1950s

Letters to Louise by Theodore Dreiser (25 Books in 25 Days: #11)

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I love reading a collection of letters, and presumably that’s why I bought a copy of Letters to Louise (1959) – a collection of letters that Theodore Dreiser wrote to his friend and editor Louise Campbell (who was edited this book and wrote the commentary between letters). It certainly wasn’t because I had any affection for Theodore Dreiser, whom I have never read – though Sister Carrie has been on my shelf for a long time. Having said that, it might have gone in the moving-house-cull.

Dreiser tended to write quite short letters, often signed with alternative names (James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, etc.), but Campbell’s commentary is useful and engaging. And what I enjoyed most was the fondness and admiration that Dreiser manages to get into his letters – admiration for her editing talent. Since they met when she wrote him a letter chastising him for criticising Philadelphia, it’s impressive that he was open to the friendship at all.

Books like this are always a bit better when you get both sides of the exchange, which Letters to Louise doesn’t have, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like I know Dreiser pretty well from this short collection – or one part of his personality, anyway – and it’s fun to have Project Names and 25 Books in 25 Days come together to get something unexpected off my shelves.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (25 Books in 25 Days #10)

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is one of the books that has been on my shelves the longest, I think. I bought it in a library sale in 2004, and it has hidden on my shelves ever since – and I haven’t even seen the film. Basically all my knowledge about it comes from the famous image of Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder and the song ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. Which is a great song.

About ten years ago, I read In Cold Blood by Capote, and I wasn’t super keen to read more by him. Yes, it was very good – but it was so deeply unpleasant that it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it’s stupid to dismiss an author based on one book, particularly when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so very different – and, indeed, I was totally beguiled by it.

Our narrator opens by saying that he hasn’t seen Holly Golightly (full name Holiday Golightly! I did not know that before) for years, but used to live in the same building as her – and first encountered her properly when she kept ringing his doorbell whenever she got home at 2am or 3am. I’d somehow picked up somewhere that Holly was a prostitute, but she is not. She is a ‘cafe society girl’, whatever that means. And it chiefly seems to mean living a bohemian life with a stream of men, but guarding her independence and only giving as much as she chooses.

Holly is a wonderful creation. Any number of authors want to make a spirited, lively female character, but she is no manic pixie dream girl. She is vibrant on her own terms – initiating conversations (by, say, knocking at the narrator’s fire escape in the early hours), chopping and changing what is on her mind in a dizzying way. She is always finding new ways to express her thoughts, and refusing to bow to expectations. And there is an underlying dignity, despite any undignified place she might find herself. I think Capote achieves all of this through the dialogue he gives her. It’s a tour de force, and I’m wondering how the film lives up to it.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (25 Books in 25 Days: #6)

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I think I bought Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) partly because of the similarity of the title to Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington – but I had also read a couple of PHJ’s other novels. I thought one was great (The Honours Board) and didn’t like another (An Error of Judgement), so where would Skipton sit on the spectrum?

She is certainly a varied author – this one isn’t like either of those, but it is very good. It’s principally a character piece. Daniel Skipton is a writer living hand-to-mouth in Belgium – he has had a critically successful novel followed by a critically unsuccessful one, and neither have made him much money. What he certainly doesn’t lack is self-confidence, as we see in the opening pages as he writes a bragging and insulting letter to his publisher, Utterson. While not writing, he endeavours to make money by convincing tourists to spend too much money on fake art, prostitutes, and a nude version of Leda (which the tourists who take up much of the book find hilarious).

Having had his lunch and rinsed out a pair of socks (he had only two pairs and kept one always in the wash), he took his manuscript from the table drawer, ranged before him his three pens, one with black ink, one with green, and one with red, and sat down to the hypnotic delight of polishing. The first draft of this book had been completed a year ago. Since then he had worked upon it every day, using the black pen for the correction of simple verbal or grammatical slips, the green pen for the burnishing of style, the red for marginal comment and suggestions for additional matter. He knew well enough that the cur Utterson would like to get his hands on it. It was not only a great book, it was the greatest novel in the English language, it would make his reputation all over the world and keep him in comfort, more than comfort, for the rest of his life.

Skipton reminded me quite a lot of Ignatius J Reilly, though The Unspeakable Skipton is nothing like A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s as though a character with Reilly’s monstrous nature was transposed to a much less heightened novel – and we see glimpses of Skipton’s genuine loneliness and desperation amongst the comedy of the situations Johnson creates.

Skipton is a wonderful creation, but I also enjoyed the band whom he encounters – from light-hearted Duncan to innocent Matthew to the intellectual snob Dorothy and her passive husband Cosmo. Dorothy apparently appears in another couple of novels in this sort-of series, and I would happily read more about her. She doesn’t have Skipton’s ruthless selfishness, but her sense of self-importance is not far behind – there is a wonderful scene where she gives a literary talk to an assembly of uninterested people.

So, The Unspeakable Skipton wasn’t really what I expected – but it is a character piece done with brio, and an unusual and confident novel.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

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‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That quote often appears on lists of best opening lines, but it might be as far as most people get into The Towers of Trebizond (1956) by Rose Macaulay. She hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion completely, as a handful of her novels remain in print, but it’s fair to say that the average person in the street won’t be able to tell you a lot about her. She’s an author I love, but I’ve had very mixed success with her novels. At the top of the tree are Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, which are very funny while also being incisively insightful about mid-century society. At the bottom is the turgid Staying With Relations. The much-feted The World My Wilderness fell in the middle for me, being very well observed but lacking the humour she does so well.

Where would The Towers of Trebizond fall on my list? It’s among her best known, but various red flags worried me – since I don’t particularly enjoy books set in countries that the author isn’t from, and I particularly don’t get on with travel books. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with this one… but I made my book group read it, so that I’d find out!

Laurie is the narrator and, for much of the book, she details the journey she takes from Istanbul to Trebizond, along with Aunt Dot (Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) and her friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Dot is there to improve the lot of women, while Father Hugh is hoping to convert the masses to his particular brand of High Anglicanism. Somewhere along the way, Dot and Hugh go missing – possibly to Jerusalem, possibly to Russia – and rumour spreads that they are spies.

Macaulay apparently referred to the writing as a ‘rather goofy, rambling prose style’, and I can see why. The tone is often a little detached, curious, and wry – with the same sort of lengthy, relatively unpunctuated sentences that make Barbara Comyns’ style so quirky. Here’s an example:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

The main topics she addresses are faith (and distinctions between different denominations), history, and travel. Much of the book is her musings on these, with plenty of contributions for her companions while they’re about. I think it’s largely commendable for how impressively of-a-piece it is. She does not let up this style – it is consistently well done and totally all-encompassing. I guess it’s then just a question of whether or not you like this style.

While they were travelling around, I found it all a bit muddy. I couldn’t really distinguish the different places they were going, and I certainly found the interpersonal bits much more interesting than her reflections on the places she was seeing. Without anything concrete to hang onto, it was all a bit – well, the most fitting word I can think of is, again, muddy.

I could still definitely appreciate the skill that went into the creation of this portrait, and I did find a lot of it funny. Being a Christian and having been brought up in an Anglican church, I did enjoy some of the discussions of faith – though I always find that it’s non-Christians who find denominations so fascinating, and we’re happy just to do our best to follow Jesus. Macaulay has a wonderfully arch tone, and the faux matter-of-fact style did work – I just wish she’d set it in England. (The section I found funniest was when she was reflecting on having often used a line from her phrasebook about not speaking Turkish, only to discover later that she’d mixed up lines and was actually asking to speak to a Mr. Prorum, or something like that – who did turn up at one point, nonplussed.)

And, indeed, the sections of the novel I liked best were at the end, when she has turned to the UK. There is a very odd sidestep into her trying to raise a chimp – complete with driving lessons – that I thought was marvellous. In fact, having now been to book group, it was one of those times when discussing it made me like it more – reflecting on all the funny scenes and the unusual way Macaulay presents them. It’s all an impressive achievement, for the way in which it is sustained, if nothing else – and, while it doesn’t quite rival my favourite Macaulays for me, I can see why other readers would consider this her masterpiece.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

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I don’t remember who originally told me about The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore, but that recommendation was enough for me to buy it in 2012. A few people read it for the 1955 Club a little while ago, and I’d read so many positive reviews that I finally read it. Yes, it’s rather brilliant! (By the way, I’ve included a copy of the NYRB Classics edition because it’s beautiful; mine was a film tie-in, with Maggie Smith on the cover, and it was made me want to seek out the film…)

Here are the first couple of paragraphs, to whet your appetite:

The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.

After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction. His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.

Judith Hearne is settling into a boarding house, uncertain about how she will be perceived and how she will fit in. These two pictures sum up her life – a devoted Catholic faith, and a longing for any sort of family. But she has her pride, and – on a quest for a hammer, to put in a nail for her oleograph – she is reluctant to jump straight into a friendship with her talkative landlady and the landlady’s overgrown, ugly adult son. But she is rather taken by the landlady’s brother, James Madden – an Irishman who has recently returned from many decades in the US, possibly returning wealthy.

The other friendships she has outside the house are with Moira and her various children – all of whom mock her behind her back, and see the weekly cup of tea as a chore that they can take in turns. These scenes encapsulate what Moore does so very well – showing us the pain that comes not only from Judith Hearne’s loneliness but from her self-awareness. She knows that the family are tired of her, and she notices when they exchange glances at her comments. With James Madden, she has immediate, desperate visions of them falling in love and marrying – but she is no fantasist. She knows her visions are fake, and can’t happen. There is no escape for her in fantasy.

I’ll read more or less anything set in a boarding house, and Moore is brilliant at the enclosure of it – the proximity of strangers and the factions that develop between them. This proximity is even the reason for a rape scene that is very troubling, and I don’t think would be written in quite the same way today – it is written as a terrible crime, but there is little aftermath.

What Moore is best at is developing the portrait of Judith Hearne – her desperation, her melancholy, her stupidity, her hopes and the ways in which she protects them from the eyes of others. Her crisis of faith is dealt with sensitively and without the sneer of the cynic. She is a complete and miserable character, whose life could have been far more complete – but who, one suspects, would always have managed to spoil things, or to let the fly in the ointment overwhelm and destroy her. It is impossible not to feel for her; it is impossible not to realise that she is her own worst enemy.

All this Moore achieves through superlative writing. It reminded me a lot of Patrick Hamilton in its vitality, though perhaps without the dry wit – here is more the humour of hysteria, albeit subdued hysteria. I’m so glad I finally read it – and I hope his other novels are as good.

Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake

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My friend Clare bought me Mr Pye (1953) by Mervyn Peake, and I added it to my wishlist after I saw it being compared to my beloved Miss Hargreaves – a comparison I will look into more thoroughly later in this post. Project Names seemed like a good opportunity to pick it up – and what an intriguing world and character Peake creates

I only really knew Peake’s name in connection with the Titus Groan books, which I have not read, and had assumed he was exclusively a fantasy writer. While this novel incorporates elements of the fantastic, it is set firmly in the real world – specifically Sark, one of the Channel Islands. Here’s the opening of the novel:

“Sark.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man in the little quayside hut. “A return fare. Six shillings.”

“A single, my friend,” said Mr Harold Pye.

The man in the little hut looked up and frowned at the unfamiliar face.

“Did you say a ‘single‘, sir?”

“I believe so.”

The man in the hut frowned again as though he were still not satisfied. Why should this fat little stranger be so sure he wanted a ‘single’? He was obviously only a visitor. A return ticket would last him for three months and would save him two shillings. Some people, he reflected, were beyond hope.

“Very well,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“And very well to you, my friend,” said Mr Pye. “Very well indeed -” and with a smile both dazzling and abstracted at the same time he placed some silver coins upon the table and with a small, plump, and beautifully manicured forefinger he jockey’d them into a straight line.

Mr Pye is extremely warm and friendly with everyone, almost disconcertingly so. He doesn’t seem to quite understand the rules governing social interaction, as his slightly uptight landlady Miss Dredger soon discovers. He bustles into her life, keen to improve her through cheerfulness and advice from God – whom he refers to as the ‘Great Pal’. It’s rather endearing, and yet we understand how Miss Dredger might feel rather unsettled by the whole thing.

A mainstay in Miss Dredger’s life is her enmity with another local – Miss George. There is a very funny scene when they squabble over who will use the island’s transport to get down the steep hill – where Mr Pye’s luggage is waiting to be collected. His attempts to find a compromise do not go down well, but his personality is so forceful that they find themselves doing as he says. And then he invites Miss George to move in with them…

But while Mr Pye is having a dramatic effect on the island, there is also an effect happening to him. I shan’t say what it is, but a physical metamorphosis starts to cause him great alarm – and fans of Miss Hargreaves will notice a definite similarity at this point. Birds of a feather, and all that.

And are they birds of a feather? I can see many things they novels have in common – chiefly that an extraordinary being appears and disrupts a community, unaware that they are quite as unusual as they are. But the tone feels quite different at times, and I really liked Mr Pye where I love Miss Hargreaves.

Peake does have a great way of creating a strange dynamic and seeing what will happen next. His illustrations are also delightful, enhancing the novel’s quirkiness and charm. I can’t quite put my finger on what stopped this being an absolutely-loved-it read, because all the ingredients are certainly there. While it probably won’t be on my Best Books of 2019 list, it’s certainly a great example of imaginative character creation, a Bensonian community of genteel feuders, and exactly the right splash of the fantastic.

Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald

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The final of the Betty MacDonald audiobooks from Post-Hypnotic Press is 1955’s Onions in the Stew – the fourth of her four autobiographical books. And it’s just as enjoyable as the others, even if Anybody Can Do Anything remains my favourite of the series.

No chicken farms or TB wards in this one – rather, it documents MacDonald moving to Vashon Island with her new husband, Donald MacDonald. As always (always!) MacDonald meanders around vagaries connected with the topic before getting into the topic proper – but ultimately they decide that they can’t live in Seattle or the surrounding suburbs, but could make a home for themselves on one of the islands,

MacDonald does seem to make a rod for her own back. She describes her difficulties and obstacles extremely amusingly, but moving to an island that is often inaccessible, and to a house that doesn’t have a road leading to it, is hardly conducive to ease.

As in all the other books, MacDonald encounters any number of odd characters. There is a feeling of unity on the island, but the odd fly in the ointment – such as the woman who palms off her (many) children on anybody who’ll house and feed them, then makes out later that she has been horribly offended and abused by said person. In MacDonald’s writing, though, the incident is funny rather than traumatic – with just that dark edge to it to set it off. The most appalling character seems to be her angry and bellicose dog Tudor.

MacDonald does self-deprecation so well. It’s so fun, for instance, to read about her family’s attempts to manoeuvre a washing machine by boat. Her daughters make a proper appearance here, having been mysteriously absent from her previous memoir, and join in the family’s amiability and ineptitude.

As for Vashon Island – I was rather surprised to learn, from Wikipedia, that the population is over 10,000. I don’t know what it was in the mid-century, but I rather got the impression from the book that it was a few hundred. I suppose 10,000 is still a smallish place, but I live in a village of about 150 people, so everything’s relative.

I’m sad to have got to the end of MacDonald’s oeuvre, and enjoyed hearing Heather Henderson narrate them so well. But I do have all the books on my shelves, so next time around I can read them the old-fashioned way.

The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot

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It was only as I started writing this review that I noticed the title was The Gentlewomen and not The Gentlewoman – which certainly puts a different spin on this 1952 novel by Laura Talbot. When it was in the singular (in my head), it referred to Miss Bolby – in the plural, it tells us more about the world that Talbot has created.

Miss Bolby is a governess in the mid-1940s, and has recently accepted a new position with Lady Rushford. Miss Bolby is proud of her status as a gentlewoman, keen to tell everyone that her sister married a man with a title, and that she was born into a good family living in colonial India. The Indian bracelets she wears attest to this when her words do not.

But Miss Bolby finds herself in a world where such things are no longer valued as much as they used to be. She arrives at the railway station alongside Reenie, the kitchen maid, and they are treated fairly similarly. At the same time, the dignified family seem to be growing less dignified – no longer putting such an emphasis on the correct names and titles, or a strict hierarchy within the house. As the blurb of my Virago Modern Classic edition writes very well, ‘Miss Bolby needs her pretensions to gentility and, in a household where these are no longer of consequence, her identity begins to crumble’. And that plural title – it shows Miss Bolby striving to put herself on the same level of those above her – but also the threats from those below, as the term ‘gentlewoman’ loses its dignity.

I thought The Gentlewomen was very well written, in a style that didn’t quite fit with anything I’ve read before. There are hints of Ivy Compton-Burnett in the cool and proper ways characters address one another, but also the lightness of the middlebrow novelist – and, woven in between, the manners and mores of society-focused fiction. Miss Bolby is never a pleasant character, but nor does the reader wish her ill – even when she is petulantly using her power as a governess to take out her frustration on her infant charges.

Much of the novel looks at the dynamics between the different characters – but a couple of important plot points in the second half give a new momentum to the narrative, and Talbot skilfully pulls us through.

It’s an unusual and impressive book – looking not just at the world war atmosphere so familiar to us from novels and film, but seeing how one world order was beginning to disintegrate – and how that didn’t only affect and disorientate those at the top of the hierarchies.

The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp

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After reading a lot of titles for A Century of Books during my 25 Books in 25 Days, I got too cocky and started reading quite a few that didn’t fit years. And my advantage slipped away. I tend to read about 100 books a year, so I can’t afford to get too distracted – so I went to my list of gaps and decided to pick one. It was 1954 and it was Margery Sharp – The Gipsy in the Parlour has been waiting on my shelves since 2011.

This is the fourth Sharp novel I’ve read – the first being back in about 2003 – and it is very different from those others. I really enjoyed the first three, but they were all comic novels, at least to some extent. The Gipsy in the Parlour is emphatically not a comic novel – but it is a wonderfully atmospheric and involving novel, and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. From the opening line onwards…

In the heat of a spacious August noon, in the heart of the great summer of 1870, the three famous Sylvester women waited in their parlour to receive and make welcome the fourth.

The novel is told from the perspective of a young girl (who, I only now suspect, might be unnamed) who is niece to the Sylvesters. She is a Londoner, but spends her summers in Devon with this family who all live together on a farm – the women are not related, but each has married a different Sylvester brother. The brothers are inconsequential in the novel and in life – essentially good-natured, easy-going, unexpressive men who work the land and let their wives run the house. The chief of these is Aunt Charlotte, who married the oldest son and is de facto leader of the household. It is she who has arranged for the other two wives to join the family.

But the youngest Sylvester brother, Stephen, has chosen his own wife – and Fanny arrives as the novel opens. She does not have the beauty of the other sisters – and she seems somehow wilder and less part of the domestic picture. Disconcertingly for the narrator, she sees Fanny wandering the garden at night, staring back at the house with an expression she cannot quite understand…

For the narrator, who is seven when the novel starts, this is a mysterious but halcyon world. She longs to return to the farm and to the security of her aunt’s plain speaking affection. (And, miracle of miracles for the reader, they speak in dialect but are neither unintelligible nor annoying.) She also longs to be at the wedding of Fanny and Stephen, but the timing is wrong for her start back to school – so she must leave shortly before it takes place, and waits to hear about it via letter in London. But the letter never comes.

On her next visit, the next summer, she discovers that Fanny is in a decline, of the sort common in the 1870s. She is weak, nervous, and spends all her time lying in bed or on the sofa – and tensions in the house grow steadily over the months and years, witnessed by the niece who sees all but does not understand all.

There are definite elements of The Go-Between in this novel. Sharp has drawn the child and her perspective so well – so she is never a dishonest narrator, but clearly cannot piece together all the different elements she witnesses. Her interpretations of characters are given to the reader, who must take a step back to try and understand the whole picture – it is all handled brilliantly, and with the feelings of rich nostalgia that a child would feel who can only return to a much-loved world once a year.

In fact, the whole of The Gipsy in the Parlour is pervaded with a wonderful atmosphere. I felt as though I were immersed in this 1870s farm, with the same limited scope and detailed canvas felt by those who seldom or never left the village. It is odd to read Sharp with so little levity, but her talent at this almost melancholic, elegiac domestic novel is quite something. It is not flawless, particularly in the later chapters, but it’s still an extraordinary achievement. If I had to pick between this and (say) Cluny Brown, I wouldn’t know quite which to choose – but I’m impressed that Sharp could do both so well, and delighted that I can read both.

Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald

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It’s been a while since I listened to all the Betty Macdonald books on audio, courtesy of review copies from Post-Hypnotic Press, and every now and then I remember to write about them. Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) is the third – after The Egg and I about chicken farming and The Plague and I about life in a TB hospital. This is the most general so far, and also my favourite of the four autobiographical books Macdonald wrote.

It takes place during the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce and Betty is desperate. So desperate, in fact, that she takes the advice of her go-getter sister Mary. Mary insists that anybody can do anything, and specifically that anybody can get any sort of job. Which is how, in the era of very little employment, Macdonald manages to secure (and lose) a vast number of jobs.

As usual with Macdonald, she meanders around the topic for a little too long before getting into it – each of her books would be slightly better with the first chapter lopped off – but once we’re in the sway, it’s hilarious. She works as a photo tinter, she works a stenographer, she works as a typist. She has various office jobs, she gets involved in a pyramid scheme, she organises the offices for a mining company – and gets in trouble for putting all the maps in size order, rather than by place or contract. Often we don’t see quite how she leaves these jobs, but there are dozens of them – each time, Macdonald describes her own ineptitudes extremely amusingly. She has self-deprecating down so well that you’d swear she was British.

This does all eventually lead to her sister forcing her to try writing, so there was definitely a happy ending. But the pinnacle of the book is a lengthy section that is creepy rather than simply an amusing catastrophe. It concerns a woman whose name I can’t remember but was something like Doritos. She turns up a shift of folding papers and putting them in envelopes (if I recall) and talks wildly, roots through Macdonald’s bag, and later starts stalking her. That doesn’t do this section justice – she is built up like something in a suspense novel, and it shows an element to Macdonald’s writing that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Masterfully done, and leaves us with nervous laughter rather than the empathetic, happy laughter of the rest.

Macdonald’s personal life is curiously absent from the page. Her time in the TB clinic is glossed over in a sentence (understandably, given the amount of time she spends on it in The Plague and I), but she also acquires a husband almost incidentally – and her children are scarcely mentioned at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to dilute what focus the book does has, but it is bizarre to remember that they exist, in the middle of some amusing exploits in an office Macdonald is comically ill-suited to.

As before, Heather Henderson does a brilliant job narrating this – I can’t imagine Betty Macdonald in any other hands now. Heartily recommended.