1980s

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm

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As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

Cases that formally terminate – i.e. end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient – are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

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I loved this book! It was one of those times when I had to decide between racing through it and treating myself to a few pages at a time – and I went largely for the latter route, reading a bit with my breakfast each morning.

I bought The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne back in 2013 in Malvern, and have been a bit nervous about picking it off the shelves. I thought it might give away the endings to all the Christies I haven’t read, which is probably about half of them. My fears were allayed as soon as I read the preface – Osborne promises not to give away any murderers or major spoilers, and he sticks to this throughout.

The book goes through Christie’s works one by one, in order. Each section gives some context about Christie’s life at the time, a few details about the set up of the novel, what the critics and public thought etc. There’s about two pages per book – which, considering how many she wrote, comes together for a very satisfying book. Osborne is so good about giving you a taste of what makes each book original. In a short space, he might tell us how it fits into Poirot’s career, how Christie was inspired to begin, how it was reviewed, whether there were adaptations. He is remarkably good at hinting at a novel’s ingenuity – or, alternatively, if it repeated a trick or wasn’t as convincing as others – without giving a single jot away. There are plenty of biographical details about Christie, even though this isn’t quite  a biography. He gets the combination of elements perfectly.

And this is a critical work, in the sense that he shares his opinions. He’s not afraid to point out some of her weaker work, but he is obviously also an avid fan – most of the time he is enthusiastic and picks out the reasons why he likes the books. It’s not quite an out-and-out appreciation, but nor is it one of those dispiriting works where the writer seems to have chosen a subject they barely respect. Osborne writes very affectionately. And he is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Christie, and I enjoyed the times where he points out that other Christie critics got things a bit wrong.

I really enjoyed Osborne’s tone of voice, and his very English sense of humour. For example…

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so.

He’s also not afraid to point out errors in Christie’s novels, with the acuity of the superfan. This section is perhaps not quite representative, as it is more detailed than most, but…

Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were the singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews and in the novel Evil Under the Sun; (iv) the plot another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel A Murder is Announced; (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate.

This is one of the few times when he names which novels/stories share traits – a little unfair, if you happen to have read one but not the other. More often he’ll just say that something appeared earlier, without specifying where.

Osborne clearly knows a lot about opera and music, and it is these areas where he often picks up on errors. Elsewhere, he teasingly decides to pretend Christie deliberately included the mistakes – for instance, suggesting that Poirot’s inaccurate French is clearly a result of spending too much time in England, or that Miss Marple has got absent-minded and forgetful when certain details don’t line up.

I mostly enjoyed Osborne’s personality shining through. It’s a little less palatable when he goes on a tangent about how longer jail terms are needed for criminals, or a very unnecessarily impassioned defence of the use of the n-word in the original title to And Then There Were None. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is cut in the revised and updated edition from 2000, that I don’t have.

But his other quibbles are all part of the charm for me, and make it feel even more like you’re listening to a keen fan discussing their favourite author.

As I say, I’ve read about half or so of Christie’s books, and I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hadn’t read any or many. I definitely enjoyed reading about books I knew a bit more than those I didn’t. But to anybody who loves Christie – this is a total delight.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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It always feels slightly different to read a book that is a worldwide bestseller. I’d obviously heard of The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, but I couldn’t tell you a lot about it. Except that I’ve always got it mixed up with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I also hadn’t read.

Well, my book group chose this book and I borrowed a copy from my brother Colin, who hadn’t been enthusiastic in his mini review of it. This edition is translated from the Portuguese by Alan Clarke – I don’t know if there are mutliple translations out there. I was certainly intrigued by the atmosphere of the opening paragraph:

The boy’s name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an abandoned church. … an enormous sycamore had grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

In case there are others who didn’t know the plot – it’s about this boy called Santiago who lives in Andalusia, where he is a shepherd. But he dreams of more from life, and can’t stop thinking about a fortune he received from a fortune teller – that he should travel to Egypt to discover treasure.

Off he goes to Africa but not, he quickly learns, materially nearer Egypt than he was when he started. I can’t remember if it’s spelled out, but I’m pretty sure he’s in Morocco – where his money gets stolen by a conman, and he must work for a crystal merchant. He is still determined to raise the money to find this supposed treasure.

Rather late in the day, he does get to Egypt and meet the alchemist – who seems more minor a character than I’d have anticipated from the title. And then it all becomes a mixture of magic realism and an Aesopian fable.

So, what did I think? Well, I really enjoyed the first third of the novel. Santiago is a wonderful character – an interesting mix of determination, hope, uncertainty, and naivety. All of the stuff in Morocco was a delight, and I would happily have read a novel of his experience in the crystal shop – becoming something of a surrogate child to the crystal seller. I’ve never been to Morocco, but I felt rather like I had when I was reading this.

But as the novel moves forward, and Coelho loses any sense of being tethered to the ground, then I lost my affection for The Alchemist. And it’s not even my documented reluctance for magical realism. It’s because the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar. It’s everything I kind of suspect the most run-of-the-mill self help books might be. I felt like Coelho’s sensitive eye for character was rather wasted in a series of philosophical truisms.

He’s continued writing ever since, but I haven’t heard of any of the other books. I’d love to try something else by him if he’s written anything that is less queasy. And I can do no better than quoting a line from Col’s thoughts: “A life-changing book, the blurb claims, but I suspect mostly for people who believe horoscopes.”

 

 

What Hetty Did by J.L. Carr (25 Books in 25 Days: #15)

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What Hetty Did (1988) is the fourth novel I’ve read by J.L. Carr, and each time I feel like I understand him as a writer a little less. He’s so varied! The one he is probably best known for is the elegiac, lovely A Month in the Country. Well, What Hetty Did is not much like that – though it does include one of the same characters. Indeed, characters from at least four of his other novels pop up in this one.

Hetty (actually Ethel) is a bright A Level student who is not much liked by her mother and openly disliked by her father. She decides to up and leave – at least until such time as she might get a place at Cambridge. A chance encounter on a train gets her recommended for a guest house. While staying there she decides to try and find the biological mother who gave her up for adoption. Various other eccentric characters mill around the outskirts.

Eccentric is definitely the key term for this novel. Carr seems to have got odder and odder, as a writer, as he got older – and was in his mid-70s when What Hetty Did was published by an imprint that Carr had set up. Hetty is a whirlwind of a character, and not a very likeable one – more determined than pleasant. And the strange way in which things are described is due to some sort of disconcerting energy in the narrative. It’s like Angela Carter but the events are mundane, even if the prose is not.

Did I like it? I honestly don’t know. It’s an impressive feat, and quite distinctive – but such an odd way of telling a relatively simple plot that I never quite felt I could find myself on stable ground. But if nothing else, it’s nice to read a novel set in my homeland of Worcestershire – that doesn’t happen too often. And Bredon Hill even gets a mention, which was the hill abutting my village!

Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido

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Ten years ago, Bloomsbury sent me a set of Barbara Trapido books for review. Ten years ago! And, yes, I read and reviewed (and really liked) Brother of the More Famous Jack back then, but it has taken me a decade to read my second Trapido – Noah’s Ark (1984). And I’m still rather unsure what I thought about it.

My first thought, as I read the opening, was how good the writing was. Here is most of the first paragraph, which I’m going to quote at length because I think she does such a good job of throwing you into an intriguing and unconventional world:

Ali Glazer was stitching up her husband’s trouser hems, but had paused to glance up at the kitchen pin board in some fascination. The photograph of a man, bearing a disconcerting resemblance to Thomas Adderley, had been torn from a Sunday magazine advertisement and pinned there by Ali’s older daughter Camilla. The girl herself had had no awareness of that resemblance which now so forcibly struck her mother and had fixed the picture there merely because she liked the man’s collarless Edwardian shirt. The man – in keeping with the clichés of capitalist realism – was manoeuvring a white stallion through a dappled glade of redwood trees and was advertising cigarettes. Ali noticed that Camilla had fixed him rather high on the pin board where he beamed out, as from a higher plane, above the two postcards pinned side by side below him. This hierarchical arrangement struck her as altogether suitable given that she had always elevated and revered Thomas, while the postcards had come from people to whom she felt predominantly antipathetic. 

I say ‘unconventional’, but I suppose Ali’s world is rigorously conventional. It is only her outlook, or the perspective that Trapido gives us, that makes it feel quirky and unusual. I was completely beguiled by that writing, and keen to immerse myself in whatever came after the first few pages – would Ali reconnect with Thomas? What would this mean for her marriage to the benevolently controlling Noah, who obviously doesn’t think that Ali is capable of very much, and mistakes her imaginative eccentricity for something inferior to his rational good sense?

Then Trapido did the thing that so many novelists do, and which always puts me off. We go back into the past. That was one scene in the present, to set a stage that we will work our way too. I never know why this is such a common trope, as I always find it deadens a novel. Oh well, I suppose I’ll put up with it.

We skate back to Ali’s past – between marriages. She has split up with her obnoxious ex-husband Mervyn, and is trying to work out how best to live life as a single mother – when Noah walks into her life, besotted and determined to sort out the disordered way in which Ali has allowed herself to become a doormat. Having seen how Noah treats her in the present day, we do get some benefit of hindsight, as it were, but it also removes some of the tension of wondering what will happen.

And the novel continues to be eccentric. We jump forward in time, or across continents, with very little warning. Trapido’s own eccentric authorial gaze refuses to let us get settled. Her writing style is never unduly odd, and certainly never breaks with the conventions of grammar etc., but the things she chooses to highlight often keep the reader on his/her toes. We spend more time being shown how different characters react to the prospect of head lice than we do to major life events. Everything is slightly off kilter. And I think that’s good?

I have to admit that I was a bit thrown by the novel. That started when one adult character starts lusting after an 11 year old Camilla, openly and in front of others, and nobody says anything. The hints of paedophilia are infrequent and never followed up in any way, but elsewhere, Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness. And then I found the disconcerting way she puts together sentences and scenes was building together into something I couldn’t quite grasp. Much of the time I really admired it, but it made it difficult to identify the centre of the novel – to have anything concrete to hold onto.

Perhaps it’s a case of needing to be in the right mood for Trapido. I was definitely in that mood when I started the novel, and was loving it. The writing was really wonderful. By the time I finished it, the mood was faltering. Had I read it at a different time, I suspect I’d be writing an unadulteratedly glowing review of Noah’s Ark. I still think she is a richly inventive and unusual writer, but I’m going to be selective about when I start reading her again.

The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace

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I was reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott for my 1986 entry in A Century of Books, but it’s a big book and felt too important a read to rush through for the sake of a reading challenge. And so I turned to the other 1986 books waiting on my shelves – it turns out I have a lot, and I was toying with Margaret Forster, Henrietta Garnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, Diana Athill, Quentin Bell, Barbara Pym… but settled, in the end, of The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace.

I don’t remember exactly the conversation that led to this, but Kim (of Reading Matters) kindly sent me her copy back in 2012 – I think perhaps the twins were mentioned in an Oliver Sacks book? – and it’s been waiting patiently until then. The edition is a 1998 reprint, including a new chapter, and is clearly marketed to fit into the post-David-Pelzer proliferation of misery memoirs. The tagline – ‘the harrowing true story of sisters locked in a shocking childhood pact’ – is nonsense that does the sensitive book a disservice.

June and Jennifer Gibbons are the twins of the title, born in Yemen and growing up in Haverfordwest in Wales (a pretty miserable town, I have to say, having gone there a few years ago). The Gibbons were a loving family, excited to add to their number – and, having moved to Wales, were dealing well with the tensions that came from being one the few black families in their 1960s community. But as the girls grew older, they were clearly different from their family and from local families. They were more or less elective mutes – speaking to each other in words so fast and curiously stressed that it sounded like another language, but never speaking to their parents or older siblings. Their younger sister was the exception to the rule.

Baffling teachers, June and Jennifer didn’t seem to match any evident diagnosis – and, indeed, Wallace doesn’t attempt to give them a diagnosis. Trapped in a world of their own, spending hours in their bedroom with their dolls and stories as they grew older, they were an enigma to the world at large. Limp and uncommunicative in public, they clearly had a ferociously active sororal relationship. They also wrote prolifically – fiction (which they furtively sent off to publishers, and eventually self-published) but also diaries. Wallace uses these diaries – which they wrote for years, covering enormous quantities of pages in tiny handwriting, to recreate their experiences. Often we see things from their perspective in the narrative, with the diaries silently referenced – most movingly when they deal with how much June and Jennifer love their family, even while never expressing it or communicating with them at all.

In their later teens, things changed. They start stalking some brothers. They lose their virginities with frantic determination. And they go on a spree of ill-concealed burglary and arson that will lead to them going to court – and, ultimately, Broadmoor. On a life sentence (of which they served eleven years), for crimes that usually warranted a few months’ sentence.

It is a fascinating tale, and Wallace does her best to show us the deeply complex relationship between June and Jennifer – drawing from the diaries, because of how little she or anybody else can see of it from the outside. And the power dynamics and repressions behind those silent exteriors were truly extraordinary.

Time and again the twins returned to this theme. They saw themselves as the ultimate unhappy couple, Jennifer as the quirky, irascible husband, June the victim wife, and although they switched roles in most of their other games, in this they remained consistent.

The ‘silent’ of the title isn’t quite true. As they got older, they spoke more – and seemed to have held relatively normal conversations with the teenagers they became involved with, as well as answering Wallace’s questions at least at times. But their twin relationship certainly plays into some of the stereotypes associated with twins in the popular consciousness – that we inhabit a world apart, unknowable to outsiders, and that the relationship might be unhealthy or dangerous. I can’t count the number of times people have asked me if Colin and I have a secret language, or if we can feel each other’s pain, or communicate psychically. Or, more generally, what it’s like to be a twin. Well, as I’ve said before, I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be a twin – but I also can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the closed and claustrophobic world June and Jennifer inhabited. My relationship with Colin is the most special in my life, and I don’t doubt that there are dynamics there that no other relationship could have, but it’s definitely not the curious mix of passionate hatred, obsessive love, and controlling fear that the Gibbons had. Theirs is truly a unique existence.

As for the writing – I think Wallace used the diaries well, and told their story without being unduly melodramatic. Indeed, I found the whole thing curiously sedated. It’s not bad writing by any means, but having discovered Janet Malcolm and Julie Salamon this year, I have new high standards for this variety of non-fiction. Wallace felt a bit unambitious in the way she wrote – though you could also argue that she was letting the extraordinary circumstances tell their own story. And they did do that, but I think I’d have valued the book even more if there was a little more to the writing.

I’m glad to have finally read it – thank you, Kim!

Desirable Residence by Lettice Cooper

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Most authors write the same sort of book over and over again. And I don’t just mean the Ivy Compton-Burnett type, where each novel is resolutely interchangeable (and yet brilliant). Even those who are able to shift in terms of format, character, genre tend to have the same worldview and sensitivities as they keep going.

That’s why it was so interesting to read Lettice Cooper’s 1980 novel Desirable Residence, published when she was 83. Most of us who know her are probably chiefly familiar with the 1930s novel The New House – one of the few books to have been both a Virago Modern Classic and a Persephone. And it’s great – and very of its time. How would this octogenarian take the 1980s?

The novel is, again, about people moving into a new house – but that’s about the only similarity there is. In this case, it’s a small block of flats – old Hilda Greencroft on the top floor, the Blackstones on the next down – and a young couple have started squatting in the ground floor flat. ‘The first three’ is the ominous title given to the first half of the book – Polly and Dennis Dyson, and their baby Brian. Unable to cope with living with Dennis’s mother any longer, Polly has dictated this move – clinging to the vague strength of ‘squatters’ rights’ and hoping that any media attention given to their eviction will get them a council flat.

The neighbours are surprised but not especially horrified. Hilda is a kind lady who sees the vulnerability beneath Polly’s hardness. The Blackstone parents are chiefly occupied with their own foundering marriage, while their son Simon is obsessed with the well-intentioned cult he intends to join, and their daughter Tasmine thinks this is a perfect opportunity to do some research for a school project.

But things take a turn when other squatters hear about the place, and join Polly and Dennis. ‘The others’ (the second half of the book) shows us as a group of petty criminals move in – unafraid to victimise Polly and Dennis, and distinctly changing the dynamic of the house.

I was amazed that Cooper wrote this novel. It has the same storytelling talent of her earlier novel, but there is nothing false or jarring about the sharp modernity of it. She throws around expletives, and I found it genuinely scary at times – her violent characters are chillingly real. Here is a writer who changed with the times, equally convincing as the 14 year old as she is when writing old Hilda.

The one fault I found, in fact, is offspring of this talent – we are taken into every character’s mind, even if they only appear for a few pages. This means the narrative force gets a bit diluted – and I think the novel would have felt a bit more focused if there had been one dominant character to act as the lens for the events.

Still, a very surprising – and surprisingly good – novel. Luckily I have a few more of hers on the shelf, waiting.

Unexplained Laughter by Alice Thomas Ellis

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One of the things I’ve been occasionally trying to do during A Century of Books is read some of the authors who’ve been waiting on my shelves for years and years. Among those is Alice Thomas Ellis – I have three or four, and I think one of them has been there since about 2003. The one that I chose – Unexplained Laughter (1985) – has only been there since 2009, but it’s quite time that I gave her a go. Here are some quick thoughts about it…

“What was that?” asked Lydia. She was standing in blackness in the middle of a narrow, ice-cold stream. The stones over which it flowed were as slippery as its fish and Lydia was wearing town shoes.

“It’s an owl,” said Betty.

“No, it isn’t,” argued Lydia. “Owls go tu-whit-tu-whoo. Whatever that was was squeaking. It was a mammal – something furry. Something’s eating something furry.”

“Give me your hand,” said Betty irritably. “I’m on the other side. I think I’ve found the path again. And it’s only the tawny owl who goes tu-whit-tu-whoo. All the rest squeak like that.”

“I can’t see my hand,” said Lydia. “Anyway, you’ll have to wait because I’m going to have hysterics. I’m going to stand in this stream and scream.”

That’s more or less the beginning (except for one of the occasional, confusing bits in italics from ‘Angharad’ that I largely ended up skimming). Lydia has retired to the atavistic and wild world of a holiday cottage in Wales, escaping her cosmopolitan life. With her is put-upon friend/companion/dogsbody Betty – who is very much the victim of Lydia’s barbs and selfishness.

Based on this novel, I’d put Alice Thomas Ellis in the category of Muriel Spark, Jane Bowles, and (some) Penelope Fitzgerald – inasmuch as she creates larger than life characters who say exactly what comes to them. Lydia is a monster on a small scale, but it’s very entertaining to read her bluntness and quips. Because of the tone of the novel, we don’t feel too bad for Betty – or any of the villagers who receive the pointed end of Lydia’s observations.

Less successful, to my mind, was the curious supernatural undertone. I don’t have a problem with that being in the novel, but I just felt a bit confused and lost as to what was going on – and what the reader was supposed to be understanding by it.

But I’m a sucker for the late-century brittleness and absurdity, and I’m sure I’ll be back to my shelves to read more of the Alice Thomas Ellis there.

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

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After reading Two Lives by Janet Malcolm, you may recall that I went on a Malcolm buying binge. Four of her books arrived more or less at once, none of them matching remaining A Century of Books years, but I allowed myself to cheat on ACOB with In the Freud Archives from 1984. Sadly my edition is not the lovely NYRB Classics edition pictured, but it’s much nicer than mine.

I researched quite a lot about Freud for my DPhil – or, more specifically, how his ideas permeated to the middlebrow public of the 1920s and ’30s, and how they often ridiculed his ideas. Malcolm is looking at rather a different world connected to Freud – fast forwarding a few decades, and exploring the in-fighting between the various custodians of his ideas and legacy.

I think Malcolm might be a Freudian herself, and takes his legacy seriously – but it would difficult to take it as seriously as the people in this work of reportage. (But it is more than reportage.) Kurt Eissler is a respected psychoanalyst and head of the Freud archives. He brings in a young scholar, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who has a background in Sanskrit but the sort of personality that can make people believe he should be in control – and he is lined up as the next Curator of the Freud Museum (waiting only for Anna Freud’s death). And then there is Peter Swales, the self-styled ‘punk historian of psychoanalysis’, whose modus operandi is writing people enormously long letters detailing their failings (and then circulating these letters widely).

As a cast, they feel like they belong in a Muriel Spark novel or something by Beryl Bainbridge. They are forthright, obsessed, and deeply distrustful of one another. And much of their rivalry and animosity stems from whether or not they believe that Freud went back on the concept of the ‘seduction theory’. Of such matters are careers and lives made, it seems. Dramatic papers are published; people are fired and sued and verbally attacked. While 99% of us don’t care either way, this is the lynch pin of the fraught relationships between Swales, Masson, and Eissler. The former pair are particularly astonishing creations – because, while real people, one feels they must have been put through Malcolm’s eye for the absurd.

And yet this is an earlier work than Two Lives, and Malcolm feels a little less adventurous in her writing. She is still very much a presence, but (perhaps because her subjects are alive) she is more of an observer than a shaper of her topic. Long sections are devoted to the words of her subjects, and I felt that I missed her unique view of the world in those moments – I wanted her to intervene and twist things slightly, bringing the shock of the new in her muted way. That talent of hers is definitely there, but a little too muted; too restrained.

If her style and interventions are more cautious, she has still done an exemplary job of showing us who these people are – letting them be hoist by their own petard, perhaps. It’s all a bit dizzying, and her genius shows itself best in that she discovered the issue and focalised it in the way she did. Whether or not you have the remotest interest in the legacy of Freud, I recommend you discover how it has obsessed these lives – and it confirms my belief that I will read absolutely anything Malcolm turns her eye to.

25 Books in 25 Days: #12 Another Time, Another Place

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I knew that my friend Phoebe had given me Another Time, Another Place (1983) by Jessie Kesson as a birthday present, but I hadn’t remembered that it was as far back as 2015. In my head it was last year. Well, this project and its 120 pages are good bedfellows, and I’ve now read it.

Times like these, the young women felt imprisoned within the circumference of a field. Trapped by the monotony of work that wearied the body and dulled the mind. Rome had been taken. The Allies had landed in Normandy, she’d heard that on the wireless. ‘News’ that had caused great excitement in the bothy, crowded with friends, gesticulating in wild debate. Loud voices in dispute. Names falling casually from their tongues, out of books from her school-room days. The Alban Hills. The Tibrus…. ‘O Tibrus. Father Tibrus. To whom the Romans pray…’ Even in her schooldays, those names had sounded unreal. Outdistanced by centuries, from another time. Another place. The workers in the fields made no mention of such happenings. All their urgency was concentrated on reaching the end riggs at the top of the field. The long line of army jeeps roaring down along the main road provided nothing more than a moment for straightening their backs, never impinging on the consciousness of the turnip field.

The story is set in 1944, as three Italian prisoners of war start working as farmhands in a remote part of Scotland – and the effect this has on the various inhabitants of the village.

I’m just going to leave this one with the quote, I think. Because the writing was often rather lovely – but I found it quite hard to work out exactly what was going on. One character seemed to die, and then appeared again… Anyway, I enjoyed it for the atmosphere and the beautiful turns of phrase, and perhaps someone can explain what happens to me.