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Top 15 of 2011

StuckinaBook All 21 Comments

I’m going to have a few days’ rest from blogging and celebrate Christmas – let’s face it, there have been plenty of reviews recently for you to get your teeth into!  But I shan’t leave you abandoned, oh no.

I love lists, I really love ’em.   Putting things in order has delighted me ever since Mum used to empty a big tin of buttons on the table for us to sort.  That’s why I don’t make a top-ten-in-no-order list – I rank my most loved books of 2011 in strict order, even when it is a far from exact science.  It’s how much I liked them, how much I admired them, how much I enjoyed reading them (all of which are slightly different) all rolled into one.

Some amazing books have been left out, but it’s still a nice mix of male and female authors (7.5 each), various decades, and… well, three non-fiction books in there.  And a lot of funny books too, or at least books with funny elements (numbers 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 6, 5, and 1 would all qualify).  Enough jabbering, over the list – do link to your own list, if you’ve made one.

A wonderfully surreal, oddly detached, and brilliantly written novel – which I’d recommend to any fans of Muriel Spark or Barbara Comyns.

The best ending I’ve ever read, and plenty of other good pages before that – an amusing and ultimately heart-breaking view of Edwardian high society.

Further evidence that two lacklustre reads shouldn’t put me off trying a third – hilarious, clever, and deservedly a classic.

This wins the year’s prize for Book I Thought I’d Hate and Ended Up Loving – Ignatius J. Reilly is utterly obnoxious, but tales of his arrogance and verbose ineptitude made for uproarious reading.

To recycle my line, more Provincial Lady than Headless Lady – and utterly delightful.

The second volume of this extraordinary (and yet somehow ordinary) woman’s observant and moving diaries.

The only 2011 book on this list (and one of only three I read this year) this is easily the most moving book I read, but far, far more than a melancholy memoir.

The only novel in translation on the list, this novella is beautiful and a must for any fans of fallible memory narratives.  Better than Atonement.

Such a perceptive, calm take on the infidelity narrative – and one which shows how exceptionally well Young could write about families.

Somehow both cynical and life-affirming – an utterly joyous romp of British-German twins through wartime America.

Comyns never lets me down, and this surreal novel with its utterly matter-of-fact narrator is no exception.  Nobody else could do anything bizarre and brilliant in the same way.

A girl falls in love with the puppets from a puppet theatre?  Sounds enchanting – but Gallico’s novella gets pretty dark, and is an ingenious tale which is too fairy-talesque  ever to be too disturbing.

The best novel I’ve read from the 21st century.  A simple plot of an old minister writing to his young son, Robinson captures a voice in a way which is much more convincing than most autobiographies, let alone novels.  So beautiful, and makes Robinson, from my reading, the greatest prose writer alive.

Only recently reviewed on SiaB, these letters show the best talents of both of these wonderful writers – a collection which I will revisit many times, and the benchmark against which I’ll set all future published volumes of letters.

From the first page onwards, Hamilton’s writing was so good that it left me actually astonished.  How could an author be this talented?  He is the 1940s missing link between writers as disparate as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  A shy woman bullied in a boarding house is an unlikely topic for great literature, but this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read – and Hamilton one of the most exceptional writers.

Safety Pins – Christopher Morley

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I seem to write my reviews in protracted parts now – there are the bits I can’t help typing out and posting as soon as I read them, and then, rolling along months later, comes the actual review proper.  The snippets are probably more enjoyable to read, and certainly speedier to write, but I’ll leave that sort of blogging to people like Claire who does it so beautifully.  Me, I like the sound of my own voice.  So not only did I give you Christopher Morley’s delightful, wonderful essay ‘On Visiting Bookshops‘ back in July (go and read it now, if you didn’t then) but I’ll cover the whole collection it came in: Safety Pins (1925).  (I’m pretty sure these essays are collected elsewhere under another name, or scattered through different collections – grab any book of essays with Morley’s name on it!)

Morley was best known to me as the author of Parnassus on Wheels, which I love, and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop, which is a curate’s egg.  I love little literary or personal essays, and was delighted to find that he had written some – doubly delighted when I discovered that it included bibliophilia of that order.  The rest of the collection is something of a mixed bag – brilliant at its best, and humdrum at its worst.  Actually, that assessment isn’t quite fair: I find him fascinating when our interests overlap, and less so when they don’t – only the greatest essayists can make a subject compelling which would otherwise be considered dull.  I don’t even remember the topics of those that I skimmed through, so let’s move on to those I loved?  And when I love Morley’s essays, I really love them.

When he writes about books and writing, I am besotted – ‘The Perfect Reader’ is sweet and sensible; ‘On Unanswering Letters’ is farcical and yet oh-so-true (how letters are accidentally left unanswered for so long that it is impossible to do so, and no greeting works); he even admits to ‘the temptation to try to see what books other people are reading – this innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles.’  But beware the man who falls asleep while reading in a chair:

And here our poor barren clay plays us false, undermining the intellect with many a trick and wile.  “I will sit down for a season in that comfortable chair,” the creature says to himself, “and read this sprightly novel.  That will ease my mind and put me in humour for a continuance of lively thinking.”  And the end of that man is a steady nasal buzz from the bottom of the chair where has collapsed, an unsightly object and a disgrace to humanity.

Not even Shakespeare is safe from Morley’s attentions – in ‘On Making Friends’, he gives his own views on those tenets laid down in Hamlet:

Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on friendship.  The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one to live with; we ave often thought that Ophelia would have gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet.  Laertes preaches to Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes.  Laertes escaped by going abroad, but the girl had to stay at home.  Hamlet saw that pithy old Polonius was a preposterous and orotund ass.  Polonius’s doctrine of friendship – “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” – was, we trow, necessary in his case.  It would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old sawmonger.

You probably sense Morley’s tone – and have a good idea whether you’ll love him or loathe him.  Some people do have an odd hatred for insouciant humour.  Morley’s essays are like A.A. Milne’s or Stephen Leacock’s or anybody who deals in slightly over-the-top whimsy – but rooted in a love of ideas and a passion for literature.  Morley becomes earnest, when on the track of his hero R.L. Stevenson, but is equally adept at cod-earnestness – for example, in the title essay, in praise of ‘Safety Pins’:

The pin has never been done justice in the world of poetry.  As one might say, the pin has no Pindar.  Of course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.  This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a profound truth.  When you see a pin, you must pick it up.  In other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are.  Their instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they, rather than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to some one long before Newton.

Well, quite.  I keep using the word ‘delightful’, but it is the perfect word for Safety Pins.  If he is not entirely consistent, at least that is better than being consistently dull.  There is plenty here for the bibliophile, and plenty more for those who like to laugh at the little things in life.  I love it – I think a lot of you will too.

Other things to get Stuck into:


Once a Week by A.A. Milne – every now and then I eulogise about AAM, and hope that one or two of you will try him and love him.  The review I link to is really more about Punch, but hopefully you’ll be inspired to try Milne’s whimsical, clever essays.


Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock – the great Canadian humorist deserves a better post than I gave him, but you can at least read one of his pieces there.  His sketches and essays brim over with humour, and he was wonderfully prolific too.

Any other humourous essayists you think I would enjoy?

The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton

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I’ve nearly come to the end of my pile of must-review-before-the-end-of-2011 books (and I really should have spaced them out a bit, perhaps… oh well, we’ll have a bit of a rest after Christmas.  Or an avalanche of my Books of 2011 posts.  We’ll see.)

Now, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) is a curious little book, not least because the central importance of it doesn’t reveal itself right until the end – at which point the rug is pulled from under your feet, and everything you’ve read takes on something of a new dimension.  Hmm… I don’t think it’ll spoil the book if I tell you the revealed theme, but in case you don’t want to know I’ll hide it in a link.  The Man Who Was Thursday would make an ideal companion read to (spoiler fans click here) this.  Ok, confused?  Good.

The Man Who Was Thursday is subtitled ‘A Nightmare’, which I wasn’t expecting, given that I know Chesterton best as a humorist.  Nor does the subtitle come into play for quite some time.  We start with Gabriel Syme, a member of secret anti-anarchist police, who meets anarchist Lucian Gregory at the party of a poet.  The opening scenes, where these characters debate the structure or chaos of poetry, are as amusing as anything found in this whimsical, witty decade, if a little more philosophical and theoretical than usual.

“The poet delights in disorder only.  If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.
“Nonsense!” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox.

It’s all very jolly and garden-party-esque – cucumber sandwiches all round.  Syme and Gregory exchange verbal quips stridently, but without intending any of their barbs to hit home.  Indeed, far from being offended, Syme agrees to go with Gregory to an underground anarchist meeting, so that Gregory can prove what Syme doubts: that he is serious about anarchism.

What follows is a rather lovely piece of satirical reasoning.  Gregory is a serious anarchist – and had previously asked his leader how he could blend into the world, to perpetrate his ideology:

I said to him “What disguise will hide me from the world?  What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?”  He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.  “You want a safe disguise, do you?  You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?”  I nodded.  He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice.  “Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!”  he roared so that the room shook.  “Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.”  And he turned his broad back on me without another word.  I took his advice, and have never regretted it.  I preached blood and murder to these women day and night, and – by God! – they would let me wheel their perambulators.

Clever.  But Syme manages to outwit Gregory, and get himself elected to the central council of anarchists, where each is assigned the name of a day of the week.  Syme, as the novel’s title suggests, is Thursday.  Head of them all is the mysterious Sunday.

That’s as much as I shall reveal of the plot – it becomes something of a intoxicating mix of spy novel, epigrammatical social novel, and even philosophical/theological.  The subtitle ‘nightmare’ is odd, but the style certainly has a dreamlike quality – swirling from one event to another, with twists and surprises along the way.  It’s a little madcap, but never to the extent that you think Chesterton’s been at the opium.

I don’t think it’s the sort of novel that would be published now – it’s too varied and unusual.  Which I think is great, of course, but probably wouldn’t satisfy the demands of a marketing department.  Chesterton still remains a bit of a mystery to me, and The Man Who Was Thursday is intriguing and admirable rather than lovable, but I would recommend it to readers who enjoy satire and surprises, washed down with a bon mot or two.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“Weird. Nightmare-ish. Imaginative. Chestertonian.” – Sherry, Semicolon


“Despite its philosophizing, its humor makes much of it a very light book, and some of the more “adventurous” scenes would make an awfully good film–there’s even a car chase.” – Christopher, 50 Books Project


“To say that the novel develops a nightmarish quality is not to say that it’s scary. I think perhaps most nightmares are only scary to the person who dreams them.” – Teresa, Shelf Love

Santas everywhere!

StuckinaBook All 6 Comments

I’ve been a lucky boy today, since my Persephone Secret Santa arrived to coincide with opening day for the LibraryThing Virago Secret Santa – so I got this little lot of goodies, courtesy of lovely Emma and lovely Rob.  Thanks, guys!

Emma chose Miss Buncle Married and this lovely Christmas tree biscuit (I’m glad I took a photo, since I’ve eaten most of it now) – Rob surprised me with two authors I’ve been intending to read this year: G.B. Stern’s White Oleander and Margaret Kennedy’s Together and Apart.

Have any of you read any of these?

Nella Last’s Peace

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Nella Last’s War was my favourite read from 2010, and when I tell you that Nella Last’s Peace is more of the same, then that should tell you how impressed I was by it.  (Thank you Profile Books for sending it to me.)  True, I didn’t warm to it quite as much, and I’m not sure it’s of quite such historical importance, but it is only repetition that will inevitably place this book lower on my reads of 2011 – last year I was expecting mediocrity and was bowled over; this year I expected Nella Last to be as good as she is.

For those who have thus far missed the whole Nella Last phenomenon, she was a ‘Housewife, 49’ (to quote the television adaptation title) when she signed up to write for the Mass Observation project.  Every Friday Last posted her diaries away, recording the everyday life she observed so shrewdly, and in such plain but crafted language.  Actually, ‘crafted’ is the wrong word – it seems to have just flown from her pen.  ‘And what he thought,’ as the First Folio editors said of Shakespeare, ‘he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’  Except with Nella Last it was true.

I said at the top that Nella Last’s Peace might be less historically significant than Nella Last’s War, but I’m already beginning to doubt that statement.  Although the war years were doubtless more momentous, they are also well documented.  The earliest peace years, with its hardships and regrets, has given birth to far fewer records – but Nella Last kept going, indefatigably.

I said once at the WVS [Women’s Voluntary Services] Centre, “I feel like a piece of elastic that has been stretched and stretched and now has no more stretch – and cannot spring back.”  They laughed, but several said it was a pretty good description of their own post-war feelings and I can tell Arthur has somewhat the same reaction.  More and more do I feel I must take each day as it comes, do the best I can and lay my day aside, taking up the next.  Sometimes I feel so dead tired, like a burnt-out shell, craving only to relax and rest.  Then my mind rises and rebukes my tired body – says, “So much to be done, so little time.”  The stars shine brightly tonight.  I love stars.  They make me feel trivial and unimportant – and are so stable.  I don’t wonder the old ones thought Heaven was above the bright blue sky.

Without her war work in the canteen, and with different anxieties concerning her boys, Nella mostly turns her attentions to her recalcitrant husband, large circle of neighbours, and everyday life when money is scarce and rationing in full flow.  She grows more impatient with her husband (I start to sympathise with him at times!), and readier to give her friends the rough side of her tongue, but remains practical, thoughtful, and a force of commonsense to be reckoned with.  There are any number of activities and opinions I could quote from her diaries, but I’d be in danger of typing out the whole lot.  Instead I’ll quote a trip to the Lake District which shows how gifted a writer Last was – not solely as an observer of people and pastimes, but in a strain which is almost poetic:

My husband had to go to Ulverston and we decided to go on to have a look at frozen Windermere, if the roads were not too bad.  We felt a queer awe at the steel grey sheet that was the friendly rippling lake of summer – it looked austere and remote.  The sun was smiling behind a shoulder of a hill, and its slanting rays seemed to lick out every shorn hillside, every ugly gaping gully where trees had been dragged to the road.  There was not a sound anywhere.  An awful stillness seemed on everything and that queer atavistic desolation gripped me.  I felt I wanted to lift my voice in a wild ‘keen’, if only to break the silence  We seemed the only living and moving things left on the earth.  I felt thankful to leave the unfamiliar scene.  The hills around were patched rather than crowned with snow.  The fields were white instead of freshly ploughed as they should have been by March, and heaps of dung stood frozen and useless.  I wonder if it will mean a bad crop and harvest, with so late a season.  Heavy sullen clouds rolled in from the sea, looking as if we would have more snow, and we were glad to get home to a fire and our tea, with the table drawn close to it.
One thing I wish I could do is reach across the decades and reassure Nella Last that she is a talented writer – and that her writings would not be forgotten.  Here is a glimmer that she understood this herself – and yet the terrible fact that she did not realise her own worth and the books which would eventually be published!

Such a nice letter from MO [Mass Observation].  Arthur can see a value in my endless scribbles.  He told me long ago they were of more use than ‘clever’ writings, as they wanted an ordinary woman’s viewpoint and routine.  There’s so little help I can give now.  It gave me a grand feeling I could help someone.  An idle thought struck me – the weight and volume of over eight years’ scribbling must be surprising.  Supposing I’d been clever, there could have been a few books!  Always I longed to write, but there was something missing.  Only in my letter writing and MO have I found fulfilment of my girlhood yearning to write.  Anyway, they might have been good books.  At least my letters have cheered and comforted – the boys always like them.

As she later writes, ‘whatever else that one is or has been, there’s never been a trace of dullness!’  It is evident to me that the lack of dullness has little to do with events, and everything to do with Last herself.  She is a fine example of making the most of any situation – and an even better example of the powers of keen observation.  To her perceptive eye, nothing could be dull – and we are forever lucky that she kept this diary for so many years.

Cornflower’s meme – and a Sunday Song

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I do like a meme which plays with book titles, and Karen has started this one – I’ve also seen it done by Harriet, Claire, and Jane.  A few of these will be appearing in my Top 15 of 2011 (yes, it’s gone up to fifteen – there were just too many good books.)  Have a go yourself, if you like…

My Day in Books

I began the day with A View From Downshire Hill

On my way to work I saw The Town in Bloom

and walked by People on a Bridge

to avoid The Perfect Pest

but I made sure to stop at A House in the Country.

In the office, my boss said, “How Can You Bear To Be Human?“

and sent me to research Life Among the Savages.

At lunch with Two Serious Ladies

I noticed The Gingerbread Woman

under The Skin Chairs

then went back to my desk, A Kind Man.

Later, on the journey home, I bought The Amorous Bicycle

because I have To Tell My Story

then settling down for the evening, I picked up Gin and Ginger (The Double)

and studied Exercises in Style

before saying goodnight to People Who say Goodbye.

Enjoy that?  Well, here’s a song to finish off, courtesy of Our Vicar:

The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson

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Back in June, I posted Shirley Jackson’s most famous short story ‘The Lottery‘ and promised that, sooner or later, I’d write about her collection The Lottery and Other Stories.  Well, six months later I’m finally going to write a post about it, but I have a feeling that it won’t quite qualify as a review.  But I’m not one of those bloggers who gets myself in a tizzy over whether or not to use the word ‘review’, so shall we move on?

If you haven’t read ‘The Lottery’, I suggest you click on the link above and acquaint yourself.  It won’t take long, and it will leave quite an impression.  Enough of an impression that some people (naming no names) have been wary of reading anything more by Jackson.  I, however, love me some Shirley – her gothicy, psychological novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House as well as her Provincial Ladyesque Life Among the Savages.  Where in this broad spectrum, pondered I, would her other short stories fall?

A whole new territory, it turns out.  After ‘The Lottery’ (you should go and read it before I accidentally give the game away) I expected Jackson’s stories all to pivot around shocking twists, with menacing backdrops of small town life.  As it happens, all the other stories collected here are rather different from ‘The Lottery’.  Where that story is a masterclass in structure, building in tension until a revelatory climax, Jackson’s other stories are much more nebulously structured.  They rarely have an end, and often don’t have a beginning – instead they are slices of life, and significant experiences rather than momentous, er, moments.  Going through the other short story writers I’ve read, in my head, the nearest I can think of are Alice Munro and Kate Chopin – much shorter than Munro’s stories, but with that balance of interrogation and eventual mystery.

Jackson’s stories, though, still lean towards the familiar themes of claustrophobic. small town life.  A few deal with racism.  In one of the longer stories, ‘Flower Garden’, a friendship between young mothers unravels owning to differing views about letting their children play with a black boy.  In turn, one of the mothers (a newcomer) is gradually ostracised by the community.

[Mrs. MacLane] stared at the blue bowl, and said slowly, “When I first came, everyone was so nice, and they seemed to like Davey and me and want to help us.”
That’s wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn’t ever talk about whether people like you, that’s bad taste.

Jackson often quietly questions the codes which hold together communities, and the hypocrisy within society.  The same theme is visited more subtly in a much shorter story – ‘After You, My Dear Alphonse’ – which demonstrates how brilliantly Jackson follows that first rule of writing: show, don’t tell.  She never has the here’s-the-moral-we-learnt moment, but rather shows normal people and lets them reveal their own dark natures.  Dark, but not evil – her characters are always understandable, if not quite sympathetic.

My favourite story here, aside from ‘The Lottery’, is probably ‘The Daemon Lover’ – a mysterious, haunting story of a bride wandering door-to-door on her wedding day, trying to find her groom.  It gives one a prolonged shudder, rather than a sudden shock, and the atmosphere laced through it is Jackson at her best.  Flicking through at random, ‘The Tooth’ is almost hallucinatory; ‘Of Course’ is witty and wise; ‘Charles’ is actually an excerpt from Life Among the Savages and has that wry, warm tone; ‘Afternoon in Linen’ shows a slightly more jarring childhood moment. There are twenty-six stories in The Lottery and other stories and, as often with short story collections, it’s difficult to pinpoint a unifying theme.  But I think I may have spotted one… and it’s not just the curious repetition of the name ‘James Harris’ throughout, to which this Wikipedia entry lends a clue.

A lot of perceptive critics have noted the domestic claustrophobia of Jackson’s two most famous novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House – a Gothic influence that is absent from almost all these stories.  But Jackson has broadened this theme into the more widely felt one of entrapment.  People in these stories are so often trapped – in sad situations, in unwelcoming towns, or in their own unmovable prejudices.  Even within the way the stories are written, denying the characters a big moment of narrative climax, finishing in the middle of ongoing scenarios rather than ending neatly, the characters are trapped in unfinalised tales, unable to escape.  If this is more often sad or staid than scary, then that only emphasises Jackson’s impressive sensitivity – and versatility.

Persephone Secret Santa

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Well, today is the day we are supposed to reveal our Persephone Secret Santa gifts… but… I don’t have mine yet.

 Turns out I was going to be given it at the Persephone Books Open House today, but in the end I couldn’t go… because I had locked myself out!  I wasn’t stuck outside for very long, but I was on quite a tight schedule, and it was long enough to make it impractical to get to London and pack for going home for Christmas (which I’m doing later today.)

However, I did get a card from my Persephone Secret Santa this morning!  In lieu of a book, I’ll show off my lovely, intriguing card:

Thanks to Claire and Verity for organising this – I look forward to seeing everyone unveiling their books, and yelping about how exciting it all is.  You’ll just have to comment on my card and cartoon (bonus points if you recognised the Persephone logo…), for the time being…

If you got a Persephone Secret Santa, do pop a link to your reveal post in the comments.  I’ll show off mine when it arrives!

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

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I want to cry a little bit, because I just spent two hours writing a post on So Long, See You Tomorrow, which disappeared when I tried to add a picture.  Sometimes I hate Blogger… Well, I’m going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you’ll know why…

It has ended up being quite neat, though, that I’m blogging about a novella by William Maxwell – following on from other reviews in this vein this week.  I fell in love with Maxwell when I read They Came Like Swallows (thanks Karen!), bought up a few of his books, read half of The Chateau, and… stopped.  Not sure why.  But Rachel’s review of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) catapaulted it up my tbr pile, and while I didn’t love it quite as much as They Came Like Swallows, it’s not far off.

I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events – especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore.  That makes me sound a bit sadistic, doesn’t it?  But examples like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and, even better, Jens Christian Grondahl’s Virginia (reviewed here) show how this can create a structure of dual narratives, looking forwards and backwards, memories and regrets influencing the telling of past and present.  Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify.

The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell’s deceptively simple manner:

One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot.  Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.  Within a few seconds it had grown light.  No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road.  The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.

Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends.  Living on neighbouring farms, their families had grown alongside each other, and Maxwell builds up this dynamic between neighbours and friends in a believable, simple manner – until circumstances change and the friendship is gradually unwoven, with the tragic results already revealed to the reader at the outset.  The narrator’s guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart.  This guilt colours the narrator’s presentation of the past, and is a net from which he has not been able to escape.  The novel moves between past and present, developing each narrative line, and demonstrating the far-flung influence of long ago events – in a way which flows beautifully, never forced, quietly showing Maxwell’s novelistic expertise.

The narrator’s own life was not easy.  Crippling shy and suffering from the early loss of his mother, the narrator feels that he has disappointed his father, and is out of kilter with the sort of boy he is expected to be.  Maxwell touches gently on the father’s grief, in an example of his understated but powerful style:

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.  He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was.

Many lesser novelists would have spent several pages dissecting the narrator’s father’s emotions, but Maxwell’s talent is that he does not need to do so – he encapsulates everything we need to read in two short sentences.  It is this approach which exemplifies Maxwell’s brilliance, but also how easily he could be underestimated.

The father does remarry, and the family is moved to a new home.  I love portrayals of houses in literature, and the scenes of their new home being built make for some great sections – the narrator compares the building site to Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture ‘The Palace at 4am’.  There is no picture of the sculpture in the book, it is only described verbally, but I went and tracked down an image.  In its curious form, seemingly incomplete and distorted, it reflects not only a building site but the structures of memory:

 

For, despite the murder and the family tensions, the true subject of So Long, See You Tomorrow is memory and the fallibility of memory.  Not so much that facts may be altered, but the distortion of remembered emotions and responses; superimposing later feelings over old ones, and the overlap between past and present:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
A murder mystery usually has a fairly straightforward structure – clues must be laid, of course, and herrings must be red, but the masters have laid out the pattern.  By removing the mystery of whodunnit, Maxwell explores the much more human, fascinating dynamics of how circumstances and personalities led to murder – and how the aftermath continues for decades and decades.  To construct a narrative through the abstract themes of grief, regret, love, pain, and guilt, Maxwell sets himself a much more difficult task – and achieves it.  I’m excited eventually to read more of Maxwell, and it was worth having to write this post twice to tell you how good this little book is…

Others who got Stuck into it:
 
“I don’t think I have come across a finer work of modern fiction.” – Rachel, Book Snob
 
“Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose.” – Trevor, The Mookse and the Gripes
 
“This book will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time.” – Lynne, dovegreyreader

Up At The Villa – W. Somerset Maugham

StuckinaBook All , 11 Comments

I’m trying to get through all the books I’ve read and not reviewed in 2011, so there will be a flurry of reviews over the next fortnight.  Prepare yourselves!

A while ago I did one of my novella reading weekends, but I don’t think I ever actually told you about it, before or afterwards.  One of the books I read was my first stab at W. Somerset Maugham, only eight or so years since I first bought one of his books.  Which wasn’t the one I read.  Up at the Villa (1941) came recommended by Simon Savidge (see links at the bottom) and is only 120pp – plus it has a lovely cover, so why not?

Up at the Villa is rather difficult to classify – in terms of length, it probably counts as a novella, but structurally it seems much more like a short story.  There are all manner of attempts to define the short story, and I find a few quite helpful.  Brander Matthews suggested over a century ago that “a short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of single emotions called forth by a single situation.” In 1979 Wendell Harris picked up on the same focal word in his definition: “single memorable curve of action revealing a single memorable personality.”  Poe wrote more vaguely, but sensibly, that the short story must have “unity of impression”.  All these definitions essentially suggest singularity – no room for interweaving plots, multiple focalisation, etc. etc.  Of course, there are dozens of writers and hundreds of short stories which break these rules, but rather fewer novellas and novels which fit so neatly into the definition.

Up at the Villa doesn’t take us far from beautiful young widow Mary Panton’s perspective, nor from the events of a single momentous day.  In the wake of her husband’s death, Mary is living in a beautiful borrowed villa overlooking Florence.  Her beauty is striking, she is privileged (if not quite opulent) and at the beginning of the novel she even receives a proposal from an older man who is soon to be Governor of Bengal.  Not to mention the rakish attentions of Rowley Flint, who doesn’t have marriage on his mind.

So where does this single memorable curve of action take us?  It starts with one act of generosity:

They had dined late and soon after eleven the Princess called for her bill.  When it grew evident that they were about to go, the violinist who had played to them came forward with a plate.  There were a few coins on it from diners at other tables and some small notes.  What they thus received was the band’s only remuneration.  Mary opened her bag.
“Don’t bother”, said Rowley.  “I’ll give him a trifle.”
He told a ten-lira note out of his pocket and put it on the plate.
“I’d like to give him something too”, said Mary.  She laid a hundred-lira note on the others.  The man looked surprised, gave Mary a searching look, bowed slightly and withdrew.
“What on earth did you give him that for?” exclaimed Rowley.  “That’s absurd.”
“He plays so badly and he looks so wretched.”
“But they don’t expect anything like that.”
“I know.  That’s why I gave it.  It’ll mean so much to him.  It may make all the difference to his life.”

And, one thing leading to another, it does make a difference to a lot of lives.  But I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot…

I do love stories where one seemingly innocent action leads to a huge fallout.  The only one which comes to mind right now is a broken cup in an episode of Flight of the Conchords, which probably isn’t a seriously helpful example… but you know what I mean.   I thought Maugham manipulated the situation well, and without contravening the personalities of the characters drawn at the beginning.  Mary is impulsive and romantic and not always able to deal with the outcome of her actions, and this makes for a plot which snowballs out of her control – a touch melodramatically, but still within the realms of feasibility.

My only confusion is why it became a 120 page book.  Most authors would have condensed it into thirty pages, or added more characters, more ideas, more occurrences – and another 120 pages.  It might seem an odd thing to focus on, but Up at the Villa falls between two stools, which is difficult to ignore.  What makes me want to return to Maugham, and try one of his more famous books, is that even with these reservations, I still found Up at the Villa a skillful, interesting read.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“Up at the Villa is a perfect book when you want something slightly familiar and yet something that completely throws you.” – Simon, Savidge Reads

“The pacing of the story is excellent, starting off at the slow, languid speed that you might expect from a novel about the English upper classes in Italy and gradually speeding up until it feels almost out of control.” – Old English Rose

“It’s a fine and entertaining diversion, and it’s got guns in, and sometimes that’s all we need” – John Self, The Asylum