Month: November 2021

A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham – #NovNov Day 6

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Today is definitely cheating, because A Wild Swan and other tales (2015) is, as the full title suggests, not a novella. It’s very definitely a collection of short stories, but it does come in at around 130 pages, so at least that bit fits the bill.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Cunningham books here, and he is definitely one of my favourite living writers. As far as I know, this is his only book of short stories – and they are all twists on fairy tales. Often they take the well-known story and see it from another point of view. What is the backstory for the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Was there a good reason that the Prince had been cursed in Beauty and the Beast? Did the Giant really deserve to have everything stolen by Jack, or to be killed?

It’s a mercy of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

The book has wonderful illustrations by Yuko Shimizu – fanciful, surreal, exuberant, a little dark. You can see some of them on Shimizu’s website.

Cunningham is so good at delving below the surface of the mundane that it feels quite odd to have his take on the fantastical. There is definitely a little of his dry reflections, such as this bit from a take on Rumpelstiltskin:

He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And…

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

I did find A Wild Swan enjoyable and quirky. Maybe my only reservation is that, creative as it was, this is nothing new. People have been reworking fairy tales for generations, and it no longer feels very fresh to rewrite them from the antagonist’s perspective. If Cunningham had been the first to do anything like this then it would have been amazing. As it is, the book felt a little unnecessary.

I often find myself thinking of a line from Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne, about his long poem about faith and philosophy The Norman Church: ”it was the sort of book which publishers accept ‘only out of deference to a writer who has supplied them through many years with better, more marketable books in other fields’.” I think about it for all sorts of books, and this was one of them. A new author would have a hard time justifying this book, but maybe his publishers thought Cunningham deserved to write what he fancied – and his name on the cover would sell plenty of copies.

So, I did enjoy this, in the same way I enjoy anything a little predictable and unchallenging. But did it need to be written?

By the way, I’ll be taking the day off a-novella-a-day tomorrow – because it’s my birthday, and I’ll be spending it with my bro. Back, maybe even with a proper novella, on the 8th!

Murder Included by Joanna Cannan – #NovNov Day 5

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A murder mystery is a fun choice for my novella-a-day challenge, because I always wants to finish a murder mystery in one day – and it’s only the length that stops me. Quite spontaneously, I took Murder Included by Joanna Cannan off the shelf this morning. It was published in 1950, though seemed to me to be set a decade or two earlier. Confusingly, it has also been published as A Taste of Murder and Poisonous Relations, which could be handy information if you want to track it down – and I recommend you do, because I thought it was really excellent.

Perhaps the title has been changed because it isn’t instantly obvious what it means, at least to more modern eyes. It refers to the idea of ‘breakfast included’ or ‘baths included’ – whatever features and facilities might be mentioned by somebody advertising rooms. Because the setting is Aston Park, a palatial ancestral home that has recently opened up to ‘paying guests’. I.e. it’s a hotel retaining a veneer of titled pride.

Sir Charles d’Estray lives there with his new wife Barbara, known as Bunny, a fairly highbrow novelist. They haven’t been married long, but it’s long enough for Bunny to realise that an overhaul is needed to avoid bankruptcy – so she spearheads the paying guests venture. Both halves of the marriage have at least one child – Sir Charles has three, all horsey and disdainful, while Bunny’s daughter Lisa is the main reason she has agreed to a marriage that never particularly appealed. She wants stability. They have lived in France for a long time, poor and with an unsalubrious crowd, and seeing Lisa expertly resurrect a drunken man at the age of twelve has convinced Bunny to take her to English respectability.

All has been going well, with various fairly long-term paying guests – some relations of the d’Estrays and others strangers – when one of them is found dead. Elizabeth – one of the relatives; a cousin – has been poisoned.

A death in a crowded country pile is hardly a novelty for the murder mystery, but there were various things that made Murder Included stand out for me. One is the cleverness of the solution, which naturally I won’t spoil – but it does include a neat trick that I don’t remember seeing used anywhere else. But the main reason I loved this book is Cannan’s writing. Here’s the police detective, Price, arriving at the scene:

He had kept silence as a loutish local constable drove him through the October dusk over hills to wrought-iron gates, yew hedges, and Elizabethan gables. A doddering parasite of a butler had shown him into this large, over-crowded, shabby, so-called study, where Colonel Blimp, after nearly wringing his hand off, had turned ‘Susie – little woman’ out of a chair and expected him to sit down in it. Now, fussing about with cut-glass decanter and silver cigarette box, he was doing his best to turn an important conference into a cosy chat.

(Susie, for the avoidance of doubt, is a dog – and Colonel Blimp is a reference to the archetype, not a character in Murder Included.) Price has been sent in from Scotland Yard because the local police are too biased in favour of the respected family and the house’s servants, many of whom are related to police officers. And Price doesn’t have any time for this sort of set up. He has his prejudices about rural people, titled people, and more or less anybody who isn’t a left-wing urbanite like himself.

Cannan can be very funny, and she spears characters so mercilessly well. That means she can make us really like the people we’re meant to like, such as Bunny and Lisa. But others are definitely victims of her pen. I’m not sure if we are meant to actively dislike Price, and she apparently did use him for other murder mysteries, but he definitely isn’t the sympathetic detective hero that many novelists would use. Here he is questioning teenage Lisa…

‘I’m sure you’re a very clever little girl. I’m sure if anyone – even a grown-up person – annoyed you, you’d get the better of them.’

Lisa looked puzzled. ‘I’m not in the least clever. I’ve never got the better of anyone. Actually if someone annoys me I answer back, but I generally get the worst of it.’

‘And then do you brood over it and think out your revenge?’

‘Good gracious no! I’m not a character out of Wuthering Heights,’ said Lisa, laughing merrily.

Elizabeth isn’t the last person to die in the story – it would hardly be a classic murder mystery if she were. And perhaps the book is published a little late to truly be of peak Golden Age, though it’s up there with the best examples I’ve read in terms of economy, style, and plot.

In fact, I would give it that great accolade, which is all too rare of detective fiction: I’d have loved it just as much if there hadn’t been a murder at all.

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl – #NovNov Day 3

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Like Amsterdam that I read yesterday, Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl opens with a death.

Now your husband is also dead, Anna. Your husband, our husband. I would have liked him to lie next to you, but you have neighbours, a lawyer and a lady who was buried a couple of years ago.

The novella is narrated by Ellinor as one long address to Anna, the first wife of Ellinor’s husband Georg – he has just died, and Anna has been dead for four decades. Anna and Ellinor were friends, and Ellinor has now been stepmother to Anna’s twins for far longer than the seven years that Anna knew them. Ellinor is now 70. Her life is far from over, but many of her ties to the past are disappearing.

This novella was published in 2016 and translated from Danish by the author in 2017. It is certainly very short – 167 pages in my edition, but with a large font and enormous margins. In that space, Grøndahl covers an impressive amount. We start in the present, with Ellinor detailing the way that her stepsons and their families have reacted to Georg’s death. Or, moreso, how they have reacted to her reaction. Ellinor has sold the house even before the estate has been properly settled, and she is moving to a house in a disreputable part of town – the part that she came from.

Ellinor’s narrative wanders further back – to the friendship she and Anna had, as well as how she met the man she married to before Georg. And to the event that led to Anna’s death. Without losing a certain gentleness in her reminiscences, Ellinor slowly shows us that the relationships were more complicated than they might seem at first:

You must allow me to place that image here, Anna. We must look at it together; please don’t lower your eyes. The worst thing was to lose you, but the second worst thing was that you never got a chance to ask for my forgiveness. You don’t hear what I am saying, and that is the worst. You don’t remember; you are not. I speak to you only because I want to be something more than an accumulation of facts and their succession.

And Ellinor goes further back still – as though, having begun to explore the past, she can’t help go further still. To her own childhood, to her mother’s younger days – as told to her, of course. As she considers a new start in the present, Grøndahl shows us all the ways that Ellinor is tethered to events in her past and those that happened before she was born. As with his brilliant novella Virginia, the war shows the long shadows it can cast across generations.

This is the third book I’ve read by Grøndahl – two very short, and one quite long. From that sample size, I prefer him in novella form. He can get so much of life into a short span, told sparsely but in such a way that we sense the depth behind the brief accounts we hear. Ellinor’s story isn’t told in many words, but there is a whole life in Often I Am Happy.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan – #NovNov Day 2

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I bought Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan around the time I read Atonement – so probably around 2003, i.e. half my life ago, more or less. I’ve been up and down with McEwan, but have somehow never read this Booker prizewinner – and now I have, it is right up there with my favourites of his.

I had assumed – you can see why – that the novella took place in Amsterdam. While there are moments there, the full impact of the title isn’t clear for a while, and much of the novel takes place firmly on English soil. It opens with the funeral of Molly Lane, and conversation between two of her former lovers. Clive is a composer, writing a symphony for the millennium; Vernon is the editor of The Judge, a newspaper that has been slowly declining for a long time and may be on its last legs.

Vernon and Clive have more in common than their mutual lover (deceased). They have been friends for a long time, and have still a friendship that is equal parts affection, competition, and disdain. McEwan is very good at the spiky sort of witty unpleasantness of a certain sort of man, and both these men are in that category. He’s also good about creative processes, and I think he writes well about musical composition. I say ‘I think’, because I can’t do it and have no idea what composers would say, but it worked for me.

Creation apart, the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and deletions; amending again until the bar is right, and playing it once more on the piano. By midnight Clive had extended and written out in full the rising passage, and was starting on the great orchestral hiatus that would precede the sprawling change of key. By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

I shan’t say too much about the plot, but both men come up against moral quandaries – harming someone, or at least not preventing harm, in the name of their art/profession. McEwan’s spin on this is that neither of them really see the moral dilemma in their own lives, but only in each other’s. And neither is nice enough for this to be a learning experience. Amsterdam is perhaps a dark comedy. Or maybe a light tragedy.

So, I thought it was brilliant – and a page-turner too. The only reservation I have is what a blank space Molly is. Yes, she is dead before the book begins, but McEwan never really gives us any sense of her vitality before she died, or why so many men were attracted to her. Or maybe she is meant to remain an enigma.

Another great Novellas in November read – keep checking out Cathy and Rebecca‘s blogs to see what everyone else is reading!

A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson – #NovNov Day 1

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It’s time for Novellas in November – run by Cathy and Rebecca – and I have rather unwisely decided to try and read one every day in November. It seemed like a great idea a while ago. I’ve done my 25 Books in 25 Days a couple of times, and it’s not many more – so here’s hoping it’ll be a fun time.

There are a couple of caveats – I’m going to chat and do a book a day, not necessarily a novella, so expect some non-fiction and perhaps some short story collections, and other rule-breaking things. The other caveat is that my eyes/head haven’t fully recovered from the mystery illness I had last year – usually all is fine now, but sometimes I get periods when I’m dizzy or have sore eyes, and neither make reading very easy. If that happens, I might have to quietly give up or postpone the project.

ANYWAY that’s a lot of intro when really I should be writing a quick review of A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson. It was published in 1933 and I bought it in 2009. It has been one of those books I’m really keen to read, and kept wanting to save it for a special occasion – eventually, after more than a decade, I decided I should stop waiting and just read it. Coming in at 191 pages, it fits my loose definition of a novella that it should be under 200pp.

The title is a bit misleading – it is all very connected with the theatre, but the child of the title is arguably not the main character, and nor is she a child for very long. She is Amy Bowker, later known as Amy Ida, who had her big break after being spotted as an angelic infant – swept onto the stage, quickly falling into a world that her working-class, naive, mildly neglectful parents don’t truly understand. Her carefully learned morals no longer make sense in this new environment. Everything becomes about her ascendancy through the stage – an ascendancy that is very up and down, teetering in the right direction. Ferguson depicts it with dry humour and clear-eyed reality. ‘Reality’ isn’t a word one would usually associate with Ferguson. A Child in the Theatre is certainly more grounded than her more famous novels. While Ferguson will never write about the grimness of the gutter – she satirises that sort of outlook in a play in A Child in the Theatre, called ‘High Tea’ – she has also peopled this book with characters who don’t wander into fantastical realms, in the way her characters often would.

I said that Amy isn’t really the central character of the novel – that title must belong to Vivian Garson, later Vyvyan Garson. She is introduced as Amy’s schoolteacher – one with very unconventional views, particularly for the first decade of the 20th century…

And then it began: the rumour, staff-circulated with shocked, apologetic titter, that Miss Garson had explained, upon inquiry, what a mistress was to the elder girls. Yes. Nell Gwyn… or Mrs Fitzherbert.

Miss Langham took the splendid line that the rumour was incredible – and invited Miss Garson alone to tea to cheer herself.

‘Miss Langham! They’ve a right to know. I mean, they’ll be wives and probably mothers themselves one day, and what is the real difference between being a wife or mistress, when you get down to brass tacks?’

Miss Langham closed her eyes. She was never herself among brass tacks.

Vivian Garson is eventually fired after being seen having a port with someone in the theatre, where she has been to support Amy’s first professional role. She can’t find another teaching job – but she has become almost obsessed with the prodigious Amy, and decides to get a role herself in the theatre. While she doesn’t end up going where Amy is, as she intends, she does become swept up in the theatrical world. As Vyvyan, a more glamorous name, she becomes part of the chorus. And then becomes a bigger and bigger name.

Vyvyan and Amy have interlocked lives, but Ferguson cleverly keeps them apart in the book. Their careers overtake and imitate each other. It’s not a case of one having success and the other languishing – at times, one is feted and the other struggles. Then it will reverse. Vyvyan never stops thinking about Amy, seeing a deep bond between them; Amy, on the other hand, seems wilfully ignorant of her erstwhile teacher and well-wisher.

Ferguson’s novels are often delightfully unhinged. A Child in the Theatre is something different. It has a recognisable Ferguson style, but is much more about the intensity of a relationship between two women, even if they seldom meet or correspond. There are so many places where the story could have played out differently, but Ferguson never gives into the predictable. She hardly ever even states the unbreakable tie that shadows both of the women. She plays out their two careers, and the bond is invisibly in the background.

Ferguson obviously has a great time writing about the theatre, and presumably draws on her own experience as a stage actress in the years before the First World War. I found it very illuminating and convincing, and there are other fascinating period moments – such as brief sections on suffragette. And it is, of course, often very funny. I did enjoy this paragraph, which feels like it came from life:

Miss Anderson came of a local family whose trade beginnings success was swamping, and whose care for the deletion of the Howdlie accent was a religion. The Andersons did not say ‘By gum,’ but by-gummery was in their blood and outlook, and to Vyvyan her struggles to imitate a lady imitating an actress imitating a mill-hand were a feast for eye and ear.

Overall, I can see why this hasn’t had the wide audience of Ferguson’s tour de force novels. It is a quieter, subtler, more sedate book in some ways. It is, of course, also quite short. But I think it is no less an achievement than many of her delightfully histrionic books. A Child in the Theatre is Ferguson in a different mode, and one I think is certainly worth seeking out.