1960s

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

When I read R.B. Russell’s very good Fifty Forgotten Books, there were a handful of books that particularly appealed – and one of them was Phyllis Paul’s much-admired but out-of-print Twice Lost (1960), even though Russell actually prefers her A Little Treachery. I set up an abebooks alert and patiently waited – and, hurrah, finally a copy come up! It was quite pricey and not very good condition, but I didn’t think I’d ever stumble across another chance to read it.

…days after this tatty Lancer Gothic edition arrived, I saw the news that a beautiful new edition was being printed by McNally Editions! I do wonder if the bookseller had caught wind of the news and wanted to sell off this copy quick-sticks. NEVER MIND. I may not have the lovely edition, but I do have the fun of a copy that clearly mystified its editors/marketers. Because the way they’ve tried to sell it is really quite bafflingly unlike the book you’ll find inside. ‘An innocent schoolgirl is the victim of evil, and in terror the people of Hilberry ask why!’ sets up a very different sort of novel, and I suspect quite a few purchasers of this edition ended up confused and disappointed. For one thing, it gets the name of the village – Hilbery – wrong.

It’s clear from the outset that Phyllis Paul is not writing disposable mass-market fiction. Her writing is lush and beautiful, more like the opening of an Edwardian novel of manners than a gothic thriller. Here’s the opening paragraph:

They had separated and were creeping about the grass, bowed over, with their eyes on the ground. But it was too near nightfall. Through the gateway with the flanking piers topped by urns, whose pale, classic shapes were enveloped in savage tufts of ivy, the rest of the tennis-party had already drifted, and out in the lane voices rose boldly above the din of bicycle bells and hooters, and the stuttering of a motor-cycle on the point of moving off. Christine Gray and a friend of her own age, Penelope, had good-naturedly stayed behind to help the little girl in her search for a lost treasure.

The little girl is a curious, adventurous child called Vivian. Don’t worry about Penelope because we don’t see much of her, but Christine becomes a key figure – she is young herself, with the carelessness and trust of youth. It seems inconceivable that anything could truly go wrong. Not here, in a large, beautiful house in the English countryside at a party for well-off, cheerful people.

And yet – of course it does. Little Vivian goes missing. A search is made for her, or for the treasure she was hunting. No trace of her is left behind.

Twice Lost isn’t a procedural mystery by any stretch of the imagination, and the reader never feels like they are the trail of a detection. While we wait to see if a resolution will be given, it feels for much of the novel that Phyllis Paul isn’t especially interested in the disappearance herself. It’s the catalyst for a few things, and the story continues through to the end of the novel, but Paul is far more invested in writing about this small community in lovely, languorous prose. She is very good at it. There are many scenes where we can simply relax into the comedy and drama of human relationships – particularly between newcomers to the village, a writer Thomas Antequin and his son named, of all things, Keith. They have come to Carlotta House with the idea of Thomas Antequin becoming a renowned playwright, if he can do so away from all the distractions of town. Descriptions of Carlotta House are as near as Twice Lost gets to truly being Gothic, in my opinion. The section I noted down to quote is actually about a different house, a minor cottage, but it’s an example of the vivid, gorgeous writing that I so enjoy – and which must have come as such a surprise to readers hoping for the sort of novel suggested by this cover. It’s also a great insight into village life and the ways that small issues can become major. (You get the feeling these elms preoccupy villagers more than Vivian’s disappearance.)

But crouched at the foot of these majestic trees, on an uncultivated piece of ground as spacious as a meadow, was one small, ancient cottage; a little garden patch before it, and all the rest wild. Here, in fact, was an outstanding example of that obstructive cottage property which many a good, full, tidy mind in Hilbery lusted to sweep away. It was felt to be the nearest approach to a slum that the district possessed.

This lonely relic of wild beauty caused much unease in Hilbery Village. For the elms were ‘wild’! Efforts were therefore continually being made to prove that they were dangerous. Everyone knew that this cry of danger was a bare-faced pretext; the elms, if dangerous at all, were not remotely as dangerous as the near-by road since that had been straightened and turned into a speed-track, and there was no proposal to scrap that. And in fact, as always in such cases, all sorts of humane and public-spirited reasons had been put forward to mask a simple lust for destruction.

There was, of course, the opposite camp. The elms had their partisans. Even in Hilbery there were those whom wanton destruction enrages – and those who are perhaps even more enraged by the tidy mind. And among the first of these was the owner of the ground, a Mr. Parmore, who lived opposite in one of the rejuvenated farmhouses, and he was a man as determined as wealthy, and doted on his view. In the second class was the tenant of the cottage.

How many Lancer Gothic writers were putting in things like that? (It did slightly amuse me, in a sad kinda way, that this would be a moot conversation within a decade or two – when Dutch elm disease would have laid these trees to waste.)

We continue seeing the affectionate squabbling between Antequin senior and Anetquin junior – affectionate, but with an element of malice – as well as Christine’s development towards adulthood. Vivian is given up for lost, and people are sadder about the idea in the abstract than because anybody particularly valued poor Vivian as a person. Her stepmother certainly doesn’t mourn her. Her disappearance is chalked up as a freak accident.

Suddenly, turning from one chapter to the next and hardly heralded, we are a significant amount of time in the future. I don’t want to give away anything from this point (though the blurb to my edition does – and, to a certain extent, the title does too). But relationships have been formed, suspicions have developed, and Vivian’s disappearance continues to haunt Hilbery and its residents in ways that aren’t entirely obvious to the undiscerning.

I really enjoyed Twice Lost. It is a fascinating novel. For the most part, it is beautifully written and a piercing but undisturbing psychological portrait. Phyllis Paul sees her characters keenly, with the insight of a writer who doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. But what also makes Twice Lost fascinating is how Paul seems to disregard many of the conventions of novelistic structure. It’s not even that she defies the rules of particular genres, or merges different genres together. There are parts that seem intentionally clumsy. There are significant characters and plot points hurriedly introduced in the final pages. The title only makes sense with enormous spoilers. There’s a lull in the momentum for the major part of the novel’s middle – that is fine, as a reader, because it’s so enjoyable to read – but it’s hard to imagine anybody advising on novelistic structure would let Vivian’s disappearance fade away for such a long stretch.

Only one of these strangenesses weakens the novel, in my opinion. The belatedly added characters feel like a cop out, and dent the sort of eerie elegance that the rest of Twice Lost has. For the rest – they just mark Paul out as an unusual novelist forging her own path. I can see why McNally republished this uncategorisable novel. One of the blurb quotes on my edition says, ‘A brilliant novel of suspense… haunting, fascinating, wonderful’. I don’t think it’s a novel of suspense – but I can’t disagree with the final three words.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

StuckinaBook All , , , 19 Comments

I don’t usually stand behind the idea that the books we read in school are ruined for us – but I have to admit that I have no long-lasting love for Of Mice and Men. It was rewarding to analyse for my GCSE English, but I filed it away in ‘worthy’ rather than ‘enjoyable’. It’s only recently that I’ve come to enjoy Steinbeck for his portrayal of small-town America. Last year I read Cannery Row, and now I’ve read The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

I suggested the book for my book group because I thought it would make sense to read it during winter… well, it turns out the title (while obviously a quotation from Richard III) is only working on one level. The novel starts on a ‘fair gold morning of April’, and Ethan and Mary Hawley are waking up together.

Ethan work in a grocer’s – though he used to own the shop. His family used to own a number of shops, in fact, and were well-respected people of note in their small community. Steinbeck doesn’t go into too much detail about the financial gambles that Ethan made, but they went horribly wrong. His business prospects were destroyed, and he has ended up at the bottom of the ladder again. He still has his loyal wife and his young, eager children – he is the sort of man who cannot be openly affectionate with any of them, but shows his love through parries and quips. Steinbeck is very good at the sort of light-hearted banter that men like Ethan exchange with their friends and dole out to their family (and very good also, later in the novel, at the confusion that children feel when this sort of father suddenly becomes serious).

The Hawleys seem to have a broadly happy marriage, and the badinage between them is elegantly done too. But Ethan clearly hasn’t come to terms with his fall from grace – and even patient Mary isn’t beyond outbursts of frustration:

“You said it! You started it. I’m not going to let you hide in your words. Do I love money? No, I don’t love money. But I don’t love worry either. I’d like to be able to hold up my head in this town. I don’t like the children to be hang-dog because they can’t dress as good – as well – as some others. I’d love to hold up my head.”

“And money would prop up your head?”

“It would wipe the sneers off the face of your hold la-de-las.”

“No one sneers at Hawley.”

“That’s what you think! You just don’t see it.”

“Maybe because I don’t look for it.”

“Are you throwing your holy Hawleys up at me?”

“No, my darling. It’s not much of a weapon any more.”

“Well, I’m glad you found it out. In this town or any other town a Hawley grocery clerk is still a grocery clerk.”

“Do you blame me for my failure?”

“No. Of course I don’t. But I do blame you for sitting wallowing in it. You could climb out of it if you didn’t have your old-fashioned fancy-pants ideas. Everybody’s laughing at you. A grand gentleman without money is a bum.” The word exploded in her head, and she was silent and ashamed.

I think the Hawleys’ state is an interesting contrast between mid-century America and mid-century Britain. I’m not a social historian, so have just picked this up from literature – but, in the UK, a ‘grand gentleman without money’ is still a grand gentleman. America doesn’t seem to have impoverished gentry in the same way – class in this community, at least, is determined by money and success. Now Ethan has lost it, he has lost his status.

Mary is a complex, sympathetic character – but Steinbeck is less generous to other women, particularly Margie. She seems a jack of many trades – telling fortunes being among the least disreputable. Ethan dislikes but largely tolerates her, and other men sleep with her when they’re out of other options. All of that is fine – Margie is a ‘type’ in a lot of mid-century novels of small-town America – but it is awkward and unpleasant to read narrative lines like ‘It was a durable face that had taken it and could it, even violence, even punching’. Steinbeck seems incapable of describing her without lingering on her breasts, and she is probably the least successful of his characters. Someone should have taken him aside and told him to grow up a bit.

I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Margie and Mary have similar names. Together, one with supposed prophecy and one with hope, they think that Ethan has business success around the corner. Can he become content with his station in life, or will he try to change things? In the first half of the novel he is an exemplary portrait of a moral man. It wouldn’t be Steinbeck if things stayed that simple. And it wouldn’t be Steinbeck if he didn’t make some cynical comments about the state of the nation:

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honourable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonourable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad.

What I most liked about Cannery Row was its depiction of small-town life that relied on many portraits of different men, women and children. The Winter of Our Discontent is much more about a single central character – the secondary characters are almost all very well-drawn and compelling to spend time with, but this is Ethan Hawley’s novel. Indeed, the narrative has some chapters in first-person and some in third-person, moving back and forth. I think I prefer Steinbeck when he turns his attention to a wider cast, but The Winter of Our Discontent is excellent. I haven’t detailed much of the plot, partly because its simplicity means that even a handful of hints will give too much of the game away – it is very predictable, I suspect deliberately so, but also very affecting because Ethan is known so intimately to us and we want to retain our respect for him.

This was Steinbeck’s final novel, and his talent was clearly undiminished. I haven’t attempted the novels on which his reputation is often considered to rest most firmly – East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath – but perhaps now I should.

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – #1962Club

StuckinaBook All , , 11 Comments

Cat in the Window - Tangye, Derek: 9780722183960 - AbeBooksWow, there are so many 1962 Club reviews coming in! I am behind with updating the page and not even managing to read all the reviews at the moment, but will go back and explore them. And I did manage to read one more, very short, book for my own 1962 Club contributions – A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye.

I picked this up in a brilliant bookshop in Whitehaven earlier this year – they had an awful lot of books by Derek Tangye and I foolishly only bought this one. They all seem to be about his life in Minack, Cornwall, with his wife and a series of different animals. In the previous book in the series, A Gull on the Roof, he apparently introduced Monty the cat. And A Cat in the Window takes us back to tell us about Monty in more detail.

Novels about cats are very hit-and-miss in my experience, often being too fey or leaning into a kind of kooky magical realism that isn’t my cup of tea. But non-fiction about cats, like Tangye’s, are almost always wonderful in my experience. Because they are written by people who love and know cats – who appreciate their character, their dignity, their independence. And who form loving friendships with cats, knowing that the cat isn’t slavishly desperate to please them but, rather, any affection is earned.

But Derek was not such a man at the outset, as he confesses in this book:

Dogs, then, had been entities in my life. Cats, as if they were wasps with four legs, had been there to shoo away. They did not belong in my life nor in my family’s life. All of us were united that whenever we saw a cat the most important thing to do was to see it out of sight.

But as I moved slowly out of the environment of my family, I found naturally enough people and homes who accepted cats as we accepted dogs. Cats were not vulgar as, in some mysterious way, I had been led to believe. I began to note that cats were able to bestow a subtle accolade upon their apparent owners which made these owners rapturous with delight.

One such cat-lover was Jeannie – the woman that Derek fell in love with. And she, with the cunning of all of us who adore cats, introduced a little kitten to the household – saying that living with them was his only chance of survival. Derek is reluctant. He has never known the charm of a cat. He allows the kitten only if it stays outside and in the kitchen. Certainly Monty will not be allowed upstairs.

We all know what’s going to happen don’t we?

My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.

Nobody has the zeal of the convert. The rest of this slim volume is about the joy of living with a cat (one cannot say ‘ownership’). He understands Monty’s character beautifully, not fabricating things that are not feline. He also understands Monty’s place in the food chain – killing rodents, but also under threat from neighbourhood foxes.

Perhaps only a cat lover would love this book, but I heartily recommend it to anybody who understands the majesty of cats and the privilege it is to share a home with one or more. I certainly felt more affected by Monty’s death (thankfully at the end of a long and happy cat life) than by most human deaths in the books I read.

Reading for club years is always enjoyable for seeing how times have changed and what’s stayed the same. Most of the 1962 choices I’ve seen mentioned (including my other two reads for this week) couldn’t be written in the same way today. But A Cat in the Window could. Cats are happily unchangeable – and the way a felinophile would write about cats hasn’t changed at all either.

The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper – #1962Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 10 Comments

I didn’t manage to read a huge amount for the 1962 Club, and I seem to have specialised in authors better remembered for other books. After Lynne Reid Banks, I’ve turned my attention to Lettice Cooper and The Double Heart, a book I picked up in a little sale box outside a church in about 2005. Its moment has come!

Lettice Cooper is best remembered for The New House, once a Virago Modern Classic and now a Persephone book. She had an astonishingly long publishing career, spanning 1925 to 1994 – so while The Double Heart came 26 years after The New House, it was far from a swansong in her bibliography. But she is not a early-century writer still turning out the same books after they have ceased to be fashionable: this feels very 1960s, and even a bit startlingly modern at times.

The novel didn’t open super promisingly, in my opinion. Hervey is a failing playwright (my second failing playwright for the 1962 Club!) and meets a beautiful young woman called Bell, short for Belinda. This is their moment of encounter:

Then Jonathan moved and beyond him Hervey saw a girl, who turned round on her stool and glanced towards him. She was very young, with smooth fair hair falling round her long neck, with large, light grey eyes under heavily painted lids. She wore a close-fitting black jersey and a green tartan skirt that belled out round her stool. She was half listening to Jonathan, obviously bored. She looked full at Hervey. He felt he jolting shock of a collision. He stood still returning her stare. Her lips just parted, hardly smiling. It was as though she had lowered a gangway for him. He walked towards her across the room.

Love at first sight might happen in real life sometimes, but it’s very tedious in a novel. More tedious still is the sort of things they say to each other almost immediately. Because there is a pesky little obstacle to their era-defining romance: Bell is married with a young son. She decides that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Lucas, and starts to psychoanalyse herself in the bar.

“I still can’t partly because a person that Lucas expects me to be. I know now that I don’t want to, and so I do it badly. I’m neither one thing nor the other, and it makes me half hate Lucas, though it’s not his fault. And I don’t want to hate him, he’s not a person to hate. And then there’s Toby, my baby. I’m very fond of him, but he’s something tying me down to this life that isn’t really mine.”

It was at this point, on p.17, that I considered giving up on the novel. Nobody speaks like this outside of novels, and Bell and Hervey are tiresome, unpleasant people whose love affair I couldn’t care less about.

BUT – it turned out that Cooper was doing something much cleverer than I’d given her credit for. This sort of talk takes up the first chapter, and then the rest of the novel is really about the fall-out. How does it impact relatives and friends when two young people make a selfish decision? What are the knock-on effects?

First, of course, is Lucas. He is a slightly dull but dependable young man who is unbelieving and angry that Bell has left him in the most casual way possible. Despite the anger, he wants her to come home and quietly forget the whole thing. This all makes him sound like the staid villain of the piece, but Lucas really has out sympathy. He and Bell have had a fairly happy marriage so far, from his perspective at least, and he is ready to forgive and forget her curious blip. But he has a job and can’t look after baby Toby – and so he gets shepherded off initially to a lady in another flat (who is indignant) and next to Lucas’s mother.

Lucas’s widowed mother, Dorothy Marsden, is perhaps my favourite character. She is one of the few who could have stepped out of The New House. An eminently sensible woman, we meet her coming in from the garden with a dripping bunch of chrysanthemums to answer the telephone – couldn’t that be in any interwar middlebrow novel? She takes Lucas in with a mix of grandmotherly happiness and, as a person with her own life, a certain reluctance. We hardly get to know Lucas at all – he is a burden to outsource rather than a character on the page – but he certainly disrupts Dorothy’s life. The fall-out of Hervey and Bell’s decision even covers Dorothy’s dear friend Hatty – there are intriguing suggestions that their relationship might be more than friends, and Hatty is furious to be cast aside.

We also see Hervey’s mother – a fluttery, nervous woman who feels very overwhelmed by the situation. Then there’s Bell’s parents – an emotionless man whose main regret is marrying the beautiful young woman who fell pregnant with his baby and thus had to get an engagement ring. He resents Bell for being too like her mother (even though the pregnancy in question turned out to be a son, much more like himself than his wife.)

I’m racing through characters because there are an awful lot of people we get to know well – Lucas, Hervey and Bell also each have friends, some of whom have spouses and children to meet too. I think Cooper spread her net perhaps a little too wide, and sometimes I struggled to remember who people were or if we’d met them before. She is great at getting deep into someone’s personality, but slightly fewer people would have made this trait pay off a little better, in my opinion.

As for Hervey and Bell themselves – the lustre doesn’t last super long on their relationship, as anyone could tell. Hervey is monstrously selfish. He thinks it ‘makes sense’ for him to finish his play first rather than get a menial job, because then he will be a rich and successful playwright. But he hasn’t actually started the play yet, nor does he have any ideas for it. He lets Bell believe that her son will come and live with them, but secretly will refuse to allow this. He has, essentially, no redeeming qualities. Bell, on the other hand, is more floaty than selfish. She seems to live on another plane, where consequences of actions don’t quite exist. She means nobody any malice, but also doesn’t seem to walk with her feet on the ground. Perhaps the most touching relationship in this novel of flawed relationships is the platonic one she forms with a workman who shouts her a full English breakfast (because she has no money for meals) and they form an extraordinary friendship. It becomes the main plot of the latter section of The Double Heart, but I won’t say any more on that.

How representative of 1962 is this maelstrom of characters and storylines? It comes across when they talk about marriage:

“Your idea is what it [marriage] used to be. When our parents were young they could believe in things lasting. How can we, when it’s obvious that we shall probably all be blown up in a year or two?”

“I think the only to take that situation is to go on living as if it wasn’t going to happen. Just as a solider must behave as if he wasn’t going to be killed.”

Perhaps every generation thinks that the previous generation had more stability – and every generation thinks that theirs is more liberal in marriage. But only a handful would have had that genuine fear that they could be ‘blown up in a year or two’. I suppose that might be the sort of thing that would make someone abandon their family on a whim?

Whether or not the catalysing moment for The Double Heart is plausible, I really enjoyed what Cooper did with it. It’s an interesting way of looking at sudden romance that throws caution to the wind. Following all the people left hurt and disoriented by this caution-throwing gives opportunity for a compelling plot and a wide range of characters – and Cooper shows that she is every bit as adept at writing about 1960s society as she is at 1930s. Hopefully more of her books will be read and discovered – she’s far from a one-trick, or even a one-decade, pony.

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks #1962Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

(I wrote this review before the recent shocking violence in Israel and Gaza, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned.)

One of my favourite books is Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, which was also one of the first adult novels I discovered for myself. I’d loved her children’s books and it was a great step from one world of reading to another. I read the two sequels, but didn’t read all that many of her other novels for a long while – despite buying An End To Running back in 2002. (I should say – I got a bit of déjà vu reading it, but I think that’s because it has similarities to her children’s book One More River.)

This was Lynne Reid Banks’ second novel and there are elements that could remind you of her first. The male lead is a Jewish writer, for instance – but the female protagonist, Martha, is nothing like The L-Shaped Room‘s Jane. Martha is a no-nonsense, articulate, intelligent young woman looking for work as a secretary – preferably something literature-adjacent. As the novel opens, she is being interviewed for a job with Aaron Franks. She instantly dislikes him. He has a cruelty to his demeanour and a self-importance as a writer that comes across as childishly arrogant. But he is supported in this by his sister – the real power behind the throne – who believes Aaron to be a genius, and takes against Martha immediately.

Martha is offered the job, and takes it because she needs the money – and because she is undeniably intrigued by this man. She thinks the writing his sister most prizes is pretentious, meaningless waffle – but there is a novel about his father’s experience as a Jewish immigrant that seems clearer and deeper. In all honesty, Banks takes us from their initial mistrust and disdain for each other to a friendship rather quickly and slightly unconvincingly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot.

Somewhere along the way, Aaron comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea. Sick of his sister’s bullying and misguided views on literature, he decides to write a play entirely in the style that she likes. It is meaningless nonsense, and Banks clearly enjoys giving us excerpts from it. And it is an admirable pastiche of a certain sort of play. This is 1962, and presumably the stage of the day was suffering from an influx of playwrights trying to emulate works like Waiting for Godot (1953 in French; 1955 in English) and Harold Pinter’s (The Birthday Party was 1957; The Caretaker was 1959 etc.) Actually, two of the novels I’ve read for the 1962 Club have would-be playwrights as lead characters, so it was clearly in the air.

Meanwhile, Aaron is preoccupied with his Jewish identity. That’s a common theme of Banks’ work – and we mustn’t forget, of course, that this is only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Characters like Aaron grew up with the most violent anti-Semitism being loud and clear across Europe. Early on, his sister rejects Martha’s suggestion that he write a play about Jewish people:

“Why not Jews? I want to understand this.” 

“Primarily because we want the play to be a success.”

“Why should Jewish characters hinder that?”

“Because it’s esoteric. It’s all right to put shaggy old East End pawnbrokers or sharp-nosed shysters or hand-spreading fat crooks into a play for laughs or a gentle tear or two. But you can’t write a serious play exploring Jewish feelings and expect anybody but Jews to understand it.”

Anti-Semitism is sadly all too present in 2023, but I hope no novelist would feel that the above dialogue was an accurate reflection of the arts today. As a sidenote, I can’t find out whether Lynne Reid Banks is Jewish or not, and it does make a difference to how I respond to her writing. She so often returns to ‘Jewishness’ as a theme, particularly people who are ashamed of being Jewish – which feels like a vulnerable thing to explore if she is Jewish, and… well, opinions vary on whether or not it’s appropriate if she isn’t Jewish.

Aaron writes his play and it is put on by a small theatre group – and, twist, it becomes a big success. Aaron at first finds this amusing – but Martha points out that his reputation as a writer is now settled. He can’t become a new novelist without this reputation. One thing leads to another, and they decide to move together to a kibbutz in Israel – a sort of communal living compound. They are able to move there under the then-rule that any Jewish person around the world could move to Israel (I believe it’s a bit more stringent now).

It was one thing not to be wanted in the place you were born in. That might not be enough to make you get out – it might only make you more stubbornly determined to dig in. But if there was a place that did want you – wanted you so badly it didn’t even ask whether you had tuberculosis or a criminal record, let alone whether you were popular in the place you came from or whether you liked yourself or whether you had the guts to stand on your own two feet – then what sort of a bloody fool would you have to be not to go there? Surely there, if anywhere, you could start again with nothing chalked up against you, even in your own mind.

Yes, it is a bit of a jump! But somehow it feels plausible in the novel. What works slightly less well is jumping to another country and another voice – because the first half has been in Martha’s first-person perspective, and the second half (such as that quote above) is from Aaron’s first-person perspective. By changing all the parameters in one fell swoop, it does feel like two very different novels.

Though Martha is not Jewish, they are accepted onto the kibbutz because they lie that they’re married. From the start, it doesn’t go well. Aaron is not built for physical labour, and finds the hours in baking heat harvesting vegetables both exhausting and mindless. He doesn’t particularly like the communal way of eating, or having other people’s children everywhere. Perhaps because he is escaping somewhere rather than being excited about the arrival, he resists everything. Even though we are in his mind, he is not a sympathetic character. It is evident that he considers himself too good for this.

Martha, meanwhile, is a better fit. She seems to have changed a lot from the first half – perhaps a convincing contrast of the way she sees herself, versus how Aaron sees her. She is more compliant, more liked. Banks lived on a kibbutz herself for a while, and she certainly conveys it very well. I can see why it’s a setting she returns to in several of her books.

I shan’t give any more of the plot – but I will say I liked An End To Running very much. Lynne Reid Banks is brilliant at enveloping you in a world and making it deeply familiar to you – bringing across both the pain and the discomfort of familiarity. My qualms about the novel are really that it is two novels, barely hinged together. If one were the sequel to the other, I think it could have worked. But as it is, the leap of perspective and setting, and the concomitant change of tone, means it’s hard to think of An End To Running as one whole.

And how representative of 1962 is this club choice? There are certain things that could only be from this period – from the vogue for a certain form of highbrow theatre to the relatively recent re-creation of Israel as an independent country. The cover does its best to seem racy, but this is a fairly minor part of the plot – it would have been shocking three decades earlier, but is pretty tame for 1962.

I’d never recommend this as the best place to start with Lynne Reid Banks, and it certainly won’t dislodge The L-Shaped Room in my affections – but I do think, beside that novel, she is not as widely read as she deserves. Perhaps her interest in Jewishness means her novels are more vulnerable to dating poorly, but she is an exceptionally good writer and I hope more people read her.

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Finishing #ABookADayInMay with The Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

We have got to the end of May! Thank you for all your encouragement and comments as I’ve finished my book each day – and particular thanks to Madame Bibi for creating the challenge and leading the charge. We did it! And it’s been really fun. Including audiobooks this year made life easier – because I was finishing a book each day, rather than reading a whole book every day, it meant that I could have a breather sometimes and finish off an audiobook that had been on the go for a bit. A few more reflections before I get onto my final read for this challenge…

  • I read seven works of non-fiction and 24 works of fiction – the non-fiction is the main reason I call this challenge A Book A Day rather than A Novella A Day
  • 18 of the books were by authors I hadn’t read before – which pleased me, because I felt like I was in a bit of a rut of not trying new authors in 2023
  • Three were in translation – from Dutch, French, and Italian
  • I toyed with ranking them all, but they basically fall into tiers – and I think my three favourite books from this month were all non-fiction: Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier, A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, and Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner

Onto my final choice – and it wasn’t until I’d decided on it that I realised how appropriate the title was to be a final choice: The Finishing Touch (1963) by Brigid Brophy.

This is my second book by Brophy – I don’t know how The Finishing Touch is regarded in relation to the rest of her oeuvre, but I really liked it. Her style is delicious, reminding me of the biting qualities of Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett. There is a convoluted, self-aware artistry to it that is unique, and those words might sound like an insult but I mean them as a compliment. My first Brophy was Hackenfeller’s Ape, which I also really liked, though I don’t remember it reading quite like this.

The setting for the novella is a finishing school in France, run by co-proprietors Miss Hetty Braid and Miss Antonia Mount. The former is diligent, plain, and unloved, though with a far greater knowledge of the running of the school and the individual girls than has Miss Antonia. Miss Antonia, meanwhile, is languidly lovely – adored by most of the girls and, indeed, by Miss Hetty herself. I loved these sorts of authorial commentary-by-intrusion:

“To which girl was the note addressed?”

“Sylvie Plash.”

“Is that the pretty one?” (‘Personal attention and care of the joint head mistresses for each girl‘, said the Prospectus.)

“No, that’s Eugenie.”

What happens? Well, a princess is coming to the school – Royalty, as she is initially referred to – and the headmistresses and pupils get excited about that. Otherwise, the plot is really just about the dynamics between these two women and their charges – particularly a few girls who are entirely besotted with Miss Antonia. The story doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the telling, and style is much more compelling than substance here. Brophy writes sentences in the most indirect way. Each page is littered with parentheses, and nothing is told simply. It does mean you can’t rush through a page of writing, but I think it is very successful. It is certainly distinctive.

One is, thought Antonia, smoothing the frilled sleeve of her breakfast négligé (pale: it was not the hour for strong colour), misunderstood.

I’m not sure I could cope with a 400-page novel in this style, but it works very well over 120 pages – with a large font and wide margins. I also don’t know if this is representative of all her writing, but I always applaud an author who can make idiosyncratic writing compelling, characterful, and (above all) readable. Brophy delivers on all fronts and this novella is a really fun way to end my May challenge.

It Ends With Revelations by Dodie Smith #ABookADayInMay No.23

StuckinaBook All , , 19 Comments

Back in 2012, lots of us were excited when Corsair reprinted some hard-to-find Dodie Smith novels – and with lovely cover illustrations by Sara Mulvanny. I’d already read The Town in Bloom (borrowed in an older edition from the library), but I snapped it up along with The New Moon with the Old and It Ends With Revelations, and promptly never opened them again. But the intention was definitely always there, and I’m pleased to have finally read It Ends With Revelations (1967). The title comes from that famous line in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance – one character says “The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.” Another replies, “It ends with Revelations.” Which has always irritated me, because the final book of the Bible is called Revelation, not Revelations.

ANYWAY, to turn to this book, the main character is 34-year-old Jill Quentin. Her husband Miles is a well-respected theatre actor, and she has accompanied him to an English spa town to the opening of a play that looks unlikely to do very well. It has recently been a TV series, but the transferral to the stage is pretty weak for any number of reasons, and Miles won’t mind extricating himself from the whole thing in the likely event that it ends after a few weeks.

Before I go further with the plot – my favourite parts of this novel are all the theatre things. Dodie Smith was both a jobbing actress and a playwright at different times, and writes about the theatrical world from the inside in one of her autobiographies and in The Town in Bloom. Her knowledge of the theatre suffuses the first half of It Ends With Revelations, but is seen more from an outsider – Jill has no wish to be an actor, though would have enjoyed being a stage assistant or something. Smith is very good on the various feuds and triumphs of the rehearsal process, how lines are cut and rewritten, or scenes re-directed to put focus on a different actor. You can tell it’s a world she knows well. I loved slightly knowing, caustic things like this:

They tiptoed into the back of the stalls. On the stage, a working light of dazzling brilliance dangled into a roofless composite set, made up of a sitting room and a kitchen separated by a staircase leading up to a room which suggested a look-out for forest fires. The whole gave the impression of a giant toy badly put together, rather than a place where human beings could conceivably live.

While buying chocolates for the leading boy, Jill bumps into Geoffrey Thornton. He is the local MP, as well as being a lawyer, and they quickly form an affinity. He introduces her to his daughters, Robin and Kit, on the cusp of adulthood. They are extremely self-possessed and take an instant liking to Jill – before long, they are all seeing each other, drinking hot chocolate in cafes, discussing their ‘dipsomaniac nymphomaniac’ mother with unusual candour, and sharing their tastes and interests. Perhaps my favourite two pages in the novel are where the sisters discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett.

“I almost like her because she writes about families,” said Robin. “But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.”

“Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?” said Kit impatiently. “And she does say quite a bit about backgrounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination.”

It’s totally irrelevant to the plot, and I imagine most modern editors would cut it, but I loved it so much.

The plot of the second half gets more complex, and it’s hard to write about it without giving spoilers – suffice to say that the lives of the Quentins and the Thorntons becomes increasingly entangled. There are, indeed, revelations. And among these are themes that are surprisingly modern for the 1960s, and discussed with a range of viewpoints. And, of course, anything surprisingly modern in 1967 will necessarily feel quite dated now. There are certainly passages that wouldn’t be printed today. And the debate rages on about what that means for reprints.

I really enjoyed It Ends With Revelations chiefly for the theatrical setting, but the second half worked for me too – because the revelations and twists say more about character than shocking plot, and they explain various things that were a bit mysterious in the first half. It’s a well-structured novel and pretty satisfying, give or take a few improbable relationships and decisions. I particularly enjoyed Kit and Robin, and would have liked even more from them – Smith is so good at girls of this age, as I Capture the Castle proves.

Better late than never, and I remain glad that Corsair made these lesser-known novels available to a wider audience.

The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

StuckinaBook All , , 15 Comments

If you read my favourite books of 2022 list, you’ll know that Margaret Laurence came out on top – with A Jest of God, a brilliant short book about a woman called Rachel living a claustrophobic, hopeless life in a small Canadian town. I also read The Diviners last year, and read The Stone Angel many years ago – which meant that I only had two novels from Laurence’s Manawaka sequence left. One is a collection of short stories that I don’t own, and one is the book I recently finished: The Fire-Dwellers (1969).

There are a few connections between the books in the Manawaka sequence (though they can be read in any order). Perhaps the clearest link is between A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers – as The Fire-Dwellers is the story of Rachel’s sister, Stacey.

Stacey appears in the peripheries of A Jest of God as the sister who managed to get out of the town. Her life is only sketched in fragments, but she is held up as a contrast to Rachel’s stultifying inability to develop. In The Fire-Dwellers, we discover that her life has been far from ideal.

I’ve imagined myself getting away more times than I can tell you
Then do it.
Stacey looks at him, appalled and shaken by the suggestion of choice. Then she turns away again.
If I had two lives, I would. You think I don’t want to?

Yes, she has the husband, Mac, and the children – but she feels trapped and lost. Her marriage is hollow and sad, her children don’t bring her the fulfilment that she hoped they would, and the drudgery of daily life is overwhelming. As a theme, it is hardly unique – but Laurence brings her trademark insight to the telling. She is so good at getting beneath the skin of the everywoman. Her searing insights are remorseless. No character can hide behind pretences, even as we see their attempts at dissemblement – which might, indeed, fool the people around them, if not the reader. Her husband, for instance, is so fixated on an affair that he wrongly believes she’s had that he doesn’t notice the affair that she might have. The children are at an age where it is inconceivable that their parents might have independent personalities outside of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – though the oldest daughter is beginning to recognise this, and clearly finds it troubling.

Several of the side characters are drawn really well. There is Thor, the head of the vitamin company for which Mac is salesman – a company that is only millimetres away from being a cult, and Thor is every bit the darkly boistrous cult leader. There is Mac’s boorish best friend – a trucker whose chief pleasure comes from playing ‘chicken’ with other truckers, both facing each other down in the middle of the road, daring the other truck to last as long as possible before pulling to the side. And then there is the enigmatic man that gives Stacey a new lease of life – a kind, clever, funny man who is not unlike the man who intervenes in Rachel’s life in A Jest of God. Across the span of Manitoba, the sisters were experiencing similar epiphanies that they never communicated about. And neither is a panacea, because Laurence is too realistic for that.

So, did I love The Fire-Dwellers as much as A Jest of God? Well, I’ve made it sound wonderful – and I know that others have found it brilliant, including Barbara’s Book Obsession recently, but I’m afraid I didn’t love it. And that’s for one reason which may or may not matter to you, and which might have been clear from the quote at the top. For some reason, Laurence decided not to use speech marks in this novel.

Normally I give up on a novel immediately if I see it doesn’t have speech marks. I only persevered because I love Laurence. Some people don’t mind this increasingly common authorial choice, but I find it maddening – an affectation that doesn’t add anything to a book, and simply makes it harder to read. They might as well leave out spaces between words. (I did, actually, find Laurence’s technique of sometimes leaving several spaces between words rather more effective.)

Here’s a section that illustrates it as well as any other bit. When she uses a dash, it is internal thought.

Duncan, for goodness sake shut up and quit making such a fuss about nothing.
Leave him, Mac. He was scared. Ian told him a rusty nail would
Scared, hell. He doesn’t need to roar like that. Shut up, Duncan, you hear me?
Duncan nods, gulps down salt from his eyes and the mucus from his nose. His chest heaves and he continues to cry, but quietly. Mac clamps a hand on his shoulder and spins him around.
Now     listen here, Duncan. I’ll give you one minute to stop.
Duncan stares with wet slit-eyes into his father’s face. Stacey clenches her hands together.
-I could kill you, Mac. I could stab you to the very heart right this minute. But how can I even argue, after last night? My bargaining power is at an all-time low. Damn you. Damn you. Take your hands off my kid.

Perhaps you think this is a silly reason not to enjoy a book as much as I’d hoped. (Someone on Twitter certainly did!) Or perhaps you’re on the same page as me. I just found it frustrating that The Fire-Dwellers could have been a brilliant novel, in my opinion, if she hadn’t tried this affected stylistic avenue. I understand that people like to play with the limits of literary form, but the absence of speech marks would have looked a little ‘done’ by the 1930s, and brought nothing to the table in 1969.

So this is comfortably my least favourite of the Manawaka sequence, though there is enough of Laurence’s brilliance to keep me going. Ultimately I found it a frustrating read, but it still hasn’t dinted my belief that Laurence is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Five memoirs I’ve read recently

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Quite a large percentage of the non-fiction I read or listen to is accounted for by memoirs and biographies. While glancing at my pile of books to be written about on here, I realised that five of them fell into the category of memoir and autobiography – while covering an extraordinary range between them. And all by authors where I haven’t read anything else by them. Here they are…

My Father and Myself (1968) by J.R. Ackerley

I have four of Ackerley’s books, because I’ve always assumed I will enjoy his writing (and because they are delicious New York Review of Books Classics) – I took to Twitter to ask people which I should start with. While My Father and Myself didn’t win the poll, the replies were sufficient to convince me.

As the title suggests, this book is more or less equal parts about Ackerley and his father, Roger – a relationship that grows steadily more fascinating as the book continues. At times, they have a shocking openness, particularly around sexual matters – while there are other, major parts of Roger Ackerley’s life that his son had no idea about until after his death. I shan’t spoil what they are, because they are revealed rather late in this book – though I was already aware of them because I’ve read The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre.

From the attention-grabbing opening line onwards (‘I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919’), Ackerley is an excellent storyteller – particularly about the things that interest him. What most seems to interest him, for better or worse, is his own sexual exploits. There is an awful lot about the young men he encountered through life and what he did to them (and they to him). There is a startling candour in these passages. In a biographer, it would have felt unprofessionally prurient; in Ackerley’s own words, it seems like a lengthy attempt to understand his own fascination with this aspect of his life.

More interesting to me was his perspective on his parents’ marriage – people say that nobody knows a marriage except those in it, but constant onlookers can perhaps have a more even-handed view. His mother put up with a lot; his father was not a monster, but lived by a set of principles that combine curiously and don’t benefit many people, including himself.

Honesty and accuracy are not the same thing, of course, and Ackerley’s striking openness sits intriguingly alongside the limits of his self knowledge. It’s a fascinating read, often uncomfortable, but mesmerising too.

Diary of a Lone Twin (2019) by David Loftus

To talk of the death of one’s twin to surviving identical twins is almost impossible; the break of that bond is too painful and shocking to describe, too unbelievable to imagine.

Loftus was in his 20s when his identical twin brother died, not long after they had celebrated their birthday together. Three decades later, he takes us through the diary of a year – a year where nothing significant happens in relation to that death, but which is as good an opportunity as any to continue processing the grief, seeing what has happened to him over the years.

As you probably know, I have a twin brother (Colin, who is also reading Loftus’s memoir), and the idea of losing him is as unbelievable as that quote at the beginning suggests. My life doesn’t make sense without him. And that’s the world David Loftus was thrust into, from a brother who was also his best friend. We don’t learn at first how he died, and Loftus measures out the parts of that story throughout the first half of the book. It feels oddly like a thriller, as we piece together how it happened – eventually discovering that it was shocking medical malpractice.

Of course, Diary of a Lone Twin is not an objective account, nor should it be. Rather than simply a description of what happened, it is Loftus’s thoughts on life without John – and how it might have been different. It’s also about his recent second marriage, about his son, about his career as a food photographer. At times, it felt like other things were crowding out the story of John and its aftermath (I could particularly have done without the pages about how much he hates cats). But, even with the padding, this is a very engaging attempt to describe the unthinkable.

Delicacy (2021) by Katy Wix

I listened to Wix reading this extraordinary memoir – about cake and death, as the subtitle says (and isn’t it a brilliant title for that?). It looks through the significant moments of Wix’s life through the prism of cakes that she associates with each of them. And it’s about the deaths of her father, her mother, and her best friend.

I first encountered Wix as a contestant on Taskmaster, and she appears in almost every good British TV show of recent years. While she is extremely funny in character roles, her personality and comic sensibility is rather different on her own terms – it is still funny, but it is equally melancholy. In her narration, there were plenty of lines that would have made me laugh if I’d read them on the page, but she delivers them with calmness, almost a sadness, which makes them effective in a very different way. A possible exception is the chapter on a personal trainer, which does have moments of poignancy but is more unabashedly hilarious than other sections of Delicacy.

As well as discussing the loved ones she lost, in difficult and painful ways, Wix also writes about her career – the highs and the lows, and particularly about the way that she has been expected to look and behave as a woman in the industry. She doesn’t name many of the productions she’s been in, so it’s not a tell-all in that sense, but she is still very candid about the treatment she experienced. And there is a moving, tense chapter on a possible reunion on a project with a bully from her early life.

As you can perhaps tell from this overview, I don’t remember any of the specific cakes that Wix associates with different moments of her life. As a framing technique, it isn’t especially relevant – but if it helped her produce a book this good, then hurrah.

Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once (2021) by Phil Wang

Another comic I first encountered on Taskmaster, and a memoir published in the same year – which I also listened to as an audiobook read by the author. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia, and the second 16 in the UK – so this book is about a life split down the middle in years, but also in terms of identity. He writes of feeling not Malaysian enough for Malaysia and not British enough for Britain.

The book is divided into different categories – food, nature, language etc – which gives Wang opportunities for covering a vast amount of material. There is definitely some serious stuff about racism in here, and about the differences between cultures and the difficulties of trying to ‘be from two worlds’ without either of them suffering – but it’s also a very, very funny book. Wang’s writing is much more punchline-driven than Wix’s, and a lot of the book would feel equally at home as stand-up. I definitely recommend you try the audiobook, if you read Sidesplitter, because it really requires Wang’s insouciantly optimistic voice.

Raining Cats and Donkeys (1967) by Doreen Tovey

Definitely the most uncomplicatedly fun book on this list, it’s one of a series that Tovey wrote about having Siamese cats and a donkey. It opens with:

Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

At that moment we were in our donkey’s paddock dealing with the fact that she’d eaten too many apples, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

It’s representative of the entirety of this short memoir. The book is a collection of self-deprecating stories that show how complicated life can get when you fall in love with spirited pets. The stakes are not often particularly high, and that’s what makes them so entertaining to read – because things might go awry, but at the end of the day Doreen and Charles will be happy together, contentedly accompanied with a menagerie of animals.

Tovey is very good at conveying the characters of the two cats, Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey – without ever making the mistake of making them too twee or fanciful. She is a keen observer of genuine animal behaviour, in its ruthlessness and obstinacy as well as its more gentle moments, and describes them with humour and affection. My edition was given to me by my friend Kirsty and Paul, and has an earlier handwritten dedication from 1968: ‘For Alan, as a Bedside Book (to encourage earlier bedtimes). I can see that it would have done.