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Go! Find! Buy!

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I’m pretty certain today, Monday, is the day the Bloomsbury Group books come out – Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennys and The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson. Searches for those sorts of words will bring up my reviews of them, but suffice it to say I love them both. Henrietta’s War, especially, is a book which should never have gone out of print. I’m really hoping Bloomsbury reprint the sequel, Henrietta Sees It Through, but this of course depends upon the success of Henrietta’s War.

Usually I don’t force books on people, I just give my view and leave you to decide – but with The Bloomsbury Group I’m going to get a little pushier. It’s a bit of a bold move, doing a reprint series, and something we really need to encourage and support. With that in mind, do please buy buy buy these reprints! They’re great books, striking editions, and affordable too. Discounted to £5.99 from the Bloomsbury website, and even less from other online sources. How many new novels are that cheap?

Expect this sort of peer pressure at intervals through the year – the Bloomsbury Group are published in three instalments of two. So… buy online, buy in a shop, but get these books and read ’em – you’re in for a treat. No, sorry, six treats.

Parents and Children

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Few authors inspire excessive amounts of love and hate as Ivy Compton-Burnett. I first swore my love for ICB on this blog a year ago, but I do space out my ICB novels (they do have a tendency to be similar) and whilst on holiday I read Parents and Children (1941).

And what a lot of children there are – nine of ’em. I’ve left the book in Somerset, so I can’t remember all their names – actually, there’s a challenge, how many can I recall… Honor, Gavin, Graham, Daniel, James, Nevill [sic?]… and three others. They split neatly into three groups – three in the nursery, three in the schoolroom, three adults. As usual in ICB novels, not much happens – but when it does, it’s pretty drastic. Life-changing events are encompassed by lengthy, facetious discussions – gently vicious and cruelly precise, always picking up on the things said by others. Calmness permeates even the most emotional responses, and ICB’s writing is always astonishing in its use of dialogue. More or less all of it is dialogue, and though often sophistry, it is somehow also accurate about family dynamics.

Alongside the nine children, two parents and two grandparents are three governesses, various maids, a visiting family of three and a neighbouring family of three siblings. That makes at least 23 central characters – somehow each of them is individual, with their own distinct dialogue and personality. How she does this in fewer than 300 pages is astonishing.

As I said, giving plot would be a waste of time, especially since most of the major events happen in the last fifty pages or so. In fact, the blurb to my copy gave away more or less all the plot. What I will say is that any ICB fans will also love this one – I don’t think it as good as Mother and Son or A House and Its Head, so I’d recommend ICB newbies should start with one of those. But any ICB novel is so unlike any other author’s, and a real treat. Or, alternatively, a nightmare. Only one way for you to find out…

The Outside of Houses

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At the moment Pride and Prejudice is beating Persuasion (which is my way of thinking too) but I’ll leave the vote for a few more days to see if you Anne-fans can help her beat our Lizzie.

Yesterday I went with two friends from the Masters course on a road trip to Sissinghurst – we’re all fans of Vita Sackville-West and/or the Bloomsbury Group in general, so this was a post-dissertation-hand-in treat for us. And we drove for hours, including a scenic tour of Reading (if such a thing is possible?) only to discover that… it was closed. Whoops. We didn’t think to check the website… just thought, perhaps, in the middle of summer they’d be open during the week. It’s what Vita would have wanted. Regardless, we had a really fun day – we could explore round the outside of the buildings, walk down to the lake, have a lovely picnic and buy lots and lots of postcards. (Note – I will never be happy in future with a picnic unless there is a melon – it was perfect food for the weather). And then we also took a trip to Knole, a Vita tour of Kent – which was, again, beautiful. And there were deer roaming around the park too, so it was like a Magdalen home-from-home.

And I did 7 hours of driving! Including my first proper motorway. When in Devon we were briefly on a motorway, but it was a 50 mph stretch, so the M25 was a different kettle of fish. And it was mostly fine – except for one near-miss. Actually, that was on an A road – and it wasn’t even my fault. A van was coming on from a slip road; I was in the left lane and couldn’t pull over as there were a couple cars adjacent in the right lane. This didn’t deter the van – instead of giving way, or pulling behind me, the driver decided simply to move into my lane, where I actually was. So I had to swerve into the right lane, where the other cars were. Luckily they were both alert, and had also pulled over a bit – we had three vehicles in two lanes. Terrifying moment, but thankfully we were all fine, just a little shaken up. And the van sped off as quickly as possible, having almost caused a big accident. Goodo. (And sorry Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife, who are finding out for the first time, reading this – I tried to call you yesterday!)

I must be a proper driver now, I’m complaining about other motorists. But the positives outweighed the negatives – a really fun day out with some good friends, and some great literary sites to be seen.

Year Three: Book Reviews

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Ashworth, Jenn – A Kind of Intimacy
Bailey, Jenna – Can Any Mother Help Me?
Baker, Frank – Miss Hargreaves
Beauman, Nicola – The Other Elizabeth Taylor
Bowen, Elizabeth – The Last September
Cannan, Joanna – Princes in the Land
Carey, Edward – Observatory Mansions
Cavanagh, Mary – A Seriously Useful Author’s Guide to Marketing and Publicising Books
Compton-Burnett, Ivy – Parents and Children
Compton-Burnett, Ivy – Manservant & Maidservant
Compton-Burnett, Ivy – Pastors and Masters
Comyns, Barbara – Sisters By A River
Comyns, Barbara – The House of Dolls
Cunningham, Michael – The Hours
Delafield, E.M. – As Others Hear Us
Dennys, Joyce – Henrietta’s War
Dennys, Joyce – Repeated Doses
Devonshire, Deborah – Home To Roost
Dominguez, Carlos Maria – The Paper House
Faulks, Sebastian – Pistache
Frame, Janet – The Lagoon
Frisby, Terence – Kisses on a Postcard
Garnett, Angelica – The Unspoken Truth
Gavron, Asaf – Croc Attack!
Graham, Virginia – Say Please
Greenberg, Michael – Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
Greene, Graham – Travels With My Aunt
Hapwood, Dianne – Tea and Tranquillisers
Harman, Claire – Jane’s Fame
Hart, Elizabeth Anna – The Runaway
Hill, Susan – Howards End is on the Landing
Hill, Susan – The Beacon
Hill, Susan – In the Springtime of the Year
Ishiguro, Kazuo – Never Let Me Go
Jackson, Shirley – The Bird’s Nest
Jackson, Shirley – We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Jansson, Tove – The True Deceiver
Kundera, Milan – Immortality
Kundera, Milan – Identity
Last, Nella – Nella Last’s War
Lawrence, D.H. – The Fox
Lee, Hermione – A Very Short Introduction to Biography
Lelord, Francois – Hector and the Search for Happiness
Leverson, Ada – Love’s Shadow
Lindsay, Joan – Picnic at Hanging Rock
Longford, Christine – Making Conversation
Macaulay, Rose – Crewe Train
Macaulay, Rose – Keeping Up Appearances
Mansfield, Katherine – Selected Stories
Maxwell, William – They Came Like Swallows
Michaels, Anne – Fugitive Pieces
Miles, Susan – Lettice Delmer
Murray, Simone – Mixed Media
Nemirovsky, Irene – David Golder
Olmi, Veronique – Beside the Sea
Oyeyemi, Helen – White is for Witching
Panter-Downes, Mollie – Minnie’s Room: The Peacetime Stories
Saki – A Shot in the Dark
Sam, Anna – Checkout: A Life on the Tills
Sjon – The Blue Fox
Sinclair, May – Life and Death of Harriett Frean
Smith, Emma – Maidens’ Trip
Spalding, Frances – Insights: The Bloomsbury Group
Stevenson, D.E. – Mrs. Tim of the Regiment
Strachey, Julia – Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Struther, Jan – Try Anything Twice
Summerscale, Kate – The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Taylor, Elizabeth – Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Taylor, Elizabeth – A Game of Hide and Seek
Truss, Lynne – Making the Cat Laugh
Visman, Janni – Sex Education
von Arnim, Elizabeth – The Enchanted April
Wodehouse, P.G. – Indiscretions of Archie
Wodehouse, P.G. – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
Wolff, Tobias – In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
Woolf, Virginia – Flush
Young, E.H. – Miss Mole
Zaid, Gabriel – So Many Books
Various – Bayard Books

Another Vote!

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a little poll on Stuck-in-a-Book. In the past we’ve discovered that you prefer Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, Music to Art, and think that Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy are absolutely neck and neck.

So what this time?


It’s a Jane Austen head-to-head. Pride and Prejudice vs. Persuasion. I know some people will have other favourites from the Austen canon, but these are the two I hear mentioned most often, and I’m intrigued as to which will come out on top.


And, to whet your appetite (or does one wet an appetite?) expect thoughts on the following over the next week or so:

– some new children’s books
– Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
– Sex Education by Janni Visman
– Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
– Dreamers by Knut Hamsun
– They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
– Parents and Children by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Get voting on Austen, and do please tell me if there are any books in that list above that you’d particularly like to hear about first – supply and demand, doncha know!

Twins

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How are twins like amnesiacs? Find out below…

Hurrah, technology works! My neutral status is the assumption that things won’t work (computers, cars, biros) so it’s always a pleasant surprise when they do – my posts appeared as if by magic. It’s as though we weren’t away, but I can promise you that we were – Col and I had a fun time in Devon and Cornwall, seeing castles and beaches and a donkey sanctuary.

I read four and a half books whilst I was away, so will be getting you updated on them before too long. I also, surprise surprise, bought a few. One which I had to leave at home in Somerset, because it was too bulky to take back on the train, was Virago’s anthology of Twins and Doubles. I wish I could say more about it, but it’s a few hundred miles away from me… but it looks interesting.

And whilst we’re talking about twins, I’ve been rummaging through family albums, taking photos of photos, and I’ll leave you with a picture from our childhood. It is quite bizarre, going through family photographs with Colin and Our Vicar’s Wife, and often none of us were able to tell us apart. So I look at my family albums and don’t know which pictures are of me… this is how twins are like amnesiacs.

Henrietta’s War

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I’m sure it won’t have escaped your notice how excited I am about The Bloomsbury Group – not Virginia et al, but the reprints being published by Bloomsbury this year. Amongst them is my favourite novel, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker – but they are coming out in instalments, and the first two are The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, and Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennys. I believe the latter was suggested by Karen at Cornflower (see the links on the left; she now has a book blog and a separate domestic blog) and is the first one I’ve read. Not published until 7th July, I believe, but available for pre-order in quite a few places. (I also wrote about The Brontes Went To Woolworths a while ago, a book I now have in three different editions, though looking back at that review it’s pretty vague and woolly, sorry.)

It’s just as well that I’m using stock pictures, rather than taking a photograph of my copy of Henrietta’s War, as it’s pretty battered. I took it up to London, and carried it around all day, loth to be apart from it. (And what a beautiful book it is too, I love the designs of this series, so well done Sarah Morris for your design, and Penelope Beech for your illustrations – delightful.) Quite simply, Henrietta’s War is wonderful, and I never wanted it to stop.

Henrietta’s War was originally a series of articles in Sketch magazine during the Second World War. In the 1980s (the year I was born, actually) Joyce Dennys was doing her Spring Cleaning and came across the articles – and they were published in two collections. Henrietta’s War and Henrietta Sees It Through. They take the form of letters from Henrietta to Robert, a childhood friend away at war.

It is very Provincial Lady-esque, which can only be a good thing. In the first few pages we had a Robert, a Lady B. and even advice concerning the planting of bulbs, which happens on page one of The Provincial Lady (EM Delafield, but I’m sure you knew that). They’re even both set in Devon. It took me a while to cope with a Lady B. we were supposed to like, unlike Delafield’s condescending Lady B. – but, of course, this hindered me little. The humour is very similar – self-deprecating, and appreciative of the ridiculous even while she is proud of England’s bravery. The letters are also accompanied by Dennys’ own delightful sketches – have a look at Elaine’s review of Henrietta’s War over at Random Jottings to see some examples (one of which I have stolen) as well as reading Elaine’s wonderful thoughts, of course.

Henrietta represents the middle-class women in England, plucky and determined to carry on as normally as possible. They garden and chat and squabble – resisting the overly-zealous scrap metal collectors, and slowing down the knitting bee so as not to finish too soon, can be slotted into their daily lives. ‘There’s not much glamour on the home home-front. Ours not the saucy peaked cap of our untrammelled sisters [in the ATS]. Ours rather to see that the curtains are properly drawn, and do our little bit of digging in the garden. Ours to brave the Sewing Party and painstakingly make a many-tailed bandage, and ours to fetch the groceries home in a big basket.’ In the background are Henrietta’s husband, Dr. Charles; friends and occasional enemies Faith, Mrs. Simpkins and Mrs. Savernack; Henrietta’s children Linnet and Bill.

I think this quotation demonstrates the mixture of pluckiness and ability to laugh at oneself, which characterise both Henrietta’s War and so much writing of the period:

‘I was thinking to-day,’ said Lady B dreamily, ‘that if all we useless old women lined up on the beach, each of us with a large stone in her hand, we might do a lot of damage.’
‘The only time I saw you try to throw a stone, Julia, it went over your shoulder behind you,’ said Mrs. Savernack.
‘Then I would have to stand with my back towards the Germans,’ said Lady B comfortably.

Henrietta’s War is quite simply a wonderful, witty, charming, and occasionally very moving book. It deserves to be in the company of Diary of a Provincial Lady and Mrs. Miniver as great chroniclers of the home-front – and I can only hope that Bloomsbury will reprint Henrietta Sees It Through at some point in the future.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

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This does feel strange, writing my blog posts in a row on the 20th, knowing they won’t appear for a few days. I say ‘knowing’ – I’m still living in doubt that it will come to fruitition. Hopefully Blogger will prove me wrong… in fact, if anybody is reading this, then I have been proved wrong! As you read this, Col and I will be in deepest, darkest Devon, probably eating an ice cream and reading a book. Actually, those activities rarely go hand-in-hand (pun, if there is one, intended).

My book group in Oxford recently read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. I can’t remember whether I suggested it or if it was Angela, our Antipodean member. We were certainly trying to find a classic of Australian fiction to read, having just done Tim Winton’s Breath (which is quite good, though also quite a lot of content I shall euphemistically call ‘dodgy’). Picnic at Hanging Rock was one which none of us had read, or seen, but which I’d heard lauded a few times.


Oh. My. I warn you that this post contains a few spoilers from the novel, especially towards the end of the post, so don’t read beyond the following paragraph if you want to keep the plot unknown.

Only three of us turned up to the meeting to discuss it, and none of us liked it, I’m sorry to say. I thought it a curate’s egg; good in places. At the beginning a school party goes into the Australian bush, to see the Hanging Rock (which apparently exists) – four girls wander off, as does a schoolteacher. One of them comes running back in tears, but the others have disappeared. Will they ever return? Dot dot dot.

As premises go, that’s pretty promising. I had thought the picnic would occupy the whole novel, but far from it. The rest of the work details the effects of this mystery on the people involved – though not from the perspective of those lost. Again, potentially very interesting. But a big problem with the novel is its myriad styles – sometimes girls’ school story, sometimes grisly detective mystery, sometimes Prince and the Pauper-esque in a rather odd storyline about the close bond between an illiterate stablehand and a rich Englishman. A bit like Enid Blyton meets John Grisham meets Mark Twain. And not in a good way. The narrative jumps all over the place, stories and characters picked up and dropped and forgotten.

My overriding issue with Picnic at Hanging Rock, however, is (and this is a huge spoiler, so look away now if you want to) that we never find out what happens to the lost people. A mystery needs a conclusion, in my view of narrative. Apparently this open-endedness is credited with making the book and film a big success, but I just found it unsatisfying. Although it is better than what Joan Lindsay was *going* to put as the ending, later published as The Secret of Hanging Rock – time stands still, corsets hover in mid-air, and the girls turn into lizards. I kid you not. Completely incongruous.

One thing I did like about the novel was the way it was made to seem like fact. Quite a few people I spoke to thought it *was* based on true events – Lindsay is ambivalent in the preface, but uses footnotes and drops hints that it is true, though in fact none of it is. Obviously similar events happened – people going missing, I mean, rather than turning into lizards.

My question – why is this novel an Australian classic? I think it has some good passages, some clever lines, but overall it bears all the marks of an unedited first novel, with the author trying to cram absolutely everything in. Perhaps the film is better, and accounts for the novel’s continuing success? I am willing to hear the case for the defence, and I hope somebody here can offer it.

Tripping Over

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One of the books which I should have included in my Top 15 last year, but somehow didn’t, was Emma Smith’s excellent memoir of a Cornish childhood, The Great Western Beach. I wrote about it here, complete with a jaunty picture of a little bucket. When I heard Maidens’ Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal was being reprinted by Bloomsbury in the same format, I hurriedly asked for a copy, and the journey to and from London enabled me to read it.

Last time I praised David Mann’s jacket design, and I can only do so again – The Great Western Beach and Maidens’ Trip sell well for the content, I daresay, but there must be lots of casual browsers who picked it up on the basis of the brilliant design. And then there might be people like me who have a liking of Maidens’ Trip simply for the excellent apostrophe use. It’s reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan’s best work. Man, I love Bob Dylan.
[I should add that I left the computer unattended for a few minutes, and it was sabotaged by Colin.]

I knew approximately nothing about the Grand Union Carrying Company and the wartime work which happened. Women were employed to ‘make use of boats lying idle’, and transport goods up and down the canal. Emma Smith did this in 1943, with several other girls at different points, but with authorial licence she condenses these trips into one trip, and the girls into three girls – Nanette, Charity, and Emma. Yes, Emma is Emma Smith, but an edited version. In The Great Western Beach Emma Smith had a slightly surreal narrative voice – the vocabulary of an adult, the ignorance of a child. Maidens’ Trip demonstrates that she always used an unusual angle – though she always uses ‘we’ and ‘us’ to describe their experiences, there is no ‘I’. Emma, like Nanette and Charity, is always referred to in the third person, even though she alone has thoughts and reflections revealed. It took me 60 pages to discover why the book was a little unnerving, and then I realised what was going on. ‘We’ but never ‘I’.

There are too many mini-adventures in Maidens’ Trip for me to describe them all, and each feels representative of a boating life. Their interaction with professional boating fraternity shows a world now lost. These families would travel up and down the canals all their lives, marrying within the fraternity, bringing up their children in the same ways, with little knowledge or care about the world away from the water. Their friendships would survive on seeing people for only a few minutes a week, passing on the canal. Still Nanette, Charity and Emma made friends – and made enemies. Though the girls have distinct characters, each also has the stubbornness needed to battle the elements, the privations, and the locks. The overriding impression is of dirt, weariness, hunger and a constant triumph that they were succeeding at all.

Just like The Great Western Beach, Emma Smith writes in a continually captivating and energetic manner in Maidens’ Trip. Her experiences were unusual, but it is her writing voice which makes them fascinating. A sparse honesty pervades, and the book is without a drop of sentiment. Though perhaps not as good as The Great Western Beach, which deserves to be a classic of memoir for generations to come, Maidens’ Trip is a wonderful journey into the bizarre episode in the life of a very interesting woman.

“The trouble is,” said Charity, hearing, as always, only what she wanted to hear, “that no one knows a thing about canals till they come on one. People have said to me so many times: ‘But what do you do?’ and I can’t explain. They seem to think you do nothing but lean on a tiller all day.”

Perhaps we can’t share the same experiences as Charity, Nanette and Emma – but Maidens’ Trip is a close second best.