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When The Floods Came by Clare Morrall

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I am lucky enough to receive quite a few review books in the post. Some of these I snap up, some of these end up sitting in the living room for a while – and my housemate Melissa nabbed (with my full blessing and encouragement) a novel called When The Floods Came. Even better, she wrote me a review of it! Here it is – do make her feel welcome please.

When the Floods CameThere’s a certain trend in literature these days that plays on our insecurities about what we really know to be true. Everyone loves a good whodunnit where the killer is revealed at the end, or an action adventure where the good guys win; but the fact is that in real life juries disagree on who actually did it and no-one is quite sure who the good guys were in the first place. Reading this book on a day when I’m feeling disjointed and confused about whether the world makes any sense at all may have been a good thing – I’m not sure I could have stomached something with the quiet certainty of Narnia or the inevitable outcome of Pride and Prejudice.

I don’t know enough literary history to know whether authors have always exploited our insecurities; I do know that there are many variations of the dystopic novel on bookstore shelves at the moment, and this one fits firmly into that trend. There’s the introduction to a new world with the unsettling mix of familiar and unfamiliar; the gradual piecing together of how our world fell apart and this new world was built on it; the lack of clarity about who is really in control and whether or not they’re on the right side. This world has been shaped by many of the things we’re afraid of today: environmental change, market forces, uncontrollable disease, ill-considered government policies. The UK has been decimated by epidemic, quarantined by the outside world, flattened by storms, cut off from all but online contact with the rest of the world and the occasional aid package dropped by drone. It’s a world where education and high-level technology – our traditional markers of progress – provide no protection from danger and deprivation.

Against this backdrop live the Polenskys. The parents are transplants from an age we’re familiar with, activists who welcomed decisive action on climate change and fought corporate domination by Amazon (it’s rare for a novel to mention a company by name!) They are concerned about their children’s education, behaviour and values as much as their security. The kids are independent and ambitious, exploring freely across the territory around their home, working online for Chinese companies who pay them in education and medical security, happy to cooperate with government rules that their parents find stifling. They’re surprisingly well-rounded given their tiny social circle in a world where people are few and people under twenty are pretty much extinct. The family has their secret (which is hardly a secret given that they’ve no-one around them to hide it from): little daughter Lucia was a waif found by the roadside and adopted in place of their own little one who did not survive. She doesn’t know this but you get the feeling that she can feel it, and needs an increased level of reassurance that she really does belong.

Their secluded family life, in an area of Birmingham where no-one else lives anymore, is about to change as 22-year-old narrator Roza plans her wedding to a work colleague she’s never met in person. Hector is a part of Roza’s life that never fully materialises, appearing as a hologram or in voice messages and nervously awaited in the flesh; a joker who allows only occasional glimpses of his real self to show through. The wedding will involve a trip to Brighton for the whole family – a first outing in two decades to a place that really is inhabited.

But before any of this expected change can occur, the family is disrupted by the arrival of Aashay, a charmer who moves into a neighbouring flat that has lain empty for years and who refuses to provide an explanation for himself. He clearly holds some attraction for Roza and I thought at first that it would be one of those (*annoying*) novels where a hot guy who turns up out of the blue and disrupts all her safe and sensible plans. But that isn’t quite the way it goes, and the family’s relationship with Aashay continues to fluctuate between friendship and distrust.

Aashay opens the family’s eyes to a world where people meet and interact in person outside the rules. The prospect holds both interest and fear as they contemplate the possibility of stepping outside the safe boundaries they’ve lived within for so long. In fact, their trip out to a clandestine fair reveals pretty much what you would expect: there are both things to be gained and there are risks. For the most part, it’s unclear whether the people they encounter are to be trusted or not and what their motives are for being welcoming, but what does become apparent is that all these people are there for different reasons, and there is not one guiding force uniting them. It’s just another way of doing life in the harsh reality they live in. If there is danger in it, the danger ultimately is not due to the people they encounter there or the fact that the fair is technically illegal, but simply in being more exposed than they have been before.

There is a twist at the end; it’s neither predictable nor a major surprise. You get the feeling that the author could have chosen to end the book in one of several ways. Not all the questions are answered, but most of them probably didn’t need to be. I appreciated that there is some closure, that you do end up knowing who was and who wasn’t to be trusted. I’m not sure that’s a realistic outcome in this scenario, but it’s a nice change.

There’s one issue in particular addressed in this book that I’d like to look into further, around entitlement to children. It’s an unusual feature of this dystopia that infertility is wide-spread, and children are a rare commodity. Child abduction and trafficking flourish because of the longing many have for a family of their own rather than for the purpose of exploitation, which means that the attraction strangers show to little Lucia is concerning for a very different reason that it would be to us today.

In such a context, Lucia’s adoption by a family who already had children of their own walks a difficult line between the admirable, in rescuing and caring for an abandoned child, and the selfish, in taking for themselves what so many others wanted to have. When questions are raised about who Lucia’s birth family could be, the Polenskys’ instinct is to run, ostensibly to protect her, but also to protect themselves from being exposed as imposter parents and from losing her.

Although it isn’t yet so extreme, the place of children in our society has changed a lot over a few decades. It’s not that long since having children was a necessity to parents who needed to ensure an income and support for themselves in their old age, or simply an unavoidable reality in the days before contraception. Today, with reliable contraception and varied fertility treatments, children are seen as a lifestyle choice and as a luxury that many feel they cannot afford.

Neither of these approaches are completely unselfish – nor should they be, since children deserve to be wanted. Sometimes, though, the degree of choice we have over how, when and what children we will have can be unsettling. How do we ensure that we continue to value our children without turning them into a commodity? I haven’t reached any answers, nor does the novel provide any, but it is a question we would do well not to ignore if we want to make sure our children continue to be welcomed, wanted and treated with respect just as they are.

StuckinaBook’s almost-weekend miscellany

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Yes, it’s a Friday, but here are four things I wanted to share with you…

Books

1.) I was very excited to be a guest on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast talking about the wonderful Tove Jansson. You know how much I love Tove Jansson. Luckily Trevor does too – and it was a real blast to chat with him. AND so nice to be on a podcast that I don’t have to edit! Listen to it here, or via podcast apps etc.

2.) Quiz yourself on literary heroes over at OxfordWords… I had great fun making up names.

3.) It’s always wonderful when somebody else discovers Miss Hargreaves – especially when they write a review as enthusiastic and fab as Ali. Go and be persuaded!

4.) It’s French writing week at Vulpes Libris. Which has become curiously poignant with the terrible news from Nice. It feels odd, with that horror going on, to share a book review – but I am of that belief that maintaining the good things in life in the face of evil is as much a defence as most of us can manage. So, please don’t think we’re being deliberately insensitive by continuing the week – which finishes with Strange Gardens (Effroyables Jardins) by Michel Quint.

The Bird of Night by Susan Hill

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My theme of paperbacks-I-took-to-Edinburgh continues; on the way back, I read most of The Bird of Night (1972) by Susan Hill, and then finished it later that weekend.

The Bird of Night

I’ve read quite a few of Hill’s novellas over the years, though mostly the ones that have come out more recently – so it was interesting to see how she was writing 40+ years earlier in her career. There is even a very young, quite morose, picture of her on the back of my 1976 Penguin paperback, when Hill was presumably around my age. Unlike me, though, Hill had already published six novels by the time The Bird of Night hit the shelves.

The opening sets the tone of the novel:

Once, during the summer we spent at Kerneham, Francis locked himself in the church for a whole night. I found him there, at five o’clock the next morning, huddled up beneath the pulpit. It was cold. He could not feel safe anywhere else, he said, and then he began to weep, as so often happened, and shouted at me through his weeping, to understand the truth, that he deserved to be locked up, why would I not admit that and see to it, why had I driven him to do it for himself?

That is what I remembered this morning but I do not know why one bubble should break upon the surface rather than another. I should be content that I remember.

Francis is Francis Croft, a renowned and garlanded poet (though Hill wisely gives us, as far as I can recall, no lines of his poetry – his greatness is not tested on the page); the narrator is Harvey Lawson. He is describing their relationship from the distance of years – where he is the protector of Croft’s reputation. Or, rather, he keeps mostly schtum about Croft and insists that there are no papers to share (though there are). And his reflections take him back to their shared history: they meet incidentally, and develop an intense and restless friendship. It is intense chiefly because of Croft’s mental illness and descents into madness.

And this is the trajectory the novel follows. Somehow it is hard to describe the plot; it is more a portrait of a friendship (or more? It is never clear). But the faint structure matters little, and that is because of the strength of Hill’s writing here. I always think she’s at her best when she is looking in detail at the minutaie of relationships between individuals, or characters’ introspections and self-analysis (and how rare is that? Usually that’s where authors fall down). Here is Harvey describing looking after Francis during his most troubled times:

But the cycle of Francis’s madness was never a regular or predictable one. I had prepared myself for days, perhaps weeks, spent closeted in that dismal flat by candlelight, having to comfort and support him through his deepest apathy and depression. Certainly, for the next two days he stayed in bed or sat slouched in a chair looking as though he were half drugged, his eyes blank and all his attention turned inward upon himself. He hardly spoke to me and when he did answer a persistent question, it was with a monosyllable. He would not shave or eat or read, but only sat up once in a while and muttered to his own hands. “It’s all wrong, I tell you, it’s all wrong.” Once I caught him staring at himself in a mirror, his face very close to the glass. He looked puzzled. “I’m afraid we have not been introduced,” he said to his reflection. “I do not know your face. Should I know your face? Is this a good party?”

Much of the novella follows this pattern – a detailed, nuanced, and interesting depiction of mental health and a troubled friendship.

Of the many ways in which Hill writes fiction, I think this might be my favourite – something like an extended character study. I have read somewhere that Hill doesn’t rate this amongst her best novels, but I would put it up with In the Springtime of the Year as containing the best of her writing that I’ve read.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

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Delta WeddingAnother book from Shiny New Books Issue 10 – Delta Wedding (1945) by Eudora Welty. Truth be told, I came away not knowing quite what to make of it. I certainly prefer her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, but I think Delta Wedding is a tour de force of a different variety.

See how I battled to make sense of it over at Shiny New Books…

Delta Wedding might win the award for the most beautiful book I’ve read for this issue of Shiny New Books – as an object, I mean, though the term can also apply to the writing. Along with the other new reprints from Apollo (an imprint of Head of Zeus), the paper quality, choice of image, and interesting directional lines on the cover, come together to make a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Luckily the inside of the book lives up to the exterior.

More Was Lost by Eleanor Perenyi

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More Was LostYou know that I love an NYRB Classic, and lament how often their beautiful editions aren’t available this side of the pond – so it was lovely to get a review copy of More Was Lost by Eleanor Perenyi. It’s a poignant, warm, captivating memoir. But read the introduction last. Promise me you’ll read the introduction later.

Here’s the start of my review; read the rest over at Shiny New Books.

If you’re anything like me, you might be unfamiliar with the political dynamics of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to the Second World War. They form the backdrop to this involving and poignant memoir that manages to combine the personal and the global in an extraordinary way: More Was Lost, published in 1946 and now clothed in the loveliness of a NYRB Classics edition.

Literary Taste (how to form it) by Arnold Bennett

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I love that this sort of book was once published – and not only published but, as my copy suggests, owned by the 23rd Hartlepools Troop of Scouts. I do hope they enjoyed it. Who knows what journey it then went on before I picked it up in Edinburgh?

Literary Taste

Literary Taste: how to form it was published in 1909, though there was later a revised edition by Frank Swinnerton in the 1930s, according to Wikipedia. My copy is undated but is evidently from around 1909 – because it doesn’t have the extra section Swinnerton added (more on that later), and, well, because the book is obviously from that period. One of my specialist talents now is being able to date an early 20th-century hardback to within a few years. It doesn’t come in handy all that often.

Bennett had only been publishing novels for about a decade when this book came out, but they included big-hitters and his name was already at the forefront of literary reputation – though it would take a tumble later, when he became more or less synonymous with the stale Edwardians (thanks partly to Virginia Woolf’s influential essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’). I’ve yet to read any of his fiction, though my book group is doing The Old Wive’s Tale next month, but I’ve read quite a bit of his reviewing and journalism. He’s certainly got a passion for books, and the sort of determined I’m-just-like-you persona that is rivalled only by Jennifer Lawrence.

This book is addressed to the person who enjoys reading and wants to be well-read, but doesn’t quite know where to start. Bennett is almost absurdly precise in where you should start (it is, apparently, the essays of Charles Lamb), but before this he says things about literature that echo down the decades to get a rousing ‘amen!’ from all of us.

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been ‘presented the freedom’ of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t see; he can’t hear; he can’t feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.

Love it.

The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it i to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world.

Preach, Bennett!

Well, having said that, I think it can also just be to amuse the hours of leisure. I don’t think Bennett would think much of me, literature-wise. For one thing, he’s no big fan of the academic study of literature. For another, he’s not very impressed by people who don’t start with 16th-century literature – and, I’ll be honest, it’s been quite a while since I grabbed a copy of anything from before the first world war. Well, except Literary Taste, of course.

Bennett writes very interestingly about why a classic is a classic, who decides it, and how choices in reading can make or break one’s literary education. All of it feels fresh today, and are debates that still rage. But Bennett isn’t just talking hypotheticals: he wants to get down to brass tacks about actual books to read. Not only Charles Lamb (though emphatically him) – Bennett compiles a list of essential books, and prices them out as well. It’s nice that he is aware of financial limitations, and deliberately omits some authors whose works are not available in good, reasonable editions in 1909. It’s also so unexpected to see these sorts of balance sheets in a popular literary text.

This was apparently pretty influential. Wikipedia has kindly put them all in a list, which you can examine closely; it also includes books from the post-1909 period of literature that Swinnerton added in his 1937 revision. I am more comfortable ground in this years, of course, and it’s nice to see people like A.A. Milne included – and unexpected to see Stella Benson’s The Little World, which I haven’t heard of despite being (I suspect) one of relatively few people today to have read more than one book by Stella Benson. And there’s a Compton Mackenzie recommendation to follow up after my recent review of Poor Relations.

I’ll admit, Bennett’s choices leave me feeling like I have very little literary taste – and also wondering how he’d time to read all these authors and books by the time he was 42. As he concludes the list (which includes brilliantly sassy moments like ‘Names such as those of Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik are omitted intentionally’):

When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these three hundred and thirty-five volumes, with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, though to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.

Well, not yet, Arnold. And probably never. Somehow I find it more fascinating to read books from 1909 about how people formed literary taste – and this was certainly a great, interesting, unusual read.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

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Guys, I love Virginia Woolf. That ain’t no secret around these parts. And now I’ve read four novelisations of her life… or at least where she features. Those are The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, and now Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) by Priya Parmar.

Vanessa and Her Sister

The Cunningham novel remains my favourite, but all of them have been good in their different ways – and Parmar takes the different angle of framing this as the diary of Vanessa Bell, which opens thus:

Thursday 23 February 1905 – 46 Gordon Square
Bloomsbury, London (early)

I opened the great sash window onto the morning pink of the square and made a decision.

Yes. Today.

Last Thursday evening I sat in the corner like a sprouted potato, but this Thursday, I will speak up. I will speak out. Long ago, Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer. “You do not like words, Nessa,” she said. “They are not your creative nest.” Or maybe it orb? Or oeuf? My sister always describes me in rounded domestic hatching words. And invariably, I believe her. So, not a writer, I have run away from words like a child escaping a darkening wood, leaving my sharp burning sister in sole possession of the enchanted forest. But Virginia should not always be listened to. 

Alongside these ongoing entries there is a collage-style selection of letters from various members of the Bloomsbury Group – most amusingly between Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, the former trying to persuade the latter to marry Virginia Stephen. Spoilers: he does.

That does bring about one big factor in reading this novel, or any book about real people. The reading experience will depend a lot upon how much you know about the people in question. I read Vanessa and Her Sister for my book group, and some people there said they were forever flicking to the list of people at the beginning, and trying to work out how everybody was connected: I was in the lucky position that I already knew who everybody was, and what would happen to them, and even some nicknames (‘Goat’ for Virginia, for instance). I have rather immersed myself in Virginia and her circle, of course – as have many of you – and so I wasn’t surprised when Thoby died (for instance) and none of the novel held tension for me, per se.

This also meant that I had to read the book with parallel sets of people: the real individuals, and the characters that Parmar has created. She is keen to emphasise in her afterword that the novel and people are fictional – but, of course, one can’t help thinking constantly of the actual lives these people lived, and real events are constantly being referred to.

The focus of the novel, as both the title and the excerpt above suggest, is the relationship between sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. The novel, indeed, ends before Virginia’s first novel is published – so we see them as sisters learning their craft as painter and writer respectively, without their later reputations clouding the scene. And most prominent in Parmar’s handling is the possessiveness Virginia feels over Vanessa.

Much happens in Vanessa and Her Sister that would probably have been cut from a complete fiction, as distracting from the main narrative – the Dreadnaught Hoax, for instance – but it is Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell and Virginia’s resentment of this that occupy most of the book. Virginia and Clive begin an affair of the mind, and Vanessa tries to deal with the fragility of Virginia’s mental health alongside the indignity of Clive’s other affairs, and this betrayal.

Tbh, Virginia comes off terribly in this book. We don’t see her talent, and we certainly don’t see her humour – which is always evident in her writing, particularly her non-fiction and letters. She is chiefly a clingy, selfish, extremely weak person in this narrative. But, then, who is ever charmed by their own siblings? Love them, yes, deeply – but we see our nearest and dearest in clear ways that nobody else would, and speak of and to them in ways that nobody else could. The angle is perhaps realistic?

Oh, and Parmar certainly writes well and very engagingly. We can’t know how Vanessa would have written her diary, because she did not. What worked less well, to my mind, were letters between people who did write letters to each other. When we can read the letters Virginia, Roger Fry, or Lytton Strachey wrote, why would we want to read versions that Parmar has made up? (Incidentally, Roger Fry is easily the novel’s nicest character. I don’t know much about him, and have yet to read the biography of him that Virginia Woolf wrote.)

My most pressing question throughout was: had Parmar read Susan Sellers’ novel? So much of it seems to be inspired by the same things, though Sellers wrote in a much more Modernist way, that worked very well.

You’re spoiled for choice if you want to read novelisations of the Bloomsbury Group. I’d still always recommend The Hours as a first choice, and would probably choose a biography before a novelisation anyway, but Parmar has tackled a difficult topic and approach very capably. This is certainly an enjoyable read, but perhaps for people who already know the figures well, rather than those hoping to learn about the individuals involved.

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

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H.E. Bates was first introduced to me as the author of The Darling Buds of May, which I used to love on the TV, but I have never actually read anything by him. Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944) has been on my shelf for almost five years – indeed, I bought it one week after reading Lyn’s review at I Prefer Reading. Indeed, you can see my comment saying that I intended to keep an eye out for it.

Fair Stood

It joined those books I took to Edinburgh with me – and, in fact, I think I read all of this one on the train journey. It certainly begins dramatically. John Franklin is forced to crash-land while in a bomber plane over France, along with his fellow pilots. That happens in the first few pages, and was my introduction to the excellence of Bates’ writing:

The ground was too soft and the moon for a few seconds jolted wildly about the sky. The Wellington did a group loop, about three-quarters circle, and Franklin could not hold it. He was aware of being thrown violently forward and of his sickness knotting in his stomach and then rising and bursting and breaking acidly, with the smell of fuel and oil, in his mouth. He was aware of all the sound of the world smashing forward towards him, exploding his brain, and of his arms striking violently upward, free of the controls. For a moment he seemed to black-out entirely and then the moon, hurling towards him, full force smashed itself against his eyes and woke him brutally to a moment of crazy terror. In that moment he put up his hands. He felt his left arm strike something sharp, with sickening force, and then the moon break again in his face with bloody and glassy splinters in a moment beyond which there was no remembering.

Now, I usually prefer the crux of a novel to be about somebody forgetting to return a library book (for instance), but I thought that was really rather good – and the domestic reader is not ostracised at any point by war jargon or jingoism.

For some reason they are very keen to be in Occupied France rather than Unoccupied France. I couldn’t work out why that was (anybody?) – being around Nazis seems like a bad idea to me, but I’m sure there are reasons.

This all sets up the main section of the novel. Franklin is badly injured, but they have no choice but to get away from the wreck of their aircraft. Warily, he approaches a woman at a farmhouse. At the first one, she is terrified but asks him to leave. At the second, the woman is completely calm, and welcomes him and the others in for food and somewhere to rest. She and her family selflessly offer them somewhere to stay for as long as is needed – though it would mean they would certainly all be killed if it were discovered.

‘Calm’ is the word that is used over and over to describe Francoise, and it is very fitting. She is softly-spoken, unflappable, and sensible. Even when she and Franklin travel into the nearest town because his arm badly needs the attention of a doctor, Francoise refuses to panic or even (it seems) worry. She has a wisdom that can only be gained by implacably facing the unfaceable. (And a good line in simple bribery: ‘She smiled. “With a chicken you can do most things,” she said.”With two chickens you can do anything.”‘)

Lyn uses the word ‘understated’ in her review to describe Fair Stood the Wind For France, and it is very apt – and Francoise sets the tone. Her manner seeps into the novel. Terrifying and terrible things are happening, but Bates does not inject the novel with undue drama; instead, we witness these events in a kind of a quiet horror and share the simple humanity of the characters. Because, of course, Francoise and Franklin begin to fall in love. And they do that in a very understated way too. There are no overblown statements, but simply a meeting of minds and a shared understanding.

It’s a lovely novel, which combines the simple and the extraordinary beautifully. Thank you, Lyn, for bringing it to my attention – and this proves that books can wait a while on the shelf before they’re finally enjoyed!

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

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Seize the DayOne of the books I bought in the US in 2013 (in Alexandria, Virginia to be precise) was Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. I daresay I could have found a copy in England, but it felt right to buy one of the Big American Writers while in the US of A. And eventually I read it, and then there was quite a gap before I got around to writing this…

I went in with some trepidation. There are all sorts of those Big American Writers whom I’ve still not read. Faulkner, Hemingway… well, those are the only two I can think of right now that I’d put in the same intimidating category as Saul Bellow. But now I’m not quite sure why I put him into that category at all – Seize the Day was really good, and not at all off-putting or difficult or testosterone-filled in the way that I imagine those other two are. (Am I wrong about them too?)

Seize the Day (1956), for anybody else in my position of Bellow ignorance, is apparently considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century and was Bellow’s fourth novel. It’s also super short, which is a criterion that meant more to me than those other things – my copy weighs in at only 118 pages.

The hero – though he is far from that – is Wilhelm Adler, a failed actor who is in a mire of frustration. He is estranged from his wife and children and a disappointment to his elderly father – as his father is not reluctant to let him know. Wilhelm has moved into his father’s hotel, and is trying to reconnect with him, though it is not made easy. The focus of Seize the Day is a single, ordinary day: Wilhelm is going to have breakfast and an argument with his father, and is musing on the various failures of his life. We go in and out of his mind, reliving the past, seeing how everything went wrong by increments. Here, for example, is an overview of his dashed hopes of becoming a filmstar, after he was invited to a screen test:

But when Venice saw the results of the screen test he did a quick about-face. In those days Wilhelm had had a speech difficulty. It was not a true stammer, it was a thickness of speech which the sound track exaggerated. The film showed that he had many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable. When he shrugged, his hands drew up within his sleeves. The vault of his chest was huge, but he really didn’t look strong under the lights. Though he called himself a hippopotamus, he more nearly resembled a bear. His walk was bearlike, quick and rather soft, toes turned inward, as though his shoes were an impediment. About one thing Venice had been right. Wilhelm was photogenic, and his wavy blond hair (now graying) came out well, but after the test Venice refused to encourage him. He tried to get rid of him. He couldn’t afford to take a chance on him, he had made too many mistakes already and lived in fear of his powerful relatives.

More recently, he has lost much of his savings in an ill-fated financial dalliance with Dr Tamkin, a self-professed psychologist who is really fraudulently preying upon Wilhelm’s weak character. Yet even here, there are shades of grey. We aren’t seeing the conniving nemesis manipulating the vulnerable hero – it is more nuanced than that.

Most nuanced, and the section I most admired, is the conversation between Wilhelm and his father. If Wilhelm embodies the death of a certain sort of American dream more broadly, these exchanges look more closely at the universal desire to make one’s parents proud. Dr Adler is fairly harsh in his refusal to excuse his son, and is clearly disappointed in him, but Bellow manages to make us see that this is one conversation in a long line of similar conversations. Wilhelm is asking for pity where his father can only feel disgust at his self-pity. Each line of dialogue is believable while being a blow to the heart.

It’s hardly revelatory to say that I think Saul Bellow is a very good writer, but I had expected bravado and grandiose writing, rather than the subtlety and even delicacy – yet somehow a forthright delicacy – that he puts on the page. I’m last to the party, but I can certainly see myself returning to Bellow when in that sort of frame of mind.

Next stop, Faulkner?

Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie

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(To kick off: everybody in the UK, and around the world, is thinking about Brexit at the moment. I don’t think I have the heart to talk about it myself here, because it has broken my heart a little and – combined with our last general election – I no longer feel like I recognise or understand my own country. Victoria has written about it all brilliantly. And now I’m going to seek solace in books.)

Poor Relations

One of the books I read while I was in Edinburgh was by the appropriately-Scottish Compton Mackenzie. Like most people, I think all I knew about him was that he’d written Whisky Galore (which I haven’t read, though I’ve seen a bit of the film) and that his first name wasn’t Crompton (he often comes up when I’m looking for Richmal Crompton books by people who’ve made that error). It actually wasn’t Compton either, it was Edward, but let’s move on.

Well, according to the good people of Hutchinson’s “Pocket” Library – perhaps they put that in inverted commas because nobody has pockets big enough to fit this paperback – Poor Relations is a ‘famous novel’, and according to the Evening Standard, quoted on the cover, it is “Very witty and very amusing”. BOTH those things AT ONCE, people. (They aren’t wrong.)

The novel was Mackenzie’s seventh, published in 1919, and he went on to publish dozens of other novels before his death in 1972, including (I discover, on reading his Wikipedia article) one which is a sequel to Poor Relations. I also learn from Wikipedia that he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, as I did (floreat Magdalena!), and co-founded the SNP, as I did not.

I shall certainly look out for more by Mackenzie, as I loved Poor Relations. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t something as funny as this – his turn of phrase reminded me a lot of Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, and the whole novel has the sort of levity that characterises the best of early-20th-century insouciant fiction.

John did possess another cap, one that just before he left England he had bought about dusk in the Burlington Arcade, one that in the velvety bloom of a July evening had seemed worthy of summer skies and seas, but that in the glare of the following day had seemed more like the shreds of barbaric attire that are brought back by travellers from exotic lands to be taken out of a glass case and shown to visitors when the conversation is flagging on Sunday afternoons in the home counties.

The main character is a John Touchwood. He is – as the narrative often reminds us – a ‘successful romantic playwright and unsuccessful realistic novelist’, and has made something of a fortune at plays which the public love and the intelligentsia rather despise. That intelligentsia include his brother and his brother-in-law, one of whom is a critic who makes no bones about his own infinite literary superiority, the other of whom was recently a vicar but has decided to leave that life in order to become, himself, a playwright. Both are insufferably pompous and rude to longsuffering John, and both are hilarious to read about.

In every direction, Touchwood is besieged by ‘poor relations’ – and they are more than willing to impose. Whether it is that ex-vicar moving into his country house and (without permission) erecting a garden room in which to write, or his other in-laws ditching their children with him a refusing to panic when they are lost in a zoo, John’s patience is repeatedly tried.

The novel is quite episodic. There is something of a romance storyline thrown in, with an admirably unflappable woman whom he hires as his secretary and who insists on behaving professionally until… well, you can probably imagine that there is a happy conclusion. Before that, we move from relative to relative, often returning to the same ones again, but without much evolution in the way they treat John. Which makes sense – how many of us have sharply changing relationships with our nearest and dearest?

John himself is very likeable. He is put-upon but not weak, and he gives as could as he gets in determined ripostes and eloquent rebuttals – while still putting his hand in his pocket most of the time, despite the lack of gratitude he gets from all sides. He reminds me of characters that A.A. Milne might have created in his Punch stories, albeit perhaps slightly steelier when needed.

After reading Poor Relations, I kept coming across Mackenzie novels in secondhand bookshops – but I didn’t really know where to start, especially since he wrote so many. They were all chunky hardbacks, so I left them there rather than weigh down my luggage – but if anybody has any suggestions for others they’ve enjoyed, that would be very welcome. And I heartily recommend tracking down a copy of Poor Relations!