Brophy

Finishing #ABookADayInMay with The Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

“To which girl was the note addressed?”

“Sylvie Plash.”

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

“No, that’s Eugenie.”

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

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

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

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy

StuckinaBook All , , , 4 Comments

Hackenfeller's ApeAs you may have heard mentioned in the latest episode of ‘Tea or Books?’, should you listen to that, I’ve recently read Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) by Brigid Brophy – inspired by listening to a ‘Backlisted’ episode on one of her novels, and hearing her daughter speak at a conference. I think I’d bought the novel (novella?) some time before that, based entirely on the fact that short Virago Modern Classics are often interesting – and it proved to be really rather good.

I’ve read a couple of books about monkeys and humans relating one way or another – though they were both written a little earlier; Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan is about a woman trying to teach a monkey as though he were a child, while His Monkey Wife by John Collier is… well, what it sounds like. Hackenfeller’s Ape is less adventurous in its premise: the ape remains firmly an ape, and nobody is trying to get him to be anything else.

Professor Darrelhyde is (as the Virago blurb informs me) ‘a diffident bachelor’, and he’s been stationed at London Zoo to observe the mating practices of Hackenfeller’s ape – more particularly, that of Percy and Edwina. In the world of the novel (look, I don’t know if this ape even exists), the mating has never been observed, and it will be a service to science for the Professor to make notes. Only it seems the Percy isn’t keen. Edwina keeps making approaches that he refuses – and Brophy judges brilliantly the amount that we should be let into his perspective, with a certain haziness where Percy can’t quite understand his own ape-motivations.

Halfway through, things change a bit – as the Professor (and a would-be pickpocket who reluctantly joins forces with him) tries to rescue Percy from being sent into space. Bear with me – it sounds absurd, but it works.

What makes Hackenfeller’s Ape so good is Brophy’s writing. She balances light, insouciant dialogue with pretty elaborate and philosophical prose. It shouldn’t work properly together, but it really does – it makes for an intoxicatingly good mix. Here’s an example of her writing from near the beginning – where she describes the humans who have set up the zoo:

These were the young of a species which had laid out the Park with an ingenuity that outstripped the beaver’s; which, already the most dextrous of the land animals, had acquired greater endurance under the sea than the whale and in the air had a lower casualty rate for its journeys than migrating birds. This was, moreover, the only species which imprisoned other species not for any motive of economic parasitism but for the dispassionate parasitism of indulging its curiosity.

She also has a knack for wry observation that was a pleasure to read – not that dissimilar to Elizabeth Taylor, thinking about it. I can imagine either of them penning this line (which is Brophy’s): ‘He smiled in a way which, in the middle-aged man, was boyish. In a boy it would have been sinister.’

It continues, with drama and pathos, poignant and action-packed in turn. And all – may I remind you – in hardly more than a hundred pages.

My conclusions, after finishing this novella, are that I’d read Brophy writing anything. She handles this frankly bizarre premise, and mix of styles, with excellent adeptness – and it gives me great hope for diving into more of her novels in future. It will be intriguing to see how her writing works over a broader canvas.