1940s

Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford

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Apparently I bought Pigeon Pie (1940) by Nancy Mitford in Clun on 15th August 2011. I have no idea where Clun is and no recollection of having gone there, but I suppose I must have done! I read the novel quite a few months ago, so forgive any patchy memory (I’m linking to some great reviews at the end!)

For all my Mitfordmania, I have actually only read one Nancy Mitford novel (The Pursuit of Love); despite very much enjoying it, and having lots of others on hand, I still haven’t actually read any more. So I picked up this purchase from mysterious Clun, and started. The first thing I noticed was the author’s note:

I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning – Nancy Mitford, Paris, 1951
Well! That’s quite the start, isn’t it? As Nancy warns, this novel is about the phoney war – that bit at the beginning of war where everyone prepared themselves for an onslaught, and not very much happened. And so she is able to be rather casual about the war, in a way that would look rather scandalous even by the time of publication. And the heroine of Pigeon Pie is nothing if not casual. Lady Sophia Garfield is a flippant socialite who has married for money, finds her husband a bore, and lives for the petty squabbles she has with the other doyennes of London society.

I do rather love this compact description of the phoney war:

Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn’t play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except like Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.
The things that do begin, in Pigeon Pie, are rather extraordinary. A much-loved singer is killed, and Sophia finds herself swept up in an unlikely espionage and kidnap plot. None of it is treated particularly seriously – it is definitely silly rather than tense, and a wry eye is never far from the narrative. The denouement is just as unlikely as all the rest, and treads an awkward line between satire and failure…

I love Mitford’s tone, and I love her observations about the in-fighting of the upper classes. In another novel, Sophia could have been great fun.  But I’m not sure that Pigeon Pie (for me) is ever more than quite good. And that isn’t particularly because of insensitivity (although that warning was perhaps more pertinent in 1951) but because Mitford is turning her hand to a genre at which she is not an expert.

Others who got Stuck into this book


“The tone is maybe a little uneven, but when the wit works it really does sparkle.” – Jane, Fleur Fisher in Her World


“It feels unreal and flippant; the language makes it seem a little like Enid Blyton for adults.” – Karyn, A Penguin A Week


“A very enjoyable tale, filled with the usual Mitford acerbic wit, ridiculous characters and finely observed minutiae of upper class inter war life.” – Rachel, Book Snob

A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain – A.C. Ward

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Back in April I read A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (1943) by A.C. Ward, very kindly given to me by the always wonderful Karen/Kaggsy, but I have only just got around to reading it. I can’t remember where this first came up (maybe in person; before her lovely review anyway) but I was extremely happy to be presented with a copy. What a fascinating little book it is, and so perfect for somebody with an interest in the early 20th century.

A.C. Ward has a special place in my heart because of his book The Nineteen-Twenties (published, I think, in 1930 – so a very immediate retrospective). I was reading it at the beginning of my DPhil, just to get a sense of how somebody contemporary might have characterised the period. Lo and behold, he had a chapter on ‘The Refuge of Form and Fantasy’, where he discussed the vogue for the fantastic in the period. Since I’d already decided to write my thesis on this, it was wonderful confirmation that it had been significant in the 1920s – as well as providing an invaluable quotation from a talk by Sylvia Townsend Warner that doesn’t appear to have been quoted anywhere else. Research mad skillz.

Anyway, in A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain Ward does exactly that, whether figuratively or not – he takes the reader on a journey through Britain, showing the literary sites that have been saved from bombing, or those that have been irrevocably changed by war. I can only imagine how poignant and moving this would have been in 1943; it is certainly moving enough now.

Plenty of his narration takes place in London, unsurprisingly – it was undoubtedly the area of Britain most physically affected by war – and in between commemorating Keats in Hampstead and Dickens in Doughty Street, he turns his attention to pre-war Bloomsbury (in a passage, incidentally, which would have been very useful in my first chapter):

After the last war ‘Bloomsbury’ became a synonym for intellectualist inbreeding and highbrow snobbery. But it is as difficult to define (or even to find) the pure ‘Bloomsbury’ type as it is to define or isolate ‘Victorianism.’ There is an old Punch joke, ‘”You can always tell a Kensington girl.” “Yes; but you can’t tell her much.”‘ his, if given an intellectualist twist, might be applied to Bloomsbury in the nineteen-twenties. The authors who wrote and/or published their books in Bloomsbury then were not susceptible to instruction. They instructed. The hallmark of ‘Bloomsbury’ was a tart intellectual arrogance; and in their literary style Bloomsbury writers affected a dryness which was intended to have the vitrue of dry champagne, yet the product was, often, sandy on the palate. The Mother Superior of ‘Bloomsbury’ was Virginia Woolf, but, beside her, the rest were mostly novices lacking a vocation. Her one vice was preciosity; her virtues were legion.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more incisive and concise depiction of the Bloomsbury group.

Along with the text (and I should re-emphasise that he does sweep through other counties, and not just southern ones either) there are two types of illustration – pencil sketches and photographs. The photos are amazing. We see Westminster Abbey with rubble, Milton’s statue knocked off a plinth, Canterbury ruins, etc. A trove of poignant (yes, that word again) images which bring to life a period that even the greatest description inevitably keeps at some distance.

Thanks, Karen, for sending this my way! A unique perspective on wartime Britain that I will really treasure.

Delight – J.B. Priestley

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In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don’t think I ever got around to a proper post about it.  It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause.  Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it – Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.

Somehow I didn’t get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn’t resist it – it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!

I haven’t read any of Priestley’s novels, although I’ve read one play and seen another – and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don’t know.

Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live ’til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him.  And the things that delight him are truly delightful – covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels).  Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight.  Here’s an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:

And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred.  But where are they, these fountains we love?  We hunger for them and are not fed.  A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes.  What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?

Well – as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise.  But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy – there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint.  I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this… it’s just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader’s shelves.

Every Good Deed – Dorothy Whipple

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It wasn’t until I listed Every Good Deed among my purchases at the Bookbarn that I realised how scarce it was – as a couple of commenters pointed out.  That made me feel duty-bound to read it asap, despite having only read some of the Persephone Whipples available (Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr Knight, Greenbanks, High Wages, and The Closed Door – more than I’d thought, now I come to list them).  Well, judging by Persephone’s love for Dorothy Whipple, I predict that Every Good Deed (1946) will one day join that number – but perhaps they needn’t rush.  It was enjoyable and interesting, but it wasn’t Whipple on top form…

They general idea is that a couple of oldish spinster sisters adopt a child from a local sort of orphanage, and all does not go well.  Susan and Emily Topham are shy, caring, worried about what society thinks of them, and above all not ready for a trickster.  Their cook (Cook, if you will) is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely.  Enter Gwen.

She steals, she talks back, she lies, she is (when a little older) no better than she ought to be.  She abuses their care and runs amok – and runs away.  She’s not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters.

There were hundreds of children who, in the same circumstances, would have responded to their care, would have loved them and been grateful; but by mischance they had hit upon Gwen.
That’s Whipple’s slightly half-hearted attempt to make sure we know Every Good Deed isn’t supposed to be a universal cautionary tale.  The classism of the book did make me a little uneasy, and I’m not sure that sentence saved things…

There are a few more ins and outs in the narrative than this, but not many.  Although I enjoyed reading it, and Whipple is an expert at writing a very readable book, it did feel a lot like a short story which had got a bit long.  There is only one arc of the narrative – subplots not welcome – and the moments of crisis feel like the climaxes of a short story, not multifaceted moments in a novella.  Every Good Deed is only just over a hundred pages long, but I reckon it would have made more sense at, say, forty pages, in one of Whipple’s short story collections.  An enjoyable enough read, but if you’re struggling to find a copy anywhere… well, don’t feel too distraught about it.

As For Me And My House – Sinclair Ross

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Well, I hope you’ll still be having a wander around Shiny New Books, but that won’t (of course) stop me writing reviews here on Stuck-in-a-Book – although they may quieten down a bit when Issue 2 starts to loom!  (Incidentally, we’re keen to get lots of bloggers writing pieces for us – contact me on simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk, or all of us at info[at]shinynewbooks.co.uk if you’re interested.)

And onto a book that I’ve been reading for about six months – As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross, kindly given to me by… someone.  I think Thomas at My Porch – certainly he is a huge fan.  Am I?  Hmm.  I don’t know.  This is one of those cases where I know the book is very good… but I didn’t very much enjoy reading it.

As For Me and My House (1941) takes the form of a woman’s diary from provincial Canada – but Diary of a Provincial Lady this is not.  True, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife are the central characters – Philip Bentley and his (anonymous?) narrator wife – but that’s where the similarities end.  Basically, the narrator’s life is miserable.  The small town is rude and ungrateful for the hard work her husband does.  He, in turn, has lost his faith and wishes he were a painter.  They are poor, their marriage is rocky, and dissatisfaction soaks every word of the novel.

He’s a failure now, a preacher instead of a painter, and every minute of the day he’s mindful of it.  I’m a failure too, a small-town preacher’s wife instead of what I so faithfully set out to be – but I have to stop deliberately like this to remember.  To have him notice me, speak to me as if I really mattered in his life, after twelve years with him that’s all I want or need.  It arranges my world for me, strengthens and quickens it, makes it immune to all worlds.
Well, as you can see, the writing is beautiful.  There is a deep and emotional richness to the way Ross writes.  I’m not sure it benefited from being in the diary format – it would have worked equally well, and probably rather more convincingly, simply as a first person narrative – but he certainly offers a fully-realised voice.  Just as convincing are the husband and (later) sort-of-adopted son, although I wonder if Ross intends us to believe the narrator to be as perceptive as she seems.

Here’s another beautiful, dispiriting passage:

The sand and dust drifts everywhere.  It’s in the food, the bed-clothes, a film on the book you’re reading before you can turn the page.  In the morning it’s half an inch deep on the window sills.  Half an inch again by noon. Half an inch again by evening.  It begins to make an important place for itself in the routine of the day.  I watch the little drifts form.  If at dusting time they’re not quite high enough I’m disappointed, put off the dusting sometimes half an hour to let them grow.  But if the wind has been high and they have outdrifted themselves, then I look at them incredulous, and feel a strange kind of satisfaction, as if such height were an achievement for which credit was coming to me.
That rather aptly describes how it felt reading the novel.  Melancholy piled on melancholy.  It swept through all the pages, in every sentence, almost in every word.  The more I read, the more I felt outdrifted by it.  I don’t demand novels of unswerving cheeriness, but… surely life isn’t as bad as all this?  (“But a man’s tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him.”)  It was wearying.  Beautiful, but wearying.

Of course, I read As For Me and My House as someone who has lived in a vicarage for many years, and whose father is still a working vicar (and mother a working vicar’s wife).  I am well aware that it isn’t always easy – that some parishioners can be difficult or aggressive or ungrateful.  In this novel it is the purportedly faith-filled whose hypocrisy stands out; in real life, it is just as likely to be the thoughtless atheist who tells you he’d like the church to burn down, or the teenager who thinks the vicar’s sons are fair game to shout abuse at in the street.  But Ross gives only the tiniest mention (in Mrs Bird) of the positivity that comes with the profession.  The strangers who are kind to you as soon as you arrive in a new village, the people who selflessly give up their time to help with kids’ events and so forth.  There is a world of literature bemoaning the claustrophobia of the small town – which needs to be balanced by how really lovely it is when people all know each other, care for each other, and let nobody go lonely.

Part of this seems like I just wish that Ross had written a different book.  But I think I could have really loved this one if there were a bit more balance – something more to alleviate the melancholy and hopelessness.  As it is, I do admire As or Me and My House.  Ross is unarguably a brilliant writer.  One I’d definitely recommend to sturdier souls.  And maybe my soul will be sturdier next time I try this one.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

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If Swallows and Amazons is a great book to be reading while the brain is a bit confuzzled, then Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) probably isn’t.  But it came to mind the other day when Dorothy Richardson was mentioned – simply because I’d mixed up who wrote it – but by then I’d pulled it off the shelf, and the fab Picasso cover, combined with the book’s brevity, meant I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Every great writer has, I imagine, been called a fraud – and many frauds have been called great writers.  Which is Gertrude Stein?  I haven’t read anything else by her, and the introduction to this edition more or less says that Blood on the Dining-Room Floor wasn’t a success, but I spent the whole time thinking ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’.  But then I thought… there are plenty of people who say that about Virginia Woolf’s fiction, which I think is sublimely brilliant – so it’s just as likely that this novella is brilliant and I simply don’t get it.  Here’s a sample sentence:

A little come they which they can they will they can be married to a man, a young enough man an old man and a young enough man.
Well, sure, Gertrude, why not?  Not all the novella is that obfuscatory, but it’s also far from unique in the narrative.  In theory, I’m not anti experimental writing – but as I get further and further from my undergraduate days, my tolerance for unconventional grammar and deliberately cloaked meaning gets lower and lower.

And what’s it about?  Well, the writer of the blurb optimistically calls Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a detective novel, but since it’s more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor (a more prominent death in the book is the maybe-sleepwalker who fell out a window), then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.

An interesting experiment to read, and it’s always possible that my cold-ridden delirium played its part, but… I can’t call myself a Stein fan as of yet.  Anybody read this, or any of Stein’s more famous work?  Could I be yet persuaded?

Abbie – Dane Chandos

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A friend from my book group kindly lent me Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos about a million years ago, and I’ve somehow only recently got around to reading it.  I think it looked almost too inviting – it seemed a delicious treat of a book that I didn’t think I quite deserved.  And I thought it might be a sweet, old-fashioned children’s book, which isn’t something for which I’m always in the mood.

Well, I was right and I was wrong.  It isn’t remotely sweet or a children’s book, but it is wonderful.

You (like my friend) are probably aware of my penchant for characterful old ladies in books, and Abbie does not disappoint.  The episodic novel is narrated by Dane (I thought it might even be a sort of autobiography, until I discovered that Dane Chandos was actually the pseudonym for two authors, Peter Lilley and Nigel Millett) who, from his schooldays onwards, has a close and amusing relationship with his Aunt Abbie.

Abbie is composed of interspersed letters and narrative – the letters being from Abbie, who jaunts off around the world (she hires camels in Algeria, haggles in French markets, skis in Switzerland) but always returns to her East Anglian garden.  Gardening is perhaps the least exotic of her hobbies, but it is also her most passionate.  She judges everyone on their gardening abilities, she is willing to steal and deceive for her art, and this piece of dialogue (which I choose more or less at random) is from one of the chapters on gardening:

“Drat the regatta. We’re too late now, anyway.  I have to get those camellias put in.  Now please take care of them, Arthur.  Do not make an impetuous gesture.  Cotoneaster twigs are very delicate.  Prenez garde!  These old gaffers should not be allowed on the roads, especially when there are such handsome almshouses at Upper Dovercourt.”
Abbie is an interesting creation.  Battleaxe types are always a joy to read in some measure, but the author’s (or, in this case, authors’) task is to keep them on the right side of sympathy – or open them entirely to ridicule.  It is that which separates the Lady Catherine de Bourghs from the Miss Hargreaveses of this world.  Abbie is certainly not a figure of fun – much depends on the reader developing the fondness for her that Dane (the character) clearly has for his aunt.  How successful is this?

Well, the negatives.  She is unabashedly xenophobic – but not racist in particular, because every non-British person (indeed, every non-British non-upper-class person) meets with her disdain.  She is quite selfish.  She is rude, abrupt, and tells everyone to ‘Prenez garde!’ all the time.

And the positives.  She is very funny – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.  She loves her nephew and her husband.  He is called Arthur, is calm and sensible, and balances out her forthright sense of purpose.  He is also, along with Dane, capable of quietening her down. The authors give us enough examples of Abbie being bested (my favourite being in the garden theft incident, by a confident neighbour) that we can afford to like her.

Make no mistake, she would be a horror to know as a person – and her xenophobia is only understandable as a product of her time – but I couldn’t help loving reading about her energetic exploits and astonishing self-confidence.  The more low-key her social battles (arguing with a waiter, or going for a dress-fitting) the more I loved it – things got a bit out of hand with runaway camels and the like. But my taste always leans to the domestic and social minutiae.

Any fan of slightly silly, very funny, early twentieth-century novels will find a lot to like and laugh at in Abbie.  And, even better, I’ve just discovered that there is a sequel, Abbie and Arthur!  Thanks Caroline for lending this to me, sorry it’s taken an age to read it…

Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books

Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell

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William Maxwell is an exceptionally good writer; I think that would be difficult to dispute.  Famously he was an editor of the New Yorker (editing, amongst many things, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories – leading to the miracle of wonderfulness that is their collected letters), and it is those skills which he carries over into his fiction writing.  A close eye to detail, an observing nature, and a delicate precision in his prose that makes reading his novels a lengthy exercise in perception and patience.

All of which means that I have to be in the right mood to read Maxwell.  When I am, nothing is more glorious.  I can luxuriate in his sentences and his precise (that word again) cataloguing of human emotion.  If I’m not in the right mood, it wearies me – it requires proper attention, and sometimes I am not a good enough reader to give it.  This, incidentally, is how I feel about many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, too – and, like A Game of Hide and Seek (for instance), I started, shelved, continued, shelved, repeat as needed, and eventually finished Time Will Darken It (1948).  It took the best part of four months, but it was worth doing it like this – had I rushed it, I would have resented it.  As it is, I think it was wonderful.  (Thank you, Barbara, for giving it to me back in 2009!)

The focus of the novel is on Austin King and his family in Draperville, as his cousin’s family come to visit, and the aftermath they leave behind them.  There are broken hearts, accidents, threats, arguments – but these make up a patchwork which portrays a community, rather than being of utmost importance themselves.  And the highlight of this community is Austin King himself.  He is a very Maxwellian character – patient, kind, uncertain, and never entirely able.  He lives in the shadow of his great (late) father, having taken on his partnership in a law firm; he lives his wife Martha who seems cold and distant, but is really (as Maxwell scrapes away the layers) confused and unhappy.  And then he lives with his boisterous cousin Mr Potter, his chatty wife, caddish son, and besotted daughter.

One part of King’s life which is largely satisfactory is his relationship with his daughter Abbey, or Ab.  Many Maxwellian characters are good fathers, and even though I am not a father of any variety, I love reading his portraits of these relationships – which always remind me of Maxwell’s lovely relationship with his own daughters, as shown through his letters.  He is always a sensitive writer, but perhaps most of all when it comes to Ab.

The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances.  They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day.  At what moment, from what hiding place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling.  And when it does, the result is not always disastrous.  Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives.  Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure.  You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.
There are some many characters and events that I can’t begin to list them all, so I’ll just quote one incident I thought rather lovely.  Here Miss Ewing – Austin’s aging legal secretary – is talking to him about his father:

“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here.  I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work.  He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate.  He was more like a friend than an employer.”

Austin nodded sympathetically.  What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true.  His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing.  Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant, and her old-mad ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her.  He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship.  But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.
Maxwell often does this, and does it so well – a specific event will lead into generalised maxim, but one with such heart and such insight that all my wariness of generalisations is washed away.

The only times this approach doesn’t work very well (in my opinion) is when Maxwell gets too homiletic for too long.  There is the odd chapter which might as well be the third act of an Ibsen play, and sometimes he forgets to give us enough of the specifics before he gets onto the reflections.  But they are small flaws in a novel which is extraordinarily insightful and complex.  No character’s action or reaction is careless or implausible – sometimes they are extreme, but only where extremity is believable.  He is truly an astonishing writer – I just wish I were always as capable and adept a reader.

Oh, and the cartoon… a while ago I said I’d start doing pun covers, as a bit of silliness, and promptly forgot all about it.  Well… they’re back!

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read; beautiful, maddening and thought provoking” – Rachel, Book Snob


“The greatness of Maxwell’s writing is that he looks deep inside each character, and he looks with humanity, without judgement, indeed with what I can only call love.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“I liked the way the town and its characters came to life, as a sepia-tinted photograph does. There is an old-fashioned, autumnal feel to this novel.” – Sarah, Semi-fictional

Six Fools and a Fairy – Mary Essex

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I forgot to take a photo…
This one is from here,
where you can buy a copy

You may remember that, back in November 2011, I wrote about Mary Essex’s The Amorous Bicycle, which was very witty and fun and delightfully middlebrow – and I puzzled over the fact that Essex (in fact Ursula Bloom) had managed to write so many novels (over 500) and still put out quality.  Sometime before that, Jodie (known to us as Geranium Cat) kindly sent me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy (1948), saying that she’d tried it a couple of times and couldn’t get into it… fast forward a couple of years, and my Reading Presently project has propelled me into finally getting it down from my shelves.  How would I find it compared to The Amorous Bicycle and another Essex novel I’d loved, Tea Is So Intoxicating?

Well, I’m afraid it’s not as good… That sounds like a very ungrateful way to start a Reading Presently review, so I shall also say that it was a fun read, and just what I wanted for relaxing in the evenings after working away ferociously on my thesis, but it’s an idea which doesn’t quite get off the ground.

And that idea is a school reunion where each of the six men recounts a story, relating to each course, about… well, I’ll let Charles Delamere explain:

“I should enjoy it immensely if we each told our own story.  About the woman, the one woman who meant something out of the rut to us.  The one each of us remembers most forcefully.”
The courses are Consomme Paysanne, Sole a la bonne femme, Vol-au-vent, Roast Lamb, Gooseberry fool, and Angels on horseback.  Give or take a few accents that I’m too lazy to find.  I’ll confess, I was already unsure about how things would go when this premise was set up.  Surely it would lead to a great deal of disjointedness?

It’s essentially a series of short stories, each of which relate all-too-appropriately to the course in question, and each of which recounts a lost love.  At one point a character makes a caustic reference to the stereotypical heroes and heroines of an Ethel M. Dell novel, but Essex isn’t far behind – her heroes aren’t swarthy silent types, but they do all fall into much the same mould as each other.  I usually hate the criticism that “He can’t write women” or “She can’t write men”, because it is (usually) silly and reductive, suggesting there are only two types of people – but Essex does seem, in Six Fools and a Fairy, to be under the impression that all men fall in love instantly, are proud, and are quite keen to hop into bed as soon as poss.  And throw into that stereotype that they’re all generally a bit hopeless.  She spends a while delineating her characters at the beginning, but it’s pretty impossible to tell the difference between them when they start talking.

Each chapter tells a difference character’s story, only occasionally returning to reunion dinner, and since they have only about thirty pages to do, we whip through fairly stereotypical tales of misadventure and the-ones-that-got-away without building the characters up enough for the reader to care.  And then the story is over, and we’re onto the next.  The chapters aren’t even structured as anecdotes, but instead are shown through an omniscient narrator.  It’s all a little bit bewildering and unnecessary.

Mary Essex is certainly an engaging writer, though, and it’s easy enough to whip through the chapters.  She has that ability to write a page-turner, even if (once turned) one has no particular wish to mull over what one has read.  For a novelist renowned chiefly now for romance literature, though, this book – the first of the three I’ve read which prioritises romance – is surprisingly less interesting than Tea Is So Intoxicating and The Amorous Bicycle, which are about gossipy villagers and amusing incidents.  For wit has absented itself from Six Fools and a Fairy, creeping only into the odd line, then slinking out again quickly.

So, diverting enough for a quick read, if one doesn’t want to feel at all challenged or invested.  But while her other novels made me think she was approaching the middlebrow joys of Richmal Crompton or even E.M. Delafield, had I read Six Fools and a Fairy first, I’d never have bothered with another.  Thanks very much for giving me a copy, Jodie, but ultimately I’m not too far from your assessment of it – and I think I’ll be passing it on again.