Publishers are sneaky (or: my book group read The Reader on the 6.27)

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My book group recently read The Reader on the 6.27 (2014) by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. The novella (which the publishing house has made look more like a normal-length novel, with a huge font and not many words on each page – though that is not why they’re sneaky) is about Guylain Vignolles who pulps paper for a living. Every day on the 6.27 train, he reads one of the pages he has saved aloud to the passengers – who, somewhat surprisingly, largely seem to respond positively.

The novella went by so fast that it was hard to know whether or not I liked it, and it turned into rather an add romance – all while having the surreal tone of a dystopia, despite not really being one. I can’t quite see why it was such a bestseller, but it’s nice that more translated fiction is getting bestseller status. To be honest, I don’t have a lot to say about it – the writing was pretty good; it was all very engaging but not life-changing – but what I wanted to write about was the cover. Half the book group had this one:

While I (along with the other half of the group) had this one:

Spot the difference?

Yes – for some reason, half of us had snow and reindeer, and a gold font. And when I say ‘some reason’ I mean, of course, Christmas. Is there snow in the novella? No. Are there reindeer? If so, they keep very quiet about it. It’s a completely shameless attempt to make the book seem like an ideal Christmas present, despite the fact that the story isn’t even set in winter (with apologies to any readers in the southern hemisphere).

I don’t know how they landed on this one. Perhaps it was bubbling under as a very good seller, but could go the extra mile with a bit of marketing. Now, I’m certainly not against marketing – I work in it, after all. I don’t think PR is a bad thing (I have witnessed somebody call the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year campaign “a moronic piece of PR gimmickery”, unaware that I had worked on the campaign – which was, of course, PR and light fun. What did they expect? That a word had actually won some sort of real life battle?)  But I think there should be a bit more grounding than “we’d like to flog a few copies of this”.

So, yes. I love it when British Library Crime Classics get the Christmassy titles out, or even when there’s yet another edition of A Christmas Carol published. But why on earth did this novella get the treatment? And how many people were disappointed when they settled down on Boxing Day for some festive fun?

Oh, and here’s a translation quandary. The fact that Guylain Vignolles is a spoonerism for vilain guignol isn’t an immediate win in English.

Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon

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During the Persephone Readathon, I chose to read Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon – which is rather an anomaly for Persephone, in that it was published in 1981. AND the author is still alive! I can only think of a couple other Persephone authors in that category. So, why did Persephone Books step so far from their usual territory of interwar literature to a novel about the kidnap of a child?

For that is what Still Missing is about – it was later adapted into the film Without a Trace. And yet it’s worlds away from the sort of book that might be conjured up in your mind. There certainly seems to be a trend in modern crime fiction for depicting the worst possible things that can happen to children or women. Whether the authors are doing that gratuitously or to expose a troubling trend in the real world, they’re not books I want to read. Whereas Still Missing is far more about the psychology of a mother going through this appalling predicament, day by day by day.

That is the power of the novel. Nothing is rushed. We agonise alongside Susan, feeling as though we are deep in her mind, even though the novel is in the third person. As for her son, Alex, all we see is him leaving for school – and not getting there. He disappears from the novel as suddenly as he disappears from the neighbourhood.

It may be that one loss helps to prepare you for the next, at least in developing a certain rueful sense of humour about things you’re too old to cry about. There’s plenty of blather, some of it true, about turning pain into growth, using one blow to teach you resilience and to make you ready for the shock of the next one. But the greater truth is that life is not something you can go into training for. There was nothing in life that Susan Selky could have done to prepare for the breathtaking impact of losing her son.

I don’t know what would actually happen when a young boy goes missing, nor (more to the point) what would have happened in 1981 – but I’m willing to believe it would be rather what Gutcheon depicts. There is the initial flurry of media interest and police action – questioning her estranged husband, getting statements from everybody in the area, putting everybody at their disposal. Her friends are either too horrified to talk to her, too awkward to know how to help, or (a select few) an essential support. Gutcheon shows people’s reactions perfectly, and dryly explains how and why people react as they do.

“Are you sure there’s nothing… funny about her?” his wife asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She was so cool,” said Pat. Uh-huh, though Menetti. Now it starts. It can’t happen to me. It happened to her, she lost her kid, but if there’s something funny about her, then there’s a reason it could happen to her but it couldn’t happen to me. Now starts the drawing away, the pulling aside, the setting the Selkys apart.

Chief among the policemen is Menetti, in that conversation above. One of the reasons the novel is in the third person (I suspect) is so that we can jump into Menetti’s mind instead – he is an intensely sympathetic character, trying to help Susan as much as possible while also maintaining procedure. She begs him not to waste time following the lead of her ex-husband – she is adamant that it has nothing to do with him – but Menetti must follow the (fruitless) most likely option. And we see him when he goes home too, anxious and resigned, the impact on his own family life all too unavoidable.

Still Missing is very gripping, but not because it is full of event. It is full of tension, but it is mostly the tension of nothing happening – of friends and journalists gradually losing interest; of the leads drying up. And of Susan’s agony remaining just as painful and stark throughout – of her own measures to find Alex growing increasingly desperate. Gutcheon judges the pacing brilliantly almost all the time – I say ‘almost’ because there are a few clunky bits, thrown in for plot and red herrings, that don’t sit well with the rhythm of the rest of the narrative.

I’m still not sure it quite fits as a Persephone, and the 1980s still lies between nostalgia and modern in a slightly off-colour, dated interim state – but it’s certainly an involving and beautifully judged read. The premise has become worn through re-use, but Gutcheon takes it back to essentials, and the novel is the more powerful and personal because of it.

A little Alan Ayckbourn

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It was lovely to see quite a few bloggers take up the challenge of A Century of Books, and quite a few of them wanted to check the small print with me. The rules, they asked – is it year of publication or year of translation? Can I count books I’m halfway through? Is this small black cat technically a book?

“Make up your own rules!” I said. “Sure, maybe that cat IS a book! Read it! Read it as much as you like!”

And nowhere has this playing-with-rules become more evident in my own reading decisions than with Alan Ayckbourn. Because I’ve counted the audiobooks I’ve listened to of his plays (with different actors for different characters), where I wouldn’t count a play I saw on stage towards my century. Does it make sense? No, of course not. Are they my rules? Yep, and I’m sticking to them.

I listened to three Ayckbourn plays (well, technically five – more on that in a mo) and I gave up on Henchforward… which was some bizarre dystopian robot thing. Apparently Ayckbourn does dystopian plays now and then, but it’s not my cup of tea and I skipped onto a different play. Btw, I’m using the year of first performance as the date for each play. #MyOwnRules.

The Norman Conquests (1973)

This is actually three different plays, all first performed in 1973 – Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. I think (?) they’re his most famous plays, and I’ve had a DVD of them since forever that I still haven’t watched. (Fun fact for Good Life fans: Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal were in the original production. Fun fact for Ever Decreasing Circles fans: Penelope Wilton and Richard Briers are on the DVD, as is Penelope Keith.)

All the plays feature the same characters, and take place on the same evening – the clever conceit is that each play looks at what’s going on in one room/space during the evening – the kitchen, living room, and garden respectively. It’s not quite as clever as Ayckbourn’s Home and Garden, in that the plays can’t be played simultaneously, but it works very well nonetheless – you can see any one of them individually as a self-contained play (though I have my doubts that Round and Round the Garden would be very rewarding done thus), or you can watch all of them and put together the whole picture.

And the plot? Broadly, Norman had been planning to run away with his wife’s sister – for a dirty weekend in (ahem) East Grinstead. Over the course of the evening, the various couples – siblings and their spouses or would-be spouses – shout at each other, flirt with each other, and come to some sort of resolution. It’s all very entertaining, even if it’s rather a stretch to believe that anybody at all would want a relationship with Norman, since he’s selfish, unkind, arrogant, and frequently rather annoying. But the title is brilliant.

Just Between Ourselves (1976)

The play is set over four consecutive birthdays, and features two couples who meet when one of them is thinking about buying the car of the other – though even this is rather up for debate, as the quietly warring husband and wife who come to look at the car can’t even decide if they want a car at all.

This play is all very tautly told, but I can’t remember many specifics… which perhaps tells that the structure of Just Between Ourselves isn’t quite as good as Ayckbourn at his finest. The main male is just as annoying as Norman, though. What is it with Ayckbourn and annoying men who somehow captivate everybody around them?

Man of the Moment (1988)

This one is rather cleverer – it takes place around an episode of a series called ‘Their Paths Crossed’. In this case, the paths crossed 17 years earlier – between the TV personality Vic Parks and a rather hapless man named Doug. I’m not going to tell you how their paths crossed (don’t look at Wikipedia!) just in case you listen yourself, or go and see it performed, because I had a great time guessing until it was revealed.

From the reveal is quite a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about forgiveness, chance, fate, and… well a bit of drama thrown in. Guess what? Vic is another terrible person. A little too terrible at times – it would be a more nuanced story if he weren’t. It might not be a coincidence that my favourite Ayckbourn play so far is Relatively Speaking, in which everyone is (relatively) pleasant.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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I’m writing this a few days before the weekend, and I’m already feeling a little bit ropey… fingers crossed I don’t spend the actual weekend in bed, since I’m supposed to be visiting a friend of mine. Eek. But anyway, here’s a link, a blog post, and a book nonetheless…

1.) The link – is the most fascinating true story I’ve read in ages.

2.) The blog post – is Harriet’s review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s brilliant collection of short stories, Swans on an Autumn River. I also loved this, but she writes about it way better.

3.) The book – I’ve still never read any Rose Tremain, though am intending to read The Gustav Sonata at some point (and have it waiting) – but I see her childhood memoir is coming out in April, and I feel sure some of you would want to know…

A Century of Books: some catch-up mini-reviews

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I’m actually doing rather better in A Century of Books than my tally has been looking, to date – and that’s because there are quite a few titles that I haven’t reviewed. And, for one reason or another, I don’t want to write full reviews of all of these – so, instead, I’ll do a quick round-up of some of the other books I’ve been reading… in date order. (And more reviews to come shortly!)

1925: The Human Machine by Arnold Bennett

This was an audiobook, and I think it might have been serialised much earlier, but Wikipedia says 1925 so I’m going to believe it. It’s a rather odd self help book, in which Bennett spends much of the time saying over and over that people don’t train their brain enough, or control their emotions enough, but doesn’t come up with much concrete advice other than ‘concentrate your mind for half an hour every day’. To be honest, I was listening more out of interest in social and literary history than to receive any self help advice, and for that it was an entertaining angle on Arnold Bennett. (Whenever I write about him, the Arnold Bennett Society pop up – so hello guys!)

1959: The Young Ones by Diana Tutton

I would do a full review of this, but I had to read it in the Bodleian (since secondhand copies are rarer than hen’s teeth) and I don’t feel like I can write a review without the book in front of me. It’s about a brother and sister and their adopted sister, and the various emotional tangles they get into – including the brother and adopted sister falling in love. But that is the least of the tangles… It’s written with the confident wit and ever-so-slight surrealism of Tutton – not as wonderful as Guard Your Daughters (and indeed what is?) but I think very deserving of being back in print nonetheless.

2013: Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

I’ve read one previous memoir about the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, Simon Stephenson’s brilliant Let Not The Waves of the Sea – and Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir tells of being in the midst of it, losing her husband, parents, and two children. What makes the book so powerful is that she doesn’t attempt to retrospectively explain the grieving process, but just tells us what she did – even when it’s as odd as terrorising the family who moved into her house. Stark and astonishing book.

2017: Scribbles in the Margins by Daniel Gray

I love a book about books, and one that’s inspired by J.B. Priestley’s Delight is likely to be, indeed, a delight. This is a fun look through the different things that readers love doing, and different reading habits, but it is very light on actual books. That means its potential audience is much wider – and I imagine it was rather a stocking filler last year – but it’s not got a huge amount to get your teeth into. A very enjoyably diverting read, of course – but expect it to be what it is!

The disturbing popularity of The Sheik

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My latest audiobook from Librivox was The Sheik (1919) by E.M. Hull, and it was a fascinating experience – and not only because I discovered that some people say ‘sheek’ rather than ‘shake’. (The recording was done by a group of people, taking different chapters, and an especial hat nod must go to M.J. Franck who is a brilliant reader.)

If you’ve done any reading about popular fiction in the early decades of the 20th century, you’ll have read about The Sheik. It was an enormous bestseller (selling over a million copies even before the silent film with Rudolph Valentino was released – which, incidentally, you can watch on YouTube). It kicked off a whole new lease of life for desert noir, or whatever they were calling it. And I’m pretty sure that almost nobody reads it nowadays.

I listened to it entirely out of my interest in literary history – not for the novel itself. You’ll understand why the more I explain, if you don’t already know about the novel. And this blog post will have spoilers, because I’m not expecting anybody to read The Sheik. Indeed, I urge you not to read it.

The novel tells of Diana Mayo, an independently-minded young woman who doesn’t want to kowtow to society’s restrictions. She’s not interested in romance or marriage, but instead wants to go exploring on her own – to the concern of her decadent brother. Indeed, she is rather an admirable and refreshing character. Against her brother’s advice, she sets out into the desert with some locals to guide her… and is ambushed. Some of the men are shot. And she is kidnapped by ‘the sheik’. There is rather a lot about how strong he is, and about how his strong arm pushes her strongly against his strong chest. He’s strong, in case that was too subtle.

The sheik is Ahmed Ben Hassan. And he has not intention of letting her go now that he has her. Indeed, between the second and third chapters he rapes her. He continues to rape her every day for several weeks – this is 1919; we don’t see those scenes, but we do get lots of scenes of him looking cruelly at her, laughing cruelly, smiling cruelly etc. Hull goes in for iterated statements.

And throughout all of this, Hull is crazy racist. Lots of sweeping statements are made about “the Arabs” and their supposed disregard for mercy. A lot of her horror seems to come as much from having had sex with “an Arab” as from being raped – though the word ‘rape’ is never used. It’s all pretty unpleasant.

It gets worse.

One day, out riding, she manages to escape. Long story short, she doesn’t get super far until Ahmed Ben Hassan catches up with her and makes her come back to his camp. And… she realises that she is in love with him. I knew this was coming, but I still shouted at the car radio when it happened. I think this brief excerpt sums up everything I hated about the plot of the novel:

Her heart was given for all time to the fierce desert man who was so different from all other men whom she had met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength. And he was an Arab!

I had thought it might be more like Pamela, where the power of her virtue forces him to repent – but, no, she is the one who changes to be his object. And – skipping forward a few chapters – phew, it turns out he’s actually European after all, so all’s well that ends well.

Hull writes surprisingly well and engagingly, and I’d enjoy reading her in an entirely different sphere – it doesn’t make much of a difference what a writing style is like when it’s about this. My main surprise – as with when Fifty Shades of Grey became so popular – is that so many people had this… taste? fetish? fantasy? Apparently in 1919 this passed for acceptable reading – unless all the millions of copies were read in secret, of course. It’s telling that, in the film, the sheik only thinks about raping her, but doesn’t actually do it.

I’ve no idea what E.M. Hull’s other novels are like (though I don’t hold out hopes for The Son of the Sheik), and I don’t think I’ll explore any further. This dip back a century has confirmed my worst fears from reading about the novel – and painted rather a disturbing picture of what was de rigueur in 1919.

Tea or Books? #52: Detective Fiction vs Crime Fiction and Merry Hall vs The Sweet and Twenties

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Detective fiction, crime fiction, and Beverley Nichols – what fun!


 

Rachel has had to take a quick break from the podcast, but I was delighted to have a special guest in the form of Karen, from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, who took to it all brilliantly. After an introductory chat with Karen, we talked about Golden Age detective fiction vs modern crime fiction – with my usual lack of research, though Karen is rather better informed.

Karen and I are both besotted with Beverley Nichols, and it seemed like a good opportunity to compare two of his books – Merry Hall and The Sweet and Twenties.

Rachel should be back for our next episode. In the meantime, you can visit our iTunes page – and we’ve also set up a Patreon page. Obviously we are very, very happy for people to keep listening without signing up for Patreon, but if you’d like to help us recover hosting costs etc. and get some ‘rewards’ (from shout-outs to book parcels) then you can check out our page.

In the episode, we talk about a wonderful clip of Beverley Nichols – here it is:

The books and authors we mention are:

Nairn’s Paris by Ian Nairn
Leadon Hill by Richmal Crompton
Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton
Narcissa by Richmal Crompton
Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton
Frost at Morning by Richmal Crompton
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dashiell Hammett
Raymond Chandler
Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle
Val McDermid
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Endless Night by Agatha Christie
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
Wallander series by Henning Mankell
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
Jo Nesbo
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
The Wychford Poisoning Case by Anthony Berkeley
John Bude
John Dickson Carr
Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
Quick Curtain by Alan Melville
Death of Anton by Alan Melville
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards
Murder in the Museum by John Rowland
Calamity in Kent by John Rowland
Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols
The Sweet and Twenties by Beverley Nichols
Crazy Pavements by Beverley Nichols
Yours Sincerely by Beverley Nichols and Monica Dickens
Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols
Twenty Five by Beverley Nichols
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F Tennyson Jesse
Messalina of the Suburbs by E.M. Delafield
Virginia Woolf
Noel Coward
Oscar Wilde
Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson
Vita Sackville-West
Sunlight on the Lawn by Beverley Nichols
Laughter on the Stairs by Beverley Nichols
Elizabeth Bowen
Molly Keane
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
The ABC of Cats by Beverley Nichols
The XYZ of Cats by Beverley Nichols
This is Sylvia by Sandy Wilson
Nancy Spain
L.P. Hartley
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
According to Mark by Penelope Lively

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend! I’m sitting with a cat on my lap, and his paws are on my arm making it rather difficult to type. (Definitely worth it.) I’ve got a busy one, with my bro coming on Saturday and my friend coming on Sunday – I’ve made brownies in preparation – but plenty of time to leave you with a link, a book, and a blog post.

1.) The link- I’m super excited that the wonderful sitcom Mum is coming back for a second series soon, and you can catch up with series one on iPlayer (or, cough, more illicit means if you’re not in the UK). Not to be confused with the fairly dreadful US sitcom Mom, this one stars the always-wonderful Lesley Manville as a woman whose husband has recently died, as she deals with her son, brother, sister-in-law, parents-in-law etc. The writing and acting are sublime.

2.) The book – have I mentioned Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading? A review copy is on its way to me, but I had to let you know it exists because it sounds wonderful. Just from that title alone, really, but follow the link and all the other info also makes it sound even better.

3.) The blog post – I loved seeing all the Persephone-related posts pop up in the blogosphere in the past couple of weeks, and here is Karen’s top ten, to pick one most. (Also have a mosey around Karen’s blog for a Miss Mole review!)

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

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It’s turning out to be all Whipple all the time on Stuck in a Book right now. Well, long before I started Random Commentary, I was already reading the monster that is The Priory (1939). It’s enormous. My copy is 528 pages – I basically never read books that are over 500 pages, and that’s why I’ve had my copy for nearly 14 years (gasp, how did time pass that quickly?)

I bought it just before I started university, while on a trip to the Bookbarn to buy books for my course. This was, ahem, not for my course – but I couldn’t resist. And it was only when I got home that I discovered that my copy was… signed by Dorothy Whipple!

Obviously my copy is much older than the Persephone edition – which I do also have, as I can’t bring myself to get rid of either copy. And it starts like this…

It was almost dark. Cars, weaving like shuttles on the high road between two towns fifteen miles apart, had their lights on. Every few moments, the gates of Saunby Priory were illuminated. Every few moments, to left or to right, the winter dusk was pierced by needle points of light which, rushing swiftly into brilliance, summoned the old gateway like an apparition from the night and, passing, dispelled it.

The gates were from time to time illuminated, but the Priory, set more than a mile behind them, was still dark. To the stranger it would have appeared deserted. It stood in dark bulk, with a cold glitter of water beside it, a cold glitter of glass window when clouds moved in the sky. The West Front of the Priory, built in the thirteenth century for the service of God and the poor, towered above the house that had been raised alongside from its ruins, from its very stones. And because no light showed from any window here, the stranger, visiting Saunby at this hour, would have concluded that the house was empty.

But he would have been wrong. There were many people within.

So – what’s The Priory about? The house in question is called Saunby Priory, and is the vast home belonging to the Marwood family. There is grumpy widower Major Marwood, who lives only for the cricket season – which he throws large sums of money at, while the rest of the year he is a fierce penny pincher. There are his daughters Christine and Penelope, still in the nursery though now newly grown up. And there is a handful of servants who occasionally war with each other and occasionally sleep with each other (in a tactful 1930s way, of course).

Curiously, the Priory never felt very big to me. After that introduction, the scenes inside the house are rather claustrophobic – people worrying about space, getting in each other’s way, or being moved to make room for others. I wonder how deliberate that was.

There are a series of stages, where the entrance of a new character into the scene changes things – the first being the shy, anxious woman who will become Major Marwood’s new wife: Anthea. She is old enough that she believed she would always be a spinster, and is keen to accept his fairly ungracious proposal – which he makes by phone, because he doesn’t want the bother of going around to her in case she says no. There are also men who enter stage left to woo the girls; there is a passage of time in London. It is all very involved, and spaced evenly throughout the hundreds of pages – like an ongoing soap opera of events, neatly paced and always meeting the anticipated dose of emotion. There is also humour, particularly at the beginning, though the tone of the novel grows a little more melodramatic as the pages go by.

The Priory doesn’t have the psychological nuance of some of Whipple’s other novels. (That’s my view anyway – see review links at the bottom for different opinions!) Because her tapestry of events is so protracted, and must be filled, each one gets its moments of alarm and pathos, and everybody reacts in heightened dialogue before neatly moving onto the next moment. For instance, Anthea moves from being a timid new bride to ruthlessly running the household for the protection of her new babies, but settles into the new role so comfortably that it doesn’t feel as though a psychological shift has taken place so much as a new set of characteristics has been introduced. The same is true for the daughters as they experience marriage, parenthood, and adult woes.

Which is not to say that what is here isn’t a joy to read. It is – I moved through the novel very happily, enjoying every page for the entertaining soap opera that it was. I suppose my only point is that Whipple can do better, in terms of insight and depth – but not every novel needs to be insightful and deep. Some can just be engagingly written and immersively enjoyable – indeed, that is no mean feat. Yes, it could have been 200pp shorter without losing very much – I’d have advised staying in the Priory and not wandering off around the country – but I can’t disagree with the tribute that E.M. Delafield gave the novel in The Provincial Lady in Wartime:

What, I enquire in order to gain time, does Mrs. Peacock like in the way of books?

In times such as these, she replies very apologetically indeed, she thinks a novel is practically the only thing. Not a detective novel, not a novel about politics, nor about the unemployed, nothing to do with sex, and above all not a novel about life under Nazi régime in Germany.

Inspiration immediately descends upon me and I tell her without hesitation to read a delightful novel called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, which answers all requirements, and has a happy ending into the bargain.

Mrs. Peacock says it seems too good to be true, and she can hardly believe that any modern novel is as nice as all that, but I assure her that it is and that it is many years since I have enjoyed anything so much.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The best thing about this book is the characters. Whipple develops them so skillfully, and I loved how she did it by showing the reader through their words, thoughts, and actions, not just telling us.” – Books and Chocolate

“It is a beautiful novel, worthy of the highest praise and Whipple is an author, whose writing I look forward to reading more of, in the near future.” – Bag Full of Books

“Not a lot “happens” in this novel; most of the action centers around emotion. It’s all about subtlety here.” – A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

There is also an enjoyable write-up in the Persephone Forum.

 

Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple

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I’m continuing my informal project of reading the long-awaited books on my shelves – and since I know how lucky I am to have a copy of Random Commentary (1966) by Dorothy Whipple, I thought I should actually read it.

I remember vividly finding it in a bookshop in Falmouth. I’d had a hunt for it online, and knew how rare it was – and there it was, sitting with The Other Day (also by Whipple) on a shelf, and not very expensive. Dad couldn’t quite understand why I was so excited, or why I lunged for them – just in case somebody should appear from nowhere and grab them before I could get my hands on them.

That was in 2006. And now I’ve finally read Random Commentary, was it worth the wait?

Well, yes and no (as so often).

Those familiar with Whipple’s lifespan will know that she died in 1966, and this book was published from the journals she left behind her – which span from 1925 until the late 1940s. Whoever edited them has pulled out mostly entries related to her writing, which is wonderful, but has put them together without any date markers or sense of the passage of time – so we might go in a couple of paragraphs from the genesis of a book to its publication. It’s not usually quite that swift, but the moment of finishing writing is often immediately followed by the book appearing in print – which makes the whole thing rather dizzying at times. This dizzying quality also comes when Whipple has clearly edited her journals at a later date – though we don’t learn quite the extent this has happened. Here’s an example of all of this…

I posted the book to Cape’s at five o’clock. I hope they will like it. I hardly think they can. What possessed me to write about a girl in a shop? I know nothing about it. But I was fascinated by the life of Miss S., who has done so wonderfully well with and for herself.

I went to the theatre: “Five o’clock Girl”. Hermione Badeley is a genius. I wish I could ask her to tea. I wish one could do that sort of thing. What fun if you could get to know everyone you wanted to!

My book back from Cape. They refuse it. They say it wouldn’t be a commercial success. (This book afterwards sold thousands of copies and is now in its tenth edition. Still selling after thirty years. SO refused authors should take courage and go on notwithstanding. I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Everything worth while is accomplished notwithstanding“.)

I long to do better and am humbled in my own estimation.

But it’s certainly a pleasure to read, structure aside. It was extremely interesting to get an insight into her writing process – and into her thoughts of herself as a writer. She frets that she may be no good; that each new book must be a failure. And yet she is also strongly protective of her characters and her writing, in anguish when her dialogue is badly re-written for a film version, or when publicity material misunderstands the point of They Knew Mr Knight.

Lovers of Whipples novels want to find out all the information they (we) can, and it’s a shame that the entries close before she starts writing my favourite of her books – Someone at a Distance. Quite a lot of the space is occupied with the writing of her autobiography, The Other Day – largely because she doesn’t at all think she can write an autobiography, and ends is some sort of tussle with the publisher, who assures her that she can. I’ve not read it yet, but it’s interesting that (despite all the fiction publishing they’ve done), Persephone haven’t brought her non-fiction into print. It’s much more scarce, so one must assume that they’ve decided it’s not meritworthy enough.

As for Random Commentary – it’s a wonderful resource for the Whipple completist, and brings the novelist as nothing else could. She is frank in these notebooks, and I felt a lot of empathy for her very human feelings about her writing and the publishing process. But it has to be admitted that these notebooks are not great works in and of themselves – they are what they are, which is random jottings of an author trying to encourage herself to write, or distract herself from worrying how a manuscript will be received.

I suppose we’ve been spoiled by Virginia Woolf’s diaries – particularly the edited version A Writer’s Diary – and spoiled by how great an author can be in their diaries. Hers are sublime, a great gift to literature. Whipple’s are not that. They are entertaining, though, and they add a valuable perspective on her much-loved novels. Is this book worth the price you’d have to pay online to get it? Probably not. But keep your eyes peeled when you’re wandering around Falmouth, and you might be in luck.