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Crossriggs by Jane & Mary Findlater

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I read a review of Crossriggs (1908) by Jane and Mary Findlater back in my early days of blogging, and I now have no idea where – but I bought it in 2008, and it’s only taken me twelve years to take it off my Virago Modern Classics shelves and finally read it. And I loved it! (I have no idea how two authors go about writing a book together, so I’m going to quietly ignore that element of it. If anybody has any insight, do share.)

The novel is about the small Scottish village Crossriggs, which only has a handful of families, most of whom have known each other forever and can date back their family in the area through several generations.

We made at Crossriggs a right little society within a very small circle. True, the village was only an hour by train from a capital city; but our excursions there, and our returns, only made our independence the more marked. Crossriggs was no suburb – owed none of its life or interest to another place. Edinburgh was our shopping centre; some of us had business, and all of us had relatives there; our surgeons and our boot-makers lived there; but socially, Crossriggs hugged itself in a proud isolation from ‘town’. We didn’t want it; of course ‘town’ would never have believed that, but it is true all the same, and although the Scottish capital is at all seasons swept by sufficiently bracing airs, one of our customs was to draw a deep breath on alighting from the train at our own station, and remark with satisfaction, “How good the air tastes after being in town!”

Our heroine is Alexandra Hope, commonly Alex, who is a clever, witty, impetuous young woman living with a kind, unworldly father (‘Old Hopeful’) who is terrible at keeping money and excellent at having new interests and schemes. He is a fruitarian, and is usually to be found trying to get unsuspecting locals to try various vegetable pastes that he eats instead of proper meals. I loved him – think the kindness of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding and the absent-mindedness of Mr Pim from A.A. Milne’s Mr Pim Passes By, rather than the self-centred eccentricity of Mr Woodhouse in Emma. He has a childlike wonder and delight in the world, and an equally childlike inability to manage responsibility and duty.

Alex tolerates him but has to do something to help the family finances – particularly when her widowed sister returns from living abroad, bringing five children with her. She refuses the help of Mr Maitland – a local man of some renown, who has moderate fame and riches, and a wife that nobody is particularly fond of. Some of my favourite scenes in the novel are when he is dealing bluffly with Alex, trying to educate or reason with her, while clearly very fond of her and a little in awe of her. There is something of the Emma/Knightley relationship.

Instead of his money, she starts reading for a local Admiral, whose sight is not up to reading for himself. And he has a smooth, handsome grandson in tow.

Crossriggs felt a lot like an Austen heroine in a Gaskell novel to me – all update a little for the Edwardian period. (In the writing, that is; it is set in the late-Victorian period). Alex is in the same mould as Elizabeth Bennett – very lovable and quite flawed. And not at all like the cover pic on the Virago Modern Classic, which I think is a rare poor choice from them. The story of romance is not simple, as there are a range of male candidates and none of them are quite suitable. But, like Austen’s novels, this is much more a book about the heroine’s development and dawning self-understanding than it is about romance.

I shan’t spoil the ending, but the plot develops in a way I didn’t at all expect – and very satisfyingly. I think I originally bought the novel because it was described as a comedy – well, it’s more a comedy of manners. Smiles rather than laughs, and not without sensationally tragic moments that are of their time, but a wonder set of characters and an enchantingly engaging setting. Perhaps Alex’s similarity to Austen heroines isn’t entirely accidental, but the novel succeeds in being entirely its own thing, however much it owes to a history of sister novelists.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“I could just say – find a copy, read it!” – HeavenAli

“It’s a good story, but I thought that Alex was a bit dense most of the time” – A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore

“I did love it. I can’t say that it’s a great book, but it is a lovely period piece.” – Beyond Eden Rock

British Library Women Writers #3: Chatterton Square by E.H. Young

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For the third of the British Library Women Writers series, I thought I’d republish a post I wrote for the #1947Club back in 2016, which is when I first read Chatterton Square. It’s also the first of the British Library titles that I chose myself – and the afterword that was most interesting to me to write, as I had to do some new research into 1930s divorce law. I hope also interesting to read about! Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2016…

I was really pleased when I heard that Chatterton Square by E.H. Young was a 1947 novel, as I’ve had it on my shelves to read since 2007. Since 21st December 2007, to be precise, which makes it a couple of months after I read Tara’s review of it at Books and Cooks. Tara sadly left the blogosphere many years ago, but this book and she have always been associated in my mind – and it is only now, looking back at her review, that I discover that she wasn’t quite as enamoured with Chatterton Square as my memory had suggested…

This was the first E.H. Young novel I bought, but it’s now actually the fourth one that I’ve read – Miss Mole, William, and The Misses Mallett being on my have-now-read list, with William finding its way to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About list. How does Chatterton Square fare on my list?

It was E.H. Young’s final novel, and there is a great deal of maturity here. I would never have mistaken it for a young writer’s first effort – because the characters and their experiences are described so subtly, so gradually and with such sophistication. As usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Who are these characters?

The novel concerns two families living next to each other on Chatterton Square in Upper Radstowe – Young’s fictionalised version of Clifton in Bristol. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming. They cannot know, but some are pretty sure – and some are adamant that it will not; I think this sort of dramatic irony might be something we see a lot of in the 1947 Club.

Mr and Mrs Blackett have an unhappy marriage, but only Mrs Blackett knows it. Mr Blackett is an astonishingly real creation: a monster who is never openly cruel or even vindictive. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. He rules with a rod of iron – but one which manifests itself in hurt disbelief if anybody should ever disobey him, and genuine wonderment that anybody could wish to. Their three daughters – Flora, Rhoda, and Mary – deal with this in different ways. Flora is a copy of her father, though has grown increasingly sick of him; Rhoda is a copy of her mother (as they begin to realise as the novel progresses), and Mary – well, she’s not really anything, and could probably have been left out altogether.

Mrs Blackett has tolerated her misery by pretending to be happy, and mocking her husband to herself. This charade is what keeps her sane, and also what brings her amusement. If there is cruelty in her methods, it is because it is a question of survival. The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges. It seeps into the reader’s mind and won’t go away.

She is also unafraid to show parents who don’t idolise their children. Mr Blackett is frustrated and confused by Rhoda, but Bertha Blackett actively dislikes her daughter Flora – while still loving her. But it is touching to see Rhode and Bertha come together as Chatterton Square progresses (and it begins when Rhoda sees her mother give her father a look which contained ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’.)

This family transfixed me, and is the triumph of the novel in my opinion, but we should turn our attention to the other family. Rosamund Fraser heads up the family of five children – her husband is believed by some to be dead, but actually she is separated from him. The family is happier, freer spirits, gravely looked down on by Mr Blackett – but appealing to almost all the other Blacketts (sometimes specifically – Flora fancies herself in love with one of the sons – but more as a unit to be envied.)

Living with them is Miss Spanner – a spinster and friend of Rosamund, who suffers still from the memories and affects of an unhappy childhood. She and Rosamund have a close friendship that yet retains many barriers – not least a one-way emotional dependence. Miss Spanner, in turn, starts to become friendly with Rhoda, who sneaks over illicitly to borrow books.

Young has created such a complex and believable web of relationships between these two houses, and it is an engrossing novel. There is less levity than some of her others (no character leaps off the page like the lovable Miss Mole), and it perhaps requires more commitment from a reader than some. It is not one for speed-reading – but there is an awful lot to appreciate, and slow, attentive reading is rewarded.

And as I said, the threat of war looms. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner. Miss Spanner has this wonderful moment of musing how war could be:

War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea.

In our previous chosen year, war was around the corner but could only be guessed at. Some of the books we read paid no attention to the looming at all; some of the authors probably agreed with Mr Blackett that it would never happen. What I’m intrigued to discover this time around (and this is partly why 1947 was chosen) is – will any of the books ignore the war? Could they? And how differently will they all write about?

My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock

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When I went to Toronto in October 2017, there was only one site that I really, really wanted to go to. Well, two including Niagara Falls – but the place I was most excited to visit was a little town called Orillia. Mention that to anybody in Toronto and they will be baffled – and, having spent a day there, I can see why they might be. It’s a small, perfectly pleasant town, but not the sort of place tourists from England would usually make a beeline for – unless, of course, they love Stephen Leacock. Or are the twin brother of someone who loves Stephen Leacock.

So we spent a day there, and I got to visit his house. Not many people were doing the same, but I found it very moving. I’ve loved Leacock since I started loving books aimed at grown ups, more or less, and it was a dream come true to be in the house where he wrote.

I’ve read a fair amount of Leacock, and had even more unread, but I had not come across My Discovery of England (1922). As soon as I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. In the early twentieth century, there were lots of books written by British authors about North America – often on the back of a few weeks travelling between hotels. They repeatedly answered the same sorts of questions about American culture, American women, America’s future – you might remember it being teased in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America.

Well, Leacock decides to beat the writers at their own game – and writes the reverse, coming to England to ‘jot down his impressions’, always bearing in mind comparisons with the places he knows and loves in ‘America’ (he often refers to Canada and America interchangeably as ‘America’ in the book, mentioning in a footnote that he uses it as shorthand for North America).

By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographic Society of England (to both of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense.

The resulting book is (a) very funny and (b) frequently shows how little has changed in the UK in the intervening century. For instance, here he is not long after his arrival, taking a train journey:

The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small county; it contains only fifty thousand square miles, where the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow-passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922; but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting down an impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellow-traveller other than to read the labels of his luggage and to peruse the headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder.

It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow-passenger in a compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fully conversant with the rules of travel as understood in England. I should have known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man.

A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.

Curiously, the one time he does seem not to be dry is when writing about co-education – and, despite being a professor at McGill University and teaching both men and women, he launches into quite an odd and unconvincing line of argument against women receiving degrees. Try, if you can, to put that to one side – and then there is much to enjoy in his cursory exploration of Oxford University (from the vantage of the Mitre pub which, one hopes for his sake, was nicer in 1922 than it is today). The university certainly doesn’t seem to have changed much…

In the second half of the book, he focused more on the disadvantages of being a visiting speaker – again, very amusing, but I preferred the first half of the book. But overall it was exactly the sort of mildly silly, gently biting book that I have come to expect and love from Leacock. Something fun for lockdown, certainly.

Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert

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I recently tweeted a photo of my British library Crime Classics collection, most of which I haven’t read, and asked the good people of Twitter which I should read next.

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As I should have perhaps anticipated, I got many, many suggestions – practically as many as there are books there. But I went away and explored a few of the options, and chose Death in Captivity (1952) by Michael Gilbert, which I think I got as a review copy. I was intrigued by it’s WW2 setting and the ‘locked room mystery’ element to it.

The novel is set in a POW camp in Italy towards the end of the war – the soldiers have heard rumours that the end of the war might be coming, but nothing concrete. But they do know that a retreating German army might have no compunction in a few last-minute killings of British soldiers in an interment camp. Now is the time to make good their escape – and they have been busy tunnelling away from the various huts they’re living in.

I’ll be honest – the characters more or less blended into factions for me, in this one. I was too caught up with the setting and the mystery (to which I’ll come in a moment) – so this review is going to be lamentably short on characters’ names and personalities. I was also feeling pretty anxious when I read it, so was speeding through for the plot. But Gilbert definitely makes us feel like we’re in the middle of this camp – with all the humour, rivalries, fear, and ambition that are the everyday norms of the extraordinary situation in which these man have found themselves.

While there are a few tunnels, most are really only decoys for the main tunnel. But one morning, the soldiers find that there is a dead body in it, under a pile of rubble. It brings about a long list of questions: murder or accident? How did he get in? Do the Italian guards know about the tunnel – and how can they begin to investigate his death without exposing their chance of escape?

Like so many detective novels, the denouement doesn’t live up to the prowess of Agatha Christie. If, like me, you started with her, every subsequent detective novelist will disappoint with their plots – I’ve yet to find any exceptions. And, no, the denouement here is not particularly satisfactory – but what was brilliant was the way in which Gilbert brought that world to life. For the vividness there, and sections of real tension, I’d very readily recommend Death in Captivity.

British Library Women Writers #2: My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

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I’ve left it far too long since I wrote about The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair – I’ve been meaning to write quick posts to let people know about the British Library Women Writers series that I am lucky enough to be series consultant for.

When they asked me, back in the dim and distant past, they’d already picked some of the titles to republish – and My Husband Simon was one of them. It was also the only one of the three they’d chosen that I’d already read. And luckily I liked it – and I liked it all the more when I re-read it to write my afterword (which is about class and reading matter in the novel).

The main character is Nevis, and she is a writer with an early success under her belt. Like Panter-Downes herself, she’d published a book as a teenager and had a follow-up that wasn’t as successful. How far it’s a self-portrait is hard to say – I don’t know if any such man as Simon existed, but Nevis is won over by him pretty quickly. He is proud of the fact that he doesn’t read and hasn’t heard of her. He also, she suspects, wouldn’t have heard of Virginia Woolf. Despite coming from different classes, with very different sets of likes and priorities, they get married. The original US title gives us a clue why: Nothing In Common But Sex.

Into this increasingly fragile marriage comes Nevis’s publisher – and a sort of love triangle forms. But the novel is much more than that. It’s about a meeting of classes that has nothing of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover fantasy to it. I’ve noticed a lot of the reviews have also drawn out the way that women’s work was (and always is) disparaged – that’s definitely in the mix too. It’s a really fascinating look at an incompatible marriage – told in a pacey, page-turning way. It doesn’t have the fine prose of One Fine Day, written substantially later, but it is still good writing with moments of real brilliance. This is the bit I excerpted when I reviewed it here years ago:

We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.

Wonderful, no?

It has been noted online that Mollie Panter-Downes didn’t rate the novel as highly as her later works, and didn’t want it republished during her lifetime. Interestingly, I’ve seen this noted by someone who has no qualms about biographies that reveal things their subject wouldn’t want revealed! It’s an interesting set of questions, but not one I’ll go into here – as with the George Orwell novel I reviewed recently, she definitely needn’t have worried. It is not her greatest work, but it is greater than many authors’ entire outputs.

The Overhaul #5

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You remember the Overhaul? Where I look back at a previous ‘haul’ post on my blog and see how many of the books I’ve read. And it’s always a super embarrasingly low amount. Welp, here we are with another instalment!

The Overhaul #5

The original haul post is here, where you can find why I bought the books.

Date of haul: February 2011

Location: Edinburgh (lots of bookshops)

Number of books bought: 19

 

Right, let’s see how well I did with those 19!

  • Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell – Their Correspondence
    I have not read this, but who actually reads collections of letters? They’re just there in case they’re needed. Right?
  • The Grasshoppers Come – David Garnett
    It’s embarrassing how important Lady Into Fox was to my DPhil and how few other books by Garnett I read. I have not read this.
  • Moor Fires – E.H. Young
    I was very lucky to find this scarce EHY but… I have not read it. I really must read some more Young, because they’re always great.
  • The Loved and Envied – Enid Bagnold
    Why am I doing this to myself? I have not read this – or, indeed, anything by Bagnold. Is this a good place to start?
  • Thunder on the Left – Christopher Morley
    I… have not read this. I look it at often, though, if that counts.
  • Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds
    This was one of the books I didn’t keep when I moved into my flat – and if you’re wondering if I read it before I got rid of it, the answer is no.
  • A Model Childhood – Christa Wolf
    I have read a novel by Christa Wolf since, but this is not it.
  • A View of the Harbour – Elizabeth Taylor
    Hurrah! I have read this! Yes! And it’s brilliant. Phew, that took a while, didn’t it?
  • Our Spoons Came From Woolworths – Barbara Comyns
    I have read this, but years ago and before I bought this copy. But, you know what, I’m going to count it. I since got rid of the first copy I had, but I kept this nice Virago Modern Classic with its Stanley Spencer painting on the cover.
  • Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther – Elizabeth von Arnim
    I don’t think I ever review this, but I have read it and it’s brilliant – the way Arnim conveys both sides of a correspondence despite only giving us one side is masterly.
  • The Caravaners – Elizabeth von Arnim
    And I read this! One of my favourite E von As – an extended satire of dry humour, it’s very, very funny.
  • Three Came Unarmed – E. Arnot Robertson
    When I bought this, I had lots of E Arnot Robertson novels I hadn’t read already on my shelves. Well, in the intervening years I’ve read a total of one of them, and it was not this (it was Cullum).
  • William: the Pirate – Richmal Crompton
    Another one I’d read before buying – good for this tally, if nothing else!
  • Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary – Ruby Ferguson
    I’d already read this as a Persephone, and I’ve since decided that I don’t need two copies, lovely as this one was.
  • Maurice – E.M. Forster
    Nope, haven’t read it. I’ve still only read the three major novels, and only really liked one of them, so… we’ll see,
  • Apricots at Midnight – Adele Geras
    One day, one day! Somebody else read my copy, so at least that’s something.
  • How Can You Bear to be Human? – Nicholas Bentley
    I wasn’t sure if I’d read this or not, but apparently I did not long after I bought it.
  • Joy and Josephine – Monica Dickens
    Somehow I haven’t read this even though it’s been on holiday with me twice, and I expressly determined to read it for Project Names last year.
  • Violet to Vita – the Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West
    See the first point about letters…

Total bought: 19

Total still unread: 11

Total no longer owned: 2

Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

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I’ve been reading D.J. Taylor’s enormous overview of 20th-century English literature on and off for four or five years. It’s called The Prose Factory, which isn’t a great title for a book that also covers poetry, but it’s certainly been interesting. Like anybody with a private interest, some things loom larger than perhaps they ought – and with Taylor it is George Orwell. He’s obviously a significant figure of the 30s and 40s, but it’s astonishing how often Taylor manages to mention him.

I’m actually thirty years further forward in The Prose Factory, but picking it up reminded me of its Orwell-dominance, which in turn reminded me that I wanted to read more Orwell. I’ve read the big-hitters – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – and I’ve read Homage to Catalonia. I thought all of them were brilliant, and have had several others for many years. Simply because it’s been on my shelves the longest, seventeen years, I took down Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) recently.

I think Orwell might fall in that category of author you don’t see mentioned that much in the blogosphere, simply because we all read him long before we started book blogs. I don’t remember seeing a review of this one, or any of the lesser-known novels, and it’s a pity because it’s rather brilliant. I’d love it for the opening scene alone.

Gordon Comstock is the ‘hero’ of the novel, and as it opens he is working in a secondhand bookshop that also functions as a library for twopenny books. He is working on his own poetry, and has had a volume published that the Times Literary Supplement said showed promise. The extended scene in the bookshop/library is effectively to set up Gordon’s position on a scale of intellectual snobbery. I’m glad I read it now rather than seventeen years ago, because I think most of the names in the passage below would have meant nothing to me then – whereas now I can understand them as Orwell intended the reader to: as a barometer of the reading taste Gordon is setting himself against.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were ranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyes them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding.

Some of these names might only be familiar if you’ve studied popular culture of the period – does anybody read Warwick Deeping now? – but others have lingered. It’s a mix of the middle-class and the lower-middle-class, all with pretensions above their stations. Those who read Galsworthy thought themselves intellectuals; those who read Ethel M. Dell probably thought themselves above those who read westerns. All of it makes bitter Comstock feel angry and repelled – and bitterness is the keynote of his personality.

He lives in poverty – or, at least, poverty for someone of his education and intelligence. The only people he sees are a rich friend called Ravenstock, who tries to help get his poetry published and offers (and is refused) to lend him money, his girlfriend Rosemary, and an aunt Julia who is ever poorer than him, but from whom he still borrows money. It fits his code of pride that he cannot borrow from a rich friend, but will from a poor relative.

Pride is the other keynote, alongside bitterness. His stubbornness is infuriating. He won’t let Rosemary pay for dinner when they go out, because the man must pay for the woman – even if it means he can’t pay his rent or can’t afford to eat for the rest of the week. Rosemary puts up with an awful lot, and sticks with him despite all his moroseness.

Iterated through the novel, either in Gordon’s dialogue or in his internal dialogue, is that everything comes down to money. He can’t marry Rosemary because he doesn’t have money. She won’t sleep with him – so Gordon argues – because he doesn’t have money. He can’t work as a poet because he doesn’t have money. And he doesn’t have money because he left a relatively well-paying job in advertising in order to get out of the capitalist machine.

What’s so impressive about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that Orwell has a mouthpiece for a point of view with which he evidently has substantial sympathy – and bravely chooses to make that mouthpiece objectionable. As well as bitter and proud, Gordon is stubborn, selfish, and often unkind to the long-suffering Rosemary. But there is also enough good in him to make the reader (this reader, at least) not hate him. He loves the beautiful and noble. He partly cares so much what people think of him because of his own low self-esteem, and his recognition that others have achieved much more. On the whole, he falls down on the side of being unpleasant. But it is so well-judged a portrait that he does not become a villain – rather, he is a friend that we are frustrated by and beginning to be sick of, even if we agree with him in essentials.

Orwell apparently thought little of the novel, and didn’t want it reprinted. I don’t agree with him. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four but it does have the same brilliant prose. He is the best writer I’ve read for writing that is entirely unshowy and is yet superlatively good. The plot is simple but perfectly judged, and I’m all the keener to read those other Orwells I’ve got on the shelves. In some ways, it’s a shame that his dystopian novels are the only ones that are widely remembered, because he so strikingly observed the real world too.

The Green Overcoat by Hilaire Belloc

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Like many of us, I suspect, the name ‘Hilaire Belloc’ was always associated in my head with characters like Matilda, who lied and burned to death, and Jim, who ran away from his nurse and got eaten by a lion. These spoofs of moralistic stories for children have outlasted the things they were spoofing, and I remember enjoying a cartoon of it as a child. It’s also where most people hear about Arthur Wing Pinero and his very-interesting-play nowadays.

Incidentally, in one group of friends we use ‘belloc’ as shorthand for ‘hilarious’.

Well, nine years ago I bought The Green Overcoat (1912), to find out a bit more about Belloc’s other writing, and now I’ve finally read it. The main character is Professor Higginson, a psychologist described thus:

He was a tall, thin man, exceedingly shy and nervous, with weary, print-worn eyes, which nearly always looked a little pained, and were generally turned uneasily towards the ground. He did not dress carefully. He was not young. He had a trick of keeping both hands in his trouser pockets. He stopped somewhat at the shoulders, and wore a long, grey beard. He was a bachelor, naturally affectionate by disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet were exceedingly large, and his mind nearly always occupied by the subject which he professed.

He is leaving an event when he discovers it is pouring with rain and he hasn’t brought a coat. He decides to borrow another coat on the rack, intending to return it the next day – it is a very distinctive green overcoat, and he doesn’t know its owner. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well, as it turns out, he gets kidnapped! The overcoat had misidentified him.

This is only the beginning of the bizarre chain of events that happen because Professor Higginson borrowed the coat. All of them follow relatively convincingly after the first, only slightly heightening probability. Truth be told, I expected them to be a little more surreal than they are, and there are periods of the novel where Belloc seems almost deliberately to be avoiding the more extreme things that could have happened.

In terms of tone, it’s a comic novel but with a much lighter touch than I’d expected. That is, Higginson’s distress at being kidnapped is real rather than written for laughs – the humour comes from the absurdity of the situation. And Professor Higginson is a likeable main character, having the right mix of nervousness and ultimate determination to make him empathetic. These sorts of things rely on the reader thinking they might have made the same choices, and there is no cruelty at his expense from the novelist, in the way that Waugh does when his affable characters experience misfortune.

Ultimately, I think I’d have liked the novel more if it had been a bit more heightened – closer to Saki, perhaps. As it is, it’s a fun read that doesn’t quite live up to its potential, but good to know more about Belloc than I did before.