1940s

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild

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I bought I Ordered a Table for Six (1942) by Noel Streatfeild in a lovely secondhand bookshop in Ironbridge, just a few weeks before the pandemic hit the UK. It feels like another lifetime. It’s certainly been catching my eye ever since then – because isn’t that a wonderful title?

I’ve much less well-versed in Streatfeild’s output than many of you will be, having never read Ballet Shoes or any of her other children’s books. Previously, I’d only read Saplings – the book Persephone published – and was a little lukewarm about it. For my money, I Ordered a Table for Six is rather better – and it’s available from Bello, though I was lucky enough to find this old hardback. Here’s how it starts:

“I shall,” thought Mrs Framley, “give a little party for him.”

Adela Framley had come downstairs to her office. There are few things which are pleasurable in a war, but walking to what had been the breakfast-room, and was now her office, was a daily source of happiness to Mrs Framley. Her route lay through the main passage where the unpacking was done, and through the big dining-room, which was now the work-room. As she passed, women straightened their backs or raised their eyes from needles and sewing-machines and smiled. To everybody in the building she meant a lot. She was Mrs Framley who ran ‘Comforts for the Bombed’. They might say this and that about her for her story was no secret, but during the hours while her workrooms were open she was the organiser and founder and therefore a personage. For nearly four years her sense of inferiority had been so absorbing that the fibre of her nature had shrunk. Since she had founded her comforts fund it was expanding, not to its old shape and size, but enough to give some relief to her contracted nerves.

The ‘him’ in question is Mr Penrose, the patron of this charity that has given Mrs Framley purpose. It provides necessary items to those whose homes have been destroyed by bombing, and is the sort of moment for which women like Adela Framley live. She is the sort of woman who commandeers a village jumble sale and rules it with determination (and an underlying awareness that nobody much likes her) – and ‘Comforts for the Bombed’ has given her the opportunity to do this with an unassailable moral virtue. Though there are talks of subsuming her small division into a wider, better-organised scheme. And most of the legwork is done by Letty – an assistant who is blandly loyal on the surface, and doesn’t much like Adela underneath that.

One of the wartime mysteries is the absence of Adela’s son. I can’t remember how soon in the novel that is revealed, so I shan’t say anything – but there is certainly early doubt that he is away fighting, not answering her letters. And one of the five people invited to the dinner is a friend of this son’s, who is only there in the hope that it could be financially advantageous to him. Adela’s daughter – on the cusp of adulthood – is also coming to London for it, against the advice of the relative she is staying with in the depths of the countryside. A dully suitable man has been invited in the hopes of being an eligible future husband.

The dinner doesn’t take place until towards the end of the book, but there is plenty to engage us before this. Streatfeild gives us richly detailed characters, and isn’t shy about making them unlikeable. Everybody is shades of grey – Adela’s war work being a good example of the different impulses, good and the reverse, that motivate most people. The only thing I found confusing was when we were thrust into the world of another of the dinner guests, and suddenly had whole new places and sets of characters to meet and engage with – it always felt a little severed from what had preceded, even though the different threads come together well at the climactic dinner.

It’s always interesting to read a book so centred in the Second World War that was published while the war was in full flow. I Ordered a Table for Six gives a perspective on the war that I hadn’t seen before, with perhaps the closest being the sections on war work in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime. There are few characters to warm to, but it feels like a vividly real depiction of a moment in a desperately strange period of recent history – managing to merge a sort of abrasive uncertainty about the future with the ingredients of an early-20th-century domestic novel of middle-class life. I think definitely worth tracking down – just don’t read the full description on the publisher’s website, as it gives away the ending!

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

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Brat Farrar: Amazon.co.uk: Tey, Josephine: 9780099536840: BooksMy old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it. It definitely came up during our discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant novel The Scapegoat, because the premise is very similar. (In most years, The Scapegoat would have been among my best reads – but 2020 had some truly brilliant reads.)

Brat Farrar is the lead character of the novel – yes, it is a name, and an almost wilfully terrible one. What a bad title! I wonder why she did it? Anyway, he meets a man who tells him he is a doppelganger for a neighbour called Simon Ashby. As it happens, Simon’s twin brother went missing when he was 13, seven years earlier. A suicide note was found, but his body has never been identified – one washed up that was assumed to be him, but it was beyond recognition. So Brat is persuaded to go back and pretend to be the missing Patrick – and, as the older twin by a few minutes, inherit the family wealth. Speaking as an older twin by a few minutes… I wish.

Brat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. Brat is an orphan (his name is a corruption of St Bartholomew’s Orphanage) and has made his way in the world through being on a ranch in America. Man, he loves horses almost as much as Josephine Tey thinks the reader loves horses.

It’s an intriguing set up, if one is willing to suspend disbelief, and I always am for some sort of coincidental premise. It’s the less vital parts of the puzzle that left me slightly more incredulous – for instance, Patrick’s family don’t seem that bothered about his return from the dead. They react in the way I might if I saw someone I hadn’t expect to see for another month or two. Patrick’s aunt and guardian, Bea, is a delightful character – wise, kind, very mildly dry – and I loved her, but she is representative of the whole family in her fairly lukewarm response. I suppose one can’t spend half the book with people fainting from surprise, but still. Anyway, they’re all pleased to see him and immediately taken in – except for the twin, Simon, who is rather stand-offish and the last to be convinced that Brat is Patrick.

It’s very interesting to read about, but there isn’t much tension. It suffers from comparison with du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, which is better in many ways but particularly the feeling that everything could crumble at any point. Because we know the truth of his identity from the outset, and never seriously suspect that Brat’s cover will be blown (he has been immaculately coached by the family friend), we aren’t left very gripped. It’s entertaining to read, but bizarrely unsuspenseful for a mystery novelist.

And then, lordy me, the horses. Perhaps the most interesting character is that christened ‘Timber the murder horse’ by my book group – he has killed a man by smacking him into a tree, and his one wish in life is to do it more people. I enjoyed reading about him, and Tey really gets into the limited psyche of a horse. Where I started skimming was at a race or showjumping or something, where there are pages and pages and pages of descriptions of horses and their style and pedigree and all sorts. Just leave horses alone, guys.

Brat Farrar was left me in the strange position of really enjoying reading it, but having piles and piles of caveats. None of those are Tey’s writing style, which is excellent. It’s one of those cases where there is the kernel of a much better book at the heart of a good book. Perhaps that kernel turned into The Scapegoat?

The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp

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I was VERY excited when I saw that the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press will be reprinting many Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons titles in January. Do I have many books by both these authors still unread? Yes, of course. But it’s still great to be able to get easily available copies of books that have eluded many fans for years – most notably Rhododendron Pie by Sharp, something of a golden fleece for book bloggers.

Dean Street Press have kindly sent me that as a review book, but I have started with the other one they sent – one I’ve had my eye on for a while: The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp, from 1940. I had high hopes, because the next novel she wrote is probably my favourite of the seven Sharps I’ve read, Cluny Brown. And the premise is irresistible: there is a little village called Gillenham where there was reputed to be a ‘stone of chastity’ in the stream. It was a stepping stone that any ‘unchaste’ woman would stumble on – sort of like one of those medieval witch trials, though believed to have been around in the time of the current population’s grandparents.

Professor Pounce arrives in the village, with his widowed sister-in-law and his young adult nephew Nicholas, intending to investigate the legend. Oh, and there’s also the beautiful, distant Carmen, whose presence is not quite explained. It’s a delightful set up – because the Professor can’t understand why anybody would find his investigations impertinent or insulting. As his sister-in-law points out, people might be offended at his prurient questions about their grandmother’s purity – but he has only science in mind. Nicholas, meanwhile, has other things in mind – and begins to fall both for Carmen and for a Bloomsbury-type who is staying in the village and writing terrible verse-set-to-music.

Nicholas’s objections to distributing the Professor’s questionnaire are disregarded, and he sets off to an unsympathetic local community. Here’s a sample of Sharp’s delightful prose:

Wobbling down the road next morning, on a borrowed bicycle with the bundle of questionnaires stacked in its carrier, Nicholas Pounce felt himself to be, both literally and figuratively, in a very precarious position. He was practically certain that only the front brake worked, and he was extremely apprehensive as to the effect upon its recipients of his Uncle Isaac’s questionnaire. By a curious chance all the villagers he passed were able-bodied males. Some of them said “Mornin'” to him, and Nicholas said “Good morning” back. He said it ingratiatingly. In each stolid pair of eyes he detected, or thought he did, a complete lack of scientific interest and a fanatic regard for the good name of woman.

As I’ve said before, Sharp is equally good at funny and poignant – and in The Stone of Chastity, she is in full comic mode. It reminded me a lot of R.C. Sherriff’s equally delightful The Wells of St Mary’s – a local village dealing with the unexpected introduction of the miraculous, and responding with the sort of village politics that have changed little in the decades since. Factions are formed, rumours spread and, yes, the stone itself turns up.

Thanks so much, Dean Street Press and Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow, for bringing back this wonderful novel – like so many of Sharp’s books, it deserves to be a modern classic. Incidentally, it seems to have reprinted a number of times – check out the range of cover images it has received over time.

The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh

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I’ve always been intrigued when I saw mid-century novels by authors I’ve not heard of, and that’s particularly true since I’ve been scouting for titles for the British Library Women Writers series – and so I’ve started looking through my shelves for novels that are out of print and a little lesser known. Recently, I read The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh, from 1947.

Mrs Hooker lives in a small village where everybody knows each other’s business and usually makes it their business too. In the opening pages we are introduced to the community – vicar and wife, policeman, teacher, local aristocrats. The expected crowd of a village scene, though confusingly the women include Moya, May, Mary, and Maggy, which doesn’t make it particularly easy to remember which is which. Marsh has a light touch and quickly lets us know which characters will amuse and which will frustrate us. Though Mrs Hooker isn’t among this initial crowd.

She lives with her son Jim, who has just become an adult. During the war, they – like most people in the village – took in an evacuee. A young girl called Sylvia. The village – and seemingly the author – have some prejudice against London girls and their forward ways; their swaying hips and eyes that are asking for it, etc. Suffice to say, this sort of description would not be welcome in a novel now, and thank goodness.

Sylvia goes back to London for a bit, where Mrs Hooker visits, looking on her as a surrogate daughter despite the village’s distrust of her. She is rather upset by the indifference shown by Sylvia’s parents, not to mention the poverty she lives in. So when Sylvia unexpectedly returns to the village, she is welcomed by Mrs H. And she comes bearing news: she is pregnant, and Jim is the father. She is also only fifteen years old.

Jim denies that he ever slept with her, and says it must be some London dalliance. [Or – call it what it is, which the novel does not – statutory rape.] The village is divided in whom they believe of the pair. But the one person you’d expect to be on Jim’s side, and who isn’t, is Mrs Hooker herself:

“I don’t know why I should doubt the poor child’s word. I reckon she’s speakin’ the truth, poor lamb. No, it was Jim, an’ he’s got to stand the racket. I’d give my right hand for it not to be him – the disgrace of it – well, you know what folks are! But it is him, an’ she’ll make him a nice little wife an’ I’ll look after the baby for ’em an’ she can go out to work.”

This is the unnatural behaviour of the title: that she refuses to believe her son, and will not be swayed.

It’s an interesting premise for a novel, and a spin on the evacuee situation that I haven’t read before but must have been relatively common. The reason the novel didn’t quite work for me is that, after this set up, it’s incredibly repetitive. It’s less than two hundred pages long, but it keeps going in circles. Jim insists he isn’t the father. Sylvia insists he is. Various local people repeatedly refer to Jim as a ‘good, clean boy’. Mrs Hooker maintains that she is going to be a grandmother. I shan’t say what the truth is, but the reader does know it pretty early on – so we aren’t reading to find out the solution to a mystery. It all just got a bit samey – not to mention rather unpleasant to read, when people blame the fifteen-year-old Sylvia for being a hussy etc.

So, an interesting writer and a good village set up – but the theme of the novel hasn’t dated well, and the structure of the plot is severely lacking. But I’d still read something else by her, hoping for the best.

British Library Women Writers #3: Chatterton Square by E.H. Young

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For the third of the British Library Women Writers series, I thought I’d republish a post I wrote for the #1947Club back in 2016, which is when I first read Chatterton Square. It’s also the first of the British Library titles that I chose myself – and the afterword that was most interesting to me to write, as I had to do some new research into 1930s divorce law. I hope also interesting to read about! Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2016…

I was really pleased when I heard that Chatterton Square by E.H. Young was a 1947 novel, as I’ve had it on my shelves to read since 2007. Since 21st December 2007, to be precise, which makes it a couple of months after I read Tara’s review of it at Books and Cooks. Tara sadly left the blogosphere many years ago, but this book and she have always been associated in my mind – and it is only now, looking back at her review, that I discover that she wasn’t quite as enamoured with Chatterton Square as my memory had suggested…

This was the first E.H. Young novel I bought, but it’s now actually the fourth one that I’ve read – Miss Mole, William, and The Misses Mallett being on my have-now-read list, with William finding its way to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About list. How does Chatterton Square fare on my list?

It was E.H. Young’s final novel, and there is a great deal of maturity here. I would never have mistaken it for a young writer’s first effort – because the characters and their experiences are described so subtly, so gradually and with such sophistication. As usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Who are these characters?

The novel concerns two families living next to each other on Chatterton Square in Upper Radstowe – Young’s fictionalised version of Clifton in Bristol. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming. They cannot know, but some are pretty sure – and some are adamant that it will not; I think this sort of dramatic irony might be something we see a lot of in the 1947 Club.

Mr and Mrs Blackett have an unhappy marriage, but only Mrs Blackett knows it. Mr Blackett is an astonishingly real creation: a monster who is never openly cruel or even vindictive. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. He rules with a rod of iron – but one which manifests itself in hurt disbelief if anybody should ever disobey him, and genuine wonderment that anybody could wish to. Their three daughters – Flora, Rhoda, and Mary – deal with this in different ways. Flora is a copy of her father, though has grown increasingly sick of him; Rhoda is a copy of her mother (as they begin to realise as the novel progresses), and Mary – well, she’s not really anything, and could probably have been left out altogether.

Mrs Blackett has tolerated her misery by pretending to be happy, and mocking her husband to herself. This charade is what keeps her sane, and also what brings her amusement. If there is cruelty in her methods, it is because it is a question of survival. The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges. It seeps into the reader’s mind and won’t go away.

She is also unafraid to show parents who don’t idolise their children. Mr Blackett is frustrated and confused by Rhoda, but Bertha Blackett actively dislikes her daughter Flora – while still loving her. But it is touching to see Rhode and Bertha come together as Chatterton Square progresses (and it begins when Rhoda sees her mother give her father a look which contained ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’.)

This family transfixed me, and is the triumph of the novel in my opinion, but we should turn our attention to the other family. Rosamund Fraser heads up the family of five children – her husband is believed by some to be dead, but actually she is separated from him. The family is happier, freer spirits, gravely looked down on by Mr Blackett – but appealing to almost all the other Blacketts (sometimes specifically – Flora fancies herself in love with one of the sons – but more as a unit to be envied.)

Living with them is Miss Spanner – a spinster and friend of Rosamund, who suffers still from the memories and affects of an unhappy childhood. She and Rosamund have a close friendship that yet retains many barriers – not least a one-way emotional dependence. Miss Spanner, in turn, starts to become friendly with Rhoda, who sneaks over illicitly to borrow books.

Young has created such a complex and believable web of relationships between these two houses, and it is an engrossing novel. There is less levity than some of her others (no character leaps off the page like the lovable Miss Mole), and it perhaps requires more commitment from a reader than some. It is not one for speed-reading – but there is an awful lot to appreciate, and slow, attentive reading is rewarded.

And as I said, the threat of war looms. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner. Miss Spanner has this wonderful moment of musing how war could be:

War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea.

In our previous chosen year, war was around the corner but could only be guessed at. Some of the books we read paid no attention to the looming at all; some of the authors probably agreed with Mr Blackett that it would never happen. What I’m intrigued to discover this time around (and this is partly why 1947 was chosen) is – will any of the books ignore the war? Could they? And how differently will they all write about?

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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When I reviewed Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s brilliant, brilliant novel O, The Brave Music – which is being reprinted by the British Library in the autumn, hurrah! – Sarah wrote in the comments that I should try her 1947 novel Proud Citadel. I was very much looking out for my next D.E.S, so I ordered a copy – and it came with this lovely, atmospheric dustjacket.

Like O, The Brave Music, the novel starts with a young girl – but we follow her for about 25 years, rather than to the edge of adulthood. Jess has just lost her mother and is moving to a distant relative in Yorkshire.

Out of the turmoil and hardships and deep devotion of her eleven years had emerged three salient precepts: you must never lie or break a promise, you must never get into debt, and you must never love anybody too much.

Jess has been through an awful lot for her age, and takes this journey anxiously and uncertainly. At every stop, she asks the train guard if they have yet reached Sunday Halt – until he gets exasperated and three young boys start teasing her. One is clearly the ringleader whom the others follow – and Jess wonders at his unkindness but also his charm and magnetism.

She gets out at Sunday Halt and is given unclear directions through the town, out to the moor, and to the cottage where Mary is waiting for her. She is guided by that dominant, cruelly charming boy, whom she learns is Randy – to Jess, he shows kindness. And as she is crossing the moor and catches her first sight of the sea, we get one of the many wonderful passages in the novel that describe the landscape and its effect on the observer:

Jess stood and stared in silent astonishment. In all her wildest dreams of the sea that Mother had talked about she had never imagined such a fierce and turbulent loveliness as met her sight. The lines of white she had glimpsed from the train now revealed themselves as the edges of deep, curling, grey-green waves that rose in incredible majesty and stood poised for a breath-taking instant before hurling themselves with a shout on the sharp black teeth of rock that thrust out from the sandy foot of the cliffs. And then what a boiling and a surging of brownish, foam-flecked water! What a flat, shining floor of sand as the waves retreated, gathering audible breath for the next attack! What a sharp thrill of expectancy as each wave swung slowly up and up and over…

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions in books, my eye just glides over them unintentionally – but Smith wrote so wonderfully about the moor in O, The Brave Music and writes equally wonderfully about moor AND sea in Proud Citadel. It’s always stunning while also being descriptive – nothing fanciful, but prose from someone who knows and loves the sea and the moor and is able to convey why.

When Jess arrives with Mary, she finds her first loving home. Mary is a delight – wise, kind, mildly witchy, and able to encourage good sense and adventure in Jess. As she grows older, her life becomes tangled with so many members of the community – and especially the three boys from the train and, from them, even more especially Randy.

It took me a while to finish Proud Citadel, which no doubt partly because of coronavirus anxiety. But it was also because of the one major flaw in the novel, in my eyes – there are so many characters, and we spend scenes with so many of them. You eventually realise that all of them are pretty much necessary to Jess’s central story, even though it often doesn’t seem like it at the time, but I found it hard to juggle so many households in my mind and in my sympathies. There are about five characters I’d have cut from being the major focus of scenes – they could still be there, but without interrupting Jess’s story so much.

Because Jess is a fascinating character. She is adventurous and can be as wild as the sea, but she has a deep core of morality – and, having been let down so often in her youth, cannot bear people who break a promise. The novel is in the third person, but I felt like I was let into Jess’s world entirely.

And, while I flagged at times in reading it, I still raced through the final third of the novel and felt bereft once I’d finished it. There’s nobody like Smith for making you fall in love with a community, a landscape, and feel adrift once you are no longer with them. I’m sure I’ll re-read this one, as I have already re-read O, The Brave Music, and perhaps next time it will feel like coming home to the village – and the large cast of characters will be familiar faces to whom I am returning.

The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington

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I picked up The Vanishing Celebrities (1947) by Adrian Alington in Oxford a couple of years ago, partly because the title sounded fun, partly because I love the look of Albatross paperbacks and partly because I thought it would be a Golden Age detective novel. As it turned out, it was a lot more than that – and a total delight that sadly seems to have become almost completely forgotten. [Sidenote: this is number 5364 in the Albatross paperback series. Who knew they had so many, and how come I so seldom find them?]

The setting is Spindlesby Castle, and the opening chapter has ghostly figures from different periods of the castle’s past congregating – they know something is about to happen, but don’t know what. These ghosts only appear at the beginning and end of the novel and were rather a distraction than anything else – I’d have cut them, though they may have been a satire on something I don’t know about.

Because most of the other characters are clearly satires – either of real people or of types; I don’t know enough of popular culture from 1947 to be certain. But present at the houseparty, organised by the Duchess of the castle and reluctantly permitted by her husband, are…

  • Trackless Butterworth, an explorer
  • Olivia Hitchforth, an actress and Trackless’s wife
  • Aurora Fairground, a tennis player, and her mother
  • Carlotta Trott, a detective novelist who invented Sir Cecil Sweetlip and who is in a bitter rivalry with Fay Peabody, inventor of the detective Aristede Foufoupou
  • Viola Ramshott, MP
  • Virgil D. Schrenkenkraut, an American film magnate
  • The Ambassador of Strubania
  • Len Trooper, a handsome singer
  • Mr Titterways, who is not famous but somehow always turns up where famous people are

You see that Alington has a way with names. Carlotta Trott and Fay Peabody are obviously spins on Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and there’s a later reference to Tenderly Jones, ‘the man who writes whimsically about gardens’, who I think must be Beverley Nichols. Whether the others are types or real people, they are a delight. My favourite to read was perhaps Aurora Fairground, whose reputation her mother is keen to preserve – whenever anybody asks her about her tennis career, she says that she would rather have babies of her own, and is just a girl who loves England and happens to be good at tennis.

An alternative title for The Vanishing Celebrities in some editions was The Room in the West Tower – put those two together, and you’ll work out happens. There are rumours that anybody who slept in a room in the West Tower disappeared by morning. Viola Ramshott, MP, has no time for such nonsense and says she’s will sleep there to no ill effect – and by morning, of course, she is gone.

In the silence which seemed inevitably to follow any observation put forward by Aurora, Carlotta Trott made her first contribution to the discussion. She had been listening to the others with a somewhat cynical smile. Now, thinking that a suitable moment had arrived for the kind of sensational intervention which Sir Cecil enjoyed, she said, adopting her best Sir Cecil drawl, ‘Have you tried draggin’ the lake?’

‘Er – no,’ said the Duke.

Carlotta’s smile became still more cynical.

‘Not a bad idea, what?’

‘A very interesting idea,’ replied the Duke, ‘really a very interesting idea indeed. But as a matter of fact, Miss Trott, there is no lake.

A succession of these celebrities decide to sleep in the room for increasingly unlikely reasons, and they disappear. Various policemen turn up, including people from Scotland Yard with ridiculous nicknames – my favourite was ‘What’s More You’ll Be A Man My Son’ Darby. Fay Peabody pops up to score one over her novelist nemesis.

As a detective novel, it’s not the most impressive. The solution is pretty laughable – but in the good sense as well as the bad. The whole thing is really funny. Alington has a great ear for witty dialogue and, having established the ludicrous characters, frequently made me laugh by dropping in just a few representative words from them. We don’t even have the usual straight man, watching on and being the reader’s perspective on the zany world. Everyone is absurd. It’s a delight.

I suppose the danger in any novel that draws on figures of the period, or even on types of the period, is that they are less relevant when those figures and types have faded. But I loved this even when I wasn’t sure who Alington was drawing on, and the whole thing was a total joy. If you can get your hands on a copy, do – otherwise I hope that it might catch the eye of the British Library Crime Classics series at some point…

A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

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Stefan Zweig is rather brilliant, isn’t he? A Chess Story [also published as Chess and A Royal Game], from 1941, is the third Zweig novella I’ve read and the best so far – a really astonishing achievement in so few pages. Translated by Alexander Starritt, I should say – someone at my book group had a very different translation, based on our comparison of the first few lines, but it hurts my head to think too much about the variations that are possible with different translators at work.

I didn’t know anything about A Chess Story when I started it, and I was very glad about that. It made the whole experience so much more surprising and revelatory – so part of me wants to tell you to stop reading this review and just get a copy. Preferably the gorgeous Pushkin Press edition I have. But I’ll keep going anyway.

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us – it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure.

The narrator is an interested and friendly man, but we don’t learn all that much more about him. Rather, he is there to introduce us to other people – to be the intrigued onlooker, always ready to give backstory when necessary. Zweig breaks all sorts of narrative ‘best practice’ rules, or what we would now consider rules, and somehow gets away with it. For example, he jumps from this present moment into a full history of the celebrity in question: Mirko Czentovic, chess prodigy.

We learn that Czentovic came from poverty and was considered unusually stupid. He barely communicates, and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. Except one day he reveals himself to have a preternatural ability for chess. One thing leads to another – Zweig tells it very well – and Czentovic is now a big deal. He’s also a mercenary, and will only play chess if it’s monetarily worth his while.

A competitive man on board the ship, and the narrator, manage to get together a group who are willing to put together the price. And it looks like the hubris of the amateur and the arrogance of the professional will be the story here. It would have been a good story. But, in the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. And, diffidently, he calls through an instruction. It quickly becomes clear that he is brilliant at chess himself – but once the match is over, he doesn’t want to play again.

Dr B is his name – and the second half of the novella becomes about something completely different. I won’t say what, though it’s easy enough to discover online if you want to. It’s about how he became so talented at chess – and why he doesn’t want to play again. Frankly, it’s astonishing.

All the more astonishing is how vividly Zweig creates two worlds – the ship and this other world that I won’t say too much about – in only a hundred or so pages. He could have made it a novel of three times the length, but there is a great power in his brevity. It says more about its time than novels ten times as long; I suspect it will stay in my mind for a long time. I’ve seldom read a better portrayal of mental illness, and the final chess match in A Chess Story is one of only two times that a sport has held any interest for me – the other being the cricket match in The Go Between.

If you’ve never read Zweig before, this is a great place to start. And I’m keen to get as many more as I can.

My favourite novel of the year? (O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith)

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I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.