Everybody wants to be a cat…

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When I was grabbing a book for the train down to Somerset, I decided upon Jennie by Paul Gallico. I bought it nearly three years ago, and have had numerous recommendations for it – especially from the appropriately nicknamed Dark Puss. After recently loving Love of Seven Dolls (more here) it seemed sensible to try more Gallico – with the bonus that Jennie would fit into the themes of my doctoral research even if, published in 1950, it’s a little too late for my period of study.

And I decided, since I was at home, it would be nice for Sherpa to pose sitting alongside my copy of Jennie. Sherpa had other ideas… as documented through this post.


There is a very simple story behind Jennie – an eight years-old boy called Peter suddenly discovers that he has turned into a cat. As you do. Unlike metamorphosis tales like Lady Into Fox, the novel isn’t focalised through those who witness the change – nor do we witness Peter trying to live alongside his family as a cat. They are quickly left behind, as Nanny throws him into the street (“Drat the child! He’s dragged in another stray off the street! Shoo! Scat! Get out!”) Peter dashes through the streets, is beaten unconscious by a territorial cat who doesn’t want to share his shelter, and by the time Peter comes to, he is in the company of Jennie.
Peter rolled over and behled the speaker squatted down comfortably beside him, her legs tucked under her, tail nicely wrapped around. She was a thin tabby with a part white face and throat that gave her a most sweet and gentle aspect heightened by the lively and kind expression in her luminous eyes that were grey-green, flecked with gold.
Jennie gives him a bath and a mouse (‘To his intense surprise, it was simply delicious’) and sets about teaching Peter how to be a cat – as, after a little hesitation, she believes his account of how he became a cat.


It is this vein of Jennie which gives it both its charm and somehow rescues it from being too fey or whimsical. Gallico captures the behaviour of cats so exactly (the first rule, at all times: WASH). If he’d kept an eye on the human observers, laughing at how cats misunderstood such-and-such, or inventing witty reasons for cats behaving so-and-so, then Jennie might well have been unbearable. Instead, it is… well, ‘realistic’ is hardly the word, but Gallico shows Jennie in as workmanlike a manner as possible under the circumstances. Her explanations of how strays must loiter in every doorway when exiting, to check the street for safety, make sense. The way she uses humans, and doesn’t trust them, chimes in with many of the timid cats one sees on the streets. I didn’t love the idea of cats greeting one another with faux-18th century decorum, nor the idea of some sort of feline telepathy, but in general Gallico didn’t overstep the mark.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, who wrote her own fantasy in the form of Lolly Willowes, said this in a 1929 lecture:
Since [the fantasist’s] main thesis surprises by itself, he must deny himself further surprises…. The novelist not only may niggle away with small licences all the time, he is a dull dog if he doesn’t. But the fantasist, having taken his initial liberty, must mind his Ps and Qs for the rest of his adventure…. The fantasist who has begun by asking for one vast initial credit must do on that credit to the end.Well said, Sylvia. And Gallico is almost always content to let the turning-into-a-cat liberty be the main one. True, there are some unlikely dramatic incidences as they board a ship to Glasgow, and Gallico sprinkles coincidences through the novel like nobody’s business, but…


When I wrote about Love of Seven Dolls I mentioned that it had something of the atmosphere of a fairy-tale – which didn’t hinder the pathos, but rather made the evil streak of the novel less striking. Jennie is even more like a fairy-tale – in fact, at times it felt like a Disney film. The characters are drawn with surprising reality, but the events are not. Easily the most interesting chapters were those where Peter was learning how to be a cat, or contemplating the relationship between owner and pet. I was less interested when merry escapades took over, and there is one spectacularly superfluous chapter about Lulu – an excitable, flirty, irreverent cat with whom Peter is briefly smitten. I think Gallico perhaps felt his initial conceit was flagging a bit, and so introduced this little ball of fire – but Lulu sticks out so obviously as a distraction to enliven proceedings that I feel she should either have arrived much earlier, or not been introduced at all.

It is the plotting and tone which made Jennie a bit of a disappointment to me. The characters of Jennie and Peter are great – and, as I’ve said, Gallico has really closely observed cat behaviour. But the tone is too sprightly, even with the sad aspects of the story. What I loved in Love of Seven Dolls was the dark, subversive tone intertwining with the whimsical. If Jennie doesn’t become too whimsical, it also never wanders into darker territory – it felt a lot like a children’s tale which wouldn’t stray too far from an accessible storytime-voice.

It is a really fun novel to read, and I’m sure a similar idea has been done much worse. But Lady Into Fox demonstrates how subtle and moving the metamorphosis novel can be; Love of Seven Dolls shows Gallico is capable of more – Jennie just didn’t live up to the hopeful expectations it had accumulated after three years on my bookshelf. But do give it a go – it might be just the novel you’re after.

Virginia

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Hands up who saw this post title and thought that I’d be talking about Mrs. Woolf? Well, that was the immediate connection in my mind when I saw Virginia on the shelf in my local £2 bookshop. If it was the title that made me pick it up, it was (a) the beauty, (b) the brevity, and (c) the Scandinavian..ity… that made me buy it. You know what a sucker I am for all those things. And it felt just the right book to read after church, in the park, on a beautifully sunny afternoon.

Jens Christian Grøndahl is a Danish writer who’s probably really well known, but was new to me. Virginia (2000, translated 2003 by Anne Born) is a deceptively simple novella about guilt and the ways in which brief encounters in other people’s lives can change the paths taken for both. If that’s ringing Atonement-sounding bells in anyone’s minds, then you’re not entirely off the mark – but Grøndahl treats the topic rather more calmly. I haven’t read enough Scandinavian literature to comment, I suppose, and I can’t read any except in translation, but I’m going to generalise wildly nonetheless. Scandinavian literary fiction seems to bathe the action in a haze – the beautiful landscapes are reflected in the choice of language, which isn’t short and sharp, but slightly dreamy and pensive. The Guardian reviewer wrote that Virginia ‘makes even Chekhov seem effusive.’ Of course there’s The Girl With The Gruesome Shocks to prove me wrong, but I did say ‘literary fiction’…

Virginia begins in 1942 in occupied Denmark. A young woman (I’m going to take a plunge and say that she’s unnamed, because I don’t *think* we’re told that she’s called Virginia – that name becomes important elsewhere) leaves Copenhagen to stay with a family she barely knows on the North Sea coast – presumably to avoid a city in wartime, although this is never really spelt out. Here is the first paragraph of Virginia, which gives you a taste of the prose:

You could never get used to the sound, the distant drone of aircraft engines passing high overheard in the night. It was hot under the sloping timber roof, and she kept her window open. She lay with one leg outside the duvet, breathing in the stuffy holiday cottage air and feeling the cool breeze on her calf and thigh, listening to the small dry click when the wooden edge of the black-out curtain bumped against the window-frame. She’d just had her sixteenth birthday that summer, the only time she stayed at the house by the sea. She didn’t belong here. She slipped out of our life and we slipped out of hers.

One of that family is our narrator (also unnamed?) who, at fourteen, is a couple of years younger than her, and something of a distant admirer. There is precious little dialogue between them, and almost no indirect speech – in fact there is barely any direct speech throughout Virginia – but Grøndahl evokes their dynamics perfectly. He is full of calf love, and she doesn’t really notice he’s there. The awakening of first infatuation is a topic which has been treated time and again, and although Grøndahl’s approach is gentle and subtle, it would not suffice as the pivot of even so short a novella – and indeed it is not the pivot.

In a local outbuilding there is an English solider, whose aeroplane has come down. While the narrator is infatuated with the girl, she in turn is experiencing her first love – for a man with whom she cannot converse, and whose presence she must keep secret. We learn this piece-by-piece, through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy. Or, rather, through those eyes as remembered by the same boy fifty years later – for Virginia is a novella of remembering, and incomplete recollections. The narrator calls the boy ‘he’, even though it is himself. We see the scenes through a glass darkly – and this is the pivot on which the novella turns. The boy has accidentally discovered the English pilot’s hiding place:

The German soldiers had stopped on the other side of the planked wall. He could hear their voices quite clearly now but couldn’t understand what they said. When he looked up again the pilot gestured excitedly at him as if to urge him away, out of the shed to where the soldiers were coming round the corner to the doorway.

He did not move while the other repeated his desperate, soundless gesture. Not a single thought passed through his mind in the seconds that followed, but through all the succeeding years I have asked myself whether the German soldiers had seen me go into the shed and whether it would have made any difference if I had gone out to them alone instead of letting them find us together.

Maybe they would have searched the place anyway. On the other hand it is not impossible that they might merely have laughed at the terrified boy who came out of his hiding place before they went along the path, while in fact the boy stayed there watching them and holding his breath. The possibility has stayed with me always, like a thought I have never been able to think through to the end and so have never finished.

These thoughts stay with the reader as well as the character through the rest of the novella – we move forwards fifty years. The narrator saw the girl (then a middle-aged, grey-haired woman) only once more, in Paris – he later meets her ex-husband and children. These scenes are haunted by his uncertain guilt – even more subtle than Atonement, because he cannot be certain that his actions were wrong, or just simply tragically unfortunate. It is a moment which has defined much of his life – but one over which he may have had no control.

In so slight a novella, so much is evoked. There is even something of a twist, which I shan’t spoil, but which is elegant and sobering. As I wrote at the top, Scandinavian authors seem to have a beautiful way of encasing a narrative in a sort of hazy beauty. Grøndahl enhances this by having almost no direct dialogue – which makes the novella so much more authentic as the recollections of a 64 year old man for his youth, as well as putting the events at a suitably nebulous distance. For those of you who love novellas as much as I do, Virginia is a really beautiful, thoughtful example (and there are copies from a penny on Amazon!) – I look forward to finding what else Grøndahl has written. Anyone?

Books to get Stuck into:

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson: this portrayal of rural American [edit: I mean Canadian, thanks Elizabeth!] family life, and the sister who left and has felt guilty all her life, has an equally clever twist, as well as being funny, sad, and thoughtful.

Atonement by Ian McEwan: well, it had to be, didn’t it? I’ve not reviewed it on SiaB, but writ on a larger scale than Virginia, it’s undoubtedly a clever and moving examination of how momentary decisions cause lasting guilt.

Bassington Giveaway

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Do you think the above is the version read by bears everywhere? In between finishing The Unbearable Bassington and writing my review of it, I stumbled across a copy of it – and, even better, it comes with a wide selection of his short stories too – including my favourite, ‘The Story-Teller’.


I’m not just bragging, of course – this little gem is up for grabs. Pop your name in the comments if you’d like me to send this off to you – open worldwide. (Apparently it’s available on Kindle for free, so even if you don’t win this, you should be able to read it!)

The Unbearable Bassington – Saki

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One of my favourite things about the blogosphere is when lots of people start reading the same neglected author at the same time. I’ve seen it happen with Shirley Jackson, Barbara Comyns, and of course Persephone favourites Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski etc. It’s even more wonderful when it’s a complete coincidence – I had just finished reading The Unbearable Bassington (1912) by Saki, when Hayley posted her review of it here. We even have identical battered Penguin copies. Actually, hers is much less battered than mine… Hayley and I belong to the same online reading group, and our united praise of the novel has sparked off everyone there dusting off their Complete Saki collections, or buying themselves copies. I had seen a cheap Penguin in my local secondhand bookshop, and offered it up for grabs – Elaine (aka Random Jottings) leapt at the chance, kindly reciprocating with E.F. Benson’s The Luck of the Vails – and she has already posted her thoughts here. (I’ve just spotted, as I edit this post, that Lyn’s review has popped up too!) Cut a long story short, we all thought it was great.


And now to cut a short story long. I have loved Saki ever since I stole my parents’ copy of his complete works. (Er, sorry Mum and Dad… did I ever return it?) His short stories are wonderfully sharp, biting and a little macabre at times – but always hilarious. You can read a couple of them on here, if you select Saki from the drop-down author menu in the left-hand column. So I turned to The Unbearable Bassington expecting more of the same… well, there is certainly a lot of one-liners, the litotes which British authors do so well, and a sort of Wildean humour. I liked this line: “As far as remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.” (If the Biblical allusion passes you by, click here.) Even the epigraph could have been penned by our Oscar: ‘This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.’ And Comus Bassington could have stepped out of one of Wilde’s works – he is a feckless, money-wasting burden upon his mother Francesca. He absently intends to marry heiress Elaine, but puts no effort into wooing her. Instead, he borrows money from her to waste, and generally lives a hedonistic, slightly sadistic, life. Here he is:
In appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name. His large green-grey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost expected to see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark hair. The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a redeeming touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking, half-petulant face. With a strain of sourness in him Comus might have been leavened into something creative and masterful; fate had fashioned him with a certain whimsical charm, and left him all unequipped for the greater purposes of life. Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly damned.

Francesca is no saint, though. A really interesting discussion could be had as to which Bassington is most appropriately given the epithet ‘unbearable’. Francesca (“if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room”) is dominant on the social scene, which means we see her fierce (but genteel) fighting with everyone else, put-downs delivered with a smile, and constant battling to stay on top (and solvent). Saki’s eye for the viciousness of social interaction is matched only by E.F. Benson’s, and Saki does less to cloak it. It’s all rounded-off with delicious humour, of course, but there’s no getting away from the fact that mother and son are equally selfish – although they care for each other, in a disguised and distorted manner. Here is Francesca’s oh-so-empathetic thoughts about her brother:
In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for limber was limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could consider worth repeating.

Saki continues in a similar vein for much of the novel, and it is delicious. Lots of social cattiness and social failure, awkwardness when nemeses are sat together at dinner, that sort of thing. If it did not have the bite of his short stories, or quite their brilliance, then it was still certainly very good – the sort of thing a Mapp & Lucia fan would want to read when they’re at their most spiky.

I thought I had a firm grasp on what Saki was doing, and I was enjoying it a lot, until I came to the final chapter. Oh, that final chapter. I shan’t tell you the catalyst, but it is some of the best and saddest writing I have ever read. So, so brilliantly done – not a word overwritten, and not a false emotion. Stunning. At first it felt like it had come out of nowhere, completely out of kilter with the rest of the novel – but it actually had the effect of unveiling my eyes to the rest of The Unbearable Bassington: suddenly I could see that laughter and weeping, joy and sadness, had danced together throughout the whole narrative. Laughter was resolutely winning most of the way – but when it slipped, and weeping rode higher, it was really only the undercurrent of the novel flooding into view.

The Unbearable Bassington really is the most incredible little book. I think I still prefer his exemplary short stories, for their quick and witty impact, but The Unbearable Bassington is spectacular in a different way. Capuchin have recently republished it, and I’m glad that someone has – this is a novel which shouldn’t be neglected, and here’s hoping that the recent spate of reviews across the blogs will encourage a mini Saki-revival…

Song for a Sunday

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Some unashamed summery pop music today, I think, in a bid to encourage the sun to shine. A Fine Frenzy has released two albums – this is from her second, Bomb in a Birdcage. It’s perhaps not my favourite from the album, but I do love the video, and the song is lively and fun. Here is ‘Electric Twist’ – enjoy!

For all previous Sunday Songs, click here.

A very quick weekend miscellany…

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Just two things today –

1.) Thank you SO much for all your wonderful and impassioned comments on my Agatha Christie vs. Dorothy L. Sayers post here. If you haven’t done so, do go and read the comments – they’re brilliant, and often hilarious. And the poll at the moment? I’m delighted to say that Agatha is three votes ahead of Dorothy!

2.) It’s time for the prize draw for Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt. Patch hasn’t been in action recently, but since this novel is about a dog, it seems right and proper that he lends a hand. And the winner is…


Congratulations, Harriet! And thanks Patch for choosing someone who lives in Oxford… promise it wasn’t rigged. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Hardy hard? Hardly…

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Quite often you’ll see Harriet and I write about the same books around about the same time. That’s because we’re in the same book group in Oxford… and usually she is much more prompt than me at actually getting around to writing about the things. Today’s post is no different – I’m writing about Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, and she did so here.

I thought I’d cracked Hardy, last year. I made my second attempt with Jude the Obscure, and loved it – it even ended up on my Top Ten of 2010. And so I was excited when Harriet suggested that our book group read The Return of the Native – I wanted to get some more Hardy under my belt, now that I’d discovered that I loved him.

Hmm. Well, that didn’t pan out quite as expected. You’ll have to forgive my post title – I put it in because it amused me, not because it was true. Whilst I’d been surprised that Jude swept me along like a modern page-turner, I found The Return of the Native something of a slog.


The novel kicks off with a few pages describing Egdon Heath, which are apparently famous and much-loved. Well, you know me and descriptions of landscape – I was flicking past these pages before too long. And we come to a group of yokels discussing and dancing on the hillside. This crowd did give for a moment or two of something I didn’t expect at all – humour!Want of breath prevented a continuance of the songs; and the breakdown attracted the attention of a firm-standing man of middle age, who kept each corner of his crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn back into his cheek, as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness which might erroneously have attached to him.That occasioned a little chuckle, and I liked this next bit from later in the novel so much that I went and read it aloud to my housemate:
“Strange notions, has he?” said the old man. “Ah, there’s too much of that sending to school in these days! It only does harm. Every gateost and barn’s door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other chalked upon it by the young rascals: a woman can hardly pass for shame some times. If they’d never been taught how to write they wouldn’t have been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn’t do it, and the country was all the better for it.”(In my village, I must say, the local vandals tended towards the pictorial.) None of these characters end up being particularly important, however, and it’s all a rather lengthy introduction to some of the novel’s main players – Eustacia Vye and Damon Wildeve. Eustacia is all flashing eyes and passionate proclamations; Damon is all wry comments alternating with romantic gestures. Awkward, then, that he’s about to marry someone else – a girl so virtuous and accepting that I can’t even remember her name.

Naturally everyone is in love with everyone else. Throw the reddleman Diggory Venn into the mix (a reddleman being someone who transports sheep-dye around the countryside, and is covered head to toe in the stuff), and the ‘native’ himself Clym Yeobright, and we’ve got a love-hexagon or -septagon or somesuch going on. To be honest, it all felt a bit like a watered down version of Jude the Obscure, even though that novel came later. All the partner-swapping, and going back and forth between people; false promises and broken vows; wild and amorous announcements followed by bitter renouncing, etc. etc. This excerpt is fairly representative:
She interrupted with a suppressed fire of which either love or anger seemed an equally possible issue, “Do you love me now?”

“Who can say?”

“Tell me; I will know it!”

“I do, and I do not,” he said mischeviously. “That is, I have my times and my seasons. One moment you are too tall, another moment you are too do-nothing, another too melancholy, another too dark, another I don’t know what, except – that you are not the whole world to me that you used to be, my dear. But you are a pleasant lady to know, and nice to meet, and I dare say as sweet as ever – almost.”This sort of histrionics does occasionally result in humour where I imagine Hardy didn’t intend it. The following is possibly my favourite quotation from Victorian literature, and one I intend to put to good use in moments of over-dramatic angst:
“Your eyes seem heavy, Eustacia!”

“No, it is my general way of looking. I think it arises from my feeling sometimes an agonizing pity for myself that I ever was born.”Well, quite, Eustacia. It comes to us all.

I can’t decide whether The Return of the Native really is much worse than Jude the Obscure or if I was simply not in the mood for Hardy. And I wasn’t, especially since I had to speed-read the second half for book group… to which only one other person came!

Perhaps I’m not being fair, and I have enjoyed ripping into Hardy a bit – it somewhat makes up for the slog I had reading it. I’d love (as I always love) someone to come along and disagree with me – there must be someone who loves this novel? Maybe I would if I read it in a different mood. As it is… I’m back to the drawing-board with Thomas Hardy.

Year Three & Four: The Sketches

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It seems that, despite my best intentions, at no point in the last year did I collect together the sketches from Year Three on my blog – so here are Year Three and Four together! They’ve been sadly less frequent than I intended when I started up this blog, but… never mind. In fact, I can’t believe there have only been fourteen in the past two years. Oops. Must Do Better.

Clicking on each cartoon *should* take you to the relevant post.