I have a couple of pieces elsewhere this week on two of my favourite topics – Persephone Books and twins!
Over at Vulpes Libris, I’ve written an overview of my favourite Persephones, and which you might want to try, depending on your mood…
…and on the Oxford Dictionaries blog, I’ve written about twins and words. The title is one of my life’s greatest accomplishments…
…more here at Stuck-in-a-Book soon!
A friend from my book group kindly lent me Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos about a million years ago, and I’ve somehow only recently got around to reading it. I think it looked almost too inviting – it seemed a delicious treat of a book that I didn’t think I quite deserved. And I thought it might be a sweet, old-fashioned children’s book, which isn’t something for which I’m always in the mood.
Well, I was right and I was wrong. It isn’t remotely sweet or a children’s book, but it is wonderful.
You (like my friend) are probably aware of my penchant for characterful old ladies in books, and Abbie does not disappoint. The episodic novel is narrated by Dane (I thought it might even be a sort of autobiography, until I discovered that Dane Chandos was actually the pseudonym for two authors, Peter Lilley and Nigel Millett) who, from his schooldays onwards, has a close and amusing relationship with his Aunt Abbie.
Abbie is composed of interspersed letters and narrative – the letters being from Abbie, who jaunts off around the world (she hires camels in Algeria, haggles in French markets, skis in Switzerland) but always returns to her East Anglian garden. Gardening is perhaps the least exotic of her hobbies, but it is also her most passionate. She judges everyone on their gardening abilities, she is willing to steal and deceive for her art, and this piece of dialogue (which I choose more or less at random) is from one of the chapters on gardening:
“Drat the regatta. We’re too late now, anyway. I have to get those camellias put in. Now please take care of them, Arthur. Do not make an impetuous gesture. Cotoneaster twigs are very delicate. Prenez garde! These old gaffers should not be allowed on the roads, especially when there are such handsome almshouses at Upper Dovercourt.”
Abbie is an interesting creation. Battleaxe types are always a joy to read in some measure, but the author’s (or, in this case, authors’) task is to keep them on the right side of sympathy – or open them entirely to ridicule. It is that which separates the Lady Catherine de Bourghs from the Miss Hargreaveses of this world. Abbie is certainly not a figure of fun – much depends on the reader developing the fondness for her that Dane (the character) clearly has for his aunt. How successful is this?
Well, the negatives. She is unabashedly xenophobic – but not racist in particular, because every non-British person (indeed, every non-British non-upper-class person) meets with her disdain. She is quite selfish. She is rude, abrupt, and tells everyone to ‘Prenez garde!’ all the time.
And the positives. She is very funny – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. She loves her nephew and her husband. He is called Arthur, is calm and sensible, and balances out her forthright sense of purpose. He is also, along with Dane, capable of quietening her down. The authors give us enough examples of Abbie being bested (my favourite being in the garden theft incident, by a confident neighbour) that we can afford to like her.
Make no mistake, she would be a horror to know as a person – and her xenophobia is only understandable as a product of her time – but I couldn’t help loving reading about her energetic exploits and astonishing self-confidence. The more low-key her social battles (arguing with a waiter, or going for a dress-fitting) the more I loved it – things got a bit out of hand with runaway camels and the like. But my taste always leans to the domestic and social minutiae.
Any fan of slightly silly, very funny, early twentieth-century novels will find a lot to like and laugh at in Abbie. And, even better, I’ve just discovered that there is a sequel, Abbie and Arthur! Thanks Caroline for lending this to me, sorry it’s taken an age to read it…
Well, after my previous post, I couldn’t resist doing my own hunt for dreadful covers – and Wuthering Heights seemed like the sort of book which would oblige. There are actually a lot of great covers out there for it (I really like the modern, slightly dark ones I saw) but there were also, of course, some awful ones. With all inspiration due to Bizarre Victoria (and to Caustic Cover Critic), here are the ones I found…
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| Wuthering Heights: the Edvard Munch edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the Gone With the Wind edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the ‘it’s raining and all I had was my bedsheet’ edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the ginger edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the Little House on the Prarie edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the Isabella Blow edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the ‘which house IS that?’ edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the Rosie & Jim edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the ‘here are two images I found, right, LUNCHTIME’ edition |
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| Wuthering Heights: the 90210 edition |
Why not pick your own Victorian novel and give it a whirl?!
Busy week, so quickly… my friend Lorna sent me a link to Bad Jane Eyre Covers, and (being a fan of awful covers) I loved it. You can see them here.
When my week has calmed down, I might try and see what I can source for another novel or two… but feel free to give it a whirl yourself!
I’ve been very excited about Vintage Books reprinting Stella Gibbons’ lesser-known novels (perhaps following the lead Virago started with Nightingale Wood, which I still haven’t read) and I have been impressed, in part or in whole, by Westwood and Bassett. (Clicking on those titles will take you to my reviews.) I have to admit, part of my joy at the series is the beautiful covers, and I asked Vintage if they’d send me a copy of Here Be Dragons (1956), partly because Sue recommended it at a Possibly Persephone? meeting, and partly because of that beautiful cover.
Well, that’ll teach me to judge a book by its cover, because when I asked Vintage for a copy of Here Be Dragons, they (quite rightly) sent me one of their print on demand copies, which doesn’t have a picture on its cover at all. (Maybe this is Kindle only?) It was also very hard to hold open for long periods of time – being very tightly bound – which is one of the reasons it took me about six months to finish it. The other reasons, I will come to…
I am a sucker for a novel where someone opens a tearoom, which sounds quite niche but is stumbled across quite often in the 30s-50s. Nell, the heroine of Here Be Dragons, doesn’t actually get around to opening a tearoom – but she works at one, and she intends to open one soon, and that’ll do me. She is the daughter of a slightly eccentric upper-class family, and as the novel opens her clergyman father has decided to leave the church – and they are all bundled into a flat (which is really most of a sizeable house). Nell – bravely catching up with the past two decades – decides to enter the world of work.
First she is a typist in an office, where a constant battle is waged over whether a window is, or is not, left open. The work is dull, the old men are patronising, and she is tempted away with the promise of £16 a week (including tips) should she become a waitress. This she does, at the Primula, and I loved the scenes where she finds her feet in the café, learns to get along with the curious staff, and starts to plan her independent tearoom career (even if she can’t imagine being beyond 25 without this.)
Sadly, that’s pretty much all I liked in this novel. I think it’s called Here Be Dragons because Nell enters a world which had previously been unfamiliar and alarming – as with maps which used to use those three words to delineate scary foreign lands. And Nell’s scary foreign land is the world of bohemian layabouts, to which she is introduced by her monstrously selfish cousin John. This is the sort of thing he does/says:
Sometimes he would lecture her about being a waitress, saying that she never had a moment to spare for him; that she was necessary to him, like the sights and sounds and smells of London; and that her ‘so-called work’ took up too much of her time; that she was hardly ever there when he wanted her.
This was sweet to hear, but like most of John’s statements it bore only a tenuous relationship to the facts, which were that often saved him an evening or a Monday afternoon and never heard a word from him throughout the whole of it.
“Of course. I didn’t want you then,” was his usual petulant comment when asked casually (Nell’s own temperament, as well as a kind of deer-stalking instinct, prevented her from asking in any other tone) what he kept him or prevented his telephoning? And he would add, “You see, you must be there when I want you, Nello.”
Nell is not blind to his faults, but she is still in love with him, despite him having no discernible good qualities. I can’t work out whether we are meant to find John intellectually charming, or if he really is supposed to be as ghastly as he comes across. (That ‘this was sweet to hear’ worries me.) Whenever I think that a character is self-evidently dreadful, I remind myself that some people, somehow, come away from Wuthering Heights thinking that Heathcliff is a romantic hero, so…
But I could just about forgive Here Be Dragons having the world’s most awful character – and unashamed selfishness is the vice which irritates me most in fiction – if he had been interesting. I’m afraid I found huge swathes of the novel just quite boring. There is a subplot about a fey young thing called Nerina which didn’t grab me at all; Nell’s father losing his faith is mentioned occasionally, but quite half-heartedly. The whole thing, in fact, felt a little half-hearted. Enjoyable enough to pass the time, but uninspired – particularly when it could have been so much better.
So, I am still excited about the reprints, and I will keep trying Stella Gibbons to see what gems lie in the rough – but I don’t think, on the whole, that Here Be Dragons is one of them.
This has been my jam this week:
I never got around to reviewing Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye (2010), which was one of the books I read while finishing my thesis – chosen because it was so far from the books I was writing about. I still loved them, but I needed to balance things out with something different. I wrote about Sacks in this article, but not this book in particular – and I especially wanted to write about the final chapter, because it struck a chord with me.
That is a painting I did for my parents’ Christmas present – of our house – partly because I thought you might like this glimpse into the Christmas festivities of the Thomas family, partly to include a picture in this post, and partly as evidence that I am rather a visual person. I am a thousand times happier in an art gallery than at a concert; I can think of nothing nicer than looking at the beauties of nature, and I am overcome with appreciation when looking at views in the Lake District or a beautiful old house etc. etc.
And yet, I have never in my life visualised characters in a book.
You know how some readers watch a film and complain that the people cast didn’t match their mental images? Not me. I mentally carry characters through a book as bundles of emotions, thoughts, responses, likes, dislikes, characteristics – but I will have no idea what sort of nose they have, or if their hair is straight or wavy, or anything like that. Even if the author has told us what they look like, I’ll probably have ignored it. And I have to skim past any passage which describes what a place looks like, because it means nothing to me. Similarly anything with spatial descriptions – if a passage talks about someone entering from the right, walking behind a sofa with a bookcase to the left, etc. etc., I have to concentrate incredibly hard for it to compute. And it’s not worth it!
I would understand this, if I wasn’t bothered by aesthetics. But they mean so much to me. It’s curious.
And then I read Oliver Sacks, and he is the same! It was so nice to read someone so knowledgeable and eloquent who had his brain wired the same way. (You see, he was so informative that I’ve learnt the terminology… ahem.) You see, I don’t say ‘problem’, because I don’t think this impairs my reading at all – I certainly don’t miss it when I’m reading, and it’s not as though I hate books – but it does mean I can’t read most travel literature, as that is almost invariably scenery-description-based.
As usual, I’d love you to weigh in – anyone else there like me, who loves scenery and art and aesthetics, but can’t meaningfully interpret a description of something visual? Or do you always ‘see’ characters when you read about them? I don’t think any of these things are better or worse – heck, we all love reading, don’t we? – but it’s interesting to see (ahem) the different types of readers we all are.
I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp (2013), alongside which was included a lovely note from the author herself, hoping I’d enjoy it. Well, I did – it is everything that is splendid and lovely and jolly and fun, even while taking you on a trek through the emotions.
My full thoughts are over on Vulpes Libris today, but quickly – if you’ve ever hoped that Nancy Mitford were alive and well and writing 21st-century novels, then this is as close as you’re going to get.
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| Can we talk about how pleasingly this bookmark goes? |
I started reading The Suburban Young Man (1928) when Tanya was giving a paper on it at a conference we both attended – that link will take you to her great review of it, which includes interesting research into Delafield’s writing of the novel. Well, I didn’t manage to finish it then, and it went back on the shelf for 18 months or so… and recently I picked it up and swiftly read through to the end.
It’s definitely not one of EMD’s best books, but it’s EMD – so it’s still definitely worth a read.
The main characters are aristocratic Antoinette and the eponymous young man – Peter – who is married to the saintly housewife Hope. They begin an extramarital affair which is entirely a meeting of minds – Delafield, as with her better-known The Way Things Are, never takes things as far as the bedroom door, let alone further.
Much of the novel is taken up Antoinette and Peter telling each other how well they are suited, even though their backgrounds are so different. One of the assumptions the novelist makes (and all the characters make) is that the suburbs – here represented by ‘Richford’ – are entirely beyond the pale, and culturally mired in the commonplace. That view is essential to many interwar novels, but it falls rather flat for the modern reader. Still flatter, for this modern reader, is all the earnest discussion of romance. Delafield is at her weakest when she tries to be earnest – she is so, so much better at lifting the veil on self-delusion, or the comedy of everyday life, and not with paragraphs like this:
He was unable now to view himself as disloyal to his wife with any sense of conviction, and this not because technically he had remained faithful to her. Merely he could not feel that he had taken from Hope anything that she had ever possessed, or would ever have wished to possess. They had married one another neither by reason of passion nor from any strong sense of affinity, and the liking and admiration that he felt for many aspects of her personality had increased, rather than diminished, of late; nor did he think that she liked him less.
Hope is an absurdly tolerant character, who invites Antoinette to tea and has rational discussions about the possibility of her husband running off. Their marriage is pretty emotionless, but she is almost violently rational, and it’s not terribly convincing. More interesting (to me) are the scenes of Antoinette as a worker in an office, and discussions of what it was like for the newly-poor(ish) upper-classes to need employment.
Tanya wasn’t a fan of Norah (Peter’s sister-in-law) but I have to say that, along with Antoinette’s vague but surprisingly wise mother, Norah was my favourite character. Mostly because it gave a chance for Delafield to show her claws, which I delight in. Here’s a couple of examples.
Norah burst out laughing, as she invariably did at any opprobrious epithet, however applied.
Norah made a grimace that might have suggested a spoilt child in a prettier woman.
So, although I wasn’t hugely impressed when I put it back on the shelf in 2012, I rushed through the second half in 2014. Delafield’s writing is dependably engaging, and I certainly enjoyed reading The Suburban Young Man. But I’ve now read 23 books by Delafield, and this one is probably towards the lower end of the list, and I wouldn’t avidly encourage you to seek out the (extremely scarce) copies of this one.
Since Delafield came out of copyright recently, I’m hoping that more of her books will be reprinted – and not just endless copies of the (admittedly exceptionally good) Provincial Lady series. But I shan’t shed too many tears if The Suburban Young Man is left to languish a bit longer.
More from singing shows… this was already one of my favourite songs, and this girl on The Voice did a beautiful job with it.