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Trance by Appointment by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Recovered Books by Boiler House Press continue their admirable work of bringing out G.E. Trevelyan’s novels and sent me Trance By Appointment back in March. I read it in July and I’m finally writing about it – and, gosh, Trevelyan was such a varied writer. That sort of variety might explain why she hasn’t had perhaps the legacy she deserves, since it is hard to describe what sort of writer she is, or what to expect when you open one of her novels.

Trance By Appointment (1939) was Trevelyan’s final novel, and is in many ways the most traditional of the ones I’ve read by her. Two Thousand Million Man-Power is formally interesting, doing rather brilliant things with fluid prose and a sense of diving from the general to specific; William’s Wife has an extraordinary single-mindedness in its focus on one woman’s self-inflicted downfall. And Appius and Virginia is a little experimental in style as well as unusual in topic.

Against that backdrop, Trance By Appointment feels more ordinary in style and topic – though ‘ordinary’ is not a criticism in this case. Jean is certainly living an ordinary life: she is a working-class girl living in London, and that does mean that we have to put up with a little of Trevelyan’s attempts to paint a portrait of everyday, working-class Lond0n life (she even uses “You won’t ‘arf catch it if Mum sees you!”) She is good at this sort of milieu in William’s Wife but a little unconvincing in the outset of this novel.

But try not to let that hold you back – because we see Jean in a fascinating world. Simply to earn a little money, she becomes a sort of apprentice to ‘Madame Eva’ – a kind, canny woman who charges her clients to read palms, tarot cards, or a crystal ball. Her instructions are an interesting mix of showmanship and insight: she takes for granted that their service is inherently charlatan – but she also gives hints of how you can genuinely interpret people’s demeanour and their words to give accurate understandings of their future.

Jean is timid and uncertain, and stumbles her way through the initial readings – never quite understanding that any element of it might be fraud, despite Madame Eva’s best efforts. And then one day…

Jean set out the cards and started off reading them to her, and then, while she was talking, all at once it was as if the cards went big and misty and faded out, and she was looking all along a road that had sunshine at the end of it. She didn’t know any more until she came back the way she did when she was by herself and heard her own voice as if it had been talking. There were the cards still laid out in front of her, but she was sitting back in the chair and she hadn’t moved them from the first layout, hadn’t even turned up the wish.

She was going to do it when the girl got up and took her hand. “Oh, thank you,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “You have helped me such a lot.”

She put down her money and went out, and Jean went and told Madam Eva. She felt all in a daze.

Jean discovers that she has The Gift. She goes into a trance, without any recollection of what took place during it – except it clearly helps people. She then learns that her spirit guide, leading her into this realm, is a young girl called Daisy – the late little sister of Mr Mitch. In introducing us to Mr Mitch, Trevelyan doesn’t show her greatest moment of restrained subtlety: ‘Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.’

Things progress, and Mr Mitch becomes increasingly controlling of Jean – including marrying her, and swiftly showing her little affection. His total disdain towards his offspring is a little exaggerated, perhaps. I’m sure such men exist, but I think he would have been a more interesting character had he been a little less full-throated in his hatred of Jean spending any time with their children, and his total lack of care for Jean’s wellbeing. Sometimes showing us the worst of humanity is, while possible, not paricularly likely.

The reader can see where the novel is going to go, more or less, and we see Jean’s descent into misery – not done as well or as gradually as the descent in William’s Wife, but engaging nonetheless. And there is a revelation in the latter part of the novel that truly shakes Jean’s outlook on her unasked-for talent, as well as asking wider questions about everything we’ve done so far. It was a decision on Trevelyan’s part that certainly made Jean a more compelling character.

Trance By Appointment is a short novel and I think that’s for the best – because, on its own terms and at a reasonable length, it works very well. Lacking the subtlety of character and plot in some of Trevelyan’s other novels, and the ambitious stylistic choices she makes elsewhere, it would have dragged had it been any longer. As it is, I can safely recommend Trance By Appointment as a good read – and, if not a final flourish in a fascinating career, at least a respectable culmination of a writing life that had rather better highlights.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

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For my second and final entry to this year’s Women in Translation month, I’ve read The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye. I’ve read and loved a handful of the short Ginzburg books that Daunt are diligently republishing, so opened it up with high hopes – and immediately encountered this striking opening paragraph:

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what is was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a hankerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

Gosh! Well, if that doesn’t draw you in, then what will? Most of the novella is then told in flashback, with occasional returns to ‘present day’ and the aftermath of this shooting. It’s not my favourite structure for a novel usually, as I find putting the entire story in flashback often deadens it – but it worked well in The Dry Heart.

As so often, it wasn’t until writing this review that I realised that the narrator is unnamed. (Do others notice this while they’re reading? I never seem to.) She is an emotional, hopeful woman who becomes a little obsessed with an older man she sees at the theatre – a man we later learn is called Alberto. When he’s present, she can’t quite understand why she is so fixated on him: he isn’t especially attractive or charismatic, and seems rather diffident and unwilling to develop anything approaching an emotional connection. But when he isn’t there, the narrator can’t stop picturing their future life together.

Alberto doesn’t try to disguise that he is in love with another woman – but she is married. He has determined on singleness, since he can’t have her, but – with those cards on the table – is willing to propose.

When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

If you’re not familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, this is a good indication – she writes fairly plain prose, and uses it to crystallise emotions and emotional miscommunication in a simple way. It works very well, getting to the heart (pun not intended) of any scene with the directness of an arrow.

As the story progresses, we already know the ending – and we can guess how we might end up there (and learn pretty soon that, yes, Alberto is having an affair with the woman he’s in love with). But Ginzburg does a couple of more subtle things with this premise. One is the significance of the drawing, and the drawings that Alberto does as the story progresses – and the other is the scene in which the narrator and the woman Alberto loves meet each other. I think that’s the strongest moment in the story, overturning expectations.

Perhaps, also, it’s the scene I found most interesting because of the relationship between the two women: rivals, but both vulnerable, neither getting what they want from the situation or from their lives. And, as a complementary point, the reason I didn’t love The Dry Heart as much as the other Ginzburg novellas I’ve read is a matter of personal taste: I find stories of romantic couples much less interesting than the other sorts of relationships that Ginzburg has centred narratives around, particularly parent/child.

Perhaps that’s because narrative art of the past few centuries has been so obsessed with romantic love that it is refreshing to find somebody (especially somebody of Ginzburg’s talent) turn an equal attention to one of the many other fundamental relationships that make up our lives. So The Dry Heart is doubtless just as good as the other books I’ve read by her – but didn’t captivate me in quite the same way.

Project 24: Books 17 and 18

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Well, we have got ahead of ourselves. But ‘we’ I mean ‘I’. Because the calendar is saying it’s late August, and my Project 24 tally says that September has already ended – I’m up to book 18 in my Project 24 restrictions. But hopefully you’ll see why I couldn’t resist these two beauties.

Last weekend, I went to Stratford-upon-Avon with my brother and some friends to do a treasure hunt. I knew there might also be treasure in Chaucer Head Bookshop, which I hadn’t been to for the best part of a decade and was delighted to discover still existed. They’ve got a nice range of very reasonably priced books – and I came away with these two.

Theresa’s Choice by Rachel Cecil (daughter of David Cecil) seems to be about some sort of love triangle – but, let’s be honest with ourselves, I bought it because I loved the cover. And I’m always willing and ready to try a mid-century woman writer that I don’t know anything about.

Nina by Susan Ertz is the black blob underneath the colourful dustjacket – less captivating on the eye, but more exciting to me since it is SIGNED by her! I’ve only read a couple of Ertz novels, and they’ve been very different from each other, but I’m interested to read more by her – and I think there might be something special among her output. Fingers crossed it’s this one!

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro

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Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro cover

I wanted to join in Women in Translation month, so was looking around my shelves for possible candidates – and chose Follow Your Heart (1994) by Susanna Tamaro, translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni. I picked it up in a nearby charity shop a couple of years ago without knowing anything about her – I was attracted by the slimness of the book first and foremost, but the description also intrigued me: a grandmother writing a long letter/diary/confession to her estranged granddaughter. And, wow, it didn’t disappoint.

Apparently this was a huge international bestseller in the mid 90s, so possibly everyone knows about it already – I was only nine years old when it was first translated into English, so it passed me by. I’m always slightly suspicious of bestsellers (can they truly be good when that many people are reading it?) but I was blown away by the way Tamaro captures the voice in this novella.

Olga is an 80-year-old who has raised her granddaughter (I think unnamed?) almost single-handedly, since Olga’s daughter died in a car crash when her daughter was only a few years old. She describes moments of beautiful synergy, as they experience and love the magic of the natural world together – and how she naively hoped this would last forever. But the granddaughter is now newly an adult and has decided to study abroad – splintering an already fragile relationship.

I remember the day you left. What a state we were in! You wouldn’t let me come with you to the airport, and every time I reminded you to pack something or other you told me, ‘I’m going to America, not the desert!’ As you walked through the door, I shouted in my odiously shrill voice, ‘Look after yourself,’ and you, without even turning round, left me with the words, ‘Look after Buck and the rose.’

At the time, I must confess, your words left me with a deep sense of frustration. Sentimental old woman that I am, I had expected something more banal: a kiss or a word or two of affection. Only later that night, when I had given up trying to sleep and was wandering round the empty house in my dressing gown, did I understand that looking after Buck and the rose meant looking after the part of you that still lives with me – the happy part.

The first section of the novella is really just Olga walking around her home, remembering, thinking, reflecting. It is in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, but in the same way that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a letter to John’s son (and, indeed, Gilead is the book I was most reminded of – a very big compliment from me, of course). That is to say, Olga’s granddaughter is the one being continually addressed, but we have no idea if this letter will ever be sent – it’s really a way for Olga to frame her thoughts. And it’s beautiful. She is painfully honest with herself, not allowing the refuge of any comforting lies – whether about her own behaviour, the future of this relationship, or even about the lifespan of the birds and beasts she delights in seeing.

Tamaro’s (and Bardoni’s) major achievement is that capturing of voice. That’s what carries you through a book like this, and there is a rich gentleness throughout.

As the novella progresses, there is more plot – specifically about a past lie that Olga told, and an affair she had. We learn more about her marriage, about the man she had an affair with, and about the long shadow of implications this had on her relationships with her husband, daughter, and granddaughter. I think I preferred Follow Your Heart when it was less tethered to specific incidents, but Tamaro manages to get plot in without losing the strength of the novel – that voice. And, like anybody coming towards the final years of their life writing to a much-loved, younger person, she wants to share wisdom.

I kept thinking that Follow Your Heart is the sort of novel that people claim The Alchemist is. I wrote in my review of The Alchemist that ‘the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar’. Despite Tamaro having chosen exactly a ‘follow your heart’ title – well, in fact, the original Italian translates as Go Where Your Heart Takes You – there is so much more profundity and depth in her novel. In isolation, it may not show all of that depth – but, in context, it was beautiful. But I’m going to isolate it, nonetheless…

Little by little the music faded into silence, and with it went the profound sense of joy that had been with me in my first years. The loss of joy, I must say, is the thing I have mourned more than any other. Later, indeed, I felt happiness, but happiness is to joy as an electric light-bulb is to the sun. Happiness is always caused by something; you are happy about something, it is a feeling that comes from the outside. Joy, on the other hand, is not caused by anything. It possesses you for no apparent reason; it is essentially rather like the sun, which gives off heat thanks to the combustion of its own core.

Over the years I abandoned my self, the deepest part of me, to become another person, the person my parents wanted me to be. I exchanged my personality for a character. Character, as you will find out for yourself, is valued much more highly than personality.

From the opening pages, I fell in love with Follow Your Heart. As I say, it reminded me a lot of Gilead, and I’m always looking for books that have that exceptional creation of character – and especially ones that manage to be gentle without being saccharine. Tamaro has written a lot, though only a few of her books seem to have been translated into English – I’ll certainly be looking out for more.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I had a few days where I couldn’t get into this blog, and the advice I got in various forums was kind but totally incomprehensible to me (PHP error log, who she?) – but the good people at the hosting company were able to sort me out, and I’m back. And I do have a pile of books to review, as per, though I’ve been doing more listening than reading quite a lot of the time. Anyway, hopefully will tell you about some of those soon – for now, it’s a book, a link, and a blog post.

1.) The blog post – Caro does such wonderful reviews of many of the British Library Women Writers titles, and I love her enthusiasm for G.B. Stern’s The Woman in the Hall.

2.) The link – in case any of you can get to the excellent (and chaotic) Hurlingham Books in London, they currently have piles of Virago Modern Classics going at £3 each.

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

3.) The book – how did I not know about And How Are You, Dr Sacks? by Lawrence Weschler? I love memoirs by people who knew and loved the great and the good. This one has been out for a few years, but my friend Rachel mentioned it this week and I knew it would have to be in my hands at some point.

 

Project 24: Book 16

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The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White cover

I’m always excited when a new reprint publishing house pops up – and there are so many out there now, whether imprints from big publishing houses or tiny indies. Obviously I think the British Library Women Writers list is the best one out there, but there are plenty of others doing wonderful things – and I love it when they are specialising in something specific. So when I heard about Quite Literally Books, I was very intrigued.

You can see plenty of intel on their website. I chortled at their header ‘Reader, we reprinted them’. Yes, we’re among friends here. And they say ‘We are a heritage press devoted to discovering and reissuing ought-to-be-in-print books by American women authors—and occasionally others—who’ve been shelved for far too long.’ You can tell it’s American because their email address begins ‘writeus’. Then again, Jane Austen used that sort of phrasing too.

I’ve listened to the two co-founders on a couple of podcasts, and they seem to have delightful curiosity about the literary past, a taste for books that are both enjoyable and have something to say about a moment in time – and (this will help) clearly have enough funding from somewhere to make Quite Literally Books a very chic concern.

Their first three titles are The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset and The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White. Perhaps they will always publish books exclusively by women with doubled-up surnames. Anyway, of course I already have the Persephone edition of The Home-Maker, so I had to choose between the other two titles for my exploration into Quite Literally Books. My weakness for books about houses made The Pink House the obvious choice. It was actually only after I ordered it that I joined the dots and realised it was a book (under an earlier edition) that Gina had raved about.

One problem: their books aren’t (yet) available in the UK. And shipping from the US is extremely expensive. And that’s where my friend Jo stepped in! She was visiting a mutual friend in Seattle, and so I got the book shipped to my friend’s Seattle house, and Jo brought it back in her suitcase. Thank you, Jo! (I wonder if this qualifies for the ‘has anybody asked you pack anything?’ question that airports always pose.)

I haven’t started it yet, but I love the quality of the physical book, the beautiful cover design, and the very promising blurb. Watch this space! I’m so interested to see what they bring out next – and, for once, I’m writing about something that American readers will find much easier to locate.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, everyone! I will be hither and thither for much of it, so I’m glad the heatwave is over. I’m also finding myself not super in the mood for reading at the moment, which is very unlike me and will hopefully pass soon. (Not an eye issue this time, thankfully, just not always able to get into a book – more like the reader’s block I wrote about for Vulpes Libris years ago.)

But here is a book, a blog post, and a link to entertain you this weekend, whatever you are doing:

1.) The blog post – I loved Brona’s reminder of why Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is so good.

2.) The book– I love Jenn Ashworth’s writing, particularly her novel Fell and her memoir Notes Made While Falling. She now has another memoir out – tellingly, given the recent Salt Path debacle, it’s about walking as a way of healing. I’m really keen to try The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North.

The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North : Ashworth, Jenn: Amazon.co.uk: Books

3.) The link – and, just in case that mention above is baffling and you’re the one person in the bookish community who hasn’t read the exposé on The Salt Path – here is some brilliant journalism from Chloe Hadjimatheou.

Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith | Goodreads

Ever since discovering the miraculously good O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, I’ve been steadily making my way through her other novels – wondering if anything will be equal to it. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her, though that extraordinary spark seems to have only struck once. The other novels are very good but not classics. So, what of Huffley Fair (1944), the most recent I’ve read?

The novel covers quite a long time period and several generations of a family, and we are back in a similar setting to several of Smith’s other novels – the moors and the surrounding villages. Here is the opening paragraph, with Smith’s ability to capture place beautifully and invite you in.

Up on the hill-tops the day was broad awake; warm with sun, bright with gorse and hawthorn and star-eyed daisies, loud with bird-song and the hum of bees, washed with dew and wind. But deep in the valley, where the Huff was a dark-and-silver thread between two towering hills, the day still slept, waiting for the sun.

Into this scene comes a group of travellers – of gypsies, in the language of the novel. I say ‘family’. There are quite a few tangential relationships between these people, but they are bonded together by their work and their lifestyle as itinerant fair-workers – rather disdained by all the communities they go to, and perhaps disdaining them in return, but accepted for their brief period of their work. The fair offers entertainment to the children and to the townfolk doing long hours at tedious jobs. Among them is Lou, a pretty, unsociable young woman who will come to the centre of the novel.

One family unlikely to be found at the fair is Abel’s. He is a serious-minded craftsman, opening the novel finishing off a chair. Unorthodoxly, he intends to use it to propose to Hilda, a neighbour for whom he feels no love and little affection, but who seems the inevitable choice as a wife. She, in turn, considers him her last hope (more on her in a minute). But while Abel gets his living from building furniture and the like, his passion is as a preacher at the Mission. He preaches fury and fire, the love of God swept up more forcefully in the wrath of God. It is the passion that draws people: his church is exhilirating, and far more people come than to the tamer churches nearby.

The kindest, loveliest characters in the novel are Abel’s parents – Alfred, who also preaches, and Eliza, who bakes and cares and worries. The evilest character in the novel is Hilda’s father – who brings out the sharpness of Smith’s pen:

Years ago, Samuel Berridge had come to Huffam to die. That he was still living was a matter of some regret to a number of people, not least of whom was his daughter Hilda.

Fat, timid, a good hosuekeeper and willing slave, and foolishly fond by nature, Hilda had been marked down from birth as her father’s lawful prey. Her mother departed this life at the earliest possible moment, thankful in the knowledge that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Her brothers bolted from home as soon as they knew how to turn a penny, honest or otherwise. Her sisters leapt into the arms of the first young men who looked at them, safely entrenching themselves in homes of their own. On Hilda’s shoulders fell the task of caring for her father’s declining years, and it was a task no one wished to wrest from her.

Samuel is such a dark character in the novel, and some of the abuse was really difficult to read.

The moment that changes the trajectory of the novel – and Hilda’s future among others’ – is Abel stumbling across Lou on the moors, who has sprained her ankle. He tends to her, somewhat unwillingly, and somehow they go swimming together. Smith gives us three ellipses for what happens next – but when we see Abel come to the Mission (late for preaching), she gives an extraordinary scene of his preaching. We feel whipped up in the furore his congregation experience, and it’s clear he is driven by some new force. It’s hard to convey sermons (I remember two others in fiction, very different – Lease of Life by Frank Baker and Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck) but Smith does it with brio.

What has made him so animated? If we hadn’t guessed, we can piece it together a little while later – when Lou reveals to her fellow fair-goers that she is pregnant. They reason that she can get some money from the father and so, reluctantly, she allows herself to be taken to demand it. What they don’t expect is Alfred insisting that his son marry the woman he has made pregnant. And so a marriage takes place that nobody truly wishes, least of all Lou. And there goes, it seems, Hilda’s chance of security.

The next section of the novel shows Abel and Lou living together in Huffley, Abel having refused to stay with the family – and, indeed, he cuts himself off completely. They live a few miles away but may as well be at the other end of the universe. Absurdly, Abel blames Lou for all of this – for tempting him to sin, and ruining his life. Smith doesn’t overly editorialise, but any reader will be deeply frustrated by him: he makes everything worse for everyone through his stubbornness, unkindness and selfishness. Lou believes that she has wronged him and, in a subdued, sad way determines to ‘make it up to him’ through her lifelong obedience. Huffley Fair keeps going into the next generation too, and beyond, with their child and her future. But I shan’t reveal any more of the plot because we’ve gone far enough.

So, what was Huffley Fair like to read? Smith writes beautifully, and her characters are so well-realised and believable. It’s that believability which makes them so painful to read at times. As elsewhere, she captures the landscape in a memorable and evocative way and, as the novel takes place over several decades, we see the shifts that come with modernisation and the approach of war.

There is brightness in the novel – chiefly Eliza, and perhaps her other son, Walter, whom I haven’t mentioned. I thought Huffley Fair was very well-written and I did like reading it but, gosh, what a heaviness to it all. I often say how surprising it is that O, The Brave Music is such an uplifting novel when so many sad things happen to the characters. The opposite is true for Huffley Fair: it is such a melancholy novel. The aftermath of one man’s stupid, cruel choices is drawn out through years and years, and it is bitterly sad. Maybe that’s the difference between the triumph of hope over unavoidable tragedies in O, The Brave Music versus the very, very avoidable tragedies in Huffley Fair where hope is deliberately trampled under pride.

It’s still very good, but goodness me it won’t cheer you up. I’m not sure I’ll reread, certainly not as often as I know I’ll return to O, The Brave Music throughout my life, but I’m glad to continue expanding my relationship with Smith.

Roofs Off! by Richmal Crompton

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Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about my changing relationship with Richmal Crompton. She’d gone from being a favourite author I raced through in my late teens to being an author I felt a little less sure about – though a lot of that was probably connected with having read her best work so early. And yet I keep returning to her every few years, making my way through the collection of her adult novels that was compiled because I managed to get in there in the sweet spot – when secondhand booksellers online made her novels accessible, but before they became prohibitively expensive.

I’ve recently finished Roofs Off! (1928), which I bought back in 2010 and which seems now more or less impossible to source online. Which might make it annoying to say that it’s one of the best Cromptons I’ve read in a while – or, perhaps, simply that I was in the right mood for it. Because her writing is seldom nuanced or deep – but, at the right moment, it is compulsive and wonderful in a slightly soapy way.

That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Her characters are often interestingly constructed – she just reuses the same types over and over again. There are always posh people who aren’t happy; poor, honest folk with hearts of gold; stiff, loveless marriages; children who don’t understand the machinations of the adults around them – and, most specifically and most frequently, a pair of retired women in a toxic friendship with hidden lesbian undertones.

All are present in Roofs Off! but it takes a while to get to them. For a long stretch at the opening of the novel, we remain with one character: Martin Evesham. He is in his early 50s and recently widowed – mourning his wife, but also free for the first time in many years. Mary was clearly strict about rules, behaviour, and social climbing. Martin had to set aside his artistic ambitions for a respectable and lucrative career in business. I’m not sure Crompton ever convinces us that Mary had her up-sides (though she often tries to) – but she does convince us, on the other hand, that Martin is better off without her.

I always love house hunting scenes, and Martin starts looking at homes on a newish housing estate – not with any intention of buying, but swept along by an estate agent (who evidently knows Martin’s mind better than he does).

“Is this all the Estate?” he said; “Chestnut Drive and Woodlands Avenue?”

“There’s Fairview,” said the agent with a slightly pained expression. “Bungalows and cheapish houses. Quite distinct. No, you couldn’t do better than Woodlands Avenue. It’s between. It’s neither the one thing nor the other. It’s safe. It hasn’t the expenses of Chestnut Drive and it hasn’t the – I won’t say commonness – but you know what I mean – of Fairview.”

The British class system is thus rigorously delineated! Though when Martin moves to Woodlands Avenue – because of course he does – there is a wider range of class than you might expect from the estate agent’s description. At its pinnacle is a young woman engaged for years to a young man who will receive a title – but who strikes up a friendship with the working-class, shy man who lives next door. There are children who are dear friends but know they must hide it from their parents, because of their class difference. And Martin discovers (in a rather unrealistic coincidence) that the woman who lives at the manor, whose estate has been sold off for land to build these houses, is the woman whom he loved before he got married. Class runs like a seam through almost every dynamic in the novel.

When I was 17, I took Crompton’s enormous casts in my stride. Nowadays, I do struggle when we are suddenly introduced to 20+ people over a handful of pages. To be honest, I was quite enjoying the focus on Martin. And yet, in Roofs Off!, I did manage to work them all out and keep them in the correct places in my mind. The budding friendship/romance between the engaged woman and the working-class man was particularly lovely, and done better than such things often are.

The title is explained quite late in the novel, when Martin and other characters are discussing a child’s game with some cardboard dolls’ houses – where the roofs had to be remoed on the signal of ‘Roofs Off!’ to reveal the hidden and interesting lives of the dolls therein.

“I wonder,” said Martin dreamily, “which would be the most interesting life in Woodlands Avenue if someone said, ‘Roofs Off!'”

Mrs Glendower shot him her quick smile.

“They’d all be indescribably dull,” she said.

“I doubt it,” challenged the doctor. “I believe that there isn’t such a thing in the whole world and never has been such a thing as a dull life. What you see of it may be dull, but you only see a part of the pattern or a back side of the pattern. If you could see the whole you’d be amazed. You’d be thrilled. A life may be sad or even uneventful, but it can never be dull.”

Crompton’s characters are not dull – and nor are they especially memorable, particularly in the early- to mid-career. Her best novels do seem to have come in a run at the end of her writing. I think what makes many of her novels enjoyable romps rather than particularly nuanced works is that no characters ever act ‘out of character’. Once they are established as a type, you know they will behave precisely in that manner on every single page. I think the best writers of character are those who can make somebody act inconsistently, and make it both believable and significant.

I’ve also realised what marks out my least favourite Crompton novels: overuse of ellipses. So many of her earlier novels put ‘…’ at the end of almost every sentence, I suppose with the intention of adding airy poignancy. It quickly becomes too much. In Roofs Off!, she uses it sparingly – and that alone is enough to elevate it.

The cast of Roofs Off! has no real external reality to the novel, but sometimes that’s fine. Crompton is clearly very interested in her characters, even when they are strikingly similar to people in many of her other novels. There is enough entertaining stuff about houses and housing estates to mark this one out for me, and certainly plenty of plot to race through. In the right mood, in the right place, I think Roofs Off! can head up towards the upper half of Crompton’s prolific output – and it might even be one I return to when and if I finally get to the end of her many novels. But if you can’t find it for sale, you’ll find very similar things in almost any of her novels – and have a lovely, inconsequential time doing so.