Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.

K is for Kingsolver

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I don’t have a lot of candidates for ‘K’ in the alphabet, though perhaps more than I would have expected at first: I own and have read books by Emily Kimbrough, Jessie Kesson, Molly Keane, Margaret Kennedy, Sheila Kaye-Smith off the top of my head, and maybe even some books by men beginning with K too. But Barbara Kingsolver is my choice – partly because she wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, and also because I know she is well-loved across the blogosphere.

How many books do I have by Barbara Kingsolver?

I’ve got five books by Kingsolver, which is quite low for an author in this series – perhaps you remember the dizzying piles of Crompton and Delafield books. But there are probably more pages in these five than five books by any other author I have in the house.

How many of these have I read?

From this pile, I’ve only read three (including one I finished yesterday). Confusingly, I’ve read another two that aren’t here – and one of the pile I have read was actually another edition. The Lacuna has had a journey of getting, giving away unread, re-buying, and still not having read.

How did I start reading Barbara Kingsolver?

My first Kingsolver was The Bean Trees, borrowed from a friend and finally bought earlier this year. It was part of a postal book group I was in, where we chose a book and posted it around a dozen people before it came back with a notebook of comments and thoughts. I loved it, but then I read The Poisonwood Bible for a book group. I can’t remember if it was borrowed from the library or a friend, or if I decided not to keep it – but it made me lukewarm on Kingsolver (for reasons I’ll go into below). It was only when doing A Century of Books that I turned to Pigs in Heaven because I needed something to read to fill the 1993 slot. It was so brilliant that I got back on the Kingsolver train. (The only I’ve read that isn’t pictured is Prodigal Summer, which I listened to as an audiobook.)

General impressions…

As you may have gathered from the above – mixed! Pigs in Heaven is one of the best modern novels I’ve read (I can count 1990s as modern, right?) and I loved The Bean Trees. I did like Prodigal Summer a lot, though perhaps could have done with a little less description of the environment and more about the fascinating characters she had created. As for The Poisonwood Bible – some brilliant writing, the final quarter should have been lopped off, and the preacher was a rare misstep in Kingsolver’s aptitude for subtlety. And I’ve just finished Small Wonder, a collection of her essays, which I’ll write about soon and which were great – if rather locked in one particular moment of time.

Overall – I think she is a great prose writer, able to be just poetic enough without losing the storytelling momentum. I’m not sure the things I find interesting totally overlap with what she finds interesting, and I think she’s at her best when she doesn’t let the message overpower the story. But I will certainly keep reading her (and her ENORMOUS books) and am glad that such a thoughtful writer is finding a wide audience.

British Library Women Writers 11: The Love Child by Edith Olivier

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When the British Library Women Writers series was first suggested, one of the titles I thought about first was The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Not only is it one of my favourite novels, – novellas? – it was one of the key texts in my DPhil on middlebrow, fantastic novels. I’ve read it many times, and have pressed it into many people’s hands. I’ve written about it on here more than once. But it wasn’t in print, and I really wanted it to be.

Or… was it in print? While you wouldn’t have been likely to find it in bookshops, there was a print-on-demand version available – along with all the rest of Olivier’s novels. The editions weren’t beautiful, but they were great at making the books available. And yet I really, really wanted it between beautiful British Library covers… luckily I was like the persistent widow of the Bible, and finally the British Library agreed. (It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but I am delighted that The Love Child made it!) It was possible because Olivier died more than 70 years ago, and so the novel is out of copyright.

The Love Child was Olivier’s first novel, written when she was in her 50s – she described the idea as coming to her in the middle of the night, and feverishly writing the beginning in her bed. And that idea is this: what if an imaginary friend became real?

What makes this such a 1920s novel is that the heroine is an unmarried woman who feels herself on the shelf in her 30s – and, with so many men lost at war, she has far fewer options for marriage. While many women have always been happy without marriage and children, Agatha Bodenham is not one of those women. Not having a child is clearly an aching gap in her life.

As the story begins, she is mourning her mother – her final close family connection. Agatha starts thinking about Clarissa, her childhood imaginary friend – whom had been a wonderful (if illusory) companion until a governess poured scorn on her. She remembers the joy of playing with her, and starts to do so again.

Then one day, when Agatha was quietly sitting on the white seat at the end of the green walk, darning a black woollen stocking to wear in church the next day, and for once more absorbed in darning than in dreaming – then, all of a sudden, Clarissa came and sat on the seat beside her. She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.

Clarissa has materialised! From here, The Love Child looks at the delight of this miracle – but, as time goes on, the problems that come with it. Clarissa is increasingly visible to others, and Agatha has to deal with that. And, as she grows earlier, Clarissa begins to yearn for independence herself…

This is a short masterpiece, far better than anything else Olivier wrote. It’s sophisticated and complete, and I think ranks as one of the most perfect novellas of the 20th century. As it’s so short, this new British Library edition also includes a selection of excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography, Without Knowing Mr Walkley, which I think is a really helpful addition to the book. And, of course, my afterword – which is largely about the introduction of the first adoption law in the UK, referred to in the novel.

If you haven’t read this gem before, I very much recommend it! And don’t miss the different posts about the series appearing across blogs, YouTube and Instagram during the ongoing #FarMoreThanFiction blog tour (of which this is, I suppose, an unofficial entry!)

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

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In Mrs Alfred Sidgwick’s 1923 novel, None-Go-By is the fanciful title of the Cornish cottage that Mary and Thomas decide to move to, to escape the hustle and bustle of relatives, friends and neighbours and their lives in London. Mary is our narrator, and describes how their lives have been taken over by the demands made by others – and this is intended to be something of an escape.

The cottage was so small that Thomas and I never quite got over the impression of living in a doll’s house; but, if Thomas was careful, he could stand upright in the rooms. He is a thin, tallish man with a saint-like expression that he thinks must have come on him gradually through being married to me; and even when he is out at elbows he has a way of looking presentable. What he ought to have done was entertain Mrs Lomax while I escaped upstairs and made myself tidy; but on the wrong occasion Thomas will often act with disconcerting suddenness. In this case he threw open the door of the room that contained our visitor, and there we were confronting each other. My first thought was that the room could hardly contain anything else. However, we squeezed in.

Thomas writes books with titles like The Physiological Correlate of the Instinctive Process. Mary doesn’t pretend to understand his work, but has her own interests – including less niche books and gardening. The novel opens amusingly, and the tone reminded me rather of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield – justifiably a classic, and perhaps a touchstone for a certain sort of middle-class, middlebrow humour that I love from the period.

As is perhaps inevitable in a comic novel where a couple are trying to avoid demanding relatives and neighbours, they are continually inundated with both. There is a succession of nephews, nieces, and the like who come with their all-important personal problems or a need to be distracted. A niece has left her husband, or so she believes; a young nephew floods the garden while supposedly convalescing after illness. Each comes with their own trials that Mary, as narrator, relates as comedies rather than tragedies. There is no genuine pathos in None-Go-By, nor is there intended to be.

Mary and Thomas get to know the neighbours, of whom or two are not objectionable. A snobbish character tries to hector them into keeping certain company; another unpleasant character thinks they aren’t artistic enough to remain where they are. The stakes remain low because Mary doesn’t take anything too seriously – the reader can’t really feel genuine emotions when the characters don’t seem to.

I quite enjoyed reading None-Go-By, but I did have a couple of pretty big reservations that stopped me loving the book – as I’d thought I might, when I started it. The first is hinted above – relatives and friends come and go, neighbours are introduced and sidelined, and it gives the novel a really episodic feel. We don’t really get to know a visitor until their little crisis is resolved and they’re on their way. It all emphasises the fact that Mary and Thomas can’t truly escape the maelstrom of their lives, but I found it meant the novel lost something in the way of momentum.

The other thing was Thomas. Jane wrote a very enthusiastic review of None-Go-By seven years ago, and in it she writes ‘I had to smile at gentle marital bickering between Thomas and Mary; for all that each tried to have the last word it was clear that they were two very different people who loved each other and accepted each others little foibles.’ They certainly bicker, but I have to say I found Thomas too infuriating to smile at it. Where the Provincial Lady’s husband Robert is oblivious, Thomas is astonishingly selfish and thoughtless. He often blames Mary for the chaos he causes, disregards her expressed wishes, and never thinks of anything except his own contentedness. Mary does rather roll her eyes and move on, but I think Sidgwick overplayed the card of ‘aren’t husbands absent-minded?’. It was hard to see why Mary would even want to remain married to him.

So – I started off really loving this novel, and thought it could be a real winner. And I ended up a little disappointed.

This is my second novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way – and there is enough that I liked in the tone of this novel that I’m keen to read more by her. There was just some elements to this one that jarred, while also feeling a little drab. But I feel curiously confident that there will be a book waiting for me among her output that will hit the sweet spot and become a cherished favourite. Now I just have to keep exploring…

Anne Severn and the Fieldings by May Sinclair

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It’s not the first time I’ve said it, but there is always such a sense of achievement in reading a book that has been on the shelves for a long time. Particularly if it turns out to be a good’un. I bought Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) back in 2009 and it has been patiently waiting for me ever since.

Anne Severn had come again to the Fieldings. This time it was because her mother was dead.

She hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she asked “Where’s Jerrold?”

“Fancy,” they said, “her remembering.”

And Jerrold had put his head in at the door and gone out again when he saw her there in her black frock; and somehow she had known he was afraid to come in because her mother was dead.

Anne is ten years old, and has been a regular visitor to the Fielding family. She has a cautious, fragile connection to the three brothers – who are different from one another, but not in the ‘ticking boxes of different types’ that often happens in novels about young siblings. Jerrold is kind, wise, and almost parental; Eliot is sporty and intelligent and confident; Colin is the youngest and quite anxious. As for their parents – Mr Fielding is a bit distant and very well-meaning, and Mrs Fielding is the opposite of these things. She needs Anne to need her. She is overly attached, and uses emotions as weapons.

As the novel progresses, Anne spends most of her time as part of this family that isn’t related to her, but has sort of adopted her. It’s worth noting that the novel was published a few years before adoption was legally formalised in the UK, and the opening is set a decade or two earlier still. She grows older and Sinclair develops a convincing heroine – loving, uncertain of herself, a combination of spontaneity and regret. Her moral decisions are very interesting for the period. Early in the novel, she says she would do anything for somebody she loved. This prophecy comes true before the end of the novel. The relationships she has with the three brothers in turn, and that with their mother, are all drawn interestingly and convincingly. Sinclair shows us the different facets of one individual that come out in three different friendships, which are indeed quite different, despite all being under the same roof.

Anne Severn and the Fieldings reminded me a lot of The Tree of Heaven – in the sense of showing the important events of the early twentieth century through the lens of one family unit. While they naturally consider themselves of utmost importance, we also get a good sweep of the period – particularly the war.

I found the whole novel involving and psychologically interesting, but it’s the war sections that are the jewel in the crown. Anne goes to the front, working as a nurse. Colin goes too, despite everyone saying that he is too ‘highly-strung’ for it – and, indeed, he suffers appalling shell-shock – or PTSD as we would call it now. Sinclair avoids tropes of ‘our brave troops’ – and, if the actual fighting is a little sanitised, the psychological impact of trauma is dealt with clear-sightedly.

I think Anne Severn and the Fieldings might be better than The Tree of Heaven, though perhaps too similar for me to nominate for the British Library Women Writers series, at least just yet. It’s a novel to luxuriate in, nothing moving quickly but everything capturing the attention. The only thing that prevents it becoming an all-time favourite for me is Sinclair’s tendency towards melodrama, which rather spoils the effect at times. The dialogue, in heightened moments, feels a bit like a b-movie. It’s unsurprising for the era, perhaps, but it’s at odds with the nuanced understanding of human relationships that Sinclair is rightly known for.

Sinclair is in danger of being remembered for coining ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique, one or two novels, and not much else – but if her prolific output holds other books as enjoyable and rewarding as Anne Severn and the Fieldings, then it’s time to get digging.

I got to be a guest on Backlisted!

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If you read my blog, I’m almost certain you already know about the Backlisted podcast. ‘Giving new life to old books’ is their tagline, and Andy and John (and editor/producer Nicky) do a wonderful job of discussing many brilliant backlisted titles. They often do authors that Rachel and I have also covered on ‘Tea or Books?’ – our tastes certainly overlap a lot.

I started listening around the time they launched, and I’ve always had a secret dream to be invited as a guest – and was so delighted to be asked onto the episode about Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker. It’s such a brilliant novel, and the best one about twins out there.

Alexandra Pringle (head of Bloomsbury, and once of Virago) had chosen the book and was the other guest, and the four of us had a wonderful time discussing Cassandra at the Wedding. It was every bit as joyful an experience as I’d have hoped. Thanks so much for having me, John and Andy!

You can listen via your podcast app of choice – or on their website, where you’ll find lots of other info.

Some books I’ve got recently…

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This is sort of a haul post, but the books have come from quite a lot of different places on many different occasions over the past month or so. I’ve decided to do Project 24 next year – where I only buy 24 in the year, in an effort to tackle the tbr mountains. And I think something in me has gone into panic mode and I’m stockpiling books. Despite clearly having thousands of the things unread.

ANYWAY.

Here are some books I’ve bought or got recently – I’d love to know if any of them leap out at you.

The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens
I love Brecht Evens’ beautiful graphic novels, and so was delighted to get a review copy of this from Drawn and Quarterly. I think I’ll be reading this one for Novellas in November, though I’m not sure it quite counts as a novella.

The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn
Karina is a friend of mine I’ve known since university, so I was very excited when she had a novel published – this is a work of magic realism, drawing on Peruvian and British cultures, and I’m excited to try it soon.

The Last Englishman by Byron Rogers
This is a biography of J.L. Carr – one of a pile of books I bought from a lovely bookshop in Tiverton, all of which were very reasonably priced. I think someone mentioned it as being brilliant in a comment on StuckinaBook sometime…

The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam
Black Faces, White Faces by Jane Gardam
I bought these in different shops, but apparently I want to read more Gardam. I think I’ve only read one, God on the Rocks, which I did like a lot, though didn’t love. And I’ve bought and culled a couple of others over the years, so maybe my house is just a resting point for Gardam novels on their journeys.

The Service of Clouds by Susan Hill
Hill’s literary novels are reliably wonderful and hadn’t heard of this one. She is a very varied writer, and I have found the streams of her writing that I enjoy most – this looks like it could be one of them.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
I have a feeling that JW could be one of those writers who, now I’ve really enjoyed one of her books, I stockpile and never get around to reading. But hopefully I will actually read this one? Maybe? Anyway, The Gap of Time was wonderful so at least I have options now.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Somehow I’ve never read any William Trevor and he is recommended so often and so winningly – though I never seem to hear any particular book recommended. During Project Names I got really into novels with people’s names in the title, particularly if they are The X of Full Name. I don’t know if that’s the most scholarly approach to choosing where to start, but at least it’s a choice.

Wintering by Katherine May
I was a bit lukewarm on May’s The Electricity of Every Living Thing, but when I was reading more about it, Wintering sounded much more up my street. And this one was signed, which is fun.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Maybe Jenny from Reading the End recommended this to me?? Well, someone did and I added it to a wishlist years ago. And then the other day I found it for 60p in a ludicrously cheap charity shop near me. The sad thing, for me, is that this charity shop almost never has anything in it that I could possibly want to read. So this was a delightful change!

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
AND they had Olive Kitteridge in the same charity shop. Lightning struck twice! I thought I’d read it, but I realise I read two other books by Strout – for a Tea or Books? episode. And I knew I hadn’t read The Burgess Boys, which I found in another bookshop.

The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
I don’t know anything about this author, but the book looked short and intriguing – I’m hoping it leans odd rather than fey. For some reason reading the blurb reminded by of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst, which I really enjoyed.

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban
I’ve bought a few Hobans since loving Turtle Diary, and have been told that his career took a turn for the tawdry at some point. I don’t know where this came, but it’s about a couple who meet in each other’s dreams? Maybe? That is a premise I will either love or loathe. Maybe one day I will find out.

Obscure Destinies by Willa Cather
Cather is one of my favourite prose stylists, so I buy up anything I see by her that I don’t have. But this is a fusty old paperback that I can’t imagine touching for any prolonged periods, so… who knows if I will ever read it.

Two Names Upon the Shore by Susan Ertz
Why are there so many authors that I read once and then buy book after book? Welp Ertz is another. I’ve only read Madame Claire, and I just keep buying up more and more Ertz novels without reading any of the others. Perhaps this one will tip me over the edge – the edition looks very trashy, but I suspect it could do the contents a disservice.

Something to Declare by Julian Barnes
I’ve only been lukewarm about the two Barnes novels I’ve read, but I wanted to give his essays a go – there are already some about art on my shelves; these are about France, I believe.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley
Andy Miller and others have mentioned Riley a lot on social media recently – specifically her most recent novel, but I thought this backlisted title would be very appropriate.

Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann
Similarly, I’ve never quite got the courage to launch into Ducks, Newburyport, but would love to try Ellmann and this novella is about a twentieth of the length.

Here We Are by Graham Swift
I’ve only read one of Swift’s novels, Mothering Sunday, and really liked it. But, if I’m being honest, what got Here We Are into my hands was the beautiful cover.

1976 Club: Review Round-Up

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It’s been another great week of seeing lots of reviews crop up across the blogosphere – thank you everyone for joining in. I haven’t read all the contributions yet, but will make sure to do so. And here is a round-up of the books covered – if I’ve missed yours, please do let me know. And there’s still a day and a half to go, of course, as I click ‘publish’.

Speedboat by Renata Adler
Words and Peace

Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken
She Reads Novels

The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss
Calmgrove

Alas For Her That Me Men by Mary Ann Ashe
Briefer Than Literal Statement

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov
Brona’s Books

Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
What Me Read

A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

A Little Local Murder by Robert Barnard
Bitter Tea and Mystery

Afternoon of a Good Woman by Nina Bawden
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond
Staircase Wit

The Iron Coin by Jorge Luis Borges
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Beard’s Roman Women by Anthony Burgess
Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books

Two pieces by William Burroughs
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Mystery of the Emerald Buddha by Betty Cawanna
Staircase Wit

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
What Me Read

The Question of Max by Amanda Cross
Scones and Chaises Longues

Catch A Falling by Len Deighton
Bitter Tea and Mystery

Deus Irae by Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny
Typings

The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
What Cathy Read Next

Bear by Marian Engel
Stuck in a Book
HeavenAli

Home to Roost by Andrew Garve
Bitter Tea and Mystery
Staircase Wit

Roots by Alex Haley
Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Buried in Print
The Australian Legend

Tintin and the Picaros by Herge
Literary Potpourri

Another Death in Venice by Reginald Hill
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
Winston’s Dad
Finding Time to Write
1streading’s Blog

Hilda’s Wedding by Elizabeth Jolley
Whispering Gums

Orsinian Tales by Ursula Le Guin
Entering the Enchanted Castle

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula Le Guin
[A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else]
Entering the Enchanted Castle
Pining for the West

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann
Stuck in a Book

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
746Books

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively
Relevant Obscurity
Laurie Welch on Instagram
Literary Potpourri

Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes
Annabookbel

The Golden Gate by Alistair MacLean
Literary Potpourri

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Words and Peace

Apalache by Paul Metcalf
Neglected Books

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
Typings

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
Stuck in a Book
HeavenAli
JacquiWine

The Voice of the Sea by Alberto Moravio
1streading’s Blog

Travels by Jan Morris
The Captive Reader

Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley
Stuck in a Book

Short stories by Vladimir Nabokov
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
ANZ Lit Lovers

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Book Word
Bookish Beck
Expendable Mudge

The Plantagenet Prelude by Jean Plaidy
Lizzy’s Literary Life
Hopewell’s Library of Life

The Space Machine by Christopher Priest
1streading’s Blog

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Dolce Bellezza

It Concerns You Too by Herman Sachnowitz
Kinship of All Species

The Girls from the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage
Book Around the Corner

Lucinella by Lore Segal
746Books

The Omen by David Seltzer
Mr Kaggsy

Wilt by Tom Sharpe
Rattlebag and Rhubarb

A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon
Staircase Wit

The Takeover by Muriel Spark
The Takeover

Abel’s Island by William Steig
Becky’s Book Reviews

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
Rick MacDonnell

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor
JacquiWine’s Journal
Reading and Watching the World
Stuck in a Book

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Becky’s Book Reviews

Letters from Father Christmas by JRR Tolkien
Becky’s Book Reviews

1876 by Gore Vidal
What Me Read

How Did I Get To Be Forty… and other atrocities by Judith Viorst
The Captive Reader

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
1streading’s Blog
Anji Hanzel

Meridian by Alice Walker
What Me Read
Reading Envy

Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones
Staircase Wit

Two unsuccessful #1976Club reads…

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I’ll finish off my reviews for the week with a couple of 1976 books that I didn’t really like or dislike. Both had pluses and minuses, but were really just mediocre [in my opinion] and so I shan’t say too much about them. I’ll do another post before the end of the week, rounding up all the many wonderful club reviews I’ve seen.

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann

I bought this a few years ago because of Lehmann’s connections with Leonard and Virginia Woolf – I’d already read his very bitter memoir of working with them, Thrown To The Woolfs. He spent eight years as managing director of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, but his career covered many other literary avenues – running his own publishing house, founding periodicals, writing poetry and biography, and championing many poets. His sister was the novelist Rosamond – and In the Purely Pagan Sense was, I think, his only novel. And it is only scarcely a novel – because the first-person narrator, Jack Marlowe, is clearly more or less Lehmann himself.

As I’ve been writing afterwords for the British Library Women Writers series, about societal changes for women through the early twentieth century, it’s amazing how often I have to resist writing about sex again. It is one of the biggest shifts of the period – not so much what was happening, but what was permissible to write about. And gay sexual relationships seem to have followed a similar trajectory, though not at exactly the same time. When In the Purely Pagan Sense was published, gay sex had been officially legalised in the UK for a handful of years – but clearly Lehmann didn’t yet want to put his own name to the descriptions in this novel.

And, good lord, there is precious little else in In the Purely Pagan Sense. Essentially it is a litany, from adolescence through to his fifties, of Marlowe’s sexual conquests. He doesn’t seem ever to have encountered a man who wasn’t sexually attracted to men – and, specifically, to Marlowe himself. We don’t learn an awful lot about the many men he engages with – usually a brief physical description, particularly the size of their thighs, and whatever happened in the bed, and onto the next. There are two or three who linger for longer periods, and they were quite interesting. But otherwise it’s mostly soft porn, and it all gets a bit tedious.

This is against the backdrop of enormous events of the mid-20th century, and the blurb optimistically says ‘his pursuit of pleasure also provides an accurate and revealing picture of Europe between the wars’, but he is too preoccupied with one sort of ‘revealing’ to bother too much about any other.

Lehmann writes well, and I’m sure he could have written a psychologically much more interesting novel. This one was entertaining to turn pages, but it’s going to a charity shop.

Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley

This biography was the eleventh book published by Persephone Books – and it’s curious that, so early in their publishing history, they issued a book that is such an outlier to their usual output. Being by a man, about a man, quite late in the century, and a biography, it is a Persephone minority in many ways. So surely it must be brilliant? Erm…

I don’t know how well know Grenfell is as a war poet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him mentioned out of the context of this biography – and I didn’t see much of him as a poet within it. As the Persephone site says, ‘so much of it is about his mother’, Ettie. There is far, far more about her – her passions and assignations – than it is about Julian, who only really comes into his own in the final hundred pages of this 400-page book. And when he does, he seems truly awful – relishing war, and seeming to think it universal that people would quite enjoy killing.

Of course, there’s no problem with writing a biography of an unpleasant person, or even several unpleasant people. But I found the whole book a curious mix of good writing and total clumsiness. Mosely relies heavily on quoting letters and the like in full, often one after another. He doesn’t seem to have any sense of pacing or perspective, and rambles in whichever direction catches his attention. We learn almost nothing about Grenfell’s development as a writer or, truly, about him as a writer at all. It seems bizarre to call the book Julian Grenfell and have him such a cipher in the background for most of the book.

And yet, the writing is often really impressive, and I did find myself whirled along by it a lot of the time. Particularly towards the end. Here’s a section (though one where his summary of Julian’s views on war is not reflected in anything else he says):

To feel oneself within the processes of destruction and yet to love life because these are the processes out of which life continually comes – this is dangerous, because destruction can thus be encouraged. This was Ettie’s predicament: she wanted to make war holy. But then Ettie, ashamed of childish feelings, had toc all war by grandiose names; her dangerousness was in the delusion. Julian saw war for what it was – its childishness and terror – and he did not want to describe it otherwise. And so, in spite of his pleasure, he does not seem an encourager of war; pleasure did not involve approbation. That he did not seem to want to go on living was perhaps the sign of Ettie’s victory over him: the growing-up part of him had been too much alone. As a dying hero he could be a child in his mother’s arms again. But part of him would still be amused by this. He could see both the scene and himself in relation to it: this ‘he’ that saw being neither victim nor killer; but codifier; artist.

Julian Grenfell is certainly a very unusual biography, and perhaps that means it will be loved and admired by some – it’s a risky approach, because it can equally leave someone like me nonplussed. If you want something beautifully written, bewilderingly structured, and very coy on the topic of its central subject, then you might well prize Mosley’s book.

Since both books covered here are concerned with the past, neither are very reflective of what was going on in 1976. But I always think, each club year, to see how the previous years of the 20th century were considered from that vantage.

From my week’s books, I had three successes and two not-quites – I think The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore ended up being my favourite of the five.