1960s

The Snake Has All The Lines by Jean Kerr – #ABookADayInMay Day 30

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Back in 2012, I read Jean Kerr’s best-known book, apparently turned into a beloved film, Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. She followed it in 1960 with The Snake Has All The Lines – a curious title that apparently comes from her son being cast as Adam in a school play about Eden, but complaining that the snake has all the lines.

Like the previous collection, a lot of The Snake Has All The Lines covers the experience of being a put-upon wife and mother – and, like that collection, it is episodic. The separate comic essays don’t have any overarching narrative, which makes her writing perhaps a little less satisfying to curl up with than something like Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson – but certainly very diverting to dip into. Or, if you’re doing A Book A Day In May, read in one rush.

Kerr is very pithy, and the lines she opens essays with are well-crafted – e.g. ‘I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.’ She is gifted at observational comedy about domestic life, and does it with a precision and rhythm to her sentences that is always enjoyable. What I will say, though, is that those observations have become truisms over the years. Even in 1960, I suspect it wasn’t the peak of freshness to say that children are a handful and given to chaos, or that husbands are absent-minded and a little bit useless – in the six or so decades since, most comic writers would choose to put a little bit more of a spin on it.

Here she is on married life:

When a man calls you from Tulsa, he invariably makes the mistake of calling either from a public bar or from his mother’s living-room. Neither setting is exactly conducive to a free exchange of ideas. There, within earshot of his fellow revellers or his mother, he can hardly say the one thing you want to hear, which is that he misses you terribly, it’s been a nightmare, a nightmare! and he’s never going to make a trip alone again. For that matter, you can’t tell him you miss him either, because the children are there with you and they become downright alarmed at any hint that their parents have preserved this degrading adolescent attachment so far into senility.

And here’s an example of her take on children:

I know that small children have a cetain animal magnetism. People kiss them a lot. But are they really in demand, socially? Are they sought after? Does anybody ever call on them on the telephone and invite them to spend the week-end on Long Island? Dot heir own grandmothers want them to spent the whole summer in Scranton? No. For one thing they bite, and then they keep trying to make forts with mashed potatoes.

It’s all very entertaining, if not the most original. But there is more variety in The Snake Has All The Lines than I remember there being in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. As well as wife-and-mother scenarios, Kerr is writing as a successful author and playwright – so there is an essay about dealing with bad reviews, for instance, and one about travelling with a show you’ve written. Most unusually of all, she dramatises Lolita and Humbert Humbert at marriage counselling, which I daresay I’d have understood better had I read more than one and a half pages of Lolita.

Kerr isn’t writing great literature and she isn’t pretending to be. But this is an example of a genre I love – self-deprecating domestic memoirs with an exaggerated tone and a clippy pace – and a very enjoyable example at that.

The Tin Men by Michael Frayn – #ABookADayInMay Day 21

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The Tin Men by Michael FRAYN on Between the Covers

I’ve read a couple of books by Michael Frayn from later in his career, but it’s quite a departure to read his debut novel – The Tin Men (1965). It is a raucous satire of – well, of quite a few things. And it is prescient in quite an astonishing way about one thing in particular.

We are at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research – chosen by Frayn because of the irony of being named after the artist William Morris, I assume, given his abhorrence of mass-production. The William Morris who made cars would presumably approve. Everything that is being achieved by the institute is a ludicrous extension of normal office practices, and Frayn writes in highly ironic terms about it all:

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

The various figures in charge of departments are a little interchangeable – or, at least, they are all eccentric and incompetent, though their eccentricities and incompetences differ a little in kind. There’s silent, almost immobile Chiddingfold, in charge of everything. There’s Riddle, the sole woman, cigarette always dangling from her lips and given to unexpected displays at company dos. There’s Hugh Rowe, using office hours to write a novel – but deciding it’s easiest to start by writing the fawning jacket copy or glowing reviews. It’s a joke that should get old, but someone remains amusing – even when we get to examples of his prose, which are clearly satirising something and ended up being maybe too good for satire.

My favourite example of the automation is run by Macintosh, doing research into automating morality – by creating Samaritan (and later Samaritan II and Samaritan III) which are programmed to sacrifice themselves in the event of a shipwreck, so long as they can identify that the other objects involved are humans. It’s an example of the humour in The Tin Men – which I found witty rather than laugh-out-loud, and which could be wearing if it weren’t for a certain variety in its applications. I kept being reminded of David Lodge’s Nice Work (though thankfully without Lodge’s fixed belief that writing about going to the toilet is hilarious) – and I thought it was a similar idea done much better and much less annoyingly. Of course, Nice Work came out a couple of decades later, so Lodge might well have been influenced by Frayn.

The humour does feel very of its time – and very of a certain milieu. Perhaps in the 1960s it was a daring, new humour. It now very much feels like the voice of older, middle-class men who can’t punch up, because there is no ‘up’, and so just punch around. We are expected to recognise these worlds, not as an outsider but as people mere steps away from this level of absurdity. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the tone, particularly after falling foul with Lodge, but I ended up rather liking it. Somehow it feels more dated than humour from decades earlier, but you can see how it could have been very fresh in the 1960s.

And what is the most prescient thing? Another worker, Goldwasser, is working on the automation of newspapers – and it sounds extraordinarily like AI:

The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article. With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them.

Frayn’s vision is still tethered to the concrete, piecing through physical cards to form a newspaper-article-by-prediction, but it is still astonishingly similar to what generative AI is doing now. Musings about whether the automation machines can take over the ‘work’ of prayer are clearly satire, but still incredibly close to current conversations about the ways in which AI might remove spiritual or soulful elements of creativity.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to say that this isn’t simply a string of funny ideas and people – though the funny ideas are probably the strong point of The Tin Men. There is also an ongoing plotline about the Queen being on her way to open the new wing. It gives some momentum to a novel that could otherwise feel a bit scattergun.

The Tin Men has very little in common – stylistically or thematically – with the later Frayn books I’ve read, and I’m glad I read it. As well as being a fun, silly, eerily farsighted novel, it helps fill in a part of literary history that I’m less aware of and which seems less ripe for rediscovery than others.

The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann – #ABookADayInMay Day 20

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The Swan In The Evening: B Format: Fragments of an Inner Life (Virago Modern Classics) : Lehmann, Rosamond: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Crossing Day 20 feels like we’re on the home stretch, and I am still really enjoying doing A Book A Day in May – certainly finding it much easier than last year, when my eyes were still pretty ropey eight months after Covid. And there’s something I particularly like about reading books that have been on my shelves for ages – such as Rosamond Lehmann’s The Swan in the Evening (1967), which I bought in 2011.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Fragments of an Inner Life’, and fragments is the word. The first section is a fairly impressionistic take on her childhood – stray memories coming together to form some sort of image, however imprecise. Or, rather, she goes for very precise scenes that flow into other precise scenes, without really trying to cohere into anything very detailed. Some of it is in the present tense, giving it a childlike immediacy.

I am in the Parish Hall; it is a Sale of Work. I circulate among the visitors with a trayful of lavender bags which I proffer to the long lean sallow nurse in a grey uniform. I know her: she looks after a little boy with a squint and a funny way of talking, who is said to have tantrums and beat his head against his nursery wall, who once presented me with a letter that said, in grimy reeling print: ‘Dear Rosy sprinkel me with kisses if you want my luv to gro yore everlasting Joey.’ The nurse bends down to me, smiling, and says in a low confidential voice: ‘I’m stony broke.‘ At once such terror grips me that I almost swoon. Why? How was it that this harmless if unfamiliar slang phrase took sinister form as she uttered it and dropped on me with the chill weight of granite! Absurd, morbid child… Mad, like all children…: or so very little madder.

Among the memories given their sudden spotlights is one that a longer-lasting impression: the death of the six-year-old daughter of a man who works on the family estate. Without being able to truly understand the depths of this tragedy, young Rosamond sees its impact. It lingers with her as an incomprehensible sadness – and, later, becomes something all too comprehensible for her.

The second section of The Swan in the Evening tells us about the death of Lehmann’s daughter, Sally. Or, rather, the death is focalised through Lehmann’s own absence – her daughter is fairly newly married, in a distant country, and Lehmann is innocently going about everyday life. There are hints at a premonition, understood only in retrospect, and a veil drawn over the shock of the phone call – and the days and weeks after that.

But she picks up some time later, where she starts trying to communicate with Sally beyond on the grave – explained in no more metaphysical terms than that Sally is still alive, though not in the way such things are usually considered. From here, Lehmann goes through a curious mix of sharing how she believes Sally is communicating with her – and a defence of this belief. I’ll be honest, the combination was quite confusing. Lehmann is adamantly not part of any traditional religion, but she does piece together her beliefs from various different writers and influential figures.

It’s clear that her real reason for writing The Swan in the Evening is to relay her experiences and explain why they are reasonable. How could it be anything other than poignant. But it’s also quite abstract, even when she seems to be mounting her defence. This is from earlier in the book, but it’s a good example of the style I mean. Fluid, flowing from one thought to another, quite hard to pin down. Rather less firmly constructed than her novels, from my limited reading of them.

Myself in extremis, floored; myself saved, rejoicing: each of these opposed conditions deemed while it lasts, to be perpetual; yet even then a shadowy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, in the wings… Perhaps this is an abstract of anybody’s childhood. But of course it is only one aspect of the truth, or of illusion.

I think perhaps the most interesting part of my edition was the afterword she wrote when Virago Modern Classics reprinted it – highlighting bits she would have liked to phrase differently, and sharing some of the public and private responses she got to the initial publication. The Swan in the Evening is an interesting addendum to the life of a very good novelist, and of course a grieving mother is unlikely to be able to express that level of sorrow to anybody who hasn’t experienced it (and yet should certainly be allowed to try). I’m just not sure what the book is trying to be, and so it ends up being a jumble of different things that are not limited enough for memoir or wide enough for proper autobiography. I would, for example, have liked a lot more about her writing career. I hope the book was helpful for her to write, and it’s diverting to read, but it certainly earns the word ‘fragments’ from the subtitle.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

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I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

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Believe it or not, I’ve only read one Georgette Heyer before – I listened to April Lady and really enjoyed it. In the three years since, I’ve bought quite a few Heyer novels but haven’t actually got around to reading any of them. A little while ago, I thought I’d see if any of the Heyer titles on my shelves matched gaps on A Century of Books – and landed on Frederica (1965), which comes rather late in her publishing career.

Like most of Heyer’s novels, this is a Regency romance – and she certainly enters into the style and ethos of a novel from the period. How many 1960s novels would open with this lack of urgency?

Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence. “In a smart new curricle, too, Mama, and everything prime about him!” declared Miss Kitty, flattening her nose against the window-pane in her effort to squint down into the street. “He is the most tremendous swell, isn’t he, Mama?”

Lady Buxted responded in repressive accents, desiring her not to use expressions unbefitting a lady of quality, and dismissing her to the schoolroom.

Uncle Vernon – more commonly known as the Marquis of Alverstoke, or just Alverstoke – is very wealthy and very selfish. His sisters are forever importuning him with requests to use his power and connections to help their various offspring, and he languidly refuses to do any such thing because it doesn’t interest him. There is a very believable grown-up-siblings dynamic between them, with a fair dose of Mr Bennett being needlessly antagonistic to his wife in Pride and Prejudice, all the while intending to help. But more often than not, Alverstoke won’t do anything for anybody else unless he finds it interesting. It’s not a very attractive character trait, truth be told, and it’s fortunate that Heyer manages to make almost every occasion an example of an exception to the rule – so the rule is really just what we are told, and the exceptions are what we are shown.

Bursting into this contented world are the Merriville family. They are oprhaned and as desolate as you’d expect of a family who will never have to work for a living. Oldest of the lot is (as we might expect from the title) Frederica – a sensible, clever, funny and caring woman who considers herself on the shelf as a spinster, aged 24. Next is Charis, who has that Regency trio of characteristics: beautiful, dim-witted, and kind. And finally three brothers, one of whom is away at Oxford. The other two are Jessamy, pious and anxious, and Felix, enthusiastic and boisterous.

It’s an enjoyable whirlwind to encounter, and Alverstoke finds himself rather taken aback. Having initially turned down the opportunity to help them as guardian, he ends up agreeing when he sees that they aren’t really mercenaries – and that Frederica is a capable, unsentimental woman. From this point onwards, none of the negative character traits that we’ve been led to believe beset Alverstoke ever really appear again.

What makes Frederica so fun is Heyer’s unceasing commitment to the Regency vibe. It’s a rich, detailed prose which you can’t read quickly, as the verbal sparring between characters is delightfully Austenesque and the narrative voice itself is, if not on Austen’s level, still great fun. Here, for instance, is Alverstoke trying to get Frederica to be chaperoned in town:

“I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!”
“You did!” she retorted. “And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!”
“Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!”

and here is Alverstoke being wonderfully bitchy to his sister:

“Do you mean to tell me that Mr. Trevor read my letter?” demanded Lady Buxted indignantly. “Your secretary?”
“I employ him to read my letters,” explained his lordship.
“Not those written by your nearest and dearest!”
“Oh, no, not them!” he agreed.”

The only downside to Heyer’s commitment to verisimilitude – in my opinion – is the vast quantity of era-appropriate slang, particularly from the boys. Here’s a selection, just flicking through: basket-scrambler, ninny-hammer, Friday-faced, high fidgets, rumgumption, Queer Nabs, mawworm, and so on and so forth. I can see how some readers would love these touches of authenticity, but they always took me out of the action. They were the only times it felt like Heyer’s researchw as being unceremoniously dumped into the dialogue.

To go back to the hero and heroine: what really warmed me to Alverstoke was his reluctant devotion to the young boys. (I didn’t need to warm to Frederica, as I loved her from the off.) And Heyer does the boys so well – especially the youngest, who believes he is offering a great treat to the men he meets by talking to them at length about mechanics, and being escorted to mills or something. Her eye for young people is so accurate, and timeless.

The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

Frederica is a long book, and did feel long. My copy was about 300 pages but the font is tiny – I see other editions are around the 400-page mark. There are some brilliant set pieces – a runaway dog; a chase after a hot air balloon – but most of the novel is simply the steady, detailed study of these people interacting, squabbling, matching wits and falling in love. I had to relax into it and not expect anything to happen quickly – but, on those terms, it was a total treat.

The Clocks by Agatha Christie

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The Clocks - Wikipedia

I’ve reached the point where I can’t really remember which Agatha Christie novels I’ve read and which I haven’t. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it means I can go back and re-read them and will have probably forgotten who the murderer is. Or, more likely, think I’m being very clever when it comes back to me.

But I definitely hadn’t read The Clocks before. Published in 1963, that means it falls towards the end of her writing career – but before the books got really bad. It’s also technically a Hercule Poirot but, for reasons we will come onto, it doesn’t really feel like one.

(Btw, I shan’t give away huge spoilers – like the culprit – but there will be some milder spoilers in this review, so you are warned.)

The location of the murder is 19, Wilbraham Crescent. Christie describes the street in a way that I enjoyed:

Wilbraham Crescent was a fantasy executed by a Victorian builder in the 1880’s [sic]. It was a half-moon of double houses and gardens set back to back. This conceit was a source of considerable difficulty to persons unacquainted with the locality. Those who arrived on the outer side were unable to find the lower numbers and those who hit the inner side first were baffled as to the whereabouts of the higher numbers. The houses were neat, prim, artistically balconied and eminently respectable. Modernisation had as yet barely touched them – on the outside, that is to say. Kitchens and bathrooms were the first to feel the wind of change.

I think that’s a lovely observational, about kitchens and bathrooms, and it’s expressed well and elegantly. Christie is often unfairly dismissed an excellent plotter and poor writer, but I disagree. A lot of The Clocks is quietly amusing and she has a good eye for social detail.

Anyway, a young typist called Sheila Webb is called to a new client’s house. Mrs Pebmarsh has requested her by name to 19, Wilbraham Crescent, and off she goes, letting herself in (as instructed). She finds a living room with numerous clocks on the mantlepiece and other places – far more clocks than anybody would normally need. And, more curiously, they are all at 4:13pm – an hour ahead of the current time.

But that’s the strangest thing Sheila finds in the room. The other, behind the sofa, is the body of a dead man.

She runs out screaming, and encounters our narrator for half the novel – Colin Lamb. Christie goes back and forth between third-person narrator and Colin’s perspective, and he is really our detective for the novel. He’s also rather smitten by Sheila.

We gather some facts: Mrs Pebmarsh says she did not request a typist. She does not know who the man in her house is, and she is blind – so he may have been there for a while without her noticing. Colin begins questioning all the various neighbours, who do rather get confusing, as we pretty quickly go to lots of different houses and encounter a large number of people who may or may not have any bearing on the novel. It’s an opportunity for Christie to enjoy herself though – there’s a ‘cat lady’ totally devoted to her cats; there are some rowdy but intelligent young boys; there is a glimpse of a certain type of political discourse in 1963:

“Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.”

“Must have been foreign,” said Mrs Curtin. “Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with the Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.”

Plus ça change, if I may.

So, where does Hercule Poirot come into this? Just barely. We know that we are in a Poirot novel because of there are stray mentions of Ariadne Oliver (and Christie has her usual good time poking fun at Oliver for choosing a Finnish detective when she doesn’t know anything about Finland). The man himself enters by way of interview with Colin Lamb, an old friend – or, rather, a younger friend whom Poirot tries to educate, but in a sort of frustrating way where he never says what he means. A few times, Colin Lamb traipses off to Poirot’s residence to lay his new findings at Poirot’s feet and get some sort of enigmatic reply in return. At no point does Poirot himself talk to anybody else involved, or visit the scene of the crime. It’s all rather strange. Why is he there at all?

For much of The Clocks, I thought I was onto a real winner, and wondered why it wasn’t talked about more about Christie’s oeuvre. It was a page-turner with entertaining writing and a fun (if occasionally slightly overwhelming) cast of characters. The sidelining of Poirot was odd, but I went with it. Even the occasional hints of spy rings didn’t put me off – and I find Christie very tedious in spy mode, which she couldn’t resist returning to.

Well – without spoilers – The Clocks did end up being a disappointment to me. I’ll just say that the solution wasn’t at all satisfying, and it felt very anti-climactic compared to her usual cleverness. I feel like the inventive set-up deserved a better pay-off. I’m glad I read it and I enjoyed myself, and from another author I’d be very impressed, but this definitely isn’t one of Christie’s masterpieces.

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

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Christopher Isherwood is one of those authors everyone knows about, and you sometimes see mentioned, but whose wide-ranging catalogue of books doesn’t seem to get as much attention as you’d expect. Beyond the sexy German-set novels, what else did Isherwood write? A few years ago I loved Prater Violet, and recently I read one of his much later works – A Meeting By The River (1967). It’s one of his only novels not to be given a Wikipedia page, which might or might not speak to its general reception – but I thought it was really excellent.

The novel (or perhaps novella) is told entirely in letters and diary entries written by two brothers – Oliver and Patrick. They are somewhat estranged. There is clearly a history of power struggles between them, and neither trusts what they read or hear from the other. But, as the first letter shows, Oliver re-opens correspondance because he has something significant to say.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else whould be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcultta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

Oliver is about to be fully received into the Hindu monastery, renouncing the world (though, as he points out to Paddy, this wouldn’t prevent him receiving letters – he is not totally disappearing). Patrick/Paddy writes back an enthusiastic letter full of bonhomie – and the reader thinks it’s going to warm up to being a cheerful tale of brothers reuniting. It is received more or less as such, and Oliver writes back explaining the monastic process a little more. And then Patrick writes back, suggesting that he come and visit Oliver in Calcutta.

And this is the first of many times that Isherwood pulls the rug from under our feet a bit. Because, after this exchange of letters, we get our first taste of Oliver’s diary.

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is.

The reader has also probably ‘accepted what he wrote at its face value’, and I felt quite wrong-footed here. Who was correct? Was it charming, bombastic Patrick – or Oliver, whom I now knew was mistrusting and wary?

This all accelerates when, despite Oliver trying to put him off, Patrick does arrive on the scene. He alleges he’s there to support his brother and find out more about Oliver’s new life and future – but we know from Patrick’s letters to his wife and his mother that he’s trying to dissuade Oliver from taking this step. Oliver is suspicious himself, but goes back and forth on whether he can trust what he’s hearing.

In some ways, A Meeting By The River is quite a simple story of feuding brothers miscommunicating, worn down by years of mistrust and rivalry – yet also bonded in a way that cannot be dismissed. What makes it unusual is the setting in an Indian Hindu monastery. What makes it so brilliant is the way Isherwood constantly wrong-foots the reader. After each letter or diary entry, I felt on firmer ground – then you’d gradually discover how Patrick was lying in a letter, or how Oliver jumped to the wrong conclusions in his diary. Later, Oliver reads some of Patrick’s letters, and the plot thickens further when he suspects Patrick left them out on purpose, so his brother would read his lies.

It’s done so well. Isherwood is so, so good at the ways that people deceive each other (and themselves) – not in big, gradiose, elaborately crafted falsehoods, but in the small, thoughless moments the suit the occasion, without thinking about the wider implications. And that’s before I get to the affair that Patrick is trying to keep hidden…

A Meeting By The River is a slim novel, deceptively simple – but I think it is a masterpiece in miniature. Isherwood may be more remembered for the showy subversion of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, but for my money his real brilliance can be seen on show in quieter, cleverer works like this one.

Everything’s Too Something! by Virginia Graham

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Towards the end of A Book A Day in May, I read Virginia Graham’s Everything’s Too Something! (1966) and said I wanted to write about it a longer length – because it is such a delightful book, and I didn’t want to short change it.

I first came across Graham because Persephone Books publish her poetry – and that led me to her absolutely delightful correspondence with Joyce Grenfell, published as Dear Joyce, Dear Ginnie. From there, I turned to Here’s How and Say Please, which are a spoof how-to guide and a spoof etiquette guide respectively. She has that Provincial Ladyesque humour, combining self-deprecation and wry wit, and I relish it.

Everything’s Too Something! is a collection of essays that were originally published in Homes and Garden. Do magazines like that still have humorous columns in them? Are they of such joyful quality? Across the 36 short essays in this book, Graham covers some topics that link to Homes and Garden – though, curiously, they include how awful it is to have to tour around somebody’s garden. But really she turns her attention to anything – anything, that is, that would fall into the attention of a middle-class, middle-aged woman in the 1960s.

This ‘review’ is likely to end up being simply a list of quotes that amused me, so let’s just go with that. I think she (again, like E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady) is very good at the comic list, getting exactly the right balance of relatable observation with the slightly outlandish. For instance, here on friends of friends whom you haven’t met…

The friends of friends are always a problem. Some can be ardently welcomed into the circle, but there are always a number who not only do not get loved but are more or less mythical. Joyce can go on talking about Enid for years; how well she cooks ravioli, how she has composed a trio for horn, bassoon and drums, how sweet her chilren are, how ill her mother is, what she said to the magistrate, where she gets her corsets and a host of other intimate details relating to her life. And yet one never gets round to meeting the woman. ‘You would love her I’m sure,’ says Joyce. ‘I’m sure I would,’ you reply half-heartedly.

I’m not sure Graham would have considered herself at the forefront of 1960s feminism, but she does her bit for exposing the foibles of the patriarchy – mostly by satire. There’s a funny section on not trusting male drivers, for example, and there’s this from an essay on men and women living together:

It is unfortunate how many women are idea-prone. A man is an impractical creature, and a woman often can’t help having an idea which would get him out of the mess he is in – and, incidentally, the mess she will have to clear up. She might, for instance, have an idea about getting out the step-ladder instead of balancing the telephone directory on a stool on a table.

She might have an idea that it is better to start a bonfire with small sticks rather than full-grown trees. She might even go so far as to have an idea that the nails she has been handing one by one to her husband for an hour, might to advantage be parked on some adjacent shelf, or even in his pocket.

Then there’s this little snapshot of courtship vs marriage:

I remember my husband, when he was my fiancé, licked down, with his little pink tongue, all the envelopes for our wedding invitations. When it came to our first post-marriage party he refused to lick down one because, as he confessed, it made him feel sick and always had. The only thing a wife can deduce from this is that love wanes on marriage, and that her dear one is not prepared to feel sick for her now the nuptial knot has been tied.

Graham was 56 when the book was published, and had got to a time of life when she could write this next excerpt, though from the vantage of 38 I feel much the same some days:

The nice thing about getting to my age is that there are so many nice things to complain about. Of course, the young complain too, but their grumbles are usually concerned with more cosmic things such as the Condition of Man. The Condition of the Roads doesn’t worry them at all.

Most non-fiction published nowadays is described as ‘important’, and there’s definitely space for books which challenge our worldview, shows us about lives we know nothing about, educate us and so forth. I’m not sure how often, today, books are published like Everything’s Too Something! – that is to say, trivial and diverting, but also exceptionally well written. Caitlin Moran is the closest that comes to my mind, though even her writing has become increasingly keen to be important. I love that there is also room on the shelf for someone like Graham – whose writing couldn’t possibly be considered important, but is absolutely wonderful nonetheless.

Two frenetic novellas #ABookADayInMay – Days 15+16

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The past couple of days, I’ve read two quite strange novellas. I don’t think they have anything in common except strangeness, so let’s dive in.

The Following Story

The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom

I hadn’t heard of The Following Story (translated from Dutch by Ina Rilke) until Karen reviewed it the other day, and the premise instantly grabbed me. Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Portugal – but he doesn’t remember how he got there, and he’s pretty sure he was in Amsterdam the day before.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead or vice versa, I could not ascertain. Death, I had learned, was nothingness and if tat was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts and memories.

As he explores what’s going on in the first-person narrative, we are piecing together who he is. Herman used to teach classics, though now writes travel guides under a pseudonym, and the worlds of Greek and Roman mythology are almost as real to him as his own life. They are rather more real now, in fact. A particular pupil from his teaching days becomes significant, and the timeline dives and weaves between past and present. At one point Herman merges with the myth he is recounting, and the schoolroom past and Lisbon present are equally intermingled. It’s all rather dizzying. Nooteboom never gives us any sure footing or easy conclusions. We are trying to establish Herman’s identity, but he is doing the same thing himself.

But this is also, in a way, a morality tale. The hotel room is a place he once, decades earlier, slept with a married woman. What bearing does that have on the story? I was strongly reminded of a very different writer – May Sinclair’s brilliant short story ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quench’d’, where a woman keeps running but always ends up in the hotel room where she had an affair.

I really enjoyed the first half of this novella. Nooteboom isn’t trying to give the reader any stability, but the writing is mesmerising and elegant. You can more or less work out what’s going on, even if you’re always a step or two behind, deducing what’s happening a moment or two after it has. I struggled a bit more in the second half… suddenly Herman is on a ship with a wide cast of strange people, going goodness knows where. In Karen’s review, she talked about a ‘gut-punching ending’, but I have to admit I am very hazy on what actually happened in the second half. It all got a bit too frenetic and confusing for me. I think I know what happened to at least one of the main characters, but I’d have liked a little more clarity to have the full emotional impact.

The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

The Bloater (1968) by Rosemary Tonks

Any listener to the Backlisted podcast will doubtless be familiar with Rosemary Tonks – and I think they’re pretty much responsible for this strange, good novella coming back into print. It’s about a BBC sound engineer called Min and her various friendships, dalliances, and (most interestingly to me) profession.

We don’t get a huge anount of the profession, actually, but the novella’s best scenes are those that take us behind the scenes of a BBC audio programme – discussed, as everything in the book is, with jagged, slightly disjointed, often amusing back-and-forth dialogue. Min is nothing if not frank. Though married to a kind, negligible man (he is ‘always on the way to or from the British Museum’), she is preoccupied with possible romances. She and her female friends discuss these things openly, and with a sharp narrative verve that never goes in quite the direction you’d anticipate.

“Yes, but I’ve seen his chest. And I want him dreadfully.”

“Pooh! What’s a chest?”

“This one’s absolutely smooth, with thick rounded shoulders. And it shudders when it’s near me.”

I reflect that you really can’t ask much more than that. So I say disgustedly:

“This is all very objective, Jenny. But what sort of person is he, for G-d’s sake?”

“Quick as a flash, very pop Cambridge, I told you, success and plastic high living. He’d flit through any kind of situation without turning a hair.”

“He sounds genuinely nasty.”

Speaking of nasty, let’s discuss the Bloater of the title. Actual name Carlos, and her lodger, he is a constant presence in Min’s life – and here is how he is introduced:

This huge, tame, exotic man was reading a book as though he was sitting in an airport lounge, with no more regard for me than one has for the factotum in tinted nylon uniform-pyjamas who brings a cup of coffee and wipes over the simulated marble formica with a morsel of rubber skin. Not content with ignoring me, this loafer, this self-regarding bloater – smells. Oh yes, he does. I, personally, can smell him from the kitchen door.

Min seems disgusted and fascinated by the Bloater in equal measures. She invents elaborate excuses to try and avoid him, but then seems quite keen to sleep with him. It’s all very odd and quite unsettling, and you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t spend more time with her poor husband. I’m not sure why the novel is named after the Bloater, rather than (say) Min herself, but perhaps it is representative of the uncertainty at the heart of Min’s character. She doesn’t know what she really wants, but she’ll self-destruct in an effort to get it.

I enjoyed The Bloater mostly for its curious writing style. I’m always drawn to dialogue-heavy books (if they use speech marks!) and the off-kilter way the book chops between sparse sentences reminded me of other, similar mid-century writers like Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. In her strangeness and slight nastiness, Tonks belongs with those significant names. I’d be interested to see what she can do on longer scale, if any more of her books ever get reprinted.

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

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When I read R.B. Russell’s very good Fifty Forgotten Books, there were a handful of books that particularly appealed – and one of them was Phyllis Paul’s much-admired but out-of-print Twice Lost (1960), even though Russell actually prefers her A Little Treachery. I set up an abebooks alert and patiently waited – and, hurrah, finally a copy come up! It was quite pricey and not very good condition, but I didn’t think I’d ever stumble across another chance to read it.

…days after this tatty Lancer Gothic edition arrived, I saw the news that a beautiful new edition was being printed by McNally Editions! I do wonder if the bookseller had caught wind of the news and wanted to sell off this copy quick-sticks. NEVER MIND. I may not have the lovely edition, but I do have the fun of a copy that clearly mystified its editors/marketers. Because the way they’ve tried to sell it is really quite bafflingly unlike the book you’ll find inside. ‘An innocent schoolgirl is the victim of evil, and in terror the people of Hilberry ask why!’ sets up a very different sort of novel, and I suspect quite a few purchasers of this edition ended up confused and disappointed. For one thing, it gets the name of the village – Hilbery – wrong.

It’s clear from the outset that Phyllis Paul is not writing disposable mass-market fiction. Her writing is lush and beautiful, more like the opening of an Edwardian novel of manners than a gothic thriller. Here’s the opening paragraph:

They had separated and were creeping about the grass, bowed over, with their eyes on the ground. But it was too near nightfall. Through the gateway with the flanking piers topped by urns, whose pale, classic shapes were enveloped in savage tufts of ivy, the rest of the tennis-party had already drifted, and out in the lane voices rose boldly above the din of bicycle bells and hooters, and the stuttering of a motor-cycle on the point of moving off. Christine Gray and a friend of her own age, Penelope, had good-naturedly stayed behind to help the little girl in her search for a lost treasure.

The little girl is a curious, adventurous child called Vivian. Don’t worry about Penelope because we don’t see much of her, but Christine becomes a key figure – she is young herself, with the carelessness and trust of youth. It seems inconceivable that anything could truly go wrong. Not here, in a large, beautiful house in the English countryside at a party for well-off, cheerful people.

And yet – of course it does. Little Vivian goes missing. A search is made for her, or for the treasure she was hunting. No trace of her is left behind.

Twice Lost isn’t a procedural mystery by any stretch of the imagination, and the reader never feels like they are the trail of a detection. While we wait to see if a resolution will be given, it feels for much of the novel that Phyllis Paul isn’t especially interested in the disappearance herself. It’s the catalyst for a few things, and the story continues through to the end of the novel, but Paul is far more invested in writing about this small community in lovely, languorous prose. She is very good at it. There are many scenes where we can simply relax into the comedy and drama of human relationships – particularly between newcomers to the village, a writer Thomas Antequin and his son named, of all things, Keith. They have come to Carlotta House with the idea of Thomas Antequin becoming a renowned playwright, if he can do so away from all the distractions of town. Descriptions of Carlotta House are as near as Twice Lost gets to truly being Gothic, in my opinion. The section I noted down to quote is actually about a different house, a minor cottage, but it’s an example of the vivid, gorgeous writing that I so enjoy – and which must have come as such a surprise to readers hoping for the sort of novel suggested by this cover. It’s also a great insight into village life and the ways that small issues can become major. (You get the feeling these elms preoccupy villagers more than Vivian’s disappearance.)

But crouched at the foot of these majestic trees, on an uncultivated piece of ground as spacious as a meadow, was one small, ancient cottage; a little garden patch before it, and all the rest wild. Here, in fact, was an outstanding example of that obstructive cottage property which many a good, full, tidy mind in Hilbery lusted to sweep away. It was felt to be the nearest approach to a slum that the district possessed.

This lonely relic of wild beauty caused much unease in Hilbery Village. For the elms were ‘wild’! Efforts were therefore continually being made to prove that they were dangerous. Everyone knew that this cry of danger was a bare-faced pretext; the elms, if dangerous at all, were not remotely as dangerous as the near-by road since that had been straightened and turned into a speed-track, and there was no proposal to scrap that. And in fact, as always in such cases, all sorts of humane and public-spirited reasons had been put forward to mask a simple lust for destruction.

There was, of course, the opposite camp. The elms had their partisans. Even in Hilbery there were those whom wanton destruction enrages – and those who are perhaps even more enraged by the tidy mind. And among the first of these was the owner of the ground, a Mr. Parmore, who lived opposite in one of the rejuvenated farmhouses, and he was a man as determined as wealthy, and doted on his view. In the second class was the tenant of the cottage.

How many Lancer Gothic writers were putting in things like that? (It did slightly amuse me, in a sad kinda way, that this would be a moot conversation within a decade or two – when Dutch elm disease would have laid these trees to waste.)

We continue seeing the affectionate squabbling between Antequin senior and Anetquin junior – affectionate, but with an element of malice – as well as Christine’s development towards adulthood. Vivian is given up for lost, and people are sadder about the idea in the abstract than because anybody particularly valued poor Vivian as a person. Her stepmother certainly doesn’t mourn her. Her disappearance is chalked up as a freak accident.

Suddenly, turning from one chapter to the next and hardly heralded, we are a significant amount of time in the future. I don’t want to give away anything from this point (though the blurb to my edition does – and, to a certain extent, the title does too). But relationships have been formed, suspicions have developed, and Vivian’s disappearance continues to haunt Hilbery and its residents in ways that aren’t entirely obvious to the undiscerning.

I really enjoyed Twice Lost. It is a fascinating novel. For the most part, it is beautifully written and a piercing but undisturbing psychological portrait. Phyllis Paul sees her characters keenly, with the insight of a writer who doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. But what also makes Twice Lost fascinating is how Paul seems to disregard many of the conventions of novelistic structure. It’s not even that she defies the rules of particular genres, or merges different genres together. There are parts that seem intentionally clumsy. There are significant characters and plot points hurriedly introduced in the final pages. The title only makes sense with enormous spoilers. There’s a lull in the momentum for the major part of the novel’s middle – that is fine, as a reader, because it’s so enjoyable to read – but it’s hard to imagine anybody advising on novelistic structure would let Vivian’s disappearance fade away for such a long stretch.

Only one of these strangenesses weakens the novel, in my opinion. The belatedly added characters feel like a cop out, and dent the sort of eerie elegance that the rest of Twice Lost has. For the rest – they just mark Paul out as an unusual novelist forging her own path. I can see why McNally republished this uncategorisable novel. One of the blurb quotes on my edition says, ‘A brilliant novel of suspense… haunting, fascinating, wonderful’. I don’t think it’s a novel of suspense – but I can’t disagree with the final three words.