Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys

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When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for Canadian writers – but with the proviso that I wanted them to be writing about Canada. On the plane on the way home, I read one of my new purchases: Helen Humphreys’ brilliant memoir about her late brother, Nocturne. But I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her best-known novels, as they were set in the UK, and that wouldn’t quite scratch my Canadophile itch.

Thankfully, Debra very kindly stepped up! She posted Rabbit Foot Bill (2020) across the ocean to me – a novel by Humphreys that is firmly placed in Canada. Saskatchewan, to be precise.

The novel opens in 1947. The narrator is 12-year-old Leonard Flint – a misfit in his community, bullied at school and without any friends. Except for one: Rabbit Foot Bill.

The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

Rabbit Foot Bill has his nickname from one of his ways of earning money: he kills and cleans rabbits, then sells their feet for good luck. Leonard has amassed six of them from his friend, for free. There is a real friendship between the two of them, though it is unusual – more a sympathy of souls than anything based on conversation or even shared activities. Somehow, proximity between them is enough. There is no suggestion of anything sordid. They simply enliven each other, in a calm, undemonstrative way.

This all changes one day when there is a shocking, sudden murder. And there ends the first section.

We fast forward to 1959 and Leonard is now a young doctor, starting working at a psychiatric hospital. Many of the patients have lived there for decades, and some have even been born in this place. One of the staff estimates that half of the patients (who are more or less inmates) have no real mental health problems, but have become so conditioned by their surroundings that they would struggle to survive outside of the hospital anyway. Leonard’s job is to help the men get work and get used to the outside world, as well as monitoring them from a medical perspective.

And who should one of the patients be, but… Rabbit Foot Bill. Leonard is shocked, but perhaps the reader isn’t. They stumble back towards a form of friendship. Bill doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before penitentiary, which has clearly been torture, often literally. Leonard doesn’t quite know how to relate to this man who is his patient but was also a sort of silent mentor. Humphreys does this beautifully. She is so good at the strange nuances of their relationship, often deeply moving even when you aren’t exactly sure why.

I think there are moments when the human soul is visible, and what I was seeing when I looked over the side of the bed at Bill curled up on the floor, was a glimpse of his soul. And what is a soul? Something between the inherent nature of an individual, and their desires – a tangible truth and a reaching, all bound up together. Like the movement of the rabbit in flight, how it runs so fast that its feet don’t touch the ground.

You can see that Leonard is not your stereotypical doctor. And, indeed, he struggles in his role. There is little guidance and he is left to his own devices – and his own devices repeatedly take him back to Rabbit Foot Bill. It means that he scarcely gets to know the other patients, and he feels like an inconvenience whenever he does approach them. Humphreys is very good at conveying the feeling of being useless and unsure in a workplace, which perhaps many of us have experienced in different workplaces. She is great at uncertainty in general.

Uncertainty develops more and more, particularly as Leonard revisits the unhappiness of his childhood. There is no rug-pulled-out-from-under-our-feet moment – simply the gradual unravelling of a complex life, without the chance of firm conclusions. It’s all written in spare prose that felt tonally very different from Nocturne, and initially I wasn’t sure what I thought of it – but it wasn’t long until I was totally captivated. Humphreys doesn’t put a foot wrong in character, tone or style.

There are a couple of sub-plots I haven’t mentioned – one is Leonard’s affair with his boss’s wife (the unforgivably named Agatha Christiansen); the other, more substantial, is experiments with LSD as an attempt to cure patients. The doctors dose themselves to a lesser amount, in the name of science, and this was an interesting element of the novel – Humphreys does the near-impossible of narrating a drug trip without becoming tedious – though I’m not sure it entirely cohered with the main story.

What makes Rabbit Foot Bill succeed so well is Humphreys’ control of voice and the restraint she shows in almost everything – it’s a subtle novel, even with its shocking moments, and she keeps steady reins on everything she includes. It will stay with me, and I’d love to know if any other of her novels are set in Canada. I’d snap them up.

My Late Wives by Carter Dickson – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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Carter Dickson is the not-especially-hidden pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, and he wrote murder mysteries under both names and a handful more. He specialises in the locked-room mystery, which is one of my favourite tropes – though I have only read one of his books, his first novel It Walks By Night, which I thought was pretty poor. Thankfully, My Late Wives (1947) is a significant improvement on that novel, particularly in character and in writing style, and it has restored my hopes in pursuing him as a writer.

There’s quite a convoluted set up to the novel, so bear with me. It somehow makes sense on the page. We open with the speedy account of Roger Bewlay – a serial killer, who has murdered four wives in turn, while living under different aliases. None of their bodies have ever been discovered – despite there being a young woman who witnessed the final dead body through the window, watching Roger Bewlay casually lighting a cigarette.

Fast forward 11 years. A lawyer called Dennis Forster – an upstanding, stolid, not especially characterful character – is going to see his friend Beryl, a theatre producer. Her big theatre star, Bruce Ransom, is coming to the end of a long run and is eyeing up his new project. An anonymous script has come through the post about the life and crimes of Roger Bewlay – and a bet about the likelihood of the ending gets out of hand. Ransom vows to masquerade as Roger Bewlay – or, rather, as someone pretending not to be Roger Bewlay, but deliberately making a poor job of it. As part of this, he must woo a naive young woman of his choosing. As I said, it’s quite convolted, and it’s impressive that Dickson makes it very clear what’s going on.

Dennis wants to warn Scotland Yard, so that they at least won’t burst onto the scene and arrest Bruce Ransom – and that’s how series detective Sir Henry Merrivale (‘H.M.’) gets involved. It’s strange to encounter a series detective in his 17th outing, because so little is done to contextualise him. There’s really no reason for him to be involved in this story, and his disappears for long stretches of time. It often felt like he was fighting with Dennis in being our primary perspective and, particularly towards the end, seemed to only turn up to be needlessly cryptic about what he’d worked out.

From what I can gather, he is a jumble of affable eccentricities – with a bullish, toughman overlay, so he doesn’t feel too much like a P.G. Wodehouse character. E.g. ‘H.M., if the truth must be told, is a notoriously bad driver with an absentminded habit of leaving the handbrake on, or of sitting and thinking about something else while the car bears straight towards a stone wall.’ Or this explosion:

“I really am a meek sort of feller, my wench. Honest. I’m a man of mild language. I never use profantiy, God damn it. Otherwise, so help me! I’d have told him to take his ruddy file and stick it…

“What I mean is,” coughed H.M., suddenly remembering his high-mindedness and assuming an air of piety, “that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do; now was it?”

He is ebullient and larger-than-life and I’m sure Dickson had many longstanding readers who rejoiced and seeing him again. I quite enjoyed my time with him, but he didn’t really feel like he matched the tone of the novel or contributed much to its plot. And his insistence on calling Beryl ‘my wench’ was pretty tiring.

In the final quarter or so of the novel, My Late Wives does what so many novels of this genre seem to do – become suddenly an adventure novel. I prefer detective novels to maintain their even tone right to the end, keeping to the drama of the drawing room rather than car chases, overblown fights etc. But this one was so overblown that I could enjoy the theatrical silliness of it – and maybe Dickson was reflecting the theatrical lives of his main characters.

Dickson’s writing in My Late Wives is so much better than his debut novel. Witty, pacy, shrewd – and not overwritten in the way of my only other experience with him. I really enjoyed rattling through the plot, and particularly Beryl as a character. What I will say about the plot is that it is not subtle. I am terrible at working things out, and the solution to this one was pretty glaring. (This isn’t really a locked-rooom mystery, incidentally.) Some ‘clues’ stood out a mile and, to be honest, there just weren’t enough male characters in the book for Roger Bewlay’s true identity to be much of a mystery. One key ‘shock twist’ is more or less spelled out earlier in the novel, to the point where it didn’t even seem like it needed revealing. But there was one element that was hidden in plain sight and which totally passed me by, and I thought that was an excellent gamble.

Normally, a weak plot or an easy-to-guess plot would spoil this sort of novel for me, but there was something in the spirit and vim of My Late Wives that meant it didn’t much matter. I still really joyed this one, and I’m glad I’ve got a couple more on my shelves.

 

#138: Do We Care About Authors’ Personal Lives? and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne vs The Beautiful Visit

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Elizabeth Jane Howard, Brian Moore, and authors’ personal lives – welcome to episode 138!

In the first half of the episode, we do a question that Lindsey suggested: do we care about authors’ personal lives? It takes us to questions both of ethics and of privacy. In the second half, we pit The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore against The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you, even if I’m quite bad at replying quickly. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us. And you can support the podcast at Patreon.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Recommended! by Nicola Wilson
Hugh Walpole
J.B. Priestley
Sylvia Lynd
Clemence Dane
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Stasiland by Anna Funder
Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Virginia Woolf
Stella Gibbons
Enid Blyton
Neil Gaiman
Mary Lawson
The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman
Jane Austen
Dorothy L. Sayers
Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis
Echo by Violet Trefusis
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Elena Ferrante
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
J.K. Rowling
Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson
Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater
John Keats
Percy Shelley
Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
Invitiation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
R.C. Sherriff
The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan – #ABookADayInMay Day 10

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It’s been a busy day, but I finished an audiobook that I borrowed from the library: The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan. And boy, what a journey that novella is. I don’t have much time today, so we’re going to do a bullet point post…

  • Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories
  • I have a checkered history with McEwan, mostly positive – I love Black Dogs, Amsterdam, and Atonement. I like On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. I thought Saturday was pretty bad, and I haven’t anything he’s published since 2007.
  • The Cement Garden is narrated by Jack, aged 13 at the beginning, with an older sister, a younger sister, and a rather younger brother.
  • Their father dies – and, a year later, their mother dies. Worried about being taken into care, they decide to encase her body in cement in the cellar – and then begin dysfunctionally living without any supervision.
  • Jack’s voice is captivating and convincing, as a young man whose competing concerns make it hard for him to discern or prioritise between the everyday and the shocking.
  • I think there’s a very good novella in here about a family of children failing to cope in a terrible situation, and the gradual falling apart of their fragile ecosystem (the addition of Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, is very good at expanding their world and showing how horribly flawed it is).
  • But…
  • Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children? What do Jack’s unexplained incestuous desires add to the novella? To me, they just make it self-consciously abhorrent, and detract from a subtler novella hiding within it.
  • SO much of the book is preoccupied with bodily fluids, disgusting smells, masturbation – oh gosh, has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masturbation? It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.
  • It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why. There is the promise of a novelist here, but covered over by the belief that the only way to be real is to be sordid. The sordid is no more real than the beautiful, Ian.
  • Here is an excellent quote from Anne Tyler’s review in The New York Times: “these children are not – we trust – real people at all. They are so consistently unpleasant, unlikable and bitter that we can’t believe in them (even hardened criminals, after all, have some good points) and we certainly can’t identify with them. Jack’s eyes, through which we’re viewing this story, have an uncanny ability to settle upon the one distasteful detail in every scene, and to dwell on it, and to allow only that detail to pierce the cotton wool that insulates him. […] It seems weak-stomached to criticize a novel on these grounds, but if what we read makes us avert our gaze entirely, isn’t the purpose defeated?”

I probably haven’t read enough McEwan to do an Unnecessary Rankings! of him, but The Cement Garden would certainly be toying for bottom place.

The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway – #ABookADayInMay Day 9

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Ernest Hemingway is one of those big-name authors that I’ve never previously read. Truth be told, I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t like his books, and that’s only partly because he seems so unlikeable as a person. When I think toxic masculinity, I think Hemingway.

BUT at some point I must have bought The Torrents of Spring (1926) – and, according to the pencil mark inside, it cost me 30p, so potentially I’ve had it a long time. And look at that Penguin cover I had – which takes various themes of the novella and puts them together in quite an unsettling still life.

I should say from the outset that I probably didn’t pick a very good starting point for Hemingway. Having finished the novella and doing a little bit of reading around it, apparently The Torrents of Spring was written speedily as a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. I – like, I imagine, everyone alive today – haven’t read Dark Laughter. I know the name ‘Sherwood Anderson’ but wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about him or his work. So if The Torrents of Spring is a parody of a style, genre, and author that I am very unfamiliar with… I’m not sure I got out of it all that Hemingway put in.

So, what is the book about? Scripps O’Neil and Yogi Johnson are two men who work at a pump factory (I never truly worked out what a pump factory was). Scripps has a wife back home that he is estranged from, and rather suddenly has a bigamous marriage with a woman who is introduced and repeatedly referred to as an ‘elderly waitress’.

Along the way, the men (separately and together) muse on the ideal women, on fulfilment, on baked beans. Sometimes a simple narrative exposes unexpected psychological depth. Sometimes it’s just shallow. I’m afraid I didn’t get much depth from The Torrents of Spring but, as a satire, that may well have been deliberate.

For some periods, the prose reminded me of Truman Capote’s famous barb about Jack Kerouac: ‘This isn’t writing; it’s typing’. I was aware that Hemingway wrote sparse prose in short sentences, but then there’s something like this…

Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door that led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?

Writing that sparse and repetitive must be deliberate, and I daresay it is satirising something that Sherwood Anderson does. It doesn’t make for the most enjoyable reading, though I suppose it’s better than being very overwritten. Indeed, in the hands of another writer perhaps I’d have admired it. Here (again, perhaps because it’s a satire) it felt insincere.

Something more openly insincere, but which I did somehow enjoy, were the times that Hemingway broke the fourth wall. Quite often he addresses the reader, checking what they thought about the previous chapter and explaining various techniques and authorial choices:

I would like the reader to particularly remark the way the complicated threads of the lives of the various characters in the book are gathered together, and then held there in that memorable scene in the beanery. It was when I read this chapter aloud to him that Mr Dos Passos exclaimed, ‘Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece’.

It’s all a very bold choice for an author who had previously only published one volume of short stories. In that same year he would publish The Sun Also Rises which, of course, has had a more significant impact on literary history. I honestly have no idea if The Torrents of Spring succeeds on its aims, because I have no real sense of what its aims were.

So I hoped I had ticked off a major author with my choice today, but reading this particular book by Ernest Hemingway has really only raised more questions than it answers. Can any Hemingway aficiando tell me how similar this is to the rest of his oeuvre?

Alison by Lizzy Stewart – #ABookADayInMay Day 8

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It’s been quite a while since I read a graphic novel, and A Book A Day In May seemed like an excellent opportunity to remedy that. I bought Alison (2022) by Lizzy Stewart last year, on the basis of having seen it mentioned on various blogs and Instagram accounts. And also because I was in the lovely Caper bookshop in Oxford, and I don’t feel I can leave there empty handed.

The Alison of the title is Alison Porter, our narrator. In the opening pages, she tells us that she was born in 1958 in Bridport, Dorset – a town, incidentally, that some of my relatives live in. At 18, she marries a local boy a handful of years older than her. “He was nice. I was fast-tracking my route to an ordinary life. It made sense; an ordinary life seemed like the right thing to do.”

Before long, a much older man called Patrick meets her – and woos her away from her short-lived marriage.

I loved Patrick Kerr as a trapdoor out of my life long before I found I could love him as a man.

She has only experienced provincial mundanity. He represents bohemia, London, art – and she is swept away. But even in Stewart’s first illustrations of Patrick, he seems creepy – almost vampiric. We suspect long before Alison does that this will not be a happy ending.

Patrick affects to encourage Alison’s art, while also using her as a model for his own paintings, but he doesn’t seem to want her to have her own artistic voice. He insists on hours a day of drawing practice, trying to turn her into an imitator of his own style. Disillusionment seeps into Alison’s mindset. But she is encouraged and enheartened by a friend she makes – Tessa, a young Black sculptor. She is the only true friend that Alison meets in the maelstrom of artists who gather around Patrick and (deliberately or otherwise) make her feel ignorant, wrongly dressed, and inadequate.

Alison doesn’t end at the disillusion there. It covers many years, and it’s really about finding and flourishing in your own identity – though remaining clear-eyed. Her self-discovery doesn’t prevent her having problems, whether that be detachment from her parents or tragedies that befall people she loves. It is a very honest book – so realistic that I had to look people up to see if they were real (which they are not).

In a graphic novel more than anywhere else, the medium and presentation are fundamental. For the most part, Stewart uses simple line-drawings with (I think) watercolours that are somewhere between sepia and grey. You can see some examples in the Guardian review. There are pages of many frames, where they hold a conversation. Others have chunks of first person text alongside the drawings, and these are written in a beguiling manner with enough psychological depth to lend weight to the overall story. And then some spreads in the book are wholly illustration, and the only moments of colour in the book; in these, Stewart has more opportunity to play with style and format. It all works together very well.

I found Alison a moving graphic novel, dodging some platitudes and cliches even while telling a familiar story – the naive woman who is taken advantage of by a powerful man, and creativity that has to force its way through conventions. My only query is why the cover art is chosen – so different from the style found inside. Why wouldn’t they have used one of the many illustrations of Alison herself?

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the experience, and I won’t leave it so long before I pick up a graphic novel again.

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick – #ABookADayInMay Day 7

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I’m only buying 24 books this year, and so naturally I’m choosing them carefully. I knew I had to have The Odd Woman and the City (2015) by Vivian Gornick when Jacqui wrote a brilliant review in January (and it certainly didn’t hurt that it had been republished by Daunt Books, who have impeccable taste). Now I’ve read it, and Jacqui didn’t put me wrong – it’s brilliant.

The Odd Woman and the City has the subtitle ‘a memoir’, but it’s only a memoir in the loose sense that it’s non-fiction and in the first person. Don’t come here expecting to have anything you might traditionally expect in a memoir. Anything we learn about Gornick is picked up almost by accident, in amidst the things that she thinks are more important – or perhaps I should say, she recognises that things like friendship, city life, and literary appreciation are more significant markers of a person’s life than date of birth, list of publications etc. etc.

The Odd Woman and the City isn’t told in fragments in the way that Blue Postcards was – it feels more linear than that – but it is still built up impressionistically, weaving between reflections on friendship with a man she loves but brings out her negative side, to comments overheard as she walks through New York, to analyses of books she has loved from Middlemarch to Isabel Bolton to George Gissing’s The Odd Women that inspires Gornick’s title. Her main subjects are right there in the title: herself, and New York.

I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to ­arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center of the world and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby. 

At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.

I have never been to New York, and I don’t particularly want to. I am emphatically not a city person and I never intend to live in one again (my 13 years in a city as small as Oxford were proof that I wasn’t built for city living). Gornick even commits the cardinal sin of saying that the Bronx is ‘like a village’, which is the sort of thing people say about areas of cities if they have never lived in a village. And yet I loved reading about Gornick’s thoughts on city life – the people she knows, the people she overlaps with, the communities that have battled through modernity and the ones that have been lost. She scatters in amusing or unusual New York moments in between longer self-examinations, as though she is walking through the city, lost in contemplation, and occasionally interrupted by something significant in front of her.

On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need –’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’

She is excellent at immersing us in different worlds, whether that is particular streets or particular milieus. Some are more sustained – towards the end of the book there is a poignant recollection of seeing a friend delivering a Samuel Beckett monologue after having been severely invalided by a stroke. Some are only in passing, but Gornick is brilliant are using all of the elements to build up a picture of her life. Her sense of rhythm and pace – whether of sentences, paragraphs, or whole sections – is exhilirating.

She is remorseless is self-examination – though I did enjoy the contradiction of nearby sentences that ‘It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are’ and ‘No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am’. What an irony – to create a memoir while saying that she does not understand herself, and that you shouldn’t believe her even if she said she did. But somehow both those statements get to the heart of what The Odd Woman and the City is: more an exploration of the questions you could ask about your life, your friendships, your connections, your city, your home – and less about any concrete conclusions. Gornick resists writing the traditional, solid memoir on firm foundations, and the result is excellent. The book is somehow sturdy in its fluidity.

In conclusion, Jacqui was right, of course. This book is a marvel.

The Woods in Winter by Stella Gibbons – #ABookADayInMay Day 6

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Many people have spoken highly of Stella Gibbons’ The Woods in Winter (1970) – including when I ranked her novels. It comes very late in her body of work, though is almost entirely set several decades early than its publication date – and is one of several Gibbons’ novels that were republished by Dean Street Press. My parents kindly gave me a copy, and I finished it off for today’s book.

When I started the novel (when it was actually winter), I found the opening extremely promising. An unlikely friendship, of sorts, is struck up between middle-aged Ivy Gover and Helen Green, one of the people for whom Ivy is charwoman. Helen is gentle, intelligent, and moves in the literati without feeling fully confident there. Ivy, meanwhile, is fierce but fair, ruthlessly unsentimental (except perhaps about one of her three past husbands) and not very good at reading – which sends her to Helen when she gets a letter that she can’t decipher.

She [Helen] tried to get around her difficulties by murmuring the letter aloud.

“… Gardener, Elliot and Son, 24 High Street, Nethersham, Buckinghamshire… beg to inform you…”

“I don’t want nothing to do with beggars, Miss. Got no use for that sort. Bone-idle, mostly.”

“It doesn’t mean that kind of begging, Ivy. It’s just an old-fashioned way…” (here Helen was pulled up by remembering that, to Ivy, ‘old-fashioned’ would mean something quite different from what it would mean to herself) “… just a way of being polite.”

Ivy’s face said nothing and neither did her lips. But her eyes under the hat sent out an impatience to hear.

“… The late George Coatley, you great-uncle… deceased October the twenty-fourth… The cottage known as Catts Corner… vacant possession… leasehold… would be glad if you could call upon us at your convenience… They will then be pleased to hand over to you the key. And they sign themsevles your obedient servants.”

Helen looked up, tucking a plume of hair behind one ear with a slowly-moving finger.

“Reckon it’s a take-in?” Ivy demanded.

It is not a ‘take-in’, but you can see why Ivy is suspicious. Her life has not been one of good fortune or the generosity of man. This windfall is unexpected – and, once Ivy has visited the cottage, you’d be forgiven for seeing it as a mixed blessing. The home hasn’t been lived in for a while and it’s falling apart. It’s in the middle of nowhere, far from the city life she is used to. She would be totally isolated. And yet she craves all these things – in her no-nonsense, unsentimental way. She moves there.

And sadly we don’t see much more of Helen for the rest of the novel. I’ll confess I was disappointed that this unlikely pairing doesn’t get much space on the page – I thought it was very entertaining, as well as filled with potential to be eccentrically heartwarming. Instead, we are introduced to a whole host of other characters – Coral and Pearl Cartaret, who inexpertly run The Tea Shoppe; Angela Mordaunt, mourning her beau killed in war; the vicar; the Lord of the Manor. It all adds local colour, of course, but it also takes away from the central character, Ivy, who is left with a slightly predictable story about adopting an unloved dog – which does feel a bit of heavy-handed imagery.

I still enjoyed The Woods in Winter, but I had the problem I often have with Gibbons: she is so good at amusing, eccentric characters and the meeting of people who feel awkward with each other but grow into companionship. And then she ditches all that for a lukewarm romance story with some other characters, with very little at stake for the reader. (I’ve never got over how brilliant her novel Bassett started and how tedious it ended up. This one certainly isn’t that bad.)

Most readers seem to have fallen deeply for The Woods in Winter, and I wish I could have loved it more. It was an enjoyable novel but it could have been a really brilliant one – or perhaps I just mean that it could have been much more to my tastes. But I think I’m being a little more objective than that when I saw that the structure of The Woods in Winter doesn’t quite work – burgeoning out to a lot of characters in moments when narrowing in would have been more satisfactory. I’d certainly suggest you read Enbury Heath, Miss Linsey and Pa, or Westwood before you read this one – and, of course, Cold Comfort Farm. But I am quite an outlier on this one, so maybe try it and see for yourself!

#ABookADayInMay: Days 3, 4, 5

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I was away for the Bank Holiday weekend, which is why I’m behind with reviewing books for A Book A Day In May – but I did manage to keep reading, hopefully without being too antisocial to the friends I’d gone away with. Here are the three books I finished over the weekend…

Day 3: Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton

I hadn’t heard of Douglas Bruton when I picked up Blue Postcards (2021) in a secondhand bookshop in Portsmouth, but I was drawn by the nice design of the pocket-size Fairlight Modern – and, when I opened it, by the fact that it is written in 500 numbered vignettes. This fragmented style has been very successful for me in the past few years, and I’m always keen to try more. I can now firmly add Blue Postcards to the list of successes: I absolutely loved it.

  1. At the foot of the steps of Le Passage de la Sorciere in Montmartre sits a man in a blue suit, the sleeves of his jacket pushed up to his elbows, his shirt collar unfastened and his blue tie loose around his neck. He sits playing with three chased silver egg cups and a wooden ball the size of a pie. He asks passers-by if they would like to be on which egg cup the ball is under, after he does a dance of the cups, shifting the order and showing the wooden ball and then not showing it. It is a trick of course, but he does it so well it’s hard to see how. Once I saw him life all three cups and there was no ball at all; it has disappeared.

That is the first of the vignettes, and it sets the tone of the book, even if the man himself isn’t among the most significant figures (though it’s not the last we will see of him). I often find that novels that use this fragmentary style start with something more tonal than relevant – so we are immediately in a world of illusion, street artistry, customers, Paris and, of course, a stray mention of the word ‘blue’. They are all things that will become paramount in Bruton’s novella.

There are a trio of main characters, I would say: Yves Klein, Henri the tailor, and the narrator himself. I was aware of Yves Klein but would have struggled to tell you much about him – now I know that he was a French artist in the mid-20th century, famed for monochrome art – most usually in a vivid shade of blue that came to be known (and maybe patented, or maybe not) as International Klein Blue. As well as canvas paintings, he painted sculptures and other pieces in this same blue. His other famous art was a living piece – his claim that he could jump from a height and be temporarily suspended in the air.

Henri the tailor and the narrator are fictional people. Henri makes a suit for Klein, sewing blue thread into the pockets, as he does into every suit. He figures significantly in his role as tailor, but we don’t learn (or need to learn) much of him beyond this. And, about 50 years later, the narrator is interwoven with these two lives. He finds a blue postcard at a stall in Paris – an invitation that Klein sent out in 1952 to one of his exhibitions – and he returns often, hoping to discover more postcards, and also hoping to get to know the woman who sold him the postcard. All three of these men share an obsession with the colour blue.

It took me a moment or two to realise that we were working in two timelines. The paragraphs sometimes follow on from one another and sometimes jump between the main trio, or to some objective fact about the colour blue, or to a poetic image that is tangentially relevant. Like many of the books I’ve written in this form, it builds together a picture – using the contrasts and unexpected similarities between disparate paragraphs as a way of giving more depth to a story than is possible in something more linear.

As another example, here are a couple of paragraphs that segue between Henri and Klein – and also demonstrate the narrator/author’s intrusion, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the secret of his techniques:

109. Henri writes in his ledger when the suit is finished and when it has been collecgted. He puts the day and the date and how much he charged the customer. I should say that ‘once’ he wrote these things down but when I am talking about Henri I hope it is understood that we are in his time and not really in our time. If this was a film we might see Henri through a blue filter to show that his time is different.

110. On 15 October 1955, Yves Klein staged an exhibition of twenty of his monochrome paintings at the Club des Solitaires at 121 avenue de Villiers in Paris. Those that took the time to see the show responded with derision. One can imagine that the air was blue and loud was the sense of frustration at the waste of time it had been. But it was this strength of public response that attracted the attention of a critic called Pierre Restany who would go on to become the champion for Yves Klein’s work.

These authorial intrusions, particularly towards the end, give Blue Postcards a slightly postmodern twist – but the author is also like the man with his cups and ball in Montmartre, seeming to reveal his tricks as a way of getting us more deeply under his control.

I think Blue Postcards is a brilliant book. Bruton has clearly researched Klein in depth, and has written about him in a form that allows freedom to make something much looser and more interesting than a traditional biography. I’m very keen to read more Bruton – and to discover what else has been published in the Fairlight Moderns series.

Day 4: Stay True by Hua Hsu

I’m going to rattle through the next two books, but only because I want to go to bed(!) I finished the audiobook of Stay True (2022) by Hua Hsu while I was away – read by the author – and I thought it was excellent. For the first half of the memoir, it is about Hsu’s experience as an Asian American who is second-generation American to immigrant parents – and particularly how this shapes his experiences at college. It is also a memoir about self-discovery through music, through zines, through exploring alternative identities and forming connections with other people.

At college, he forms a slightly unlikely friendship with Ken – also Asian American, but that’s where the similarites end. Ken is in a frat, popular and athletic, and unshrinkingly enthusiastic about music and films that Hua considers far too mainstream. And yet Ken’s keenness to learn about Hua’s tastes is a driving force in them becoming dear friends – with plenty of in-jokes, one of which leads to the title of the book. They have the sort of intense closeness that can only happen in your late teens, freshly away from home and into the adult world.

I almost don’t want to tell you what the second half is about, because I think the memoir is extremely strong on what has already gone – and doesn’t need the tragedy that happens next to make it an exceptionally good book. But I must tell you. Ken is 20 when he is murdered in a senseless car-jacking – killed by a trio who are easily caught, making no effort to cover their tracks when they use Ken’s credit card at the mall. And so Stay True becomes about dealing with that shock and grief – but also a revealing demonstration of how ill-equipped 20-year-olds are to process any of this. There is a sharp honesty to Hsu’s telling of the days and weeks following the murder, which are disorienting, futile, and sometimes curiously ordinary.

Stay True isn’t the sort of grief memoir to try and make sense of these experiences, or draw any significant conclusions from them. It’s not really even an attempt to create a tribute to Ken – because a murder like this removes so much that should be part of a tribute to a life. But is a beautiful, thoroughly human book about many different things that cohere somehow perfectly.

Day 5: The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

I love L.P. Hartley, but The Brickfield (1954) is probably the weakest book I’ve read by him yet. Novelist Richard Mardick is relating his memoirs to a much younger man, Denys. The scenes between them are excellent, and there is an amusing badinage between them that is very hard to capture on the page – and Hartley is very good at the sarcastic exchanges that still contain a level of respect from secretary to Man of Letters. But I find framed narratives often kill the story dead, and this is no exception.

So much of what Richard relates about his childhood is scene-setting – telling us what he always did as a child, or the way that relatives always behaved, rather than making the story interesting with specificity. Once the scene is (finally!) set, it is more engaging – telling of his leaving school through possible ill-health and living with aunts in the countryside. But it often feels like a pale imitation of The Go-Between, and a waste of his excellent talents. And – shamefully – the blurb on my edition gives away a major plot point that happens in the final 50 pages.

The Happy Ending by Leo Walmsley – #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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The Happy Ending (1957) is the third book in Leo Walmsley’s trilogy of autobiographical novels – starting with Love in the Sun and followed (rather later) by The Golden Waterwheel. Clicking on those links will take you to my enthusiastic reviews, and I’ve read the whole trilogy within four years, which feels like breakneck speed considering how often I leave sequels until I’ve long forgotten the original.

As with the previous two books, the focus of the plot is on the unnamed narrator and his wife Dain buying and renovating a property. In Cornwall, it was a seaside shack. In Yorkshire, it was a bigger house with ambitions for a huge waterwheel. In The Happy Ending, they are in Wales – having bought, sight unseen, a sizeable property (and farmland) called Castle Druid that is in total disrepair. The Second World War has started and their Yorkshire home has been requisitioned, so this is something of an emergency plunge into the dark.

In the first book, it was just the couple (then unmarried, which ruffled feathers locally) and a kitten. By now, they have a brood of children who get added to by large numbers of evacuees. We have lost the intimacy of the original, which truly felt like an us-against-the-world situation. Here, it is more about a community – the growing community of the home, but also connecting with the local Welsh people who are pleasingly welcoming to these outsiders.

I love reading about renovations and discovering new features of an old property. The gradual repair and extension of Castle Druid – the discovery of the cellar, the introduction of a waterwheel, even the digging of drainage ditches – is written with the same steady fascination of the previous books, and I always love Walmsley’s wonder at what can be created by diligent work, imagination, and hope. He isn’t brilliant at all the tasks he undertakes, and I think it’s the realism of the arduous labour and unexpected obstacles that stop this seeming self-congratulatory and smug (unlike this book, which has the most angry comments of any review I’ve ever written!) His self-deprecation helps make the simple idealism seem relatable – because I loved the way he and Dain enivsage an idyllic life. Here’s Dain:

“You’re making me homesick. Of course I remember. It was all so lovely. But so was Adder Howe, and so is this, really. If we haven’t got the sea, we’ve got the country, and if we make the lake, it will be almost as good as having the cove at our front door, especially if we have fish in it. And couldn’t we have some sort of a boat? We can swim in it in summer, and if there’s a shallow end with a sandy beach, the little children can have it for paddling. It will be perfect if we do get the waterwheel. I think that as well as using it for electricity, we ought to grind flour with it. If we grew just a little wheat, we could grind that, and actually make our own bread from start to finish. We could make oatmeal anyway, so that we wouldn’t have to buy it in the shops. It would all be helping with the war.”

Having said all of this, The Happy Ending has a relationship at its heart, and it isn’t between the narrator and Dain. The most dominant character is Clow. He is a local man who can turn his hand to everything, and instantly offers to work on the renovations for a modest wage for as long as it takes. He insists that Castle Druid would, by rights, belong to him and his sister – but seems to hold that against fate, rather than against the couple.

The narrator takes him on, and Clow is indeed invaluable – but he also has a pretty negative relationship with him. Clow takes charge of everything, giving unsolicited advice and taking credit for anything that goes well. If somebody else comes up with an idea, he says that he could have told them that, if he’d asked. The narrator is frustrated by how often Clow takes the most significant moments in the renovation to himself – and there is something quite childlike but touching about the way the narrator and Dain keep the possibility of the cellar secret until they can unearth it without his gaze.

I was fascinated by the dynamic. I’m not saying there was anything homoerotic about it, or anything like that, but there is an intensity to the way the narrator and Clow clash and depend on each other that drives much of the emotion of the novel. I wonder how much Clow was based on a real person, and if Walmsley ever truly worked out what they thought of each other.

Like the other books in the series, The Happy Ending is peculiar for its total humourlessness. That’s not a negative thing – it’s just that humour isn’t one of the tools in Walmsley’s arsenal. Nor is it earnest – it’s just presenting what happened in a steady, clear-eyed, almost loving way. To be self-deprecating without trying to be funny about it is very unusual, and quite disarming.

I think this is probably my least favourite of the trilogy, partly because it doesn’t have the intense insularity of the earlier books that made them so vivid – and partly because the narrator hardly does any fiction writing in this book, which was a central theme of the others. But that’s only by comparison. I still loved it, and love this special trilogy. If you’ve not read them, I urge you to start.