Unlike Madame Bibi, I am getting behind with my reviewing – I am still managing to finish a book a day in May, and that’s the main thing, but telling you about them is another thing. My latest excuse is that I was away for the weekend (Eurovision!) and, let’s be honest, I’m sure you’re coping. Here are some quick thoughts about the latest three books, and fingers crossed I find time to be more thorough for the next ones.
Day 17 – The Tick of Two Clocks (2021) by Joan Bakewell
I don’t know how well known Joan Bakewell is outside the UK, but here she has been a mainstay for many decades. She is well-respected as a journalist and presenter, and has been in the House of Lords for a fair while. The Tick of Two Clocks is a memoir about deciding to downsize at the age of 87, and I loved reading about the experience of house-hunting and redesigning a new home to be more suitable for her older age – and saying goodbye to her large London home. I lap up anything about houses. Other parts of the book felt a bit hasty – like notes for a book – in which she skirts through any number of cultural and historical points, such as naming the Bloomsbury Group and then immediately moving on. But it was a quick, enjoyable read – even while dealing with the weighty topic of old age.
Day 18 – A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood
George is a man in his early 50s whose long-time partner, Jim, has died just before the novel opens. He tells people that Jim has moved away, rather than dealing with other people’s responses to his grief, and Isherwood has crafted a brilliant novel about that grief. What makes it so good is that grief is barely addressed – instead, it suffuses everything. George is in turns furious, melancholy, desperate, distracted. He wishes violent tortures on other people; he lusts after the inconsequential virility of younger men; he is alternately rude and reluctantly considerate to a woman who might provide a sort of friendship. At his work, as a university professor in literature, he seems to put aside his mourning – able to discuss an Aldous Huxley novel while analysing the behaviour of a roomful of students – but Isherwood shows with infinite subtlety how grief gets deep into every moment.
The style of A Single Man is quite different from other Isherwood novels I’ve read. It starts in quite an experimental way, with the ‘it’ of George’s body gradually becoming a ‘he’ – and then calms down into a style less experimental but more abstract and poetic than his early novels. It is a very powerful book, all the more powerful for its restraint. And has there ever been a more satisfactory image of a relationship than ‘Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of the other’s presence’.
Day 18 – One Sparkling Wave (1943) by Cynthia Asquith
If I’d read the wartime economy note in the front – that ‘There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times […] this novel would ordinarily make a book of about 352 pages’ – then I probably wouldn’t have tried to finish it for A Book A Day In May, even though I’d read half already.
Anyway, I absolutely loved Lady Cynthia Asquith’s previous novel – The Spring House – and was keen to read One Sparkling Wave, which is her second and final novel. The title comes from a William Barnes’ poem about a daughter’s beauty picking up where the mother’s leaves off – and there are three generations of women who fit the bill. Lady Glade is an older woman used to getting her way; Daphne is a sensible, middle-aged woman who isn’t used to this, and Lark is a flighty young woman given to theatrics romantically and professionally. These inter-generational dynamics are fraught with miscommunication and exasperation – but there is one woman who understands and sympathises with them all. Indeed, she is called on to perform this role constantly – a woman, the real heart of the novel even if not the community, who has the universal nickname ‘Available’. I will say that I never became used to a character being called Available, and it felt unnatural throughout.
The writing in One Sparkling Wave is good, but the plotting is a bit all over the place. The action takes a while to get going, as Available goes between three frustrated generations of this family (in consternation over Lark’s ill-advised romantic attachment) – and, in the second half of the novel, we are suddenly taken off on a cruise with a whole bunch of new characters seemingly introduced for comedy alone. Finally, we have the amusing situation of Daphne becoming an anonymous playwright and Lark the play’s anonymous star – with only Available knowing both mother’s and daughter’s secrets. It is fun and works well, but comes a bit too late in the novel.
I was surprised by how much less accomplished One Sparkling Wave felt than The Spring House – enjoyable to read, but with many fairly significant flaws in its structure. But I did like that the main character is a middle-aged woman who is settled into spinsterhood and remorselessly aware of her own plain looks. This paragraph is something I have often thought myself:
Not for the first time it occurred to Available how much suffering she herself had escaped by having no beauty to lose. What did it matter when her colourless hair turned white, and what had her unchiselled face to fear from time? She would never know the strain of that long agonizing rearguard action against an unrepellent enemy, whose attack might be so stealthy that his inevitable advance was almost imperceptible, and yet all the while you knew that insidiously but surely he was gaining ground, ground that could never be won back. How inextricably profit and loss were entangled in life!
Amen, Available! If you are on the hunt for Cynthia Asquith’s novels, please by aware how hard they are to track down – and I recommend concentrating your efforts on The Spring House rather than this one.