very bad at romances, and also indefatigable at including them. In Beside the Pearly Water, the famous and beautiful Julia Lanier pays a visit to a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. She went there many years earlier, and there is a young woman (a girl, on Julia’s previous visit) who has held a grudge ever since. She devises a romance between Julia and a local man with a secret…

Somehow the two fall in love instantly, and we are meant to believe that they plan to spend the rest of their lives together on the basis of a half hour conversation. The final denouement is absurd and bad – and though tied to a 1950s concern, that I won’t spoil, is so histrionic that it a schoolgirl would be embarrassed to plot it. Gibbons really dropped the ball on this one.

The stories are a mixture of strong and weak. I think the best was ‘Listen to the magnolias’, about a nervous older lady waiting the arrival of various American soldiers who are being stationed in her house. (I am a bit confused if the fact they all turn out to be African-American is meant to be a twist or not… hopefully this story isn’t racist.) It’s thoughtfully and movingly described, and I felt like I was in her house as she waited.

The oddest opening to a story is ‘Madonna of the Crossings’, with “In the early summer of that year, the figures for road accidents soared, as usual, and as usual very many of those hurt or killed were young children.” There’s an attempt at a story in historical dialect that I skipped. And others are fine… but the aftertaste of Beside the Pearly Water lingered.

 

The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair – #1954Club

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My friend Barbara bought me a whole pile of Furrowed Middlebrow books a while ago, and one of them was The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair – my third novel by Fair, and one with the most beautiful cover. I am assuming it is from the original edition, because otherwise it is unbelievably apt for one of the opening scenes: two busybody ladies in the village of Goatstock are peering through the railings at a house that has just been inherited by Julia. One of them gets caught in the railings, presumably moments after this illustration.

Julia Dunstan is a widow in middle age, or a little later, who is relatively merry and pretty well off. She reminded me a bit of Julia in Margery Sharp’s The Nutmeg Tree, though several notches less exuberant. She has the same witty outlook on life, unbowed by the various difficulties she has faced. As the novel opens – before the railings incident – she is talking with her old nanny about some childhood memory of the house she has inherited.

But this explanation conflicted with Nanny’s memories, which were sometimes tactlessly different from Julia’s. She laid the stocking down and gave her employer what she called ‘a straight look’. This preliminary, and the little grunt that accompanied it, warned Julia that they were about to begin an argument; and although she did not doubt that she would triumph (Nanny was so old and her memory was not what it had been) she did not wish to be in the middle of an argument when Dora arrived. Arguments took time, and also a lot of tact and sympathy and loving remarks so that she and Nanny should finish up good friends. It wasn’t – it simply could not be – the right moment for starting one.

You get the measure of Julia! Dora is her cousin, less merry, who moves in as her companion. They were both nieces of the man who left the house to Julia, and there is no obvious reason why she has been left as the sole beneficiary. It is partly guilt, partly kindness and, one assumes, partly curiosity that leads Julia to invite Dora into her new adventure in Goatstock.

I would happily have read a whole novel about the dynamics between Julia and Dora. But that isn’t really what The Native Heath is – Elizabeth Fair likes giving a wide cast of villagers, and she doesn’t stint here. I got a bit confused between a few of the older ladies, but there is also some young people and some in between. A down-on-her-luck Lady with an interest in organic food. A love triangle of sorts, including a young woman engaged to a missionary in a far-flung country. A vicar and his sister, who fears that he will marry and she will have to leave their home. A village produce and flower show. Etc. etc. Over it all hangs the threat – very 1950s – that the village will become a New Town, absorbed into a mass building project.

Because there is so much going on, each element taking centre stage for a period, your enjoyment of any particular section of the novel will depend on how invested you are in that story or person. The structure ended up feeling quite episodic. I really enjoyed an unsuccessful picnic, which was where Fair went to town with humour and character assassination. There were other sections that I found less interesting, and I think The Native Heath would have benefited from a ruthless cutting down to a smaller group of people and storylines.

I still really enjoyed spending my time there, but I think there was an even better, more incisive and interesting novel hidden within the crowds of people and plots. Still, for something perhaps more Miss Read than Margery Sharp, this is a delightful 1954 book to spend some relaxing time with.

Lease of Life by Frank Baker #1954Club

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Few things in life represent the triumph of hope over experience as much as my continued attempts to find an equal to Miss Hargreaves among Frank Baker’s other output. My attempts have ranged from actually-quite-good to extremely-forgettable, usually settling somewhere around mediocre – with Miss Hargreaves appearing as an extravagant anomaly.

But the 1954 Club is another great opportunity for me to take another chance – and this time with Lease of Life, a novel that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. Here is the opening paragraph:

On a winter afternoon the last light of a dying sun fell slowly through the great west window of Gilchester Cathedral. Far away, from the world beyond the choir screen, the organist was playing the introduction to Purcell’s anthem, ‘Rejoice in the Lord’. As the descending C major scale passage dropped, then rose again, so did the light fall lower down the window, revealing the glory of its colours. Seeing the falling light, hearing the falling music, a middle-aged man who was the solitary occupant of the darkening nave, was curiously moved. The light must go, the music must end: this was inevitable. He was not saddened by the thought; it was like a new experience, like falling in love again and remembering from the passage of many years the heart’s elation when a girl smiled at you. Lawrence Hearne smiled now when he thought of this; he was fifty-two, far enough away from youth to begin to revalue it. So, he thought, I am in love. And what am I in love with? There was only one word which could answer the question. He was in love with life.

Lawrence Hearne is a vicar who has never come to much notice outside of his family – loving wife and daughter, the latter of whom shares his love for music, and may be a talented pianist. As the novel opens, this love of life is particularly painful. Because he is told by a doctor that he has not long to live – the sort of illness that will go unnoticed by those around him, but which will take him suddenly in the next few months. He decides not to tell his wife and daughter or, indeed, anybody else.

Meanwhile, there is a funny scene where discussion is under way for a new Dean. The role comes with more money, privilege, and notice. And Rev. Lawrence is identified as a possible candidate – so long as he does well at a sermon he is giving for schoolboys at the cathedral soon. Hearne himself has no idea that he is even in the running, or that the sermon is going to have any undue attention.

Here is a little snippet of Robert Donat delivering part of that sermon, in a film adaptation that was released in the same year the novel was published, 1954, with a screenplay apparently written by none other than Eric Ambler.

I really enjoyed Lease of Life, mostly because of Lawrence Hearne. He reminded me rather of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding, and not just because of his profession. While he will never be in the same league as dear Septimus, one of the greatest creations of literature in my opinion, he has the same gentleness, humility, and determination to seek and do the right thing.

In Lease of Life, this coalesces around his sermon – which veers from an interpretation of Scripture to being something a little more avant-garde. I suspect the views expressed are Baker’s own, and they would be considered mild in 2022, but apparently rather disruptive in 1954. I did have some trouble believing that, even in 1954, anybody’s sermon would grab popular attention and scandal in quite the way that Hearne’s does. Particularly since it seems inoffensive, if a little flighty.

It is typical of Baker’s non-Miss-Hargreaves novels that the ideas are required to carry more weight than perhaps they can. By which I mean, he puts ideas down in place in plot, and the novel is more about examining and discussing them then it is about narrative and characters. Ironically, the reason that Lease of Life works better than most of his writing is that the characters still feel vital and enjoyable (albeit least of all when they are required to discuss those Ideas). If he’d just made Lease of Life about a vicar, his wife, and their daughter – maybe dealing with his diagnosis, maybe pursuing their own aims in ignorance of his fate – then I think it would have been a much more successful novel. Certainly more likely to have lasting affection, and welcome re-reads, then a novel in which Baker tries to form his own form of theology.

So, if I were ranking Baker’s novels, this would be quite high up the list. But perhaps not for the reasons Baker hoped. I wish he had been less philosophically ambitious in his writing, and happier to use his undeniable gift for character and dialogue in a simpler manner.

Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson #1954Club

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When I was in Toronto in 2017, I was keen to buy books that wouldn’t be so easily available back home – and it made sense to pick up Canadian authors, where possible. It was also during another Project 24, so I couldn’t go wild with the number of books I bought – I restricted myself largely to Stephen Leacock, Margaret Laurence, and Ethel Wilson.

The only Ethel Wilson I’d read was Hetty Dorval, in the Persephone edition, and I remember liking it but none of the details. Now I’ve read this beautiful edition of the unprepossessingly-titled Swamp Angel, and I can see why she is so beloved by many Canadians.

We open in Vancouver. Maggie Vardoe is living with her second husband, having been widowed in her first marriage. And, on page one, we get this sentence:

Mrs Vardoe had become attached to, even absorbed into the sight from the front-room window of inlet and forest and mountains. She had come to love it, to dislike it, to hate it, and at seven-fifteen this evening she proposed to leave and not to return. Everything was, she thought, in order.

As well as a vital plot point, it’s a great indication of Wilson’s writing in this novel. She blends the beautiful with the plain. Throughout the book, we are always aware of the surroundings – views and environments and nature are as crucial as anything happening in the foreground. But Wilson is not sentimental about the natural world; she is in awe of it, and she values the vantages people have of it.

Maggie leaves the house, having cooked enough meat for her husband to eat cold for a few days. We don’t learn a lot about Mr Vardoe, except that he is irascible, unkind, demanding and unsatisfactory. It’s no mystery why Maggie wants to leave. What is less clear is where she might go, and why.

Swamp Angel follows Maggie as she becomes independent. At various places in those forests and mountains she could see from her window, Maggie learns how to live in a way that gives her autonomy, and respects the people and places around her. She is pretty good at it from the outset, so this isn’t a case of seeing a suburban housewife gradually learn to adapt to a new way of life. It is as though this way of life has always been waiting for her, and she only has to dive into it.

Maggie isn’t alone in this experience, nor is it idyllic. A large part of the novel sees her working at some remote cabins, and the difficulties this causes with the married couple who own it. She also invites a young Chinese boy to work with her, based on a brief meeting. There is little maternal in the relationship she has with him, or his brother. What I found interesting about Wilson’s writing is how often it resists comfortable emotional conclusions. People remain self-contained, or have outbursts that they regret. There is a beauty in the restraint that the characters are permitted.

In between the character interactions, Wilson allows herself leisurely envelopments in the natural world that are the novel’s most beautiful moments. I particularly loved this description of the northern lights, and how Maggie is swept into it:

One night she saw, north of the lake, a pale glow invade the sky. Maggie got up and pulled a blanket round her. The pale glow was greenish, no, a hot colour rose up and quickly took possession. The colour changed. The vast sky moved as with banners. The sky was an intimation of something still vaster, and spiritual. For two hours Maggie watched enraptured the great folding, playing, flapping of these draperies of light in heaven, transient, unrepeated, sliding up and down the sky. After declaiming lavishly, the great Northern Lights faded with indifference as one who is bored and – deploring display – says I may come back but only if I choose; I do as I wish; I am powerful; I am gone but I am here. The orthodox stars, which had been washed away, returned palely. Night was resumed, and Maggie slept.

I’ve missed quite substantial parts of Swamp Angel that take place back in Vancouver, with Maggie’s friends and husband, and haven’t even mentioned that the Swamp Angel is in fact a gun. But hopefully I’ve said enough to tempt you to the quiet tumult of this novel.

The Golden Waterwheel by Leo Walmsley – #1954Club

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One of the books I loved last year was Leo Walmsley’s Love in the Sun, a very autobiographical novel about living and loving in poverty beside the sea in Cornwall. You can read my earlier review, and it will leave you unsurprised that I was keen to read more from Walmsley. And so I was really pleased to see that the first sequel, The Golden Waterwheel, was published in 1954 – quite a long time after 1939’s Love in the Sun, but picking up where it finished.

The narrator (basically Walmsley himself) and his wife Dain have made the difficult decision to leave Cornwall behind and go back up north, to Yorkshire, where they had come from. They want to set up a home with plenty of land, still near the sea, and raise their young family. Having coped with very little in Cornwall, they know they are capable of making do – but the narrator also has a new source of income, in the form of his successful writing. In Love in the Sun, his first book was accepted – in The Golden Waterwheel, he is writing what would become Love in the Sun. It’s all very meta.

The slow, steady pace and the guileless tone of the first book are replicated here. Each step is given equal weight, and we see the couple find various sites they’d like to live in, before finally getting a plot further from the sea than they’d wished but with views and plenty of potential. And they set about creating their dream home – within the remit of modest, achievable dreams. I always love reading about house-hunting, house-building or anything to do with devising a home, and so I loved all of this. Again, it is a gradual development, told in a straightforward way. Walmsley doesn’t mine it for humour, and there is nothing either self-deprecating or self-aggrandising. Anything that is amusing comes from incident, not from the framing of it.

And it is beautiful. Walmsley is a deep appreciator of the natural world, and he conveys it without metaphor or ornament. He sees that it is beautiful, and he describes it as it is. Here is a walk on the nearby moor:

It was lovely. The real heather was a long way from being in full bloom. Enough of it was out to give a blush of tender purple to the dark green and browns of the moor. The sea wind had packed the sky with cloud, too even in its structure, too pale and too low to portend rain, and although there would be no visible sunset, the light was strong and the lower air so clear that every detail of the moorland landscape for miles around was optically sharp. The lone pines, the odd groups of sheep, a shepherd’s hut, the low hills each surmounted by one or several of the conical mounds that marked the burial place of an ancient Briton. The salty wind was cool but invigorating, and the sun-dried springy turf extended a warmth. There was a steady droning of bees and you could almost taste honey in the smell of the heather blooms they were plundering.

I loved this book as much as its predecessor, and I’m looking forward to The Happy Ending, the final in the trilogy. It is set on the cusp on the Second World War, so is not really representative of 1954 life – but does hark back to a halcyon time. The waterwheel of the title is never built; it is a dream that doesn’t quite come true, and perhaps that is why it remains golden. But, even without out, there is something golden about the whole period.

Ludmilla by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 18

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Earlier in the month I read The Lonely by Paul Gallico, and today I read the other half of the book I have it in – Ludmilla, originally published in 1955. It was printed as a separate book initially, but it is only about 50 pages – including drawings by Reisie Lonette.

For those who’ve read Gallico’s Small Miracle, it is quite similar. Set in Liechtenstein, it’s about a festival where cows are paraded with ribbons etc, and the cow at the front is the most celebrated one of the year. The Weakling cow covets the prized position, though barely produces any milk and is lean and unimpressive. But a prayer to St Ludmilla might just sort things out…

You who believe that animals are dumb and incapable of reason or emotions similar to those experience by humans will of course continue to do so. I ask you only to think of the yearning and heartache that is the lot of the poor and not-so-favoured woman, as she stares through the glass of the shop window at a gay Easter hat, a particularly fetching frock, the sheerest of stockings, or a pair of shoes with little bows that seem to dance all by themselves; lovable articles, desirable articles, magic articles out of her reach since she can neither buy them, nor earn them as a gift, yet things that she knows would transform her in a moment from someone drab and unnoticed, into a sparkling queen, a ravishing beauty that would draw all eyes to her. Or, if not all eyes, then at least a few, and if not a few, then just one pair of eyes, and in the end, the only pair that mattered. Are you a book editor? Find your job on Jooble.

Ludmilla is very slight, but has its charm. The cow is rather a lovely character. It is a curious choice to pair it with The Lonely, because they have nothing in common (except for Gallico’s not-entirely-enlightened perspective on the role and motivations of women). Gallico can be fey or dark or both, and this one couldn’t be feyer if it tried. Fun, if minor.

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.