1950s

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson – #1956Club

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It is well documented that I want to own every single one of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal. I bought Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson last year, having coveted it when Scott first blogged about it. It’s a war memoir – and it’s always interesting to see the tone these have in the post-1945 club years. I get the impression that things went a bit quiet on the war memoir front immediately after the war, but 10+ years later people were ready to look back on that bizarre time.

First off, yes her name was Verily. And here’s why:

One of my father’s interests is words. He devised a system for naming his five children. Each name had to have six letters; and, because his and my mother’s names contain an R and an L, each of ours had to too – plus some peculiarity not shared by others. Merlin (n), Rhalou (h), Erroll (doubles), Verily, (v) – not so much a name as an adverb – and finally, to fall in with the system, he had to invent Lorema.

Spam Tomorrow starts off with Verily going briefly AWOL as a F.A.N.Y. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) so that she can marry Donald, which they do hastily and illicitly – illicit because she didn’t have leave, rather than because they couldn’t be married.

She then jumps back a bit to joining the F.A.N.Y. – before which she had found a job that used her artistic talents to some extent, in that she designed the wrappers for toffees. It is an example of the slightly eccentric and bohemian spirit that is key to understanding Anderson’s character and writing – a detail that might seem too niche and absurd in a novel, but just happens to be true.

Anderson doesn’t work for the nursing yeomanry for a very long time, and is quite open about how poorly suited she was to such a regimented life. There is a very funny and odd scene early on where she is arrested and threatened with court-martialling for crashing a government vehicle into a gatepost.

A few minutes later, while I was getting ready for lunch, two F.A.N.Y.s of the quiet, useful, obedient type came into the bedroom which I shared with four others (including one whose claim to fame was that her husband had been fallen on by Queen Mary in her recent motor accident). The two F.A.N.Y.s stood in a waiting attitude, one each side of me.

“Want to borrow a comb?” I asked affably.

“You’re under arrest,” said one.

“I’m what?” I asked.

“Under arrest. We’ve had orders to close in on you and march you to the orderly room without your cap or belt.”

She never quite works out what is going on, but ultimately receives a reprieve. It’s an insight into the daftness that always comes with a militaristic attitude to life.

The bulk of Spam Tomorrow is taken up with her married life and particularly her domestic life. Some of the most dramatic pages, unsurprisingly, are when she goes into labour during an air raid. Apparently this left her quite ill for a long time, and the only cure was to have another child – which rather baffled me, but it seemed to work.

I loved everything about her looking for housing, and it was fascinating to read about the precarious nature of homes in London in a period when they could easily be bombed at any moment. And then there is the section where she starts taking house guests in a larger place in the countryside, and discovering how inept she is at it. Which gives plenty of opportunity for being scathing about some of the worst paying guests – particularly those who come from an artists’ colony and have extremely demanding tastes. It reminded me quite a lot of the latter stages in another Furrowed Middlebrow title, Ruth Adam’s wonderful A House in the Country.

Basically, the whole book was very funny and enjoyable, without ever shying away from the perils and privations of the home front. I’ve read far more home front memoirs than those of active soldiers, and I can’t imagine that trend will change, and Anderson’s is a worthy addition to the genre – because of her experiences, but mostly because of her frank, eccentric, and indomitable character.

Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith – #1956club

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I’ve been buying up Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s novels, because I’m worried that when O, The Brave Music is published by the British Library later in the year, there will suddenly be none of them on the secondhand books market. Of course, Miss Plum and Miss Penny from Dean Street Press might already be having the same effect. Well, I bought Beyond the Gates earlier in the year and was delighted when I saw that it qualified for the 1956 Club.

This novel came somewhere in the middle-to-late period of Smith’s all-too-short writing career – she was 50 when her first novel was published. It concerns a 15-year-old called Lydia and the gates she is going beyond are those of Mary Clitheroe Orphanage. She has been chosen to go and be a servant for Marion Howard and her small household – though she is so diminutive that Marion initially mistakes her for someone much younger than 15. Rather a lot of emphasis is placed on how small and ugly Lydia is, though they’re not particularly significant characteristics for the rest of the novel – except for contributing to the low self-esteem she has.

Marion is unsure if Lydia will be able to manage the work on her own, but takes her back to the house and agrees to a trial. Marion is a single woman who lives with her niece Midge – various other siblings and nephews/nieces come to visit at different times, though most members of the sprawling family were killed in an accident. I drew out a family tree in the pack of my copy, and then most of them died and it became less relevant!

When she was a very old woman, whatever else Lydia might forget, she would never forget one thing – her first sight of the room which Miss Howard told her was to be her very own. 

She advanced across the threshold slowly, warily, as an animal enters strange territory, fearful of the hidden enemy, the biting trap. She stared about her furtively. Her flat, sallow face showed nothing of the leaping, incredulous pleasure that swept her in a great wave.

“Put down your box, Lydia.”

Lydia set the trunk down carefully against the wall.

This is all in 1920. The novel is in three parts, and the others are in 1930 and 1940. There is some plot along the way, not least when Lydia’s past life catches up with her in the middle section, but for the most part Beyond the Gates is about relationships. It’s about how Lydia discovers being part of a family for the first time, gradually thawing until she can believe that she is loved.

Which makes it sound extremely mawkish. And it does lean a tiny bit that way occasionally – I would have preferred Lydia and Marion to have a few more negative character traits, to offset the loyalty and kindness that they have in common. But mostly Smith is too good, too delicious a writer to be disliked. I’ve read four of her novels now (though don’t remember much about the one I read years and years ago), and what really makes her stand out is the way she brings the reader into the world of the story. I never visualise the books I read, but I feel like I’ve spent time in each of her communities. I don’t know quite how to explain that, because I haven’t imagined myself in those surroundings (my brain doesn’t work like that), but I belong to these worlds. There is something in the warmth of them, the timbre of them, the atmosphere of them, that has enveloped me and kept a bit of me behind.

It’s a rare quality, and it’s precious. O, The Brave Music remains my favourite of her books, and the one that enveloped me most completely, but I loved reading Beyond the Gates too. I’m so glad this special writer is finally being rediscovered.

Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker – #1956club

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book cover of Talk of the DevilAnother book that’s been on my shelves for at least 15 years is Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker [image on left from Fantastic Fiction]. It’s no secret that his earlier novel Miss Hargreaves is all all-time best-beloved book, but I’ve had mixed-to-negative reactions to all the other novels I’ve read by him. Will Talk of the Devil be any different?

Spoilers: not really. But let’s keep on.

The narrator, Philip, has headed to Cornwall, an area that Baker particularly loved, to visit a couple of old friends – Paul Acton and Jeremy Holden. And Baker is good on descriptions of Cornwall – here’s what he says about St Zenac, which isn’t a real place but is a wonderfully Cornish name:

‘It is a place so much on the edge of unreality, you can never decide where myth ends and history begins. Wild moorland, with massive stacks of granite clutched by lichen; streams that trickle secretly to the sea; the raven, the buzzard, the viper; and in little ravines, soft mounds of sweet turf where bladder-campion and thrift grow in rich masses. It is a country too ancient to be safe. The few farming people, in wind-swept stone cottages, are a troglodyte race, stunted in growth, with thick burry voices. Antiquarians, geologists, archaeologists, and novelists – all have written about this last edge of England, once called Bolerium. And those who have come under the spell of it invariably have to return to it; to return to the last sweeping fire of the falling sun as it sinks beyond the Atlantic, the death of day in England.’

I think Baker is at his best in Talk of the Devil when writing about Cornwall – the landscape and also the feelings it evokes. This is very near the beginning of the book, and I was filled with hope. But…

The actual plot of Talk of the Devil is rather more confusing. While Philip is visiting, he hears about the death of Gladys Acton – which many locals believe was the result of dark supernatural forces, though officially she died of natural causes.

”Because she was murdered in such a way that there could never be any evidence. Because, in fact, she was murdered by the power of malicious thought, bent upon her end. And shall I tell you why I’m so interested, Jeremy? Because people can be, and are being destroyed without any material force being employed. You don’t need guns in this game. Simply the collective power of evil. And especially for unfortunate people like Gladys Acton, who have enough integrity and determination to get in the way.”

The above is the sort of conversation a lot of people have, and Philip spends quite a lot of the novel trying to establish the nature of evil, and determine whether or not there is such a person as the devil.

Baker often looks to the metaphysical in his books. In Miss Hargreaves, a significant element of the novel explores the power of creative thought – being sufficient to make a fictional person come alive. It works there, because it is an undercurrent to a very funny and enjoyable narrative, and it is attached to a very concrete example. In Talk of the Devil, as elsewhere in his other novels, Baker gets too tangled up in philosophical and metaphysical conversations without enough surface story to make them compelling.

I found myself quite confused by Talk of the Devil. It was enjoyable enough to read, but it hovered between a rather flimsy thriller and something with more sophisticated, but more baffling, aims. Putting together a treatise on the nature of evil with a murder mystery sounds quite promising, but the tangle didn’t ever really become disentangled.

If this were the first novel I’d read by Baker, I’d probably give it a lukewarm appreciation. It’s certainly not poorly written on a prose level, even if the construction isn’t wonderful. But I start each Baker novel with the hope that, finally, I might have found a worthy successor to the wondrous Miss Hargreaves. Maybe after 15 years I have to acknowledge that lightning struck once. But more likely, I’ll keep slowly reading his books, hoping for that second miracle.

Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill – #1956Club

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One of the reasons I love these club years is that it makes me delve into the books that have sat on my shelves for donkey’s years. I bought Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill in 2005, and it has sat quietly waiting for a long time. I even read a couple of her other novels when Turnpike Press republished them (they’ve also done this one), and I enjoyed them though I wasn’t blown away by them. Not in the way that I was by Tea at Four O’Clock. It’s brilliant.

As the novel opens, Laura Percival is returning from the funeral of her sister Mildred. They have lived all their lives in a very large house (‘Marathon’) in Northern Ireland, now neither parent is alive, and for the past six years Laura has been looking after Mildred. As she walks home from the funeral, the words of the priest are going around in her head: ‘the sister who with exemplary devotion did not spare herself in the long months of nursing’. It is the only tribute she has received for these years of service. Now that Mildred has finally died, Laura has agency – and for the first time in her life.

We learn that, even before this sickness, Mildred dominated Laura’s life with a well-intentioned but draconian insistence on routine. And on respectability above all else. It’s that rigorous routine and respectability that Laura finds hard to escape in the days after Mildred’s death – she has left such an imprint on Marathon that it is unthinkable to do anything but obey her. This is what George sees when he returns – the wastrel brother who has been estranged from the family for decades. The quote below is where the novel’s title comes from. (Miss Parks is a friend of Mildred’s who came to visit and then moved in, and is clearly hoping to be asked to remain.)

“It’s a good many years,” he said, a little uncertainly, “since I heard that clock.”

Miss Parks was quick to emphasise her more intimate acquaintance with it. “Four o’clock! That’s always been a very special time with us. Mildred rested in the afternoon, you see, and Laura brought her tea-tray in at four o’clock. Mildred did like regular habits, you know. It’s a great help to an invalid, and Laura understood that so well. Do you know, Mr Percival, I’ve seen Laura waiting outside the door in the hall, with the tray in her hand, and the minute the clock had finished striking she would knock and come in. ‘Mildred,’ she would say, ‘Mildred dear, it’s four o’clock.'”

George could suddenly bear no more of it. He could see Laura standing there waiting, the tea-tray with all its appointments of lace and china and silver correctly placed for the personal satisfaction of one querulous invalid. He could imagine Laura’s hand, a small hand, never very clever at anything except the delicate brushwork of her paintings, poised ready to knock when the sound of the clock had sunk to silence. Then the hesitant rap and the opening door, and Mildred on the sofa turning her ailing body to feed on Laura’s apparent health. He felt sick and turned to the sofa to reassure himself it was indeed empty. “I’m going out into the garden,” he said, “for a smoke,” and fumbling his way through the blinds he opened the french windows and went out onto the lawn.

Hopefully that’s given a sense of how good McNeill’s prose is in this novel. She is also so good at the nuances of how Laura is reacting now – some relief, some guilt, some helplessness, some uncertainty. She doesn’t want to switch her dependency from the dead sister to the newly returned brother, but nor does she know what to do with independence. Each of the interlocking characters, dead and alive, is drawn so subtly and cleverly.

We also see the lost chances of the past – and the different paths for the future. George has affection for this sister, but also a plan to get him, his wife and child out of relative poorness (his wife is a wonderful and wise character). It’s hard not to sympathise with all of the characters. Even those whose motives are initially suspect grow more forgivable as we understand them more.

It’s a beautiful and brilliant novel, and I’m so glad I finally got it off the shelf.

Mrs Panopoulis by Jon Godden

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Earlier in the year, I read and really loved the odd, cold, psychologically fascinating novel Told in Winter by Jon Godden (sister of the more famous Rumer). So I was keen to try more of her things, and I’m a sucker for novels about older women – so Mrs Panopoulis (1959) winged its way to me. Isn’t the cover gorgeous?

(I should say, at the outset, that I read this in the peak of my eyes getting back to working, and with quite a lot of dizziness, so it wasn’t the ideal time to take it all in. But it has a big font and it’s quite a simple story, so I thought it would be a good place to try reading again. And clearly that was a few months ago, so here goes nothing with this post! For those asking so kindly, health continues to be up and down but eyes have largely been fine, praise the Lord.)

Mrs Panopoulis woke early, as the old do, but even earlier than she usually did because the ship’s engines had stopped. To her it was the stopping of an enormous heart. She lay on her back on the berth, and before she opened her eyes she moved her hand cautiously up to her breast. Her heart was beating unevenly, as it always did, but it was still beating.

Waves of light were running across the white-painted ceiling; she knew that they were reflections from the sea outside, but for a moment she could not remember where she was. The sound she heard in her sleep came again, a high, shrill mewing. “Seagulls!” she said, still half asleep, and then, “We have arrived.”

Typing that out now, I really like Godden’s writing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right state to appreciate it when I read it. Anyway, Mrs P and the people on her cruise have arrived at an island off the coast of ‘Portuguese East Africa’, whatever that is or was. Among the group are a pair of young things who have yet to acknowledge that they love each other, Martin and Flora (Mrs P’s great-niece) – Martin has travelled to meet a business partner whom he idolises. And Mrs Panopoulis has determined that she will shape their destiny.

The depiction of the island hovers on that line between interesting travel literature and not-very-sensitive cultural hierarchies. It isn’t out-and-out racist, but it also isn’t the most comfortable read. I’m felt that Godden was on safer ground when she was talking about the tourists who’d travelled there and the ex-pats who lived there. Mrs Panopoulis herself is a little sharp and rude, but driven by a thirst for adventure and an impatience with her own increasing age.

There were a lot of things to like in Mrs Panopoulis, not least the fully realised depiction of an old woman who doesn’t fall into any of the old-woman stereotypes. But, overall, I wish the novel had a bit more depth, a little more cultural sensitivity, and, without giving anything away, an entirely different ending.

So, this Godden isn’t in the same league as Told in Winter, but it might be one to revisit at some point, to see if I missed anything the first time around.

 

A House in the Country by Ruth Adam

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It’s always exciting when there’s a new set of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I always want to read all of them. I got a couple as review copies, and went straight to A House in the Country (1957), partly because I thought I’d already read it and realised I hadn’t.

I love books about houses, and particularly about rambling old mansions. This one is enormous and in a little village – and is the place that Ruth Adam, her husband, and a handful of relatives and friends decide to rent together. What they couldn’t afford on their own, they can manage as a household of eight. Incidentally, A House in the Country is marketed as a novel, but it is very heavily based on real life, including the names. So is it a memoir or a novel? Probably a fictionalised version of real life, in the mould of the Provincial Lady series. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a delight.

Though the first page of the book warns the reader that it will be far from an unalloyed delight for the group experimenting with this venture:

This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier…? It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless. Our old parents tried it. We wouldn’t listen. “If only you could see her,” we said.

She first came into our lives through the Personal Column of The Times. I have the advertisement still. Sometimes I look at it bitterly, as if it were an old dance-programme, with some scrawled initials on it which I had since learned to hate.

If that sounds like quite a bitter opening, then don’t worry. It’s better that we know all will not end well, to ameliorate the sadness when things start to go wrong – but I was still about to dive into the joyfulness of the first chapters. Quite a lot of space in the book is devoted to finding, taking, and inhabiting the house. They assign rooms, they decorate, they marvel at the extraordinary beauty of a magnolia tree on the lawn.

Moving house is one of my favourite themes in literature. Moving somewhere this magical is a dream to read about, with hope in the air offset by the gentle bite of the narrative. Because Adam writes very amusingly, somewhere between the self-deprecation of E.M. Delafield and the snark of Beverley Nichols. She sees herself and her companions and her new neighbours with clear eyes, willing to see the best in all and unable to avoid highlighting the less good. It’s a complete joy to read, and the through-line of mild cynicism prevents it from being cloying.

The only difficulty with the book being heavily based on real events is that it messes up the structure of A House in the Country a little. The second half of the book covers a great deal more time than the first, as inhabitants splinter off and are replaced – sometimes by new long-termers and sometimes by short-term rentals who might deserve more than the few, funny paragraphs they are given. But Adam has to cover a lot of similar years in a short space, and she chooses to rush through some events and characters rather than let the book become repetitive.

And the end of the book, as they have to leave the house, is as sad a description of mourning as I’ve ever read – prepared as we were from the outset. Yet, somehow, I still look back on the book as fun, light, joyous. I suppose it has a bit of every emotion felt in a love affair – albeit a love affair with a house.

 

Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert

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I recently tweeted a photo of my British library Crime Classics collection, most of which I haven’t read, and asked the good people of Twitter which I should read next.

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As I should have perhaps anticipated, I got many, many suggestions – practically as many as there are books there. But I went away and explored a few of the options, and chose Death in Captivity (1952) by Michael Gilbert, which I think I got as a review copy. I was intrigued by it’s WW2 setting and the ‘locked room mystery’ element to it.

The novel is set in a POW camp in Italy towards the end of the war – the soldiers have heard rumours that the end of the war might be coming, but nothing concrete. But they do know that a retreating German army might have no compunction in a few last-minute killings of British soldiers in an interment camp. Now is the time to make good their escape – and they have been busy tunnelling away from the various huts they’re living in.

I’ll be honest – the characters more or less blended into factions for me, in this one. I was too caught up with the setting and the mystery (to which I’ll come in a moment) – so this review is going to be lamentably short on characters’ names and personalities. I was also feeling pretty anxious when I read it, so was speeding through for the plot. But Gilbert definitely makes us feel like we’re in the middle of this camp – with all the humour, rivalries, fear, and ambition that are the everyday norms of the extraordinary situation in which these man have found themselves.

While there are a few tunnels, most are really only decoys for the main tunnel. But one morning, the soldiers find that there is a dead body in it, under a pile of rubble. It brings about a long list of questions: murder or accident? How did he get in? Do the Italian guards know about the tunnel – and how can they begin to investigate his death without exposing their chance of escape?

Like so many detective novels, the denouement doesn’t live up to the prowess of Agatha Christie. If, like me, you started with her, every subsequent detective novelist will disappoint with their plots – I’ve yet to find any exceptions. And, no, the denouement here is not particularly satisfactory – but what was brilliant was the way in which Gilbert brought that world to life. For the vividness there, and sections of real tension, I’d very readily recommend Death in Captivity.

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

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We’re in the last few days of Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, run by Ali, and I am glad I managed to sneak in under the line with The Scapegoat from 1957. I did a poll on Twitter to see whether I should read this, short stories, The Parasites, or I’ll Never Be Young Again, which account for all the unread books I have by her – and I’m glad that this one topped the poll, because it’s rather brilliant. Truth be told, it tied with the short stories – but the people cheering on The Scapegoat were very convincing.

I didn’t know anything at all about it when I started, which was quite an exciting way to read the novel. But I can’t just stop writing then – so read on to have the premise of the novel spoiled. And it really does happen in the first handful of pages.

John is the first-person narrator – he is a university history lecturer from England, visiting France. In Le Mans, he happens upon his doppelgänger. Not just somebody who looks a bit like him, but somebody exactly like him. They even have the same voice, and John’s French is so good that this other man – Jean de Gué – didn’t realise John was English. They start drinking together… and eventually so drunk, or perhaps drugged, that John passes out in Jean’s hotel room.

When John wakes up – Jean has taken all of John’s possessions and gone. He is left with Jean’s clothes, luggage, identity documents – and none of his own. Left with little option, he decides to go to Jean’s house.

If you swallow the far-fetched concept of doppelgängers so identical that nobody at all can tell them apart, then this is a premise rife with possibility. And, look, it isn’t possible. I speak as someone with a literal clone, and very few people would think we were the same person. No matter – let’s go on with the show.

John-as-Jean arrives at his chateau. His earlier attempts to explain what has happened are taken as poor joke, and he takes the path of least resistance. It’s rather an ingenious way to introduce the new cast to us – because John, narrating, is as clueless as the reader as to who they are. There are several women, a child, an older woman, a man. Gradually, he works out how Jean relates to all of them – sussing out the histories and relationships without being able to ask outright. Why does he have bad blood with one of the woman, and apparently secrets with another? Which is his wife??

In their brief encounter, it was clear that Jean was a more ruthless, less pleasant man that John. As he stays there, it becomes increasingly obvious how this had affected things – and how Jean has set John up to be the scapegoat of the title. John is no saint himself – though motivated by much purer morals than his doppelgänger, he is weak and often foolish. And blindingly naive at times. For all that, he is very sympathetic, and du Maurier does a great job of making us feel his frustrations, fear, and dawning attempts to make the best of it.

If Daphne du Maurier had written this twenty years earlier, around the time she was writing Rebecca, this would be a brilliant set-up for something gothic, something in the mould of a thriller. Well, The Scapegoat is not that. It is a much more sophisticated take on the genre, if I can use the word ‘sophisticated’ as a value-free term: I still adore Rebecca; it’s still my favourite of her novels. But The Scapegoat is more of a character piece – after the fantastic premise, everything is believable and even likely. It’s a poignant unfurling of one man’s psyche, while he is similarly on the track of Jean’s. There are dramatic moments, but this isn’t really a dramatic novel. It’s all about personality and relationships and family, and gentle attempts to change things.

It’s also beautifully written. I’ve never seen du Maurier better at the incidental metaphor, descriptions of people and places, and above all subtle and precise descriptions of how John feels and responds.

As I say, Rebecca is still in a league of its own as a complete tour de force – but this is a clever, engaging, and unexpectedly nuance competitor.

Patience by John Coates

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A couple of weeks ago, Jessie at Dwell in Possibility organised a mini Persephone readathon. Basically, an excuse to get a Persephone book off the shelf and dig in – and I had a quick mosey through the ones I have unread on my shelves, and opted for Patience by John Coates, originally published in 1953.

Coates is one of those rare[ish] creatures – a male Persephone author – but his main character is a woman. ‘Patience’ is there as a theme throughout the novel, but it is also the name of the main character. She is a devoted mother to her children, and thinks she might be on the way to another. Here’s the rather wonderful opening line:

It was odd, thought Patience, that surprises never came singly, and that the day she asked herself whether she was going to have another baby, poor Lionel should have asked himself to tea.

Lionel is Patience’s brother and something of a hassle. His wife has recently left him to join a retreat, permanently, and he is busying himself with interfering in Patience’s life and her marriage. He’s always quite interfering, but he has particular reason this time: because he’s discovered that Patience’s husband, Edward, is having an affair.

That might be rather a devastating discovery for many wives, but Patience isn’t unduly perturbed. Her relationship with Edward is one of thoughtless acceptance. She has been taught to be submissive and so she lets him sleep with her, and she is proud of the offspring of that marriage, but it seems never to have crossed her mind that one might love one’s husband, or want to spend time with them.

An awful lot of things have never crossed Patience’s mind. Coates has created something rather extraordinary in her – because she is clueless and naive, taking things on surface level, kind to everyone and absolutely predisposed to like them. But she is never, never the butt of the joke in the narrative. Patience would be a slightly absurd comic character in the background of most novels. Here she is a heroine, and I loved her. She is fundamentally good, even if the way she understands the world and its morals is a mixture of pragmatic, idiosyncratic, and Catholic.

I’ve buried the lede, but Catholicism is one of the big themes of this very funny novel. Importantly, Coates isn’t mocking Catholicism – I have zero time for novels that mock people’s faith – but he is funny about people who twist scripture and the tenets of the church for their own ends, or who are half-hearted in it. This early sentence amused me, and gives a good sense of Coates’ tone – it’s about why Patience is married to a non-Catholic:

For darling Mummy had been unable to find any eligible Catholics for her daughters, what with the war being on and perhaps not trying very hard.

Because of her firmly-held faith, Patience can’t get a divorce. Even when things get more complicated, as she falls instantly in love with a man called Philip… and that’s just the beginning of the complications that follow.

I have only two qualms about this novel. One is the love-at-first-sight thing. Maybe it does happen sometimes, but it just feels a bit silly in a novel. The other is that Patience thinks a lot more about the church than about God, which is a little at odds with the genuine nature of her faith.

Besides those details, I loved Patience. Coates is really good at putting together this bizarre twist on a moral dilemma, in a novel that could easily have been a miserable tale about unhappy marriage in a different author’s hands. Instead, Coates sustains the humour and lightness of the novel, and keeps the reader – well, this reader at least – fully empathetic with Patience, and really liking her. But then again I never find unworldliness offputting in someone, real or fictional, unless it means that other people have to deal with the mess they leave behind them. And that’s never the case with Patience.

Such an unusual topic for a novel, handled perfectly, and a delight from start to finish.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The tone of the novel is a deceptively simple one; Patience’s voice is perfectly delightful, childlike whimsy. Despite its few flaws I really thoroughly enjoyed this surprising little novel” – HeavenAli

“While it is, in many ways, quintessentially ‘Persephone’, it is also quite strikingly different, and fills a gap in the Persephone canon that I hadn’t realised was there before.” – Book Snob

“It’s a rare occurrence but sometimes a Perephone title just doesn’t suit me and this was one of those times which was mildly disappointing as it’s the one I’d had the highest expectations for.” – Desperate Reader

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

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It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott at the excellent Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Every time I want all of them, and every time I only manage to read a handful – but thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a review copy of My Caravaggio Style (1959) by Doris Langley Moore. Don’t worry too much about the title – I’ll come onto that in a bit.

Quentin Williams is the narrator. He works in an antiquarian bookshop and is the writer of fairly unsuccessful biographies of people nobody much cares about. In a chance conversation with a passing American, he somehow manages to suggest that he has access to the memoirs of Lord Byron, believed to have been destroyed. One thing leads to another, and Quentin decides that he’ll give forgery a go.

Moore was a Byron expert and there is plenty of background detail about Byron here – or, rather, enough so that those of us who’ve never read a word of Byron don’t feel entirely adrift. She even does a good job of making you feel the significance these memoirs would be, though mostly because they’d be worth a lot of money. The cleverest thing is that we are always reluctantly on Quentin’s side when it comes to the forgery – because he is such an intensely dislikeable person.

I hope this was deliberate. He is arrogant, careless of the feelings of others, and particularly unpleasant to his girlfriend Jocasta. Every time he describes her, he talks endlessly about her beauty and stupidity. It’s the sort of viewpoint that is at the very worst edges of men-writing-about-women, so either Moore was impersonating a terrible man, or needed a quiet talking to. Let’s assume the former. This is the sort of thing Quentin says about Jocasta…

Such a vapid and unworthy comment quite irritated me. I had never regarded my beautiful Jocasta as an intellectual girl but she had been brought up by highly cultured grandparents, and I saw no reason why she should appear – no, I won’t say vulgar, for she had too little pretension ever to be that, but – I can only repeat – childish.

While we cannot forget the chief reason that he is dating her – she is so beautiful, y’all – it’s never clear what she sees in him. And, indeed, she’s very keen that they get married, despite him having no redeeming qualities at all. Quentin is rather easier to cheer for when he visits his great-aunt – by some convoluted reasoning, he needs some manuscript books from her attic and also needs her to witness him receiving them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Moore can be very witty – particularly in these sections. For example…

It was curious that so much good will towards the human race should be combined in my great-aunt with an inveterate reluctance to allow any member of it whom she saw at close quarters to be comfortable.

To distract Jocasta from finding out about the forgery, Quentin sets her off doing a research project on Byron and animals. She gets really into it and starts to love reading Byron – rather ludicrously, Quentin gets terribly jealous that she should love Byron. His reasoning is fairly unhinged: Byron was a notorious womaniser and thus he doesn’t want his girlfriend falling in love with him. Despite, of course, Byron being long dead. And so he tries to write things in the forged memoir that will alienate Jocasta…

It’s all bonkers, but Moore manages to make the logic of the novel work well. I found that I wanted Quentin to succeed in his efforts, even as I wanted Jocasta to get as far away from him as possible. It’s always fun to read about literary obsessions taken to great lengths, and once different Byron scholars get involved (including ‘Doris Langley Moore’ as a character!) it’s all very amusing and dramatic.

And the title is apparently a reference to something Byron said about his own writing, though that does make it one of those slightly silly titles that only makes sense to the in-crowd. That aside, Moore did a great job of making this interesting to someone who doesn’t care at all whether or Byron’s memoirs are discovered.

Another success for Furrowed Middlebrow. Just as long as Moore knew she was creating an idiot and not a hero.