1966

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (Novella a Day in May #15)

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Wow. A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence is absolutely brilliant. I bought it in 2007, and 15 years later it has come off my shelf and been devoured in a couple of sittings. It might not quite be a novella, at 202 pages, but its scope is compact in time and space – and a spectacular success.

This is the second in Laurence’s Manawaka series of novels – I’ve now read the first, fifth, and second (in that order) – set in a fictional town in Manitoba, Canada, though with a different set of characters each time. Having read the lengthy, spacious The Diviners for ‘Tea or Books?’ and finding it astonishingly good, I wanted to see which other Laurence treasures I’d been neglecting.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing then.

Rachel Cameron isn’t just living in the same small town where she grew up – she is living in the same house, and working as a second grade teacher at the same school she attended as a child. Her life has not progressed in any of the ways she’d imagined. Her days are spent at work with children who know her deeply for a year and then move on – still in the same school, the same town, but no longer part of her life. Her evenings are spent with her widowed mother, living above the funeral parlour that Rachel’s father used to run. Like some of the other books I’ve read this month, the mother/daughter relationship is too dependent, too stultifying, too thoroughly tangled with guilt and resentment, as well as love. Rachel seems to have few friends and no intimates – and she tries to avoid the closeness sought by her colleagues, such as the teacher who wants her to come along to her charismatic church.

Into this unchanging world comes Nick Kazlik. Or, rather, into it he returns.

“Hello, Rachel.”

Has someone spoken to me? A man’s voice, familiar. Who is it?

“It is Rachel, isn’t it?” he says, stopping, smiling enquiringly.

He is about the same height as myself. Not thickly built, really, but with the solidity of heavy bones. Straight hair, black. Eyes rather Slavic, slightly slanted, seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery in them from years ago.

Nick was the milkman’s son, returned to stay with his elderly parents – he left; he went to teach high school in the city. He and Rachel weren’t particularly close, but now they are drawn to each other. Soon, they are spending most evenings together – clandestinely, for both know their parents wouldn’t approve of anything so sudden.

In another genre, this would be a romantic release from drudgery. But in A Jest of God, Rachel cannot get release from herself. Though there is happiness in this new fling, Rachel has the self-consciousness of an adolescent. She second guesses everything she does or says, constantly imagining how it might be interpreted, what sort of impression she is making, whether she will be accepted or rejected.

Laurence writes with astonishing psychological acuity. The Diviners was sprawling in time and space – A Jest of God takes place over just a few weeks in a town so insular that it’s hard to conceive the rest of the world exists in any meaningful way. Rachel is so detailed and complete a character that the reader loves her, wants the best for her, and knows how unlikely it is that she will get it – because of flaws in herself and her upbringing, as much as the environment in which she lives. The tension between the possibility of Rachel’s future and her own hubris is what keeps this novel pacy and compelling, even when very little is happening on the surface.

It is a fantastic success of a novel, showing how adept Laurence is at whichever scope she sets herself.

Omar by Wilfrid Blunt (25 Books in 25 Days #12)

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Ok, I really like this one. I can’t remember quite why I picked it off a shelf in 2013, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have bought it because of that wonderful cover – and because it’s about a theme that I’m interested in: fantastically anthropomorphised animals. Indeed, I wrote a section of my DPhil thesis on this, and bought this novel about a month after I submitted my final thesis. Thank goodness, being published in 1966, that Omar by Wilfrid Blunt was too late to be relevant for my remit anyway.

That cover illustration is by John Verney, and does a good job of selling the novel – but also leaps about halfway through it! The subtitle ‘a fantasy for animal lovers’ is also apt, and the narrator is certainly that. She is Rose Bavistock – an unmarried woman approaching fifty years old. She has recently lost her father (after complications when an otter bit him), but isn’t unduly upset. Animals mean a lot more to her than people do. She has had many and various pets, and enjoys the more exotic ones. So she is quite excited when she is given a bandersnatch, which she names Omar.

Blunt has borrowed the name ‘bandersnatch’ from Lewis Carroll (now perhaps more famous as a Black Mirror episode), but the novel claims that it is the same as the hyrax. Look up the hyrax; they’re cute! Anyway, after initially biting her, Omar becomes an affectionate pet and companion. But Rose starts to wonder if he is more intelligent than he lets on…

When she discovers that he knows some English, and can even read it, she is astonished. But that is just the beginning of the marvel…

I expected to like this, given my love for fantastic literature (I disagree with his use of ‘fantasy’ in the subtitle, but that’s one for people interested in fantasy theory). And I did more than like it – the novel is so charming. It was published in 1966, but reads more like a book from thirty years earlier. There is a certain nostalgic element to the novel, and Rose’s life is almost as atavistic as Omar’s. The twists that follow the revelation of the fantastic are handled well, and sustain the original conceit.

The only thing I’d mention, in comparing it to other novels in this genre like His Monkey Wife by John Collier and Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan, is that this is not a parable or fable. It doesn’t comment on its current society or contemporary anxieties, at least so far as I can tell. There’s no reason why it should, I suppose, but fantastic novels that do do that tend to have a little more depth. Omar is self-contained with very little to say about the world. It’s no the less charming for that, but it is a curio, seemingly divorced from context. And I’m very glad that I got it down from the shelf.

Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple

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I’m continuing my informal project of reading the long-awaited books on my shelves – and since I know how lucky I am to have a copy of Random Commentary (1966) by Dorothy Whipple, I thought I should actually read it.

I remember vividly finding it in a bookshop in Falmouth. I’d had a hunt for it online, and knew how rare it was – and there it was, sitting with The Other Day (also by Whipple) on a shelf, and not very expensive. Dad couldn’t quite understand why I was so excited, or why I lunged for them – just in case somebody should appear from nowhere and grab them before I could get my hands on them.

That was in 2006. And now I’ve finally read Random Commentary, was it worth the wait?

Well, yes and no (as so often).

Those familiar with Whipple’s lifespan will know that she died in 1966, and this book was published from the journals she left behind her – which span from 1925 until the late 1940s. Whoever edited them has pulled out mostly entries related to her writing, which is wonderful, but has put them together without any date markers or sense of the passage of time – so we might go in a couple of paragraphs from the genesis of a book to its publication. It’s not usually quite that swift, but the moment of finishing writing is often immediately followed by the book appearing in print – which makes the whole thing rather dizzying at times. This dizzying quality also comes when Whipple has clearly edited her journals at a later date – though we don’t learn quite the extent this has happened. Here’s an example of all of this…

I posted the book to Cape’s at five o’clock. I hope they will like it. I hardly think they can. What possessed me to write about a girl in a shop? I know nothing about it. But I was fascinated by the life of Miss S., who has done so wonderfully well with and for herself.

I went to the theatre: “Five o’clock Girl”. Hermione Badeley is a genius. I wish I could ask her to tea. I wish one could do that sort of thing. What fun if you could get to know everyone you wanted to!

My book back from Cape. They refuse it. They say it wouldn’t be a commercial success. (This book afterwards sold thousands of copies and is now in its tenth edition. Still selling after thirty years. SO refused authors should take courage and go on notwithstanding. I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding“.)

I long to do better and am humbled in my own estimation.

But it’s certainly a pleasure to read, structure aside. It was extremely interesting to get an insight into her writing process – and into her thoughts of herself as a writer. She frets that she may be no good; that each new book must be a failure. And yet she is also strongly protective of her characters and her writing, in anguish when her dialogue is badly re-written for a film version, or when publicity material misunderstands the point of They Knew Mr Knight.

Lovers of Whipples novels want to find out all the information they (we) can, and it’s a shame that the entries close before she starts writing my favourite of her books – Someone at a Distance. Quite a lot of the space is occupied with the writing of her autobiography, The Other Day – largely because she doesn’t at all think she can write an autobiography, and ends is some sort of tussle with the publisher, who assures her that she can. I’ve not read it yet, but it’s interesting that (despite all the fiction publishing they’ve done), Persephone haven’t brought her non-fiction into print. It’s much more scarce, so one must assume that they’ve decided it’s not meritworthy enough.

As for Random Commentary – it’s a wonderful resource for the Whipple completist, and brings the novelist as nothing else could. She is frank in these notebooks, and I felt a lot of empathy for her very human feelings about her writing and the publishing process. But it has to be admitted that these notebooks are not great works in and of themselves – they are what they are, which is random jottings of an author trying to encourage herself to write, or distract herself from worrying how a manuscript will be received.

I suppose we’ve been spoiled by Virginia Woolf’s diaries – particularly the edited version A Writer’s Diary – and spoiled by how great an author can be in their diaries. Hers are sublime, a great gift to literature. Whipple’s are not that. They are entertaining, though, and they add a valuable perspective on her much-loved novels. Is this book worth the price you’d have to pay online to get it? Probably not. But keep your eyes peeled when you’re wandering around Falmouth, and you might be in luck.

Swans on an Autumn River by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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One of the reasons I never make ‘end of year’ lists of best books until the last possible moment (more or less – I don’t spend New Year’s Eve parties typing away) is because sometimes I read something brilliant in the last few days of the year. And picking up Swans on an Autumn River (1966) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, I’m glad I’ve waited. (It was published as A Stranger with a Bag in the UK, but I’ve gone with the title of the edition I have.)

This is my second collection of short stories by Warner, and it’s just as brilliant as the first one I read (The Museum of Cheats). The more I read by her, the more I think – with the possible exception of the brilliant Lolly Willowes – that short stories were truly her metier, rather than novels. She somehow puts humanity powerfully into these curious, wise, and very adeptly controlled short pieces.

Warner is exceptionally good at first lines. They aren’t the pithy, quotable sort that are laboriously placed as some sort of diving board, after which the tone of the story becomes much more natural – we all know that variety, and they are indeed fun to quote, but don’t always sit well with the rest of the narrative. Warner captures your attention, but there is no jolt as we move from the first sentence to the second. Here are a few of them:

We had divorced in amity; when we met again after the statutory six months we found each other such good company that we agreed to go on meeting from time to time. (‘A Jump Ahead’)

From that morning when he woke to the sound of the first autumnal gale lashing like a caged tiger against the house fronts and knew with physical infallibility that after all he was going to recover, Guy Stoat burned with impatience to get out of the County Hospital and go home. (‘The View of Rome’)

As he quitted the Aer Lingus plane from Liverpool and set foot for the first time in his life on Irish soil, he was already a disappointed man. (‘Swans on an Autumn River’)

My favourite story of the collection is the first one, ‘A Stranger with a Bag’. In it, a travelling salesman notices a rickety old house out of his train window for the first time, and – on an uncharacteristic impulse – decides to go and see it. Warner weaves together his imaginative journey with the one he actually takes, putting both into simple sentences, so the reader is (for a while) unsure whether things like ‘he walked towards the house’ are actually happening or not. The scene he finds is unexpected, to him and to the reader, and the title shows Warner’s tilts of perspective – as he realises that, to the household, he is just a stranger with a bag.

I like it so much because it mixes elements of fairy tale with the unshakably mundane. Warner is very good at scene-setting and buildings – she shows us the house from a distance and then close-up, knowing that a house is very different from these perspectives, and somehow conveying it in her writing.

Other topics she looks at are the visit of a young relative to his grandmother and great-aunt, and the clash of his recollections of them with the real experience; a new wife and an old wife collaborating unexpectedly; a disturbing picnic. Many more. In perhaps her most famous short story, ‘A Love Match’, a brother and sister quietly become a couple.

A few of the stories feel a little too dramatic at their climax – the title story, ‘Swans on an Autumn River’, perhaps falls into that category – but, at her finest, she is brilliant at undercutting a reader’s expectations and, in doing so, showing a truer, brighter light on human nature. And that doesn’t mean that she always sees the worst – she sees past either cynicism or pollyannaism into the heart of what makes people who they are.

A review round-up

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As with 2012’s Century of Books, there are some books which – for one reason or another – don’t get their own blog post, but I still need somewhere to link to in my run-through of 100 books.  So… here is that place!  Or at least the first part of it.  Let’s call them mini-reviews; that sounds better.

The Perfect Stranger (1966) by P.J. Kavanagh
A friend lent me this; it is a memoir of a young man’s life – at Oxford, at war, and in love.  I certainly liked it, and it was rather moving, but that’s about all I remember now.

The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie
I think my Reader’s Block is FINALLY over, and that means my Agatha Christie binge has probably come to an end too.  Whenever I read too many in a row, the plots have to be really good to impress me, and – well – I just read too many, I guess.  So I liked The Sittaford Mystery and I think it was probably quite artful, but I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have done.  I did very much like the feisty, no-nonsense, secretly-sensitive heroine who took on the role of quasi-detective.  I think her name was Emily?

Inclinations (1916) by Ronald Firbank
Mike Walmer kindly sent me a copy of this, but I’m afraid I didn’t have a clue what was going on while I read it.  I love some books which are mostly in dialogue (I call Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett to the stand) but this one just baffled me.  Luckily Karen/Kaggsy enjoyed it more – read her review for more elucidation.

Riding Lights (1955) by Norman MacCaig
Green Song and other poems (1944) by Edith Sitwell
Every now and then I think I should try poetry. I don’t remember anything at all about these.

Country Boy – Richard Hillyer

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Goodness, it feels an age since I wrote a proper honest-to-goodness book review.  Let’s see if I can still remember how to do it.  Well, what better way back into the hurly-burly of reviewing than with one of Slightly Foxed’s latest Editions?  The review practically writes itself, because it seems impossible that SF will ever put a foot wrong with their endlessly delightful memoir series.  Country Boy (1966) by Richard Hillyer [real name Charles Stanks. You can see why he changed it] is no different.  Review in short: it’s wonderful, and you’ll love it.

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I made the deliberate decision not to look up Hillyer’s post-memoir career, because I thought it would be more interesting to see what I thought about his recollections of childhood and teenagehood without any sense of where his path might go – and I never read introductions until the end, of course.  So I shan’t spoil it for you either, except to say that Hillyer doesn’t get as far as discussing his career, or even his adulthood – instead, the memoir ends as he moves into a different section of his life.  And for some reason I don’t want to spoil that shift either.  At times, the memoir is as tense and exciting as the plottiest novel, and it pays not to know much in advance.

Hillyer was born into a poor farm labouring family in a small village in Buckinghamshire in the first years of the 20th century – in a village Hillyer calls Byfield.  As the grandson of a farm labourer myself, I found it especially interesting to read how my life might have been had I been born a few generations earlier – and the oppressive sense Hillyer reiterates throughout that, though he loves his family and has some friends, ultimately there has never been an escape from Byfield for its non-wealthy inhabitants, and only a windfall or very good luck will enable him to attend grammar school, let alone find a world outside that determined for him by his circumstances.  As a second-generation university attendee, it was more or less assumed from the outset that I would at least have the chance of going to university, but for first-generation university students, I imagine it all felt a bit different (perhaps Our Vicar will comment on this…)  (Of course, with the huge increase in fees in recent years, and thus the clear indication that our government doesn’t value higher education in the same way that it values schools, things have swung back the other way.  But that’s as political as I’m going to get on Stuck-in-a-Book!)

Hillyer writes simply and touchingly about his family, and seems to have had an observant eye for his parents from an early age – as all children do, I suppose, which must be quite disconcerting for the parents at times.

I have no kind of fear or constraint with my father.  Mother is different, you never quite know.  Things went on in Mother’s head that were difficult to guess at.  Father is always easy to understand.  For him life was simple and had no worries.  If he worked, and earned what money he could, Mother would see to the rest.  In a dumb, speechless sort of way he loved and admired her beyond all things, and believed her capable of dealing with any crisis which might arise for any of us.  Beyond that his thoughts did not go.
In any marriage where one partner is idolised and bowed down to by the other, there is the opportunity for the powerful partner to abuse this obeisance, knowingly or unknowingly.  In the case of the Hillyer family, his mother (thankfully) doesn’t.  There is no tyrant – rather each family member plays a role in a fully-functioning machine.  It’s terribly tempting to (mis)quote “poor, but ever so ‘umble” – yet that is precisely what they are.  The stringent hierarchy of class in the village is nothing to celebrate, but the way people behave within it is often moving in their determination just to get on with life, and value the importance of family and friends rather than pipe dreams.

After quite a bit about his parents, I was surprised about how quiet Hillyer was being about his brother John, and thought perhaps they didn’t get on very well.  They were, after all, very different.  But towards the beginning of chapter 10, this beautiful passage appears:

We were brothers, but there was more than brotherhood between us, a special relationship, that was entirely satisfactory to us both.  We were two people, as different as could be in our ways and thoughts, and yet each perfectly accepting the other.  He would listen to my confidences without understanding them or trying to; just taking them as coming from me, and no doubt making sense so far as I was concerned, but outside his sphere.  Not treating them as trivial, because they were not his own; listening to them patiently but making little comment, and taking them just as a part of me.  He was the outlet for all the odd notions that milled about inside me, and all the better outlet because he made no effort at all to influence me.
What nicer testimony to a brother – or, indeed, to a friend – could there be?  Hillyer has such a touching way with words which, even amidst descriptions of the mindlessness of his menial apprentice farm work, or the visit of the lord of the manor, can bring out the most moving and acute sentence.

One of the main differences which set Hillyer apart not only from John but from everyone else in the village was his intellect.  In a section which all of us bibliophiles will love, he describes stumbling across a furniture store which also, somewhat indifferently, sold bundles of books.  The idea of owning a book was new and wonderful to Hillyer – and his earnings were soon redirected to this source of joy and the wider world.

Life at home was drab and colourless, with nothing to light up the dull monotony of the unchanging days.  Here in books was a limitless world that I could have for my own.  It was like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time.
Anybody interested in rural life in the early 20th century will relish this book, of course, but its appeal goes further than that.  Anybody who believes that a love of literature can be an act of escape will love this book.  Anybody who values the bonds of family, ditto.  And anybody who appreciates simple, evocative, kind writing will want a copy of this memoir too.  Slightly Foxed – you’ve only gone and done it again.