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Cheerful Weather for the Wedding: Readalong

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Right, books at the ready!  I’ve re-read Cheerful Weather for the Wedding ahead of seeing the new film (which I’ll be doing in one week’s time, at The Phoenix in Oxford, which has a one-night-only screening) and I’m opening up this post for discussion.  It won’t be one of my usual reviews, because I’ve actually already reviewed the novel (novella?) here, but more of a hub for conversation about it.

But I’ll give you a quick overview of my thoughts on re-reading Cheerful Weather for the Wedding.  It might be worth popping over and reading my thoughts in 2009, if you’d be so kind… basically I loved every moment, particularly the hilarious secondary characters.  Most memorable were mad Nellie (who spouts irrelevant conversations she has had with the plumber, while addressing the tea-tray) and brothers Tom and Robert, who come to a contretemps over the latter’s unorthodox emerald socks.  (I’m assuming that everyone knows the basic plot by this point – Dolly is uncertainly preparing for her wedding to Owen, with a houseful of eccentrics helping and hindering her – and a bottle of rum within reach.)

This time around, I found the novella a little less amusing, but mostly because I already knew where all my favourite bits were coming.  It is testament to Strachey’s humour that Nellie, Tom, and Robert have remained firmly fixed in my mind, down to their individual lines (“Put your head in a bag” still makes me grin) but inevitably surreal moments of humour heavily rely upon novelty.  Her cast of near-grotesques were still a delight, but not quite as much the second time around.

This, however, left me more able to appreciate other aspects to Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (and not just that sublime cover – I kept closing the book just to stare at it for a bit longer.)  I’d appreciated Strachey as a comic writer, but hadn’t really noticed how gorgeous some of her other writing is.  Her propensity to describe every character’s eyes when they arrive on the scene was slightly unnerving, but depictions of buildings and countryside were really lovely, and contrasted well with the surreal descriptions of people.  I couldn’t resist this excerpt…

Dolly’s white-enamelled Edwardian bedroom jutted out over the kitchen garden, in a sort of little turret.  It was at the top of the house, and reached by a steep and narrow stairway.  Coming in at the bedroom door, one might easily imagine one’s self to be up in the air in a balloon, or else inside a lighthouse.  One saw only dazzling white light coming in at the big windows on all sides, and through the bow window directly opposite the door shone the pale blue sea-bay of Malton.

This morning the countryside, through each and all of the big windows, was bright golden in the sunlight.  On the sides of a little hill quite close, beyond the railway cutting, grew a thick hazel copse.  To-day, with the sun shining through its bare branches, this seemed to be not trees at all, but merely folds of something diaphanous floating along the surface of the hillside – a flock of brown vapours, here dark, there light – lit up in the sunshine.

And all over the countryside this morning the bare copses looked like these brown gossamer scarves; they billowed over the hillsides, here opalescent, there obscure – according to the sunlight and shadow among their bronze and gauzy foldings.
It can’t just be me who wants to move in immediately?  But I couldn’t leave you without a moment of Strachey’s wonderfully wicked humour…

“How are your lectures going?” asked Kitty of Joseph, a kind of desperate intenseness in her voice and face.  This was her style of the moment with the male sex.
And now over to you!  If you post a review of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding during the week, please pop a link in the comments (I’ll probably do a round-up later in the week) but I’d also like this to be a place for discussion – do reply to each other’s comments, and I’ll join in, and it’ll be FUN.  I won’t post for another two or three days, to give everyone a chance to see this.

Here are some questions to start things going:

Did you enjoy the novel, for starters!?

What do you think Julia Strachey was trying to achieve – what sort of book was she trying to write?

Why do you think Strachey made it so short?  Would it have worked as a longer novel?

Who were your favourite characters?

If you’re re-reading, how did you opinion change this time?

How do you think it will translate to cinema?

House of Silence – Linda Gillard

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The aftermath of A Century of Books definitely seems to be a sudden dash towards 21st century books, particularly those I’ve had on hold for a while.  And few books have hovered more determinedly around my consciousness than Linda Gillard’s House of Silence (2011).  I’d read her first three novels, and enjoyed them all – one to this-is-incredibly-I-love-it standards. Although I’ve never met Linda Gillard, we used to be in the same book discussion list, and we’re friends on Facebook, so I’m putting this kind gift in Reading Presently.  Them’s my rules.  And it’s not even the first time she’s given me a copy of the book.

As many of you will know, Linda Gillard is a runaway Kindle bestseller – we’re talking 30,000 copies of House of Silence here, let alone her other Kindle titles – and has a devoted audience around the world.  And then, lolloping up behind them, wearing too many belts and clearly thinking the calculator in his hand is a mobile phone, comes me.  I don’t have a Kindle, or any of the other-ereaders-are-available.  I don’t want one even a tiny bit.  The only advantage they have, in fact – and this has quite genuinely appeared on my mental pros/cons list – is access to Linda Gillard’s novels.

Yes, yes, I know.  Kindle-for-PC.  I downloaded it; Linda kindly gave me a download of House of Silence.  I tried to read it.  I read the first page every now and then… and got no further.  It was like standing outside a bank vault and not having the combination – because, try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to read an e-book.  It took me months to read the one my good friend had written, which even thanked me in it.

And then – praise be! – Linda published it as a POD paperback, and sent me a review copy of that.  Huzzah!  I read it, and, dear reader, it was good.  Which is just as well, after all that.

(Incidentally, isn’t the cover gorgeous?  Unlike most self-published authors, Linda Gillard goes the extra mile with design and aesthetic, paying a designer for this beautiful look.  What a shame that easily her best novel, A Lifetime Burning, should also have easily her worst cover… but the new cover for the Kindle edition is beautiful.)

House of Silence has been advertised as Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm – both traits I could identify, and which can definitely be no bad thing – but, more than that, it felt reliably Gillard to me.  In terms of period, event, and even genre Linda is versatile – but certain ingredients stand out as characteristic.  The most dominant of these is the feel of the book and the characters, vague as that sounds – with Linda Gillard’s novels, you know you’re going to get strong emotions and passionate people, trammeled by everyday experience, but refusing to lie entirely dormant…

Guinevere (known as Gwen) works alongside actors, in the wardrobe department.  Already, I’m sold – you might know how I love books which feature actors, and Gillard uses Gwen’s knowledge of fabrics to ingenious effect as the novel progresses.  It is in this role that she first meets Alfie, who is having some issues with his breeches… one thing leads to another, and they end up dating.  Which, in turn, leads to her spending Christmas with him and his family, at beautiful old Creake Hall in Norfolk.  He’s a little reluctant for her to join him, but eventually is persuaded.

And what a group of eccentrics they find!  Chief amongst them – although appearing very little on the scene – is Alfie’s mother Rae.  Her mind is wandering, and her grasp of time and people is never strong, but she is still regularly producing her series of children’s books about Tom Dickon Harry.  This little chap has made her famous – and is based on Alfie himself, who (in turn) rose to notoriety after appearing in a documentary about the books when he was eighteen.  The irony is, Alfie explains, that he actually grew up with his father, who divorced Rae – and now he only sees his sister and half-sisters once a year, at Christmas.

Those sisters include loveable, scatty Hattie – who is forever making quilts, and babbling away without any real sense of boundaries.  Viv is less open, but still welcomes Gwen into the family.  Throw in two visiting sisters, in varying states of life-collapse, and things are bound to be interesting.  And Creake Hall is a wonderful setting.  Who doesn’t love an Elizabethan manor for a mysterious, slightly unsettling novel?  What makes it most unsettling is that the reader shares with Gwen the feeling that Alfie isn’t telling us everything… why was he so reluctant for her to stay?  What secrets does he hide?  What secrets are hidden by the house of silence?

Gwen is rather younger than Linda Gillard’s previous heroines – she is in her mid-twenties, in fact.  At no point does she come across as that young, though – which I thought might be a failing on Gillard’s part, until I got to the part where she asked Marek to guess her age:

“Older than you look.  Younger than you sound.”
One of the main aspects of Gwen’s personality is that she has had to be old before her years.  I suppose that’s what happens when you lose your entire family during adolescence – to drugs, alcohol, and AIDS – including finding your mother, dead, on Christmas.  Yup, Gwen has had it tough.

Oh, and Marek, you ask?  He is the gardener, known as Tyler to everyone (because every gardener has been known as that) and is warm, a good listener – he used to be a psychiatrist – and generally a safe place for Gwen to retreat.  He’s also (I quote Lyn’s review) ‘gorgeous, sexy, and irresistible.’  I have mental blocks for big age gaps with fictional couples – even Emma and Mr. Knightley is a combination which makes me wince a bit – so I’ll sidestep any potential entanglements here, and leave those quandaries to your imagination.  I will say that Marek reminds me a lot of Gavin from Gillard’s Emotional Geology, that he lives in a windmill (far from the only thing which reminded me of Jonathan Creek), and plays the cello – which led me in the direction of this beautiful piece.  It’s Rachmaninov’s Sonata in G Minor, Opus 17 No.3, Andante.  (Sorry, I have no idea how one is supposed to phrase the titles to music.)

I refuse to give any more of the plot away.  I’ve left it all deliberately vague, because it’s the sort of novel where the plot does matter.  One of the reasons it reminded me of an episode of Jonathan Creek, in the best possible way, is that you’re desperate to find out what happens – and twist upon twist come, so that everything is plausible but unguessable.  The ‘reveals’ are entirely consistent with people’s behaviour throughout the novel; character is never sacrificed to plot – indeed, the explanation of what has happened is also an explanation of why the members of this family are the way they are.

It’s all beautifully, addictively done.  I stayed up far later than I should, devouring the second half of the novel. I was unsure, in the beginning, whether it would match up to the compulsive quality of Gillard’s other novels, and the action doesn’t quite kick into gear until we’ve arrived at Creake Hall – but, after that, hold onto your hats.  It is a mark of Linda Gillard’s talent that her novels are both versatile and identifiable – no matter what genre she turns her hand to (and I believe her next was a paranormal romance), I would be able to recognise a Gillard at a hundred paces.  And, although she may be one of the new wave of successful Kindle authors, thank Heaven she’s found a way for the Kindless to enjoy the dizzying, thoughtful extravaganza that is House of Silence.



Others who got Stuck in this Book:


“House of Silence is a compulsively readable book. It’s a compelling story of family secrets & lies, set in a crumbling Elizabethan mansion at Christmas in the depths of a freezing Norfolk winter.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading


“This is a book in which it is so easy to lose yourself, at once emotional and mysterious.” – Margaret, Books Please


“The book has romance, bubbling away underneath, it deals with mental health issues so effectively and considerately that you actually do not realise until reflecting back on the book.” – Jo, The Book Jotter

The Winter Book – 99p!

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Another rush by – just wanted to pass on the info (to which Linda Gillard alerted me) that Tove Jansson’s The Winter Book is Amazon’s Kindle deal-of-the-day, for 99p: click here.  Unless you’re ethically against Amazon and whatnot, but at least you can make a fully-informed decision now!

This collection of short stories is my favourite Jansson book, and she is one of my favourite writers, so you can imagine how much I love it!

[this is probably for UK readers only… not sure…]

Comments (again)

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Just to say, I’m afraid I’ve put word verification back on.  I didn’t mind getting lots of spam when Blogger detected it (although it was tiresome deleting them all from my inbox), but now they’re getting through to the page.  Sorry if word verification means some people have trouble commenting, but needs must!

What are you reading?

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An Interior With A Woman Reading – Carl Larsson

 
Just so you know that I’m not dead in a ditch – just rather wiped out from a cold that doesn’t feel like going away – I thought I’d ask you all what you’re reading at the moment?

I’ve just finished a very gripping modern novel (more anon) and started Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, who is being reliably fascinating so far.

And over to you!

Lots of Provincial Ladies

StuckinaBook All , 65 Comments

Be prepared for me to be pretty flexible in my Reading Presently project, folks.  I mostly won’t be including re-reads, but I will be more inclined to if I’m reading the gift for the first time – i.e. first time in that particular edition, but not first time overall.  And, in the first days of the new year, I re-read E.M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady for the umpteenth time, and loved it just as much as ever.  I’m amazed by how consistently wonderfully Delafield writes it, with almost every line making me smile or laugh.  Just flicking through a copy, here is an example, because I feel she should get to say something in this post:

Write letters.  Much interrupted by Helen Wills [the cat], wanting to be let out, kitten, wanting to be let in, and dear Robin, who climbs all over the furniture, apparently unconscious that he is doing so, and tells me at the same time, loudly and in full, the story of The Swiss Family Robinson.
As I say, I’ve read it many times – this is probably the eighth or ninth time in ten years – but this is the first time I’ve read the particular edition given to me by (drum roll, if you will)… Thomas at My Porch!  Yes, that adorable man knew that I had something of a collection of Provincial Lady editions, and sent me this beauty:

Isn’t it fab?  I was so grateful, especially since it’s an edition I’ve never seen on my bookshop travels in the UK.
Whilst we’re here, I thought you might fancy a little tour around my other editions, no?  If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better about your own book buying compulsions.  You’ll feel a model of restraint and good sense, by comparison.
This is the first ever edition that I bought, having read The Provincial Lady Goes Further from the local library (large print edition – the only E.M. Delafield book they held).  This is the edition I’ve read most often – in fact, it’s always on my bedside table – and the spine has fallen off.  It’s all four Provincial Lady books in one, with an introduction by Kate O’Brien.  It would have originally had a lovely dustjacket – like the one pictured in Christine’s post here – but mine came, instead, with a cup mark.
Over the years, I’ve bought up cheap editions of the various books in the series, when I’ve stumbled across them.  That accounts for this little pile – two copies of The Provincial Lady Goes Further, and one of The Diary of a Provincial Lady – which, interestingly, has a bunch of pages duplicated in the middle, and thus must be worth…. um, nothing.

One of the reasons I buy these, other than because they’re simply lovely, is for the fantastic Arthur Watt illustrations:

And then, of course, I have the Virago Modern Classics edition, with Nicola Beauman’s introduction.  I couldn’t not have that, could I?  But… I suppose I didn’t medically need to get this two separate editions of this omnibus, simply for the different covers… (second photo not mine, pinched from Christine’s site – because I forgot to take a photo of it, and it’s in Somerset.)
And, finally, when shopping in one of my favourite bookshops – Malvern Bookshop in Malvern, Worcestershire – I came across the Folio edition of the first book.  I don’t think the illustrator really interprets the book in the way I would, but Folio books are so beautifully produced that I couldn’t leave this one on the shelf now, could I?  No.  No, of course I could not.
Ok, dear reader, I know what you’re thinking… I don’t have the Cath Kidston edition which Virago published a year or two ago!  And you’re right, of course.  I imagine one day, when I find it cheaply, I’ll add it to my collection.  ‘Collection’ sounds better than hoard, doesn’t it?
Well, my name is Simon, and I am addicted to editions of the Provincial Lady.  Thomas is my enabler.  I’m well aware that I couldn’t stop any time I wanted to.  I’m not even trying to go clean.   Don’t LOOK at me, I’m SO ASHAMED.
(I’m not.  Not at all.)

Cold, Cosy, Cat

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I’m not going to be very wordy today, as I have a cold and a late night… but I just wanted to post you in the direction of a new blog!  A new blog, but not a new blogger… lovely Darlene, who we once knew as Roses Over a Cottage Door, is now blogging at Cosy Books.  Pop by and say hello – because the first book she’s written about there is brilliant.

And, because this post feels absurdly short, here is a little photo diary of what happened when Sherpa spotted my camera cord…

Hopefully more posts this week, depending on how beleaguered I’m feeling!  But they may be short…

Rethinking Darcy

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At present, I am in the midst of listening to Sebastian Faulks’ Faulks on Fiction, which I intend to write about more fully when I’ve finished – not least because it is the first audiobook I’ve listened to properly since I was about 11 – but I thought I’d respond to something he said about Pride and Prejudice. He divides the book into thematic sections, and Darcy & Elizabeth take their place in the Lovers portion of the book (alongside such luminaries as Tess Durbeyfield and Lady Constance Chatterley.)

Faulks mostly gives plots and some gentle, often personal, analysis, but he takes rather a brave leap with Darcy – suggesting that he suffers from intense depression, and wants Elizabeth almost wholly as ‘lifelong Prozac’, replacing Mr. Bingley in this function. And Darcy definitely comes in for the worst of Faulks’ censure where the proposal scene is concerned. The first one, that is (er, spoilers alert.) Faulks think he is utterly wrong, in everything he says – not just the way he says it.  Here are a couple of examples of how it has been done on film – I shan’t be sullying my blog with the ridiculous travesty that is the proposal scene in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Rarely has a scene been so misjudged from page to screen… mini-rant over.

As you see – and as I’m sure most of us are familiar – Darcy is usually depicted in this proposal scene as having reached the very nadir of his arrogance, pride, and rudeness. That’s certainly the way it has been acted (except, I should add, by Laurence Olivier), and it’s how Sebastian Faulks interprets the book. But… I wonder.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, and I’d cite my sources if I could remember any, but… Darcy’s proposal is super-genuine! He really is being astonishingly sacrifical. Let’s not forget that he is willing to marry beneath him – an act which Lizzie herself dismisses, having been cautioned against it by Aunt Gardiner, when she considers Wickham. He is throwing away all manner of things, all for the love of Elizabeth.

What does he say in the proposal that is not true? What does he say, in its aftermath, which is not justifiable (to his period, not to our 21st century sensibilities, that is)? Could she expect him to rejoice in the inferiority of her connections? Would it have been better if Darcy had, in the manner of most romantic heroes of the time, lied through his teeth during proposal, or at least exaggerated every virtue and sidelined every qualm to the extent that he might as well be lying? Elizabeth is entirely justified to reject him on the basis of his treatment of Jane – but this, too, is really the misreading of her intentions, and thus an act of kindness to his best friend. Certainly not, as Faulks suggests, simply to keep Bingley to himself.

I think film and television adaptations have tended towards seeing Darcy as the villain-made-good, and Elizabeth as the woman who makes him good. She may be a bit impetuous (this line of thought goes), but essentially she is the one in the right, and he comes to realise this. I think Jane Austen is much cleverer than this. Elizabeth’s shortcomings are not incidental or irrelevant – she really has as far to travel as Darcy, in terms of her character, before the match is equal. Yes, she is always a delight to the reader – but that is neither here nor there, in terms of morality or character defects. Which of us does not adore Emma? Yet which of us would say she needs no reforming?

There is a common acknowledgement that Lizzie needs to reform her character defects – that she can be proud and she can be prejudiced – but, in practice, or at least in adaptation, interpretations of her encounters with Darcy all suggest otherwise. And most especially the proposal. His bluff manner does not make him wrong; her eloquent outrage does not make her right. If we allow ourselves to think only in the context of the period – how generous Darcy is! How ungrateful, Elizabeth! And how wonderfully both reflect upon the scene, and – accordingly – change themselves for the better, and for each other. But let’s recognise that Darcy’s change is not a 360 reversal, and Elizabeth’s, on the other hand, is not inconsiderable.

Yours Sincerely – Monica Dickens & Beverley Nichols

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When my e-friend Sarah mentioned that Monica Dickens and Beverley Nichols had co-authored a selection of light essays called Yours Sincerely (1949), can you really imagine me not immediately buying a copy?  If you answered ‘yes’ then you’re either new around these parts, or you have a stronger sense of my self-control than is just.

So, back in autumn, it arrived – and I started reading it in a gradual way, such as befits this sort of book.  It is great fun.  I don’t know quite where the articles came from – they’re quite varying lengths, and don’t seem to have been written specially for this volume, but cover topics in the same line as Rose Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures.   Everything from ‘Planting Bulbs’ (reminiscent of Provincial Lady, no?) to ‘Sensuality’; ‘Talkative Women’ to ‘Coddled Men’; ‘Losing Your Temper’ to ‘Brides in White.’  All the sort of topics of middle-class chatter in the 1940s – but feeling, somehow, old-fashioned even for the 1940s.

Indeed, Beverley Nichols has no qualms in describing himself as ‘old-fashioned, out-of-date, and generally encrusted in lichen’.  Even when I agree with him, he’s so curmudgeonly that I felt like I wanted to distance myself from him…  it’s enjoyable to read, but not quite the laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating whimsy that I’d expected – and which Monica Dickens delivers in spades.  Sometimes he was just too saccharine and worthy for my taste…

You can’t bruise a plant and feel aggrieved because it grows up stunted or deformed or “odd.”  The slightest twist or wound, in it infancy, grows and swells, till in the end the plant is an ugly wretched thing that you have to throw onto the rubbish heap.

It is the same with children.  A lie, an injustice, a cruelty – these get under the skin.  And they too grow and swell, till at last a miserable man or a wretched woman is rejected by society.
Undeniably true, but… am I bad person for wishing that he’d been jollier?  I still haven’t read any of his books, and now I’ll be rushing towards them a little less eagerly.

Whereas Monica Dickens, after getting all serious in The Winds of Heaven, is on fine form in Yours Sincerely.  Lots of smiles all round, and never too earnest.  Just the sort of light essay which I adore, and which doesn’t seem to happen any more.  Here she is on proposing…

We’ve all dreamed much the same dreams, I expect.  You know – you’re in a diaphanous evening dress of unearthly beauty.  You’re the belle of the ball.  You’ve danced like a disembodied fairy and now you drift out on to a moonlit terrace, mysterious with the scent of gardenias. 

He follows, in faultless evening dress, no doubt (mine sometimes used to be in white monkey jackets), and says – IT.

Or, he says IT on the boat-deck of a liner gliding through phosphorescent tropic seas, or on a Riviera beach, or sometimes at the crisis of some highly improbable adventure.  He’s just rescued you – or you him – from a fire.  You’re besieged in an attic firing your last round at the enemy now battering at the door below.  You’re a beautiful nurse and he’s a dying soldier – but not irretrievably dying.

There are endless variations but always the same theme song : “Will you marry me?”  The implication is that when one is very young the actual moment of proposal is one of the high-spots of marriage.

I used to pester my mother over and over again to tell me how my father proposed.  I couldn’t believe she wasn’t holding out on me when she swore that he never really had.  She couldn’t remember when he started saying and writing : “When we’re married we’ll do so and so.”
I have a small section of a shelf devoted to light essays – it is only a small section, because I haven’t managed to find very many.  Alongside this and some by Rose Macaulay are Angela Milne’s Jame and Genius, A.A. Milne’s various offerings in this genre, J.B. Priestley’s Delight, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Christopher Morley’s Safety Pins, and probably one or two others which have slipped my mind.  Any suggestions?

In the meantime, Yours Sincerely isn’t groundbreaking or even exceptionally good, but it’s a jolly, enjoyable contribution to that often-overlooked form of the familiar essay, and so steeped in the mores of the early 20th century that a flick through fills me with nostalgia for an age in which I never lived.