1941

Death and Mary Dazill by Mary Fitt

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With a title like Death and Mary Dazill (1941) and the cover you see above, I knew I couldn’t resist reading this novel. It went on my wishlist, and my friend Clare gave it to me for my birthday last year. I’ll have seen it mentioned somewhere in the blogosphere or on Instagram etc, but I don’t remember where – reveal yourself, if you are the one! It’s a reprint from Moonstone Press, a little publishing house specialising in detective novels, who have published a lot of Fitt’s books in lovely new editions.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, and this is her tenth detective novel under that name in a mere five years – but calling it a detective novel is misleading. There is a (at least one!) murder and there are people trying to work out who did it, but all of this has happened many years ago. The whole novel feels less like detective fiction and more like an elegy to a shadowy group of people whose vibrancy and passions have dulled over the decades – leaving only the legacy of long-ago decisions and acts.

We start in the present day, where Superintendent Mallett (apparently a series detective for Fitt) and two friends are attending the funeral of a friend. As they are leaving, they see something that strikes them:

As the Vicar reached the lych-gate, two tall old ladies entered: he swept off his hat to them, and paused for a moment to speak to them. Mallett and Jones slackened their pace, and, unwilling to be drawn into the encounter, stopped as if to wait for Fitzbrown. The two old ladies, after a few minutes’ gracious conversation, bowed to the Vicar, or rather inclined their heads like two queens, and passed on. They were followed at a respectful distance by a chauffeur in wine-coloured livery: he stopped when they stopped, and moved when they moved, keeping exactly the same distance between himself and them, as if drawn by an invisible wire. He carried an enormous circular wreath of hothouse flowers: arum lilies, scarlet amaryllis, gardenias.

These ladies are, it turns out, the fancifully named Lindisfarne and Arran de Boulter – sisters who are leaving flowers by the grave of their father and brother, who died a week apart. They bring a large wreath every week for these men who died half a century earlier – but, notes one of the observers, leave none at all on the nearby grave of Mary Dazill.

At this point, we go back to the past – knowing the three people who will be dead by the end. I was a bit worried that we would have to spend the whole novel with modern-day characters telling anecdotes about the past, but instead we are taken straight there. Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran are beautiful and naïve young women on the cusp of adulthood – so much on the cusp that you wouldn’t have thought they needed to replace a leaving governess, but their father decides they must. Enter Mary Dazill – lovely, not much older than the sisters, clever and a little mysterious. Perhaps her mystery is really only the contrast with everyone else in this late-Victorian period, as they are thoughtlessly open with one another.

That’s not quite true – among the mix is a secret engagement, secret romances and secret hopes. But even those with secrets tend to find someone else to confide in, and emotions are running high. By contrast, Mary Dazill is not driven by her emotions. It makes her seem manipulative by comparison with those who can’t control themselves, let alone others.

At first, I was a little unsure of the writing. There is a fey artificiality to it, in excerpts like this, that make it feel more like actors in a melodrama than real life:

“You can’t,” said Arran, in a voice so low that he could scarcely hear. But his hearing was acute enough, then, to catch every shade of Arran’s voice. He leaned forward and said, with his lips almost touching her hair:

“Forgive me, darling. I can’t help it. I love you.”

But I quickly decided to forgive it. The artificiality perhaps comes from these characters’ youth and inexperience. The passions are real, and have real consequences, but they don’t have mature language to express themselves.

It is these passions that lead to deaths… but who killed whom, and why?

Superintendent Mallett doesn’t get much to do in this novel, and if it’s only one of Fitt’s output that you’ve read then you wonder why these three random men are returned to so often in the narrative for their discussion and deduction. Their personalities are adroitly drawn but don’t really matter to the emotional thrust of the book. Since their detective work is based on memories of one of the women, passed on by her mother, and some fragments of evidence, it doesn’t really match what the reader is experiencing. It’s all to the good that we are transported to the past rather than hearing it all secondhand, but it does mean that the deduction element doesn’t quite make sense. Rather, we see events unfold and discover the answer ourselves.

It’s a short novel and, as mysteries go, I didn’t find I particularly cared who the culprit was. But that didn’t matter at all. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for taking me back into that late-Victorian period so well. I was reminded of The Go-Between more than of any detective novel – Fitt is excellent at the atmosphere and world she creates, and this was a lovely time spent in striking company.

Babbacombe’s by Susan Scarlett

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Writing about my latest Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press read, I have to mention the recent, tragically early death of Rupert Heath – the brainchild behind Dean Street Press. He leaves behind him an extraordinary legacy of reprint publishing – thanks for everything, Rupert. You can read more about this at Scott’s blog.

And this blog post will be yet another tribute to what he has achieved, because Babbacombe’s (1941) by Susan Scarlett is a lovely book. It was recommended to me many years ago, but at that point it was impossible to lay hands on a copy – thank goodness it’s now available as a Furrowed Middlebrow book. And it is right bang in the middle of middlebrow – totally predictable, but all the more enjoyable for that.

If you don’t recognise the name Susan Scarlett, you may well known the writer behind the pseudonym – because this was the name under which Noel Streatfeild wrote her lighter novels. In this one, Beth has just left school and is getting her first job. She manages to secure one at Babbacombe’s – the department store where her father has worked for decades. It’s a large, tightly organised place where young employees have to quickly find their place in the whirring cogs of the machine, and Beth is keen to do her best in the frocks section. Less keen to please is Dulcie – a cousin who moves in with them. She considers herself a cut above because she is paying them board and has a small private income, and is keen to be a model in the shop – but instead finds herself as a ‘lift girl’. She is vain, impractical and selfish, and hung out to dry by the narrative in a way that did feel a bit uncomfortable to read in 2023.

Beth, on the other hand, is filled with decency and morals – but also, in order to make her lovable, a tendency to speak her mind to anybody. And that includes the curious young man she ends up stick in a lift with. (Being stuck in a lift with someone seems such a 1990s romcom trope, so it’s oddly reassuring to know that it’s been around since at least the 1940s.) She had previously caught his eye when she tripped over his brilliantly named dog, Scissors. And she tells him how much she loves Babbacombe’s and admires the owner, Mr Babbacombe, a self-made man who has worked his way from obscurity to riches – but, naturally, kept his salt-of-the-earth character. Not that she says all that; we see that for ourselves a bit later.

Little does she know – though the reader has probably suspected from the first time the man was introduced – that this is David Babbacombe, the son of the owner. He is an affluent idler, on his way up to ask his father for some more money. And, let me tell you, this way of life doesn’t strike Beth and her work ethic as being very noble:

Beth examined his lean, athletic figure in shocked surprise.

“Don’t you work at anything?”

“No. A little beachcombing now and again, and I’ve a hoard of silver cups won for this and that.”

Beth forget he was Mr. Babbacombe’s son and only felt that she liked him too much to want to despise him.

“I should have thought doing nothing but playing games was pretty dull.”

He tapped some ash clear of his coat.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

Beth hated that.

“But it isn’t. It’s miserable. You might as well be a cabbage.”

Rather chastened, David changes his mind when he gets to his father. Rather than asking for a handout, he asks for a job – and starting at the bottom.

The rest of this lovely novel is David winning Beth’s heart, and then convincing her that the class difference between them is immaterial. She takes some winning over, and in real life he would seem pretty appalling for how little agency he gives her, but Babbacombe’s is not real life and we all know the ending that we both want and are going to get. Along the way there is some fun mistaken identity business, stuff with a shoplifter, a rather tense section about an eye operation, and much more. The stakes may be high for the characters, but they are never particularly high for the reader because we know what sort of book this is.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to read a book like Babbacombe’s every day, but there is indisputably a talent in creating something this perfectly frothy and engaging. Even besides the delightful storyline, this is a wonderful novel for period detail on the inner workings of a department store – and I suspect there are many of us who can’t resist that.

When I posted a photo on Instagram, the comments were filled with other people saying how much they’d enjoyed this book. An absolute triumph and a perfect example of the sort of book it’s trying to me. Vale, Rupert, and thank you for all the lovely books like this.

Novella a Day in May: Days 22 and 23

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Day 22: Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita Sackville-West

I re-read Vita Sackville-West’s novella set in an alternative 1942 where Nazi Germany has successfully taken over Europe, and refugees have fled to America. This book focuses on the occupants of a hotel on the edge of the Grand Canyon – and what happens when bombs come to the hotel. I won’t say anymore because Rachel and I will be discussing it on an upcoming episode of ‘Tea or Books?’.

Day 23: The Empty Room (1941) by Charles Morgan

In about 2003, a lady in the village called Marion lent me three books that she thought might set me off on paths of discovery. She knew I liked older books and, being 17, hadn’t formed my taste as an adult yet. The three books were Bulldog Drummond by Sapper, Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers, and A Breeze of Morning by Charles Morgan. I liked the Sayers, disliked the Sapper, and really liked the Morgan. Over the years since, I have owned and given away a few Morgan novels, but it’s taken me almost two decades to finally read my second book by him. Which I have in a proof copy – this is what proofs looked like in the 1940s!

Like Sackville-West’s novella, this was written in the midst of war – though Morgan’s is set in the contemporary world, rather than an alterative version of it. Richard is working on the development of a bomb-sight – I had to look up what that was, but essentially something that helps bombs be dropped more accurately. The novella starts with him working alongside other men who are in kept professions, most of whom fought in the previous war.

“I assure you, Flower,” Cannock answered, “this is paradise compared with the last war. And yet, you know, it’s extraordinarily like; that’s the devil of it. People wasting the same time and talking much the same nonsense. The same jokes, the same optimism – it’s like going to a play by a dramatist who may produce an exciting plot but whose style bores you to death. As yet we aren’t half-way through Scene One…”

Morgan is very, very good at describing the experience of finding oneself in the midst of war, and how it affects different people. All the quotes I noted down were about that, I now realise, and it’s particularly impressive to write so vividly about something that, even in 1941, had been described endlessly. Though The Empty Room turns out not really to be about the war – instead, it is about a family Richard meets because of it. There is a fellow worker whom Richard recognises from an earlier acquaintance, who invites him to move in rather than find impersonal barracks. Henry is a widower with a daughter who has not long become an adult. She, Carey, never knew her mother, but there is a portrait of her on the wall showing how similar her daughter looks. Besides this image, little is said of her – though the empty room of the title is Carey’s mothers bedroom, left as a sort of silent shrine to her.

Richard and Carey are about 20 years apart in age, but become close. It’s less icky than it sounds, though perhaps not ick-less. Anyway, it’s another opportunity for Morgan to write so perceptively about the war:

His was a generation different from hers in more than the years that divided them. This was his second war; after it, there would be for him no starting again, only a continuance to the end of a life already doubly broken; but for her it would become an incident of her youth, a point of departure from which her life would stretch ahead, still limitless, still expectant of an ordered fulfilment.

And here’s another example, about the end of the phoney war:

Every good thing became more precious; even things that were, in themselves, neither good not bad – an account-book lying on the table, a packet of old letters in a drawer – became extraordinary because they were inanimate, because they had existed before the break and lay in their places, still unconscious of it. There was a stab of wonder in every carefree movement of a bird, in the stream’s unbroken continuity, in the aloof and unswerving process of Nature.

What starts as a novella about wartime activity turns into a domestic psychological tale – the sort of thing Henry James would write if he could have composed a readable sentence. I did find it weird that such a short book would have the lengthy framing – I think it would have worked equally well, or perhaps better, if Richard had been more quickly introduced to this household. From here, it is a tense and well-written story – what really happened to Carey’s mother, and what is the mystery of the empty room?

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.

Mrs Tim Carries On by D.E. Stevenson (25 Books in 25 Days: #17)

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Like a lot of people who read Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson when Bloomsbury republished it about ten years ago, I was keen to read the rest of the series. And, like a lot of those people, I came up against the extortionate secondhand prices one had to pay. So hurrah and hurray for Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press for bringing them back into print! And an extra hurrah for sending me review copies – I wolfed down Mrs Tim Carries On (1941) today.

I should probably be avoiding 243pp books during 25 Books in 25 Days, but I couldn’t resist. And Mrs Tim is just as lovable as I remembered her – dependable, wise, but not with rose-tinted glasses. Her diaries give her exasperated opinions of locals, but also affectionate ones. They show her anxieties and pride as a parent, while also finding humour in everyday life. Only this time, of course, it is wartime.

It’s interesting to see how Stevenson adapts the character to the difficulties of war. Like the Provincial Lady books (which remain a very evident influence on Stevenson), she has taken a humorous character from the 30s and brought her into the war-torn 1940s. While the Provincial Lady looks at the most farcical elements of war, and the hypocrisies of those caught up in the civilian effort, Mrs Tim is a bit more restrained.

I proceed to explain my own particular method of “carrying on”. None of us could bear the war if we allowed ourselves to brood upon the wickedness of it and the misery it has entailed, so the only thing to do is not to allow oneself to think about it seriously, but just to skitter about on the surface of life like a water beetle. In this way one can carry on and do one’s bit and remain moderately cheerful.

This isn’t quite true, though. Mr Tim is an active soldier, and there is more anxiety tied in than this statement suggests. Not only for his fate, but around the possibility of invasion, and the threat of bombs. It is less all-out funny than the Provincial Lady (and, if we’re being honest, not quite as good) – but a more poignant portrait. And, to be honest, almost nothing is as good as the Provincial Lady. If this isn’t quite, then it’s still rather wonderful – and all the more wonderful for being readily available again.

Melville by Jean Giono (25 Books in 25 Days: #7)

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I loved The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono when I read it years ago – a beautifully simple story – and have been meaning to read more Giono ever since. I did start Hill once and didn’t get very far, but 25 Books in 25 Days seemed like a good opportunity to read Melville (1941 – translated from French by Paul Eprile).

It started life as the introduction to Giono’s translation of Moby Dick, and can very loosely be said to be about Herman Melville. But this Melville is very much of Giono’s own invention, as Edmund White explains in his helpful introduction to the NYRB Classics edition. Which is, incidentally, beautiful. Giono’s Melville is solidly masculine and determined, and his life is shaped partly by visions of an angel who encourages him to write the novel that is in his heart – and an Irish nationalist called Adelina, who apparently didn’t exist.

Did I enjoy the book? I don’t know, really. It is very overblown, stylistically, in a way that feels deliberate. It is impressionistic and philosophical, interlaced with conversations that are often very funny. It is more of a word picture than a narrative, and swirls around like the waves hiding Moby Dick. Yes, it was often beautiful. But it was more of an experience than a narrative, if that makes sense. I think I should re-read it one day.

He was seeing clearly. He could say it to himself, there, alone in his bed, while a broad smile moistened his whiskers: “I don’t live to keep an eye on my commercial interests. I live to keep an eye on the gods.” What’s more, he’d be ready to earn his keep, starting tomorrow if necessary, doing no matter what kind of work, even something other than writing. Not a “man of letters” in the least.

On this evening, he felt strangely free, strangely decided. He called out softly, “Are you there?” No, the fire was dying out. The embers were crackling, that was all. “That one,” he said, “as soon as he wins, he takes off. Well, as soon as he believes he’s won, because – hold on a minute there, boy! – it hasn’t been stated yet that I will write this book.”

Truly, he didn’t feel he was capable of it, unless he had a real change of heart. He looked at the sailor’s clothes he’d just bought, lying over there on the armchair. What’s he scheming? he thought. What does he have in store for me? What’s he going to turn me into?

25 Books in 25 Days: #17 Soap Behind the Ears

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I discovered my love for Cornelia Otis Skinner a while ago, and when I was in America in 2015, I ordered most of her work to my friend’s apartment. It was much cheaper to do that and carry then back then to pay for them to be shipped to England, and her books are very hard to find here. Since then, I’ve been rationing out her very funny collections of essays – this time, picking up Soap Behind the Ears (1941).

She writes very amusingly about the trials of everyday life – as a mother, as an actress, and as an observer of the ridiculous. Think Diary of a Provincial Lady meets Victoria Wood, but American. It’s all very diverting, and I can’t get enough of it. Which is a brief review, but I hope an encouragement to anybody who doesn’t know her to give her a try – her most famous book is the glorious Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written with Emily Kimbrough, about travelling around Europe.

My favourite piece was about trying to get new clothes for her young son – just the right amount of exaggeration in it. And here’s an excerpt from ‘The Body Beautiful’, about trying to get fit at a sort of trainer/clinic hellscape:

The time dragged almost as heavily as my limbs. Finally Miss Jones said I was a good girl and had done enough for the day (the dear Lord knows the day had done enough for me!) and I might go have my massage. I staggered out and into the capable arms of a Miss Svenson who looked like Flagstad dressed up as a nurse. She took me into a small room, flung me onto a hard table and for forty-five minutes went to work on me as if I were material for a taffy-pulling contest. She kneaded me, she rolled me with a hot rolling pin, she did to me what she called “cupping” which is just a beauty-parlor term for good old orthodox spanking. After she’d gotten me in shape for the oven she took me into a shower-room and finished me up with that same hose treatment by which they subdue the recalcitrant inmates of penitentiaries.

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.

Books lost in the mind

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Do you ever read a book so slowly, over so many breaks, that you sort of lose any sense of what you thought about it?

No?  Really?

Well, I do.  (And maybe you did say ‘yes’ too.)  This is a side effect of reading so many books at once – some will, inevitably, be lost along the way – and picked up later – and finally finished, some months after they were started.  Dozens of books will have been read in between, and even a short narrative will have had hundreds of other characters tangled into it.

It’s a fascinating idea, actually – the narrative, which should ideally go from page to brain in a more or less straightforward matter of read-interpret-remember, actually encompasses many other characters and stories along the way (and is clever enough to separate them) – and that’s not even thinking about the millions of other stimuli along the way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, very kindly given to me by Nichola (an internet book friend, whom I have met a couple of times, but who seems to have disappeared – Nichola, are you out there?), but I didn’t read it in ideal circumstances.

Which is to say that I didn’t simply lose the book in my mind… I literally lost it.  For about 18 months, it disappeared – and turned up when I moved house, as things tend to.  I was about two thirds of the way through when it disappeared, so… I just finished it, without going back to the beginning.

The Saturdays is a children’s book about a family of siblings who form a club, to pool their pocket money and do something exciting together with the proceeds each week, taking it in turns to decide.  It’s good fun, very charming, and with all the over-the-top events and mixture of morals and cynicism which characterise the best children’s books.  It’s probably better read as a child, or to a child, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot.  I think I finished it off during one of my headachey periods, and it’s the perfect sort of light book for that.

But I’m not equipped to write a proper review, so this is instead mostly a pondering on how the reading (and losing) process affects the way we take in a book.  And how each novel comes with the illusory promise of a narrative we can ingest – but that no reader is ever the ideal reader in that sense; stories and characters must weave their way around all the other narratives (real and fictional) in our lives, and cope with all the broken moments of reading, and distractions and forgetting.  And, out the other side, we usually still think of the book as a whole, entire and separate from our haphazard methods of reading.

All a ramble, and not put together with any forethought (I have broken up my blogging as well as my reading; I have been answering people on Facebook and writing a murder mystery party) but perhaps something interesting to think about and to discuss…?