Recapturing

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Wow, thanks for all your comments yesterday – that was quite impressive, and every single author was recommended to me… well, thanks for that! Someone (anonymous) did say that they suspected I’d only read Brideshead Revisited by Waugh – but, in fact, I have not read that, and I have read The Loved One, Decline and Fall, and Put Out More Flags – so there you go! I must confess, composing this list did make me realise how many authors I have sampled. But that would be a rather more self-congratulatory list to make. Instead I shall challenge you COWARDS who weren’t going to make your own lists – hie to it! (Heehee…!)

I’m having a mini-reader’s-block at the moment, and seem to be mostly re-reading books for the past few weeks. Not sure quite what the cause is, but I daresay the remedy is Jane Austen – but for now I’m content going over some familiar ground.

I’ve been meaning to re-read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) for ages and, as I mentioned the other day, my book group has been reading it this month. It catapaulted it up my must-reread list, and I’m delighted that I did – since I was a bit worried that it might not work now that I am much older than Cassandra. I was 17 or 18 when I originally read it – so perhaps not the age at which most people become life-long-lovers of this delightful novel – but it was Cassandra’s age.

For those who don’t know the story, Cassandra lives in a castle with her older sister Rose, younger brother Thomas, father known as Mortmain (their surname), stepmother Topaz, and sort-of-servant Stephen. She famously opens the novel “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – for this is where she starts recording her life in a diary, trying to capture the people around her. There is an atmosphere of a fairy-tale permeating the book – not surprisingly, given the family live in a castle. Cassandra thinks back to the first time the family saw it:
All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn’t enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with TO BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in it at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back – I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to go back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was – but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.
But it’s now a rather tumble-down castle, falling apart, and from which most of the furniture has been sold. Mortmain wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Jacob Wrestling (think Ulysses, in terms of being experimental and avant-garde) but the proceeds have dwindled after fourteen years (including a little spate in jail, for having threatened his – now dead – wife with a cake knife). The family thus live in poverty – but although they bemoan and bewail this, it never feels quite real – it is never meant to. They have to share towels, and can barely afford to eat – but that fairy-tale feeling prevents anything feeling too serious.

Cassandra does her job of ‘capturing the castle’ so well that I’m going to find it tricky to detail the characters quickly… but I’ll do my best. Mortmain is absent-minded and idle; Topaz idolises him and communes with nature a lot; Topaz hankers after finer things in life, and will do much to achieve them; Stephen is subservient and besotted with Cassandra; Thomas more or less loiters in the background.

Of course they are all rather more complex than that, but you have to meet them first-hand to appreciate them, so we’ll move on to Cassandra, the narrator. And what a wonderful narrator she is. Through her eyes, we see all the events of family life – especially the arrival of American brothers Simon and Neil to the large nearby house, the estate of which includes the castle. Their arrival is the catalyst for change at the castle, as Rose determines to marry Simon, whether or not she loves him (and she hopes she does) to help her family escape their destitution. Only after Simon and Rose have got engaged does Cassandra realise she has fallen in love with Simon herself…

In Cassandra, Dodie Smith has created someone quite extraordinary. The basic plot of I Capture the Castle is not the stuff of the finest literary mind – crossed wires; crossed lovers, and so forth. But because they are focalised through Cassandra, they are fascinating. Somehow Smith manages to present a teenage girl in love whose viewpoint is not remotely irritating – instead it is credible, and raises sympathy rather than annoyance in the reader. I was lucky enough not to fall in love until after I was a teenager, so I didn’t experience all the woes of angsty, unrequited teenage love which Cassandra endures – so I cannot really empathise, nor say how realistic Cassandra’s emotions are, but I do know that she is a wholly engaging heroine.

I love her for her slightly skewed view upon life, and the slightly odd, inexperienced things she says. Some examples: ‘I know all about the facts of life. And I don’t think much of them.’ She labels champagne ‘lovely, rather like very good ginger ale without the ginger.’ And perhaps her wisest piece of advice – ‘No bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.’

Dodie Smith is very clever, and she incorporates in the novel the criticism which might be directed at Cassandra – she overhears Simon telling Neil that he thinks her ‘consciously naive’. It is the perfect description for part of her personality (she is mostly, however, unconsciously naive) – but by including it like this, Dodie Smith makes the reader leap to Cassandra’s defence, and love her all the more. Spending the whole book in her company, it is important that we do love her – and I do.

I Capture the Castle is, incidentally, the only diary-style novel I’ve read which actually felt like a diary. Cassandra often breaks off entries because something has happened, or starts writing by saying she has something exciting to relate, but will try and contain herself. Much as I love books like Diary of a Provincial Lady and Diary of a Nobody, they both strike me as a little unrealistic – when on earth do they actually write their journals?

But that’s just the icing on the cake. I Capture the Castle is almost perfect in every way – Dodie Smith is not a great prose stylist, perhaps, and it’s interesting to see her write undisparagingly about Mortmain, who is essentially a Modernist author – which Smith obviously isn’t. But I Capture the Castle is cosy, amusing, warm – and yet not dull or predictable or everyone-is-happy-all-the-time. It’s like a fairy-tale brought into the 20th century, and not allowed to be either saccharine or gloomy. Instead, it is just right. Perhaps I should recommend it to Goldilocks…

P.S. the film is brilliant too. Perhaps I’ll write about that properly someday.

There’s a hole in my reading, dear Liza, dear Liza…

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I’m going to halt you right there if you’re going to say ‘there’s no such thing as books you must read’. There probably isn’t, if one wants to stretch a point. But there are authors and novels I would feel, on my deathbed, lacking from my reading life, if I were not to try them. Ok? Ok. Lovely.

So, I’m getting into the literary confessional, and letting you know some of the authors I am a little or a lot ashamed not to have read anything at all by. (Feel free to rephrase that sentence in your head, so that it doesn’t end with a preposition.) Some of these would be considered canonical – some are simply authors that people with my tastes love, and thus I feel I should have read. This is just, I think, British, Irish and American authors. If we started looking further afield than that, it would just get too embarrassing. Sorry if these authors are from elsewhere; blame my ignorance. And I’m sure I’ll think of dozens more later – these are just the ones who come to mind first.

If you spot a name and think “Wow, he hasn’t read anything by that author, he MUST read THIS RIGHT NOW” then do tell me with which title I should start.

Anthony Trollope
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
W.M. Thackeray
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Jonathan Swift
Wilkie Collins
L.M. Montgomery
Aldous Huxley
Mark Twain
V.S. Naipaul
Christopher Isherwood
Beryl Bainbridge
Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis
Paul Auster
William Golding
Toni Morrison
Robert Louis Stevenson [EDIT: oops, forgot about Dr. J & Mr. H, I have read that!]
Rosamund Lehmann
Beverley Nichols
Henry Green
Winifred Holtby
Vera Brittain
Margaret Forster
Margaret Drabble
Dorothy Parker
Salley Vickers
Anita Brookner
Anita Shreve
Salman Rushdie
E. Arnot Robertson
Radclyffe Hall
Penelope Mortimer
W. Somerset Maugham

Can you tell me about…

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…any of the books I bought on Saturday? All of them appealed, as I was browsing the Oxfam bookshop after work, but I don’t know anything about any of them, except what I was able to glean from the blurbs. I figured that Oxfam would benefit from my monies, even if I eventually decided not to read the books….


A Dark Strange by Julien Gracq

This one is the one which most intrigues me. It’s a beautiful Pushkin Press edition, a translation of a French novel from 1945. Here is the blurb:

Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920s Brittany; the other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is – that death has come to spend the summer with them.

Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the August heat and the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan – an uncannily contemporary figure – gradually disintegrates.


My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

I’ve just spotted that both those authors’ names end with ‘-cq’. That can’t be all that common. Another novel from the French, this 1998 work has an appalling title, but I was again pulled in by a surreal element. One more blurb, if you will:

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, completely vanished? When would you begin to panic – the first hour, the first night? Or the moment you realise you cannot even remember his face?


Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

This one comes with no information at all! So I bought it because I’ve been meaning to read more Cather, and because I’m a sucker for tatty old green hardbacks – which once, if my eyes do not deceive me, had a Boots Book Club sticker on the front.

If you know anything about these, then get commentin’! And, if you don’t, perhaps you’d like to comment anyway…

Slightly Foxed: Little Boy Lost

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The kind people of the wonderful literary magazine Slightly Foxed offered me the chance to give you a sneak preview of their latest issue – and from the essays included (which range from Stendhal to visiting the last bookshop in Europe to Elizabeth Goudge) I decided to choose Annabel Walker’s piece about Persephone’s edition of Marghanita Laski’s Little Boy Lost (which I wrote about myself here.)

Little Boys Lost
Annabel Walker

Being a lover of books and beautiful things, my teenage daughter usually discovers a Persephone paperback in the contents of her Christmas stocking. Last year, it was Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski. She read it almost immediately and then, appraising it and me with shrewd enthusiasm, declared: ‘This is a very good book and you’ll love it.’ She was right on both counts.

Little Boy Lost is the story of an English poet who, having lost his Parisian wife and infant son in the Second World War, hears that the child may still be alive and returns to France afterwards in search of proof. An astute psychological study as well as a tale of secrets and searches, it was first published in 1949 and, thanks to Persephone, reprinted in 2002; but how such an accomplished and gripping novel managed to achieve ‘neglected’ status (the qualification for publication by Persephone) in the intervening fifty-three years is a mystery.

Laski, born into a Jewish intellectual family in 1915 (her father was a barrister and judge, her uncle the political theorist Harold Laski), read English at Oxford and worked as a journalist, critic, novelist and broadcaster all her life. Her style mixes traditional storytelling techniques – a mysterious disappearance, a romance tragically concluded, an enigmatic night-time visitor and a superbly atmospheric setting – with a view of the affair almost entirely from the perspective of the protagonist, Hilary Wainwright. His state of mind, his mental debates, his private reactions to the people and situations he encounters,are part of the narrative. You might imagine that this would result in many slow, reflective passages but in Laski’s taut economical prose it creates an immediacy that drives the story along at a rattling pace.

Hilary is not a particularly likeable character. Having heard that Lisa, his wife of only a few years, has been murdered by the Gestapo for her work with an escape organization, he guards his grief and disappointment bitterly. He has convinced himself that he has been too badly wounded emotionally to risk exposure to further pain, and that pride and self-pity are a justifiable response to the blow Fate has dealt him. He believes his son to have been irretrievably lost in the process of being concealed shortly before Lisa’s arrest, and embarks on a search after the war primarily out of a sense of obligation to the Frenchman, Pierre, who has offered to help.

Pierre is the first of a number of characters in the book whose outlook and principles begin to undermine Hilary’s own priggish certitudes. A survivor of the French Resistance, he seems in many ways a suitable companion in Paris (though the Englishman believes him to be his intellectual inferior), just as, later on in the provincial town Hilary visits, the elderly Madame Mercatel and her schoolteacher son make him feel at ease in their cultured, elegant home. But his patronizing assumptions about their limitations are quickly shaken: Pierre has an optimism that Hilary envies, while Bernard Mercatel, a teacher at the Sorbonne before the war, is content despite living quietly in obscurity. Hilary’s reaction on hearing this is typical of the way in which Laski reveals the impact his experiences in France have on him:

This is followed by a conversation with the perceptive Madame Mercatel which leaves Hilary with the uneasy feeling not only that he has unwittingly revealed himself to be in some way morally inadequate but, even more troubling, that also he has never truly understood the relationship he had with his wife. He is a long way from the impregnable, arid safety of his London flat and his debates with himself become more urgent with each visit to the orphanage that is home to the boy who might be his son, as he runs the gauntlet of nuns whose priorities are so clear, and whose motives are so uncluttered by moral ambivalence. More than once, his encounters prompt the thought that this story is about more than one lost boy.

The impression of France that emerges from this story is not the charming, cultured, picturesque place in every Francophile’s mind. Hilary considers France the most civilized country in the world. But the Paris he finds on his return in 1945 is a place of shattered buildings, makeshift bridges, dilapidated horse-drawn taxis, hotels without hot water and cafés without butter and milk. The unidentified town, 50 miles from Paris, to which Hilary goes in search of his son, is vivid in its ruination:

The street curved away so that only its beginning could be seen from the square. He rounded the curve, and then found a wilderness of desolation. Save for a roofless church higher for the contrast of emptiness, there was not a building standing for half a mile in every direction. Red bricks and grey bricks, roof tiles and stucco, reinforced concrete spouting thick rusty wires, all lay huddled in destruction. Nothing seemed to have been cleared away save what was necessary to allow a few tracks to pass through. It was ruin more complete and desolate than Hilary had ever seen.
Marghanita Laski knew France well – she, like her protagonist, was married in Paris – and she is forthright about what she clearly felt to be the moral depravity of the black market that prospered at this time. The dilapidated hotel in which Hilary stays, shunned by people such as the Mercatels, is patronized by others who enjoy juicy steaks, buttery potatoes and real coffee while the orphanage struggles to provide its children with the most basic level of nutrition. Hilary is incredulous when the Mother Superior at the orphanage describes their situation and then mentions that there are tubercular children in the same dormitories as the others.
‘Yes,’ said the nun steadily. ‘We have tubercular children here. If you knew more of Europe, monsieur, you would know that to run the risk of being infected with tuberculosis in a home where you have a bed to sleep in and regular meals is today to have a fortunate childhood.’Nonetheless, when Hilary returns to his hotel and sees the meagre offerings of the ‘official’ menu card, he heartily accepts the alternative, discreetly whispered to him by the waitress and the obsequious patron. ‘This is Black Market, Hilary told himself, it’s what we’ve all been so shocked about, what prevents the poor getting even enough, and then he asked, But what good does it do if I refuse it? It won’t go to those children, it will only go to other people rich enough to pay for it, and he ate it, and argued with himself, knowing that he should go hungry and that he would not.’

By now the reader has reached the third and main part of the book, entitled ‘The Ordeal’. Hilary’s selfishness and moral equivocation spar with his ability, albeit suppressed, to feel pity and, at a deeper and even more suppressed level, love. The focus of this debate is Jean, the 6 year-old boy in the orphanage who may or may not be his son, and the debate is all the more agonized for this reason: that no one can provide proof one way or the other. The boy was parted from his mother before he could form lasting memories of her, and has been in the orphanage for as long as he can remember.

The exchanges between Hilary and Jean are delicately observed and arouse an aching compassion. The man who has become used to caring only about himself must carefully consider every word he addresses to Jean, in order to gain the trust of this sensitive, deprived and institutionalized child and try to decide whether he is his son. Sometimes he strikes the right note, occasionally he is horribly cruel. He is attracted by the idea of becoming a father and receiving the affection of a child; then he is repelled by something the child does or says; and all the while he is terrified of pity catapulting him into a situation he may regret. When they first meet, he takes Jean to see the trains at the level crossing, and then to a café.
Jean seemed to have forgotten about the trains. His eyes were roving the room now with eager interest. ‘Look, monsieur,’ he cried suddenly, pointing to a dusty green plant in a pot, ‘Look, there’s a little palm tree.’ ‘How do you know it’s a palm tree?’ asked Hilary, interested. ‘I saw it in a book,’ Jean said casually. ‘Do you like reading?’ Hilary pursued. Jean said, ‘I like reading about Africa.’ ‘And what else?’ asked Hilary. Jean said, ‘I haven’t got a book about anything else.’ Hilary frowned. He resented his own inability to anticipate the to him unbelievable limitations of this child’s experience. Then again he remembered that he had a part to play in which a frown was a forbidden indulgence and asked quickly, ‘What do you learn about Africa?’
What the reader proceeds to learn is too enthralling to be revealed here and, though a re-reading of a novel can never capture the thrill of discovery the first time round, I’ve enjoyed re-reading Little Boy Lost so much for this article that I’m going to read it yet again right now.

Annabel Walker was a journalist in London in the last century.

Marghanita Laski, Little Boy Lost (1949) Persephone • Pb • 240pp • £9 • isbn 9781906462055

This extract is taken from the Summer 2011 edition of Slightly Foxed, a quarterly digest produced by, and for, readers. www.foxedquarterly.com

Song for a Sunday

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I bought Stand Still by Emma’s Imagination (who won some music TV programme in the UK) because she covered an obscure song by Bic Runga on it – I thought anybody who liked Bic Runga definitely had good taste, and might write well too. Whilst I enjoy the album, this cover of Runga’s ‘Drive’ is still the highlight.

Click here for all the Sunday Songs.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

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36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Lizzy Siddal and I agreed to do a readalong of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (1947) when I realised that we both had recently got copies – I bought it off the back of a recommendation from my friend Rhona, and I am hugely indebted to her, because Hamilton is an incredibly good writer, and The Slaves of Solitude is a great novel. It is often hilarious, but somehow also increasingly bleak. As you can see, it’s straight onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. It’s not often that you can tell from the first paragraph that a novel will be brilliant, but almost from the first word of The Slaves of Solitude, I knew I was onto something special.


It’s 1943 in Thames Lockdon, a rather dreary suburban town in which 39 year-old Miss Roach (we don’t learn til about halfway through that her unwelcome Christian name is Enid) has found herself, since she’s been bombed out of her flat in Kensington. She is forced to live in a boarding house, inaptly named the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but it might as well be the third circle of hell. I know I quoted this section in an earlier post, but I’m going to do so again – this is the paragraph which made me certain that Hamilton was a writer of no small talent, and that I was in for a treat with The Slaves of Solitude.
As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – “The Rosamund Tea Rooms”. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no more – merely, if anything, “Mrs. Payne’s”. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and quietly had their error made clear to them.It was the word ‘half-hearted’ that did it. So few writers would have picked that word, there, and it creates such a perfect image.

There can be few places described as dispiritingly as these Tea Rooms. The guests creep miserably around the house, obeying the notes which proliferate:
Mrs. Payne left or pinned up notes everywhere, anywhere, austerely, endlessly – making one feel, sometimes, that a sort of paper-chase had been taking place in the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but a nasty, admonitory paper-chase. All innovations were heralded by notes, and all withdrawals and adjustments thus proclaimed. Experienced guests were aware that to take the smallest step in an original or unusual direction would be to provoke a sharp note within twenty-four hours at the outside, and they had therefore, for the most part, abandoned originality.I just meant to write that there were notes, but when I flicked to the page in question, that quotation was irresistible. I have a feeling this review will go in that direction – Hamilton’s writing is just too delicious and perceptive and perfect for me to paraphrase. He is a prose writer par excellence and, even though I’m going to try and make some comparisons, in reality utterly defies comparison. He has the breadth and rich extravagance of Dickens, but the subtlety, nuance and irony of Austen. Reading it is like being in a whirlwind, but also in the calm at its centre. Hamilton never puts a step wrong.

Although we see this horrible place through Miss Roach’s jaded eyes, it is one of her boarding house companions who is most memorable – indeed, as Harriet writes in her review, he is surely one of the most memorable characters of all English literature. His name is Mr. Thwaites and he is the dominant figure in the small kingdom of the Rosamund Tea Rooms. He is in his sixties, but has lost neither energy nor the habit of bullying. Mr. Thwaites is a grotesque, but one who is entirely believable. His hideously affected tricks of speech are recorded perfectly by Hamilton, each a separate anguish to Miss Roach. I hope Harriet doesn’t mind me copying across a section from her review, as the examples she has chosen are perfect; these are Harriet’s words, with Hamilton’s/Thwaites’ in the brackets:
He is fond of substituting the third person verb for the first (“I Keeps my Counsel — like the Wise Old Bird”), is partial to hideous cod dialect (“I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said”), and falls into dreadful and protracted archaisms (“She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee house…there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?”)
Like all great comic nemeses, Mr. Thwaites is both a joy to read and a horror to imagine. He is secretly pro-Hitler, and loathes the Russians – one of the points of attack against Miss Roach, since he willfully misconstrues her silence on the topic of Russians as an all-abiding love for Socialism:
This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr. Thwaites’ embittered vision, were undoubtedly perceived as being “all equal”, and so if the Germans went on retreating westward (and if Miss Roach went on approving of it and doing nothing about it) before long we should, all of us, be “all equal”. “My Lady’s Maid,” continued Mr. Thwaites, “will soon be giving orders to My Lady. And Milord will be Polishing the Pot-boy’s boots.” Failing to see that he had already over-reached himself in anticipating very far from equal conditions, Mr. Thwaites went on. “The Cabby,” he said, resignedly, “will take it unto himself to give the orders, I suppose – and the pantry-boy tell us how to proceed on our ways.” Still no one had anything to say, and Mr. Thwaites, now carried away both by his own vision and his own style, went on to portray a state of society such as might have recommended itself to the art of the surrealist, or appeared in the dreams of an opium-smoker.
But this hellish existence is not static for Miss Roach. She meets an American Lieutenant and begins an uncertain, meandering relationship with him – which mostly involves sitting next to him at the local pub while they both drink too much, and being nonplussed by his roars of affection or amusement. Miss Roach is plagued by doubts as to whether she should take his intentions seriously or not – alternatively laughing at herself, and wondering what she might miss out on. It is all observed so perfectly, so subtly.

And then there is Vicki Kugelmann. Vicki is a young German woman and a friend of Miss Roach – believed to be shy and unassuming, albeit with ghastly old-fashioned and odd linguistic quirks (“Hard lines, old fellow” ; “Do be sporty!”) – until she is persuaded to move into the Rosamund Tea Rooms. Their quiet friendship develops somehow, as Vicki becomes more domineering and cavalier herself, into a passionate and unspoken hatred. Vicki manages Mr. Thwaites as Miss Roach could not dream of doing; she patronises and frustrates Miss Roach; she flirts with the Lieutenant.
“No,” said Vicki. “That is not me, my dear. I do not Snatch. I do not Snatch the Men….”

Miss Roach was about to say something, but Vicki, still patting her, went on.

“No, my dear. I put him off. Have no fear. I do not Snatch. I am not the Snatcher.”

Then, with a final “No, I am not the Snatcher. Do not be alarmed. I do not Snatch,” the German woman, in a dignified way, left the English one alone in the dining-room of the Rosamund Tea Rooms.
Through the second half of the novel, this battle weaves and wends itself, on many fronts. On the small stage of a boarding house, Hamilton enacts the most impassioned and fierce of antagonisms – but always in miniature, and always in undertones. Anger seethes through the dialogue, but it is quashed by the modes and manners which Miss Roach will not – cannot – relinquish.


I had vaguely heard of Patrick Hamilton, because of his novel Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, but hadn’t heard of The Slaves of Solitude. (Actually, a search of my inbox shows me that ‘Anonymous’ mentioned it on this post back in 2009 – thanks, whoever you were!) Why? But why? Hamilton is a great writer, and this is a great novel. It is so rich; so filled with perfect observations and finely sculpted dialogue. (Hamilton was, after all, a successful playwright – amongst his works is Gaslight, later a famous film.) Nothing is over the top; everything is subdued and repressed by the force of good manners and Miss Roach’s enforced calmness. But that makes each line more potent, and each emotion more powerful.

What else can I say? The Slaves of Solitude is unusually, astonishingly good. I could read it over and over again. Instead, I shall move onto the rest of Hamilton’s output – thank goodness there is more, and bless Rhona for introducing me to his genius.

Latest Wikio rankings

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Wikio have emailed me the blog rankings for last month (or for this month, depending upon how you look at it) – and yes, it’s all just a bit and fun, but – yes, it’s still nice to see myself there, amongst such good company!

1 Charlie’s Diary
2 tales from the village
3 Stuck In A Book
4 Making it up
5 Playing by the book
6 Asylum
7 Reading Matters
8 Book Chick City
9 Cornflower
10 Savidge Reads
11 My Favourite Books
12 The Book Smugglers
13 An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
14 Vulpes Libris
15 Wondrous Reads
16 booktwo.org
17 chasing bawa
18 Gaskella
19 Erotica For All
20 BubbleCow

Ranking made by Wikio

Perfect leaving present!

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Today I have no good excuses for why I haven’t written you a proper post – I shall be posting my review of The Slaves of Solitude tomorrow evening, let me know if you’re joining in the readalong and have something ready to post.

For today, I just thought I’d share the leaving present I got from my lovely colleagues last week – my 9 month contract with Rare Books in the Bodleian came to an end, as did the job I was hired to do, so I have left them, and shall miss both the lovely, funny people I worked with and the interesting materials I saw. But before I went they gave me the perfect leaving present – they definitely know me well…

Leave it to Smith

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I was at work for 13 hours today (!!) so far too tired to write anything particularly lucid, instead I shall write a couple of lines to let you know that I am re-reading I Capture the Castle at the moment (in fact, I have nearly finished it) and it is BRILLIANT all over again. If you haven’t read it, hie thee to a bookshop. And then a DVD shop and watch the brilliant film.


The novel has lots of covers – this isn’t the one I’m reading, but it’s my favourite.

I haven’t read anything else by Dodie Smith, but some e-friends have told me her other novels are wonderful too – A Town in Bloom is heading towards my local library, so I’ll report back before too long.

Happy June, everyone!

A Beautiful Book

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I bought this a little while ago, from the small book section of Antiques on High in Oxford, but it is one of the most beautiful little books I own, and I thought I’d share it.


I doubt it would win any awards in fine printing catalogues, but I am very fond of it. The book in question is a 1929 edition of selections from The Female Spectator by Eliza Haywood (usually spelt Haywood, but spelt Heywood in this edition) edited by Mary Priestley. The Female Spectator was the first woman’s periodical written by a woman, written between 1744 and 1771 in imitation of Addison and Steele’s more famous Spectator. The selections in this book all, apparently, come from a single edition in 1748 – which is as useful as any, as far as a representation goes.

Elizabeth Haywood was incredibly prolific, and taking a gander at her Wikipedia entry I am trying to remember what I read. The City Jilt, I think, and perhaps The Mercenary Lover. I remember her being amusing and a little bit shocking at times. I have done no more than flick through this selection of The Female Spectator (indeed, I shall have to procure a page-cutter before I go much further, as some of it is still in need of cutting) but I can see I shall derive some amusement from sections entitled ‘Tennis, a Manly Exercise’, or ‘Honour of Itself Not to be Relied On’, not to mention ‘Caterpillars, their Structure very Amazing’. How seriously Haywood is to be taken will doubtless always be slightly unclear.


And I’m not just boasting about a lovely book I had the good fortune to stumble across – it is actually available fairly affordably from Amazon, and would delight any bookshelf. In fact, it’s cheaper than an ordinary new hardback – and how much more special!