Horror! Horror! Horror! by Edith Olivier – #ABookADayInMay – Day 13

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Under normal circumstances, I would run in the other direction from a book with ‘horror’ in the title, let alone three times. But I also love Edith Olivier, and was interested when Snuggly Books (!) brought out a slim volume of three of Olivier’s short stories in the horror genre. Interested enough to buy it and, as is so often the way of things, read it two years later (and it took about half an hour to read).

Olivier is best-known for The Love-Child, a novella that I wrote a substantial about of my doctoral thesis on, and which I was delighted to bring back into print through the British Library Women Writers series. But I had either forgotten, or never knew, that she also wrote horror stories – and this book collects three of them, written in 1934-5: ‘The Caretaker’s Story’, ‘Dead Men’s Bones’, and ‘The Night Nurse’s Story’.

They’re so short that it’s hard to give an account of them without giving everything away. In brief, the first one concerns someone returning to his house that a caretaker has supposedly been looking after, but finds it abandoned – and gets attacked by a seagull, which is not as incidental as it seems. The second (and least successful, to my mind) is about the deceased being unhappy with how the bones of the dead have been combined – it is one of those stories related entirely by someone who wasn’t involved, which makes it lose any immediacy.

The third was definitely my favourite of the three. Nurse Webber is off on a dark and stormy winter night to be the nurse for an ill woman in the middle of nowhere.

The dark wet November night had evidently had no effect on the spirits of the stout little chauffeur; and he gaily drove Nurse Webber away to her first private case.

They were certainly going to an ‘out-of-the-way’ place, for they quickly left the main road and began climbing about the Moor, taking farm roads which zigzagged over steep hills, and turning ever into narrower lanes where no signposts marked the way. And Matron had been right. They met no one to ask.

When the chauffeur pulls over at the next house to ask, it turns out to be the one Nurse Webber is expected at. But the name doesn’t quite match, and there are other inconsistencies that trouble her…

I shan’t say more, but it was definitely the one of the three that most successfully used atmosphere to give a creeping sense of… well, if not terror, then intriguing unease. There’s nothing like a remote country house on a dark evening, is there?

They were fun stories, but it is interesting how unscary almost all ‘horror’ stories of this period are to me. I know there are some exceptions – I’ve never read M.R. James, but I understand he still has the capacity to chill – but ghost stories by the likes of E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton, and E.F. Benson have broadly left me unafraid. And I am afraid of everything. What is it that makes these period pieces less chilling? Is it because they tend towards the discursive, rather than the sudden jolts of modern horror?

I hate being scared, so I am quite happy not to be – though it can feel anticlimactic when the author clearly thinks he/she has done enough to leave the reader quivering. As it is, I could enjoy Olivier’s stories in a different way – I was not terrified, but I was entertained, and I’m glad to have expanded my Olivier knowledge.

A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam – #ABookADayInMay – Day 12

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I bought A Little Stranger (1989) by Candia McWilliam at a National Trust secondhand bookshop, not knowing anything about it but intrigued by the enthusiastic quotes on the back – and, I’ll admit, its brevity. At only 135 pages, I knew it could fit into one of my May reading projects. The quote that won me over was from an unnamed reviewer in the Guardian: “Compelling and unsettling… McWilliam uses the conventions of middlebrow fiction to slice away its usual reassurance… very funny too, a comedy of good manners in which each well-meaning utterance becomes a source of confusion and dismay.”

I think that’s a pretty good indicator of the novella’s tone. Daisy is the narrator – often unrealiable, to herself as much as anyone else. She lives with her husband Solomon and their son John in a large house with servants, and they need a new nanny for John: here enters Margaret Pride. From the outset, Daisy is looking for relationship and information, and Margaret is equally reticent on either front. She is engaged to a man she says nothing about, gives little detail about her previous employment, and quietly disregards the overtures of interest that Daisy offers.

She did not speak of her parents in the round. She appeared to have no childhood memories. When she released details, they were flat and lifeless as details from an instruction leaflet. It was as though she described self-assembly furniture.

As Daisy shows her round the house, it is clear that this won’t be the relationship she is hoping for.

She looked around like someone wondering whether or not to buy, and again said nothing. Sensible, really, not to be beguiled by things. After all, the child was the point. In ‘her’ sitting-room and the nursery bathroom she also passed no remark. She must perhaps be shy. Her last job has been in much the same sort of place, but perhaps I intimidated her. I am told I can. I am taller than most and have more hair. I also look at other people very hard.

Daisy and Margaret are both fascinating characters. Margaret is interesting because she is an enigma – and, as we can only see her through Daisy’s eyes, we have to glean what we can through this refraction. Daisy, on the other hand, is fascinating because she is such a bad interpreter of almost everything, including herself. She is constantly trying to understand other people, but superimposes her own weak, optimistic readings before she can come to any more justifiable conclusions. The reader is suspicious of Margaret long before Daisy is, though we can’t work out exactly why.

That’s what is so unsettling about the book. There is a sense that something will burst, or some truth will come to light. Too much is kept hidden for us to trust Daisy’s interpretation of events.

And yet Daisy is a sharp, funny character on other grounds. I really enjoyed some of the incidental irony at contemproary culture. She describes an author who ‘could not write but could not help selling’, and also:

I spent the evening, after a supper of sweetbreads and rye bread, reading. I could not see that there was much on television but serials about the effects of illness or of wealth. I could not differentiate between these programmes, though the outfits worn by the victims sometimes gave a hint, and the terminally ill, or those who impersonated them, appeared to wear even more make-up than the terminally rich.

As for the title, it does describe Margaret – but it is also, of course, a reference to pregnancy. ‘Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger.’ And not long into Margaret’s tenure, Daisy discovers she is pregnant – which becomes another thread in this unsettling story.

For much of this novella, I was filled with admiration. Particularly towards the beginning, I found the balance of intrigue, eeriness, and humour worked really well. Sometimes the floweriness of the language (which suited Daisy’s character) did go rather too far, to the point that I didn’t quite know what was going on in the scene – but it was an enjoyably engineered tone and the two characters were expertly handled.

But… I shan’t spoil it, but the end of the book is such a tonal shift – and, frankly, misogynistic – that it really coloured when beforehand. There are twists that felt unearned and inartistic. It was also increasingly confusing, and not in a way that I thought was deliberate. I found it such a pity, and it went from being a book I was delighted to have discovered to one that will probably be heading to a charity shop. It’s all the more frustrating, because McWilliam is clearly such a good writer and the premise was excellent.

Sorry to end on a sour note, but you can join in my frustration!

The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim – #ABookADayInMay – Day 11

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When I was looking through my Virago Modern Classics bookcase to see if I had anything that would work for this month, I was pleased to see that The Solitary Summer (1899), though about 190 pages, had such an enormous font that it would be pretty easy to get through in a day.

The Solitary Summer is a sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, the debut novel (/autofiction?) that was an enormous success and made Elizabeth von Arnim’s name. Or, rather, didn’t make her name. She remained anonymous on her books, which were subsequently published as being ‘by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden‘, and ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’ was a concoction created, I believe, by Virago in the 1980s.

I courted controversy when I ranked Elizabeth von Arnim’s books by putting Elizabeth and Her German Garden in last place. You know what, I stand by it, but I should add that I’ve liked all of her books. For me, it lacks the spark and irony of her better books – though a lot of that was present in the third in the series, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. So, how would the middle of the three compare?

Elizabeth loves her home and garden, and the title comes from her longing to enjoy this happiness without interruption. Characteristically, she wanders around this idea in philosophical, whimsical styile before landing on it:

Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves. They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how can you make a person happy against his will? […] Obviously happiness must come from within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.

She puts forward the idea to her husband, known as ‘the Man of Wrath’ in a way that is intended for humour but doesn’t take an archeologist to dig into the discontent behind the quip. It is a little uneasy to see the lightness of his portrayal here – not the clever irony of Otto in The Caravanners, or the amusing-but-awful Father in Father. In the Elizabeth series, the narrator doesn’t seem to quite know if she dislikes him, loves him or tolerates him, the extent of his wrath is not discussed or even hinted at. A later von Arnim novel would be cleverer about it, one way or another. He has a rather stereotypical response to her plan:

“Very well, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, “only do not grumble afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose, and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective punishment.”

But the idea of the solitary summer is really just a hook to hang on whatever Elizabeth wants to mull over. For quite a lot of the book, unsurprisingly, that is her garden. I don’t know anything about gardens or plants, but I could still enjoy her enthusiasm about them – she describes them not just visually, but in terms of the way they make people feel and the life and energy they can bring to a garden. There are some comic scenes with gardeners, because of course there are.

And then, sometimes, she will use the natural world to swerve into quite sombre material:

There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs all our courage—the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each of us lives and dies. 

It’s quite beautiful, and it’s a sort of sincerity that I’ve only seen her replicate (in-between the barbed comedy) in The Enchanted April. But it’s also a little jarring – I’m not sure she fully worked out the tone of the book. We have some enjoyable whimsy with her young children’s views on heaven; there is a section on a visiting soldier; there are homilies to the most delicious foods she’s eaten. Most awkwardly of all are her attempts to sympathise with the working-class community around her, though she is pretty sharply dismissive of a woman whose child dies in infancy, and let’s not say too much about her belief that she would thrive in poverty – a vision of poverty that is beyond Disneyfied.

This is sounding quite negative, but I did honestly enjoy reading the book. It had many funny moments and many poignant ones. Sometimes we moved swiftly from one to the other. But it all felt a little random and occasionally self-indulgent, and is clearly the work of an author who hasn’t honed her craft yet. If she hadn’t written such masterpieces later in her career, perhaps I would be more generous to The Solitary Summer. As it is, it’s a beautiful, entertaining… attempt.

Having said that, I had forgotten quite how old it was. Despite not really cohering into a novel, I had to admire the freshness to it. The verve of the writing feels much more 1920s/30s than late Victorian, and there is certainly a spirited energy to it. If you want to get the best of Elizabeth von Arnim, don’t forget those rankings. If you’re a completist, you’ll find a lot to love her. If you’re a gardener, you’ll find even more. But if you want to sample Elizabeth von Arnim and see if she’s the sort of author for you, I wouldn’t start here.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder – #ABookADayInMay – Day 10

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I recently started listening to Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (read by Meryl Streep, no less) and quickly decided to pause. I don’t know how much of the novel is about putting on a production of Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder, but even if it is only the opening chapters, I was feeling very at sea. Patchett obviously assumes knowledge of this play which I absolutely didn’t have.

Am I right in saying that Our Town is a staple of American high school productions? I’ve heard it referenced plenty of times, though only as a cultural mainstay, rather than what it is actually about. And of course reading a play isn’t as good as seeing it performed, but needs must – and now I’ve read all about the everytown of Grover’s Corners.

If, like me, you don’t know the play – here’s a quick intro. Over the course of three acts, it looks at Grover’s Corners in 1901, 1904, and 1913. Over that time, the main characters are drawn from two families: the Gibbs and the Webbs. Charles and Myrtle are parents to Emily and Wally; Dr Frank and Julia are parents to George. Much of the later play is taken up by the marriage of George and Emily, and what happens afterwards – though it is told in a very unconventional way.

Coming to this blank, I had no idea what to expect. And it is a lot more formally inventive than I had anticipated. Rather than simply present the townsfolk of this ordinary town, it is done in an interesting, metatheatrical way (perhaps this is why high schools love teaching it?) Characters don’t just remember scenes – they relive them, on stage, in guise as their younger selves. We even get quite a lot of the afterlife. The Stage Manager is a sort of stage God, filtering and to an extent controlling all of the goings on. He is also open about the artifice of it all – early on, for example, when trellises are wheeled on: “Here’s a couple of trellises for those who feel they have to have scenery.”

He also has a longish speech that – correct me if I’m wrong – I’d guess is one of the most quoted from the play, because it explains Wilder’s purpose in writing it. Here’s part of the speech:

Y’know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts … and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney — same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real lives of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us–more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. See what I mean? So, – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces North of New York at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, – this is the way we were – in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

And yet, even reading it on the page, you can tell that Our Town dodges the postmodern trap of cleverness wiping out compassion. I still cared about Emily and George, and I’m sure I’d care about them a lot more if I saw them on stage. There are also plenty of funny lines, and I particularly enjoyed Mrs Gibbs saying: “It seems to me that once in your life before you die, you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”

I’m glad I read Our Town and I feel like I can place one more piece of the jigsaw of American literary culture – and now, of course, I’m also ready to read Tom Lake.

 

 

 

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri – #ABookADayInMay – Day 9

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I absolutely loved the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and naturally was keen to try more by her. It’s taken a while, but today I read Whereabouts – first published in Italian in 2018, and translated by the author in 2021. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel translated by its author before, and it all adds to Lahiri’s exceptional talent.

This novel – as so often in May, I am tempted to add ‘novella?’ as a qualifier – is about an unnamed woman in her mid-40s walking through a city. That is almost the whole plot. The story describes many different days, rather than one, but it is like an eternal moment – whether passing a shop that used to house her favourite stationery store, visiting her grieving mother, or struggling to leave the hosue, we are in a sort of everyday always. There is a sense that her life is unchanging, but she is not trapped, exactly. She is too caught up in observing everything and everyone. It’s one of several ways the book reminded me of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. They share the same gentle rhythm, and the same peaceful interaction of a woman with surroundings that she is somehow both subsumed by and separate from. As Ali wrote in her perceptive review, she experiences belonging and isolation simultaneously.

Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well. It’s probably my mother’s influence. She’s always been afraid of being alone and now her life as an old woman torments her, so much that when I call to ask how she’s doing, she just says, I’m very alone. She says she misses having amusing and surprising experiences, this even though she has lots of friends who love her, and a social life far more complicated and lively than mine. The last time I went to visit her, for example, the phone kept ringing. And yet she’s always on edge. I’m not sure why. She’s burdened by the passage of time.

We don’t learn much about the woman’s mother, except for a handful of her stronger emotions and the way she impacts her daughter’s life. But, to be honest, we don’t learn that much about the central character. This didn’t feel like a character portrait, to me – rather, it is a portrait of an experience. Of a city, but really of experiencing a city. Along the way there are snapshots – a daughter refusing to stay the night with her single father; friends rummaging through luggage in the shop that used to sell stationery; an argument at a dinner party. They are brushstrokes coming together to create a single image.

I very much enjoyed reading Whereabouts because it is beautiful, poetic, dreamy. It felt quite different from Interpreter of Maladies, which had sharp details and a depth of insight into the relationship between pairs of people. This was much more impressionistic. Both are done very well – I probably prefer Interpreter of Maladies and the sharp style she has there, but it really depends what you’re in the mood for. Being able t

The Artless Flat-Hunter by Joanna Jones – #ABookADayInMay – Day 8

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One of my favourite tropes in a book is house-hunting – particularly when it is done for comic effect. There is something so delightfully funny about the contrast between an estate agent’s exaggerated, mendacious positivity and some melancholy would-be homeowners looking at mouldy wallpaper and subsidence. Glorious.

So I didn’t know anything about Joanna Jones when I stumbled across The Artless Flat-Hunter (1963) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago, but this title and this cover meant I couldn’t resist. Having recently enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Finders, Keepers, it feels relevant to report that it had a penned dedication (‘November 1963. To Jill, all my love, Peter’) and, curiously, a clipped photo of John F. Kenndy from a newspaper article – possibly in the wake of his assassination, in the same month?

It’s one of those faux instructional guides that were all the rage in the 1930s, so it’s nice to see it continuing into the 1960s – and basically satirises the whole process of finding, renting, and living in a flat. Everything from nosey landladies to noisy neighbours, via finding the right flatmates and how to dodge unexpected expenses when estate agents try to foist unwanted fixtures and fittings on you. As a sample, one of the chapters is called ‘Low-flying aircraft and other amenities’. True, she largely doesn’t seem to realise that there are places to live outside of London, but we’ll forgive her that.

The maxim with which I opened this chapter should be followed by a second: the maximum rent you are prepared to pay will prove in the end to be your minimum.

You will start out by declaring that nowhere more than twenty minutes’ walk from such-and-such a centre of civilisation will be acceptable. You cannot afford more than such-and-such a rent, and you will not consider paying a penny more. Then the days go by,. You discover that nobody in the British Isles wants to let as much as a tool-shed. The advertisement boards are festooned with lies. It’s a wonder most of the postcards are not yellowed and curling with age. Why on earth do people pay good money to advertise in the evening papaers when they have no inteniton of even letting you set food inside the front door?

Nothing in here is unexpected, and Jones is certainly happy to hit every cliché, but that didn’t matter to me. It’s her lightness and consistency of tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She judges the right line of surreality in her satire, and while it certainly has no pretensions to great literature, it’s a very good example of a genre that has probably faded away.

According to the inside notes to the dustjacket of The Artless Flat-Hunter, there was a whole series in the Pelham Artless Library – The Artless Actor by Kenneth More, The Artless Gambler by Roger Longrigg, The Artless Musician by Sidney Harrison and The Artless Yachtsman by John Davies. What a fun idea, and what a curious selection of professions/hobbies to select. Well, these books won’t change your life, but if The Artless Flat-Hunter is anything to go by, you’ll pass an entertaining evening and be able to empathise all too well.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 7

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I’m reading May Sarton’s memoirs all out of order, so I’ve got The House By The Sea and Journal of a Solitude under my belt before going back to a slightly older one – Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), which has a bad title and a truly ugly cover. And yet inside – what riches!

There is something of a false start in my mind – a little prologue about her British ancestor and her American ancestor, and how different they are. It is extremely skippable and doesn’t give you a sense for what the book will actually be about, though I know that Americans are notoriously interested in their family trees and connections to previous continents and perhaps Sarton couldn’t resist.

Anyway, that out the way, and we are onto the main part of the book: Sarton finding, buying, doing up and living in a house in Nelson, New Hampshire. She was 46, and moving out to a distant location on her own felt like an understandably significant step for a single woman of her age – particularly one whose living was largely forged in isolation, as a writer (and occasional lecturer). Her decision-making is an example of how often she pinpoints universal emotions, while also applying them to the specifics of her life:

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life. I was not wrong in divining that for me, if I took it, this step would mean radical change and so might be compared to marriage. No woman in her forties can afford to marry the wrong person or the wrong house in the wrong place! So I groaned and teetered and waited for life itself to make some sign.

Off she drives to find the possible home…

We followed an interminable road through lonely woods for four miles, then emerged into a charming brick mill town sitting sedately beside a lake, and again veered off into thick woods. It began to feel like one of those journeys one takes in a dream, a journey that has no end, in search of something that can never be found, where if one wakes at last it is to the accelerated heartbeat of terror. I did not intend to live on the edge of nowhere.

But then, quite suddenly, the long road took an abrupt turn to the left and we found ourselves out in the sunlight of a small village green.

“This,” Mrs Rundlett said, “is Nelson.”

And she quickly falls in love. Through her descriptions, and her eyes, we fall in love too. My edition has photographs along the way, mostly taken by Eleanor Blair, but they are black and white and rather muddy, in the way of ’60s publishing. You have to let your imagination transport you to the world Sarton inhabits.

As I have written many times before, I don’t have a visual imagination. I find it nearly impossible to ‘picture’ the scenes that Sarton describes, and she does her best to tell you the lay-out, colours, materials, and feel of her home and garden – but, as with the best writers in this type of book, somehow I found myself there. I couldn’t visualise the scenes, but I could feel what it would be to live there. As she portrays her rooms, land, and neighbourhood, she is squarely in the midst of them. It is not an objective or distant depiction – she writes firmly as an inhabitant, centring her own experience in a beautiful way.

In that first week I established a rite about supper. When I sit down at the deal table, there are flowers; there is a bottle of wine, and the table has been carefully set as if by a good servant. There is a book open to read, the equivalent for the solitary of civilized conversation. Everything has been prepared as if for a guest, and I am the guest of the house.

The book covers eight years in the house. Along the way, we learn about her neighbours – eccentric and otherwise. But this is not like Beverley Nichols’ delightful Merry Hall books. Though broadly in the same genre, Sarton doesn’t have his mischievous caricatures and darting humour. There is a humour in her book, but it one of companionship, affection and enjoying every mood and season as it comes.

I say ‘enjoying’. She is also not afraid to tell us about her darker times. Perhaps they do not proliferate as intensely as they did in The House By The Sea, but there are some. Sarton feels things deeply, and she shares those feelings generously. Along the way, she also discusses her novels and poetry, but without a consciousness that her non-fiction is the best thing she will write. It is beautiful, poetic, and true.

A place like this is more like a novel than a poem – complex, never quite ‘finished’, operated on extended time, a balancing of many themes against each other. Work on it cannot be finished in one quite push. It must be resumed spring after spring, when black flies and woodchucks come back. It cannot be neglected for long – or you find yourself back where you started. A place like this must be fashioned and re-fashioned inch by inch. You wait and see. You wait and hope. You wait and work.

I absolutely loved Plant Dreaming Deep, and to be honest probably should have read it at a more leisurely pace. I think The House By The Sea is my favourite of the Sarton memoirs I’ve read so far, but there are plenty more to be read. Maybe, once I’m finished, I’ll start again and read them in the correct order.

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls – #ABookADayInMay – Day 6

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Cover of Mrs Caliban, showing cartoon illustrations of Dorothy and Larry swimming

Mrs Caliban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls was all over the place when it was reprinted by Faber a few years ago – one of those reprints that dominated end-of-year lists. It certainly caught my attention, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my friend Clare gave me a copy for my birthday last year, and I raced through its 117 pages this evening.

The title obviously reminds us of the monstrous figure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but Mrs Caliban is, in fact, a very ordinary housewife – Dorothy Caliban. She has gone through the unbearable trauma of a child dying, followed shortly by a miscarriage. Her husband is having an affair, not very subtly. A vision of the American dream of white-picket domesticity has been systematically torn apart, and yet Dorothy cannot escape from the role she had anticipated playing in it. Despite having to grieve the children and being poorly treated by the husband, she must still be the housewife. She must still wash and fold laundry, clean the house, cook the meals.

The only thing that disturbs this picture is that she might well be going mad. The announcers on the TV sometimes talk directly to her, for instance. It seems like this paranoia might become the plot – but it is sidelined for something more significant, which happens right in the middle of a very domestic scene.

Back in the kitchen again, she had all the salad ingredients out, chopping up carrots and celery with her favourite sharp vegetable knife, had put some potato chips and nuts in bowls and just slid some cheese on crackers under the grill. Then she raced for the bathroom in the spare room.

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy had earlier seen that ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’ had escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research, with warnings on the news about his terrible dangerousness. He has, in his escape, killed two of the scientists in brutal ways. And yet – she offers him some vegetables. He politely accepts. She slips out of the room to give her husband his anticipated meal, but returns to have a gentle, quiet conversation with this ‘Aquarius’ – who is, in fact, called Larry. He speaks perfect English, and seems to post no danger to her. And she scarcely seems surprised. I suppose, when so many terrible, dramatic things have happened in your life, you can take something like this in your stride.

Larry has a head like a frog, a body like a man, and strong, green arms. It is difficult for Ingalls to describe him in a way that doesn’t make him feel a little gross or like a figure from a supernatural movie – but we see him through Dorothy’s eyes, and she doesn’t flinch. Indeed, his kindness and interest in her are beguiling. It isn’t long before they are having sex (he is, it turns out, very human in that department). They have sex over and over, in any room of the house. It isn’t described at any length, and it certainly isn’t included for titillation. It is just further evidence of Dorothy’s new-found satisfaction in a life that is so deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.

And it turns out that Larry isn’t dangerous, really. He can easily kill – but he only killed his captors because they tortured him sadistically.

“Thank you,” he said. He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she knew of the brutal methods that had been used to ram home the Institute’s policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body.

Dorothy continues to conceal Larry, not even telling her best friend Estelle anything about it. I haven’t mentioned her yet, but she is a bright light in the novella, particularly in the beginning – somebody who has kept her exuberance, and encourages Dorothy, despite the sad and difficult lives they lead.

The end of the novella takes a lurch to the dramatic, with shocking events and revelations that are very different from the domestic scenes and the philosophical discussions between Dorothy and Larry that precede it. Somehow it works – perhaps because they are described with the same steady calmness that seems to shroud the rest of the book, however strange the events described. Because this is, of course, really a novella about the breakdown of a marriage and a life. There is a well-played ambiguity about Larry’s existence – could he be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination, like the TV newsreaders? – but it hardly matters, because either way this is a feminist subversion of the lives lived behind the immaculate front doors of suburbia. Ingalls plays the bizarreness of the plot with a steady hand that leaves the reader feeling that Dorothy’s unexceptional, unhappy life is the real point of fascination – right through to a final line that is very moving, even if you’re not exactly why.

With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 5

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Cover of With or Without Angels showing details from Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo

You probably know about Douglas Bruton by now. Even if you’ve missed that I love Blue Postcards and Hope Never Knew Horizon, there are many other book bloggers who also love him – and, indeed, Madame Bibi has already reviewed one of his books in her own Novella A Day In May project.

I’m continuing my Bruton journey with With Or Without Angels (2023). Like the other works I’ve read by him, it responds to and is inspired by specific artworks. In this case, The New World by Alan Smith – which, in turn, is a response to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo (‘The New World’). I have to confess that I had never heard of either artist or their work, but (miraculous for a paperback!) they are printed in the book itself – so I didn’t need to have a Google tab open.

Smith’s The New World is a series of 11 photograph collages, starting with a selfie of Smith and his wife in the Tate Modern. They appear in the subsequent images, but so do elements of Tiepolo’s work, other landscapes, and a floating cloth that may or may not be intended to represent an angel. Tiepolo’s piece, on the other hand, is subversive in its own way: a portrait of a series of people, almost all of whom have their back to us.

Bruton’s novella is told through the perspective of Smith, and his creation of the artwork – along with a young woman called Olivia, or Livvy, who has the expertise to do the digital manipulation and photoshopping required to create his collages.

Livvy is taking notes.

“It’s like something mathematical. Like showing my working out, my thinking.”

He has pritned out a picture of an empty space, a pillared courtyard. There is a well in the centre of the picture and maybe it was the reason he took the picture in the first place. He wonders if that can be removed.

Livvy looks up and nods.

“And sky – I want there to be sky, so the upper floor should be removed and something like a wind-lifted carrier bag falling down on the square. Maybe a sheet.”

“Like an angel,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“No?”

“Yes. That is to say, like an angel but also not. I am not sure that today I believe in angels.”

Smith also learns, during the narrative, that the symptoms he has been experiencing are more serious than he hoped. Along the way, With Or Without Angels becomes a subtle treatise on the broadest imaginable topics – living, loving, creating – as well as an examination of the tiniest moments.

As it’s Bruton, it’s all done with humanity and beauty. Having said that, I have to admit that the artworks are not ones I particularly respond to myself – and something about reading the fictionalised account of such a recent artist feels curiously more uncanny than reading the same thing of artists many, many decades earlier. So this won’t race to the top of my Bruton list, but any Bruton is a good Bruton and it was a fun way to spend Day 5.

Only About Love by Debbi Voisey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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A quick one from me, because I’m back home late after driving home from Hay-on-Wye (haul to be revealed at some point, possibly after May), via an afternoon at Hidcote National Trust and Chipping Camden, and then straight to Devil Wears Prada 2 (good for nostalgia’s sake, if very patchy). Somewhere along the way, I managed to finish Only About Love (2021) by Debbi Voisey.

After loving Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, I decided to buy up a whole bunch of other Fairlight Moderns. They’re such lovely little editions, and a really interesting range of titles. Admittedly, I read another one that I didn’t like (and decided not to write about) but Only About Love was more of a success.

It tells the story of Frank – in many ways, an ordinary sort of man. He lives in a normal house, has a job that is neither exciting nor particularly the opposite, and marries a nice woman and has nice children. Along the way, he has at least one affair – which is sadly also not that out of the ordinary. But the style in which it is told is where the unusual element comes in. Voisey has taken this everyman’s life and told it in fragments and vignettes – out of chronological order – from Frank’s perspective and from the perspective of his wife and children, and occasionally objective lists and bullet points. Since these are not framed with an explanation, the reader has to quickly catch up with who is telling their story, and where we are in Frank’s life history. It means Only About Love is an endless chain of mild disorientations, always having to establish and re-establish our surroundings – but it comes together in a very coherent whole.

The disorientation also puts us a little in Frank’s place – because the crux of the novella is his diagnosis, decline and eventual death with dementia. An acknowledgement from Voisey suggests she has first-hand experience of this from her father, and that is perhaps why this plot is told with such observation, kindness and charity. Illness does not exonerate Frank of his misdeeds, but nor should it overshadow the everyday nobleness that was also part of his character. (Incidentally, once you know that dementia is central to the story, I think it makes Sam Kalda’s illustration on the cover feel very poignant.)

The title comes from a section late in the novella, from the perspective of Frank’s daughter as she tends to him in the late stages of dementia. I’ll finish by quoting this vignette in full:

When you shave him, he moves his mouth and face around like he’s chewing an invisible sweet. He offers up his neck with absolute trust; you glide the blade down beneath his chin and over his Asam’s apple. It’s massive, like he’s swallowed a rock.

You hear the rasp of his stubble and it’s almost like the noise is coming from you, because there’s sandpaper inside you. Your stomach is made of it. Your heart is made of it. Your throat. Your insides have been transformed into a million tiny pieces of rock.

He can no longer speak, but words are unnecessary. Life is now simply in its cruelty; he once cared for you and now you’re caring for him.

Each touch of your fingers on his skin reminds him that love still exists. You want all his waking thoughts from now on to be only about love.