ACOB2018

A Tale of Two Families by Dodie Smith (finishing #ACenturyOfBooks!)

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Hurrah! On 29 December, I finished A Century of Books – with 1970’s A Tale of Two Families by Dodie Smith. I was a bit ahead of schedule as December started, and got very casual about the whole thing – reading a fair few books that didn’t cross off requisite years. And then I realised that the deadline wasn’t very far away… but thankfully I’ve finished with a little time to spare. You can see all 100 books here, and I’m sure I’ll do a retrospective at some point soon – and watch this space, because I’ll probably try A Century of Books again in 2020 or 2021.

Anyway, the Dodie Smith was a fun book to finish on, and I’ll write about it quickly. It was written twenty years after her most famous novel, I Capture the Castle, and I can’t decide whether or not I think it shares hallmarks of the same writer. The two families in question are a sister pair who married a brother pair – June married Robert and May married George. (Yes, the sisters are called May and June.) George is a bit of a philanderer, and May’s novel solution is to move them both to a large house in the countryside – because apparently this will make it less likely that he will cheat.

June doesn’t think all that much of the house – too large, too cold, too old-fashioned – but is somehow prevailed upon to move with her husband into the small cottage adjoining it. She tries to bury the fact that she has been rather beguiled with George ever since her sister married him.

Throw in a whole cast of other relatives – the women’s mother Fran and the men’s father Baggy; a bunch of children who are unadvisedly dating despite being cousins; Fran’s sister Mildred – and you have the tapestry for this complex group of people. To be honest, the youngest generation weren’t particularly interesting and I think the novel would probably have been better without them – but I enjoyed all of the interactions between the husbands/wives and brothers and sisters. And Fran and Baggy were both treated very poignantly, contemplating the trials and novelties of old age; it comes as no surprise to the reader that they are approximately the same age that Smith was when this was published (74). Their perspectives certainly felt the most real and emotionally resonant.

The plot is basically a series of set pieces, and seeing how this family deals with their new predicament. There’s also a bunch about househunting, which we know is my favourite thing to read about – and perhaps the most memorable meal I’ve ever read in a novel. It stems from the idea that there is never enough asparagus or strawberries when they are served as a course – and the whole meal will consist of them.

Does it have the same magic as I Capture the Castle? No, of course not, but it was still a very enjoyable read – and even has a dalmatian. Smith knew what the people wanted. It was definitely a fun way to finish A Century of Books!

Two Margery Sharp novels

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I’ve been on a bit of a mini Margery Sharp spree this year, having bought up books by her for quite a few years. I’ve read three this year, bringing my total to six – and first bought and read her around 2004, on the advice of P.G. Wodehouse. (By this I mean that he mentions how much he liked The Foolish Gentlewoman in his letters, and I bought a copy after that.) Then there was a gap of about ten years, but I’m making up for lost time.

I wrote about my favourite of this year’s three in August, The Gipsy in the Parlour, and I’ll write about the other two here – Britannia Mews (1946) and Lise Lillywhite (1951).

It’s interesting that she chose the name Britannia Mews rather than Adelaide or similar, because the novel follows Adelaide Culver from childhood to the end of her long life – spent, for the most part, in a house on Britannia Mews. The first few years of her life are in a more reputable street in the mid-nineteenth century, near which Britannia Mews is a slum they scrupulously avoid. Adelaide is brought up strictly and properly by her respectable family, and she is mostly happy with her gilded cage – until she falls in love with her drawing master. One thing leads to another, they elope, and can only afford to live in that self-same Britannia Mews.

I’m reluctant to spoil any of the other things that happen in this excellent novel, as Adelaide finds herself tied to the mews – seeing its fashion change over the years, and her own circle and identity moulded with it. She is isolated from her extended family (though the reader does occasionally pop over to Surbiton to see their honourable lives), and undergoes significant hardship. Characters often don’t change a lot in long novels, as though they are fully-formed from the outset; Sharp shows us exactly what impact these hardships have on the once-naive character of Adelaide. It is far from a miserable novel, but it is a realist one. Some of the characters are lively and witty, but the novel is not itself witty – nothing like Sharp can be in, say, Cluny Brown. But it is very immersive and well-written, and I’ve yet to find a mode of Sharp’s writing that I don’t admire and relish.

Over to Lise Lillywhite – where, curiously, she does get the title despite having relatively little narrative drive. Rather, the novel is about what people think of her and how they treat her – starting off with her being escorted to the family seat in Somerset, having been brought up in France. Her protective – not to say domineering – aunt Amelie controls the parameters of her life, and seeks to control the whole household.

Her relationship with the Somerset Lillywhites is not so familial to prevent one of the family, Martin (the principal narrator) taking a shine to her – and she ends up in a love triangle between him and an exiled Polish count known as Stan. Her own views of them are kept relatively hidden – she remains the object of their affections, in every sense of the word ‘object’. She gets rather less compliant in the second half of the novel, in a very well handled moment where we enter her mind and get sudden access to her long-withheld views. It is very effectively done, and a brave technique to withhold for so long.

The love triangle is one thing – it is engaging, and unexpected – but I also really liked this novel for its portrait of postwar England trying to piece itself together. For the relentless pursuit of nylons, if nothing else.

It’s Sharp in yet another mode – she seems to be endlessly surprising herself, even while all the variant tones she has tried in the novels I’ve read are recognisably from the same pen. There are still plenty of her novels on my shelves yet to read, and I’m looking forward to finding out still more about her.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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I had a credit to use on Audible a while ago, and was looking to fill either 1980 or 1999 in A Century of Books – but couldn’t find anything that appealed. So, naturally, I took to Twitter. Twitter has been a real help with the tricky years, and Gareth kindly stepped forward with a suggestion…

I’d already read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow – and the fact that I really liked it would have made me trust Gareth’s suggestion even if I didn’t already trust his taste (which I did). So I promptly downloaded An Equal Music (1999) by Vikram Seth and listened, without really checking what it was about.

Which is just as well. If I had looked up the plot or theme, I might not have bothered. Because it’s about ardent musicians, and I tend to find that difficult to read about. It’s the sort of novel where people non-ironically say “Oh, I’d love to study that score”, and spend years tracking down the perfect viola. I struggle whenever characters are snobs in any area of the arts, or have the attitude that being brilliant is more important than enjoying yourself. It’s why I really disliked Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows earlier this year (because the author seemed to share her characters’ views). And I would have been wary about it in Vikram Seth.

Well, it was certainly there, at least to an extent – and the main character (Michael) isn’t particularly likeable. He is obsessed with reconnecting with Julia, a woman he loved many years ago in Vienna – and has been trying to track her down, unsuccessfully, for some time. At the same time, he and his string quartet are preparing to perform… erm… some arrangement of some piece, I forget which. Or maybe it was something arranged for a quintet that is better known as a piano piece, or something like that. (Again, the problem of listening to an audiobook – I can’t go back and check!) Of course, he does find her – she is married, with a child, and there is a twist in the narrative that I shan’t spoil, but is done very satisfyingly and intelligently.

Lovers of classical music (and, dare I say it, music snobs) will get a lot out of this that I probably didn’t. I do also wonder how much one might miss if you don’t play the piano and violin – I play both, which helped me understand various discussion points and technical moments, though I don’t think any of them were particularly essential and could probably be skated through.

Why did I like it, when it had quite a few ingredients that turn me off? Partly it was the excellent reading by Alan Bates, who never tries to do “voices” (except where accents are needed for, say, the American characters) but manages to convey character entirely through tone. The audiobook also meant they could include sections of music when they were referred to as being played, which was rather lovely. But mostly it was Seth’s quality of writing. He is very good at detailed depictions of changing emotions and relationships, so that one is deeply interested even if not particularly sympathetic.

I don’t know if I’m ready for the doorstopper A Suitable Boy just yet, but I’m very glad Gareth suggested this one. And it’s a useful reminder that good writing can overcome all the prejudices I have in terms of topic and character. I suppose every theme has its variations.

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.

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

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I was finding 1993 quite difficult to fill in my century of books, and I asked people on Twitter which of my 1993 books they’d recommend that I pick up. It turned out that I didn’t have one of them on my shelves any longer, a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I did have Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason I wasn’t especially keen to read it, but enough people on Twitter convinced me that I should give it a go that I took it away on holiday and, guess what – it’s amazing.

This isn’t the first Kingsolver novel I’ve read, in fact it’s the third. One of those is her most famous, The Poisonwood Bible, which I actually didn’t like as much as most people seem to have done. I suppose my problem was with her painting this ogreish portrait of the patriarchal missionary, and then implying (or at least I inferred) that he was intended to represent the whole world of missionaries. It felt a little lazy. But before that I read The Bean Trees, I think before I started blogging, and it turns out that Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to that. I should say from the outset that it’s fine to read this novel independently, and in fact I couldn’t remember very much about The Bean Trees that except for the fact that I liked it. Pigs in Heaven tells you everything you need to know about what came before.

The main thing you need to know from that novel is that Taylor adopted young Native American girl called Turtle, given to her by a stranger in a car park. The years have passed, and Taylor is a devoted mother, unable to imagine a life without her young daughter. She is also in a relationship with a musician-of-sorts, called Jax. I rather loved reading their conversations, which were believably affectionate while maintaining a constant undercurrent of uncertainty – just how much are they joking and how much are real tensions coming to the surface? It is something dramatic that starts to change the life Taylor has made for herself, even though that dramatic thing happens to somebody else. While on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, her daughter sees a man fall into a dangerously deep cave – being so young, Turtle doesn’t realise the gravity of this until afterwards, and assumes her mother knows what has happened and is unconcerned. It is only when bringing its to Taylor’s attention that a rescue mission is mounted – despite police initially being reluctant to believe that the 4 year old has not imagined the whole thing.

The man is rescued, and Turtle becomes something of a celebrity – at least temporarily – and is invited onto an episode of Oprah for children who have saved lives. This catches the attention of a lawyer, Annawake, who decides to intervene. She is from the Cherokee Nation herself, and knows that the adoption which Taylor describes is not legal. With her own history of a brother who was taken away from family and community, Annawake sees it as her responsibility to reunite Turtle with her heritage – even if that means taking her away from her mother. (The pigs in Heaven, incidentally, are stars – a constellation you may know as the Seven Sisters.)

There are plenty of novelists who use a moral quandary as the centre of a narrative, to greater or lesser levels of success. To be honest, I am likely to run from a novel that describes itself as issue-driven – and the great thing about Kingsolver is that it never feels as though the ‘issue’  is the driving force. Nor is there any sense that there is a correct answer – as a white person myself, I am very likely to be drawn towards the argument that a child should not be separated from her adoptive mother, but Kingsolver has characters like Annawake who can vocalise that this sense of priorities is not any more objective than those which might make somebody wants to reunite a child with her ancestral community. And so what drives this novel, perfectly, is character.

Unlike The Poisonwood Bible, there are no cartoonish villains. There are simply people who are trying to do the right thing – or, with some of the more incidental characters, have lost any sense of what the right thing might be.

Women on their own run in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

That is the opening paragraph of this multi-generational novel. Alice is Taylor’s mother, and has recently made her own possibly ill-advised marriage. The family do not have the ingrained traditions of the Cherokee Nation, but they have their own localised one of women being alone – though none of the women in this book are alone as it starts, it hangs over them like a threat, or occasionally like a happy promise. Taylor’s fear of losing Turtle means they go on the run together, and Kingsolver masterfully weaves a road trip novel into this multifaceted narrative – with the possibilities that brings for funny or strange or poignant temporary characters.

As I say, it is character that is foremost – with their reflections on anything from their choice of words to their ultimate fate. Kingsolver uses her premise to give us a rich, rich portrait of many different people – even when they’re not the most pleasant people, she makes us want to spend time with them. It is riveting, as well as beautifully written. It is also evocative, not just of place but of being. I suppose what I mean by that is that it is wholly immersive.

I read a lot of books, as do we all, and it’s not often that I miss the world that I have been in once it is finished. But I wish I were back in Kingsolver’s world – and I think I might be left in the curious position of wanting to reread the original to this sequel, just to stay in that world. Hopefully that won’t leave me in an indefinite loop, but if it does, there are worse places to be. (And, to escape that loop, which Kingsolver novels would you recommend?)

By Auction by Denis Mackail

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Denis Mackail’s 1949 novel By Auction is one I’ve been reading on and off for months, but I finally finished it recently. It’s not his best… it was a little bit of a slog to get through at times, sadly. But I wanted to post a little about it, because there are moments I found brilliant.

The novel is about a young man seeing his ancestral home – or the objects therein – be auctioned off to pay debts and such. As he wakes up for his final morning there, and then sees the auction, it brings back a whirlwind of young memories (particularly of his brother, who died at war) and a series of young women who seem more or less interchangeable to me. The dashes between past and present were slightly confusing, and I couldn’t always work out which young women were where. But, anyway, if I didn’t relish these sections – I loved when Mackail was writing just about the auction. That was captivating, and almost always irrelevant to the plot. And I wanted to share this section on the auction, that I thought was brilliant:

“Going – ” said Mr Murcher, once more. Looked round, but only for an instant, for he knew his own congregation by now; and rapped – for at his desk he no longer just jerked – with the butt-end of his pencil-case. He had now achieved almost his maximum speed.

His skilled, photographic mind knew exactly which members were, except as part of the essential background to this production, no use at all. Which kept their heads. Which could be relied on to lose them. Which wanted larger bits of furniture. Which wanted oddments. Which – very important, this – had a weakness for what in a shop would have been quite unsaleable. Which were quick, which were slow; not always the same thing as which were rash and which were cautious. Which were rich, yet perhaps mean. Which were poorer, yet if led on, and personally addressed – for he would remember all names, too, or get them swiftly from his clerk – might be reckless.

He was a conductor. This was a symphony. Unrehearsed, and in a sense with a new score. But he was attuned to it. One symphony, after all, if you have experience, is much like another. The pencil-case was his baton. It started each theme. It singled out strings, brass, woodwind, or percussion; in other words the various characters gathered round him. Occasionally it combined them, in a great, orchestral swell. Then it paused. “Going – ” he said. The theme was over. He began again.

There was ballet, too; of a somewhat simple yet rhythmic nature. For perpetually, as he spoke, cajoled, jeered – Tod sometimes felt that he went a bit far with his jeering, but had to admit that it often gained its effect – or cracked jokes, the four strong men, singly, in pairs, or once or twice as a trio, came gliding up the gangway or in from the wings, with objects and articles of different sizes.

Always, or almost always, as one object or article was being exhibited and appraised, another was being removed, and yet a third was awaiting its turn. The strong men were quite expressionless. They neither led the laughter – not that Mr Murcher was so inexpert as to crack a joke every time – nor joined in it. Nor, again, did they seem aware of the baton.

Yet their steady, relentless coming and going, and the gradual but incessant redistribution of the goods in the tent, was more than rhythmic; it was slightly hypnotic. At one and the same moment you could see what you had lost or won, what you must instantly decide whether to go for or not, and what was on the point of taking its place.

Past, present, and future, as one might say, formed the basis of this choreography; which as calculated to disturb even the steadiest nerves, for who can bear all three together?

We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood by Emily Kimbrough

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This 1943 book is a play on words that I didn’t spot until I’d finished it, embarrassingly. For it is about following Our Hearts to Hollywood – more specifically, the 1942 book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, in which Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner hilariously recounted their tour of Europe in the 1920s. It’s a brilliant book, and I think relatively well known in the US – if you find a copy this side of the Atlantic, snap it up and you won’t regret it.

Hollywood moved fast in the 1940s, and almost immediately a film version was in the works – and Kimbrough and Skinner were asked to go to Hollywood to help write the script. (The film was released in 1944 – things really did move fast! – and there was even a sequel in 1946, Our Hearts Were Growing Up, which Skinner and Kimbrough were unable to prevent despite legal action.)

We Followed is pretty slender in terms of plot. It essentially shows how the two women are a bit like fish out of water in the dizzying whirl of Hollywood. Imagine what it would feel like to them now! But it’s good fun to see them get overwhelmed by the grandeur of their hotel, starstruck by various stars they encounter (few of whom meant anything to me now, I’ll confess), and try to get their heads around writing the dialogue. Or, more precisely, holding off writing the dialogue as any number of other meetings take place to determine an outline – once anybody realises that the two have even arrived.

Throughout, Kimbrough documents the sort of affectionate ribaldry and rivalry that only good friends can have – with her own ironic dose of teasing Skinner about her theatrical background (clearly, simultaneously, admiring it). There is no real butt to any of the jokes – everything is very good-natured, and witty in a self-deprecating way rather than anything more malicious.

It’s always interesting to read a book written by two people, and wonder how they did. Having now read quite a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s books and this by Emily Kimbrough, I can make an attempt at piecing together how their different styles cohered so gloriously in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. And I think it’s fair to say that Skinner provided all the sharpest wit and the funniest lines. Kimbrough is more delicately amusing, and brings the sense of wonderment and almost naivety. Don’t expect any exposés of famous people, or any people – there is no dark side to this Hollywood. There is perhaps an inefficient side, but that’s about as dark as it gets.

I’m having a really good year for books about the film industry, thinking about it. Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet, Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life Like Any Other, the extraordinary non-fiction The Devil’s Candy by Julia Salamon, and now this. Four very different perspectives on movie making, but somehow working very well together – and all very good.

If Kimbrough is at her best alongside Skinner, this is still a wonderfully enjoyable book to read. (I wonder why it wasn’t written by both of them?) If you’ve loved Our Hearts Were Young and Gay then I think you’ll relish following them to Hollywood with this one – to see a bit about the book’s afterlife, and to enjoy a snapshot of Hollywood in the 1940s.

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.