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Eastwards and Far by Chris Lee-Francis – #ABookADayInMay Day 27

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I think I stumbled across Eastwards and Far (2023) by Chris Lee-Francis on Lee-Francis’s Twitter profile, and was intrigued enough to order a copy pronto. As a memoir of cycling across Canada, it combines something I love reading about (Canada) with something I felt fairly ambivalent reading about (cycling) – but, on balance, I liked the idea of seeing Canada through the eyes of an adventurous traveller enough to give it a go. It’s been 25 years since I got a bicycle and I feel, if anything, less likely to get on one after reading Eastwards and Far, but I loved the experience of reading it.

Lee-Francis got the idea while cycling around Ontario in 2013. He spotted a sign for the Trans Canada Trail, and wondered if it would be possible to cycle all the way from Vancouver to the furthest West point of the enormous country – only later realising that the trail wouldn’t be completed until 2017. That gave time for a plan to formulate – and he and has friend Kristian ended up starting their three-month journey in Vancouver by the middle of 2017 (a third friend wasn’t able to get three months off work, so joined in for the final month). Eastwards and Far developed from the journals that Lee-Francis took during that time – turning into an endurance travelogue, documenting the experiences, the beauty, and the Canadians they met along the way.

For the most part, there are not significant dramas. Along the way, some vital belongings go missing, there is a near encounter with a bear, and misreading of a map leaves them with only six eggs to eat and nowhere to buy food – but this is not a memoir about overcoming great hazards and dangers. Rather, it is a memoir of the wonders that can be encountered by undertaking something like this. The highs and lows of battling all weathers and environments to achieve something momentous. And, above all, the interest and kindness of strangers. There are countless people along the way who may only appear for a few paragraphs or a page, but are indelliby part of the men’s experience – whether offering food, somewhere to camp, or simply company.

As the stories continued I realised our bikes had let us skip several layers of social interaction usually required to be sitting in someone’s kitchen talking as friends. A few hours ago we’d not yet met. Now, after nothing more than asking where we could safely violate several byelaws to spend a night sleeping rough without getting caught, we’d been invited over the threshold into their home.

There are definitely amusing moments in Eastwards and Far, but it isn’t played for laughs. This is no attempt to create a Three Men in a Boat style narrative. I’d, instead, describe the tone as warm. Chris Lee-Francis comes across as a thoroughly decent guy – and I suspect a lot of the kindness he and Kristian receive from strangers is because of that decency, and a capacity and willingness to embrace positives encountered every day. What else would possess someone to cycle for thousands of miles?

Of course, hearing about the challenge probably raises lots of logistical questions in your mind – and I enjoyed learning about the answers, particularly the Very Canadian ones. How, for instance, do you deter bears?

At the end of each day in bear country, when you’re nice and relaxed, tent ready and waiting, with a meal and maybe a beer inside you, comes the time to hang your food bags from a nearby tree.

The collective recommendations of friends, park rangers, information pamphlets, and numerous other knowledgeable sources was to suspect all food and cooking gear at least four metres off the ground, a safe distance from camp. Sounds easy, but this part of the day had often become more of a rigmarole than I felt it should’ve been.

The first step was to establish how far away to hang the bags. Received wisdom says at least a hundred metres, which we measured early in the trip to estimating Kristian’s running speed, calculating how long it would take him to run that far, and me timing him while he sprinted off into the distance. Bags would be suspended from a suitable tree somewhere beyond the perimeter.

“That was twelve seconds!” I called to Kristian the first night we did this. “Probably not a hundred metres?”

He looked wounded. “It could be!” he called back.

“Isn’t the world record just under ten?!”

“True! I guess the ground is quite uneven!” He ran a bit further and stopped again.

“That looks good! Probably fourteen seconds total?!” We used this time on subsequent nights.

One aspect that intrigued me, and wasn’t covered in any detail, was what it was like to spend three months constantly with a friend – and high-endurance three months, too. There are very few people I could spend that much time with, without going mad or severing the friendship. The two men seem to still be firm friends by the end, so it was obviously a success – and perhaps scarcely a cross word was spoken between them on the trip. Or perhaps Lee-Francis drew a veil over it.

He keeps the pace up well through the narrative. Something that could have become quite repetitive is somehow compulsive to read – even though he resists any urge to introduce sustained jeopardy. There is never really any doubt that the cyclists will complete their challenge, and do so in one piece. By avoiding any false tension, we can instead enjoy the journey as an adventure into curiosity. I’m still unlikely to ever get back on a bike, let alone undertake any significant challenges, but I really enjoyed reading about it from the comfort of my sofa.

As a sidenote, Eastwards and Far is by some distance the best-quality self-published book I’ve ever come across – French flaps and all! I would have appreciated the font being a little larger, as it is quite tiny, but it was certainly readable. If you’d like to read it yourself, you can get hold of it from Chris Lee-Francis’s website.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – #ABookADayInMay Day 26

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I have long meant to read Joan Didion, but didn’t really know what her writing would be like. I knew she wrote about grief in My Year of Magical Thinking, but – despite having read various reviews of her books over the years – hadn’t really pieced together what sort of style her fiction might be. I certainly hadn’t expected anything as hard-boiled as Play It As It Lays (1970).

As the novel opens, we get short chapers from the perspectives of Maria, Helene, and Carter – and the rest of the novel is in short, numbered sections that look at what have led to the opening: which is Maria in a psychiatric institution. Why is she there? Helene explains it to us, briefly, sort of, in the midst of accounting trying to visit Maria in the institutino:

I drove all the way out there, took the entire morning and packed a box for her, all the new books and a chiffon scarf she left at the beach once (she was careless, it must have cost $30, she was always careless) and a pound of caviar, maybe not Beluga but Maria shouldn’t bitch now, plus a letter from Ivan Costello and a long profile somebody did in The New York Times about Carter, you’d think that would at least interest her except Maria has never been able to bear Carter’s success, all that, and Maria wouldn’t see me. “Mrs. Lang is resting,” the nurse said. I could see her resting, I could see her down by the pool in the same bikini she was wearing the summer she killed BZ, lying by that swimming pool with a shade over her eyes as if she hadn’t a care or a responsibility in the world. 

Maria has had an unhappy, chaotic childhood – shaped by her father’s reckless gambling, which leads them to losing their home and moving to a town that he won in another game. The town doesn’t even exist in the ‘present day’ of the novel; nor does the motel, that her father installed where he hoped a highway might conveniently put an exit. She is used to instability and disappointment when she moves to the town characterised by it: Hollywood.

Apparently Play It As It Lays helped to shape the way that mid-century Hollywood was understood. It reminded me of A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) by Darcy O’Brien and, to a less extent, Prater Violet (1946) by Christopher Isherwood – which both demonstrate the chaotic insincerity of tinsel town. But, stylistically, Didion is very different. A lot of the short chapters are short, sharp dialogue exchanges between Maria and the people she forms unhealthy, dependent relationships with – her erstwhile husband, Carter; her lover Les; the film producer BZ; his wife Helene. For instance…

“I wasn’t just crazy about your asking Helene how much money BZ’s mother gives them to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach.

The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen’s at seven o’clock. “I wasn’t just crazy about that at all.”

“Well, she does.”

“Does what.”

“Carlotta gives them money to stay married.

‘So what.”

“I’m sick of everybody’s sick arrangements.”

‘You’ve got a fantastic vocabulary.”

She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.

“I’ve got a fantastic vocabulary and I’m having a baby.”

Carter slowed the car down. ‘I missed a transition,’ he said finally.

Maria did not look at him.

There are other characters who play significant roles – such as Ivan Costello, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘psychopathic blackmailer’, but he didn’t seem much more psychopathic than anybody else in the novel, to me. Because Didion gives everyone the same staccato, apathetic tone of voice, I did find it hard to disintinguish between characters. It seems deliberate – Play It As It Lays is a composite portrait of emotionless despair – but it did mean, to me, that there wasn’t much nuance between people. It scarcely mattered which absence of empathy Maria spent time with.

As well as exposing the heartlessness of Hollywood, and Maria’s limited and misogynistic experience on two movies (one successful and the other an unreleased critical darling), Play It As It Lays is a thorough portrait of dusty, hot California. Towards the middle of the novel, Maria is mostly occupied with driving – long drives along the freeway, aimless but vital to her continuation. It is oppressive and enveloping for the reader:

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky. 

There are key scenes that stand out in the choppy, sparse narrative – perhaps most significantly, the illegal abortion that Maria undertakes, the confusing ways she has to book and find her appointment, and the disastrous aftermath. Didion writes it with relentless reality, resisting any urge to make it a political point.

As Play It As It Lays closes, we learn the truth about what has led Maria to her institution (even though we don’t learn the specifics of why her and Carter’s young daughter is in a different institution). Rather surprisingly, she seems to receive a lot of visits from characters whose behaviour wouldn’t lead you to believe they’d bother.

And it ends, without any real sense of hope (maybe?). Didion is ruthless in her realism. The title is another way of saying ‘play the cards you are dealt’ – and there is a sense that the characters have done, are doing, will do this – and that the result is a moral and emotional neutral. As I said, I didn’t know what to expect from Didion, and it certainly wasn’t this sort of novel. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it. Play It As It Lays certainly has its fan base (Jacqui calls it ‘blisteringly good‘) and I’m a bit less clear about my view. There is certainly a lot to admire, but I found its sparseness and melancholy a little hard to parse. There is a laudable consistency to the tone, but I ended feeling like I knew surprisingly little about Maria, let alone anybody else in the novel. I think I liked the book nonetheless, but perhaps one to revisit to be sure what I think.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster – #ABookADayInMay Days 23-25

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I was away for the weekend with my church, and so I thought what better what to efficiently cover off three titles for A Book A Day In May than with a trilogy in one paperback? I was also chatting to my friend Tom recently, who has been reading the graphic novel versions of The New York Trilogy, and his descriptions of the original novels were enough to intrigue me. Clearly I’d been intrigued enough already to buy a copy in 2019, but it might have languished on my shelves indefinitely without that final push.

The New York Trilogy consists of three novels – City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986) – but you’ll almost invariably find them put together into this trilogy. They are totally separate novellas (well, so we presume for most of the time), but they are consistently, delicately, mysteriously interwoven – well, ‘interwoven’ feels too closely connected. Rather, they comment on each other by sheer proximity, and while you could disentangle any one from the others, there is a richness that comes from considering them as a whole.

It always feels strange to write about a book so well-known – though the sparseness of the Wikipedia page does make me question if I really am the last person to read them. They have been described as postmodernist takes on detective fiction, but if that description leaves you cold then fear not. I found this trilogy extraordinary – exactly the right amount of cleverness, so we are relish it alongside the author, rather than feeling alienated by it.

Ok, Simon, but what are they actually about? Let’s start with City of Glass. Daniel Quinn writes detective fiction under the name William Wilson. One day, he gets a telephone call asking if he is Paul Auster (!) – and he decides to assume that name to meet with Peter Stillman and his wife, to investigate the future murder of Peter Stillman by his father (since Peter Stillman is sure that his father will soon kill him). Along the way, Quinn-as-Auster also adopts the name of the detective he writes. The slippage of identity is a key theme of all three novellas, but particularly City of Glass. The person you pretend to be, or the person you are assumed to be, is elevated to a level of power that destabilises your own identity.

As he wandered through the station, he reminded himself of who he was supposed to be. The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was not altogether unpleasant. Although he still had the same body, the same mind, the same thoughts, he felt as though he had somehow been taken out of himself, as if he no longer had to walk around with the burden of his own consciousness. By a simple trick of the intelligence, a deft little twist of naming, he felt incomparably lighter and freer. 

Quinn starts shadowing the suspect, gradually losing his grip on reality. Adopting different identities is a key component of much detective and mystery fiction, of course, but Auster lifts it from its usually functionality in a novel – because it is usually done in order to get more information to convey to the reader, or to accelerate the revelation that comes at the end of the novel. In City of Glass, these sorts of disguises might bring more revelation, in terms of examining Quinn’s multi-layered psyche, but they certainly don’t remove ambiguity. There is no ultimate revelation here. We are taught to find our satisfaction in an entirely different mode from most novels with a detective.

What makes Auster so good is the quality of his writing – and what makes it so refreshing is that he isn’t playing needless games with it. So much postmodern fiction ends up being convoluted and self-indulgent. Or, even if we are being more charitable, the style is co-opted as part of the postmodernism: it intends to confuse, or blur the boundaries between reality and irreality, or highlight the fictionality of what you are reading. In City of Glass, he lets all of those fascinating things come through character and plot. The writing is just very good, engaging, with a simple lyricism. The sole example of the style itself being used to wrongfoot us is in Peter Stillman the Younger’s dialogue – which reads like a Beckett play:

“So I am telling you about the father. It is a good story, even if I do not understand it. I can tell it to you because I know the words. And that is something, is it not? To know the wards, I mean. Sometimes I am so proud of myself! Excuse me. This is what my wife says. She says the father talked about God. That is a funny word to me. When you put it backwards, it spells dog. And a dog is not much like God, is it? Woof woof. Bow wow. Those are dog words. I think they are beautiful. So pretty and true. Like the words I make up.”

One novella in, I was already hooked. The second novella is rather shorter than the other two (which worked very well for me, as the only full day I was away, with a busy timetable). I don’t have much to say about Ghosts, to be honest. It is also about a private eye (Blue) who is paid by White to investigate Black. Other characters are called Brown, Green, Rose, Gray… you get the idea. There is, incidentally, a lovely call-back to this naming in the final novella. A lot of the things I admired and enjoyed in City of Glass were also present in Ghosts, but to me it felt like a less ambitious and less successful version of the earlier novella.

And, finally, The Locked Room. On the surface of it, this is the most straightforward of the three. The unnamed narrator is a writer who hasn’t amounted to his ambitions – but discovers that his childhood best friend, Fanshawe, has abandoned his wife (in each novella, someone walks out of their life completely) and left behind suitcases of manuscripts. The narrator knew that Fanshawe had written as a teenager, but didn’t realise how diligently he had continued – or how brilliant he was. The narrator becomes as a sort of agent for the absent Fanshawe, to the extent that some people believe he is the author of the resultant novels, poetry, and plays. He also falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife and adopts his son, so that their lives begin to merge – but then Fanshawe writes to the narrator.

Towards the close of the novella, we realise how it relates to the other two – particularly to the first. But, before that, it offers a clearer example of what a talented writer Auster is. Without the same level of identity trickeries of the first two novellas, we can simply admire the storytelling, the prose, the exploration of character. The title The Locked Room obviously refers to a classic subset of detective fiction – but we are told that the locked room is the mind.

There are a couple of telling moments, offered as conclusions. ‘In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose’ – and ‘In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself’. They are the narrator’s conclusions rather than the author’s, of course, but they are also clearly untrue in the crafting of a novel. A crafted work of fiction is not chance, and every life portrayed must be reduced, truncated, into a synecdochal whole. Subtly – more subtly than most postmodernist works I’ve read – Auster sews a seam of self-awareness: this is a novella, but no novella can achieve the aim of portraying reality. It can only succeed by acknowledging its limitations.

I was often reminded of Milan Kundera, my favourite postmodernist writer, particularly in the way unusual anecdotes, historical figures, and other famous works of fiction are referenced and incorporated into a sort of intertextual patchwork. Sometimes the link between the tangent and the story isn’t clear (e.g. the man sent to starve on an island, rescued, then eaten on a drifting ship when he drew the shortest straw) – at others time, they are engaged with directly by the characters: Paul Auster (the character, rather than the author) is writing about Don Quixote; Peter Stillman The Older is obsessed with the Tower of Babel. I’d say that Auster does postmodernism in the least showy possible way. You could easily read these novellas – particularly the first and last – simply for the pleasure of the stories and characters, and not worry too much about the literary trickery. But the two elements merge together beautifully, making these novellas enjoyable to read with an added exhiliration from Auster’s intellectual playfulness. I loved the experience, join others in mourning his death last year, and look forward to reading more by him. Anywhere I should look first?

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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Careless People

Today I finished the audiobook of Careless People (2025), the recent memoir-exposé by Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time at Facebook. After a chapter about surviving a shark attack as a child, seemingly only included because how could you not mention something like that, we whizz forward to her petitioning Facebook for a role in policy and politics. The only problem is that neither the role nor the department exists. And yet, eventually, they are worn down – or at least see why the role should exist.

And what follows is a terrifying look at how Facebook runs. I’m only writing a short post today, because it’s late and I just got back home after going to Bristol to watch The Room, but a quick mention of some of its contents is chilling enough. Sexual harassment goes unchallenged (and, indeed, Wynn-Williams seems to have been fired partly for raising it); Cheryl Sandberg insists on assistants sharing a bed with her; Chinese Government’s human rights violations are accepted as a pesky necessity; Facebook lies under oath to Congress; Mark Zuckerberg barely cares when his employees are imprisoned for following his advice; a convulsing and bleeding employee is ignored by her manager and others around them because they are ‘too busy’.

None of us will have believed that Facebook was a force for good – it’s been clear since The Social Network and before that Mark Zuckerberg et al are ruthless, immoral, and selfish. But what Careless People exposes so well is exactly what the title (quoting The Great Gatsby) says: they are careless. They simply do not care about the terrible impact they are having – whether on their subordinates at work, teenage girls being deliberately served ads for weight loss products when they delete selfies, or human rights activists whose data will be given to people who will violently quash them. They are careless. It’s a new example of the banality of evil.

Sarah Wynn-Williams comes out of the book extremely well – so well that you have to conclude she is editorialising. I don’t doubt that the people around her were awful (she is even chastised for not responding quickly to work emails – while on maternity leave and in a coma) but I suspect she is not quite the tireless ambassador for morality that she suggests. It’s never quite clear why she takes so long to leave after she is disillusioned about the company – she mentions health insurance, but other companies have health insurance. Facebook/Meta are, of course, trying to tar her and say the book is all lies. I expect it is all truth, where they’re concerned. And this is just from one woman’s access to information – who knows what else they are hiding.

It’s a page-turner (or whatever the audiobook equivalent is) of a book, well-paced and unsparing. If you can cope with the info, since we all know that immoral powerful people are seldom likely to be held to account, then I recommend it.

The Tin Men by Michael Frayn – #ABookADayInMay Day 21

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The Tin Men by Michael FRAYN on Between the Covers

I’ve read a couple of books by Michael Frayn from later in his career, but it’s quite a departure to read his debut novel – The Tin Men (1965). It is a raucous satire of – well, of quite a few things. And it is prescient in quite an astonishing way about one thing in particular.

We are at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research – chosen by Frayn because of the irony of being named after the artist William Morris, I assume, given his abhorrence of mass-production. The William Morris who made cars would presumably approve. Everything that is being achieved by the institute is a ludicrous extension of normal office practices, and Frayn writes in highly ironic terms about it all:

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

The various figures in charge of departments are a little interchangeable – or, at least, they are all eccentric and incompetent, though their eccentricities and incompetences differ a little in kind. There’s silent, almost immobile Chiddingfold, in charge of everything. There’s Riddle, the sole woman, cigarette always dangling from her lips and given to unexpected displays at company dos. There’s Hugh Rowe, using office hours to write a novel – but deciding it’s easiest to start by writing the fawning jacket copy or glowing reviews. It’s a joke that should get old, but someone remains amusing – even when we get to examples of his prose, which are clearly satirising something and ended up being maybe too good for satire.

My favourite example of the automation is run by Macintosh, doing research into automating morality – by creating Samaritan (and later Samaritan II and Samaritan III) which are programmed to sacrifice themselves in the event of a shipwreck, so long as they can identify that the other objects involved are humans. It’s an example of the humour in The Tin Men – which I found witty rather than laugh-out-loud, and which could be wearing if it weren’t for a certain variety in its applications. I kept being reminded of David Lodge’s Nice Work (though thankfully without Lodge’s fixed belief that writing about going to the toilet is hilarious) – and I thought it was a similar idea done much better and much less annoyingly. Of course, Nice Work came out a couple of decades later, so Lodge might well have been influenced by Frayn.

The humour does feel very of its time – and very of a certain milieu. Perhaps in the 1960s it was a daring, new humour. It now very much feels like the voice of older, middle-class men who can’t punch up, because there is no ‘up’, and so just punch around. We are expected to recognise these worlds, not as an outsider but as people mere steps away from this level of absurdity. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the tone, particularly after falling foul with Lodge, but I ended up rather liking it. Somehow it feels more dated than humour from decades earlier, but you can see how it could have been very fresh in the 1960s.

And what is the most prescient thing? Another worker, Goldwasser, is working on the automation of newspapers – and it sounds extraordinarily like AI:

The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article. With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them.

Frayn’s vision is still tethered to the concrete, piecing through physical cards to form a newspaper-article-by-prediction, but it is still astonishingly similar to what generative AI is doing now. Musings about whether the automation machines can take over the ‘work’ of prayer are clearly satire, but still incredibly close to current conversations about the ways in which AI might remove spiritual or soulful elements of creativity.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to say that this isn’t simply a string of funny ideas and people – though the funny ideas are probably the strong point of The Tin Men. There is also an ongoing plotline about the Queen being on her way to open the new wing. It gives some momentum to a novel that could otherwise feel a bit scattergun.

The Tin Men has very little in common – stylistically or thematically – with the later Frayn books I’ve read, and I’m glad I read it. As well as being a fun, silly, eerily farsighted novel, it helps fill in a part of literary history that I’m less aware of and which seems less ripe for rediscovery than others.

The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann – #ABookADayInMay Day 20

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The Swan In The Evening: B Format: Fragments of an Inner Life (Virago Modern Classics) : Lehmann, Rosamond: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Crossing Day 20 feels like we’re on the home stretch, and I am still really enjoying doing A Book A Day in May – certainly finding it much easier than last year, when my eyes were still pretty ropey eight months after Covid. And there’s something I particularly like about reading books that have been on my shelves for ages – such as Rosamond Lehmann’s The Swan in the Evening (1967), which I bought in 2011.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Fragments of an Inner Life’, and fragments is the word. The first section is a fairly impressionistic take on her childhood – stray memories coming together to form some sort of image, however imprecise. Or, rather, she goes for very precise scenes that flow into other precise scenes, without really trying to cohere into anything very detailed. Some of it is in the present tense, giving it a childlike immediacy.

I am in the Parish Hall; it is a Sale of Work. I circulate among the visitors with a trayful of lavender bags which I proffer to the long lean sallow nurse in a grey uniform. I know her: she looks after a little boy with a squint and a funny way of talking, who is said to have tantrums and beat his head against his nursery wall, who once presented me with a letter that said, in grimy reeling print: ‘Dear Rosy sprinkel me with kisses if you want my luv to gro yore everlasting Joey.’ The nurse bends down to me, smiling, and says in a low confidential voice: ‘I’m stony broke.‘ At once such terror grips me that I almost swoon. Why? How was it that this harmless if unfamiliar slang phrase took sinister form as she uttered it and dropped on me with the chill weight of granite! Absurd, morbid child… Mad, like all children…: or so very little madder.

Among the memories given their sudden spotlights is one that a longer-lasting impression: the death of the six-year-old daughter of a man who works on the family estate. Without being able to truly understand the depths of this tragedy, young Rosamond sees its impact. It lingers with her as an incomprehensible sadness – and, later, becomes something all too comprehensible for her.

The second section of The Swan in the Evening tells us about the death of Lehmann’s daughter, Sally. Or, rather, the death is focalised through Lehmann’s own absence – her daughter is fairly newly married, in a distant country, and Lehmann is innocently going about everyday life. There are hints at a premonition, understood only in retrospect, and a veil drawn over the shock of the phone call – and the days and weeks after that.

But she picks up some time later, where she starts trying to communicate with Sally beyond on the grave – explained in no more metaphysical terms than that Sally is still alive, though not in the way such things are usually considered. From here, Lehmann goes through a curious mix of sharing how she believes Sally is communicating with her – and a defence of this belief. I’ll be honest, the combination was quite confusing. Lehmann is adamantly not part of any traditional religion, but she does piece together her beliefs from various different writers and influential figures.

It’s clear that her real reason for writing The Swan in the Evening is to relay her experiences and explain why they are reasonable. How could it be anything other than poignant. But it’s also quite abstract, even when she seems to be mounting her defence. This is from earlier in the book, but it’s a good example of the style I mean. Fluid, flowing from one thought to another, quite hard to pin down. Rather less firmly constructed than her novels, from my limited reading of them.

Myself in extremis, floored; myself saved, rejoicing: each of these opposed conditions deemed while it lasts, to be perpetual; yet even then a shadowy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, in the wings… Perhaps this is an abstract of anybody’s childhood. But of course it is only one aspect of the truth, or of illusion.

I think perhaps the most interesting part of my edition was the afterword she wrote when Virago Modern Classics reprinted it – highlighting bits she would have liked to phrase differently, and sharing some of the public and private responses she got to the initial publication. The Swan in the Evening is an interesting addendum to the life of a very good novelist, and of course a grieving mother is unlikely to be able to express that level of sorrow to anybody who hasn’t experienced it (and yet should certainly be allowed to try). I’m just not sure what the book is trying to be, and so it ends up being a jumble of different things that are not limited enough for memoir or wide enough for proper autobiography. I would, for example, have liked a lot more about her writing career. I hope the book was helpful for her to write, and it’s diverting to read, but it certainly earns the word ‘fragments’ from the subtitle.

#ABookADayInMay – Days 17,18,19

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Unlike Madame Bibi, I am getting behind with my reviewing – I am still managing to finish a book a day in May, and that’s the main thing, but telling you about them is another thing. My latest excuse is that I was away for the weekend (Eurovision!) and, let’s be honest, I’m sure you’re coping. Here are some quick thoughts about the latest three books, and fingers crossed I find time to be more thorough for the next ones.

Day 17 – The Tick of Two Clocks (2021) by Joan Bakewell

I don’t know how well known Joan Bakewell is outside the UK, but here she has been a mainstay for many decades. She is well-respected as a journalist and presenter, and has been in the House of Lords for a fair while. The Tick of Two Clocks is a memoir about deciding to downsize at the age of 87, and I loved reading about the experience of house-hunting and redesigning a new home to be more suitable for her older age – and saying goodbye to her large London home. I lap up anything about houses. Other parts of the book felt a bit hasty – like notes for a book – in which she skirts through any number of cultural and historical points, such as naming the Bloomsbury Group and then immediately moving on. But it was a quick, enjoyable read – even while dealing with the weighty topic of old age.

Day 18 – A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood

George is a man in his early 50s whose long-time partner, Jim, has died just before the novel opens. He tells people that Jim has moved away, rather than dealing with other people’s responses to his grief, and Isherwood has crafted a brilliant novel about that grief. What makes it so good is that grief is barely addressed – instead, it suffuses everything. George is in turns furious, melancholy, desperate, distracted. He wishes violent tortures on other people; he lusts after the inconsequential virility of younger men; he is alternately rude and reluctantly considerate to a woman who might provide a sort of friendship. At his work, as a university professor in literature, he seems to put aside his mourning – able to discuss an Aldous Huxley novel while analysing the behaviour of a roomful of students – but Isherwood shows with infinite subtlety how grief gets deep into every moment.

The style of A Single Man is quite different from other Isherwood novels I’ve read. It starts in quite an experimental way, with the ‘it’ of George’s body gradually becoming a ‘he’ – and then calms down into a style less experimental but more abstract and poetic than his early novels. It is a very powerful book, all the more powerful for its restraint. And has there ever been a more satisfactory image of a relationship than ‘Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of the other’s presence’.

Day 18 – One Sparkling Wave (1943) by Cynthia Asquith

If I’d read the wartime economy note in the front – that ‘There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times […] this novel would ordinarily make a book of about 352 pages’ – then I probably wouldn’t have tried to finish it for A Book A Day In May, even though I’d read half already.

Anyway, I absolutely loved Lady Cynthia Asquith’s previous novel – The Spring House – and was keen to read One Sparkling Wave, which is her second and final novel. The title comes from a William Barnes’ poem about a daughter’s beauty picking up where the mother’s leaves off – and there are three generations of women who fit the bill. Lady Glade is an older woman used to getting her way; Daphne is a sensible, middle-aged woman who isn’t used to this, and Lark is a flighty young woman given to theatrics romantically and professionally. These inter-generational dynamics are fraught with miscommunication and exasperation – but there is one woman who understands and sympathises with them all. Indeed, she is called on to perform this role constantly – a woman, the real heart of the novel even if not the community, who has the universal nickname ‘Available’. I will say that I never became used to a character being called Available, and it felt unnatural throughout.

The writing in One Sparkling Wave is good, but the plotting is a bit all over the place. The action takes a while to get going, as Available goes between three frustrated generations of this family (in consternation over Lark’s ill-advised romantic attachment) – and, in the second half of the novel, we are suddenly taken off on a cruise with a whole bunch of new characters seemingly introduced for comedy alone. Finally, we have the amusing situation of Daphne becoming an anonymous playwright and Lark the play’s anonymous star – with only Available knowing both mother’s and daughter’s secrets. It is fun and works well, but comes a bit too late in the novel.

I was surprised by how much less accomplished One Sparkling Wave felt than The Spring House – enjoyable to read, but with many fairly significant flaws in its structure. But I did like that the main character is a middle-aged woman who is settled into spinsterhood and remorselessly aware of her own plain looks. This paragraph is something I have often thought myself:

Not for the first time it occurred to Available how much suffering she herself had escaped by having no beauty to lose. What did it matter when her colourless hair turned white, and what had her unchiselled face to fear from time? She would never know the strain of that long agonizing rearguard action against an unrepellent enemy, whose attack might be so stealthy that his inevitable advance was almost imperceptible, and yet all the while you knew that insidiously but surely he was gaining ground, ground that could never be won back. How inextricably profit and loss were entangled in life!

Amen, Available! If you are on the hunt for Cynthia Asquith’s novels, please by aware how hard they are to track down – and I recommend concentrating your efforts on The Spring House rather than this one.

#ABookADayInMay: Days 14,15,16

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Playing catch up with some quick thoughts about three books – one of which was excellent, one of which was very good, and one of which is absolutely not my cup of tea.

Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops : Robey, Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Day 14 – Box Office Poison (2024) by Tim Robey

I downloaded the audiobook after a mention by Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast, I believe, and very much enjoyed Robey’s forensic look at big movie flops over the past hundred or so years of cinema, chronologically. The criteria was solely financial – meaning some notorious ‘flops’ like Waterworld don’t get in (because it actually broke even) and critical mauling isn’t sufficient, if the film did well. And, indeed, some of these flops were actually decent films, ably defended by Robey.

I’ve only seen one of the films that gets a chapter – the truly unbearable Cats. That’s probably largely because big blockbusters don’t appeal to me, and the sort of films I like were never going to have £100m to lose. But it didn’t matter – I loved delving through the decisions that led to each failure, the unjustfiably crucified ones, the very justifiably crucified ones, and the aftermath and legacies for those involved. Robey has clearly devoted his working life to this world and is hugely knowledgable, as well as having a diverse and non-snobbish taste, and I ended Box Office Poison feeling curiously more affectionate for the medium as a whole.

The Trouble With Sunbathers eBook : Mills, Magnus: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Day 15 – The Trouble With Sunbathers (2020) by Magnus Mills

Are there other examples of well-regarded novelists – shortlisted for the Booker, no less – who leave mainstream publishing and start self-publishing? I don’t know for sure, but I’d be surprised if Mills were forced out from traditional publishing. His final book from Bloomsbury, the excellent and unnerving The Forensic Records Society, got a lavish edition in 2017. But, from 2020, he has been doing his own thing – and The Trouble With Sunbathers was his second self-published novel.

It is very recognisably Mills, and I mean that as a compliment. We are in a world that is both recognisable and surreal, and we can’t quite put our finger on what makes it surreal. The premise is certainly unusual: America has bought the UK and turned it into a National Park. Almost all the population have moved to the coastline, where they sunbathe 24/7, and there are various gates to let people into the non-coastal UK – gates which are supposed to be always open, but still have gatekeepers. The narrator, alongside his friend Rupert, performs this function.

Rupert and I had done quite well out of ‘the purchase’ (as it was known at the time). We were in charge of the western gate and enjoyed all the benefits that went with the job. The four main gates had been inaugurated on the day Great Britain was officially declared a national park. They were elaborate structures of wrought iron and looked rather imposing when they were closed. Their purpose, nonetheless, was largely symbolic. The park was supposed to be open to anyone who wished to visit, and it followed that the gates should likewise remain open at all times. It so happened that the gates were fitted with locks, but there were no keys because keys weren’t required. The gates stood open on a permanent basis and it was the role of the gatekeepers to greet people as they passed through. Or at least give them a friendly nod. It was undemanding work, but Rupert and I performed our duties without complaint.

Of course, things do not remain that simple. They start to get visitors from higher authorities, and there are rumours of an important visit from the US. There is mysterious vandalism, and some experimentation with closing the gate for periods of time. The stakes are somehow very low and very high simultaneously – because the reader doesn’t truly know the ‘code’ of this world, or what might signify a crisis.

Mills has such an individual worldview, and I can’t think of any who are imitating his approach, let alone imitating it well. The prose is sparse and plain, but he gets such extraordinary mystery into it – even scenes that, on the surface, seem resolutely ordinary. I love all his books, and The Trouble With Sunbathers is absolutely as good as anything else he’s written – and, judging by titles alone, it looks like there are a couple of sequels.

Mills may not get the attention that he used to from critics, and I doubt these books are being shelves in Waterstones any more, but he is on top form – and I think there’s a strong argument that he’s one of the best, and certainly one of the most distinctive, writers alive today.

I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You: From bestselling author and the nation's favourite comedian: Amazon.co.uk: Hart, Miranda: 9781405958332: ...

Day 16 – I Haven’t Been Completely Honest With You (2024) by Miranda Hart

I enjoy Miranda Hart’s brand of middle-class, silly enthusiasm (I can’t call it schtick because it’s totally genuine) and I thought a memoir about her decade-long experience of ME-like symptoms from Lyme disease would be a good mix of poignant, educational and amusing (because a good comic writer can make anything amusing). It was those things, but it was mostly a self-help book – a genre I find incredibly trying. This one wasn’t really for me.

Messages From My Father by Calvin Trillin – #ABookADayInMay Day 13

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There is something very reassuring about Calvin Trillin’s non-fiction. In the UK I think he is best known, if at all, as the author of Tepper Isn’t Going Out. That was my first encounter with his work, after Thomas/Hogglestock correctly thought I’d love it and kindly gave it to me. Since then I’ve only read one more novel from his limited fiction output, but have gradually been reading my way through his much more prolific non-fiction.

What makes it reassuring is that he is such safe, steady hands. Whether he is writing about his poetry, an old Yale classmate, or his late wife, he seems to approach them all with the same thoroughness – and the same restrained emotion. You might expect a portrait of his father to lead to greater angst or joy, but Trillin has a certain depth of emotion that he is willing to show you and stays at it. Which is quite deep, I should say. It’s just very consistent and controlled, and will never give way to anything approaching hysteria.

He starts Messages From My Father (1996) by telling us how stubborn his dad, Abe, was. ‘Stubborn’ is his choice of word, and he returns to it often:

He didn’t drink coffee because at some point in his childhood he had sworn that he never would. My father had sworn off any number of things. As a young man, he smoked for a few years and then swore off cigarettes. He swore off liquor before he was old enough to taste any – supposedly because of his disgust at the smell of stale beer in the tavern where he sold newspapers as a boy. As far as I can remember, he never gave any specific reason for swearing off coffee. It may be that coffee just got caught up in the boyhood oath against liquor, tossed in because it was something grownups drank. I think he also must have sworn off swearing; if you ran him out of patience, his strongest expression was “For cryin’ out loud!” I sometimes imagine my father as swearing off things just to keep in practice – the sort of person who looks at himself in the mirror after shaving one day and, for no particular reason, says to the image he sees, “You have hit your last bucket of driving-range balls” or “No more popcorn for you, young fella.”

Having established a keynote in his character, Trillin then looks at his father’s career – specifically his years as a grocer, getting up at 4am every day to market. He traces back through the previous generations, who had lived in Kiev, and the ways in which being Jewish immigrants in the country had developed his father’s sense of identity – and his mother’s, who gets quite a large share of a book without her name in the title. It isn’t always the easiest to find because, though his father’s conversation is peppered with Yiddish and they observe the most popular Jewish festivals, it seems that their Jewish identity wasn’t overwhelmingly significant – and, thankfully, Trillin doesn’t seem to have experienced much antisemitism growing up. As he says, ‘he didn’t raise me to be a Jew; he raised me to be an American’.

But there is one telling moment, on a Yale campus tour together:

My father asked if Yale had any sort of Jewish quota that could keep me out even if qualified in every other way. (The representative said that he knew of no such quota. A decade later, it was revealed, to my great surprise, that the percentage of Jews in Yale College was not only the lowest in the Ivy League but also suspiciously consistent from year to year.) Although I had heard of quotas, which I associated with medical schools, I had never heard my father bring up the subject. I had never heard him acknowledge any limitations on what was available to me.

You get the sense that there is plenty unspoken in Abe’s mind, and Trillin can no longer delve very far into what was never expressed. He seems to believe that their loving reticence is typical of all father/son relationships, and perhaps it does characterise many of them. In parallel, the relationship between his mother and sister is much more open and certainly much louder. There is no sense of regret in what could have been, though: it is an affectionate portrait that doesn’t stumble into hagiography, but also is absent of reproach. Anything negative is described with near-total objectivity, and the positive sections are only mildly more personal. Abe’s determination that Trillin would go to Yale is portrayed as something representative of his determination, single-mindedness, and limited worldview – not as something draconian or pressuring. Trillin did go to Yale and so, Trillin’s conclusion is, it clearly worked.

Messages From My Father is a patchwork of other memories and incidents, spun together in a way that seems to use each one to prove a point – the point being that, yes, here is my father. I have understood his character. These attributes are illustrated by these words and actions, and they build a man that I like. Trillin seems to recognise that he can describe a character, and draws the line at understanding his father’s thoughts, motivations, passions, regrets.

I enjoyed reading the book, and there is a definite fondness throughout. It is a tribute of love, even though it is curiously journalistic. How does he combine the loving and the dispassionate into one successful whole? I don’t know, but it’s something that feels quintessentially Trillin. And I got the sense that his dad would have totally approved.

Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys – #ABookADayInMay Day 12

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When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for Canadian writers – but with the proviso that I wanted them to be writing about Canada. On the plane on the way home, I read one of my new purchases: Helen Humphreys’ brilliant memoir about her late brother, Nocturne. But I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her best-known novels, as they were set in the UK, and that wouldn’t quite scratch my Canadophile itch.

Thankfully, Debra very kindly stepped up! She posted Rabbit Foot Bill (2020) across the ocean to me – a novel by Humphreys that is firmly placed in Canada. Saskatchewan, to be precise.

The novel opens in 1947. The narrator is 12-year-old Leonard Flint – a misfit in his community, bullied at school and without any friends. Except for one: Rabbit Foot Bill.

The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

Rabbit Foot Bill has his nickname from one of his ways of earning money: he kills and cleans rabbits, then sells their feet for good luck. Leonard has amassed six of them from his friend, for free. There is a real friendship between the two of them, though it is unusual – more a sympathy of souls than anything based on conversation or even shared activities. Somehow, proximity between them is enough. There is no suggestion of anything sordid. They simply enliven each other, in a calm, undemonstrative way.

This all changes one day when there is a shocking, sudden murder. And there ends the first section.

We fast forward to 1959 and Leonard is now a young doctor, starting working at a psychiatric hospital. Many of the patients have lived there for decades, and some have even been born in this place. One of the staff estimates that half of the patients (who are more or less inmates) have no real mental health problems, but have become so conditioned by their surroundings that they would struggle to survive outside of the hospital anyway. Leonard’s job is to help the men get work and get used to the outside world, as well as monitoring them from a medical perspective.

And who should one of the patients be, but… Rabbit Foot Bill. Leonard is shocked, but perhaps the reader isn’t. They stumble back towards a form of friendship. Bill doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before penitentiary, which has clearly been torture, often literally. Leonard doesn’t quite know how to relate to this man who is his patient but was also a sort of silent mentor. Humphreys does this beautifully. She is so good at the strange nuances of their relationship, often deeply moving even when you aren’t exactly sure why.

I think there are moments when the human soul is visible, and what I was seeing when I looked over the side of the bed at Bill curled up on the floor, was a glimpse of his soul. And what is a soul? Something between the inherent nature of an individual, and their desires – a tangible truth and a reaching, all bound up together. Like the movement of the rabbit in flight, how it runs so fast that its feet don’t touch the ground.

You can see that Leonard is not your stereotypical doctor. And, indeed, he struggles in his role. There is little guidance and he is left to his own devices – and his own devices repeatedly take him back to Rabbit Foot Bill. It means that he scarcely gets to know the other patients, and he feels like an inconvenience whenever he does approach them. Humphreys is very good at conveying the feeling of being useless and unsure in a workplace, which perhaps many of us have experienced in different workplaces. She is great at uncertainty in general.

Uncertainty develops more and more, particularly as Leonard revisits the unhappiness of his childhood. There is no rug-pulled-out-from-under-our-feet moment – simply the gradual unravelling of a complex life, without the chance of firm conclusions. It’s all written in spare prose that felt tonally very different from Nocturne, and initially I wasn’t sure what I thought of it – but it wasn’t long until I was totally captivated. Humphreys doesn’t put a foot wrong in character, tone or style.

There are a couple of sub-plots I haven’t mentioned – one is Leonard’s affair with his boss’s wife (the unforgivably named Agatha Christiansen); the other, more substantial, is experiments with LSD as an attempt to cure patients. The doctors dose themselves to a lesser amount, in the name of science, and this was an interesting element of the novel – Humphreys does the near-impossible of narrating a drug trip without becoming tedious – though I’m not sure it entirely cohered with the main story.

What makes Rabbit Foot Bill succeed so well is Humphreys’ control of voice and the restraint she shows in almost everything – it’s a subtle novel, even with its shocking moments, and she keeps steady reins on everything she includes. It will stay with me, and I’d love to know if any other of her novels are set in Canada. I’d snap them up.