1971

The Home by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #26)

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THE HOME | Penelope MortimerLook, yes, I’m cheating again – The Home (1971) isn’t a novella, since it’s 230 pages, but I had a bit more time to read today, and I thought I’d spend it here. And I’m so glad I did – The Home is brilliant (and, indeed, rather better IMO than the other Mortimer I read earlier in May, My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof).

The home of the title is the one that Eleanor Strathearn moves to after leaving her husband Graham – because of his affair with a younger woman, also called Eleanor though known as Nell. He has bought her the house, under some sufferance, and she has taken almost all the furniture. She goes with their youngest son, Philip (15) – they have four other children, adults living lives of careful detachment from their parents.

The course of the novel follows the aftermath of this split, and brings in their respective mothers too. Mortimer is brilliant at combining different permutations of the family and showing the dynamics that emerge – sometimes confiding, sometimes awkward, usually fraught in some way.

What I loved most about The Home is the tone of voice. Mortimer is drily funny and quite odd, and fans of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge will find a lot to enjoy. Her descriptions of people are always slightly off-kilter and wonderful. Here is Eleanor’s mother, Mrs Bennet:

While not exactly believing in God – the prospect was a little ridiculous – she was devoted to death, regarding it as the cure for all evils, by which she meant life. However, she remained indomitably alive. Other elderly ladies – at the time of the break-up she was eighty-two – suffered from fluttering hearts, poor eyesight, deafness, arthritis. Mrs Bennet was healthier than she had been at eighteen, and as much in command of her faculties. She also grew more knowledgeable every year, and was now far better informed about politics, the arts, drug addiction, space travel, sexual permissiveness and other topics of absolutely no use to her than her husband, a gentleman farmer and Justice of the Peace, had ever been.

There is a cynicism about romance and relationships throughout The Home – one character says, “Whoever heard of a happily married couple in 1971?” – but there is also a sort of hope that is as indomitably alive as Mrs Bennet. Or at least a triumph of hope over experience. Everybody wants slightly different things, and knowingly damages and disregards the people around them in pursuit of these things – but doing so, at the same time, with genuine love and care. It is all excellently observed.

I don’t know The Home is less well-known than some of Mortimer’s other books. It probably isn’t quite the exhilarating tour de force of The Pumpkin Eater, but it is certainly recognisable as the same brilliant authorial mind. I loved it.

Love by Angela Carter – #NovNov Day 25

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It is very brave to call your novella something so broad and essential as Love – as Angela Carter did in this book from 1971 – because it necessarily seems to give a grand universality to something specific. In the case of this story, the bizarre relationships between Annabel, Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz. (This cover isn’t the one I read – it’s one on Wikipedia that I rather love, though I’m not sure how representative it is of the novella.)

Like Magnus Mills’ Three To See The King I read yesterday, Carter writes a surreal and unnerving world – but where his is told sparely, Carter’s prose is luscious and almost ornate, even when she is describing unpleasant things. This excerpt isn’t unpleasant, but it is near the beginning of the book and seems to offer a symbolic sense of being drawn to two opposites – when she sees sun and moon simultaneously.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

The ‘love triangle’ isn’t quite that – Buzz is just obsessed with his brother and Annabel, who have their own overwrought and dangerous relationship. The depiction of Buzz is quite odd. He is introduced in a voluminous dark cape, and seems to live in it; the other characters call him a freak, though without being exactly clear what they mean by that.

Throughout the novel, these three tussle with love and power and violence – drawing others into their web, while also playing at some distorted version of the domestic. It’s all rather strange, like a portrait that – once you look closer – has features that can’t possibly be true, or that unnerve on examination.

This is the third or fourth Carter novel[la] I’ve read, and I certainly admire her writing. In something like Wise Children it is also a bit fey and even joyful. Love has funny moments (”It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian”) and moments of neat insight (‘the false cheerfulness of five in the morning’), but overall it is not a joyful book by any means. Carter is perhaps one of those writers I recognise as great, but don’t especially relish spending time in the company of. It’s undeniably good, but leaves me with a feeling of having a bit sullied.

Not After Midnight and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek

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I’ve read quite a few of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, but I don’t think I’d previously read any of her short stories – some of which are, of course, very famous from the film adaptations that were made of them. Last year I was toying between reading Not After Midnight and Other Stories and Don’t Look Now and other stories – both of which I owned – before I opened them and discovered they were the same collection under different names. One went to a charity shop and I read neither – but now I’ve finally read it.

In this collection, Daphne du Maurier’s tackles what I think is the hardest form: the long short story. I’m not usually a fan of short stories that go beyond 20 or so pages, because it feels like they are wasting the unique attributes of the form. But in Not After Midnight, du Maurier writes five long short stories – and I may as well take them in turn.

Don’t Look Now

The famous one! I’ve never seen the film, but I’m certainly aware of it – but we’ll be considering the story, of course. It opens:

“Don’t look now,” John said to this wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.”

It’s a good start. John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, grieving the loss of their young daughter Christine – she has recently died of meningitis. The holiday is marred a little by news of seemingly random murders – somebody is roaming the streets with a knife. The couple get talking to this ‘couple of old girls’, one of whom tells John that he has second sight. When he sees a small girl wearing a pixie hood running in fear down a street, the lady tells him that Christine is trying to warn of danger in Venice.

When their son is taken ill at school, Laura flies home. John is going to drive home, but a mysterious incident makes him remain – and leads to a very dramatic and spooky ending.

This is an excellent story, deservedly renowned for its tension and creepiness, as well as a very good depiction of a British holiday in Italy. My main reservation with it is that du Maurier seems to think grieving a dead child is something only a mother would do. John tends to his wife, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered that Christine has died. But, that detail aside, a marvellous story.

Not After Midnight

Timothy Grey is a schoolteacher on holiday on Crete, suffering from some unspecified illness – possibly a nervous breakdown. He demands a chalet near the sea, because he intends to paint – the hotel staff are reluctant, because somebody staying there recently died…

The other notable guests are the Stolls – Mr Stoll is rude, loud, and drunk; his wife is silent and possibly deaf.

The title of this story is excellent, and for much of it du Maurier sustains the same tension and intrigue as ‘Don’t Look Now’ – but I found the ending rather unsatisfying and quite plebian.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh is an aspiring actor who finds impelled to go off to Ireland to find a man called Nick, once close friends with her father. On her father’s deathbed, he has reminisced about Nick – and, in his dying moment, looks at Shelagh with fear and horror. Shelagh hopes for answers, or at least some attempt of posthumous reconciliation, by finding Nick. But when she identifies where he lives, she is ambushed and kidnapped by Nick’s accomplices, and forced to stay on his island.

Rather unsettlingly, they start that of charming, flirty conversation that sometimes happens between kidnappers and kidnappees in films, and presumably never in real life. This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome; it is instant.

There are a couple of revelatory twists in this story – one of which is to do with contemporary politics, and one of which is pretty horrifying. More something from Greek myth than life. Anyway, this was another story that started really interestingly and couldn’t sustain that intrigue satisfactorily, in my opinion.

The Way of the Cross

The only story in the collection without any sort of horror element, this is another tale of Brits abroad – in this case, Jerusalem. A group led by a stand-in vicar are touring the Holy Land, each with their own anxieties and reasons for being there. Perhaps the most memorable of the group is nine-year-old Robin – the only person there who seems to have read the gospels – who leads them in a chaotic attempt to find the Garden of Gethsemane.

This is a really good and unusual story, though one that doesn’t fit the feel of the collection at all. It is quite poignant, as the group face humiliations and failures – realising the trip is not the once-in-a-lifetime experience they’d hoped for, and finding out things about themselves and others that they’d rather not know. As I say, this isn’t horror – there is nothing creepy about it – but there is an underlying sense of lives being sadly changed, which is perhaps more horrifying than the jump scares of the earlier stories.

The Breakthrough

Some sci-fi thing about capturing essences that I didn’t enjoy at all, but that’s probably because I find sci-fi rather tedious at the best of times.

Ok, overall rather a mixed reception from me. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is brilliant, and ‘The Way of the Cross’ is great in a very different way. The other stories are largely readable, but all could have done with some rethinking and editing. Du Maurier is exceptional at premises and settings, but doesn’t always know how to keep those things going for the length of a long short story.

The Innocent and the Guilty by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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When Helen announced Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, I thought I’d pick up one of the volumes of short stories I have waiting. I bought lots in an impulsive moment during my DPhil, and am now slowly working my way through them. Little did I think that Helen would also be reading The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) – you can read her thoughts on her blog.

This was the last book of short stories that Warner published that wasn’t themed – the ones that followed were about elves or about childhood. And, indeed, innocence and guilt aren’t the dominating themes of this collection – I love Helen’s idea that they are linked by the concept of escape.

Certainly that is the keynote to the most arresting story of the collection – ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’. It is in very much the same area as Lolly Willowes – her 1920s novel about an unmarried woman who decides to stop being dependent on her brother, moving to the middle of nowhere (and, er, other things happen that I won’t spoil). In this story, though, Lucy is married – and we initially see her disappearance from the vantage of her concerned, confused, slightly helpless husband. And then the story becomes about dual identities, as well as searching for self definition.

It’s interesting that, in the approximately five decades between Lolly Willowes being published and ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ appearing, Warner has turned an already ambiguous escape into something even more ambiguous. There are no definite emotions, let alone a conclusive ending.

And that lack of conclusion, or perhaps lack of clarity, permeates the collection. There’s a story about drinkers meeting, and the final moments suggest (half-suggest) that one of them has a very troubled life; there is a story about a devastating flood; there is one about a widow guarding her writer-husband’s legacy. In earlier collections, Warner might have shown us a moment where they changed. She is brilliant at those tiny moments that make lasting differences – or the tiny moments that illuminate whole lives. Here, I found the tiny moments didn’t really make anything illuminated. They happened (or perhaps didn’t); they confused the reader into an impressionistic sense of what the story felt like, rather than anything imprecise about what it actually was. This reader, at least. ‘The Green Torso’, for instance, has some wonderful moments about false friendships and pride – but they are in a whirl of other elements. I finished most of the stories feeling that they hadn’t quite coalesced into one radiant beam.

I think there are two outliers, in this. The final story, ‘Oxenhope’, is gentler and more lovely than the others. And ‘Bruno’ is more confusing, more unsatisfactory – to me, that is. I didn’t know what was going on or how the people were delineated.

Warner always writes great sentences. She is a delicious stylist, and often very funny. And these stories might be right up some readers’ streets. For me, having discovered what exceptionally striking, immersive, satisfying stories she could write, in the other collections I’ve read – The Museum of Cheats and Swan on an Autumn River – these ended up being the smallest bit disappointing. And I think that’s because those other two collections rank among my favourite ever short stories.

I set a tall order for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and it couldn’t quite be met. If this is where you start with her stories, you’ll probably appreciate the many gems and insights, and so you should. But, let me tell you, there are greater delights in store!

A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis

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I was given a copy of A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis by Frances (of Nonsuch Book) back in 2011 – I don’t even remember the context for that, but thank you Frances! We did eventually meet each other in 2015, which was lovely, but this book must have come across the Atlantic. When I was looking up which books I had waiting that would fit 1971, this one came up – and I knew it was about time that I finally read it. Though I had no idea what at all it was about.

Lowell Lake aspires to be a writer, but is actually in an uninspiring job and an uninspiring marriage. As the narrative later tells us, both he and his wife are married to the marriage more than each other – not only has love left their relatively-young relationship, but so has respect. In a masterpiece of writing a bit like the opening of Sense and Sensibility, Lowell’s wife gradually manipulates him into giving up a scholarship at Berkeley in favour of moving to New York – all while alleging that she doesn’t want to.

Their life in New York is no better. Davis’s writing is excellent, and we feel mired in this unhealthy, unhappy relationship – and stultified by Lowell’s mediocre life. Jonathan Lethem’s introduction to the NYRB Classics edition isn’t very good, but he does have one moment of brilliance where he describes Lowell as ‘chronically ill with self knowledge’. Lowell takes up writing full time, but does it largely at night – both he and his wife grimly determined that he will at least try to finish a novel. One of my favourite passages, because it rang so true, was Lowell’s response when he re-read his prose:

It read like mud. Totally by accident he had contrived to fashion a style that was both limp and dense at the same time, writing page upon page of flaccid, impenetrable description, pierced here and there by sudden, rather startling interludes of fustian and vainglory that neither adorned, advanced, nor illuminated the plot, although they did give the reader a keen insight on the kind of movies Lowell had seen as a child.

As you can see, hopefully, A Meaningful Life deals with unhappy people and a bleak situation, but it is very funny. I laughed quite a lot reading it – Davis has a turn of phrase that brings out the dark humour of a sad scene. He also judges just the right amount of surrealism to bring to the novel – and Lowell seems to have a small break down…

They spent the next couple of hours barricaded behind walls of newsprint, warily passing fresh sections back and forth as the need arose, and doing their best not to meet each other’s eyes. The last section to come before Lowell’s face was the ant ads. It was a moment before he realized what he was looking at. He wondered how it had come into his possession. Had he picked it up on purpose? Had his wife deliberatly placed it where he could reach it? Was he absolutely certain his shows were on the right feet?

This isn’t a turning point so much as one more milestone on a trek into misery. But a turning point does come, of sorts. And that’s when they decide they should buy property.

I have never come across a scene of house hunting that I didn’t enjoy – particularly in a comic novel. It provides such a rich seam of comedy. And in A Meaningful Life it is as strange as it is funny – particularly when they decide upon a rambling house that is currently occupied by seemingly dozens of people, each in their decrepit cells. It’s bizarre and dark and wonderful to read – and the rest of the novel looks at how the house affects Lowell and his marriage. It continues to be strange and funny and haunting right through to the final words – and Davis’s exceptional writing continues, perfectly judged. To pick one example, I loved the odd truth of something like this:

“My wife and I,” he began, striking an attitude, “bought our house six years ago.” He’d asked so many questions that this utterance of a simple declarative sentence sounded extremely strange, as though he’d begun to read aloud.”

I’d be intrigued to know what Davis’s other novels are like. This isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever read. Good as it is, I don’t know how often I’d be in the mood for more of the same – but I can certainly see it happening at least once every few years. And to leave you with a word of warning: if you have the NYRB Classics edition, don’t read the blurb – at least, don’t read it to the end. It gives away something that happens in the final 15 pages. You’re better than this, NYRB!

The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (guest review)

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My RSI has come back so my one-handed typing is being restricted as much as possible – perfect timing for my housemate Melissa to write a review I can use over here – this time of a much-loved classic. As always, do make her welcome! Over to you, Melissa…

thefirstfouryearsIn my family home, the Little House on the Prairie books are a massive deal. They’re legendary. They’re practically Scripture. (Not actually Scripture though. In my family we take actual Scripture very seriously indeed, and it most definitely does not get confused with other stuff.) From the time I could first read to when I left home, I must have read the entire series every couple of years at least, which adds up to an impressive number of times.

The Little House books take the reader on a journey through the challenges of a little pioneering family venturing into the uncharted American West in the late 1800s. They’re told through the eyes of little Laura, for the most part based on the author’s life, and the books grow with her. Not only does her perspective change, but the language becomes more complex, the number of pictures gradually reduces, and even the font gets smaller from one book to the next. What I love about these books is the delicious level of detail. If I could handle an axe, I could quite happily build my own log cabin based purely on the description of Pa building one. Alternatively, I could make hats from loose straw, or cure venison, or sew a rag rug (that last one is actually on my list of projects this winter).

The First Four Years, though, is a bit of an oddity. Look up the box set of Little House books online, and you’ll see it tacked on the end, less than half the size of any of the others in the series. Unlike the rest, it was not published in Laura’s lifetime, nor even finished; although it has a beginning, middle and end, it’s really just an early draft of a book that was never completed. As a child who had loved the earlier books, I read it and disliked it. It reads clumsily, spoils scenes from the previous book by repeating them less well, inexplicably uses a different name for one of the main characters. As for the story, which picks up where the last one left off with Laura’s marriage to Almanzo Wilder, it feels just like a long list of disasters. The neat closure of the previous book is destroyed and all in all it leaves a bit of a bad taste.

But I’m not here to diss the book. In fact, quite the opposite. Over the last week I’ve reread the entire series, and thoroughly enjoyed the who thing, but this last book stood out as by far the most interesting read, for the very same reasons I didn’t enjoy it as a child.

Like I just said, the book reads like a long list of disasters. The fact is, however, that the other books also tell of many hardships. The entire plot line of The Long Winter, for instance, is simply one blizzard following another while the whole town gradually runs out of coal and then food – not exactly cheery. The difference is mainly that the other books are more detailed; a higher proportion of the pages are given up to descriptions of the wild prairies, family gatherings round a cosy fire, and how to make a fish trap. There’s also a much thicker coat of perspective. Laura’s approach to life, learnt from her parents, is built around simple faith, strict codes of behaviour and a solid work ethic. There is no time for questioning the way things are, no option but to work hard and trust that all will come well in the end. This may sound harsh to modern ears, but it is the only way to survive in an untamed world. And within this clear-cut structure there is room for love and happiness to flourish; there is joy to be found in hard work and accomplishment, in good food and beautiful surroundings, in music and laughter, in the harmony of a caring family where each one is valued and needed by each of the others.

In The First Four Years, much of this veneer is stripped away, leaving the bare bones of the story obvious. It’s a reminder that life was simply very hard and what we would now see as abject poverty was the norm. To me, it was a humbling reminder of how little most of us have to contend with these days, with our indoor plumbing and central heating and effective healthcare; and, quite frankly, what a bad job we often make of it. I know it takes considerably less than a grasshopper plague destroying my year’s work to reduce me to a shivering wreck of anxiety.

I have a feeling that the difference is something to do with how solid our worldviews are; in a pluralistic world, my generation has learnt to question everything and to build our own truth, which can make the simplest things in life incredibly complicated and exhausting. It makes me question the value of questioning things. It almost makes me jealous, although I don’t fancy the food insecurity. Finally, it’s yet another reminder that difficult circumstances absolutely do not have to define your life, if you believe in something that runs deeper.

The other thing that made this read interesting was the insight into how Laura wrote. The story may be complete, but the book is unfinished. Descriptions and reflections are present, but they don’t flow. The characters aren’t really developed; we know Laura well, and Almanzo less well, from the rest of the series, but we don’t get the chance to really meet anyone else. It seems that Laura’s approach was simply to get the story down on paper first, then add the flourishes later. I think I could learn from her here – my first attempt at the NaNoWriMo challenge has yielded a paltry 1,866 words, partly because I spend so long fussing over getting each sentence right rather than getting on with the story.

As a wannabee writer (like literally every other arts graduate I know), I also found it encouraging that the book was, frankly, not great. In case you didn’t catch this at the beginning, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote some of my very favourite books, and the rest of the world seems to rather like them too, but it seems her drafts didn’t cut it. If even the best have to start by producing something unimpressive, then I needn’t balk at my own poor attempts. This leaves me with no excuse not to try. I like that.

Maybe I’ll see if I can hit that 2000 word mark tomorrow.

The Listener by Tove Jansson

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It’s no secret that I love Tove Jansson, and I was pleased to get the chance to read the latest collection of her work from Sort Of Books; a new translation (by Thomas Teal) of her first collection for adults, The Listener (1971).

I read it for Shiny New Books; my review is here. You can also win a copy – along with the other editors’ favourites from their sections – by entering the competition on the homepage. And then have a browse!

It feels a bit lazy to be pointing to my reviews elsewhere, but then I remember that I still spent time writing them… probably more time, as I do more double-checking etc. for SNB reviews! And I hope that regular SIAB readers still have fun looking at those reviews.