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End of Year Meme

StuckinaBook All 15 Comments

Tonight I shall be doing a little variation the meme I’ve done for the last few years – which has been developed and expanded by various other bloggers – and getting a bit more specific.  But quite a few of the same questions will reappear…  (In case you missed my Top 15 Books of 2011, click here.) First, here’s the books and authors I read this year, in a pretty word cloud:

Number of books read:
Only 106, which is the fewest for quite a few years, and doesn’t bode too well for my A Century of Books project… still, it’s not a bad number.  (I wonder how many I bought?)

Male/Female authors ratio:
36 by men, 65 by women, and 5 by both male and female authors.

Fiction and non-fiction ratio:
28 non-fiction, 77 fiction, and one volume of poetry which could be either.

Number of re-reads:
13 – including five in a row at the beginning of June – but it was late April before I re-read anything. 

Shortest book title:
Echo by Violet Trefusis

Oldest book read:
A re-read of The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare – but, the Bard aside, it is Mr. Dosteovsky and his 1846 The Double.

Newest book read:
Is, by the miracle of advance review copies, not published til 2012: Stop What You’re Doing and Read This.

Books in translation:
Ten – which came under the names of Francoise Sagan, Violet Trefusis (x2), Wislawa Szymborska, Andre Maurois, Jens Christian Grondahl, Violette Leduc, Raymond Queneau, Adolfo Bioy Carlos, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. So, thank you Irene Ash, Sian Miles, Adam Czerniawski, James Whitall, Anne Born, Derek Coltman, Barbara Wright, Ruth L.C. Simms, and Constance Garnett for your translations!

Most books read by a single author:
4 by Edith Olivier; 3 by Richmal Crompon; 3 by Lynne Reid Banks.

Best non-blog recommendation:
Rhona, from my online book group, told me about my favourite book of the year, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude.

Best blog recommendation:
Thank you to Rachel for encouraging me to read Gilead, finally.

Most unexpectedly good book:
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which I thought I’d hate.

Most unexpectedly bad book:
For some reason I was certain I’d love Violette Leduc’s The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, based on the title, blurb, etc.  But, sadly… I didn’t.   And then there was Hotel du Lac, which has put me off Anita Brookner for life.

Generally vilest book:
Wasted Womanhood by Charlotte Cowdroy.  1930s book about single, childless women. Made me want to go back in time and thwack her around her unkind head with her unkind book. 

On the other hand:
Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis, also from the interwar period and about much the same thing, was a thousand times nicer. 

Best oh-I-didn’t-realise-you-wrote-other-good-books moment:
Who knew Stella Gibbons could write something like Westwood?  Very good, not remotely like Cold Comfort Farm.

Worst oh-I-wish-I’d-stopped-with-the-previous-book moment:
I thought I’d cracked Thomas Hardy last year.  And I drudged my way through The Return of the Native. 

The book which looked like it would be brilliant, but ended up having too many twists:
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.  Halfway, I thought it was book of the year.  And then the carpet was pulled from under my feet so often that I must have started on a pile a metre high.

I had no clue what was going on:
I love Muriel Spark, but Not To Disturb was incredibly confusing. 

Favourite character encountered this year:
If we’re excluding a re-read of Miss Hargreaves (and we’d better) then it’s got to be a late-comer to my 2011 reads: lovely Joe Gargery in Great Expectations.

Title nearest the beginning of the alphabet:
Articles not included, it’s the wonderfully-titled The Amorous Bicycle by Mary Essex.

Title nearest the end of the alphabet:
Step forward, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley by Edith Olivier.

Misnomer of the year:
Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country does, strictly, include a house in the country, but if you’re expecting a gentle tale of a summer garden party, you’ll be surprised.  I was very pleasantly surprised.  (Yes, The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan is also possibly a misnomer.)

Title where I learnt a new word:
Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley.  Well, I say ‘learnt’, but I can’t remember what it means.

Books with anthropomorphic animals:
Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt; Lady Into Fox by David Garnett (re-read); Jennie by Paul Gallico.

Other assorted supernatural/fantastic things which happened in novels this year (ask if you want to know the books!):
A man could miraculously heal people; a machine transcribes people’s thoughts; a post-office filled with millions of letters is guarded by clay golems; a woman became a witch; a captured fairy helped unite an estranged couple; death started phoning the elderly; a wife kept shrinking; an ape learnt to talk; a man built his nephew from glass; a house tormented its occupents; a clerk encountered his doppelganger.  Oh, and Miss Hargreaves came along, of course.

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

Doctor Who is on downstairs, and since I am both (a) not a fan of Doctor Who, and (b) a coward, I am sitting in my room and writing a blog post about Great Expectations.  There is something of a link, though, since people in Britain will be able to watch an adaptation of Great Expectations on 27th December – I’m looking forward to it, even with Dickens adaptations being, in general, not so great.  What makes Dickens so brilliant, to my mind, is the way he writes the narrative, and the pacing of the dialogue – which is usually lost on television, for some reason.  More on that later…

I actually started Great Expectations over a year ago – I held off reading it too quickly in the final days of December 2010 lest it unsettle my Top Books of 2010… and yet, the year whirled by, and I finished it after having compiled my Top Books of 2011.  It might have been on there.  Now we’ll never know…

What can I possibly say about Great Expectations (1861) and Charles Dickens?  I suspect the outline of the plot is known to most of us – Pip looks back on his life, starting with a graveyard encounter with a terrifying convict… Miss Havisham… Estella… Jaggers… and Bob’s your uncle.  Because, of course, the plot is too complicated and strange to recount in any detail.  The characters are too many and manifold, some of which (like Miss Havisham) have entered the nation’s consciousness – others, equally wonderful, have not.  Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, who complains at all times of having to ‘bring him up by hand’, is equally wonderful an invention.  Kind, honest Joe Gargery (“Pip – what larks!”), with his twisting attempts at speech, meaning all sentences seem to start with the word ‘which’, is about the loveliest character in any novel I’ve ever read.  Here he is, in conversation with Pip, who has stopped visiting Miss Havisham and is now Joe’s apprentice (the typos are his):

“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and since the day of my being bound I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after her, or shown that I remember her.”
“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes all four round – and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all four round might not act acceptable as a present in a total wacancy of hoofs –“
“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”
But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.  “Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain for the front door – or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for general use – or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork when she took her muffins – or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such like —“
“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.
“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t.  No, I would not.  For what’s a door-chain when she’s got one always up?  And shark-headers is open to misrepresentations.  And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into brass and do yourself no credit.  And the oncommonest workman can’t show himself oncommon in a gridiron – for a gridiron is a gridiron,” said Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and you can’t help yourself—“
“My dear Joe,” I cried in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t go on in this way.  I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”
“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that all along, “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”

Now, you either do or don’t find that incredibly funny.  I do.  I really do.  But what I cannot accept is that it is boring.  How Dickens has got the reputation for being boring, I cannot imagine.  Maybe it’s those TV adaptations, after all?  Because I believe that Dickens is, perhaps after P.G. Wodehouse, the best comedic writer that Britain has ever produced.

Whenever humorous writing is discussed, it’s a matter of course to point out that humour is impossible to explain, and if you don’t find something funny then no amount of argument will change things.  And that’s true.  But I think I can pinpoint what it is I love most about Dickens’ humour – and it’s the verbal tics he gives characters.  I think it’s seen better in Our Mutual Friend, but it’s present in all the Dickens novels I’ve read (which amounts only to four, come to think of it.)  Whether it’s Jaggers’ insistence upon precision or Joe’s ‘larks’ or Wemmick’s ‘portable property’, there is no author, except Patrick Hamilton, who uses repetition so perfectly.  He threads these traits through his novels, always ridiculous but never impossible, and holds together his plots filled by these delightful grotesques.  Grotesque in the sense of odd and exaggerated rather than disgusting.  His characters are not realistic, but, hidden in the surrealism of the stories and their enactors, lie truths and humanity and reality.  Wonderfully sewn up with the absurd.

But Dickens, of course, is not simply a wonderful dance of the ridiculous – the sort which inspires Spark, Comyns, Bowles – but a constant tightrope between the funny and the saccharine.  For while Dickens’ reputation for dullness is unwarranted, there is plenty of evidence to support the stereotype of orphans dying, overpowered by the force of their own virtue, Little Nell, etc. etc.  This is the sort of thing which survives most in film and TV adaptations, with inevitable tinkly piano music, and it is an image which does Dickens a disservice.  This strain is mostly kept at bay in Great Expectations, but does escape a bit in the final third.  I tire of it myself, but if that aspect of Dickens’ writing were not present, he’d probably be even meaner than Evelyn Waugh.  No sadistic writer ever came up with the ogres and tyrants of Dickens – but because they are not realistic, they are not truly terrifying.  They are menacing only encased in the pantomime and carnival of Dickens’ extravagant language.

But it is deservedly Miss Havisham whose light outside Great Expectations has burned brightest.  She is a true original.  Spurned on her wedding day, she lives for years in that moment, in a festering wedding dress.  And she has raised Estella to be cruel and incapable of love, hoping to punish men in revenge for her own broken heart.  Pip is snared.

Then Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me and said in a whisper:
“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown?  Do you admire her?”
“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers, as she sat in the chair.  “Love her, love her, love her!  How does she use you?”
Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her!  If she favours you, love her.  If she wounds you, love her.  If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words.  I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck, swell with the vehemence that possessed her.
“Hear me, Pip!  I adopted her to be loved.  I bred her and educated her, to be loved.  I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved.  Love her!”
She said the word often enough, and there could be o doubt that she meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love – despair – revenge – dire death – it could not have sounded from her lips more than a curse.

As I said earlier, too much happens in Great Expectations to attempt a summary or even an introduction to the plot.  What I really wanted to address is, simply, that Dickens is not dull.  If you’ve got that impression from television or hearsay, please go and pick up Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend.  I also find Hard Times hilarious, but I recognise that even amongst Dickens-lovers that is rather rare.  I think he is a brilliant comedian, and genuinely unique – although I have mentioned a few other authors in this post by way of comparison, there is really nobody even close to being like him.  You might hate him.  But if you do end up hating Dickens, please hate the real Dickens, and not television’s chocolate-box version of him.

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.