1940s

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

Thanks for your lovely comments on my Holywell Cemetery post – I was a bit tentative about sharing that side of my interests, but lots of us seem to have similar activities!  I’m sorry my responses to comments have been lax of late – will get onto that soon.

Since my 26th birthday has come and gone, it’s about time I finished writing about the books I received for my 25th birthday, isn’t it?  Well, truth be told, I’ve yet to read all of them, but I have read one of those given to me by Colin: Exercises in Style (1947) by Raymond Queneau.

Oddly enough, I was offered a review copy of this back in the dim, distant past.  I said yes-please-thank-you-very-much, and they sent me… The Fox by D.H. Lawrence.  (Which, incidentally, was very good – read more here).  Not sure how that happened, but it put Exercises in Style onto my radar, and I was pleased when Col gave it to me.  Before I go further, I must add that it was translated by Barbara Wright.  Thanks, Barbara!

The premise is simple, and the execution is complex.  An everyday incident takes place, described thus on the blurb:

On a crowded bus at midday, the narrator observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately.  When a seat is vacated, the first man takes it.  Later, in another part of town, the man is spotted again, while being advised by a friend to have another button sewn onto his overcoat.

Queneau’s experiment is to find as many ways as possible to express this anecdote.  There are ninety-nine different styles used – some are expected (Past, Present, Reported Speech), some are quirky (Couplets, Cross-Examination) and some are just plain weird (Paragoge, Parts of Speech, Permutations by Groups of 2, 3, 4 and 5 Letters).

This definitely isn’t a book to read cover-to-cover in one go.  I read it gradually over the course of several months, which worked out to be a pretty good approach.  Exercises in Style is, of course, more of an experiment in what can be done with words than a gripping beginning-middle-end read.  As such, it is interesting in the abstract, wider-view – but would be far too repetitive if read in one go.  I have to admit to flicking past the styles which removed any linguistic sense from the anecdote, and the Dog Latin meant little to me, but I was impressed by how varied the same unremarkable story can be, simply through stylistic choices.

Perhaps Exercises in Style should be on hand for the aspiring novelist – it should certainly be flicked through by anybody who claims to like novels ‘in a plain, unfancy style’ – because it reveals that there is no such thing as a plain style.  True, few novels would focalise wholly through smell, feel, or sound (as some of these styles do) but Queneau reveals how many different ways a writer can approach even the most mundane objects. I’d recommend anybody interested in language or the importance of writing in fiction should have a copy of this on the shelves, to dip in and out of, smiling.

It goes without saying that, being in translation, some of Queneau’s nuances will have been lost – perhaps more important in Exercises in Style than other books, but the fact of translation doesn’t diminish the point that language choices affect the ways we read.  Indeed, it enhances it.

Rather than go on any further, I think I’ll type out a few examples, so you can see for yourself the sort of variety which Queneau creates:

Zoological

In the dog days, while I was in a bird cage at feeding time, I noticed a young puppy with a neck like a giraffe who, ugly and venomous as a toad, wore yet a precious beaver on his head. This queer fish obviously had a bee in his bonnet and was quite bats, he started yak-yakking at a wolf in sheep’s clothing claiming that he was treading on his dogs with his beetle-crushers. But the cock got a flea in his ear; that foxed him, and quiet as a mouse he ran like a hare for the perch.

I saw him again in front of the zoo with a young buck who was telling him to bear in mind a certain drill about his pelage.

Passive

Midday was struck on the clock. The bus was being got onto by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman, which hat was encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. A long neck was sported by the gentleman. The man standing next to him was being grumbled at by the latter because of the jostling which was being inflicted on him by him. As soon as a vacant seat was espied by the young gentleman, it was made the object of his precipitate movements and it became sat down upon.

The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare. He was clothed in an overcoat and was having a remark made to him by a friend who happened to be there, to the effect that it was necessary to have an extra button put on it.

Couplets

On the bus once (an S, or of that ilk)
I saw a little runt, a wretched milk-
Sop, voicing discontent, though round his turban
He had a plait, this fancy-pants suburban.
How he complained, this strange metamorphosis
With elongated neck and halitosis:
One standing near who’d come to man’s estate
Refused, he said, to circumnavigate
His toes, when passengers got on and rode,
Late for lunch, panting, to some chaste abode.
There was no scandal; this sad personage
Found where to sit and end his pilgrimage.
As I went back towards the Latin Quarter
He reappeared, this lad of milk and water;
I heard his foppish friend say with dispassion:
“The buttons on your coat are not in fashion.”

The Only Way Is (Mary) Essex

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Sue, Ann, and Erika were all intrigued by the opening to Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex, which I posted the other day, and asked if I would say a bit more about her.  Here are those lines again:

It is highly probable that the tea shop would never have started at all if Commander David Tompkins hadn’t fancied himself at being something of a dab-hand at cooking.

Well, never let it be said that I ignore the cries of my people.  I do misinterpret them a bit – because I don’t remember all that much about Tea Is So Intoxicating, I decided to read one of the other Mary Essex novels I have on my shelf – the equally wonderfully titled The Amorous Bicycle.

You see, I read Tea Is So Intoxicating almost a decade ago, and I read it immediately after finished Moby Dick.  Anything would have been refreshing right then – and, while I knew I loved the novel, which is about the struggles of setting up a provincial tea-room, I didn’t know how much this depended on comparison.  Whom could I ask?  Nobody else knew anything about her.  I’m the only person to own any Mary Essex novels on LibraryThing (since Geranium Cat very kindly gave me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy.)  And I bought Tea Is So Intoxicating on a whim, because it had a brilliant title and only cost 10p. 

Turns out, I knew more about Mary Essex than I realised.  But I’d nearly finished the novel before I discovered that, so I’m going to make you wait until the end of the review to unveil the surprise…

The Amorous Bicycle (1944) takes place in Queen Catharine’s Court, an ‘ultra-modern, ultra-select block of flats situated in South London, not too south of course, because that would not have had a desirable district number for notepaper, but fairly south.’  There is a huge cast of characters (which isn’t the only thing which reminded me of Richmal Crompton’s novels) and not really any principals – although the first we meet is Mr. Vyle, the resident manager of the building.  He’s a bit of a coward, and unduly proud of his position, but basically a good egg.

I was going to go through the lot, but it might get a bit bewildering.  Suffice to say, they do all become fully-formed – it just takes quite a few pages.  Some are closer to stereotype than others – the retired Colonel and his ex-comrade cook are in the ‘closer’ category, not to mention the temperamental French chef for the building’s restaurant.  There’s also the James family – a long-suffering mother who is more than willing to share her sufferings, her actressy daughter and casual son, and her estranged husband (preposterously called Henry James) who is ditched by the mistress he absconded with, and tries to go back to the family he hasn’t seen for a decade.  There’s a coquettish young woman; a coquettish older woman; a browbeaten decorator determined to paint every flat ‘pile blew’; a lascivious doctor; a self-important, plagiarising novelist… the list goes ever delightfully on.

It all sounds a bit like a soap opera, doesn’t it?  Well, it’s closer, as I said, to Richmal Cromptons novels – a useful comparison only, of course, if you’ve read any of them.  Gossip and intrigue sustain the residents of the building, all of whom seem to be contemplating romantic alliances to greater or lesser extents.

I am no great fan of romantic novelists.  If that is all they bring to the table, I must confess myself bored – but you probably know how greatly I prize good writing and Essex’s is certainly not bad.  It would, admittedly, be infinitely better if she had never discovered the use of the exclamation mark.  I think it can be used to great aplomb in dialogue (c.f. The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, still my forerunner for Read of 2011) but is nigh-on unforgivable in narrative.  It always looks amateurish.

BUT – Essex’s writing is funny.  Of course humour is subjective, but I think a lot of you might enjoy her humour too – it reminded me of E.M. Delafield, in that wry, observational style which occasionally does a little twist in the middle of a sentence.  Her unexpected turns made me smile – she is especially good, I thought, at introducing characters with quick, witty sketches.  Which is a mercy, given how many of them there are.  Here are three examples:

He was under forty, and good-looking in a rugged, rather ugly way.

The next one hit a bit close to home…

Professor Tyrrell, unmarried, and completely self-contained, lived in Number Ninety-one.  He was pedantic, he was finicky, he spoke repulsively correct English, in fact it was so correct that it was wrong.

And, self-deprecatingly, this was my favourite:

He was a vegetarian, and looked it.
Only the other day, when reviewing Edith Olivier’s Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady, I lamented that she hadn’t availed herself of the many opportunities to laugh at the absurdities of wartime.  Well, Essex barely comments on the more serious aspects of war (all but one person seem miraculously unaffected by any actual fighting) but is rather wonderful on the deprivations suffered by economising housewives and frustrated customers.

She proffered the menu.  It read Lunch 3s.6d. (and on the back Dinner 6s.).  Bread, one penny, Napkin, one penny, Coffee, sixpence.  Minerals and soda water.  On reading the menu, which on the face of it looked to be lengthy and extremely good, one’s mood changed, because most of it had a tendency to boil down to Spam.

Indeed, it is the rumour of a far-off fishmonger selling ‘dabs’ (whatever they might be) which compels Miss Hungerford-Hawkes to belie the dignity of her years and procure a bicycle.  This is the first, but by no means the last, mention of bicycles in The Amorous Bicycle.  Essex’s title derives from the well-known rhyme ‘Daisy, Daisy’ (read it here, if you don’t know it.)  For somehow, often quite tenuously, the advent of bicycles to Queen Catharine’s Court leads to all sorts of happenings, romantic and otherwise (and it is rather nice that Essex focuses on romances between those not in the first flush of youth – this is by no means a youthful romance-by-numbers novel.)

I did have to laugh at the following line – I know enough evangelical cyclists to understand.  (Guys, it’s just a mode of transport.  I don’t tell you at length how great walking down the street is.  Just saying.  Oh, and when I’m driving, please don’t cycle down the middle of the road, or jump red lights.  Ta.)

Really, Mrs. Plaistow decided, people with bicycles were very much like people with babies, they just couldn’t stop talking about them.

And not everybody has a fondness for this wartime economy:

Mr. Vyle didn’t think so much of a nice bike.  He found that biking made his ears cold, and he was fed to the teeth that he would probably have to give up his car because he couldn’t get the petrol for it and he knew that Mrs. Vyle would point out that other people had “ways.”  Mr. Vyle hadn’t any ways.  He was rather alarmed at the prospect of what might happen to him if he tried any tricks.  All the same he’d see this blasted war somewhere else before he bought himself a nice bike, as Tutton suggested.

Incidentally, when I worked in Rare Books in the Bodleian, I dealt with a lot of boys’ comics from the early twentieth-century.  Throughout the early 1940s the back cover held advertisements for a bike manufacturer (showing boys on bikes capturing Nazis; using their bike bells to win the war, etc.) but each said essentially “Sorry, bicycles not available during wartime, but keep an eye out once the fighting’s all over.”  The residents of Queen Catharine’s Court do, admittedly, have some trouble procuring their vehicles – but a fair few manage it in the end.

While I was reading, I wasn’t trying to decide whether or not Mary Essex was a great novelist.  She obviously isn’t.  My quandary was whether or not she was good – and, exclamation marks aside, I decided that she was.  I’d certainly read more by her, and have one more waiting on my bookshelf.  Her characters and plots don’t reinvent the wheel, but are diverting enough, and her style is pleasantly amusing.

So, that twist I promised you.  While hunting around on the internet, I discovered what I had already suspected – that Mary Essex was a pseudonym.  What I had not expected was that I had already heard of Mary Essex under her actual name – which is (drum roll)… Ursula Bloom.

I expect a lot of you have heard of her.  Perhaps you’ve seen her mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records.  Because Ursula Bloom wrote over 500 books, under various names.  In terms of quantity, she could look Barbara Cartland in the eye.

This discovery did leave me a bit shocked… how could someone so prolific actually write good books?  I know a lot of you will think “All that matters is that you enjoyed it.”  That’s partly true, but I’ve always been a believer that literary merit exists, and that books can’t be judged entirely subjectively, or on how pleasing they are to the reader.  Was my judgement wildly off?  There are so many books I have disparaged or discarded because of poor writing, yet I thought the writing in The Amorous Bicycle above average.

So… I am left puzzled.  Did Ursula Bloom put extra effort into her Mary Essex titles, or am I so enamoured by the 1940s that I’ll forgive a wartime novelist that which I’d condemn from a 21st century writer?  I don’t know… but I’d love any of you who’ve read any Mary Essex to comment, or if you’ve got one languishing on your shelves – grab it, read it, and get back to me.

Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady by Edith Olivier

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Those of you who eagerly await my ‘hilarious’ pun-nomenal post titles may have noted that, of late, I’ve gone for simple titles when doing book reviews.  This is partly so I can tell what I was reviewing when I look at archives, and partly to make the search engine work better… but I do miss trying to think of laboured ways to pun, of an evening.

Which isn’t really relevant to anything at all, only I felt I could have had a field day with Edith Olivier’s Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1940).  Nothing springs to mind right now, of course… (Landlady Olivier… no. Holding The Thoughts… no.  Night to See You, To See You… Night!  Ok, stop Simon.)  Shall we get on with the show?

It’s no secret that I love Olivier’s novel The Love-Child.  I’m currently writing a chapter of my thesis which centres around it, and it’s probably in my top ten favourite books.  So far my other encounters with Olivier have been somewhat less impressive (unless you count the genuine excitement of reading her actual diary, in Wiltshire Record Office) but I am abundantly hopeful – and thus, when I saw Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady in Taunton, I grabbed it.  (And, y’know, paid for it and everything.)

Being specific, this book is (purportedly) ‘presented by’ Edith Olivier.  It takes the form of edited diaries from the pen of Miss Emma Nightingale.  Olivier’s preface indicates that she compiled Miss Nightingale’s war diaries, deposited with her the night before Miss N died: ‘All the sentences I have printed here are hers, though I have rearranged them in order to bring them into chapters.’  Now, Jane, in her lovely review, took Olivier at her word.  I’m more cynical.  I’m pretty sure she’s lying.  Remember when Margaret Forster wrote Diary of an Ordinary Woman and there was a small kerfuffle because it turned out the ‘ordinary woman’ was entirely made up?  Well, I expect Olivier’s kerfuffle was even smaller, but… it does seem as though Miss Nightingale is a creature of Olivier’s imagination.  There’s her name, for starters (‘night thoughts’ of Miss Nightingale? A little coincidental.)  Also the fact that the book doesn’t even slightly resemble a diary – for instance, she often writes looking back over several years, retrospectively.  And finally, the style is very much Olivier’s own.  It often reads exactly like her own autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley, which I have yet to review here.

None of which, naturally, prevents it being a very enjoyable book.  It’s quite an odd, roundabout concept – but whether or not Miss Nightingale ever existed, the wartime thoughts are interesting, engaging reading for any of us interested in the home front of the war years.  Which is quite a lot of us, no?

The plot (as it were) of the book is quite unextraordinary.  Ordinary, if you will.  Essentially it narrates the experience of a fairly old woman, living in a small village during wartime, and offering up her home to lodgers.  These range from military men to a famous actress – each of which Miss Nightingale welcomes happily, and observes shrewdly.  For the most part, I enjoyed and respected the calm, kind manner in which Miss Nightingale coped with the uncertainties and upheavals of conflict.
I have found that the happiest way to carry on in the war is, not to worry about any immediate effect of what we are actually doing, but to do it as well as we can, and then to look away and watch nature all around, slowly reaching her effortless and sure fruition.  That is the complete change of air and scene which we so often think we must have.  There is no repose like the realisation that one’s little daily drudgery is already part of something beyond itself.I am endlessly interested in home-front perspectives on war, but what I really love is the good old British if-you-can’t-laugh-what-can-you-do attitude to anything and everything.  One need look no further than E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime to realise that the most unsettling of circumstances can be dealt with humorously – and that was what I found most lacking in The Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady.  It’s very rarely funny.  It isn’t unduly earnest, but does lapse into the prosaic on occasion.  Some situations had inherent humour, and those came across well, but I felt Olivier/Nightingale could have made this a more engaging narrative if she had allowed herself to be a bit wittier.  The humour, when it comes, is subtle…
One complication was that a party of mothers and “expectant mothers”, whose children were sent here, had been themselves evacuated to another place beginning with the same letter.  The authorities had imagined that this alphabetical proximity naturally carried with it a geographical one, but unfortunately this was not the case, and the other village was about twelve miles off.  For some days this caused a ferment.  First of all, one of the mothers (who further happened to be “expectant”) having been located in this remote spot, arrived at our school screaming for her children who had been sent here.  She and her two children made a terrific scene, yelling and shrieking in the school yard, while I tried to explain that as the two places were in different rural districts the exchange must be arranged by the two councils.  I promised that this would be done as soon as possible.  No good.  The yells grew louder.  The Chief Billeting Officer, being a stickler for law-abiding, refused to let me take the matter into my own hands.  I therefore conveyed the party to his office, where I pointed out to him that, unless we made an exception in this case, the “expectant mother” would soon be “expectant” no longer, and that the alteration in her status might take place in his very office.  This changed his opinion, and he delightedly consented to our sending the whole family, as quickly as possible, at least twelve miles away.(Incidentally, for two rather different angles on WW2 evacuees, see Evelyn Waugh’s spiky, rather cruel novel Put Out More Flags or Terence Frisby’s touching memoir Kisses on a Postcard.)

The final two paragraphs of the book reflect what is deep within my own heart too, and which couldn’t be understood by people who haven’t lived in a village.  It’s made me want to write a post dedicated to villages, to see if I can offer up an alternative to Rachel’s paeans to New York and London, places (sorry!) I would loathe to live.  I might well write that soon, but for now I’ll hand over to Olivier/Miss Nightingale (the quotation at the end, by the way, is apparently from George Borrow):
That is the happiness of living in this place, and indeed in any country place in England to-day.  We are not cut off from the life-and-death struggle of our country, for has not this bee called “a war of little groups”, in which the Home Guards and the housewives take their place behind the aircraft and the tanks?  Yet we still live on in our own homes, and if other homes are like mine (s I am sure they are) it s still possible for a visitor to say, as he enters our doors, “Here, one can hardly realise the war”.  And that is perhaps the best thing we can ever give to the strangers within our gates.
So the colour of the trees still matters to us, and also to our lodgers.  It has mattered to us – spring, summer, autumn, and winter – all through the past three years; and, as for the winters, it must be admitted that the war ones have been very hard.  They really might have been planned by Hitler.  Yet, in spite of that, now they have taken their place among the visual memories of a lifetime, what rare effects of beauty some of them are found to recall!  There was that marvellous Sunday morning when the rain froze as it fell, and the trees were suddenly hung with tinkling icicles, chiming with little ghost-like echoes of the church bells which had long been silent.  There are no icicles to-night, and there are no bells; but “there’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath.  Life is very sweet, brother.”Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady is a very slim volume, under a hundred pages, and doesn’t really have the quality of Nella Last’s War or the magnitude of Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges – but there is plenty of room for many voices, and this is a quieter angle, from an older perspective, and still makes for interesting reading.  Olivier still hasn’t equalled The Love Child here, but of course it is a very different kettle of fish.  For anybody interested in wartime England – I’d recommend picking this up if you stumble across it, and further recommend that you go and read Jane’s enchanting review.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

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Like many people my age, my first encounter with John Steinbeck was when studying Of Mice and Men during my GCSEs.  Unlike a lot of people, flogging out every detail of a novel (and then watching the video because we’d never quite finished reading the book) didn’t put me off reading for life – but neither was I desperate to read any more Steinbeck.

So, when my book group chose The Pearl (1947) for this month’s read, I was happy to give Steinbeck another go.  I hadn’t disliked Of Mice and Men, but I’m yet to click with any of the Great American Novels (on the list which left me cold at best: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick – although I did love To Kill A Mockingbird).  Well, there could scarcely be more different novels than Of Mice and Men and The Pearl – it’s difficult to believe they’re by the same author.  And whatever my feelings about the former work – The Pearl is captivatingly brilliant.

At only ninety pages long, The Pearl is barely a novella – the blurb of my copy labels it a short story, but I think it is most fitting to call it a fable.  That is certainly reflective of its tone and atmosphere.  It tells of Kino, his wife Juana, and their baby Coyotito.  They are Mexican pearlers, living in La Paz in extreme poverty – but a close, kind community.  That is, those of their race (which I think is Mexican-Indian) care for one another – the rich townsfolk are selfish colonisers who refer to Kino and his people as ‘animals’.

What I loved most about the book was its style and tone, which felt authentically as though it were an inherited folk-tale, told through the generations.  I daresay there’s all sorts that could be said about an outsider imposing a fable on this community, ya-dah-ya-dah, but that’s not really the point – Steinbeck has crafted something which never feels forced or voyeuristic, but as though it were part of the lifeblood of people like Kino.  Folk-tales tend to present the world in an unexpected way – in The Pearl, the Mexican-Indians experience events through melodies.  Not simply singing about them, but sensing them – Kino can hear the Song of Evil approaching; he can hear the Song of Family.  He can hear many interweaving melodies, and trusts them.

Now, Kino’s people had sung of everything that happened or existed.  They had made songs to the fishes, to the sea in anger and to the sea in calm, to the light and the dark and the sun and the moon, and the songs were all in Kino and in his people – every song that had ever been made, even the ones forgotten.  And as he filled his basket the song was in Kino, and the beat of the song was his pounding heart as it ate the oxygen from his held breath, and the melody of the song was the grey-green water and the little scuttling animals and the clouds of fish that flitted by and were gone.  But in the song there was a secret little inner song, hardly perceptible, but always there, sweet and secret and clinging, almost hiding in the counter-melody, and this was the Song of the Peal That Might Be, for every shell thrown in the basket might contain a pearl.
It will come as no surprise that Kino finds a pearl – and it is enormous.  It is, he believes, The Pearl of the World.  What follows is akin to a parable – unsurprisingly the arrival of wealth does not bring happiness; rather, it brings complications and anguish.

I shan’t give you all the details.  Although they are somewhat predictable, as with all stories (and especially folk-tales) the importance lies in the way in which they are told.  I was very impressed by Steinbeck’s technique in mounting tension (a trait he also uses, of course, in Of Mice and Men) – he manages to make a very simple tale extremely gripping.  If I knew how he did, I’d be a great writer myself.

The Pearl isn’t simply a morality tale.  That wealth doesn’t equate happiness is both true and a truism.  Steinbeck’s use of a straightforward tale is much more sophisticated – an incredibly engaging, beautiful narrative.  It isn’t the sort of book I could love in a fond, intimate manner – in feeling like a folk-tale passed down through generations, it keeps the reader at a distance – but this story of Kino and his family is still captivating, and a masterpiece of simplicity and authorial economy.

Things to get Stuck into:


The Blue Fox by Sjon – this sparse Icelandic tale kept coming to my mind whilst I was reading – perhaps because Sjon, like Steinbeck, envelops the reader entirely in the atmosphere of his tale.


The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono – for another well-told fable, with beautiful woodcut illustrations, you could do no better.

The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

Despite the tidal waves of books that come into my possession, and the fact that I rarely leave the house without buying at least one book (I’ve bought five since I did the meme on Friday) only relatively rarely do I buy a book on a complete whim.  Usually I’ve read other things by the author, or heard good things, or am following up a blog review etc.  These links can be tenuous, and tend to create an ever-widening field of gosh-yes-I-think-I’d-like-that books.  But occasionally I buy one, knowing nothing whatsoever about it or its author.

And that, dear reader, is how I came to buy The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 

I was lured in by the fact that it was an NYRB Classic, and they’re always beautifully produced, whatever else may come inside.  And I was further tempted when I saw that it was a ‘fantastic exploration of virtual realities’ (thus potentially useful for my thesis) and had apparently inspired the film Last Year in Marienbad, which has been in Amazon basket for years.  Apparently it was mentioned in ‘Lost’, too, but I didn’t see any of that.

This novella (only a hundred pages) should probably be classed as science fiction, and there is definite allusion to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau in Bioy Casares’ title – but this isn’t a tale of robots and computers, but of one lovestruck, bewildered man.  He isn’t named, and seems to be known as The Fugitive, since he is hiding on the (fictional) island Villings to escape the death penalty in his home country of Venezuela.  The Invention of Morel takes the form of his diaries.  The opening paragraph flings the reader into the catalyst of the novella:

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time.  I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time.  The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again.  As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record.
Despite having appeared to be a deserted island, complete with abandoned chapel and museum, suddenly the shore is filled with people – eccentric people, dressed in clothes of the past, dancing and socialising in the unseasonal heat.

The Fugitive is most interested in one of the women, whom he names Faustine.  She (although the narrative does not explicitly say so) resembles Louise Brooks and was inspired by Bioy Casares’ fascination with that film star.  The Fugitive follows her, watching her sunbathing and spying on her activities and – as people do in novels – falls besottedly in love with her, without ever engaging her in conversation.  His rival for her affections, who does have conversation with her and everything, is the Morel of the title.

And then all the tourists disappear.

It’s always difficult to tell how much a novel’s style is due to its author, when it comes in translation.  Either Bioy Casares deliberately wrote most of The Invention of Morel in a disconcerting, imprecise style, or Simms didn’t do a great job translating.  The novella is quite difficult to read.  It certainly doesn’t flow.  It is disjointed, not entirely chronological, meandering through speculation and confusion in between scribbled declarations of love.  All of which certainly echoes The Fugitive’s confusion, thrusting the reader into the same bewilderment he must be feeling.  What makes me suspect that this is deliberate is this paragraph, about Morel explaining his ‘invention’ (fear not, I shall tell you when to look away, if you want to avoid spoilers!)

Up to this point it was a repugnant and badly organized speech. Morel is a scientist, and he becomes more precise when he overlooks his personal feelings and concentrates on his own special field; then his style is still unpleasant, filled with technical words and vain attempts to achieve a certain oratorical force, but at least it is clearer.

Although this refers to Morel’s speech, it also reflects upon the style and structure of The Invention of Morel itself.  After this point, it becomes much more lucid and readable.  Which means Bioy Casares is being rather clever, but doesn’t make the first two-thirds of the novella any easier to read…

Ok, now I’m going to tell you what Morel’s ‘invention’ is – so run away, if you don’t want to know.

*Doo-be-doo-be-dooooo*

Ok, still with me? Here it is: Morel has recorded all of their actions for the week – but not simply audio and visual, but all five senses.  What The Fugitive has been witnessing is one of the endless replayings of the week, which keeps that group of visitors to the island in some curious form of immortality – and which explains all manner of other strange phenomena.

The Invention of Morel has been filled with all manner of clues from the outset, which make sense looking back, but merely seem confusing upon first reading them.  I especially liked this one:

I went to gather the flowers, which are most abundant down in the ravines.  I picked the ones that were least ugly.  (Even the palest flowers have an almost animal vitality!)  When I had picked all I could carry and started to arrange them, I saw that they were dead.

What originally seems to hint towards The Fugitive’s delusional or deranged state (and can that interpretation ever be ruled out, in fantastic works?) slots into the reader’s new understanding of the novel.

Giving away this device shouldn’t prevent you having a rewarding reading of The Invention of Morel.  The book doesn’t rest upon the power of a twist, as many less intellectual books and films do – rather, Bioy Casares explores themes of isolation; what constitutes immortality; what rights ought scientists to have over humans; even the power of love.

The final third of the novella, being so much less stylistically confused and confusing, allows these themes to come to the fore and it was definitely this section which I most valued and enjoyed.  Perhaps a slow, thoughtful reading of the first two-thirds would prove equally rewarding.  As it was, I did feel rather like I was battling through quicksand, never able to settle into a comfortable reading rhythm – but, after all, probably that was what Bioy Casares intended…?

Others who got Stuck into it…


“It’s the kind of read that’s slightly unsettling and not with a lot of closure.” – Amy, My Friend Amy


“I was delighted to find The Invention of Morel to be such a quick and engaging read, and yet one that has depth if I chose to read it on a deeper level in the future.” – Rebecca, Rebecca Reads


“As a mystery it’s engaging, and all the threads come together in an intricate weave with no frayed lines to tug on.” – Stewart, BookLit

Two Serious Ladies – Jane Bowles

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

This is another fairly long review, but a few of you were kind enough the other day to tell me not to apologise for long reviews – so I shan’t!  I certainly enjoyed writing it, and formulating my thoughts.

Eighteen months ago John Self very kindly offered me a copy of Two Serious Ladies (1943) by Jane Bowles, in its beautiful reprint by Sort Of Books (responsible for the recent Tove Jansson editions too, most of which are newly-commissioned translations.)  He thought it might be my sort of thing – and he was definitely right.  It just took a while for me to get around to reading it…  (By the by, Sort Of Books – I love you, I love your production standards and your choice of titles – but… only one lady on the cover of a book called Two Serious Ladies – really?)

I know John Self read the novel, but can’t find a review of it on his blog, so perhaps it never got that far.  In fact, despite being a celebrated novel, there isn’t a great deal of coverage of it in the blogging world – perhaps because it is essentially a very strange book.  You know I love me some strange, now and then, so I was more than happy with that – but it isn’t one that I would recommend to everyone.  Bowles writes quite like Muriel Spark, but without the ironic authorial comment.  The unsettling dialogue never settles into the expected, the sparse narrative offers very little guidance, and the whole novel is deliciously disconcerting and unusual.  And yet it’s still often very funny.  If you like beginning-middle-end and naturalised conversations between characters, then look away.  If you like Muriel Spark, Barbara Comyns, or even Ivy Compton-Burnett – then you could well be in for a treat.

The females of the title only meet twice, briefly, in Two Serious Ladies – towards the end of the first and third sections, of three.  The ladies in question are Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield – always called, by the narrative, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield; one of the novel’s most subtle strangenesses.  Lorna Sage’s excellent introduction reveals that there was once to have been a third serious lady, Senorita Cordoba, which might have made the unusual structure less striking – but would have thus robbed Bowles.

We first see Miss Goering as a child, attempting to inveigle a straightforward friend into an elaborate and invented religious ritual.  The reader might, not unnaturally, expect to follow Miss Goering throughout her life – but we quickly fast-forward to Miss Goering as a “grown woman” (age unspecified) and stay there.  She is unsociable, uncompromising, selfish and violently honest – yet not truly malicious.  Her character is so open and amorally direct that she reminded me of Katri from Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver.  Oddly, suddenly (so much in this novel is odd and sudden) Miss Goering invites Miss Gamelon, the cousin of her governess, to live with her.  They are never amiable companions, and although they depend upon one another to an extent, their relationship is never reliable and neither even attempts to understand the other.  It is a mystery why either would want to live with the other – but a mystery neither of them care to address.  Here is the sort of conversation they have:

“I don’t like sports,” said Miss Goering; “more than anything else, they give me a terrific feeling of sinning.”
“On the contrary,” said Miss Gamelon, “that’s exactly what they never do.”
“Don’t be rude, Lucy dear,” said Miss Goering.  “After all, I have paid sufficient attention to what happens inside of me and I know better than you about my own feelings.”
“Sports,” said Miss Gamelon, “can never give you a feeling of sinning, but what is more interesting is that you can never sit down for more than five minutes without introducing something weird into the conversation.  I certainly think you have made a study of it.”

I know I shouldn’t be attempting a piece of close reading, as that’s not what you’ve come to read, but I think that excerpt would be fascinating to analyse.  One example – that word ‘certainly’ in the final sentence.  How many authors would have included that?  And what a transformative effect it has on the sentiment, and on the character speaking it – she becomes that much more combative, and idiomatic, and faux-dramatic.  She is speaking for effect, for drama, rather than with simply honesty.  Even if I’d only read these sentences, Miss Gamelon would stand fully-formed before me.

Nearly all the characters and their conversations are piercingly honest, unswervingly self-absorbed, and insistently irrelevant.  Rarely do they seem to have paid the remotest attention to what their interlocutor has replied.  If they have, it is solely as a means of flatly refuting it.  Forster’s Howards End is renowned for the mantra ‘only connect’ – Two Serious Ladies proffers the opposite doctrine, especially where Miss Goering is concerned.  She does go out with a weak man called Arnold, whom she openly despises – although, again, without intending malice.  Jane Bowles excels at portraying awkward conversations and unhappy exchanges – if they lean too much towards the morosely disjointed to claim verisimilitude, then at least it makes a change to the neat patter of many novels.

“Since you live so far out of town,” said Arnold, “why don’t you spend the night at my house?  We have an extra bedroom.”
“I probably shall,” said Miss Goering, “although it is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.”  Miss Goering looked a little morose after having said this and they drove on in silence until they reached their destination.

Miss Goering bumps into her acquaintance Mrs. Copperfield at a party, and the narrative passes the baton on.  Mrs. Copperfield is about to embark on a trip to Panama with her husband.

This section of the novel is equally interesting, although I jotted down fewer notes while reading it… where Miss Goering is indifferent and jaded, Mrs. Copperfield has an ingenuous lust for experience.  She is not an intelligent woman, but is easily captivated, and dashes around Panama – befriending the inhabitants of a brothel along the way.  Here she has just met a flighty girl named Peggy, whose appearance in the novel is fleeting:

“Please,” she [Peggy] said, “be friendly to me. I don’t often see people I like. I never do the same thing twice, really I don’t. I haven’t asked anyone up to my room in the longest while because I’m not interested and because they get everything so dirty. I know you wouldn’t get everything dirty because I can tell that you come from a nice class of people. I love people with a good education. I think it’s wonderful.”
“I have so much on my mind,” said Mrs. Copperfield. “Generally I haven’t.”

How are these ladies serious?  Lorna Sage suggests that Bowles uses the word to mean ‘risking the possibility that you were meaninglessly weird’.   I think perhaps it is these ladies’ choice not to laugh at life, but determinedly to live it, and see what happens.  But, truth be told, Jane Bowles doesn’t seem to have a grand theme to Two Serious Ladies.  Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are not part of a philosophical quest; there is no sense of purpose or conclusion.  Questions are not answered; they are scarcely posed.  In many ways the novel doesn’t follow any progression at all – the ladies merely experience a great deal, whether grasping at it enthusiastically or raising an ambivalent eyebrow at life.  Bowles’ astonishing talent is creating a dynamic that, if not unique, is highly unusual – strange, surreal, and yet grounded to the mundane.  Her ear for dialogue is astonishing – dialogue which is almost never realistic, but always striking.

And Two Serious Ladies is a brilliant novel.  As I said, it would not suit many readers – but anybody who chose writing style over plot in my recent post on the topic would be quite likely to appreciate this book.  It is a huge shame that Bowles only wrote one novel.  The one she has created ought to be enough to assure her a sort of immortality – Bowles is one novelist we should be taking seriously.

Others who got Stuck into it:

 “There’s something interestingly off in the way the characters in this book make choices; they are all inscrutable.” – With Hidden Noise

“At its heart, it is a book about people who feel quite often unrooted and alone, even in their own parlor, surrounded by friends.” – Margaret, The Art of Reading

 “It’s essentially an absurd tale and not one I really got into.” – Verity, Verity’s Virago Venture

Westwood – Stella Gibbons

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Why, dear reader, why does it sometimes take me so long to review books?  I read Westwood (1946) by Stella Gibbons whilst on holiday with Colin, thought it was very good, have promised you reviews a dozen times… and only now do I get around to writing about it.

Firstly, many thanks to lovely Vintage books for sending me this copy, and super praise to Pep Montserrat who did the beautiful cover illustration.  Like everyone who has read it, I love Cold Comfort Farm and was excited when I heard that Vintage were hot on Virago’s heels, in publishing more of Gibbons’ work.  Then I read Lynne Truss’ excellent introduction, published in the Guardian (but now not available online) and simply had to read the novel.

In her introduction, Truss writes that ‘If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbons’s Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion.’  Those of you who know my thoughts about the relative merits of Austen’s novels may be surprised to learn that this actually encouraged me to read Westwood(!)  Obviously Truss’ analogy can only be taken so far, but she has a point – Westwood is not a comic novel (although it has funny moments), rather it is slightly melancholic and very contemplative.

The heroine of the piece is Margaret Steggles, a plain and uncertain type with a thirst for learning and an appetite for adventure which she keeps sensibly subdued.  She is only 23, unhappy with her job as a teacher and with her home life – her father is prone to affairs, and her mother is disappointed that Margaret is not more like her feisty good-time-gal friend Hilda.  But naturally things do not remain thus.  Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath and, when returning it, becomes embroiled in the lives of self-important playwright Gerald Challis, his spoilt, snobbish daughter Hebe, and her husband, the painter Alexander Niland.  They are an eminently fashionable set, full of ideas of Art and Beauty, and Margaret wants in.  The nearest she can get, to start off with, is the somewhat hysterical Jewish refugee Zita, who lives with the family and is not quite a housekeeper but definitely not one of the family.

“I like you, Miss Steggles.”

“Thank you.  I like you too,” sais Margaret, who in her present mood would have liked anyone.

“Good.  Den we are friends,” announced Zita, putting out her hand while her eyes overflowed.  Margaret took it and they exchanged a solemn clasp.  “Oh, Miss Steggles – what iss your name?” she demanded, interrupting herself.

“Margaret.”

“Zo.  I shall call you Margaret.  You will call me Zita?”

“I’d love to, Zita.”

“Margaret, I haf a many sadness.  I tell you about it.”

Margaret was so inexperienced as a confidante that no feeling of dismay overcame her on hearing this threat; indeed she hardly heard what Zita said, so overjoyed was she at the prospect of frequent visits to Westwood as Zita’s friend.
As you can see from the ‘iss’ and ‘Zo’ used so liberally, Zita does border a little on stereotype – but she is the liveliest inclusion to the novel, and that which most demonstrates Gibbons’ comic touch.  I am guilty of that which Truss does in the introduction, presumably as inadvertently as I am, of quoting the sections which amused me most.  For, as I said, this isn’t, broadly, a comic novel.  At its heart is Margaret’s awkward attempts to become part of a society which only tolerates her.  There is a desperately sad moment where Margaret overhears Hebe’s opinion of her – it’s in the same area as ‘consciously naive’ and ‘you will be limited as to number – only three at once.’  (Ten points if you recognise those references!)

She especially wants to be involved in Challis’ life, and falls rather in love with him – although from the reader’s perspective it is a trifle difficult to see why.  He is pompous, with high-blown ideas about Beauty which would make Keats seem like a materialist.

“A landscape without hills,” he suddenly pronounced, “is like a woman without mystery.”

There simply was not any answer to this, especially as his unhappy audience realized that whatever she said would be wrong, so she replied feebly:

“Oh – do you think so?”

“The monotony of an endless plain,” continued Mr. Challis disparagingly surveying the mild meadows on every side, “drives men mad.”
But Challis’ Achilles’ heel (and one of the other funny threads through the novel – although funniness laced with tragedy) is his belief in the Beauty of the common innocent girl, provided she be physically attractive, of course.  And the one he sets his eye on is Hilda – remember her?  Margaret’s feisty friend who would, in contemporary soap parlance, undoubtedly be described as a tart with a heart.  Challis bumps into her walking home from the train (“I have been sent by Providence especially to escort you”) and he decides to call himself Marcus Antonius, and she Daphne.  Hilda’s good-natured willingness to put up with him until she is bored, and his slavish (would-be adulterous) devotion to a girl whose nature he has so completely misunderstood, is both farcical and saddening.

Indeed (sweeping generalisation alert) that is how Gibbons treats a lot of the material in Westwood.  It is the kind of plot and the (large) cast of characters which could easily be tragic or comic, and Gibbons treads a path between the two – lingering, perhaps, on the tragic, but never fully abandoning the comic.  Being asked to empathise with Margaret, rather than laugh at or with her, takes Westwood away from the hilarious tour de force of Cold Comfort Farm, but also creates a more thoughtful, thought-provoking work.  Both novels introduce a whirlwind of characters, but while Cold Comfort Farm can rely upon the witty epithet to describe someone, Westwood delves deeper – which does, at times, make the novel feel a bit overcrowded and perhaps overlong – but is also ultimately perhaps more satisfying.  If I were one of these novels to reread next, I must admit it would be Cold Comfort Farm – for an uproarious escapade – but I doubt I would gain as much, and I certainly wouldn’t think as much.  The novels are so different that it is nigh on impossible to say one is better than the other, but what is obvious is that Westwood should never have gone out of print, and Vintage are to be commended for rectifying whosever oversight that was.

Others who got Stuck into this…
I’m going to copy Jackie’s lovely idea of quoting other bloggers who have reviewed the book, and point you in the direction of their reviews.  I think it’s a great addition to Jackie’s blogposts – I’m all about the blogging community.  I’ll just pick two or three each time, so as to feel more like I’m including people in a selective list rather than accidentally excluding people from an exhaustive list!

“[…Margaret] is a masterpiece and definitely earns Gibbons the right to be compared with Austen.[…]” – Hayley, Desperate Reader

“[…] do read this if you love a warm, witty, beautifully written and leisurely novel […]” – Hilary, Vulpes Libris

Shaving Through The Blitz

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I believe, when I told you about my purchases in Hay-on-Wye, I advertised Shaving Through the Blitz (1943) by G.W. Stonier as being akin to ‘Mr. Miniver’, had that book ever existed. Which probably got quite a few of you interested.


Well, it isn’t anything like that, really. About all is has in common is that is was evidently once columns in a paper. But it’s still really good. Keep reading…

I was expecting whimsy and cosiness and a general determination to ignore the more brutal aspects of war in favour of bottling pears and entering flower shows – that sort of thing. And I was prepared to devour it in the same spirit. But Stonier’s book – and his narrator Mr. Fanfarlo – is of a rather different temperament. It’s quite lyrical, in a semi-experimental manner, moving through the sights, sounds, and feelings of wartime London, rather than narrating them in a straightforward manner. Fanfarlo is also proudly aesthetic, and is given to this sort of moral dilemma:

Suppose during an air raid I held Botticelli’s Venus under one arm and an old woman unknown to me under the other, with the chance of saving one but not both, which should I choose? Immortal painting or crumbling flesh and blood? The first! As an artist, I claim that right.

I say moral dilemma, but he is not unduly given to morals. Shaving Through the Blitz was surprisingly ‘progressive’ – Fanfarlo lives with a woman called Lizzie, who would quite like him to propose, but doesn’t intend to force the matter. He works, in a fairly dispassionate way, at the Ministry to ‘provide slogans that shall be breezy and full of dare-and-do’. There were definite overtones of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Which is a hint that Stonier can be very funny at times, even while being aesthetic and high-falutin’. I particularly liked a little conversation about a young man writing for the Mass Observation project. A lady comments:

“That’s bad. Can’t you break him of it? My little nephew was a terrible mass-observer, too, before he got married.”

That puts Nella Last et al in their place, doesn’t it?

As always, it is deeply interesting to read about the war from those who experienced it. I feel like I have a fairly informed awareness of the (upper)middle-class housewife’s view of war, from various contemporary novels, but Stonier provides a viewpoint I hadn’t really encountered before. All the pieces slotting together is satisfying, to create a portrait of how wartime Britain would have felt. And this (lengthy) excerpt, below, made the book worth finding, all by itself. I think it a really moving, unusual angle upon the way the war changed, and how people at home changed their responses to it. I’m going to finish off this post with it, and encourage you to track down a copy of Shaving Through The Blitz if you can. Not the most whimsical of wartime books, but perhaps one of the more unusual.

How it has changed in the last eighteen months! Do you (who does not?) remember the carefree evenings when we all used to go for strolls in the new-found dark? It was a spree then, to walk to a theatre, or merely to walk, to stumble over sandbags and cross the road by others’ lights. “Sandbags!” we would exclaim as we picked ourselves up and went on to discover lamp-posts. Friendliness displayed itself in many ways, in a noisy jostling, in such illumination as was allowed. Torches stared at one another, cigarettes flickered a dialogue on street corners. Along Tottenham Court Road gaiety had lost nothing with the lights down, and a bubbling trail of voices down each pavement drew whisperers out of side-streets and brought even the sedentary to their doors. A gross amiability, the adolescent pleasure of being heard but not seen, infected every one who was being nudged, shoved, swept along and held back by the stream. A match would flare nearby, thrillingly, in the darkness, to reveal a face lit from below: a girl’s sucked-in cheeks over a cigarette, a beaming negro, perhaps, delighted with hours when others were as black and easily tickled as himself.

All that has disappeared – the lingering, the voices, the cigarette dream; and now with darkness falls the hush. Emptiness, but with every cranny filled. London has been given over to a monstrous drama, an act of darkness from which ordinary people, you and I as individuals, shut ourselves away. Earth and sky contract to form the arena; the city puts up its searchlights, a beetle laid on its back and helplessly wavering its legs, while the hornet drones overheard; night after night the assailant returns, the victim quivers with upturned belly. “A very bad night,” says Mrs. Greenbaum, heaving over in the morning to probe her fatness with an indignant finger, “an awful bad time it was last night, sure.” The rest of us, having shared the same delirium, with the same hornet boring down to a point in our bellies, nod stoically and blink at our silly nightlight.

Recapturing

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

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36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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