People in the Room by Norah Lange – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

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It’s May, and that means it’s A Book A Day in May time! I’m delighted to see that Madame Bibi is back at the challenge too, and I thank her for inspiring me every year to take it up. It’s always quite chaotic, trying to read and review 31 books over the course of a month, but also always enjoyable.

People in the Room: Shortlisted for the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: Amazon.co.uk: Norah Lange: 9781911508229: Books

My first choice is People in the Room by Norah Lange, published in 1950 and translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle in 2018. A synopsis of this book can do nothing to convey the experience of reading it – for what is the synopsis? A 17-year-old girl starts watching three women living in the house opposite, who never close their shutters.

They were sitting in the drawing room, one of them slightly removed from the others. This detail always struck me. Whenever I saw them, two of them sat close together, the third at a slight distance. I could make out only the dark contours of their dresses, the light blurs of their faces and their hands. The one sitting farthest away was smoking, or at least so it seemed to me, since her hand rose and fell monotonously. The other two remained still, as if deep in thought, before turning their faces in the direction of her voice. Then I managed to make out, beside one of them, the small flare of a match being struck. I longed to meet them. 

She fabricates what their dynamic might be – and gradually becomes involved in their lives. She does indeed meet them, and becomes a frequent visitor. They never go out, and so she is welcomed whenever she wishes. But she keeps it secret from her family (about whom we learn little). Neither she nor the reader learns the names of the three sisters, nor do we know the narrator’s own name. There is very little dialogue between them when they do meet, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you much about these mysterious women. There are a couple of apparently significant moments – an encounter in the post office; the delivery of a telegram; the instalation of a telephone – but these are few and far between, and seem much less significant in the scheme of things than the silent everyday.

And yet – and yet! What a mesmerising experience reading People in the Room is. In his introduction, César Aira says (of Lange’s work in general): “Lange withholds the subject at the beginning of a narrative, so the reader cannot know whom she is describing; the action therefore becomes central, and is isolated from those performing it. One side effect of this tendency is that characters become ghostly figures, subordinate to and almost hidden from the action.” It’s a very perceptive comment. Because we don’t know really what’s going on, or the motives behind it, and yet we are transfixed by the relationship between these women about whom we know so little.

The unnamed 17-year-old is constantly analysing their dynamic, even while revealing so little. The position of portraits in the room, the choice of chairs, the awkwardness whenever a specific home is referenced – these things are turned over and over in her narrative. But, more than that, she is fixated on what her observations tell her about herself. Why is she interested? Why does she never ask their names? Why does she orchestrate curious situations – lying about a trip; making a telephone call and saying nothing – and what are they to achieve? It’s interesting that telegrams and telephones play roles, because People in the Room has so little genuine communication in it – it is a novel about the silences between people that cannot be traversed, and yet the connections that can exist even when there isn’t any communication.

Another key thread is death. At times, perhaps simply as a way of codifying something in their relationship, the narrator hopes the women will die. At other times, she fears it. Most often, she seems to expect it – despite guessing that the three women are around 30 years old. Death winds tendrils through all her reflections, as though it were the inevitable companion of observation.

What makes People in the Room work is Lange’s writing (and Whittle’s translation). A novel where atmosphere is all demands a style that fits. Lange writes long, langurous sentences, filled with commas and clauses that pile up and seem to get longer as the novel progresses. Here is one single sentence:

I thought I should go home, and that for once, it didn’t matter whether they could see my anguish, my altered demeanor in the black dress, because I felt strong, and was happy to be leaving, since they were happy to have met me, still smoking, watching me as they moved their wine glasses in different ways, still having the same thoughts, keeping things to themselves, setting them aside, but happy all along to have met me even though I’d read the telegram and heard the voice in the gloom of the carriage, for, as indifferent as they were, I’d come to possess their three mysterious, placid faces, and—I swear—I never expected anything from them in return, and all that could be remembered, that was lasting, that no one else knew, was already mine, and could transform my life more than the fire, more than their own deaths, because they were happy to have met me and said nothing about my hands—even though they must have noticed everything—or my dress; and I loved them even though they were guilty.

And then there is occasional sharpness, which jolts in prose that is so fluid. I really appreciated the second of these sentences (with the first to give you some context), because it so simply pinpoints something about the way we choose words in fraught situations:

Then I turned to her and said, “I forgot to shake your hand. I was so afraid to come…” and offered her mine, thinking that if I didn’t, something terrible might happen. Then I regretted having said the word afraid, when I should have saved it for another time, for when I wasn’t afraid.

In the hands of a less capable writer, People in the Room would simply be boring. But Lange has an extraordinary gift to keep the momentum – nothing is going to happen but, like the narrator, we need to keep watching it. One of the reviews on the back describes it as having ‘the tension of a thriller’, which is an exaggeration, but there is tension nonetheless. It’s not the tension of a thriller, but the tension of sitting in a room with people whom you don’t know well, and who are not bridging the social gap. I don’t know how she does it, but People in the Room is a striking, eerie, almost poignant study in connection and disconnection.

Announcing the 10th Anniversary Reading Week Club!

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Thank you to everyone who took part in the 1952 Club and, yes, I still indeed to read lots more posts(!) – and thank you especially to everyone who submitted ideas for the special 10th anniversary club reading week in October. The idea that came up from quite a few people was a centenary celebration – hence the 1925 Club! Karen and I thought it was a brilliant idea, and also looks like an exceptional year for books. Here’s the new badge…

We all love efficiency in our reading challenges – so an added bonus to the 1925 Club is that you can also contribute your reviews to Neeru’s Hundred Years Hence reading challenge, which is going throughout the whole year.

I can’t believe Karen and I started the club 10 years ago, and I am so thankful that she said yes to my initial idea, and has so diligently co-hosted the clubs ever since. They go from strength to strength, in terms of numbers, and I’m excited to see how things go 20-26 October this year. (This will overlap with our first reading challenge – which was apparently a fortnight! Gosh, we were ambitious back in 2015.)

As a celebratory 10th anniversary, we’re adding a special anniversary element. Throughout the week, you’re welcome to celebrate favourite reads from past clubs (whether that’s over 10 years or one year, or anywhere in between – as usual with these challenges, it’s low pressure and highly flexible). We’ll be dedicating the Thursday 23 October to celebrating those.

We do hope you will join us and we’re very much looking forward to celebrating ten years of our ‘Reading the Year’ clubs! We will remind you nearer the time, of course, but do get hunting for books…

The next club… your suggestions!

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What a fun 1952 Club it’s been! I’ve tried to collect all of your reviews, though do let me know if I’ve missed anything – and I have an awful lot of them still to read, as it’s been a busy week at work and at leisure. But I am looking forward to keeping my own personal 1952 Club going by spreading out the reading as long as it takes!

I’ve definitely done more reading for the 1952 Club than for any previous clubs, as there were so many tempting candidates. And, indeed, I’m midway through a memoir by Victor Gollancz that I didn’t manage to get into the club in time. But I did read a few books that may well be on my Best of 1952 list – Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson, Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson, and Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane. All brilliant in quite different ways.

For the next club, in October, Karen and I have decided to open up for suggestions – what year would you like the next club to do? Let us know in the comments (or on her blog), and why you think it would make a great choice.

And it’s going to be a special one – would you believe it, October 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of our club years! I can’t believe it’s been going so long, and it’s really turned into a regular milestone of the book blogging year – for which I am very grateful to my co-host Karen, and to all of you who come back time after time with your fascinating reviews. And, of course, to those of you who’ve joined in for the first time for the 1952 Club!

We’ll try to think of ways to mark the 10th anniversary and make it special (and there are no plans to stop the clubs after that, fear not) – but, for now, do pop your suggestions  for the reading year in the comments. Bonus points if it has special anniversary significance! And any other way that you think would be good to mark the special 10th year – go for it!

Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison #1952Club

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My post about Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison is going to be short – because what on earth was I thinking, back in 2012, when I bought this Virago Modern Classic? Well, maybe I’ve answered my own question there. It’s a VMC, it’s slim, it has a lovely cover. Maybe I figured all of that would help me overcome the fact that a book could hardly appeal to me less?

It’s a sort of fable about a girl called Halla in some sort of faux-medieval pan-Scandinavia setting. She is the daughter of a king but thrown out of home as an infant, and raised by bears.

And then a very fortunate thing happened. Matulli and her bear husband were walking through the woods, looking for the last of the wild bees’ honey or a late fledgling from a nest, and Matulli’s husband was grumbling away to himself because he could feel that the snow was not far off and it was time to go home to the den and sleep and sleep. But Halla was running around like a crazy butterfly and clearly had no intention of sleeping. Sometimes the he-bear thought it would be both nice and sensible to eat Halla, but he did not dare because of Matulli.

Yes, I enjoyed the knowing whimsy of that phrasing. Maybe I could cope with this book. But as it goes on, and we get through dragons and the Wanderer and having to do quests and whatnot, I got more and more bored.

Mitchison’s tone is a sort of wink-wink update of mythology, with the mythology taking over increasingly as the novella continues. I simply don’t care for this sort of book. Her writing is able, but I have no interest in fantastical lands and ancient pasts (whether real or imagined). I slogged my way through 138 pages, not caring what happened to anybody, and it’s going to a charity shop – from whence it will doubtless find a much more suitable home.

No club year would be complete without a few duds. I recognise the fault is with me, for trying something so very unlikely to appeal. But at least it has that lovely cover.

Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis – #1952Club

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There was a time when I would indiscriminately buy almost any book connected to the Bloomsbury Group. To a certain extent, that’s a book-buying era I’m still living – but I don’t seem to read them as voraciously as I used to. Still, I was glad to finally get to Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis, which I bought in 2011.

Violet Trefusis (also famed under her maiden name, Violet Keppel) is probably best remembered now for her long love affair with Vita Sackville-West, but that isn’t information you’ll get from this autobiography. Apparently Nancy Mitford once said that the book should be called ‘Here Lies Violet Trefusis’ – though I haven’t been able to find any source for that quotation – and there is a sense permeating Don’t Look Round that Trefusis is being cagey with the truth, if not outright dishonest. Indeed, the paragraph-long preface says ‘I have not lied, I have merely omitted, by-passed the truth, wherever unpalatable.’ And once you’ve accepted that, it’s a fun read on its own terms.

The thing that quickly becomes clear is that Trefusis is a very enjoyable writer and doesn’t mind poking fun at herself. She grew up in extraordinary privilege (which she takes for granted – there are stories of visiting relatives, all of whom seem to live in stately homes) but in other ways her experience of parental love is much the same as anybody else’s might be.

My parents spoiled me disgracefully. My mother began as an atmosphere, a climate, luminous, resplendent, joyously embattled like golden armour; it was only later that I became conscious of her as an individual.

I basked in the climate of her love without asking myself any questions, until I was about give. Very soon she hit upon the right technique in dealing with me. Once, when I was very small, and of the opinion that I was not getting enough attention, I announced that I was going to run away. “Very well, run then,” came the bland reply.

I started on a singularly flat fugue, pushing my little wheel-narrow in front of me. Nobody called. Nobody came. It was a complete fiasco. (In later life, other fugues were to be nipped in the bud by the same method.)

I love that bit in brackets at the end. Trefusis always writes with a wink. She might be coy in her autobiography, but it is a knowing coyness, that accepts a reputation she might have without being willing to add fuel to the fire.

Like so many autobiographies, the author has probably more interest in her childhood and youth than the reader does. I’m always impatient for them to get to the bits that actually made them famous. Trefusis’s stories from her early years are a combination of relatable and very much the reverse, and it’s all very enjoyable, but I wanted to get to the writing career – and this is something she writes surprisingly little about. She introduces her first novel as a sort of afterthought, that happened in the background of more significant events in her life, and races through Echo in a couple of pages (which I think is a marvellous novel). Others don’t seem to be mentioned at all. Perhaps this comes from humility, perhaps as a simple way of dodging how much the novels echoed (!) her own complex romantic life, from which she borrowed heavily.

But if she doesn’t write much about writing, she is very enjoyable on the literary scene. Trefusis has a talent for summing someone up in a handful of words – I noted down her description of Rebecca West, ‘who has a voice like a crystal spring and eyes like twin jungles’, which I thought oddly marvellous. She does write about Vita Sackville-West in a way that demonstrates her deep affection, even if she gives away little else. Her most moving descriptions are for her husband Dennys. Naturally, she does not write about the fact they apparently never consummated their marriage, or the reluctance with which they came together. Yet it is clear that there is regard rather than passion, and it is that regard which makes the most moving section of the book about Dennys’ early death.

In reading Don’t Look Round, though, the chief love affair of Trefusis’s life is clearly France. She lived there for a long time, and her first novels were written in French. Her passion for the language, history, sights and culture of France permeates a sizeable section at the centre of the autobiography. Even after moving back to England, at the outbreak of war, it feels like Trefusis has been forcibly removed from a lover.

Who would be in sympathy with one, who, though English and proud of it, looked upon England as exile? The only bone of contention between my darling mother and myself was France. She considered we had been let down disgracefully; the subject was taboo. I twisted this way and that, longing for some kind of outlet, someone with whom I would not have to conceal my yearning for France as though it were an unsightly disease.

And, similarly, there is more love and poignancy in her eventual return to France than in descriptions of many reunited lovers:

Hélène came to fetch me in a borrowed car. We drove around a miraculously intact Paris, more beautiful even than I remembered it. A great many of the houses were pitted with bullet holes. In the façade of the Ministère de la Marine a few balusters were missing, negligible, almost coquettish damage, like scratches received in a duel.

Trefusis’s love of France also leads to my real major qualm with Don’t Look Round. There is SO much untranslated French in this book. Whether quoting dialogue in France or expressing herself with French, Trefusis piles it on – probably a sentence or every page or two, particularly (of course) for the large section set in France. In my 1989 edition, there are no footnotes or translations anywhere. I have basic French, so could struggle through quite a lot of it, but there was plenty that I didn’t understand – and I’m sure the nuance of a lot of it was lost on me. In the 1950s, and the 198s0?, I suppose fluent French was taken for granted in readers – and if you can read French, then this is no drawback. But I found it pulled me out of the flow constantly, and even the bits I could understand took some time to piece together. If you don’t read French at all, it would be even more frustrating. Maybe more recent editions, if there are any, put the English in.

Trefusis would live another 20 years after Don’t Look Round was published, though she didn’t publish any more novels. If you’re looking for the unvarnished truth about her life, then look elsewhere – but if you want to enjoy the distinctively characterful and entirely selective memoirs of someone on the peripheries of the Bloomsbury Group, then this book is a fun and often moving read.

Fever of Love by Rosamond Harcourt-Smith – #1952Club

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Fever of love: Amazon.co.uk: Rosamond Harcourt Smith: Books

I’m always willing to take a punt on a cheaply priced mid-century novel by a British woman, and that’s how Fever of Love by Rosamond Harcourt-Smith ended up in my hands on a trip to Hay-on-Wye a while ago. That was despite a title that seemed quite melodramatically romantic, and quite an ugly cover of a faded flower against a grey background. But when I flicked through it, the writing seemed quite good – and I thought it was worth a shot. It might never have left my shelves, of course, if it weren’t for the club year getting it off my shelves.

My initial thoughts were that, yes, I could see why I’d picked it up. Harcourt-Smith writes wittily and well, clearly choosing her words carefully for their comic effect. Here’s one of the main characters, Virginia, going to a hairdressers:

When Mr Frank came back and started hacking about as if he were pruning a hedge, Virginia had no heart to remonstrate. All the other women in the saloon were pleading, arguing over every hair that fell, like money-lenders haggling about interest. Week after week these persecuted creatures sat for two hours or more while Arnolph’s assistants insulted, humiliated, bullied, but sent them home almost in tears of thankfulness at their own beauty. Put the customer in the wrong, give her the works, but fix her up looking a dream and she’ll come back for more. Arnolph had made a pile playing duets on the masochism and vanity of women.

Virginia and Jane are the main two women in the novel; Sebastian and Richard are the main two men. The gist of the plot is very simple. Virginia is married to sexy, thoughtless Sebastian; Jane is married to staid, dependable Richard. Both women are dissatisfied with their marriages and think that finding a more reliable (or, alternatively, more animalistically amorous) man would solve their problems – and, without realising the other is doing the same, they husband swap. (I’ve described the differences between Sebastian and Richard, which are obvious because they are so exaggerated – while Virginia and Jane get more space on the page and more attempts at psychology, I would struggle to define how they differ.)

Here is Virginia and Richard at the moment their affair begins:

Sebastian’s love-making was as formal as the peacock’s dance. Events followed each other with an order, a rhythm, which might have been taken from Kama Sutra. In these moments he resembled a brilliant tennis player winning a difficult match by never losing his head. The technique of love, the beauty of women, his own vigour, made love as he saw it a work of art as ordered as a great painting, a Bach concerto. Richard’s utter abandonment, his desire to immolate himself in his passion, struck Virginia as touching, unfamiliar. He knelt beside her in the hay, face transfigured, running his hands over the moulding of her body as though he himself had created it and found it his masterpiece. Like a Brahmin flinging himself beneath the Juggernaut’s car, he pressed his face against her body, eyes tight shut, here, there, losing himself in her. She lay quiet, caressing him where she could, his head, his shoulders; then as Richard’s mood of absement changed she felt as though she were sinking to the bottom of a pool, half suffocated by the sudden impact of his domination. Now she was the sacrificed, imprisoned in a bubble, drowning. Slowly the bubble began to rise up through the water-weeds, up, up, gathering speed until it reached the surface of the pool where it burst in a wide glitter of iridescent vapour. Then, as it seems drowning people feel, the suffocation cleared suddenly, leaving them floating, body to white body, drowned.

I thought that was exceptionally good writing, particularly about something as notoriously difficult to write as a sex scene. And it confused me a bit about the audience for this book – because the plot, and to a large extent the characters, are the schlocky sort of things you’d expect in a novel by Ethel M. Dell or Ruby Ayres – or whoever the 1950s equivalents of those early-20th-century powerhouses might be. But would someone looking for a racy, lowbrow romance (and no judgement if that’s what someone is after) really expect references to Bach and Brahmin in the middle of a love-making scene? And yet would someone looking for this richness in writing expect a plot as torrid as this husband-swapping one?

There isn’t much else to say about the plot, because it is just a protracted tale of adultery with some side characters thrown in. Nobody has any real moral compunction about cheating, or about cheating with the husband of a dear friend. And, I’ll be honest, I grew pretty bored of their assignations – but I kept reading for wonderful lines like this:

She had been four times married. Her first three husbands she wore as if they were expensive handbags – to be carried everywhere, insured against loss, locked up when not in use and lent to no third party.

And, as for the title – late in the novel, we learn what the simile is:

You loved deeply only once. The initial stages might be like some high fever, distracting you shamefully from your chosen route, distorting your life until you recovered or came to terms honourably – a field-marshal endorsing an armistice. Even then, like small-pox, it left you scarred, marked for life in fact. But one love, and one alone, did this to you, it could not happen twice.

I finished Fever of Love feeling very confused about what I thought. It’s rare to find a book where the writing is so much better than the characters or the plot. Adultery stories bore me at the best of times (it’s my main problem with writers like Margaret Drabble) and, even within an adultery storyline, Fever of Love would have been much more interesting if there had been more at stake – more moral questioning, or enquiry about what would happen to the women’s friendship. As it is, the characters feel quite flimsy, it’s hard to care what happens to any of them, and the story had cheap melodrama and yet no consequences. And yet, and yet, the writing was often so adept and so witty. I spent much of the time wishing Rosamond Harcourt-Smith had turned her evident talents to something more worthy of them.

If I ever stumble across another novel by her, I’d definitely snap it up. As for Fever of Love – I honestly can’t decide whether or not I’d recommend it someone. But if the quotes here appeal, then I recommend you keep an eye out.

A couple of #1952Club mysteries

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Almost any club year will have a host of vintage murder mysteries (and Neeru always comes up with some good candidates) – 1952 is no exception. I’m not sure when the Golden Age technically ended, so this is probably after that – the Silver Age? is that a thing? – but it has a lot in common with that era. Here’s a couple I read for this week…

Death Leaves A Diary by Harry Carmichael

I picked up Death Leaves A Diary for a pound somewhere in 2015, on the basis that any old hardback from The Crime Club is worth exploring. It turns out it’s the first of 41 books under the name ‘Harry Carmichael’, a pseudonym of Leopold Ognall who also wrote 44 books as ‘Hartley Howard’. Phew! It’s also the first to bring together the ‘detective’, an insurance assessor called John Piper, and a police offer called Quinn. If I’m honest, Quinn felt a relatively minor character and I didn’t sense all that much importance to their relationship with each other – but this page gives more info on their pairing. I was mostly amused that the detecting character shared a name with a notable theologian…

The opening line: ‘In the light streaming out of the doorway, the little man looked like a startled hare.’ John Piper is minding his own business when an old man, Fligg, beckons him in. With a mixture of kindness and curiosity, Piper follows. Fligg’s ground-floor flat, in an enormous block of hundreds of flats, has repeatedly been broken into. Nothing has been taken, and he’s never managed to disturb anybody in the act, but he is convinced that he is the target of break-ins. His proof? That his books have been rearranged:

He went hesitantly towards a tall narrow book-case alongside the bedroom door and fingered the binding of a few old books on one of the shelves. “Yes, yes! These are wrong. I always put them back in their proper order, and that’s how they were when I went out early this evening. Now they’re all mixed up. See?” He started to pull three or four volumes from the shelf, and Piper stopped him. “Couldn’t you be making a mistake?”

“No, that’s impossible. I’m always so particular. And everything in this room is like an old friend. I collect my treasures so that I’m surrounded with the rare and the beautiful.” He looked up at Piper with a strange light in his face. “They are my children. I know exactly where everything is, where I bought it, what is cost, and all about its history.”

Perhaps we can empathise! The police has dismissed Fligg as a bewildered nuisance, and Piper is tempted to do the same. He is sorry for the old man’s evidently genuine fear, but there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do. Until, not long later, he sees a small news item: Fligg has been found, hanged, in his home.

Somewhat unbelievably, the manager of the apartment building is willing to rent Fligg’s flat to Piper, including all of Fligg’s belongings – we move on, as we must swallow this detail, as well as Piper’s apparent ability to rent a flat at the drop of a hat without leaving his current home.

The books in his sitting-room help the answer to the riddle of his death. He had carefully replaced them in their proper order while Piper had watched him the night before. Only two volumes were left alone on the top shelf. Now, there were five – and three of them belonged with their fellows on the shelf below. Fligg had put them there – Piper had seen him with his own eyes.

Who had disturbed the books in Fligg’s book-case for the second time within a few hours? Why were they so important? Fligg had died because he had become involved in something in which he had no part. The little frightened mn had never climbed on to the footstool and fastened the cord of his dressing-gown round his neck. Someone had strung him up to die because… Piper didn’t know. But one thing he did know. That was murder.

And so the detection begins! It’s a fun journey, with Piper seeking out the origin of those books at a bookshop that is simultaneously shady and business-like – there are some funny moments where the proprietor interrupts threatening conversations to serve ordinary customers. He gets to know Fligg’s neighbours along the corridor, and the book is certainly packed with incident. At one point it felt like people were being attacked every few pages, and Carmichael is good at describing the intensity of these dangerous situations that makes Death Leaves A Diary feel a little more like a thriller than the usual Poirot-in-a-drawing-room puzzle novel.

Carmichael’s tone is really enjoyable. He’s a very able writer, giving a good sense of place – particularly Fligg’s crowded apartment – and does a nice line in humourous dialogue. Piper, for instance, is sharp-witted and uses sarcasm as part of his arsenal in dealing with people he doesn’t trust. I enjoyed this quick exchange:

“Let us not explore my affairs too closely, Mr –” He wrinkled his brows. “How silly of me! I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

“By a remarkable coincidence,” Piper said, “so have I.”

It’s a fun read, even if I didn’t spot that Quinn was a character of particular significance. And, come to think of it, I don’t think there was a diary at any point. Death Leaves A Diary is just a good title, I suppose.

The actual solution to the murder mystery doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense, and Carmichael widens the scope of the scheme so much that the initial set-up of Fligg’s faux-suicide in his messy room feels like a distant memory. I always prefer it when the mysteries are a little more domestic and restricted, but it didn’t particularly matter. What makes Death Leaves A Diary fun is the tone and Piper as a character. It’s a rattling adventure that doesn’t really satisfy anybody looking for an ingenius puzzle, but will totally satisfy the reader after an enjoyable tale – a rattling good yarn, intelligently told.

A Private View by Michael Innes

Another pseudonym for the second of the mysteries – Michael Innes is the name under which J.I.M. Stewart wrote crime fiction, and A Private View is somewhere in the middle of a series where John Appleby is the leading police detective – or, indeed, Assistant Commissioner. This series appeared from 1936 to 1986, so it’s an impressive pedigree and longevity – and this is the first I’ve read, which hopefully didn’t matter too much.

The private view of the title is of the ‘at an art gallery’ variety. Alleby is not to the manner born at a private view, but puts on a good face of being interested – and even going along with the conversation when it’s suggested that he might want to invest. Of particular interest is an abstract piece titled ‘The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation’ by a little-known artist called Gavin Limbert. Midway through the exhibition, the painting goes missing…

I thought it might be a clever spin on the locked-room mystery – how does an enormous painting go missing in a packed gallery? – but sadly Innes tidies up this intriguing opening in a handful of words, and it certainly isn’t the main mystery of the book. Instead, they discover that Gavin Limbert’s recent death – initially thought to be suicide – is probably murder. And that’s when the mystery truly begins.

Perhaps one issue with joining a series detective this late in said series is that Innes doesn’t feel the need to introduce Appleby thoroughly. As such, I never really felt that I understood him. He’s certainly quite brusk when it comes to dead bodies, amusing on the topic of intellectual snobbery and Emperor’s New Clothes, and not reluctant to get into action. I did appreciate his relationship with his wife Judith, and enjoyed the section of the novel where she was centre stage the most.

What I really enjoyed about A Private View was the tone – there are some very funny exchanges, often with characters who topple over into grotesques:

“About the night of the police raid, Lady Clancarron.” Judith’s interruption was made in some haste. “Did you see anybody who might be described as a hunted man?”

“All men are hunted, child. By the Spectre of Vice.”

“Of course. But I mean an actually hunted man – one who looked as if he were in actual danger from some – some physical pursuit and assault.”

Meanwhile, Innes can’t help having some fun at the expense of modern art:

Appleby took a look. The picture space was entirely occupied by what appeared to be the representation of a work of statuary in an improbable green marble. The figure, a female one, was ingeniously contorted so as to provide the form of a solid cube; and the effect was the more striking in that the subject seemed to be an advanced case of dropsy complicated by elephantiasis. The upper limbs had approximately the same girth as the torso, and the neck had a greater circumference than the head. Appleby cast round for an appropriate word. ‘Chunky,’ he said.

The actual plot and solution take us into the realms of gangs and spies and all sorts of things I find much less interesting than domestic squabbles – and the tone is really more thriller than detective fiction. There is a solution at the end – which includes quite a lot of suspending disbelief – but I think Innes works harder at adrenaline-giving moments than he does at detective work. It’s not my favourite spin on this genre, but the amusing, sharp writing definitely helped.

Trial By Terror by Paul Gallico #1952Club

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Paul Gallico is one of the most varied writers I’ve encountered. Not just in terms of quality – though that’s probably true – but in terms of the types of books he writes. He’s perhaps best known in the blogging world for Flowers For Mrs Harris (also published as Mrs ‘arris Goes To Paris); in the wider world, it’s probably The Poseidon Adventure that is his biggest legacy, even if only for the film adaptations. But even there we can see his scope – from the whimsical story of a charlady buying a Christian Dior dress to a disaster narrative about a ship sinking. Along the way, Gallico writes fey stories of animals, ghost stories, dark stories of abuse, something akin to a detective novel, and more. Perhaps the most common thread is a fairy tale feel – whether that is the light, magical variety or the dark, unsettling side of the fairy tale world.

All of which is to say, when I bought Trial By Terror in 2016, I had no idea where it would fall on the Gallico spectrum. This pretty dreadful cover wasn’t very helpful. Penguin did some excellent covers in the ’60s and ’70s, but this was not among them. And, based on this cover, I assumed this was a horror novel of some variety. How wrong I was!

What Trial By Terror actually covers is very 1952: the early days of Hungary’s Communist state. Jimmy Race is an American reporter working for the Chicago Sentinel – specifically in their Paris office, though there is very little in the novel that gives any flavour of Paris. I suppose Gallico just needed the office to have a little more proximity to Hungary than would be found in Illinois.

Jimmy is a larger-than-life man – tall, bulky, flaming hair – and a total firebrand. When news breaks of a man ‘confessing’ to being a spy in Hungary, it is clear to all that the confession is, at the very least, coerced. Jimmy wants the newspaper to blast this on their front page, threatening retaliation to Hungary’s Communist regime – a much-feared but, in 1952, still relatively mysterious entity. And let’s just say he doesn’t take kindly to being counselled with caution.

“None of ’em have any guts, gimp, or gumption,” he continued. “They haven’t any competition and it’s made them all as soft as mush in the go-get-‘im department. They sit around on their hams and think because they’re getting out a rag in Paris instead of Kokomo they’re hot stuff. They can yawn themselves into their deadline and snooze themselves to press, and if they don’t go in on the button, so what? If anybody comes up with an idea there are five guys before Nick waiting to beat it to death before it can get around and cause them some inconvenience. And if it ever does get to Nick, he strangles it quick just in case it might hurt the feelings of some Frog sitting in the ministry or at the Quai d’Orsay. There isn’t a reporter or an editor on that sheet fit to be called a newspaperman.”

The ‘Nick’ mentioned is the head of the Paris office and the last in a line of editors who have the power to quash Jimmy’s enthusiastic ire before it gets to the page. One of the things I liked about Trial By Terror is that Gallico is generous to all his characters, and the reader knows that Jimmy’s assessment of Nick is unfair. There is no villain among the newspaper staff: we are invited to sympathise both with Jimmy’s righteous anger and Nick’s wise hesitance. Other characters include Nick’s clever, sophisticated wife, who co-manages the office, and the dowdy, devoted Janet whom Jimmy (of course) calls ‘kid’ and inadvertently strings along. I’d have happily read a whole novel set in this newspaper, and Gallico has set up a whole bunch of interesting dynamics.

But Jimmy certainly won’t stay put. He asks to go to Vienna for a story – and goes missing. He had previously told Janet that, given half the chance, he’d sneak into Hungary and expose the regime for what it is. And that’s exactly what he’s done.

From there, the novel goes back and forth between the Chicago Sentinel team desperately trying to work out what has happened to Jimmy – and to Jimmy’s ordeal in a Hungarian prison. He was caught immediately. He is not physically tortured, but kept in a bare cell and interrogated at irregular intervals. Without a watch or any predictable patterns to the day, he has no idea what time or even what day it is. The man who interrogates him most often – Mindszenty – does so with intense politeness, even a feigned reluctance to have to go through the process. He also (Jimmy sees) truly and irreversibly believes that Jimmy is a spy working for a foreign government, rather than a foolhardy journalist. Over and over, day after day, the questioning continues.

He [Jimmy] could consider man as a reasoning animal and therefore master of his wits and his tongue. He would have been willing to wager that while scientficically applied torture resulting in the destruction of bone and tissue might very well break him and lead him to admit to crimes he had never committed, a psychological or psychiatrical attack upon his mind and will could never lead to the same result. He believed one of two things: either Mindszenty and the others were mentally weaker than he or the enemy had discovered something entirely new and were applying heretofore unheard-of methods. Neither of these things was true, but by the time Jimmy was aware of it, it was also too late.

There is physical violence eventually, though thankfully it isn’t described too vividly. Gallico isn’t out to shock us. He is much more interested in the psychology of this sort of mental torture, and of the very believable way in which a strong-willed, passionate man will be worn down in ways he doesn’t suspect, or even fully realise is happening.

What prevents Trial By Terror from being a gruelling read, though, is the fact that we have the parallel story of the newspaper staff strategising to get Jimmy out. Some of that story is a little convenient, but enough of it is about character rather than plot that it doesn’t really matter.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed and appreciated this novel. I’m not sure how much Gallico could have known about what was really going on beyond the borders of Hungary, and there must be more accurately researched novels and non-fiction about the regime in that period, but I doubt anybody is going to read Trial By Terror as a piece of historical record. But the title and the cover also do the novel a big disservice. This is a very well-written character study of somebody caught in a creepingly terrible situation, and the impact on people who care about him. In 1952, it was Hungary. Today, it could be any number of other places. It shows a string to Gallico’s many-stringed bow that I didn’t know he had, and adds evidence to what an interesting and versatile author he was.

Barmy in Wonderland by P.G. Wodehouse – #1952Club

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that every club year will have appearances by Georges Simenon and Georgette Heyer – but there’s another prolific mid-century writer who usually turns up too. While P.G. Wodehouse didn’t write a novel every year, he did for 1952 – and I picked up Barmy in Wonderland back in 2018 in Hay-on-Wye.

Barmy – real name Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps – is exactly the sort of person you’d expect from (a) that name and (b) his featuring in a Wodehouse novel. He’s a member of the Drones Club and a very posh, very inept, very well-meaning gentleman. Despite his poshness, he is not wealthy – heaven knows how he’s paying for the Drones Club – and is in the unusual position for a Wodehouse hero of having a pretty lowly job. He works as a desk clerk for J.G. Anderson, the owner of a couple of hotels in America, who loathes him.

I can do no better, to introduce you to the characters, than to share from the Wikipedia summary: “He [Anderson] is angered after a hotel guest, the famous but obnoxious actor Mervyn Potter, and Anderson’s desk clerk, amiable and impressionable Cyril ‘Barmy’ Fotheringay-Phipps, wake him at 3 a.m. to give him a frog.”

Mervyn Potter is a matinee idol type, and also a near-constant drunk. It allows Wodehouse to write this sort of wonderfully Wodehousian understatement:

A female Mervyn Potter fan, seeing her idol face to face like this, would probably have blown bubbles at the mouth and collapsed in a swoon. At the least, she would have gazed at him with ecstasy. From Mr. Anderson’s gaze ecstasy was conspicuously absent.

Barmy has recently come into some money from an inheritance, and Anderson has hopes that he will buy one of the hotels – but it isn’t enough money for that. Instead, he is persuaded to invest as a producer in the new play that Potter is starring in. He is unsure until he realises that the production’s secretary is Dinty Moore – a woman whom (bear with me) he fell in love with after setting her hat on fire. As he says later…

“I fell in love with you at first sight, don’t you know, and all that sort of rot, but I had rather intended to hush it up till a more suitable moment.”

Any fan of Wodehouse will know what Dinty is like: she’s one of his capable, funny, unsentimental-until-she’s-won-over types. ‘Capable’ is perhaps top of the list, and she has to be, with Barmy’s lovable uselessness.

I found all the stuff with Anderson and a complex attempt for Potter to woo someone with Barmy’s help – during which Barmy unwillingly scales a tree – fun enough but didn’t really lead anywhere. Barmy in Wonderland really picks up when it becomes about the play. It’s obvious to the reader that Sacrifice is a dud, and Wodehouse has fun mocking the American world of theatrical productions, not least the fact that nobody remembers or cares about the name of the author. I only learned from the Wikipedia page just now that Barmy in Wonderland is adapted from a play – The Butter and Egg Man by George S. Kaufman – which seems to have largely focused on this stage of the plot. The characters’ names are different and, of course, the title is, so it seems to have been a slightly coy adaptation.

This part of the novel is a lot of fun, much pacier than the earlier section, and particularly enjoyable when the first night of the play is a disaster. In the aftermath, with people trying to solve the problems, I particularly loved a character called Fanny – famed for her juggling act, though in this case hanging around as the wife of a producer – who ridicules them all and throws in useless suggestions to amuse herself. Here, for instance, one of the actresses is trying to make her character more likeable:

“No sympathy. That’s the answer. Something ought to be put in to show that I’m really all right at heart and not just a frivolous Society butterfly.”

“How about giving out pamphlets?” said Fanny.

Towards the end of the book, it really picks up and works very well. But overall, I think this is mid-level Wodehouse. At his best, his way with words is wonderful, and the examples I’ve quoted so far definitely amused me. But there was a far higher quota than usual of lines that didn’t quite land, or felt a little underworked. For example:

If the Lithuanian chambermaid who at half-past nine that night came to turn Barmy’s bed down had been at all psychic — which, of course, very few Lithuanian chambermaids are — she would have sensed, as she went about her work, a strange, almost eerie atmosphere in Room 726, as of a room in a haunted house that is waiting for its spectre to clock in and start haunting.

It doesn’t quite land, in my opinion. I particularly thought of that ‘of course’ in the section in dashes. Wouldn’t it have been better as ‘distressingly’ or ‘regrettably’ or something along those lines? Perhaps it’s unfair to pick a section at random and do close reading on it, and humour is naturally subjective, but there felt like lots of slightly wasted opportunities to me – like Wodehouse was getting it out in a rush.

Look, it’s a P.G. Wodehouse novel, so of course it was a fun time. I have a weakness for novels about the theatre, so I loved that. It’s just that, at his peak, Wodehouse has a genius for combining plot, character, and his own brand of witty exaggeration and understatement. There’s enough of that in Barmy in Wonderland to make it a good time – but I don’t think it’s the best place to start with him.

The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson – #1952Club

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I bought The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson in Canada back in 2017, based on her being a Persephone author. Since then, I’ve read another couple of novels by her – but I think this overlooked gem might be her masterpiece. Or perhaps I was just in exactly the right mood to read the sort of brilliance that Wilson is? Either way, it’s my new favourite by her. (NB: when I call it ‘overlooked’, that is true in the UK – for all I know, every Canadian schoolboy and schoolgirl is reading The Equations of Love.)

The Equations of Love is actually two novellas which, as far as I can tell, have no point of connection: Tuesday and Wednesday and Lilly’s Story. They don’t seem to have appeared separately, but rather have always been together under this title. I thought they were both excellent but preferred the first, shorter, of the two – let’s all concentrate on that one.

The novella is about Mortimer and Myrtle Johnson, living in a small, shabby apartment in Vancouver. Mort makes a fragile living at whatever handyman work he can get – though he quickly considers himself too good to be looked down on, and either quits or is fired within a few days or even hours. Myrtle is a cleaner and she holds the power in the marriage – she holds, indeed, the power in almost any relationship with any other human. Wilson lovingly describe her tyranny:

When she slowly raises her heavy eyelids as she soon will, but not until she feels inclined to, you will see their power. Myrtle’s eyelids, and her small amused smile, which is not a turning-up but a turning-down of her lips, induce a sudden loss of self-confidence in the individual towards whom the look or non-look, the smile or non-smile, is directed. She can make you, or Mort, feel insecure and negligible, just by the extra quarter-inch of her dropped eyelids and by that amused small turned-down smile. It is not fair. If you should in your beauty, your new hat, and your recent tennis championship appear before Myrtle, she can by her special look and without saying a word, intimate to you and your friends that, for some reason obscure to them and to you but well known to her and to the rest of the world, that she thinks very poorly of you.

Tuesday and Wednesday is only 129 pages long in my edition, but there are worlds of richness in it. You might expect so short a novella to keep to the canvas of this marriage and this apartment (and – hurrah – the feisty cat, who fools them she is a tomcat). But Wilson widens the scope. Mort goes to work as a gardener, and we see the power jostles with his distracted, kind, unsure employer – with enough feminity to raise Mort’s oafness flirtation, and enough money to make him feel angrily inferior. There is a memorable scene where Mort meets an old friend who takes him to visit his workplace, which is an undertakers. We follow Myrtle to her work, where there is no power imbalance because Myrtle holds all the cards. Other friends and relatives appear – we even see the world from an anxious niece of the couple, who feels she must visit the only people she knows in Vancouver, but desperately doesn’t want to be there.

In each scene, what makes Tuesday and Wednesday so good is Wilson’s control of tone. She is so insightful in the way people behave, particularly around the numerous power dynamics that are constantly in play. She’s brilliant at what people no longer notice because it is part of the furniture of their life – from an unclean home to an unhappy marriage. And she balances all of this with a witty, ironic tone that she judges perfectly. We remain invested in the characters’ lives, but always aware that they are being observed. The detachment means we don’t get too overwhelmed by pathos – these are people under a microscope, intensely real but not necessarily to be loved.

I suppose the only way for you to discover how brilliant Tuesday and Wednesday is would be to read it – but I’ll finish this section with a quote about the cat, because I can’t resist anybody who writes well about cats:

The kitten, who was not a tom, felt her way about in the dark which was, to her, transparent, and learned the room. Feral, wise, with her inscrutable little hunter’s nose and whiskers she felt and explored and recorded each chair leg, each table leg, each corner. She prowled and prowled on silent paws, and sometimes she stopped to wash. When she was satisfied, she accepted and adopted the room. Then she slept fitfully. She slept anywhere, lightly yet deeply, waking and moving often. Chiefly she slept on Mort and Myrtle who lay deep in sleep, warm and approved by her. But sometimes she awoke, remembering something pleasant. Then she jumped lightly down and ran to her box. She scrambled up the side of her box and sat down, quivering, still, looking into the transparent dark with bliss.

The second of the novellas is Lilly’s Story, and yet it starts with a pair of sisters – ‘old Mrs Hastings who was a widow, a saint and a mystic’ and ‘her younger, elderly sister Miss Edgeworth’ – who live together with sundry other relatives. We learn a lot about the Chinese cook, Yow, which regrettably includes some attempts to transcribe his accent – even down to ‘oily [early]’. If you need to include square brackets in your dialogue to make clear what you’re writing, maybe don’t bother.

It all feels like we’re setting up a family dynamic with these sisters, hangers-on, and the rather unlikeable Yow – focused around a bicycle which Miss Edgeworth whimsically owns without riding, to be seen walking it around, and which Yow less whimsically borrows. But it turns out this is all a detailed prelude to kicking off Lilly’s story – as perhaps we might have guessed from the title.

Lilly had a sort of flirtation with Yow, more on his side than hers, and lives in a world filled with potential dangers. She is haunted by the possibility of the police – who once came to her home, when she was 11 years old, and have remained a threat in her mind ever since. Years later, and as the timeline of the novella truly begins, it’s partly this fear that sends her out into the world alone, to earn her living.

The rest of the novella follows her employment in various places, marked more by kindness than you might expect, and the raising of a daughter, Eleanor, for whom she fantasises a legitimate background – styling herself as a widow. The mother/daughter relationship continues for many years in the short novella, though with Eleanor herself less vivid – seen really in relations to Lilly. Except when she is very young, and more present on the page, where she seemed more individual:

By the time Eleanor was six years old she had three gods and her mother. Her mother was not a god, she simply an extension of herself. She had a slave, and she had a companion who refused to be owned and could not be coerced – the cat. Eleanor’s gods were Major and Mrs Butler and Leo, the big dog. As Leo sat upon his haunched looking majestically around him, Eleanor, standing, could look into his face, caressing his ears. Her slace was a nondescript faithful little black and tan dog who could be dressed in doll’s capes and hats, and would sit, miserably, in the doll’s pram that Mrs Butler had given to Eleanor.

Wilson has the same tone as before, and I also really liked and admired Lilly’s Story, but I think there’s a reason I preferred Tuesday and Wednesday. In Lilly’s Story, there are many characters but Lilly is undoubtedly the central point. And I found that Wilson’s detached, observational style worked better for a couple and their world than it did for an individual and her world. When a writer puts one person front and centre, maybe we need to be more deeply buried into their mind and heart. I knew a lot about Lilly by the end of the book, and I was fascinated by her, but I don’t think I ever really cared for her. Wilson’s characters, in The Equations of Love, are infinitely detailed, thoroughly real, and very memorable – but I think the style works best when we see them constantly in relation to each other, and not to be loved as individuals.

If I had only read Lilly’s Story, I’m sure I’d have raved about it – and it is excellent. But there was something so exceptionally well-realised in Tuesday and Wednesday that it had to suffer by comparison. As I said at the beginning, it may just be that I was in exactly the right reading mood for Wilson’s particular acuteness – but, to me, Tuesday and Wednesday is a miraculous little gem.