The Flying Fox (1956) by Mary McMinnies

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A couple of years ago, I read The Visitors, Mary McMinnies’ extremely good, extremely long novel about British government officials and their wives working and living in a thinly disguised Krakow. It was unlike anything I’d read before, particularly in its gradual, detailed approach to the story. I’ve never read a book in which characters were explored so thoroughly or so effectively.

I knew McMinnies had only written one other novel, The Flying Fox (1956), and it was not easy to track down. (Incidentally, I knew about a thesis chapter that Anne Wetherilt had mentioned in a comment.) So I was thrilled when I came across a copy last year in World’s End Books in Chelsea – but would lightning strike twice?

I have to assume that Mary McMinnies was married to a British government officer who was stationed in various places, because The Flying Fox takes place in what-was-then-called-Malaya, in the fictional town of Telebu in the fictional state of Mandore. As with The Visitors, the main characters are a newly arrived couple: Milton ‘Milt’ and Margery Hall. He is working for the ruling authorities as an assistant to the District Officer, and Margery is expected to find her place among the wives in a community that would probably describe itself as ‘ex-pat’. (It’s a term I don’t use, because… who gets to be ‘ex-pat’ and who is an ‘immigrant’?)

Milt is very much an anti-hero, and the line between anti-hero and villain isn’t particularly thick. We learn along the way that he is sometimes violent towards Margery, he doesn’t hesitate to double-cross or cheat people, and almost none of his decisions are made for ethical reasons. But it’s more complex than initially might seem: Margery is a close ally of his, and seems almost indifferent to the violence. And Milt’s own moral compass does turn out to have some shades of grey along the way.

It did take me a while to work out the rest of their community, partly because McMinnies uses first names and surnames in isolation – linking up that ‘Vivian’ was the same as ‘Lucas’ (and a man) etc etc took a while. Perhaps the most significant are Vivian and Maud Lucas, the ruling authorities of political and social life respectively, leading with joviality and an expectation of conformity. Denny Farrar, the misanthropic policeman, and his tawry wife Rose also loom large. And their are tricky racial dynamics at play with the Eurasian Dr David Anthony and his wife Teresa.

I didn’t know anything about Malaya in the 1950s (or, frankly, any other time). From a quick read of Wikipedia, it seems like the novel was written in the final days of British rule over the area – one of several things that reminded me of Margaret Laurence’s This Side Jordan – and the action thus takes place in a time of subdued conflict between the British officers and the locals.

A ‘funny’ war, no doubt about it, a war waged against shadows. After six long years, in spite of the strength of the Government forces with every sort of modern equipment at their disposal, the initiative still lay with the enemy, a handful of men sketchily armed with stolen weapons, but with the advantage of the jungle on their side. For the jungle had a ruthless way with expensive modern weapons, and discounted many of them; shadows in the jungle were no reasonable target for bombers nor yet for artillery. Green troops, however superior in numbers, created a problem of their own, because the jungle itself unnerved young Europeans bred to an office desk, a factory bench. It was a snipers’ war.

But, however much like the shadows the enemy might appear to their pursuers, they were men of flesh and blood, and they lived on rice. If they could not be bombed or shelled out of the jugnle, they could be starved out. It was at this stage of the war, when it looked as though it might continue like a running sore indefinitely, that all the wits, the efforts of the authorities, police, civil and military, were combined to control the movement, the sale, and the consumption of the vital commodity – rice.

The Flying Fox is much shorter than The Visitors and correspondingly more unified in plot. Where the strength of The Visitors was its slow, steady, immersive realism, The Flying Fox is more sharply plotted. There is a woman expecting to have an affair with one of her husband’s colleagues. There is a shocking death. There is, underlying and driving much of the story, the canny local Chinese and Malayan high-ups who are combating the above tactics and siphoning off rice. Mr Wong, in particular, feels like the puppetmaster of the whole town. It’s one of several details of the novel that haven’t dated brilliantly – for while you feel that McMinnies respects the intelligence and humanity of the Malayans in the novel, she also leans into stereotypes at times. At the same time, I think she has a nuanced understanding of the position of Europeans in this culture. It’s not the sort of novel that would be written about it all now, but nor is it as Eurocentric as you might expect. But danger does bubble below all the exchanges. Nothing feels safe, even amidst the jollity of gatherings of European people. As Dr Anthony says:

“This country has a wonderful talent for spotting defects of character. Once spotted, whatever it is, once it knows, that will be the weapon used to destroy you.”

While there is a tight plot, The Flying Fox is still driven primarily by character, too. Milt and Margery are fascinating creations, and there are slight moments that McMinnies wields expertly to reveal what they are like and how they are considered by the others around them. For instance, when Milt gets into a car crash while accompanied by a local Indian dignitary, he asks – from his hospital bed – about the state of his car, not his companion. Margery doesn’t know that he had a passenger, and is confused by the subtle stiffening rage on the faces of the people she asks whether the car is a write-off.

Speaking of the car crash – it’s a great example of McMinnies’ writing. She is such a good, inventive writer – taking you into moments, whether quietly interpersonal or very dramatic, in immersive and unusual ways. I think this is the best description of a car crash I’ve read, both impressionistic and precise:

“It’s scandalous – ” he began, turning to Krishnan, but this time the approaching light diffused over the streaming windscreen did not focus, fade, slip tamely past, but widened, brightened to a glare so fierce that for one split second his brain was lit with perfect clarity – he saw that this ferocity could not be contained in light, must burst its bonds, escape – and in the same second this happened. He heard a roar, a rending crunch, and falling into the whirling dark heard, too, his own voice saying “I have escaped” and would have laughed but for the weight which bore him down. Instead, falling down… down… the sound of shivering glass followed him like laughter.

What a writer! There are moments when I think McMinnies is up there with the best. She certainly loves a long, multi-claused sentence that you have to pay attention to. Here’s another example, of Milt and Margery’s dysfunctional marriage and their increasing dependence on alcohol:

Now she knew that the moment had come, part of the daily routine, when she must make the signal for which they both were waiting; for her to take the first step down that path – she always saw it shut in by high mountains on each side because once one’s feet were set that way the light became dim, only the path itself varying day by day in character, now rough, now smooth, as the case might be – along which she and Milton, inescapably bound to each other, would wander for timeless hours in a not unpleasant but perpetual twilight shot through with flashes of hate and suspicion, blows, even acts of love. It was as though at this moment and for the last time that day she were snuffing the fresh wind in the sunlight on the high ground, before preparing to descend; which she now did. She went downstairs and opened the refrigerator.

The bathos of that final line – there is a shrewd, dark humour running through The Flying Fox. McMinnies does not particularly like most of her characters, you sense, but she does have a grudging respect for them – at least enough to know them well, and assess them on their own terms. As you can tell from this sort of writing, you can’t race through it. Some scenes are more dialogue-heavy, and she does that well too, and more succinctly. But I loved the feel of reading it – sinking into her sentences, exploring the world, being occasionally shocked. She is brilliant at one particularly revelation, which she never quite spells out but which is nevertheless understood.

I think The Visitors is her masterpiece, and there is something about its length that makes it feel more monumental. Thankfully, it’s also much easier and cheaper to get a copy of. But The Flying Fox is also very good, and it is a sadness to me now that McMinnies only wrote two books.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle

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I’ve changed as a person. I’m becoming one of those people who reads sequels/series in relatively quick succession! I started Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series in January, and I’ve made it to the fourth volume – published in Danish in 2022, and in translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell in 2026, making it perfect for Women in Translation Month. (Incidentally, I wonder why the translators have changed since the first volume?) Here are my thoughts on the books in the series so far.

Even though I’ve read the third book as recently as May, I did have to dig around to remember what happened (and found this excellent essay). This review will have spoilers for the other books so far, of course: as a reminder, Tara is an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a timeloop. She is 35, though I’d remembered her being much older. For thousands of days, it has been 18 November. The twist is that she always starts the day wherever she ended the previous one – so, in the course of three books, she has travelled far and wide. Sometimes she returns to her husband, Thomas. Sometimes she visits her parents. The early volumes are beautiful explorations of what it looks like to find contentment alone in a world you can’t change. Then it becomes more claustrophobic. And then more people appeared. Henry, Rolf, and Olga were also trapped in 18 November.

Well, ready yourself. The stream of ‘loopers’ just keeps coming in volume IV – and that terminology is one of the main things that the book explores. What should they call themselves? What should they call the ‘normal’ people? What about names for lengths of time? If the third volume took tangents on history and feminism, the main undercurrent of this one is language and how it forms and changes meaning – which I imagine was particularly tricky for the translators. (I also imagine that ‘noopers’ being the negative of ‘loopers’ works better in the Danish equivalent.)

I started making notes about who the people were – Sonia the doctor; Marlice who also ‘works in the hospital industry’ in the hospital laundry; Rosi the au pair – but I quickly last track. Each is sketched out, and some are more dominant in the story, but their real function seems to be a united swell of people. As Tara reflects towards the end of the book:

Our house has become a reception centre, a gathering place, a meeting point. People arrive alone or in small groups. Some arrive very quietly, as if they have slipped unseen through the back door. Others arrive like peacocks, strutting through the gate and up the driveway as if a red carpet had been rolled out all the way to the front door. Some leap into focus the moment we meet them, and within an ahour, you feel like you know them. Others take longer to emerge from the bakcground, a gradual reveal, and some you barely notice until suddenly they unfold – offering a story, an idea, a gesture, an experience – and all at once, you seen them in colour, brightly lit.

For they are living together in an abandoned building – and people start living in a flat across the road, too. The loopers (if we use that term) are drawn from seeing posters that Tara and her friends put up in the third book, or perhaps by word-of-mouth – because each person takes breaks from the shared community, travelling around, encountering other loopers. The timeloop is no longer something that Tara faces alone. Instead, she is now a small part of a much larger group – and that brings a completely different dynamic to her life and to the novel. Balle captures the amorphousness really well in passages like this:

It is in the way things move. Cutlery and bowls making their way to the table. A hand reaching into a drawer for a handful of spoons, the sound of metal. The drawer sliding shut again. A cupboard opening, a stack of plates balancing in a pair of hands, then other hands bringing cups to the table. A pot of coffee is brought in, then another. Tea, brewed by Sonia, carried to the table by Peter, poured by Rosi, and Henry gets up to fetch milk while I take the empty coffee pot back to the kitchen and return with a full one.

It is this intertwining that makes it feel as though we are a group. The voices in the room, the eyes sweeping the table and the objects migrating from the kitchen to the conservatory. Then someone asks whether Olga is up yet, or whether anyone has seen Peter. Someone answers, or throws out a guess across the table. More questions follow, another scan of the table. Would anyone like more tea, are there any more oranges, and is there anything else I should bring up from the basement? Sentences floating, a voice replying, sometimes several at once. Yes, on the table in the kitchen; or no, she’s still sleeping; or he was here just a moment ago; and then the coffee’s ready, are there enough cups? And new questions come up, followed by comments on the questions and an answer from the other end of the table. We speak into the air over the table and answer on behalf of one another. We check to see whether we’re out of bread, and someone mentions that the lamp in the upstairs bathroom needs a blub, and then someone else remembers seeing a box of old light bulbs in the basement.

The individuals become almost interchangeable. A series that started about the strangeness of becoming unique has now changed into one about finding your place in community – and, in some ways, it is like being from any minority and then finding other like-minded people. At first, you are overjoyed that other people ‘get it’. And then the disparites and disjoints start to show. Just because you have the same experience that differentiates you from the majority doesn’t mean that your perspectives will completely align.

One argument that arises in the novel is the ‘why’ of it all. It’s something Tara didn’t dwell on in the first books, but there are some loopers for whom it is all-encompassing – particularly those who blame themselves. Marlice stole a hospital gown and was caught – is that the reason she was condemned to the loop? Have others made it out of the loop, and they are the weak ones who are stuck? Olga, the teenager from the previous book, gives her take:

The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat, she said. The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.

She believed our concerns about being at fault were an overestimation of our own abilities. As if we could set the universe in motion, out of commission, put the day on repeat. If we were serious, she couldn’t see why we hadn’t started putting our superpowers to better use by now. If it’s actually possible to defy the laws of nature and the entire universe by stealing a hospital gown, then we’d better get to work.

Of course, this novel is still in Tara’s diary entries – but in volume four she becomes more a documenter than a thinker. She is sharing the backs and forths of the arguments around her, and recedes behind the blur of noise. I missed the more pensive Tara from the first book, where the whole experience was focalised through her eyes and her mind. I can see why Balle has evolved the series, and the neverending flood of loopers definitely makes this book succinct, but it’s my least favourite so far. Which isn’t to say it’s bad – I still really enjoyed it – but it didn’t have quite the beauty and magic that made me fall for the first one.

Having said that… there is another twist towards the end that has made me very excited to read the fifth one, translated in November! Watch this space.

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Translating Myself and Others: Amazon.co.uk: Lahiri, Jhumpa: 9780691238616: Books

Earlier this year, I read Daniel Hahn’s excellent translation memoir Catching Fire, and I loved the experience so much that I jumped at the chance to read essays about translation by Jhumpa Lahiri – an author I’ve come to late, but whom I am loving. Princeton University Press kindly sent a review copy of Translating Myself and Others (2022), and here we are. It doesn’t quite count for Women in Translation month but it is certainly Women About Translation. Actually, it does include two essays translated into Italian, but I’m afraid I can’t read those.

Lahiri moved to Italy in 2012 and a few years later started publishing in Italian. She’s now written a novel, a collection of short stories, poetry and several works of non-fiction in Italian – but that wasn’t sufficient for this polymath polyglot! She has also turned her hand to translating her own work, which is the genesis of this collection of essays. 

I don’t speak any language other than English, so reading Lahiri’s experience as an adult language learner, and writer, was a portal to another world – and she writes about it with her usual elegance:

Confronting a foreign language as an adult is a considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I’ve had to open in Italian have flung wide, giving onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.

Reading, writing, and living in Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active, and curious. Each new word encountered, learned, and listed in my notebook constitutes a small door. My Italian dictionary, meanwhile, serves as a doorway. I think of the books I read, the sentences I write, and the texts I finish all as doors, along with every conversation with an Italian friend, each occasion to express myself.

In terms of the title of the collection, the most relevant essay is ‘Where I Find Myself’ – originally published on Words Without Borders – which examines the process of turning Dove mi trovo into Whereabouts. It is certainly the essay I found more interesting, and Lahiri talks us through the contronting experience of returning to a ‘completed’ work with a new task at hand.

The profoundly destabilizing thing about self-translation is that the book threatens to unravel, to hurtle toward potential annihilation. It seems to annihilate itself. Or am I annihilating it? No text should sustain that level of scrutiny; at a certain point, it cedes. It’s the reading and the scrutinizing, the insistent inquiry implicit in the act of writing and translating, that inevitably jostles the text.

In this essay, and throughout the collection, Lahiri tends more towards the abstract and philosophical rather than the word-by-word experience of translating. I find an approach like Daniel Hahn’s – in which he details tiny decisions, as well as larger ones – is very satisfying to read. Lahiri’s writing is entertaining and thought-provoking, but harder to take grasp of. I suppose it’s easier to get a handle on how a translator might line up three potential options and land on one particular word than it is to construct a broader philosophy of translation. 

I would like to pause for a moment on the ramifications of being first as opposed to second. Now that I have become a translator in addition to remaining a writer, I am struck by how many people regard what I am doing as “secondary” and thus creatively inferior in nature. Translation, it seems, is considered imitative as opposed to imaginative. Some people, when I tell them I am translating someone else’s work as opposed to writing something of my own, appear almost sorry for me, as if translation projects represent a dearth of my own ideas, the solution for a fallow period, a drying up of my original voice. Readers who react with suspicion to a work in translation reinforce a perceived hierarchy in literature between an original work and its imitation. This hierarchy, sadly prevalent, between what is authentic and what is derivative—one might take another step and say, between what is pure and what is tainted—influences not only how we regard literature but how we regard one another. Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not?

Sections like this – jumping off from Lahiri’s personal experience being a translator, or what being a translator means for her reputation – really interested me. It’s a good conversation to have about authenticity. But I did question why she has conflated translator and translation? Isn’t it possible for somebody to think of a translator being imitative (at least to an extent, and without diminishing the creativity needed) without disparaging the idea of reading something in translation?

Elsewhere, I found some of her bold statements rather confusing. She writes this with certainty: “While the shock of change is often a catalyst for art, art is not—should not—be an instrument for change of any kind.” Surely that isn’t true? Surely it rules out enormous amounts of fiction, non-fiction, visual art, cinema..? But then sometimes she says something so pithily that you forgive her occasional surprising views. For example, I loved the simplicity of this: ‘Translation is about choosing, at times wisely, at times reluctantly, always with lingering misgivings’. 

The essay collection is structured chronologically by publication date,  and includes three introductions/afterwords she wrote to her translations of three Domenico Starnone books – which, because of that structure, don’t appear together. The longest essay is about Antonia Gramsci, and I do think you have to have some interest in him to really get the most of it. 

It’s definitely a mixed bag, and some are less likely to have the widest appeal – but there is also a lot of really thoughtful and thought-provoking consideration of the act of translation, and what it tells us about writing, language, writers and readers. It certainly tends to the abstract rather than the specific, so bear that in mind – and adds to my admiration for the many strings to Lahiri’s bow.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, y’all. I’ll be writing a sermon on Colossians, making only my third sermon appearance at my church, so wish me all the best with that! Otherwise, just getting ready for Women in Translation month… Usually, I only manage to read one or none, but this year I’m hoping to do a bit better. I’ve got a few candidates lined up. Hope you have a fab weekend, and here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to help you on your way.

1.) The link – it’s very old, but while trying to see if there’s any table of all previous Booker judges (I couldn’t find one), I stumbled across this excellent Guardian article from 2008. It was celebrating 40 years of the Booker, and managed to get a judge from every previous year to spill the beans – often quite indiscreetly.

2.) The blog post – I wanted to remind myself of the characters in On the Calculation of Volume III before I started On the Calculation of Volume IV, and so stumbled across a blog post on a blog I didn’t know before, A Reader of Else. Well, it certainly acted as a reminder – but so much more than. It is such a brilliant piece of writing about literary fiction and science fiction, characters changing their worlds or resisting them, etc. I can’t believe such fascinating, well-written literary criticism is just available for free!

3.) The book – somehow I only recently learned that Anne Fadiman has written another collection of essays! Frog is the title – does anybody know it? Ex Libris was the starting point for my love of books-about-books, so a new Fadiman volume is always welcome.

#152: Novels about women’s home life vs work life, and The Professor’s House by Willa Cather vs The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout, Willa Cather, and women’s lives – welcome to episode 152!

In the first half, Rachel and Simon discuss whether we prefer reading novels about women’s professional lives or their home lives. In the second half, we compare two novels about educators – Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say.

(Apologies for an earlier version of this episode that went out with only the first half. Hopefully this one works!)

You can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given.

And, of course, do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any questions or comments!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart
Jane Urquhart
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
When The Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Emma by Jane Austen (!)
High Wages by Dorothy Whipple
The Lark by E. Nesbit
Economy Must Be Our Watchword by Joyce Dennys
The L-Shaped Room trilogy by Lynne Reid Banks
A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
The Friend in Need by Elizabeth Coxhead
Fresh From the Country by Miss Read
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Barbara Pym
Muriel Spark
A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens
Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
Helen Ashton
One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens
One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens
My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica Dickens
Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge
Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson
South Riding by Winifred Holtby
Carol by Patricia Highsmith
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Agatha Christie
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Alan Ayckbourn
When The Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén
Only About Love by Debbi Voisey

Five From The Archive (no.15): Books about Trees

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Apparently today is National Tree Day in Australia. Now, I’ve never been to Australia (or, indeed, to the Southern Hemisphere) but a post on five novels featuring trees on Brona’s Books inspired me to contribute my own. In her 5 Books series, she links to five previous reviews – which reminds me of my 5 From The Archive series that I haven’t done in maybe eight years. Let’s resurrect the badge…

I was surprised by how many books had trees in the title that weren’t really about trees – I had to disregard much-loved titles like The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp, The Path Through The Trees by Christopher Milne, The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge etc. But I found five excellent books about trees, and here’s links to my original review and something I thought about them.

1. The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

In short: a very short, parable-style novella about a man who plants trees – transforming a wilderness into something splendid and vital.

From my review: “The Man Who Planted Trees is a beautiful book, both visually and in every other way. McCurdy’s woodcuts have such energy and really enhance Giono’s simple and elegant story.”

2. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

In short: another case of the title doing the heavy lifting for us. A strange, oddly moving novel told by an 18th-century boy whose brother decides, in an argument, that he won’t set foot on the ground again – and keeps that promise by living in the trees.

From my review: “he reason I didn’t mind the historical fiction element of it is that Calvino doesn’t try to make it feel at all historical. The dialogue doesn’t ape the 18th-century, and there is a vitality to the novel that comes largely because it would be improbable in any time period – its setting in the past adds to the oddness, in an excellent way.”

3. The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair

In short: the tree is perhaps incidental, but it has a significance in this novel about a family dealing with the various upheavels of the 1910s, from the First World War to the women’s suffrage movement.

From my review: “It’s a really engaging, enjoyable, and moving novel. If you’ve only read Life and Death of Harriett Frean then there is a great deal more to love about Sinclair – and this one isn’t as melancholy, though it certainly isn’t a chuckle-fest!”

4. The Persimmon Tree and other stories by Marjorie Barnard

In short: beautiful short stories from one of Australia’s best-regarded writers. The tree in question only appears in one of the stories, but it is the best one IMO.

From my review: “They reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, in the sense that they are snapshots in the minutiae of women’s lives. The most successful ones don’t try to do more than that: they look at the everyday, and see the searing emotions that are always there under the surface, sometimes conscious and sometimes not but seldom revealed to anybody else.”

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

In short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a lovely, moving coming-of-age novel that fits alongside other classics of the genre like I Capture the Castle and O, The Brave Music in a wonderful trio. The tree becomes a beautiful metaphor.

From my review: I didn’t actually review this one – I did it on the ‘Tea or Books?’ podcast instead, so you’ll have to click the link above to hear more!

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend! It feels like the heatwave here will never end, and let me tell you, I have largely forgotten to water my garden. But I might be going punting for the first time since 2007 this weekend, so at least I’ll be interacting with water in some way. (What I am definitely not doing is going on my church camp. One year… I will at least find an airbnb nearby.) Here is the usual miscellany to get your weekend off to a good start.

Opening Night (Paperback)

1.) The blog post – I loved Jacqui’s take on The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith so much.

2.) The book – I spontaneously bought Opening Night by Sara Baume while in an independent bookshop in Clapham, following my oh-so-hard rule that I have to buy a book in an independent bookshop. To help the community! You’re welcome, everyone. I didn’t know anything about this book, but it was the one that most appealed – anybody got any thoughts?

3.) The link – this is only relevant if you’re in the UK and work for the NHS, a charity or are a teacher. Are you aware of Tickets for Good? Free or discounted tickets for all manner of concerts, plays and other things – you have to move fast for the most popular things, but a lovely idea that a friend recently told me about.

A memoir of sitting for a Lucian Freud portrait

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I don’t remember where I first heard about Man with a Blue Scarf (2010) by Martin Gayford, but it had been on my mental tbr list for a good while before I stumbled across a copy in Hay-on-Wye. It’s such an unusual perspective, which the subtitle explains: ‘On sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud’. And that is the premise of the memoir. Martin Gayford, a friend of Freud’s, spent many hours sitting for the portrait that ends up on the cover and in the title.

I love reading books about art and artists, particularly those which have plenty of paintings featured in the book – and this edition doesn’t stint on those. Along the way, there are colour prints of many of Freud’s artworks from across his career, but also reproductions of lots of artists that are referenced – whether inspirations, or simply creators that Freud admires. God bless whoever did the rights management for this book.

Freud is notorious for being extremely slow in doing his painting, always from the flesh, and working each area to completion before moving onto the next. There are one or two incomplete paintings featured in the book, which shows his technique perhaps better than a finished portrait does – and it surprised me, an extremely amateur painter, that Freud would do great detail in one area before even touching another. Because Freud is so gradual, Gayford often ends sitting sessions with only the most minor of additions or alterations being done, and he has extraordinary patience. Sometimes Freud discards paintings halfway through, after hours and hours of sittings. And one wonders how the horses and dogs that feature in a lot of paintings are encouraged to be equally patient.

My favourite sections of the book are those that do what it says on the tin – explaining Freud’s approach from the perspective of the model. Such as…

LF leans forward sometimes, shading his eyes like a sailor in search of land. His demeanour when painting is that of an explorer or hunter in some dark forest. He peers at me, holding his palette in his hand, with the brushes he is not using held between his little finger and the next, protruding like arrows in a quiver. His attitude is a combination of audacity with caution: an intense determination to get the thing exactly right.

Often before making a stroke LF expels air in a little sigh with the effort of concentration. The same attention is applied to the mixing of colours: “I think just a little”, “No, that’s not it.” He will often sigh again and give a little gesture between a shrug and a triumphant wave of the arms after a successful application of the brush, as though while building a house of cards he has just successfully placed a particularly tricky one. When he is really concentrating he mutters constantly, giving himself instructions: “Yes, perhaps – a bit”, “Quite!”, “No-o, I don’t think so”, “A bit more yellow.” Once or twice he is about to apply a stroke, then withdraws, considers again, then re-scruntinizes, measuring my face with little mapping movements of the brush, describing a small curve in the air or moving it upwards. The whole procedure is hugely deliberative.

I don’t love the use of ‘LF’ rather the Freud – or, indeed, Lucian – but if we set that aside, I absolutely loved this sort of scene. The diary entries give Gayford’s experience a sense of immediacy, and help separate out into parts something that possibly became more unified when remembered from a distance. Along the way, there are also fascinating discussions of art, other artists, and the experience of painting – for example, how Freud believed his emotions while painting would appear in the finished work (“I was painting the paisley patterns on her dress and I remember worrying that my sadness would get into the paisley shapes and I suppose perhaps it did.”)

Presumably there were not enough diary entries, or they did cover enough ground, because they are linked by sections with less immediacy, considering Freud’s work and life in a more abstract way. They were also interesting, though perhaps Gayford’s subjectivity is more welcome when he is actually writing ‘on sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud’, per the subtitle, rather than equally subjective reflections as Freud’s friend that don’t have the same need for subjectivity. Which I suppose is my way of criticising any sense that Man with a Blue Scarf is a memoir or biography of Freud – because, if it were, it leaves out too much. Having read Celia Paul’s excellent Letters to Gwen John, it seems impossible to write about Freud without acknowledging his relationships and the toxic elements to them. I don’t think there is any non-abusive way for a 55-year-old man to have a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old woman, even if it is just the right side of legal. And that’s before we mention his enormous numbers of children, the exact number of which seems to be unknown even to him. Perhaps you’ll say that this is all prurient irrelevance in a book about an artist, but I did feel a bit uncomfortable at the sense of a pally-pally men’s club, where Gayford wouldn’t challenge anything uncomfortable in Freud’s personal life. Maybe none of this matters because it isn’t the sort of book Gayford wanted to write – and I’d agree if he’d stuck just to the experience of sitting for the portrait, but by going a fair stretch beyond that, it raises questions about what he leaves out. (Speaking of leaving out – I think he should definitely have left out a final section about sitting for an etching after the portrait is finished, which feels anti-climactic and rushed.)

Misgivings aside, I loved a lot of Man with a Blue Scarf. Gayford is enjoyable company when he is sitting for the portrait, with enough artistic knowledge to give him an attuned interest in Freud’s methods – and yet enough of an outsider to the artists’ world to give a perspective that the average reader can empathise with. The book made me wish we had a similar sort of narrative for all the famous portraits, and it does feel like a privilege to have such an unusal experience ably documented. It isn’t a biography of Freud and shouldn’t be taken as such, and perhaps should have had slightly more curtailed perimetres. But I do think it helps to understand Freud the artist, and puts the reader in a place we are unlikely ever to sit.

The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe

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And the Canadian reading continues! I read The Book of Eve (1973) by Constance Beresford-Howe on the plane home from Canada having picked it up in Fair’s Fair in Calgary. It was one of the bookshops that very considerately had bookcases dedicated to Canadian authors, and I spent a good while going through an awful lot of promising-looking books. I’d never heard of this author or title, but it had the magical words ‘boarding house’ in the blurb – and that was enough to swing it for me.

Here is the opening paragraph:

The real surprise – to me anyway – was not really what I did, but how I felt afterwards. Shocked, of course. But not guilty. You might say, and be right, that the very least a woman can be is shocked when she walks out on a sick and blameless husband after forty years. But to feel no guilt at all – feel nothing, in fact, but simple relief and pleasure – that did seem odd, to say the least. How annoying for God (not to mention Adam), after all, if Eve had just walked out of Eden without waiting to be evicted, and left behind her pangs of guilt, as it were, with her leaf apron?

That’s about the only time the Bible is mentioned, perhaps to justify Beresford-Howe’s attention-grabbing title, though there are also letters that the narrator writes to God scattered occasionally through the book. Eva (why not Eve?) Carroll is that narrator – a 65-year-old wife and mother who walks out of a marriage to Burt that, to external observers, seems ordinary and content. There is no other man or other women; there is no domestic violence. There isn’t even really unkindness. Eve has simply had enough of a world in which she feels constantly trammeled and stifled.

She takes herself to the other side of Montreal, where she lies low for a while. She phones her 38-year-old son, Neil, to let him know that she is ok – and agrees to meet with him.

My dear son, my Neil and his kind heart with its rare flashes of insight and clumsy tact. He was the enemy, not Burt; with his sweetness and reason he was the real threat. All his life I’d fought against loving Neil too much, and that was all that helped me now.

“No, dear. I’m not going to New York. Or to Florida. Or back to your father. So if that’s all you can suggest, we might as well let you get back to the office.”

Burt refuses to make her an allowance, and Eva has no legal claim to the house she has tended for decades. There is a small pension to live on, and she refuses her son’s offers of financial help – which she knows he can’t afford. A fair amount of the story involves Eva trying to make ends meet, so she can afford the rent on her tiny apartment and the daily necessities. She does this by finding discarded things on the street on pawning them, to complement her meagre pension. In the story of a woman walking out of her life and surviving in unlikely circumstances, I was reminded of The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks and The Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. But those women are (respectively) much younger and rather younger than Eva. There is still something so shocking, so taboo, about a woman of Eva’s age choosing independence without a ‘good reason’. And that’s in inverted commas because, of course, Eva’s reason is fundamentally good in her eyes. In the 1970s, I’m sure that 65 felt much older than 65 does today – making Eva’s decision-making all the more unexpected.

While there are a handful of residents in the boarding house, it isn’t really a boarding house novel in the way I’d imagined – it isn’t, that is to say, a novel about a collection of unlikely people brought together. They are largely peripheral – with the exception of Johnny, a Hungarian immigrant a decade or more younger than her with whom she starts a love affair. Or is ‘love affair’ the right terminology? The Book of Eve is certainly not a romance novel, and while Eva’s connection with Johnny has excitement, passion, humour and intrigue, he is not a knight in shining armour and Beresford-Howe resists any simple conclusions about whether a different man is really a solution to whatever problem Eva is experiencing. But, again, how many 1970s novels have thoughtful scenes of passion involving a woman of Eva’s age?

The Book of Eve really rests on the character of Eva, and I think she was a real success. Beresford-Howe concentrates on making her a nuanced character rather than necessarily an empathetic one. This is no Lady Sloane in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, whom we unquestioningly cheer on. While no reader is likely to feel sorry for Eva’s abandoned husband, her son is more sympathetic and her granddaughter still more so. Eva treats other characters with occasional thoughtlessness, and can be frustrating in her refusal to address things head on.

And yet, and yet… I found her absolutely compelling. I loved spending time with her in all her complexities, and was fascinated to see how she would survive and what she would discover in this brave new world. I’d always rather read about interesting characters than morally upright ones – haven’t we all been annoyed by characters whose only purpose is to carry forth whatever message the author thinks is important? It is Eva’s moral grey area, and Beresford-Howe’s resistance to easy answers and pat plot points, that makes The Book of Eve such a brilliant read. I believe it is a Canadian classic, probably well known by readers in that nation – but I think rather less well-known in the UK. If you haven’t heard of it, and you love nuanced feminist novels about authentic, believable women – and, of course, if you a boarding house novel – then I urge you to lay your hands on it. If you are an aficianado of Canadian literature, do let me know what else I should read by her!

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrey

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When I was in Canada, one of the books I was looking out for was Wild Dogs (2004) by Helen Humphreys. I believe she has only written two novels set in contemporary Canada, and that was precisely the sort of novel I was on the hunt for. Having really admired her memoir Nocturne and novel Rabbit Foot Bill, I was keen to complete a trio. Even better, the copy I found in the basement of a bookshop in Inglewood, Calgary, was signed! I got to reading it pretty quickly, drawn in by these excellent opening paragraphs:

The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Their eyes flash, bright stars in the woods at night and they weave like fire through the dry grass towards the edge of the city, looking for something to kill and eat.

Love is like those wild dogs. If it hunts you down, it will not let you go. And what you can never know from the beginning is how hard or how long you’ll love something; how even when it has gone the love you felt will still chase you down, loping like dark flame through your blood.

The wild dogs are real. They are out there, beyond the safety of the streets and houses, beyond the lights of the city. And one of those wild dogs is mine.

Alice’s dog is one of several in the neighbourhood who has turned wild, with surprising rapidity. Every night, she and five other people congregate at the edge of the forest, trying to call their dogs home. They proffer toys, food, affection – and every night, they are rejected. Or perhaps they don’t even see the dogs in the distance.

It is a brilliantly arresting image for a novel to open with, and apparently based loosely on a real event. It also gives Humphreys a ready-made community of unlikely companions, which is an excellent way to organise an intriguing novel. There is a man called Malcolm who lives with his mother – perhaps. A teenager, Jamie, who avoids home because of an angry stepfather. Lily, in her 20s, who has suffered brain damage. Walter, an older man whose Jack Russell terrier has somehow joined the pack of larger dogs. And there is the person that the narrator addresses as ‘you’, with whom (as we learn in a narrative that gently plays outside of time) Alice has had a love affair. That is, it happens after the events being narrated, and has ended by the time the narrator is looking back.

Another dimension to the novel: most of these dogs have not escaped. In almost every case, there is someone who has deliberately taken the dog to the forest’s edge and let it loose – whether as punishment, or because they don’t want a dog near their baby, or they don’t think the owner is capable of having a dog. In Alice’s case, it is her boyfriend who abandoned her dog there – from a mix of anger of hopelessness. Somehow, this is not the immediate death knell to their relationship – though it comes pretty soon. And so the book charts the bonding of these disparate people, their shared and yet separate hopes, and the evolution of Alice’s affections for the mysterious ‘you’.

I think it’s a very clever arrangement for a novel. The only bit that felt heavy-handedly ‘novelistic’ was when they take turns walking the usual dog-walk routes of each dog – supposedly to feel closer to the dogs, but really a slightly clumsy way of taking the six to different places together. And I wondered quite where the novel could go, formally – and I was surprised when Alice’s narrative ended. And, instead, we turn to Jamie’s perspective, about halfway through the novel. It gives Humphreys an opportunity to write a really moving, sharp, uncomfortable account of what it’s like to live with somebody violent. Somebody unpredictable, and yet somebody you have to desperately try to predict.

It’s fifteen steps from the back door to the fridge. If I pull the fridge door back against the hinge, it will open without a sound. The bread wrapper will crinkle. Yogurt makes that suction scoop when you pull the foil top off. The cheese drawer sticks on its runners. Peanut butter will be all right. I can twist the plastic cap off slowly and it won’t make any noise. I can stand here at the fridge and shove my fingers into the jar instead of risking the rustle of the cutlery drawer.

It’s not the final shift in narrator – and, as well as various members of our six, we spend time with another character who is involved in the novel’s shocking, and yet somehow inevitable, twist.

In another Humphreys book I bought and read in Canada – And A Dog Called Fig,her memoir of writing and dogs – she writes about the genesis of Wild Dogs:

When I was thinking up my next novel, Wild Dogs, I decided to structure it after the way that a dog turns and turns before settling to sleep. I wanted the story to turn like that, to circle back on itself and then continue before coming to rest. The novel is about dogs, or rather it is about our relationship with dogs, about wildness and domesticity and belonging.

I don’t think I would have ever have guessed that was the origin, but I can definitely see what she means. When the perspective shifts, it doesn’t go back to the beginning of the story – but it does take a few steps back. And it does come to a sort of rest – though I must warn sensitive readers that not all the dogs in the novel survive.

In those opening paragraphs that struck me so much, I did have some qualms that the metaphors would be too strident and the comparison between human relationships and wild dogs a little too pointed. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Humphreys is a subtle writer for the most part, and manages to swerve anything too heavy-handed. And yet it is, as she says, a novel about wildness and domesticity and belonging. It also does that very hard thing: taking a striking opening scenario, and making the rest of the novel equally compelling. The energy doesn’t fizzle out, but it becomes something more immersive, more telling. Yes, even this cat person loved it.