I am so proud of everybody for the response to my most recent post. You’ve really shown the positives that can come of people coming together on the Internet. It brings a tear to the eye! I’m excited about my Furrowed Middlebrow books arriving, and will certainly report back on what I think of the books.
But for today – let’s look at some books about reading. This has certainly my go-to comfort-genre of choice over the past year or so. I picked up quite a few in my trips to America, and I am endlessly entertained, informed, and charmed by them – thankfully there are plenty more to read on my shelves. As I often turn to them when I want episodic distraction, I don’t always get around to making proper reviews of them – so I’ve grouped three together for mini-reviews. Sound ok?
Why I Read (2014) by Wendy Lesser
The subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.
I would certainly need to re-read to familiarise myself afresh with her lines of argument, and this is closer to a scholarly book than most of the books-about-reading I enjoy, but is still certainly accessible to the non-scholar. Indeed, it would be infuriating in a scholarly context, because there are no footnotes or referencing
Why does she read? The whole book is, of course, building that answer – but I also liked (if did not agree with) the summing-up of sots of ‘I read […] for meaning, for sound, for voice – but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself’. I’d certainly recommend Why I Read – and it is also beautifully designed and printed – but somebody should have a word in her ear about how often one can get away with throwing in Henry James. I shall always wryly smile in recollection of ‘Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading, The Golden Bowl, but we cannot always be reading The Golden Bowl‘. Well quite.
The Art of the Novel (2015) edited by Nicholas Royle
I asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.
This was one of the books I read in Edinburgh, and it was entertaining – I was reading it more out of interest than seeking advice – but I did particularly like how each essayist ended their section with a list of books they admired or recommended. It was interesting how often Muriel Spark’s excellent book The Driver’s Seat came up.
The Whole Five Feet (2009) by Christopher R. Beha
The most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.
The great plants in question are the Harvard Classics – Beha decides that he will try to read all of the Harvard Classics in a year. They supposedly take up five feet on a shelf, hence the title. For those not au fait with the series (as I was not), it was created in 1909 to be the best literature, fiction and non-fiction, made available to the everyman, in 51 chunky volumes. It is quite an unusual collection of works; the blurb describes it as ‘from Plato to Dante, Shakespeare to Thoreau’, but it also includes some more idiosyncratic choices – like Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing by Richard Henry Dana, Jnr.
What makes this book so engrossing is how well Beha combines the reading experience with personal accounts of his own life – losses and illness chiefly – that accompany the year, writing with a empathetic dexterity that makes the reader warm to him and care deeply. The actual responses to the books become less important as The Whole Five Feet continues, and it ultimately seems more of an endurance test than an engagement with literature. In some ways, this is more memoir than a book-about-reading, but it is none the worse for that.
Such a flurry of blog posts recently! It’s become rather uncharacteristic, but I felt I had to post this one soon. It’s something of a call to action.
We are very lucky, in the bookish corner of the internet, that we are mostly immune from trolls and cruelty and unkind comments. Particularly blogs which focus on middlebrow literature or books from the mid-20th century – we are collaborative, interested, bookish folk who enjoy reading together and discovering new titles, as the response to the 1947 Club beautifully illustrated.
It thus surprised and upset me to see an attack on a new venture. That venture is the brainchild of Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow, along with Dean Street Press – they have recently reprinted books by Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Peck, and Frances Faviell. Any reprints are exciting to me – particularly when it’s an author like Rachel Ferguson, whose work I really like but which is impossible to track down. Nobody is better qualified, either in expertise or enthusiasm, than Scott. It’s all rather wonderful.
BUT – somebody going under the name of ‘Lally’ (though name may change?) has taken against it. She has gone systematically through all the Furrowed Middlebrow titles leaving 1 star reviews on Amazon. The reviews are all one or two lines, were mostly added on the day of publication, and is very unlikely that she has read any of the books. It’s spiteful, unkind, and unnecessary.
The publishers probably don’t feel they can address this – it might look petty. But I have no gains in this fight – so I can.
I’m not suggesting we go on a witch-hunt to unveil Lally. (It’s also, by the way, pointless down-rating or commenting on her reviews, as she then edits the reviews to remove the comment/down-rating.) But let’s fight negativity with positivity. If you’ve read any of the books in question (you can see them at the links above, or most of them on Amazon here) then please do rate and review them – I’ve done that for the one I have read, A Harp in Lowndes Square. We may be ambivalent about Amazon, but these ratings do matter. If any of the titles appeal, do what I’ve done and order them (some more Rachel Fergusons on the way!) – either ebooks or paperbacks.
Let’s not let spite win. Let’s turn this on its head. Let’s celebrate publishers who rescue these older titles, and show that enthusiasm on the internet can outweigh unkindness.
Phew, I feel like I’ve given a rallying speech! It was always kind of inevitable that my political voice would emerge in support of the middlebrow, wasn’t it?
UPDATE: the response has been wonderful – I knew all you lovely people would want to help support this initiative! I’m also pleased to say that many of Lally’s 1 star reviews have crept up to 2 star and 3 star reviews.
Thank you so much to everybody who participated – we got a really wonderful range of books from all over the world. You can see all the reviews I’ve found here – do let me know if I’ve missed your link. These clubs always show how wonderfully the blogosphere can come together and collaborate, giving an overview of a year that would take many months for any individual reader to achieve.
So, what can we conclude? As usual, there is enormous variety – but what struck me the most was how much the war loomed over everything. That sounds obvious, but I had wondered before if people would prefer to ignore WW2 when it was over – but, while some authors chose comedy or complex plots away from battle, many could not escape it. I’d love to know any conclusions that anybody else drew?
Which is one of the reasons for the next club year that Karen and I have chosen: it will be the 1951 Club. You’ve got til next April to prepare, and don’t worry – we’ll remind you before then!
Why 1951? We wanted to read the 1950s next, and 1951 seems an interesting year in literature AND it will be really intriguing to see if the war is still at the forefront of people’s minds – or had those four extra years made the difference?
Thanks again for joining in, and we hope you can next time too. And a million thanks to Karen for co-hosting so wonderfully (and making me feel very provincial, with the extremely international range she brought to the week!). It’s projects like this that make me love the blogosphere the most – when we all join in together, we can achieve lovely things :)
Firstly – sorry I’ve been a bit behind with adding links to the 1947 Club post, but do keep them coming! It’s great to see so many different books being covered – and you have until Sunday to finish reading and reviewing.
This one might be my last for the week, though, and it’s the one I’ve been reading most of the week: Black Bethlehem by Lettic Cooper, probably best known to most of us (if at all) for the novel The New House, which was both a Persephone title and a Virago Modern Classic. That’s certainly why I bought it whenever I did buy it, which I think might have been almost a decade ago. It’s nice that I’ve been able to do all my 1947 reading from books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years – though (and sorry to write what will probably be my final review for this club as a bit of a downer) I didn’t really like this one all that much…
The book is quite slim, but the font is tiny and I think it’s actually probably quite a long novel… or, indeed, ‘three long short stories’, as I discovered it was only towards the end of reading (from this not-super-positive contemporary review). Before that, I’d just got rather confused, trying to link the sections together – the only link, so far as I can tell, is the appearance of John Everyman in each part, and that is evidently a not-particularly-coded way of introducing an everyman throughout.
There is a brief Prologue in an air raid shelter in 1944 that wasn’t particularly promising – Cooper very much puts theoretical arguments in different characters’ mouths, without much attempt at verisimilitude. Thankfully it’s pretty brief, and then we’re into Part 1. This concerns Alan Marriott in the final months of the war, invalided out of fighting, and giving an account of his wartime experience as part of a radio broadcast. We then see his uncertainties about his future, how he’s trying to keep his family happy while still trying to understand his role in this bizarre new world – and he’s in the midst of something of a love triangle at the same time.
Part 1 was my favourite section. It’s quite odd to have a female writer describe the life of a soldier – particularly as so many writers were presumably available in 1947 who’d had firsthand experience; it’s in the third person, but very much trying to put across Alan’s views and memories. It’s that slight disjointedness that doesn’t quite ring true. Cooper is describing how she imagines soldiers lived and thought and reacted to the war – and she doesn’t quite hit authentic notes. I am a passionate believer that anybody should be allowed to write about pretty much anything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be completely successful. BUT this is still the best part of Black Bethlehem – engrossing and detailed.
Part 2 was my least favourite… We hop back to 1941, and a first person narrator whom we eventually learn is called Lucy. I spent most of this centre chunk of the book trying to work out who she was and how she related to anybody else in the first section, and perhaps I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d known from the outset that there were no connections… Lucy’s work in an office was quite interesting, but mostly this part (in diary format) felt a bit tedious, and I didn’t care enough about the characters to get overly bothered when she found herself in a love triangle. Though there was the odd moment that will stick with me – such as this depiction of being in a house when a bomb hits:
After the second stick the raid seemed to shift farther off, and we all got rather drowsy sitting by the hot fire. Mrs. Everyman murmured something about taking the children back to bed. The baby was asleep. Muriel was half asleep, leaning against her mother’s knee. Marta sat smoking and staring into the fire. I began to tell Peter a story. Suddenly there was a whistle, not a very long one, and the floor heaved under our feet. I knew, – I don’t know how, – that it was a stick coming towards us. I jumped up and leaned over Peter in a futile attempt to keep him safe. We could never decide afterwards whether it is true or not that you don’t hear the whistle if the bomb lands very near you. I don’t think I did hear it. Mrs Everyman said she did. The whole room seemed to come up through my stomach. There was a loud explosion, and then a long crash of falling stone. The black-out blew in, the glass cracked, the lights went out. The room was full of smoke and choking dust.
The third part is much shorter – about a boy called Simon (of all things) and him coming to terms with the arrival of his baby brother, in 1935. It was pretty good, but quite different from the tone of the rest of Black Bethlehem, and by that point I was rather tired of the whole thing.
So – not a 1947 book I’d recommend, though also one that I suspect others would enjoy, going into it eyes open. Maybe I read it too quickly to get it finished this week. And I’m still not sure why it’s called Black Bethlehem. Oh well – it still adds to a perspective of the year, which we wouldn’t get if we only read the best books of the year!
I’ve really enjoyed the serendipity (if that’s not too great a stretch) of finding 1947 books that have been on my shelves for ages, waiting to be read – and particularly glad when it happens to be a Persephone title. The Blank Wall has been on my radar since Persephone reprinted it in 2009 – and it was nice to finally read it.
The Blank Wall concerns Lucia Holley, left with her teenage daughter Bee, son David, and her father while her husband is away ‘somewhere in the Pacific’; left to manage the home and the emotional tangles of Bee, who fancies herself much mature than she is, and who is involved with an older man. (When I said ‘manage the home’, I should add that her maid Sibyl is also there – The Blank Wall is a fascinating depiction of the relationship between a white employer and a black maid in 1940s America; a loving and close relationship that is yet divided by the rules and restrictions of the period.)
After this, Lucia gets involved in some dodgy dealings – feeling out of her depth, she somehow manages to take control of the situation nonetheless. Despite a few rather doubtful moments, the novel does a good job of showing ordinary people experiencing extraordinary events – and, somehow, the power of that ordinariness overcoming everything. That is, Lucia always feels like she is experiencing real life – even when that life is far from normal reality. That shows an impressive strength in depiction of an everyday wife, mother, and daughter – who earns our affection along with our respect and our anxieties. In some ways, this is far more a domestic portrait than it is a thriller.
Oh, and the brief depiction of New York – where Lucia travels, from her lakeside rurality, to try to raise funds for blackmail (yes indeed!) – is equally interesting for its snapshot of the time and place.
I read it in its entirety on the plane back from Siena – well, probably with time sitting in the airport added on too – which gives you an indication of how quickly I was able to race through around 230 pages. It is certainly a page turner – maybe even a thriller, though there is nothing particularly tense or terrifying here. There is very little in the way of a mystery to solve (though the reader does wonder if the carpet will be pulled from under their feet). Raymond Chandler called her ‘the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)’ and particularly championed this one and – though his judgements are not always to my taste; he was no fan of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery – but in this case he has picked a charming writer. Her strengths perhaps lie more in character than in suspense (though I suspect suspense has taken more of centre stage in the decades since he made that pronouncement), but The Blank Wall was certainly an extremely entertaining way to pass a flight.
In 2011, probably around the time I was writing my doctoral chapter on Sylvia Townsend Warner, I madly bought up all her collections of short stories. And, let me tell you, some of them are not easy to find affordably – but I wanted to stock up my shelves. Fast forward five years and I’ve read… none of these collections. And possibly none of the stories, thinking about it. So hearty cheers for the 1947 Club sending The Museum of Cheats up my tbr pile – it’s absolutely brilliant.
Warner tends towards the brief, with short stories, which is exactly how I like them – presumably because she had to fill certain spaces in the New Yorker, and anywhere else that housed these. The only exception is the title story – and I’m actually going to gloss over that one, as I found it much my least favourite story in the collection; it is on the model of The Corner That Held Them (a Warner novel I found intolerably dull, though it has many devoted fans), concentrating on the history of a building rather than the details of people’s everyday lives.
But, setting that one aside, Warner has an expertly observant eye. I was reminded a little of Katherine Mansfield – in terms of the searing through to the centre of a matter, and the potentially life-altering moments among the banal; indeed, how the banal can be life-changing. We see a hostess curious about the unkind caricature she finds on a notepad by the telephone; a woman show paintings to an uninterested visitor; a returning solider discover his books have been given away. The most striking story, perhaps, is ‘Step This Way’ – about abortion.
Warner opens each story with confident finesse, immediately taking the reader into her unusual view of the world. Here is the opening of ‘A Pigeon’:
The two large windows of the room on the first floor looked straight out into the trees of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A pigeon was cooing among the greenery. Tears rushed into Irene’s eyes. She had a sentimental character, and how sad it was, really, a girl of her age, as innocent as that bird, and all by herself, sitting opposite a solicitor called Mr. Winander and having an interview about her divorce.
The balance of that sentence and those clauses, ending on the word ‘divorce’, strikes me as so cleverly done. And she is not simply concerned with drama; I love the way Warner finds a gentle humour in the curious patterns of normal speech. This is in the same story:
“Mrs. Johnston, you must forgive me asking this. Are you quite sure that you wish to go forward with a divorce?”
“Oh yes, definitely. I never was one to stay where I wasn’t welcome.”
I suppose we have to acknowledge that these stories were probably written and published in 1946, at least some of them, but the collection certainly came out in 1947 – and, yes, the war looms large. I wasn’t expecting it to, actually. It seemed the sort of thing that would pass Warner by in her concentration on the minute. Having said that, she still looks at the war as it affects individual relationships and minds – nothing so dramatic as a world stage. This, from ‘To Come So Far’, is representative of the way Warner uses the war for her own quirky angle:
She was worn out with getting on her husband’s nerves, being alternately too strong or too weak – like tea. If he were a returned soldier, all this would be natural. Magazines were full of stories about manly nerves unable to face the return of civilian life or articles on How to Re-Acclimatise Your Man, and newspapers were full of accounts of murdered wives. But throughout the war Arnold had been an indispensable civilian, jamming enemy broadcasts, and throughout the war they had got on together perfectly, complaining of the discomforts of living and giving each other expensive presents because to-morrow we die. Now, in 1946, Arnold was mysteriously as indispensable as ever and they hadn’t died.
She has such a great turn of phrase. It’s there throughout Lolly Willowes and, twenty years later, her style remains unmistakably hers – and these sorts of unexpected stylistic quirks seem to me to be even more appropriate in a short story. It’s the sort of context that can carry the weight of something slightly bizarre, without it distorting a full-length character study. For example, in ‘Story of a Patron’ – all about the discovery of a ‘primitive artist’ – she includes this:
Mr. Haberdone asked to see more examples of Mr. Rump’s art, and Mr. Rump produced a portrait of Mrs. Rump. It was a remarkable likeness, quite as accurate as the portrait of the cactus but more dispassionate, as though Mrs. Rump had been grown by a rival seedsman.
One of my favourite stories in the collection was also one of the most curious – ‘The House with the Lilacs’. Most of the stories in The Museum of Cheats capture moments in ordinary lives, showing how extraordinary they can seem to the people experiencing them. In ‘The House with the Lilacs’, the reader is left uncertain – Mrs Finch reminds her family of a house they looked at when choosing where to live, and recalls it in perfect detail, but not where it was. The rest of the family know that neither they nor she have ever seen such a house. And that is more or less where we leave it. Even more intriguingly, in a letter Warner wrote to William Maxwell, she describes Mrs Finch as ‘my only essay at a self-portrait; her conversation and her ineffability’.
Sadly, The Museum of Cheats is pretty scarce – though more copies seem to be available in the US than in England; despite living in Dorset, Warner’s stories always found a more appreciative audience in New York. I can only imagine that her other stories would be equally rewardingly tracked down (if not as appropriate for the 1947 Club). I’ll certainly be making sure I read more from my Warner shelf before too long.
I’ll use this page to collect the reviews across the blogosphere – I’ll try to track them down, but do leave links (or, indeed, reviews) in the comment section :)
Just in case this all means nothing to you – Karen and I are hosting a week where we ask everybody to read and review books published in 1947, to get an overview of the year’s publishing. Everything is welcome – novels, stories, plays, non-fiction, whatever – published anywhere in the world, in any language.
(I’ll hunt for new reviews, but will also have a section for older reviews if you send ’em to me :))
The 1947 Club kicks off tomorrow (for the uninitiated – across the blogosphere we’re encouraging everybody to read and review any book published anywhere in the world in 1947, to get an overview of the year collaboratively) – so I thought I ought to make sure the GBBO recap happens first. After the somewhat confusing theme last week, we’re back to tradition with… dessert week!
And… we don’t get any Mel and Sue bit before the titles. This is rather disconcerting, and a Taste of Things To Come. Instead, we get our brief recap, that young girl eating raspberries in the opening titles (I hope she’s now doing shopping centre appearances and signing autographs; she is the most recognisable silent TV child since that lass who pointed at the blackboard next to the terrifying doll in the old BBC test card), and a bevvy of bakers putting on aprons.
Andrew assures us that he is ‘a desserts man through and through’, and the interviewer somehow engineers a way to get him to say ‘down’, as it is one of the best words to hear in a Northern Irish accent. Jane, meanwhile, says of the other contestants “I love them all, but” and I stop listening because I don’t want to be the witness to the death threats that will inevitably follow.
“I shall bathe in the blood of my nemeses.”
Nah, but I love Jane. My favourites are Benjamina, Selasi, Candice, and Jane – but Jane is the only one of those I’d feel able to talk to in person, as the others are so young and cool and collected that I’d just giggle and cry. I hope Jane takes this in the warm-hearted spirit with which it was intended; essentially, I can see us at a coffee morning together.
Candice points out that, with so few bakers left in the tent, ‘there really is nowhere to hide’, which suggests that hitherto she has evaded eviction solely by folding herself up into the fridge.
“Candice? Come out of that cupboard” – Selasi
Tom talks about The Curse of the Star Baker – apparently Mel and Sue’s efforts the other week to make that an accepted benchmark have succeeded. What has ALSO succeeded – segue much? – is the attendance at Blazer Watch. All four are lined up for inspection, and you can tell by his face that Paul knows he hasn’t brought the necessaries.
Verdict: loving Sue and Mel’s blazers and colour combos. That’s not really a blazer, Mary, but we’ll let it slide because it’s colourful and you’ve made an effort. Mr Hollywood – see me later.
The signature challenge for this week is a roulade – of the sponge variety, rather than meringue, and known as the Swiss roll to many of us. I have made a rather bad apricot and brandy snap roulade in my time, so I feel fully equipped to assess. What I will say is that this follows the trend of the series of doing relatively simple challenges. (Incidentally, I made Viennese whirls this weekend, and they were very tasty though my piping is very much not up to scratch.)
Benjamina confides in the listener that it is another week, while Selasi adds the helpful addendum that we are getting closer to the final. Having sorted out the rudimentaries of time, we’re ready to see some roulades being made.
Mary is in the Garden of Instruction, letting us know that a roulade should have a nice spiral (which is a step better than these segments usually are, as Mezza and Pezza tend only to advise that the baked good should be ‘perfect’). Yes, she just moves her finger round in a circle, rather than a spiral, but we’ll take it.
Baby steps.
Andrew is playing to his strengths – having ginger hair – by introducing orange stripes in the sponge of his bake, a technique which has a French (?) term that I am not going to attempt to type down. It’s a nice idea.
He’s possibly the only baker who’s doing very much out of the ordinary, in terms of technique and decoration. Selasi, for instance, is making a nice lemon and strawberry roulade with the rather unambitious addition of piped cream. ‘Fresh’ notes Colouring Pencils Man, doing the best he can without a lot to excite.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it’d be delish.
Mary advises that she wants no crack at all in the roulade – the sort of request one need only make if one has already been offered a hash brownie.
Slightly more adventurously, Tom is intending to put the ingredients for millionaire’s shortbread in his roulade – possibly (I wouldn’t like to guess) in a veiled comment about Paul’s decision to pursue money rather than honour in choosing Channel 4 over the BBC. Look, it’s possible. Also possible is that Paul detects this subtle jab, and this is why he seems uncertain about the introduction of a biscuity-type-thing (technical term) to a roulade. I couldn’t say. (NB: I do realise none of this is possible.) (Or is it?) (No.)
Benjamina is making a pina colada roulade, replete with cocktail umbrella, but this is all white noise for Mary B until she hears the word ‘rum’. Which earns Benjamina (hurrah!) this excellent Mary Berry wink.
Oh, I love her.
Candice seems to be relegated this challenge to being the baker who tells us what the time is, and puts things in and out of ovens as a marker of said time. Which is a shame, because her raspberry/passion fruit/white chocolate roulade sounds entirely delicious. Those flavours are making me feel desperately hungry. I shouldn’t recap before dinner.
We head over to Tom, who is starting again – much to Mel’s consternation in her usual doom-laden voiceover. He seems pretty chirpy about it himself, waggling an eyebrow around with aplomb. Meanwhile, Jane is busy taking the controversy of the week – rolling her roulade the wrong way! Gasps a-plenty. Colouring Pencils Man makes sly digs at this decision, with his illustration that preempts the lack of a complete spiral in Jane’s roulade.
This is the colouring pencils version of a subtweet.
Apparently she does this to get more slices out of it – which seems rather unnecessary in the context of the competition, but I do also like that she’s sticking to tried and true techniques.
Various curds are made – Selasi makes a victory grimace at the camera when Benjamina enjoys his – and then Mel seems entirely overcome by mere proximity to Selasi. We see bakers spread cream or curd or sauce in their roulades, and there is much talk of overfilling. Let me tell you, I wildly overfilled that one roulade I made. And then – rolling! They all make the rolling look pretty easy. It’s almost a relief to see Tom spread chocolate with the (sorry Tom) lack of finesse that I would anticipate in my own efforts.
Relatable content.
A little orchestra, and a montage of people doing absurd things like filling raspberries with cream, tell us that the challenge is over.
Jane’s roulade looks delicious – but, as Nostradamus with the colouring pencils predicted, it does not have a full spiral.
Paul isn’t sure about the alcohol, but Mary enjoys the mixture, and looks delightfully self-aware about her boozehound status.
Benjamina does OK, though her fake coconut is too fake, and Tom is told he should have added cream. Over at Casa de Candice, I enjoy once more the amount of effort she puts into the presentation of her bakes – an effort which, as always, appears to be entirely overlooked by the judges (especially since Selasi gets fits of giddy appreciation from Mary after dumping his roulade on a photo frame – presumably the closest thing he had to hand at the time). But just look at this.
There is a roulade there somewhere, promise.
Andrew comes out on top, though, despite his swirl being rather collapsed because of the softness of the filling. Selasi does well, but doesn’t provide enough lemon curd for Mary “loves a lemon” Berry.
Aaaand it’s Technical Challenge time! The bakers are being asked to make… a marjolaine. Sure sure. My response was not unlike Candice’s:
“Marj-a-which-what?”
Turns out it’s a French layered gateaux, with cream and meringue and ganache, and nobody knows anything about it. Tom immediately claims that the only part of it he’s made before is ganache – I absolutely refuse to believe that he’s never made meringue before.
Andrew pronounces the ‘l’ in almonds so he swoops to the bottom of my rankings.
They start off with a dacquoise – which Mary Berry describes as a ‘glorified meringue’ – and we whisk (ahahaha) through the initial stages so quickly that I can only assume it’s quite easy. They make what they can of a ‘to pipe or not to pipe’ moment. It’s the Hamlet/Magritte mash-up we’ve all long been waiting for.
In the blink of an eye, everybody seems to have done more or less everything except compiling and decorating, and two excellent things happen. Firstly, this little lad:
and, secondly, Mel delivers her intro to Whither Baking? by popping out from behind a tree, squirrel-like.
This takes us to a history of praline that you’d know about if you read OxfordWords. Sue matches her personal best with awkward interviews; the poor French folk she quizzes don’t seem to get her sense of humour at all. At one point she starts mocking the French accent. Let’s go back to the tent, shall we?
The bakers are removing their dacquoise (whatever the plural is) from the oven, and make an impressive job of taking them out of tins without them crumbling into piles of piped dreams. (I am on FIRE with my pipe jokes today, n’est-ce pas?) Andrew’s does crack, but Mel promises to keep the secret to the grave – apparently unaware that they are being filmed.
My favourite moment of the episode is when Andrew describes the desired look as ‘like a Viennetta but posher’, and Sue replies ‘Doesn’t get posher than a Viennetta, my darling’. Do people have Viennetta outside of the UK? Will that translate? It’s a wonderful cultural benchmark.
How should one pipe the chocolate around the top? This has all the marks of the Arbitrary Judging Factor that will prove all-important.
Some nuts and whatnot are scattered in intriguing lines on top, and everybody is finished. I’m super impressed by this line up. It all looks extremely good – and very similar – to me.
Mary and Paul make the most of the judging – and yes, of course, the chocolate piping comes up. They manage to say ‘layers’ a lot, even though everybody has done them correctly and there is nothing to say. Paul is left with such evident nonsense as “though it’s crisp, there’s a nice chew to it, and the chew melts”.
From last to first… Selasi, Tom, Jane, Benjamina, Candice, and Andrew. Well done Ando. He described himself as ‘chuffed’ in the outside interview bit, which I hope will baffle some non-British viewers.
Time for the Showstopper Challenge, you say? Well, you’re not wrong, give or take the judges and presenters sitting around the table and telling us that pretty much everybody is in trouble, Mel and Sue included. Heck, even I might be in trouble. Anyway – they will be making mousse cakes. Yum!
Mary and Paul describe what the texture of the mousse should be like (combined, oddly, with shots of Benjamina cutting apples and Candice zesting a lemon) and Mary warns that it should not be too set, whatever that means. Back in the tent, I’m already very impressed with Jane’s fleur-de-lis. I have spent much of the episode wondering if this had initially been French week, and then changed to dessert week, and these do nothing to dispel that suspicion.
Oo-la-la!
Apparently these are created in ‘decor paste’, which sounds disgusting, but is actually just cake mixture with egg whites instead of the whole egg. Whatever it is, sign me up. Only partly cos Colouring Pencils Man gets to dig out his non-beige-scale crayons.
YES PLEASE.
Less enticing, to me, are Benjamina’s and Tom’s – as they’re both using apples. I like an apple, but it’s always at the bottom of my list when it comes to dessert ingredient choices.
Mel makes dire warnings about the time mousse will take to set. Selasi intends to use the freezer for a bit, and Mary thinks this is an excellent idea. “It adds an extra chill” she notes to Selasi, who must surely have known what a freezer does. Mary is still remembering the days of being sent down to the ice house, of course.
I learnt something in this episode about gelatin. Apparently it comes in sheets. Who knew? (It’s also making me wonder if all the mousse I’ve eaten in restaurants over the years has secretly not been suitable for vegetarians… oh well!) Here’s Jane tossing some sheets into her bowl.
Guess what? Too much gelatin is TERRIBLE. Too little gelatin is TERRIBLE. ‘Twas ever thus in the Bake Off tent.
Tom is piping mousse into his hipster sandwiches (don’t ask) and doesn’t seem to be put off by Paul’s elaborately horrified reaction to the news. “You’re PIPING mousse?” he asks incredulously…
“Yeppers,” grins Tom, blithely unconcerned.
Candice is making a million different components to her delicious-sounding desserts. (Let’s call them desserts, sure.)
Though it is nothing compared to the five mousses Jane is making, and she seems to be constantly surrounded by enormous – albeit apparently empty – baking bowls. These sit precariously over her desk, and she appears to be counting them over and over in the early stages of some sort of breakdown.
Tom has brought the best equipment to the tent: this handheld fan.
It’s not even battery-operated. He has to turn a handle to generate the fan. It can’t possibly be any more efficient than wafting those bizarre paddle-fans around. But I am a gent who loves a fan, and recently made the middle-aged purchase of a battery-operated fan in Marks and Spencer – as well as quite genuinely considering my enormous fan as among the best investments I have ever made.
Some delicious-looking chocolate and raspberry mousses are going around the tent. And then we cut from Andrew’s mint mousse (a subtle hint of green to it) to Selasi’s mint mousse… erm…
Frankly I’m surprised the tent wasn’t evacuated immediately.
Jane is worried about whether or not she’s included gelatin in all her mousses. Since this is never mentioned again, I can only assume she did. There is much talk of whether or not mousses will set in time, and some very delicious looking concoctions coming out of freezers and fridges… speaking of, is this a secret fridge we haven’t seen before?
Perhaps they were wary after #bingate?
Let’s have an update from Selasi’s radioactive bunker before we finish:
I’m pretty sure I saw this on a Goosebumps cover once.
And they’re done! Some very good mousses. Mary describes Jane’s as ‘startling’, though apparently that’s meant to be a compliment – and Paul responds with ‘that’s mousse!’, as though waking from a dream and discovering anew where he is. Mary applauds the ‘moussiness’. Let’s take a moment to applaud her fleur-de-lis cakes.
Selasi’s mousses are too big, and the layers are in the wrong order, so we are told – but his passion fruit mousses get a thumbs up.
Mmmmm
I can’t begin to understand what’s going on with Candice’s display. The mousses seem to be floating on jelly or something in wine glasses. I feel like Damien Hirst maybe had a hand in it all.
Benjamina’s look bad but taste amazing (definitely the right way around, IMO), and Paul seems almost reluctant to concede it. Having said that, his concession includes ‘more mousse-like’, which is rather damning with faint praise.
Tom’s hipster sandwiches help us learn that piping mousse doesn’t work. Live and learn. Doing rather better, though, is Andrew and his Ferris wheels of mousse.
Fun fact: did you know that Ferris wheel is eponymous?
We get the post-judging debate, but I can’t remember an episode in any series where it was more obvious (from the comments and general tone) who was going to win and who was going to lose.
Star Baker is…
And, going home, is…
Hope you’re enjoyed Dessert Week, y’all! Come back next time for… whatever happens then. And now I’m going to immerse myself in 1947 books for the #1947Club…
I’m a bit behind with reviewing, to put it mildly, but I did read Roger Fry (1940) for the biography phase of Heavenali’s Woolfalong. She suggested a biography of Woolf, or Orlando or Flush, but I piped up with this one – the only actual biography that Woolf wrote, as opposed to those novels she tagged ‘a biography’ onto the end of. Sorry that it’s come so long after the months in question, but I promise I read it during the relevant period!
It feels quite odd, to read a biography by a woman who has been so very biographied – particularly one that was published only a year before she died. How would she write about someone? What precedent would she leave for those who would write about her? Well, it wasn’t quite what I expected. And I’m not quite sure how to write about it.
Firstly – who was Roger Fry? In some ways, he would have made an excellent character in a Woolf novel. He was a painter whose paintings never quite lived up to his hopes – and certainly never got the acclaim he sought. On the other hand, he was an art critic of great repute, whose writings of criticism were popular and respected by many – while also being castigated with horror by the old guard. Indeed, Kenneth Clark said that Fry was ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin … In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry’. Alongside this, his personal life was fraught. His wife Helen became mentally ill not long into their marriage, and moved to an asylum for the rest of her life. Fry had affairs with several women, including Virginia Woolf’s sister, but Woolf does not spend much time on these – perhaps unsurprisingly. He was a kind, damaged man, not content with his lot or his achievements – but seems to have been warmer, less difficult to love, than some of the Bloomsbury Group.
My favourite section, I think, was the chapter on the Post-Impressionists. This was mostly fun in the oh-so-subtle pleasure Woolf takes in showing the people who railed against the ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition that Fry organised in 1910 (it is argued that Woolf’s famous words ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ refers, at least in part, to this exhibition). Fry apparently coined the term post-impressionist, and he was the first to introduce Manet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and more to the British public – and most of them did not take well to it. It is astonishing, reading this chapter, to see how much vitriol there was in the press, in essays, even in letters to Fry; it damaged his standing in academic circles. It is difficult to imagine anybody caring that much about art today. But even by the time Woolf was writing, in 1940, these artists had become accepted parts of the European artistic landscape.
I went into the book expecting him to appear as something like a character in a Woolf novel, built up piece by piece, description by description, until the complex composite appeared. It wasn’t quite like that. She is fairly linear in her depiction of Fry, concentrating chiefly (in his later life) on his professional successes and failures, but Woolf does describe some of the less concrete elements of Fry’s life. I think what surprised me was her style in doing so. Here, for example, she is writing about Helen’s illness:
The end of his work in America coincided with a far more terrible conclusion. When, three years before, Sir George Savage had told him that in his opinion Helen Fry’s illness was hopeless, he had refused to believe him. He had gone from doctor to doctor; he had tried every method that held out the least chance of success. It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion. In the hope that his wife could still live with him he had built a house from his own design near Guildford. In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there. But the illness increased, and in that year he was forced, for the children’s sake, to give up the battle. It had lasted, with intervals of rare happiness, since 1898. “You have certainly fought hard to help your wife, and shown a devotion I have never seen equalled”, Dr Head wrote to him in November 1910. “Unfortunately the disease has beaten us.”
She is not quite the impersonal biographer, but she is very far from the novelist here. You can’t imagine a sentence as prosaic as ‘In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there’ appearing in her fiction. Yet you can’t imagine ‘It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion’ being found in the work of a modern day biographer. Throughout Roger Fry, Woolf’s writing falls a little between two stools. It is never bad writing, of course – she would be incapable of that – but it feels rather held back. Woolf wears the hat of the biographer a little uneasily, if she is not aping or exaggerating it in her fiction.
Woolf also makes no mention of her personal relationship with Fry. Stranger still, she refers to Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell throughout without acknowledging her connection with them – and at one point even refers to ‘Virginia Woolf’ as though it were a different person. She is trying on a persona which cannot find its reflection in the cast of characters she is depicting – awkwardly, when those characters are real and include herself.
So, is this a good biography? Yes – rich and informative and sensitive. And normally I don’t much care about the style of the biographer – indeed, I don’t want it to intrude on the reading experience, or get in the way of the subject. But any reader of Roger Fry today is likely to be more interested in Woolf than Fry, and this is a strange piece of that jigsaw puzzle. Yes, a good biography – but not quite what one expects from Woolf, and disconcerting to see her talent hide in the shadows of her own book. A fascinating read, and a curious footnote to my understanding of Woolf’s life and style.
The subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.
I asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.
The most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.
