1930s

Dumb Witness – Agatha Christie

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I’ve mentioned a few times that I have spent the past couple of months immersed in Agatha Christie, being the only author who was able to circumnavigate my reader’s block – everything else I tried was abandoned after a page or two, but I could tear through a Christie in a day or two.  Thankfully (for my general reading) I’m now having more success getting past p.1 with other authors, although it’s still a bit impeded, but I did enjoy getting into Christie mode and wolfing them down.

I haven’t blogged about them, partly because Christie novels are often very similar and partly because you can’t say much without giving the game away – but in the spirit of my Reading Presently project (reading and reviewing 50 books in 2013 that were given to me as presents) I shall write about Dumb Witness, because my lovely colleague Fiona gave it to me when I left my job at OUP (which, incidentally, I am missing furiously.)  It was (is?) published in the US under the rather-better title Poirot Loses A Client.

We had quite a lot of chats about Agatha Christie over the months, but the reason Fiona picked Dumb Witness as my leaving gift wasn’t only because she knew I hadn’t read it – it was because of the dog on the cover.  We had lengthy cat vs. dog arguments (publishers, it turns out, tend to prefer dogs – librarians and book bloggers definitely fall down on the cat side) and this was Fiona’s funny way of making a point – so, of course, I used a bookmark with a cat on it.  Sherpa, in fact, painted on a bookmark by Mum.

Dumb Witness is a Poirot/Hastings novel, which is my favourite type of Christie after a Marple-takes-centre-stage novel (she is sadly sidelined in a few of her own novels).  You may recall an excerpt I posted from Lord Edgware Dies, in which the delightful relationship between Hastings and Poirot is perfectly illustrated.  More of the same in Dumb Witness – Hastings constantly makes suppositions and conclusions which Poirot bats away in frustration, never revealing quite why Hastings is wrong (other than his touching readiness to believe what he is told by almost anyone) and holding his own cards close to his chest.

I shall say very little about the plot, because (unlike most novels I read) the plot is of course crucially important in a detective novel – so I’ll just mention the premise.  Poirot wishes to follow up a letter he has received Miss Emily Arundell, asking him to investigate an accident she had – falling down the stairs, after tripping on her dog’s ball.  Her letter isn’t very coherent, but she seems to be suggesting that it may not have been an accident… Although she recovers from the minor injuries sustained in this fall, by the time Poirot receives the letter – mysteriously, two months later – she has died from a long-standing liver complaint.  Poirot decides to accept the posthumous commission into attempted murder…

As far as plot and solution go, Dumb Witness has all the satisfying twists, turns, and surprises that we all expect from a Christie novel – it certainly doesn’t disappoint on this front, and this is one especially excellent twist, albeit with a few cruder details that are not worthy of her name on the cover.  But, alongside that, I loved Poirot’s determination that attempted murder should be investigated and prosecuted, whether or not the victim was dead – Hastings, for all his gentlemanly bluster, can’t see why it is a matter of importance.  Poirot’s moral backbone is one of the reasons I find him such a fantastic character.

And the dog?  Yes, Fiona, the dog (Bob) is rather fun, and Hastings is predictably wonderful about him – although I did find the amount of words put in the mouth of Bob a little off-putting.  It reminded me of Enid Blyton’s technique of including passages along the lines of “‘”Woof’, said Timmy, as if to say ‘They’ve gone to the cove to fetch the boat’.”  There, I believe, I have spotted the major flaw with Dumb Witness – or at least, an aspect where it could be improved.  It would be a far superior novel, had it featured a cat.

Winifred and Virginia

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I’m sure that most of us have authors who follow us around – not literally, you understand, although I swear Ian McEwan keeps getting on the same bus as me and the authorities have been notified.  No, I mean the authors we keep seeing mentioned, or on the shelves of bookshops, or recommended to us, and we’re sure that we’ll love them, only… we never quite get around to reading them.

Well, Winifred Holtby is one such author for me.  I’ve known about South Riding for about as long as I’ve been reading novels, and it used to be in more or less every bookshop I visited.  Eventually I took the hint, and bought it.  And, of course, there has been the recent television series, not to mention the beautiful Virago reprints.  So… I read her book about Virginia Woolf.

Yep, I’ve still not read any Holtby fiction, even though my shelves are full of the stuff, but I have read Virginia Woolf (1932), which my friend Lucy gave me back in 2010.  Oh, and having mentioned in my Felixstowe talk that I sometimes put sketches on SiaB, I realised that (a) I still need to make my Year Six Sketches post, and (b) I haven’t put up a sketch for ages.  So there’s one of an early draft of the cover for Holtby’s book…

You’ve got to admire Winifred Holtby’s guts for writing about Virginia Woolf in the early 1930s.  Not only was Virginia Woolf alive, but their respective reputations were even further apart than they are now – Holtby was a respected writer on women’s issues, but as a novelist, she was realms away from Woolf.  In a literary society more firmly divided into highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow than we would now recognise, it was audacious (to say the least) for Holtby to dare to write critically about Virginia Woolf.  I use the word ‘critically’ in its neutral sense – that is, an assessment.  Holtby subtitled this ‘a critical memoir’, and it is far closer to an analysis and critique than it is a memoir – indeed, let’s call a spade a spade.  For much of the time, Virginia Woolf is an appreciation.  And that suits me down to the ground.  Reading Holtby’s book reminded me that Woolf is, in my opinion, the greatest writer of the 20th century.

Let’s set the scene.  When Holtby was writing this, Woolf had recently published The Waves, easily her most experimental book.  (I imagine few people would have guessed that her final two novels [The Years and Between the Acts] would be a return to more traditional narratives; until that point, her writing had got steadily more and more experimental with prose style).  So she had certainly done enough to establish her place as one of the best and most important writers alive, with Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves (sometimes known as The Big Four, possibly only by me) under her belt – but, of course, none of her diaries or letters had been published.  It is very intriguing to read an account by a woman who knew her tangentially, and had met and corresponded with her, and yet knew so much less of her internal life than has been revealed now to anybody who buys a copy of A Writer’s Diary (which is exceptionally brilliant) or flicks through the six volumes of her letters.

But Holtby can do what none of us can do, and give a firsthand impression of Woolf:

Tall, graceful, exceedingly slender, she creates an impression of curbed but indestructible vitality.  An artist, sitting near her during a series of concerts given by the Léner quartette, said afterwards, “She makes me think of a frozen falcon; she is so still, and so alert.”  The description does in some measure suggest her elegance veiling such intellectual decision, her shyness lit by such irony.  Meeting all contacts with the world lightly yet courageously; withdrawn, but not disdainful; in love with experience yet exceedingly fastidious; detached, yet keenly, almost passionately interested; she watches the strange postures and pretences of humanity, preserving beneath her formidable dignity and restraint a generosity, a belief, and a radiant acceptance of life unsurprised by any living writer.
The biographical section of Virginia Woolf focuses chiefly on what it would be like to grow up with Leslie Stephen for a father – a man of letters, known for his work on the Dictionary of National Biography – and doesn’t look much at her adulthood, marriage, or the Bloomsbury group.  Perhaps that is to be expected, knowing that Woolf would read it (and not being a prurient person – what halcyon days those must have been!)  So, instead, she turns her attention to Woolf’s writing.

I have to say, I was really surprised by how modern Holtby’s criticism felt. I knew that Woolf was much admired during her lifetime, but so much of Holtby’s critique was so adroit, and covered arguments I’d assumed were rather more recent (such as comparing Jacob’s Room to filmmaking, or noting the importance of time in Mrs Dalloway.)  Even her assessment of Woolf’s greatest and least achievements seemed to me completely to reflect decades of later discussion – with Night and Day at the bottom, and The Waves at the top.  Comments like this one were illuminating:

She has never understood the stupid.  Whenever she tries to draw a character like Betty Flanders or Mrs. Denham, she loses her way.  They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen. Her imagination falters on the threshold of stupidity.
How beautifully phrased, too!  As I say, I’ve not read any of Holtby’s fiction – I have read part of Women and the odd essay – but it seems that something of the precision and beauty of Woolf’s writing has been picked up by Holtby, and seems to lace her sentences here.  And that mention of Jane Austen reminds me – Holtby names a chapter ‘Virginia Woolf is not Jane Austen’.  Curious that the distinction was felt necessary, but I think Holtby puts forth an excellent point when she says that Night and Day is a somewhat failed attempt to write in the Austen school of fiction.  One of the reasons it doesn’t work is explained by Holtby:

The events of a novel must appear important.  Trivial though they may be, they must create the illusion that they fill the universe.  Jane Austen was able to create the illusion that a delayed proposal or an invitation to a ball could fill the universe, because, so far as her little world was concerned, it did.  But in England during the twentieth-century war no single domestic activity was without reference to that tremendous, undomestic violence.  At any moment a telegram might arrive; the sirens might signal an approaching air-raid; somebody might come unexpectedly home on leave.  The interest of every occupation, from buying groceries to writing a love-letter, was in some measure deflected to France, Egypt or Gallipoli.
But reading about Woolf’s early, non-experimental fiction probably isn’t why anybody would pick up a critical memoir.  Instead, I was keen to find out how her characteristic, Modernist prose struck Holtby.  Woolf is now famous for distorting the sentence, for stream of consciousness writing and playing with the conventions of prose.  She is not alone in doing this, of course, but she is perhaps the best.  Well, Holtby writes brilliantly about that too.  This paragraph describes the earliest of Woolf’s experimental novels, Jacob’s Room, and the segue from that to her Big Four:

She had thrown overboard much that had been commonly considered indispensable to the novel: descriptions of places and families, explanations of environment, a plot of external action, dramatic scenes, climaxes, conclusions, and almost all those link-sentences which bind one episode to the next.  But much remained to her.  She had retained her preoccupation with life and death, with character, and with the effect of characters grouped and inter-acting.  She had kept her consciousness of time and movement.  She knew how present and past are interwoven, and how to-day depends so much upon knowledge and memory of yesterday, and fear for or confidence in to-morrow.  She was still preoccupied with moral values; she was immensely excited about form and the way in which the patterns of life grow more and more complex as one regards them.  And she was more sure now both of herself and of her public.  She dared take greater risks with them, confident that they would not let her down.
Yes, Winifred, yes!  What an excellent understanding of the elements of the traditional novel that Woolf kept, and those that she left behind her.  Which does beg the question – if she was able to identify Woolf’s genius so perfectly, and analyse the techniques she used, why did Holtby herself not try them?  (Or at least, I have always assumed her novels followed a more traditional format.)  To some is given the gift of being at the forefront of literature; to others, the ability to recognise it.  Each needs the other.

Not that Woolf seems to have been particularly grateful.  Marion Shaw’s introduction (in the edition I have, pictured) is useful on the myriad mentions Woolf makes of the biography in her letters and diaries.  I shan’t go into detail, but essentially Woolf was rather patronising and contradictory – par for the course for a woman who wrote wonderfully, but would have been rather a nightmare to know, particularly if one happened to be poorer or younger than her (and she’d have hated me for being a Christian).  Would Holtby have minded about this reception?  I rather think she might – she clearly puts Woolf-the-writer on a pedestal, and probably wanted to please Woolf-the-woman too.  Or, who knows, maybe Holtby would have been satisfied with having paid homage to the novels, and not worried too much about the author?

The only biography I’ve read of Virginia Woolf before this one was Hermione Lee’s exhaustive tome – and, my goodness, it was exhausting too.  Very scholarly, incredibly thorough, and quite a chore to read.  For my money, Winifred Holtby’s is much more worthwhile for the average reader – a unique perspective on one of Britain’s greatest writers, by one whose fiction I now really must read…

Four Hedges – Clare Leighton

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I have no recollection why I put Clare Leighton’s Four Hedges (1935) on my Amazon wishlist, but I’m assuming it was either because of a blogger or something Slightly Foxed mentioned (any guesses/answers?) – but it was enough to get my good friend Clare (not Leighton) to send this beautiful Little Toller edition to me for my birthday last year.  And where better to read a book about a garden, thought I, than in a garden.  So over the past few days, I’ve been reading it in study breaks from doing DPhil editing.  And reading it in a hammock.  Jealous at all?

It really wouldn’t have worked to read Four Hedges in a city, because it is such a hymn to nature.  It’s non-fiction (I always seem to forget that you can’t know these things unless I mention them), and tells of Leighton’s experience creating a garden, through the course of a year – the year isn’t dated, but the garden is about three years old, and presumably it wasn’t long before the book was published in 1935.

As you might have guessed by the cover, the book is filled with Leighton’s woodcuts (I assume ‘engravings on wood’, as they are termed in the book, are the same as woodcuts?)  It was this that undoubtedly attracted me to Four Hedges – there is something so simply and dignified about a woodcut; such a celebration of the forms and movements of nature.  Leighton writes at one point that people don’t appreciate the feel of nature enough, valuing only sight, sound, and smell – and, later, writes that flowers are considered too much for their colours, rather than their shapes.  Woodcuts are a rebuttal to both these errors, aren’t?  Without colour, they somehow offer texture as well as appearance – at least, they do in the hands of a craftswoman like Leighton.

As you would suppose, a lot of her woodcuts show plants – and I can only presume that they are accurate, and might well be of especial interest to the botanist.  For my part, I particularly appreciated the ones with people or animals in them.  For I am almost entirely ignorant about nature.

That’s a shocking thing to confess, for a country-boy who is desperate to get away from the city (even a city as beautiful as Oxford) and live in the countryside.  Right now I’m in my parents’ garden in Somerset, listening to the cows in the adjacent field eating parts of the hedge (indeed, I can see a couple about two metres to my left) and I love it.  One day I will write properly about my deep love for everything about villages.  But, with nature, my love is passionate but uninformed.  I love nature in the way that I love friends – joyously living alongside them, discovering more about them when they want to share, but not needing to know everything in order to love.

But I was a bit nervous before starting Four Hedges.  A few years ago I read some letters between gardeners and, while I enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship, I didn’t have much of a clue what was going on.  I don’t know when certain plants need bedding, or when others need pruning.  Latin names are so many Flowerus floweriori to me.  I love gardens, but I love walking through them and not doing an ounce of work in them – because I loathe gardening.

Luckily, Four Hedges was still perfect for me.  True, Leighton took it for granted that her reader loved gardening, and would be entirely unable to resist weeding (believe me, I resist it very easily), but she also writes in a way that can be loved by anybody.  She writes about watching birds being reared and caterpillars metamorphosing; she writes about a baby goat moving into a nearby field, and the perils of windy days – most importantly of all, she writes about her thoughts, feelings, and responses.  It is a delight to hear how thrilled she is about bulb catalogues, and I was swept away with her admiration for certain weeds, reclaiming them from gardeners’ snobbery.

It struck me how timeless this book was.  No mention is made of experiences outside the garden – barely even the house, to the extent that I thought there wasn’t a house for a great part of the book.  Certainly no hints of a forthcoming war (which was obvious to most by the mid-’30s) or anything like that.  Everything in Four Hedges could be happeningin 1835, or today – the only anachronism would be the non-electric mower and the scythe.  (Having said that, in the last place I lived in Oxford, our landlords only gave us a non-electric mower – one of their very many oddities.)

Although Leighton does not write humorously (nor intends to), there is a great deal in common between joyful writing and comic writing.  They reach towards the same goal, of sharing and bringing delight – and Leighton is so joyful, so able to find excitement and hope in the smallest detail, that it is a lift to the spirits to read her words, even for the non-gardener.  And which entirely humourless gardener, after all, would write this:

We should never take our gardens too seriously.  It is hard to curb ourselves in this, if we have any love for our plants, even as it is difficult to take a walk round the garden without pulling up weeds.  But too professional an attitude is apt to give us the same taut, strained feeling that comes into the faces and lives of all specialists.  It is better to have a few weeds and untidy edges to our flowers beds, and to enjoy our garden, than to allow ourselves to be dominated by it.  To be able occasionally to shut our eyes to weeds is a great art.  Let us relax in our gardens, and as a dear old countrywoman used to say, let us “poddle” in them.  We waste else the very beauty for which we have worked.
I am never in danger of taking gardening too seriously, but it is refreshing to hear Leighton say this nonetheless – any expert or avid hobbyist should include humour and self-awareness in their activities, shouldn’t they?  Now excuse me while I tend to my book collection – it’s getting rather overgrown, and it’s threatening to take over the floor.  A bit of weeding, and it’ll be fine.

Bassett – Stella Gibbons

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When I attended a middlebrow conference last year, my friend Terri was talking about boarding house novels – and one particularly grabbed my attention.  As you’ll have guessed from the title of this blog post, it was Bassett by Stella Gibbons – whose Cold Comfort Farm I, of course, love, and whose Westwood was wonderful in a very different way. Clicking on those titles will take you to reviews which explain what I loved about them… and now I can add Bassett to the fold, thanks to my friend Barbara giving it to me for my birthday last November.  Indeed, if it had just been about the boarding house, this would be on my 50 Books You Must Read list, and I’d be screaming from the rooftops.  Read on, dear reader…

Bassett (1933) kicks off with the glorious Miss Hilda Baker, and I think the best way to describe her is: imagine Paul Gallico’s Mrs. ‘arris if she were written by Stella Gibbons. Which, of course, she is. ‘She dressed neatly and badly in ugly little hats and ugly little necklaces’, works cutting patterns for a dressmakers, and her one vocation in life is identifying when other people are ‘sassing’ her, and reprimanding them for it. Miss Baker has managed to save some money, and is intrigued when she sees in a paper that another lady is looking to turn her home into a boarding house, and is looking for someone to run it with her.  Determined not to be cheated out of her savings, but intrigued, Miss Baker writes to The Tower, Crane Hill, Bassett – and receives this wonderful reply, which is too wonderful not to quote in full (with strong reservations about one racist sentence, of course):

Dear Miss Baker,
After much earnest thought I have decided that yours is the most suitable letter I have received as a result of the notice which appeared in Town and Country.  I am sure that the house could be made a success.  It is not damp.  Some of the letters were most unsuitable.  There was one from a Mr. Arthur Craft.  Frequent buses, but rather a long walk to them! ! !  It is so difficult, in these days, to know what to do for the best.  Mr. Craft suggested a Club.  I have a geyser and there are beautiful views.  Perhaps we could lay out the tennis court again in the field behind the house.  We are six miles from the station, but the buses run past the bottom of the hill.  I thought we might take Indians (not Negroes of course) as guests.  Is afternoon tea included do you know?  I believe not.  Perhaps you will let me know what you think.  Or perhaps it would be better if you came down one Saturday.  It is easier to go to Reading and take the bus.  I could meet you, if we decided to meet in Town, at half past three in the Clock Department.  Perhaps you would suggest a day, if Saturday doesn’t suit you. (This Saturday is not good for me I am afraid, as I have my W.I.)  But of course, they close on Saturday afternoons.  Will you let me know, by return if possible, whether you will meet me as arranged.
Yours faithfully, Eleanor Amy Padsoe.
P.S. – It is on clay soil, but some of it is on chalk.  Very healthy! ! !
That, ladies and gentlemen, is Miss Padsoe – and isn’t she a wonder?

As with Scoop, which I wrote about recently, incompatibility makes a great start for a comic novel.  Long story short, after going to see The Tower (and finding Miss Padsoe as barmy as the letter suggests), Miss Baker decides against the venture – but is then made redundant and can’t think what else to do.  So, off on a train she hops to Bassett once more.  Here’s an indication of their current assessment of each other…

And she thrust herself half out of the window again, waving vigorously and giving a false, toothy smile, and wishing Miss Padsoe looked a bit smarter.  Like a rag-bag, that’s what she was, and an old-fashioned one at that.

And Miss Padsoe, greeting Miss Baker with a convulsive flutter of her umbrella-less hand and an equally false and toothy smile, found time to wish amid much mental distress that Miss Baker did not look exactly like an under-housemaid.
Miss Padsoe’s mental distress is caused chiefly by her mother-and-daughter cook and maid, who have been cheating and neglecting her, and have now locked her out of her own house.  The sass of servants is like a red rag to a bull for Miss Baker, and she goes off to sort things out… It’s all very funny, filled with the sort of nonsensical dialogue I love (“‘Remember’? I’ll give her ‘Remember’!”) and all rather touching too – the first signs that Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe will become friends.  It’s not as rammed-down-your-throat heart-warming as that sounds (and as it might threaten to be in the hands of Paul Gallico, much as I love him!) but it’s rather lovely.

As I said at the beginning of this review, had Bassett concentrated exclusively on these ladies setting up their boarding house, with Gibbons’ delicious turn of phrase and moments of irony, this would be one of my all-time favourite novels.  Sadly, Bassett is diluted by the goings-on of another family in the village, and this takes up most of the second half of the novel…

Queenie is a 20-something girl who has come to live as a companion to Mrs. Shelling – and gets to know her children George and Bell, who are about her age.  They have progressive views about morality and romance, as does Queenie, and… well, one thing leads to another, and it becomes about Queenie falling in love with George, and the struggles this causes, involving class, morality, aspirations…

Apparently Queenie and her situation was very autobiographical, but I have to say that I found the whole thing a bit of an unnecessary addition.  It certainly wasn’t awful, and my response might well only be my impatience and boredom with any novel focuses on the anxieties of youthful ardour, but it seemed such a shame to take the attention away from such interesting and amusing protagonists.  And despite some attempts to combine the two strands, Gibbons’s seems to give up at one point, and from then on just writes about Queenie et al – the two storylines don’t blend at all neatly.

But that is a fairly small reservation, caused chiefly by the excellence of the first half of Bassett – so not a bad fault to have, all things considered!
Vintage Books have brought Stella Gibbons’ books back into print, some with absolutely glorious covers – Bassett is one of those which is only (I believe) Kindle or print on demand, so doesn’t get the same beautiful cover illustrations, but I’m not going to quibble – I’m so grateful to Vintage for making this brilliant novel accessible, and to Barbara for giving me a copy!

Scoop – Evelyn Waugh

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A few bloggers seem to have been reading Evelyn Waugh at the same time as each other – Rachel wrote about Decline and Fall and Ali wrote about Vile Bodies – only my review is coming rather belatedly, as I finished Scoop (1938) about a month ago. Oops. But it’s great, and very funny, so better late than never, I’m getting my review specs on (they’re the same as my usual specs, by the way.)

This is my fourth Evelyn Waugh novel, and I still haven’t read Brideshead Revisited.  I found the first couple too cruel for my liking, then thought The Loved One had the perfect mix of barbed wit and affection.  Well, Scoop continues in this vein – ridiculous and farcical things happen, people are mean and selfish, but always with a covering of good-humour – helped, chiefly, by the incredibly loveable lead character.

Like Decline and Fall, Scoop opens with a series of coincidences and misunderstandings (unlikely, but not impossible) which propel the central plot.  Unlike Decline and Fall, these misunderstandings are not malicious – but they end up with the wrong Mr. Boot being sent to the Republic of Ishmaelia by the Daily Beast.  Instead of the pushy young John Boot who’s been badgering the absolutely wonderful character Mrs. Stitch (the novel opens with her multi-tasking – on the telephone, directing the painter, answering correspondence, doing a crossword, and helping her daughter with her homework at the same time) to get him sent out there, it is William Boot, writer of the rural matters column Lush Places, who is accidentally sent.  Boot is an affable, quiet, honest young man (supposedly in his 20s, but he never comes across as younger than 45) who wants to live out his life in rural peace.  Who better to mire in the world of sensationalist foreign reporting?

Before he sets sail, there are my favourite scenes in the novel – where William Boot is meeting with an editor of the newspaper, Mr. Salter.  William thinks that he is going to be reprimanded for his sister mischievously exchanging ‘badger’ and ‘great crested grebe’ in his copy – which leads to a brilliant cross-purposes conversation with Mr. Salter, who has never stepped a foot outside London, and has the impression (shared by so many Londoners today!) that people from the countryside do nothing but drink pear cider and lean on gates.  As a staunch countryside person at heart, I laughed heartily at the limited views of the town-dweller, and the horror he felt when the great crested grebe reared its great crested head…

But things are sorted out, of course, and off William goes to the Republic of Ishmaelia (when it is suggested to him that he might well be fired if he refuses to go.)  Before we get there, I want to share this wonderful snippet of the way Mr. Salter deals with the newspaper’s proprietor:

Mr. Salter’s side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent.  When Lord Copper was right he said, “Definitely, Lord Copper”; when he was wrong, “Up to a point.””Let me see, what’s the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn’t it?””Up to a point, Lord Copper.””And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn’t it?””Definitely, Lord Copper.”
So practical! So wise! So deliciously funny on Waugh’s part.  It’s also a taste of his satirical tongue – for that is what the rest of Scoop essentially performs; a satire on journalism.

Boot and a dozen or so other journalists land in Ishmaelia, where nothing whatsoever seems to be happening, and have to send back copy in the form of telegrams.  While some journalists are fabricating spies and making the most out of the smallest incident, this is a telegram Boot sends back:

NO NEWS AT PRESENT THANKS WARNING ABOUT CABLING PRICES BUT IVE PLENTY MONEY LEFT AND ANYWAY WHEN I OFFERED TO PAY WIRELESS MAN SAID IT WAS ALL RIGHT PAID OTHER END RAINING HARD HOPE ALL WELL ENGLAND WILL CABLE AGAIN IF ANY NEWS.
Waugh has great fun crafting the telegrams from both sides, and it is here that his satire of journalism is both loudest and (I daresay) closest to the bone – with words like ‘ESSENTIALIST’ and ‘SOONLIEST’ abounding, not to mention ‘UNRECEIVED’ and ‘UPFOLLOW’.

The satire becomes rather a farce, as most of the journalists head off to a place which doesn’t exist, and the most famous reporter sends in his copy without even visiting the country.  It’s all very amusing and enjoyably broad, which makes the inclusion of a romantic interest (even one who is desperate for him to store rocks for her, and suggests that he marry her so that her extant husband can become British by extension) feels a little out of kilter, and I wouldn’t have been sad if Kätchen hadn’t been included.

Indeed, despite the focus of the novel being Ishmaelia – and Boot being adorable – I preferred the scenes set in England.  Perhaps that’s because I could understand a comedy on office politics, rural matters, and eccentric families (about a dozen bedridden relatives and servants fill his country pile) better than foreign reporting, or perhaps Waugh was on firmer footing himself.  Either way, I was always pleased when things turned back to Blighty.

As a round-peg-in-a-square-hole story, Waugh could scarcely choose a man less fitted for the role he is forced into – and that, of course, is the intended crux of Scoop‘s humour.  It’s just a bonus that he does everything else so well on top of this – otherwise the joke would probably have worn thin.  And, as I say, there is enough good-humour and camaraderie in Scoop to prevent Waugh’s mean streak from dominating, and so gentle souls like me are left entirely free to revel in the farcical hilarity, and not get anxious about the victims!

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding: Readalong

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Right, books at the ready!  I’ve re-read Cheerful Weather for the Wedding ahead of seeing the new film (which I’ll be doing in one week’s time, at The Phoenix in Oxford, which has a one-night-only screening) and I’m opening up this post for discussion.  It won’t be one of my usual reviews, because I’ve actually already reviewed the novel (novella?) here, but more of a hub for conversation about it.

But I’ll give you a quick overview of my thoughts on re-reading Cheerful Weather for the Wedding.  It might be worth popping over and reading my thoughts in 2009, if you’d be so kind… basically I loved every moment, particularly the hilarious secondary characters.  Most memorable were mad Nellie (who spouts irrelevant conversations she has had with the plumber, while addressing the tea-tray) and brothers Tom and Robert, who come to a contretemps over the latter’s unorthodox emerald socks.  (I’m assuming that everyone knows the basic plot by this point – Dolly is uncertainly preparing for her wedding to Owen, with a houseful of eccentrics helping and hindering her – and a bottle of rum within reach.)

This time around, I found the novella a little less amusing, but mostly because I already knew where all my favourite bits were coming.  It is testament to Strachey’s humour that Nellie, Tom, and Robert have remained firmly fixed in my mind, down to their individual lines (“Put your head in a bag” still makes me grin) but inevitably surreal moments of humour heavily rely upon novelty.  Her cast of near-grotesques were still a delight, but not quite as much the second time around.

This, however, left me more able to appreciate other aspects to Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (and not just that sublime cover – I kept closing the book just to stare at it for a bit longer.)  I’d appreciated Strachey as a comic writer, but hadn’t really noticed how gorgeous some of her other writing is.  Her propensity to describe every character’s eyes when they arrive on the scene was slightly unnerving, but depictions of buildings and countryside were really lovely, and contrasted well with the surreal descriptions of people.  I couldn’t resist this excerpt…

Dolly’s white-enamelled Edwardian bedroom jutted out over the kitchen garden, in a sort of little turret.  It was at the top of the house, and reached by a steep and narrow stairway.  Coming in at the bedroom door, one might easily imagine one’s self to be up in the air in a balloon, or else inside a lighthouse.  One saw only dazzling white light coming in at the big windows on all sides, and through the bow window directly opposite the door shone the pale blue sea-bay of Malton.

This morning the countryside, through each and all of the big windows, was bright golden in the sunlight.  On the sides of a little hill quite close, beyond the railway cutting, grew a thick hazel copse.  To-day, with the sun shining through its bare branches, this seemed to be not trees at all, but merely folds of something diaphanous floating along the surface of the hillside – a flock of brown vapours, here dark, there light – lit up in the sunshine.

And all over the countryside this morning the bare copses looked like these brown gossamer scarves; they billowed over the hillsides, here opalescent, there obscure – according to the sunlight and shadow among their bronze and gauzy foldings.
It can’t just be me who wants to move in immediately?  But I couldn’t leave you without a moment of Strachey’s wonderfully wicked humour…

“How are your lectures going?” asked Kitty of Joseph, a kind of desperate intenseness in her voice and face.  This was her style of the moment with the male sex.
And now over to you!  If you post a review of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding during the week, please pop a link in the comments (I’ll probably do a round-up later in the week) but I’d also like this to be a place for discussion – do reply to each other’s comments, and I’ll join in, and it’ll be FUN.  I won’t post for another two or three days, to give everyone a chance to see this.

Here are some questions to start things going:

Did you enjoy the novel, for starters!?

What do you think Julia Strachey was trying to achieve – what sort of book was she trying to write?

Why do you think Strachey made it so short?  Would it have worked as a longer novel?

Who were your favourite characters?

If you’re re-reading, how did you opinion change this time?

How do you think it will translate to cinema?

The House in Paris (in which we learn that Darlene is right, is garlanded with flowers &c. &c.)

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A while ago the very lovely (but, it turns out, fiercely competitive) Darlene laid down a challenge.  She would read a book by my beloved Ivy Compton-Burnett, if I would give her beloved Elizabeth Bowen a second chance.  “Game on!” said I, always happy to give respected authors two or three tries – but she comfortably beat me with her fabulous review of Manservant and Maidservant in early September, which you can read here.  I took my time, but I’ve finally managed to keep up my end of the bargain, and on my trip to the Lake District I managed to finish The House in Paris (1935).

Well, Darlene, you were right.  I didn’t enjoy The Last September at all, but The House in Paris is beautiful.  Cancel the book burning, Bowen is back in business.

The novel has a layered narrative.  The first and last quarters (called ‘Present’) take place in the Parisian house, belonging to Mme. and Miss Fisher, where young Henrietta is spending the day between one chaperone and another.  Coincidentally, Leopold is also there – nervously waiting to meet his biological mother for the first time in his life.  The middle half reverts to ‘Past’, and concerns Leopold’s mother Karen, who knew Miss Fisher (Naomi) when they were ten years younger, and the affair which led to Leonard’s conception.

It is the beginning and end of The House in Paris that I loved, and I half wish that Bowen hadn’t left the house in Paris at all.  The scenes between Henrietta and Leopold are so perfectly judged that it seems impossible that writing can be so beautiful as well as so plausible – surely Bowen (one thinks) would have to sacrifice one to the other?  But no, every moment described is a new insight into the way children interact, and beautiful because true.  This is the first conversation they have while alone together:
He said: “Miss Fisher says you’re here for the day.”

“I’m just crossing Paris,” Henrietta said with cosmopolitan ease.

“Is that your monkey?”

“Yes.  I’ve had him ever since I was born.”

“Oh,” said Leopold, looking at Charles vaguely.

“How old are you?” Henrietta enquired.

“Nine.”

“Oh, I’m eleven.”

“Miss Fisher’s mother is very ill,” said Leopold.  He sat down in an armchair with his knees crossed and, bending forward, studied a cut on one knee.  The four velvet armchairs, each pulled out a little way from a corner, faced in on the round table that reflected the window and had in its centre a tufted chenille mat.  He added, wrinkling his forehead: “So Mariette says, at least.”

“Who is Mariette?”

“Their maid.  She wanted to help me dress.”

“Do you think she is going to die?” said Henrietta.

“I don’t expect so.  I shall be out, anyway.”

“That would be awful,” said Henrietta, shocked.

“I suppose it would.  But I don’t know Mme. Fisher.”

It is never natural for children to smile at each other: Henrietta and Leopold kept their natural formality.  She said: “You see, I’d been hoping Miss Fisher was going to take me out.” Leopold, looking about the salon, said: “Yes, this must be a rather funny way to see Paris.”  But he spoke with detachment; it did not matter to him.In the first quarter of the novel, little takes place to propel the plot.  Henrietta meets Mme. Fisher (slowly, wryly, dying in a bedroom upstairs); Leopold snoops through Miss Fisher’s letters, and finds letters from his adoptive mother and Henrietta’s grandmother, and an empty envelope from his biological mother.  What makes this section so special is the gradual, engaging way Bowen builds up the relationship between the children – character is paramount.  Although they develop a fragile and fleeting friendship, they have the child’s selfish indifference to each other’s feelings – as Bowen expresses so strikingly:
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify.  There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. This passage demonstrates one of the qualities of Bowen’s writing that I most admired and liked – the way she moves from the specific to the general.  Authors are often told “show, don’t tell”, and Bowen finds an original way to follow this maxim while subtly evading it.  She never plays too heavy a narrative hand with the characters, letting their actions and words form their personalities, but then she steps back a pace or two, and draws general conclusions about children or lovers or parents or people in general.  She shows with the cast, and tells about the world.

As the first part closes, Leopold learns that: “Your mother is not coming; she cannot come.”  Isn’t that sentence delightfully Woolfean, with its balance and half-repetition?  No wonder people have often drawn comparison between Bowen and Woolf – including Byatt, in her excellent introduction (which, as always, ought to be read last – and pleasantly blends personal and critical aspects.)

actual houses in Paris wot I saw once

In the central section of the novel, we meet Leopold’s mother Karen, and witness her relationship with Naomi’s fiancee Max.  Although longer than the other sections put together, ‘Past’ felt less substantial to me.  It is, essentially, the very gradual and incremental development of the relationship between Karen and Max – from distrust to love, and… onwards.  But here I shall draw a veil over the ensuing plot for, although plot is hardly primary in Bowen, it cannot be called negligible, and I shall not spoil it.

And, finally, back to Henrietta and Leopold, as they make proclamations about their lives, in the midst of situations they cannot understand for more than a moment at a time – and eventually they part.  Without giving away too much, I shall remove one possibility – they do not end up living like brother and sister; they will probably never see each other again.  Their encounter has been fleeting, and wholly at the whim of the various adults (present and absent) whose decisions so heavily influence the children’s lives.  As a conceit it is not entirely natural, but we can forgive Bowen that – it structures the narrative perfectly, and gives opportunity for so many other moments where the natural triumphs against the artificiality of fiction: time and again novelistic cliches and truisms have the carpet whipped from under their feet, and the reader thinks “Oh, of course, that is what would happen.”

Above all, Bowen is a wordsmith.  She crafts sentences so perfectly.  They are not of the variety that can be read in a hurry – perhaps that is where I went wrong with The Last September – but, with careful attention and a willingness to dive into the world of words she creates – it is an effort which is very much repaid.  Darlene, thank you for refusing to let me declare Bowen done and dusted – she’s now very much back in my good books.  You might have won this competition, but this is a case of everyone’s-a-winner, right?

Others who got Stuck into it:

 “From the very first page of The House in Paris when Henrietta is collected from the train station by Miss Fisher, both wearing cerise cockades so as to recognize one another, I adored this book.  Elizabeth Bowen’s genius as a writer is staggering and to anyone who doesn’t agree or simply does not get on with her…I could weep for you.” – Darlene, Roses Over A Cottage Door

 “The pages were awash with beautiful, sonorous language formed into exquisite sentences that swirled through my thoughts, leaving lingering, evocative images behind.” – Rachel, Book Snob [Simon: this review is much better than mine!  Go and check it out if you haven’t done already.]

 “I wanted to love Elizabeth Bowen; one of my most respected history profs at university cited Bowen as her absolute favourite author and ever since then I’ve intended to read her. I liked this book, I even found some quotable passages which I delightedly copied out. But somehow it didn’t coalesce into a Great Read, at least not for me.” – Melwyk, The Indextrious Reader

The Outward Room – Millen Brand

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photo source

A long, long time ago (I can still remember) I was sent Millen Brand’s The Outward Room (1937) to review – in fact, I had asked for it – and it has taken me absurdly long to read it, and a couple months longer to get around to reviewing it.  But it is really very good indeed, and worth the wait.

The reason I asked for this NYRB edition was (apart from the fact that all NYRB editions are beautiful and belong on my bookshelf) that I remembered The Outward Room being mentioned once in a Persephone Quarterly – and it fixed in my mind.

The Outward Room starts with Harriet Demuth’s life in some sort of mental hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a family tragedy.  Estranged from her parents and frustrated by her doctor’s blinkered obsession with Freudian analysis, Harriet’s life has been sucked dry of anything but routine and confusion.  Her ability to articulate her personality and self have been stifled by illness and by the unsympathetic institution which came as a consequence to it.  Brand writes this section very well, but it is necessarily claustrophobic and begins to stifle the reader.

But Harriet escapes.

She makes her way to New York, pawns her brother’s ring, and lives hand-to-mouth for some time.  The Great Depression has given the city a desperate air, and she struggles to find the means of supporting herself – her first ‘job interview’ is for a single day’s work, and consists of standing in a long row with many other women, and not being pointed at.  There are some poignant scenes where Harriet first rents, and then must leave, a tiny apartment.

After about 100 pages, Harriet is sitting in a late-night cafe, unable to afford a cup of coffee, when a stranger approaches and offers to buy her the drink.  John (for this is his name) invites her back to his house for food and shelter and – desperate, and a little naive perhaps – she goes.  At this point I expected awful things to happen to her, or for John’s apparent kindness to (at least) be revealed as covering ulterior motives.  What I wasn’t prepared for was a gentle, gradual, and quite beautiful love story.  Through simple, ordinary scenes of everyday life and undramatic conversations, Harriet and John fall in love and become necessary to one another.  We see some of Harriet at work, and the friend she makes Anna; we see a neighbour or two – but the beauty of The Outward Room is the quiet unfolding of a believable, unassuming relationship.

I don’t normally just give all the plot in a series of paragraphs like that – I usually try to break it up with some of my thoughts about the author’s approach, etc. – but it seemed important to lay out the  structure of The Outward Room and the direction the novel takes before addressing the issue of style.  They are so interrelated.  At the beginning, Brand opts for quite a lot of the disjointed and fragmentary prose that is often used to represent mental disharmony or any kind of mental illness.  Personally, I find it very easy to overuse this style.  Stream of consciousness has of course often been used to portray thoughts, especially of a disturbed mind – but I think it has to be done exceptionally well (we’re talking Woolf-standards well) to work, otherwise it can simply seem sloppy.  These were the sections of The Outward Room which I found least convincing.

However, when Brand didn’t concentrate this effect into single chapters, he used a more successful variant on it – by simply omitting verbs and pronouns.  It’s a bold way to start a paragraph, giving a sense of both immediacy and uncertainty, and it think it works well within a sparser descriptive mode:

Dark, the smell of stairs.  She began to notice the stairs as she had not the day before.  She leaned and looked down the dark stairwell.  These stairs were not solid; their treads sagged, the staircase was pegged to the walls with iron rods at each landing.  The house was old.  She went down and when she came into the light of the lower open house door, she looked around her.  She saw only a bare hallway; on one side was a large metal barrel with a warped cover, on the other a table on which were several letters – evidently this was where mail was left for those in the house.  Except for this, the hall was vacant; scribbled on the plaster were a few names – “DIDOMENICO 2nd” “LICORA” —
Brand moves between this fairly straightforward narrative and a fluid, more consciously beautiful prose.  And that is the result (and the cause) of the relationship between John and Harriet.  Which comes first?  I don’t know – the gentle unfolding of their love is both mirrored and created by the gentle unfolding of touching imagery and emotional explorations.  This paragraph was picked more or less at random, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what I mean:

Breathing the air deeply, she looked down at the courtyard.  Hardly changed, a little dirtier from melted snow, the tinge of winter.  Frost had made new cracks in the cement, in the so-called paving.  Yet the evidences of winter were small only to be seen, like the signs of spring, by the heart that feels small changes.  The room too had its changes from winter, but because of her need of its permanence they too were small, only what had been absolutely necessary.

It is incredibly difficult to write about this sort of novel, because it is of the variety which can only be appreciated once one is reading them.  Perhaps that is true of any book, but it seems especially so of The Outward Room.  And that being said, it is especially impressive that Peter Cameron writes such a good afterword in the NYRB edition.  Good afterwords and introductions are hard to find, aren’t they?  One thing Cameron writes will strike home with many of us:

It’s somewhat frightening to learn that good books – even books heralded in their time – can disappear so quickly and completely.  We like to think that things of enduring quality and worth are separated from the dross and permanently enshrined, but we know that this is not true.  Beautiful things are more likely to disappear than to endure.  The Outward Room is such a beautiful thing.  
None of us are surprised when we find that wonderful, beautiful books have fallen by the wayside – we all know too many examples.  Despite having an initial print run of 140,000 copies (wow!), The Outward Room has fallen victim to this disappearing act – its peculiar qualities are those which can so easily be overlooked.  Thank you NYRB for bringing it back – the novel definitely deserves it, and I hope you give it a chance too.

His Monkey Wife – John Collier

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Some titles are metaphors.  Some titles seem to suggest one thing, only for the book to be about something completely different – from The Silence of the Lambs to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.  And His Monkey Wife (1930) is also a bit false… but only because he isn’t married to the monkey.  There is some question of it later.  But, as the novel kicks off, it’s simply that a monkey is in love with him.  That’s all.

Mr. Fatigay is an English schoolmaster in the Congo whose charms (mostly of a scholarly nature) win him the love and affection of Emily, a chimpanzee.  (I’m afraid I don’t know the difference between monkey, ape, and chimp, or where these things might overlap – for the sake of argument, I’ll refer to Emily as a chimp [which she definitely is] rather than the title’s monkey [which she might or might not be.])  Emily is rather a dear.  She is incredibly intelligent, and with an eavesdropping sort of learning, manages to become an expert reader – although she cannot talk.  You might remember that last October I wrote about G.E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia, where a woman tries – with a limited sort of success – to educate an ape as her son.  Well, Mr. Fatigay is a fairly oblivious man, and has much greater success without even meaning to.

Is it so hard to understand how she came to a comprehension of the function of books, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter functions of language?  Our scientists may think so, who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana.  They suspend the delicacy from the ceiling of a cage and assess the subject’s mentality in terms of the number of boxes he or she will pile one upon another in order to secure it, failing to see that nothing is revealed except the value which that particular chimp chooses to set upon the fruit.  And, beyond a certain low limit, this surely is in inverse ratio to intelligence.  What boy of ten would not pile up a dozen boxes in an attempt to climb within reach of it?  How many would Einstein clamber upon?  And how many less would Shakespeare?  Emily, though a fruitarian by instinct, would have disdained an eagerness capable of more than two and a jump.
For Emily is quite concerned with etiquette, and wants to do things properly.  And thus it pains her to break into Mr. Fatigay’s desk and read the letters from his fiancée in England – but she is not perfect, and not unafflicted by jealousy.  She is all ready to sacrifice her love at the altar of Mr. F’s happiness, but when she has read the letters, she (and the reader) realise how callous his fiancée, Amy, really is.  She is stringing out the engagement, clearly not eager for Mr. Fatigay to return from Congo.

But they do go back to England.  Emily is thrilled to be accompanying Mr. Fatigay… but less thrilled when she realises why.  He is giving her to Amy as a present, to be Amy’s maid!  Emily is not averse to a little hard work, but it is hardly dignifying to be the maid of your rival in love… especially one who shrinks from Mr. Fatigay’s touch, and treats him appallingly.  What can Emily do?….

Celebrity librarian (!) Nancy Pearl apparently called Emily one of the best characters in modern fiction, which is quite the claim –  but I can see where she’s coming from.  Emily is so charming.  Besides being besotted with Mr. Fatigay, she is wholly enamoured with books.  She manages to sneak out of Amy’s apartment to visit the British Museum – and becomes quite a cult figure there.  Apparently the simple expedient of wearing clothes renders her more or less indistinguishable from a human (and there is, sad to say, a bit of 1930s racism in this section, when various gents try to guess her country of origin.  For the most part, they settle on Spain – but because of her spirit, rather than her appearance.)

“Well, I like her,” said a simple fellow, “because she’s a little woman.  A bouncing little woman.  I like them like that.  My first wife was not.  I was deliriously happy with my first wife.  With my second – not altogether so.  I like a bouncing little woman.” 

“Well, gentlemen” said the senior member of the company, who ignored the last remark as being the probably carnal utterance of one whose work was merely the compiling of a cyclist’s encyclopaedia.  “Well, gentlemen, we had better make a move if we’re to catch a last glimpse of her, for like all that’s best in life, she comes late and departs early, Heaven knows where.”
I always find it impossible not to love a bibliophile in a novel – and Emily’s love of the written word is a joy.  Indeed, she is a joy altogether.  As Osbert Sitwell writes somewhere, she is in many ways the least animalistic of all the characters.  She is certainly more sophisticated, responsible, moral, and caring than Amy – although things do take rather a twist later in the book… and the ending came as quite a surprise…

Collier has picked an eccentric theme for his novel, and sometimes that might have hindered rather than boosted my interest in his writing.  Sure, I wouldn’t have read this novel if it weren’t relevant for my thesis – but I can’t help wondering how his talent for characterisation and writing would fare in a more quotidian novel.   The only other thing I’ve read by him (and this will serve as my post to link to from A Century of Books, as I don’t think I’m going to blog about it fully) is Green Thoughts (1932), a short book (c.50pp.) where people metamorph into plants – also well-written, but absorbed by the strange.

What I liked most about his writing were the incidental similes he used, and they crop up a lot.  Here’s one:

Fate, whose initial gifts to lovers are supplied as generously as those free meals an angler offers to the fish[…]
And there are plenty more to look out for!  He’s also pretty witty, adept at turning a sentence in a semi-Wildean way:

The men were the sort who have given up art for marriage, but, as if nature was scheming to restore the balance, many of their women appeared likely to give up marriage for art.
Collier really is quite an impressive prose stylist, finding that middle ground between modernist experimental and simple storytelling.  There are loads of literary references throughout, from Virginia Woolf to George Moore: Collier clearly respects his audience’s intelligence.  I don’t really know what else he wrote, but I think this might be a case where the novelty of his topic overshadows the talent Collier simply has as a novelist.  I admired His Monkey Wife, and I’d be intrigued to read something else… does anybody know anything else about John Collier and his work?

Books I Borrowed…

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There are a few books I’ve borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I’m going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it’s fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll get carried away, and write far too much… well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today… I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence – V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he’d see more of human life if he adopted layman’s clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice – as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town – where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won’t recognise him…

Once in his position as canon, Smith’s new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology – improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don’t think one would need to have faith to love this.  It’s very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there’s even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages – E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and ‘Girl-of-the-Period’, Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments – and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 (‘We Meant To Be Happy’) Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many ‘surplus women’ – only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first – ‘The Marriage of Rose Barlow’.  It’s rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin – the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, ‘The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.’  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella – the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I’d expect from Delafield – but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny – Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny ‘rescues’ Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions… but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn’t seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel’s incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum… perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn’t much care what happened.  Even though it’s a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!