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Mapp and Lucia

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I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for over a year and not made mention of a series of books which I’m sure you all either do love or will love – the Mapp & Lucia series by EF Benson. I’ve recently had the pleasure of watching Elaine at Random Jottings succumb to Elizabeth and Emmeline, and it has set me off re-reading. I’ve only read the first four of the six, actually, and if you throw in Tom Holt’s well-respected sequels (in the style of EF Benson) then I have only got halfway. More news on Benson sequels very soon…


For those who don’t know, EF Benson wrote Queen Lucia in 1920, Miss Mapp in 1922, Lucia in London in 1927 – and by 1931 had the brilliant idea to bring his creations together in Mapp and Lucia. I haven’t read the final two books, as I say, but presume that the characters remain united enemies in them. Mapp and Lucia are not likeable characters, by any means – both with their varying pretensions and self-delusions, but both holding sway over their neighbourhood, there is inevitable friction and competition when they meet. And these characters, especially when they meet, are an absolute delight to read about. We laugh at them, we are fond of them, we realise how intimidating it would be to meet them in real life.


My dear friend Barbara-in-Ludlow introduced me to these books, back in 2004, very kindly lending me her beautiful Folio edition. These were returned when I went to university, and I bought up the Black Swan paperback editions. Very nice, even featured in my post about favourite book covers – but I did hanker for the beautiful Folio editions. When I was reading Barbara’s, I was so worried I’d get them dirty that I read them with custom-made brown-paper covers. What can people have thought I was reading… Anyway, I found this boxset secondhand in Oxford, and was utterly delighted. Annoyingly, I have to use my glasses to read them (never know why this is true of some books and not others – nothing to do with font size) but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.


Advance apologies to anyone who now must go out and buy this edition… but it’s worth it.

Quiz Results

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Well, even after my avalance of clues, the character-as-author quiz remains unsolved… so here are the answers.

Any more novels I should read with characters who write?

1.) Her manuscript was burnt by her sister.
Jo – Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott

2.) Struggling to follow up his masterpiece Jacob Wrestling, he eventually wrote a novel which began ‘The cat sat on the mat’.
Mr. Mortmain – I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

3.) Based on Marie Correlli, this selfish girl wrote romantic sagas, and didn’t understand that a large percentage of her buying public was laughing at her.
Angel – Angel by Elizabeth Taylor


4.) This Jewish writer had a typewriter called Minnie.
Toby – The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

5.) This vicar’s wife wrote romantic novels, dictating them to a secretary, and wrote so many at once that she got the plots and characters constantly confused.
Mrs. Sanders – Frost at Morning by Richmal Crompton

6.) Two Victorian poets, whom 20th Century academics discover were lovers.
Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte – Possession by A.S. Byatt


7.) She wrote detective novels about Finnish detective called Sven Hjerson, and was a parody of her own authoress.
Ariadne Oliver – lots of Poirot novels, by Agatha Christie

8.) Having published a ‘minute and unpretentious literary effort’, her children compare her to ‘Shakespeare, Dickens, author of the Dr. Dolittle books’ and her husband says ‘It is Funny – but does not look amused’.
The Provincial Lady – all the Provincial Lady books after the first one, by E.M. Delafield (these quotations from The Provincial Lady Goes Further)

9.) This detective novelist was arrested for the murder of her lover, and later married a man with a monocle.
Harriet Vane – several novels by Dorothy L. Sayers

Thursday

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My computer is in one of its slow moods (do I have a virus? Hmm.) so I’m not going to give you the answers to the quiz yet – it would require uploading photographs which are not yet on my computer. But I will give you some clues to the ones which nobody has yet got correct – 4, 5 and 8. All of them are in my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, in the list so far, in the sidebar. That should narrow down the odds from all of literature!

My friend Mel and I spent the day doing a ‘road trip’ (by way of train, bus and foot) to Marsh Gibbon. We choose our destinations almost solely by their names – in the past we have visited Kingston Bagpuize, Horton-cum-Studley, Goring-and-Streatley, and Thrupp. We took a train to Bicester, and walked from there, stopping for a picnic in Launton. All was going well – we saw a bridleway sign saying ‘Marsh Gibbon, 2 miles’ – and the pathway took us past some utterly adorable piglets, very tiny and very confused, falling over each other and scampering like puppies. It was after this that the walk descended into anarchy – we wandered through field after field for about two hours, occasionally seeing a footpath arrow, but generally having to make our own guesses. Nothing was signposted, really, and any designated footpath which does exist was impossible to find. Fearing that we’d never see civilisation again, we eventually spotted the roof of some barns. Where there are barns, there’s a farm; where there’s a farm, there’s a road. And there was. We eventually got to Marsh Gibbon, where The Plough quenched our thirst.

I’ll leave you with my latest painting effort – Spotlight.

Everything’s Beachy

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I think I’ll give you another day on the writer-as-character quiz from yesterday, though well done to all the correct responses so far, I’m impressed!

Instead, I’m going to write about The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith, which Steph at Bloomsbury sent me a while ago. Its subtitle is A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood Between the Wars, which is exactly what it is. Before I go any further, I must praise David Mann and Victoria Sawdon – for Jacket Design and Illustration respectively. What a stunning book. In the publishing world, people seem to endlessly copy one another with their covers – hundreds of Joanne Harris/Jon McGregor/Kate Morton lookalikes. Bloomsbury have really done something different, and it is beautiful – Mann and Sawdon must be at the top of their game, or they should be.

Right. Onto the content of the book. Emma Smith was known to me as the writer of a Persephone book, The Far Cry, which I’ve yet to read. She’s also a Shakespeare lecturer at Oxford, but that’s a different Emma Smith. I wasn’t aware that this Emma Smith was still alive, which sounds rude, but not everyone reaches their 85th birthday. She’s (sensibly) waited until late in life (one assumes) to write this memoir of her childhood – and rather brilliant it is, too.

The Hallsmiths, as was their name, aren’t an astoundingly unusual family, but have striking points – misanthropic father who resents being in a lowly position at his bank and craves fame; mother who has lost three previous fiancees; twin boy and girl – the boy fairly sickly, the girl stubborn and adventurous; Elspeth, the author. Elspeth’s early childhood is spent on and around the Great Western Beach, and the beach, alongside the family’s various homes, forms the locations for this autobiography.

I think the most useful way I can write about this book is to describe the style. First person, but neither from the author’s current perspective, nor from the child’s. It is all written as though she were looking back at the events from a distance of only a couple years – some hindsight and analysis is permitted, but alongside childhood ignorance of certain things, and a child’s language. Actually, the vocabulary is an adult’s, but many paragraphs end with sentiments such as ‘It’s not fair! Not fair!’ How does Emma Smith make this mixture of voices and tones and persons work? I don’t know, but it does. The Great Western Beach isn’t irritating or affected; somehow the view of a child is presented convincingly, without losing the slants of wisdom which are the memoir-writer’s prerogative.

Despite the comforting title, this is no cosy childhood. Her father is unloving and mean. She watches her brother struggle through a miserable childhood. Twice she is almost victim to sexual abuse from strangers. But The Great Western Beach is as far from miserylit as it is possible to get – where others, with less material, would have written a Tragic Childhood Memoir (WH Smith actually has a stand called this…), Emma Smith writes an honest but calm book – the good alongside the bad. Her powers of recall are frankly astonishingly – presumably the conversations are not verbatim, but I wouldn’t be able to write a chapter on my childhood, let alone a book, at a quarter of Smith’s age.

Perhaps the most moving section is Smith’s Afterword, which unsettles all the assumptions I’d made:

O my parents, my poor tragic parents – my good and beautiful, brave, dramatic, unperceptive mother; my disappointed, embittered, angry, lonely, talented father: locked, both of them, inside a prison they had not deserved, for reasons they didn’t understand, by conventions they took as immutable laws. I see them now as they were in my childhood: blindly struggling, trapped by social circumstances beyond their control, governed by inherited prejudices not worthy of them. How I wish I could have saved you, set you free, given you the happiness you once expected, all the success you had hoped and longed for, and never managed to make your own. Forgive me, my father, my mother. I have written this memoir, however much it may seem to be otherwise, out of great pity, and with great love.

Guess The Writer

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I was thinking about books which have characters who are authors… was planning to make a top ten, then realised so many were rather Stuck-in-a-Book specialisms, and that I could remember so few, that instead I’d set a little quiz. So, can you name these characters who are writers, and the books in which they appear? (A browse through the books I’ve read this year would help you with one or two!) (May be occasional spoilers…)

Also, no.10 is blank – for you to fill! Characters who are writers, to whatever degree.

1.) Her manuscript was burnt by her sister.

2.) Struggling to follow up his masterpiece Jacob Wrestling, he eventually wrote a novel which began ‘The cat sat on the mat’.

3.) Based on Marie Correlli, this selfish girl wrote romantic sagas, and didn’t understand that a large percentage of her buying public was laughing at her.

4.) This Jewish writer had a typewriter called Minnie.

5.) This vicar’s wife wrote romantic novels, dictating them to a secretary, and wrote so many at once that she got the plots and characters constantly confused.

6.) Two Victorian poets, whom 20th Century academics discover were lovers.

7.) She wrote detective novels about Finnish detective called Sven Hjerson, and was a parody of her own authoress.

8.) Having published a ‘minute and unpretentious literary effort’, her children compare her to ‘Shakespeare, Dickens, author of the Dr. Dolittle books’ and her husband says ‘It is Funny – but does not look amused’.

9.) This detective novelist was arrested for the murder of her lover, and later married a man with a monocle.

10.)…

Even Stephens

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Sorry to be absent for a while – down in Somerset now, and getting a cold (isn’t it always the way, when you get time off work?) but enjoying myself nonetheless.

Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers is the book I’m going to chat about today. Whether or not you’ll like this book can be largely decided by what your reaction is to that title – if you think “Oo, nice names, sounds fun” then look elsewhere. If your immediate thoughts are “Bell! Woolf! The Stephen sisters!” then you, like me, will probably love Sellers’ novel.

Vanessa and Virginia is fictional, but based on real people and events – the childhood of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, later to be artist Vanessa Bell and novelist Virginia Woolf, and their subsequent lives up to the death of Virginia. It is from the perspective of Vanessa, and addressed to Virginia (though without expecting response). Sellers’ style is not an imitation of Woolf’s, but it has deep similarities – the same beautiful lyricism, use of abstract images, delving into human emotions with an intelligence and compassion which never stumbles into the saccharine. Had Sellers been a shade closer to Woolf, it would have merely been a false copying – as it is, she stays just on the right side. Like Woolf’s writing, though, you have to read a couple of pages every time you pick it up, before you fall into her rhythm. And, also like Woolf’s writing, I think Vanessa and Virginia will divide people. I was wrapped in the beauty of the language and never wanted to leave – but I can see how the short sentences and symbolism might rankle.

I came from the position that I knew a lot about the Stephen sisters – from Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, but more significantly (for this novel) from Angelica Garnett’s impressive memoir Deceived with Kindness. As such, I had no problem when a host of characters were introduced, one after another, in the Stephens’ extended family and the Bloomsbury Group. I don’t say all that to blow my own Eng-lit-studying trumpet, of course, but rather because I don’t know how confusing Vanessa and Virginia would be for the uninitiated – I would humbly suggest that people seek out Deceived with Kindness first, as then everything will make sense. Plus Deceived with Kindness is great. I was going to point you in the right direction to read my review of it, but I don’t appear to have written one – so it might appear later.

To return to Vanessa and Virginia. The novel is a portrait of sibling rivalry and closeness; competition and understanding; unspoken bonds and unwritten rules guiding a relationship fraught with both love and jealousy. Obviously, I don’t know how true this is. Sellers uses at least one or two events (won’t spoil it for you by naming them) which probably didn’t happen, but are poetically justifiable. From the biographies I’ve read the sisters seem very close, but perhaps the jealousy side was there with some strength too. It certainly leads to some interesting discussion on the relative merits of writing and painting : “I think of Father’s jeer that painting is a bastard sister to literature” [Vanessa] later, “There is no doubt painting is leading the way. Fiction has forgotten its purpose. The novelists circle round their subject, describing everything that is extraneous to it, and then are surprised when it slips from view” [Virginia]. (Incidentally, to my mind, it is just this ‘circling around’ which makes Woolf such a brilliant writer – she homes in on a person, object, emotion through these descriptions of contiguity, rather than going simply and insufficiently for the heart). In some ways, the literal truth of the events and relationships doesn’t matter – Sellers was never going to be able to write Vanessa Bell’s autobiography. What she has done is write a beautiful novel which does justice to Bell’s perspective as a very talented painter, overshadowed by a very talented novelist sister, in an unusual group and unusual time. I don’t know where Sellers can go after this, but I look forward to finding out.

Booking Through Thursday

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This week’s question is quite appropriate for me, as I’ve got next week off work, and shall be going home for a few days, starting tomorrow. Might mean blogging is sporadic, I warn you now…

Do you buy books while on vacation/holiday? Do you have favourite bookstores that you only get to visit while away on a trip? What/Where are they?
I can just about hear my parents’ hollow laugh from here about the first question… yes, I do buy books on holiday! Many, many books. I’m fairly familiar with the stock of my local secondhand bookshops – going away means there are wholly unmined sources. And I mine ’em. I try to leave my suitcase about half empty, to leave plenty of room for all the purchases.

Favourite bookshops visited only on trips? Well, before we moved to Somerset we used to pass by the Bookbarn on our trips to the South West, and that’s a truly wonderful place. Now we’re close to it, we don’t seem to visit all that much. Generally, the pleasure for me is finding bookshops serendipitously. Mmmm books.

Howsabout yourself?

Letter-Shaped Living

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Oh, but you’re good. Well done to everyone who correctly identified The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, whichever method you used to spot it. It feels a bit fraudulent to label a book you May Not Have Heard About, but it’s so good that it’s going on my 50 Books nonetheless.

I read The L-Shaped Room back in 2001, having bought it on a whim for 10p, and utterly loved it. It was with some trepidation that I returned to it in 2008 – after all, though seven years may not seem like a very long time, I only really started reading Proper Books in 2000, so it’s a long time for me. I needn’t have worried – this 1960 novel of Jane Graham, unmarried and pregnant, moving into her L-shaped room, was still brilliant. I was just as gripped this time, though I knew (in surprisingly close detail) what would happen throughout the novel.

Jane is thrown out by her father when he finds out she is pregnant, and she must become independent. She chooses “an ugly, degraded district in which to find myself a room… in some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation.” Determined not to engage with the other occupants of the building, to suffer her solitude, she cannot help learn about them and grow to like them. There’s John, a kind, black jazz-player in the room next door; Mavis, an elderly spinster with a mania for collecting ornaments; Doris her constantly indignant landlady; even the prostitutes on the basement floor. Most importantly, there is Toby – a writer who hides his Jewishness and is irrepressibly friendly.

Banks’ strength is her characters – all of them had stayed in my head from 2001, and it was like greeting old friends. None are stereotypical (which makes it difficult to describe them, above, truth be told) and none are too nice, either – they are real people, with real motives and emotions and consequences. You love them for it, but it makes their trials and tribulations all the more traumatic for the reader.

I’ve read the sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two Is Lonely, back in 2001/2, and remember them both being good – though not as good. Last night I watched the film. I do love a black and white film – it makes one feel effortlessly intelligent. If I hadn’t just read the book, I’d probably have really loved it – but there are so many deviations. I can cope with a film missing out bits of the book, time constraints and all, but this one changed all sorts of details needlessly. Jane was French (actress can’t do an accent, I expect), her mother wasn’t dead and we never get to see her father, such an important aspect of the book. And why they gave her a baby girl instead of a boy, I can’t imagine. Still, the actors are brilliant – each looks and acts just right. Shame about the writing.

If you’ve not read The L-Shaped Room, do get a copy. Lots cheap on Amazon. And it’s also in print, which is rare enough for the books I recommend as favourites! Jane Graham will stay with you for years, as will her L-shaped room.

Guessing Games

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Tomorrow I’m going to add another book to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About – though I think some of you may have heard of this one. Not sure, really. So today I’m going to give you a mini-guessing game, to see if you can identify the book from the brief clues I give.


I’ve just watched the 1962 film – not a musical, you’ll be relieved to hear after yesterday,

The author also wrote children’s books.

Let’s
Just
Say
That
This
Is
Also
Something of a Clue….

A Personal Low Point

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How the mighty are fallen. What would Virginia Woolf say if she knew what I’d just read. Granted, the whole book took me less than an hour, but that’s still an hour I could have spent in the company of Laura Ramsay, Clarissa Dalloway, Miss La Trobe.

I’ve just read High School Musical : The Book of the Film.

My very dear friend Mel bought it for me, since we have shared (ironically, you understand) the rollercoaster of emotions that is Troy (basketball player) and Gabriella (Maths genius) discovering affinity through song. She asked me to write about it on here, and being the slavish man I am…

If you’ve seen High School Musical, then you’ve read all the dialogue in this book. N.B. Grace, who appears to have penned all manner of such books (though also looks like a note reminding about the Gospel) has turned his/her hand to writing a book in the easiest way possible. Grab a script, and throw “He said, thoughtfully”; “She said, inwardly groaning” and so forth, throughout. Repeat as needed. Surprisingly, however, it is done unobtrusively, and makes for an enjoyable enough read.

But why do I write about it here? Well, some of you may be the parents/grandparents/friends/siblings of someone who is reluctant to read much. If that person is a pre-teenager, possibly with a crush on Zac Efron/Vanessa Anne Hudgens, then maybe this book would lure them into the reading fold… Worth a shot, anyway.

Happy, Mel? ;-)