1935

Woman Alive by Susan Ertz

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I have only read one Susan Ertz novel before Woman Alive (1935) and it was a good, fairly traditional novel about generations of a family tangled up in domestic disputes and hopes. Nothing very unexpected, though a good version of that kind of thing. Ertz was pretty prolific, and nothing in that novel would have led me to imagine what I’d find in Woman Alive – which is a sci-fi dystopia.

It starts off in the present day, with a man sent by time machine into the distant future (erm, 1985). I’d say Ertz lingers a little too long on the mechanics of the thing – or, rather, it’s done pretty quickly but with more details than we need, because the time travel is pretty irrelevant and just a way to get us into 1985. (Two things to note: isn’t it interesting that it’s only one year off Orwell’s more-famous Nineteen Eighty-Four? and also, more personally, to the year I was born.)

What is happening in 1985, in the United States of Europe(!)? Well, our narrator can explain:

A new gas has been secretly manufactured by the attackers against which the people attacked had no defence. It was called, from its greenish-grey colour – it was not, like most gases, invisible – celadon gas, and it poisoned as well as burned. The destriction of property had ceased to be one of the objects of war; only the destruction of life was aimed at.

[…]

The bodies of those it killed generated a disease – a sort of by-product of the gas itself – which proved to be highly contagious and invariably fatal, but – and was the fact with which the entire world was now faced – fatal only to women. Within twelve hours of the launching of that brief war, which lasted only eight, women began to drop dead in the streets, in their houses, in the fields, in aeroplanes, everywhere. Some of them succumbed at once; others lingered on for days.

There is no escape from this sudden plague. ‘Women were isolated, sent up in captive balloons, taken to the tops of high mountains, injected with every known serum, but death came to them all.’ Across the whole of the earth, all women and girls perish.

And, of course, this means that the human race will be over – not immediately, not for the life-span of the youngest boys alive at the time of the crisis, but eventually. Much of the world grinds to a halt, and Ertz is interesting on the professions that continue and those that give up:

Only the painters and the scientists, it appeared, were going on with their work as before. The happiest, most absorbing, and pleasantest of all the arts furnished its own rewards. The world might end, but painters went on painting because it was so much pleasanter to paint than not to paint. Scientists, too, were able to forget mankind’s doom in their researches, their almost divine interest and passion for truth providing momentum enough to carry them through even such a monstrous tragedy as this. 

It felt quite telling, in current discussions of AI, that the very creative professions that AI is trying to replace are the ones that Ertz sees as essential no matter waht.

BUT – the title of the novel might have clued you in that all is not as it seems. There is one woman alive after all.

Again, Ertz is keen to give us some back story about how this woman has survived – something to do with an all-purpose innoculation given previously by a doctor, who then sadly died before he could pass it on to anyone else – but, again, it scarcely matters. The important thing is, the narrator and a couple of other men discover the existence of the woman: Stella. She is the sole woman in the world. And what a predicament to be in.

Soon, the world’s nations are feuding for the chance to have a man from their country be the father of the new generations of humankind. Things quickly turned militaristic. Stella finds herself celebrated as a queen – and yet expected to do the whims of powerful men. Her wishes are scarcely considered – until she takes a stand.

I enjoyed the ways in which Ertz thought through the likely responses to something of this nature, not least the proliferation of nay-sayers and conspiracy theorists. Leaflets are distributed denying that Stella truly is a woman, and can’t you imagine this sort of faction existing? We’ve already discovered they exist in almost any crisis. The leaflet reads…

“Men! You are easily fooled. This is not a woman at all, but a boy dressed up. It is a shameful trick on the part of the British Prime Ministre [sic] for the glory of Britain. There are no women. Go back to your homes. It is nothing but a hoax, perfidious and indecent.”

I haven’t even mentioned the boy in Stella’s care, and the other men who feature – there are villains and heroes – because this is really Stella’s book. She is forthright and determined, while also ill-equipped (as who would not be?) to deal with this mantle. Ertz has created a memorable heroine you’ll certainly be cheering on.

Woman Alive is an enjoyable, well-written, often rather clever novel that whirls past. Written during a period where the next world war seemed likely if not impossible, it does also respond well to the rising emnities between countries. My only wish is that Woman Alive had been a little more substantial. It’s a novella and is over almost as soon as it has properly begun – not least because we spend precious time, as discussed, on the mechanics of the sci-fi. It is very rare that I ask for a novel to be longer, but I think Ertz’s ingenious idea deserved more space for exploring it, and more development for the people involved.

But what an unusual find for 1935! And how (almost) totally forgotten it seems to be. I think Woman Alive makes interesting reading alongside dystopian sci-fi classics of the period – and is certainly more atuned to the specific plight of women in these sorts of futures than most books are. It does not have the substance of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other novels that are better-remembered, but it is still very much worth remembering as a moment in the history of early/mid-century dystopian fiction.

Oh, and one final point – throughout are wonderful illustrations by Bip Pares that I think do a brilliant job of combining futurism with a distinctively 1930s Art Deco style, with hints of Fascism in there too. I think Woman Alive is worth hunting out for the illustrations alone – here are a couple of them.

Cactus by Ethel Mannin

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After reading Rolling in the Dew, I was keen to read more of Ethel Mannin’s fiction  – particularly something in a non-satirical mode. I wondered if something she wrote could be suitable for the British Library Women Writers series, so hunted down one that was clearly about a woman’s life: Cactus (1935). Sadly my Penguin copy more or less fell apart as I read it, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-read it, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

Elspeth is the heroine of Cactus. The novel opens when she is a young girl, with family in the north of England and in Scotland – she doesn’t really fit in with her family and their expectations of her, and she doesn’t have friends her own age. They don’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Her greatest friend is her Uncle Andrew – an eccentric man who chooses to live alone rather than with the rest of the family. They tolerate him with bemused affection.

In these early sections of Cactus, he teaches Elspeth to be an independent thinker. He quietly reveals the dangers of group-think, whether that be jingoistic nationalism or the meek place of a woman in Edwardian middle-class life. They are lessons that she takes very much to heart. And, on a more tangible level, he introduces her to the beauty of cacti. Others wonder why she is train to something spikey and plain, but…

When a cactus came into flower, said Uncle Andy, it was the most wonderful flower you ever saw, and it lived on long after other flowers, which bloomed more readily, had died and been forgotten. It was worth waiting for, said Uncle Andy.

And if you’re thinking ‘hmm, I wonder if this will be a metaphor for Elspeth herself’ then, yes indeed, you are right. Throughout the novel, Mannin returns to this metaphor – it becomes a little unsubtle at times, and perhaps didn’t need to be quite so foregrounded, but it’s an interesting enough idea.

Elspeth grows older and moves to Germany in the late 1930s. She falls in love with a slightly tempestuous young man called Karl, defying convention on the one hand while remaining quite bound by it on the other. For instance, she is shocked when he wants to have sex before marriage – shocked a little, in fact, that this friendship has developed into love almost unawares. Mannin isn’t condemning her for this element of conventionality. Elspeth is no more an obedient disciple to modern, bohemian thinking than she is to old-fashioned morality. She forges her own path, with her own decisions and standards.

But even the most independent thinker cannot avoid being affected by war. As it becomes clear that Germany will soon be at war – and possible (though still, to the characters, unlikely) that Britain will also enter the war – Elspeth decides to leave Germany and return to her family home. It is, she hopes, a temporary absence. But she has also been chilled by the bellicosity she had never anticipated in Karl. It is equalled by the ‘Hun-hate’ (a common word in the novel) that she finds back home. In vain does she try to explain that she may disagree with Germany’s authorities while still liking, even loving, individual Germans. I was so impressed that Mannin would write about this in the mid-1930s, when anti-German rhetoric was clearly on the rise again in Britain. Her nuance in resisting mindless nationalism and hatred of other countries is done perfectly.

These tensions become more palpable when two German prisoners of war are left at Elspeth’s family’s farm. One is a bit of a brute, but Elspeth instantly feels a connection with the other – Kurt. The similarity of his name to Karl’s is not a coincidence. While the two men are quite different, Elspeth explains that Kurt reminds her a lot of her lost love – a man she has to accept may well be dead now, given his keenness to fight. Her family won’t let the men in the house, and initially only give them food fit for the pigs – but Elspeth wears them down a little, and forges a connection with Kurt that is central to the second half of Cactus.

Mannin really doesn’t hold back in her visceral writing about war. Elspeth’s brother is working in an army hospital, but Kurt says he cannot really understand what front-line war is like. (Skip this quote if you are sensitive to graphic descriptions.)

“He doesn’t know what war is. No man who hasn’t been in the trenches does.”

“He sees every day what war does to men.”

“It’s not the same as having it happen to yourself. you can know all about building a trench parapet of human bodies and walking on human faces, and such things, but it doesn’t do anything to you unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s not a case of being physically shocked compared with being intellectually shocked, it’s a case of knowing something in your bowels. In English you talk about having guts. Mind is an abstraction, but guts are damnably real. They get twisted round your bayonet. Round your pick when you’re digging. That’s the kind of knowing, when your own guts writhe with it.”

It’s hard to believe something like this is in a 1930s novel by a woman better known, I believe, for light-hearted comedies and romances. While Cactus never takes us to the front-line, the brutality of war seeps through its pages. She doesn’t address the impending war, which was becoming inevitable in many people’s eyes by the time Cactus was published, but it is a silent subtext to the reading experience.

Cactus isn’t a perfect novel. There are times when it loses a little of its subtlety and gets too close to melodrama. It is very earnest, and I would have appreciated more of the wit that played through its first chapter or two. But, for the most part, I found it an involving, passionate cry against unthinking conflict and herd mentality. I’m certainly keen to keep exploring Mannin’s fiction.

British Library Women Writers 14: Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, Simon Thomas | Waterstones

When I originally wrote about Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes in 2020, I ended with ‘Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…’ Thankfully they agreed with me that it should enter the series, and it’s now back in print. I particularly love when there’s the chance to bring back impossible-to-find books – saving people a lot of money and time spent refreshing ebay!

Below is what I wrote originally. When I was writing my afterword to the book, I looked at the class issues in the novel – which are obviously front and centre – but also a little about contemporary cinema, how much a Rolls Royce might cost you, and which circumstances mean you use Lady Elizabeth rather than Lady Forrester (Cairnes assumes her readers will know!)

As has become custom, here’s a video review from Lil too – I love how she reads the whole series!

—

The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…

Enbury Heath by Stella Gibbons

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I usually get at least a few books for Christmas, and I like to start one of them immediately – there is something lovely about starting a brand new book on Christmas Day. Particularly if it is as good as Enbury Heath (1935) by Stella Gibbons, which my parents got for me.

Yes, there are quite a few Gibbons novels waiting on my shelves, but a few Gibbons aficionados had said that this one was particularly good – so I was, of course, keen to read it. This is the seventh of her novels that I’ve read, and follows the pattern of her earliest books being the ones I most like – because this is wonderful. Just as wonderful as that cover illustration, by Kerry Hyndman, would have you hoping.

Siblings Sophia, Harry and Francis Garden aren’t much upset when their father dies. He has been angry, unpredictable, alcoholic, and unkind. Only six months earlier, their much-loved and much-suffering mother had died, and Sophia had chosen not to see her father in that time. But there is a wide cast of aunts and uncles who want to see the right thing done. The Garden trio aren’t fond of many of these relatives, and openly loathe some of them, but get bustled through decorum and keeping up appearances – while secreting away anecdotes and quotes to share and laugh at together later. They have the casual unkindness of people in their late teens and early 20s when considering nuisance relatives, though it isn’t really cruel because the relatives are completely unmoved by it.

While there isn’t much money left, the inheritance that the three get is enough to rent a tiny cottage on ‘Enbury Heath’ – a stand in for Hampstead Heath. The descriptions seem to vary a little – at one point it seems to be a two-up-two-down squeezed in between larger buildings, but it also has a dining table big enough for a dozen or so, and seating for large parties, so perhaps Gibbons’ definition of tiny isn’t the same as mine (I have to limit dinner parties to three guests, especially since I put in another bookcase that means I can no longer use the leaf to extend my dining room table.)

Gibbons’ pacing is often a little erratic, and nearly a third of the book is over before the three move into the cottage. This was my favourite part of Enbury Heath – as they set up home together, and deal with arranging domestic help, embryonic careers, visiting dogs etc. Gibbons is particularly funny about dogs, actually, and I only wish she’d turned her attention to cats at similar length. It’s almost ninety years old, but some things about running a home haven’t changed. We might not get coal and laundry deliveries, but these sorts of messages are not uncommon…

The coal, for example. The firm which sold the coal simply could not be brought to believe that there existed a cottage in the Vale where no one was at home from a quarter to nine in the morning to half past six at night. It was nonsense; it was a try-on; whoever it was doing it on purpose, and the coal firm knew better than to give way to such caprices.

So they sent coal (it was only two hundredweight, to add insult to injury, for this was all that the cottage’s cellar would hold), for three days running at eleven in the morning, disregarding Sophia’s frantic telephone messages, and the would send it no more.

The same difficulty occurred with the laundry, which, like some puckish sprite, some coy elf of the dells, could never say exactly at what time it would call, but preferred to pop in winsomely whenever ‘the boy was down that way,’ which might be at any time during the day.

In the final third of the novel, Gibbons throws in a host of other characters – a girl called Mae who catches Francis’s eye, and an old school rival called Juan who gets involved with the family. It breaks all sorts of novelistic rules to have the cast disrupted at this late stage, and I don’t think they were particularly needed – but somehow it works. I was nervous when Mae arrived on the scene, because I recall Bassett and how brilliantly funny the first half of that novel was, and how tedious once it became about a love triangle. It’s certainly not that bad in Enbury Heath, though I confess I would have loved the novel more if Gibbons had stuck to the siblings in their cottage.

Apparently Enbury Heath is semi-autobiographical. For the sake of Gibbons’ actual aunts and uncles, I hope that it is very semi, but knowing that there is some basis in fact explains why the novel never feels like a fairy tale, even with a fairy tale opening. There is a grounding of reality throughout that tethers the narrative. It’s a wonderful novel, and another perfect Christmassy read.

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…

25 Books in 25 Days: #8 Death in the Clouds

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I thought it might be nearer the end of the 25 days when I started depending on the addictive joy of Agatha – but I could resist no longer, and picked up Death in the Clouds (1935) by Agatha Christie. It’s a relatively early Poirot novel, and thus I could feel relatively assured of it being a good’un.

The murder takes place, as the title suggests, on a plane – called the Prometheus – and Madame Giselle is discovered dead. The only sign is a puncture mark on her neck – and so all the passengers are under suspicion. Well, all except one – because Hercule Poirot happens to be on the flight.

We follow the usual twists and turns of a Poirot novel, and my foolish belief that I’d worked out the ending turned out (but of course) not to be true. Sadly no Hastings or Ariadne Oliver, both of whom I love and always want to pop up in a Poirot, but it’s a neat murder mystery with all the clues laid out well – if only the reader is able to spot them… And there’s the good fun of a detective novelist, Clancy, on board – with Agatha Christie obviously enjoying teasing the profession. Here’s Inspector Japp on the topic:

“These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn-fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.”

The Middle Window by Elizabeth Goudge

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The Middle WindowIf you had told me at the beginning of 2015 that I’d have read two reincarnation romances before the year was over, my response would probably have been along the lines of doubt that two such books existed. But, yes, they do. The first one I read was Ferney by James Long – but over fifty years earlier, Elizabeth Goudge had written The Middle Window (1935) which had a similar idea at its heart.

This is actually the first Goudge book I’ve read, which is probably a rather unusual place to start. It came as part of a postal book group, otherwise this cover wouldn’t have inspired me to pick it up (nor yet would the tagline ‘a lively story set in the majestic Scottish Highlands’), though I ended up really enjoying it – particularly the first half.

The Middle Window is very definitely divided into halves. The first – set in the 1930s – concerns Judy, a London-dweller, whose life is changed when she looks into the three windows of an art gallery. Each displays a painting: one is a cityscape; one is a country cottage. In the middle window is a painting of the wilds of the Scottish highlands. For some reason, Judy believes that her life must follow the path indicated by one of those paintings. This isn’t the last time that the title of the novel will be significant, but Judy (as you may have guessed) opts for the middle window and the Scottish highlands.

Being in the happy position to be able to afford to take a ten week holiday, she advertises to rent a house there, and goes with her parents and her fiancée Charles to Glen Suilag. It’s a beautiful but neglected mansion in the middle of nowhere. There is no running water (which horrifies Judy’s mother, Lady Cameron) and little by way of local amusements. The only company seems to be a grumpy old servant, Angus – who greets Judy by saying “Mistress Judith, ye’ve coom back”.

I loved this section of the novel. The descriptions of being released from the city into the countryside rang true with me, and in fact the scene with the painting inspiring Judy’s decision – coming alive, so she can feel the breeze and see the mountains – is strikingly similar to scenes in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father. But how would I cope when the reincarnation bit kicks in? Well, the hint is there in Angus’ welcome, and grows apace as Judy feels like she already knows the area. She also feels like she already knows Ian, the Laird of the Manor, who is staying in the village. He is a passionate, amusing, and educated man; a contrast to her nice-but-dim Charles. Ian works as an unpaid doctor in the little village, treating things which aren’t serious enough for the local hospital which, in those days before the NHS, was beyond the means of the poor locals. (Curiously, these minor ailments include a boy who has cut two fingers off; I’m wondering if that denotes an injury less appalling than it sounds.) Oh, and they take a trip to Skye that reinforces how much I really must visit it one day.

Judy and Ian gradually fall in love, and also gradually realise that it is not the first time they’ve met – but the first time was in another life…

“A man living a life is like a man writing a book. He may break off after a few chapters but he comes back to his work again and again until the book is finished.”

“And will you and I come back again and again through the centuries until we have built paradise in our glen? Faith, but Glen Suilag will grow mightily tired of us.”

“No! We are as much a part of it as the bog myrtle and the heather. It does not tire of its children.”

That conversation actually takes place in the second half of the novel, which takes place in 1745. Here they are Judith and Ramand, who fall in love and marry only a day before Ramand is called away to fight in the Jacobite rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is period of history I know very little about, so The Middle Window was surprisingly instructive, helping put in context lots of terms I’d heard but without knowledge.

I had to fight my natural aversion to historical fiction, but that actually didn’t end up being my problem with the second half. It’s just as well drawn, character-wise, as the first half (for they are essentially the same characters), but the end of the first half essentially tells us what will happen at the end of the second half. I shan’t spoil it now, but the link is a flashback Judy has – which gives away the end. Of course, plot is not the only thing to read for, but it removes some of the tension – though there is a bit of a twist which goes some way to atone for it.

Despite, on paper, being a book that shouldn’t interest me, I actually really liked The Middle Window. And what I mostly liked about it was the style and humour of the writing. The humour is more evident in the first half, and it’s great; it’s centred around how insufferable the rest of the family find Judy. She’s rather a great heroine to read it, but must be endlessly frustrating to live with – as this indicates:

Lady Cameron sighed. Judy’s recent saintly mood of meditation and withdrawal had been distinctly trying, leading her as it did to leave her galoshes about in awkward places and take not the slightest notice of anything said to her, but it had at least been harmless. The same thing, she felt, could not be said of this new phase. She knew quite well, from painful past experience, that when Judy drew her belt in tightly like that she was about to be tiresome.

Little turns of phrase throughout demonstrate Goudge’s skill as a writer, even as early as her second book. Some might be too put off the theme, but – having spent years immersed in 1920s and ’30s fantastic fiction – I was willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy it. My only wish is that she’d spent the whole time in the 1930s, with perhaps flashbacks to 1745, rather than giving equal space to both halves when there couldn’t really be equal tension or reader engagement.

 

Others who got Stuck into it (and generally hated it!):

“Gar. What a tiresome story this was. I feel all bilious; I think I need to read something crisp and witty to cleanse my emotional palate.” – Barb, Leaves and Pages

“This, unfortunately, is the first book by Elizabeth Goudge I have ever wished I hadn’t read. I disliked Judy Cameron heartily.” – Jenny, Shelf Love

 

 

Other People’s Lives by A.A. Milne

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…or, what it’s like to read a book that almost nobody else will ever read.

You may remember, back in April, I posted about Other People’s Lives (1935) – or, at least, about finding it online and receiving my copy in the post.

Other-Peoples-Lives

It was never published as a book; the only copies that have ever existed were acting editions. By their nature, they’re not intended to be kept for very long, and it is rare to find a copy of this play. I was super lucky to do so – and, a few months later, completed the deal by reading it.

The play is quite a simple idea, but executed very well. Mr and Mrs Tilling, and their daughter Clare, are a very happy little family living in a little flat. Mrs Tilling is disabled, and Clare’s job is no grander than labelling envelopes, but neither thing stops them having a wonderful life – and listening to the novel that Mr Tilling has been writing for a while. If Milne’s portrait of a happy family could be accused of being patronising, then those (hypothetical) critics could also be accused of cynicism. It’s heart-warming and, what is more, believable.

In the flat below them congregate Arnold, Lola, Stephen, and Meg. They are Milne characters through and through in their light-hearted teasing and silliness, but with a darker edge than he usually portrays. They are mostly quite selfish and inconsiderate in their joviality; happy to joke and banter, but fairly uninterested in anything deeper. Lola is an exception, and is the driving force behind trying to help her upstairs neighbours.

The plot is a little more complicated than that, but it’s basically a cautionary tale for what happens when people interfere. It’s perhaps a little too bleak – too conveniently bleak, really, considering the series of events that come towards the end – but it’s still executed very movingly, and even made me cry a little.

But, can I really recommend it? I waited over a decade for an affordable copy to appear online, so I don’t imagine anybody will be running out to purchase a copy (nab one if you ever spot it!). It definitely added something to the experience, channelling my inner-hipster instincts; I knew that only a handful of people alive had ever had the chance to read Other People’s Lives, and somehow that made me feel more connected to the audiences of 1935 who’d have seen this on stage. Reading it was quite a different experience from reading Pride and Prejudice or Fingersmith or One Day or any novel that is likely to be recognised by most book-loving people I mention it to. Curious.

Have you had this experience? How do you feel when reading a novel or play or poetry collection so scarce that you’re almost reading it in a void? Let me know!

(And, on a completely unrelated note, episode 5 of Tea or Books? is going to be even later than it already is, because Rachel doesn’t currently have Internet access…)

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

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I have been extremely pleased to see the success of the British Library Crime Classics, but although I’ve cheered them on from a distance, and bought one of the John Budes, it’s only now that I’ve actually read one of the series. And it isn’t the John Bude; it is one they kindly gave me: Death on the Cherwell (1935) by Mavis Doriel Hay.

This is extremely apt for me, since it is set in Oxford – the Cherwell (pronounced char-well, please) is part of the Thames – and I know the places Hay describes. The setting is largely the environs of the non-existent Persephone College, a women-only Oxford college. A handy map in the front shows where this college supposedly stands – a small park by the river that, incidentally, remains building-free, and would be a very foolish place to build anything you didn’t want to have annually flooded. But, according to Stephen Booth’s introduction, it’s based on St. Hilda’s – which Hay attended as a student, but before women were awarded degrees.

A group of undergraduates, or ‘undergraduettes’ as the papers apparently label them, are in the process of setting up the Lode League (‘the formation of esoteric societies is one of the favourite pastimes of undergraduates’), sat on the corrugated iron roof of a small boathouse, when a mysterious canoe floats by… In it is the body of the bursar, Miss Myra Denning, an unpopular woman whose unpopularity was, indeed, the very genesis of the Lode League.

This League is composed of Daphne, Gwyneth, Nina, and Sally. In truth, I found these young women more or less interchangeable – one was supposed to be wiser than the others, one more impetuous, and so forth, but any of them could fairly easily have said any of the dialogue. It didn’t much matter. What matters rather more is the fun that Hay throws us into.

As I wrote recently in my post on A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, detective novels that aren’t written by Agatha Christie inevitably suffer by comparison, when it comes to plot. (I’m not going to risk mentioning Dorothy L. Sayers again, even though there are striking similarities in scenario to Gaudy Night, published in the same year. I’d better not say what I thought of Gaudy Night.) And the plot of Death on the Cherwell isn’t filled with the sorts of twists, turns, and surprises that Christie would have found – it ends up being one of the people you suspected it would be all along, for fairly undisguised reasons – but, that acknowledged, this novel is great fun and very well told.

Hay is great at crafting an engaging narrative. Whenever it palls a bit, we get a new character – a vivacious and witty couple who apparently appeared in Hay’s Murder Underground make a reappearance, driving madly around Oxford and staying at the Mitre (which was apparently once rather classy; how things have changed). Then there is Draga, the ‘Yugo-Slavian’ student who lives in constant surprise at the English and equally constant poor grammar. She is in every way a stereotype of the Eastern European student, but perhaps we should expect no better from the 1930s – and she is certainly not intended as an offensive portrait. She is vibrant and amusing, and certainly stands out from the other student characters.

Although sold as an amateur detectives premise, there are a couple of police officers involved. Both, luckily, are extremely willing to share details of their investigations with the central characters, and they more or less work in tandem.

I wasn’t quite fair when I said there weren’t twists and turns. There are, just not particularly in the denouement – along the way, we get curses and secrets and all that sort of thing. There isn’t a dull moment, and it’s all (I keep coming back to this) very fun. Like The Red House Mystery, it’s definitely cosy crime – with the added bonus of offering a window into a women’s college in the 1930s. It’s a delight, and if the rest of the British Library Crime Classics are of an equal tone and standard, then I can’t wait to dive in and explore.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

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This is another one where I’m sending you off to Vulpes Libris!  We’ve inaugurated Shelf of Shame week, where five of us pick an author or book we’ve been meaning to read for ages, and see how we find them.  (I’ll pre-empt anybody saying that there’s no need to be ashamed of having left something unread by saying… it’s a fun idea for a themed week, enjoy!)

I picked Christopher Isherwood, as I felt I ought to know more about such an important interwar writer. And I own this copy because it’s got a beautiful cover!  It’s a Folio edition, but had lost its slipcover before it found its way to my hands.

Follow the link to find out what I thought…

The last Sherpa/book combo, I’m afraid…