1960s

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig – #ABookADayInMay – Day 19

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It is appropriate that I follow a book by a translator with a book in translation. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig was published in Swedish in 1964 and has just been published in a translation by Saskia Vogel by Faber & Faber, who sent me a review copy. I am always interested in reading more Scandinavian literary fiction, and its description as a ‘haunting Swedish family saga’ won me over.

It’s very different from most novels I read. There is almost no dialogue in the whole book – I thought there would be none at all, but there are four or five exchanges throughout the book. Instead, it is all narrative, and often for page-long paragraphs. It is a poetic, atmospheric depiction of a melancholy family in a rural community. Judit is also known as ‘Queen’, which is a part of her personality that often wars with the more sombre, even hopeless, part of her that is ‘Judit’. She has a taciturn brother, Albert, and a much younger brother, Viktor. At length, Trotzig depicts the dysfunction of this family unit, who scarcely communicate or connect with each other. This is a paragraph about the relationship between Judit and Viktor:

And she sensed how she was being left alone. As young as he was he had made himself unreachable, slick and smooth like a sea-glazed stone, no longer to be grasped. Gray sky, black nettles, chicken scratch, the cat upon the rat, down among the meadows the gray expanse of sea – what did she have to do with this whole world? Alone were they, each and every one unto themself, like cast stones scattered in the empty water-dawn.

It’s beautiful writing, but I have to admit to feeling a bit oppressed by the amount of beautiful writing in this book. Obviously it was a choice to keep the characters’ voices from us, but the lack of dialogue did make the family seem cold and remote from the reader, as well as each other.

In the final 40 pages, a new character arrives – she is foretold by the blurb, but I shan’t spoil it – and it could have been transformative. And yet she, too, is curiously distant from us all. Even a sudden burst of plot couldn’t change that.

So I’m not sure I’m necessarily the right reader for Queen. I could tell it was beautiful, but I couldn’t connect with it. Perhaps that was the point… and yet it felt like a book I couldn’t really get to grips with.

The Artless Flat-Hunter by Joanna Jones – #ABookADayInMay – Day 8

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One of my favourite tropes in a book is house-hunting – particularly when it is done for comic effect. There is something so delightfully funny about the contrast between an estate agent’s exaggerated, mendacious positivity and some melancholy would-be homeowners looking at mouldy wallpaper and subsidence. Glorious.

So I didn’t know anything about Joanna Jones when I stumbled across The Artless Flat-Hunter (1963) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago, but this title and this cover meant I couldn’t resist. Having recently enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Finders, Keepers, it feels relevant to report that it had a penned dedication (‘November 1963. To Jill, all my love, Peter’) and, curiously, a clipped photo of John F. Kenndy from a newspaper article – possibly in the wake of his assassination, in the same month?

It’s one of those faux instructional guides that were all the rage in the 1930s, so it’s nice to see it continuing into the 1960s – and basically satirises the whole process of finding, renting, and living in a flat. Everything from nosey landladies to noisy neighbours, via finding the right flatmates and how to dodge unexpected expenses when estate agents try to foist unwanted fixtures and fittings on you. As a sample, one of the chapters is called ‘Low-flying aircraft and other amenities’. True, she largely doesn’t seem to realise that there are places to live outside of London, but we’ll forgive her that.

The maxim with which I opened this chapter should be followed by a second: the maximum rent you are prepared to pay will prove in the end to be your minimum.

You will start out by declaring that nowhere more than twenty minutes’ walk from such-and-such a centre of civilisation will be acceptable. You cannot afford more than such-and-such a rent, and you will not consider paying a penny more. Then the days go by,. You discover that nobody in the British Isles wants to let as much as a tool-shed. The advertisement boards are festooned with lies. It’s a wonder most of the postcards are not yellowed and curling with age. Why on earth do people pay good money to advertise in the evening papaers when they have no inteniton of even letting you set food inside the front door?

Nothing in here is unexpected, and Jones is certainly happy to hit every cliché, but that didn’t matter to me. It’s her lightness and consistency of tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She judges the right line of surreality in her satire, and while it certainly has no pretensions to great literature, it’s a very good example of a genre that has probably faded away.

According to the inside notes to the dustjacket of The Artless Flat-Hunter, there was a whole series in the Pelham Artless Library – The Artless Actor by Kenneth More, The Artless Gambler by Roger Longrigg, The Artless Musician by Sidney Harrison and The Artless Yachtsman by John Davies. What a fun idea, and what a curious selection of professions/hobbies to select. Well, these books won’t change your life, but if The Artless Flat-Hunter is anything to go by, you’ll pass an entertaining evening and be able to empathise all too well.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 7

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I’m reading May Sarton’s memoirs all out of order, so I’ve got The House By The Sea and Journal of a Solitude under my belt before going back to a slightly older one – Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), which has a bad title and a truly ugly cover. And yet inside – what riches!

There is something of a false start in my mind – a little prologue about her British ancestor and her American ancestor, and how different they are. It is extremely skippable and doesn’t give you a sense for what the book will actually be about, though I know that Americans are notoriously interested in their family trees and connections to previous continents and perhaps Sarton couldn’t resist.

Anyway, that out the way, and we are onto the main part of the book: Sarton finding, buying, doing up and living in a house in Nelson, New Hampshire. She was 46, and moving out to a distant location on her own felt like an understandably significant step for a single woman of her age – particularly one whose living was largely forged in isolation, as a writer (and occasional lecturer). Her decision-making is an example of how often she pinpoints universal emotions, while also applying them to the specifics of her life:

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life. I was not wrong in divining that for me, if I took it, this step would mean radical change and so might be compared to marriage. No woman in her forties can afford to marry the wrong person or the wrong house in the wrong place! So I groaned and teetered and waited for life itself to make some sign.

Off she drives to find the possible home…

We followed an interminable road through lonely woods for four miles, then emerged into a charming brick mill town sitting sedately beside a lake, and again veered off into thick woods. It began to feel like one of those journeys one takes in a dream, a journey that has no end, in search of something that can never be found, where if one wakes at last it is to the accelerated heartbeat of terror. I did not intend to live on the edge of nowhere.

But then, quite suddenly, the long road took an abrupt turn to the left and we found ourselves out in the sunlight of a small village green.

“This,” Mrs Rundlett said, “is Nelson.”

And she quickly falls in love. Through her descriptions, and her eyes, we fall in love too. My edition has photographs along the way, mostly taken by Eleanor Blair, but they are black and white and rather muddy, in the way of ’60s publishing. You have to let your imagination transport you to the world Sarton inhabits.

As I have written many times before, I don’t have a visual imagination. I find it nearly impossible to ‘picture’ the scenes that Sarton describes, and she does her best to tell you the lay-out, colours, materials, and feel of her home and garden – but, as with the best writers in this type of book, somehow I found myself there. I couldn’t visualise the scenes, but I could feel what it would be to live there. As she portrays her rooms, land, and neighbourhood, she is squarely in the midst of them. It is not an objective or distant depiction – she writes firmly as an inhabitant, centring her own experience in a beautiful way.

In that first week I established a rite about supper. When I sit down at the deal table, there are flowers; there is a bottle of wine, and the table has been carefully set as if by a good servant. There is a book open to read, the equivalent for the solitary of civilized conversation. Everything has been prepared as if for a guest, and I am the guest of the house.

The book covers eight years in the house. Along the way, we learn about her neighbours – eccentric and otherwise. But this is not like Beverley Nichols’ delightful Merry Hall books. Though broadly in the same genre, Sarton doesn’t have his mischievous caricatures and darting humour. There is a humour in her book, but it one of companionship, affection and enjoying every mood and season as it comes.

I say ‘enjoying’. She is also not afraid to tell us about her darker times. Perhaps they do not proliferate as intensely as they did in The House By The Sea, but there are some. Sarton feels things deeply, and she shares those feelings generously. Along the way, she also discusses her novels and poetry, but without a consciousness that her non-fiction is the best thing she will write. It is beautiful, poetic, and true.

A place like this is more like a novel than a poem – complex, never quite ‘finished’, operated on extended time, a balancing of many themes against each other. Work on it cannot be finished in one quite push. It must be resumed spring after spring, when black flies and woodchucks come back. It cannot be neglected for long – or you find yourself back where you started. A place like this must be fashioned and re-fashioned inch by inch. You wait and see. You wait and hope. You wait and work.

I absolutely loved Plant Dreaming Deep, and to be honest probably should have read it at a more leisurely pace. I think The House By The Sea is my favourite of the Sarton memoirs I’ve read so far, but there are plenty more to be read. Maybe, once I’m finished, I’ll start again and read them in the correct order.

Set on Edge by Bernice Rubens – #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

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Today’s book is Bernice Rubens’ debut novel, Set On Edge (1960) and my friend Paul helpfully took a photo of my copy with me for comparison (I am on the right). Grier introduced me to Rubens’ work when she gave Rachel a copy of The Five Year Sentence and we did it for an episode of Tea or Books? – since then, I’ve been discovering how very many copies of her books are easily available in secondhand bookshops and I am amassing them at a rate of knots. At a slightly slower pace, I am reading them.

Set On Edge must have marked Rubens out as the individual, odd, and brilliant writer that I am discovering her to be. Here’s how it opens:

The trouble with family relationships is consicence, which is nearly always guilty. The Sperber family were guilt-riddled, and as no man will bear his guilt alone but looks for its source, finding there someone to blame or hold responsible, so the Sperbers sought out their rotten root. Each of them knew from the beginning where their search would lead them, and each was afraid of showing the other the way.

There are quite a few members of the Sperber family, and I don’t think you need to worry too much about quite a lot of them – because Rubens piles us high with children and grandchildren before we’ve really got the story underway. She also dashes between future and past in quite a disconcerting way before the story settles. But the main catalyst for a lot of the dynamics in the family is the death of Mr Sperber – and if this gives Mrs Sperber genuine sorrow, she is also ready to take maximum advantage of the position it gives her. She is constantly reprimanding her adult children for supposedly being anxious for her death, and remembering her husband with the most exaggerated affection.

The marriage of her children is her main aim – as well as the source of mnay of the arguments in the household. The choosing and getting of spouses is done with a trademark eccentricity. There is a quality to Rubens’ prose that reminds me a lot of Muriel Spark in the best of ways – a sort of jabby, off-kilter writing that is very ready to recognise the shortcomings of her characters, but not in a way that is likely to set you against them:

One Saturday morning he crossed Miriam on the stairs as he was going out to work. He stopped a step above her so that they were on a level, and taking a gilded comb from the tray, he offered it to her. She took it silently. When he reached the foot of the stairway, he turned towards her. “Miriam,” he said. It was the first time he had called her by her name. “Will you marry me?”

“Yes, Mr Levy.”

Where Miriam was concerned, Mrs Sperber knew better than to argue or question. Within a month they were married and there were two paying-guests in Mrs Sperber’s house.

One morning, shortly afterwards, the postman delivered calling-up papers for Mr Levy. Mrs Sperber never understood how it got to be known that anyone eligible for conscription could be found anywhere, and she marvelled at the organisation that could track down so seemingly an insignificant person as Mr Levy. His presence in the army, she considered, could make absolutely no difference to the outcome of the war. Something had to be done.

But the main character of the novel is Gladys, and she doesn’t seem able to get married. She is a large, plain, unintelligent, unprepossessing woman, trapped in a relationship with her mother that is somehow equally damaging and necessary. The title of the novel comes from a verse in Ezekiel – ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’ – about how the actions of parents have a lasting impact on their children. In Set On Edge, is it not the historic actions but the ongoing ones that determine the course of Gladys’ life.

Not that she is a passive victim. She certainly gives as good as she gets in this dysfunctional family, and is a force to be reckoned with. But she agrees with the rest of them that she will only truly be a success if manages to snare a husband, and it doesn’t particularly matter which (though there is a very amusing scene were one likely suitor is scared away at a family dinner party).

Later in the novel, another prospect appears on the scene – a recent widower who has made a lot of money through dodgy business dealings, and has – to say the least – no airs and graces. Gladys is in her 50s or 60s at this point, and it requires some thought:

Her mother would not be back for some time, so she could allot herself a while for thinking. Gladys would never think during the course of doing other things. Thinking was a separate activity, and could only be indulged in on its own and in solitude. She desperately wanted this transaction to be a success. Not that she liked Mr Bass so much. She has always pitied Ena for being saddled with him. His vulgarity did not offend her as it did Miriam. There were other things about him – his plain physical ugliness – that repelled her. And even as she thought of him as a husband, he appeared no handsomer. But she wanted to marry him for the family’s sake. She had fattened on their guilt long enough and now was the time to grant them a reprieve.

As the tone of the opening suggests, almost nothing is going to go well in this family’s attempts to sort themselves out – but I hope it’s also come across that Set On Edge is very funny. If you like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles and writers like that, you’ll love Rubens. Special shout-out for the scene where Gladys and Mrs Sperber go shopping for a dress, which I found hilarious.

I’ve only read three Rubens novels so far, but she is fast becoming a dependably brilliant author – and, as Set On Edge demonstrates. entirely comfortable in her own odd little world from the off.

The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett – #1961Club

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Virago edition of The Mighty and Their Fall, showing 'Woman Seated in Garden' by Picasso on the cover

My final 1961 Club read is by an author I’ve loved for years, and the most divisive writer out there – Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. For those not in the know, her novels are told almost entirely in dialogue. That dialogue is very eccentric and unrealistic, and people will spend pages arguing about small points of grammar before something of seismic importance happens in an aside.

The main story in The Mighty and Their Fall is the (possible) second marriage of Ninian Middleton. After the death of his first wife, he lives with his mother Selina, his adoptive brother Hugo, his various children and their governness Miss Starkie. Like almost all of Compton-Burnett’s novels, this one is set in a vague late-Victorian period in a large, upper-class house – and the inhabitants of it seem to live in uneasy harmony, where anyone might turn on anyone else at any moment. And will do so in the most elastic language. There is a distinctive Compton-Burnett dialogue style, which relies upon syllogisms (real and false) combined with a sort of unchangeable naivety.

“Do all men have two wives?” said Leah’s voice. “I mean before they die.”

“No, of course not,” said Miss Starkie. “But when they lose the first wife, they sometimes have a second.”

“But would they always like the first one best?”

“No, it would depend on many things.”

“The first would be the real choice,” said Hengist.

“I would never be a second,” said Leah. “I wonder she agreed to it.”

“I wonder she did,” said Ninian. “I am grateful to her. And so should you be, if you think of my happiness.”

“We haven’t ever thought of it,” said Hengist. “We didn’t know you weren’t happy. And we didn’t know she was coming.”

“Well, you know she is here now.”

“Yes, we can see her.”

If you like that, and find it as funny as I do, you’ll love Ivy Compton-Burnett. The arrival of the proposed second wife is particularly unsettling for Lavinia, Ninian’s oldest daughter, who has been elevated to a sort of companion. Many of Compton-Burnett’s novels have the uneasy sense of incestuous love in the air – some of them, in fact have outright incestuous relationships – and the love between Ninian and Lavinia is never transgressive but always a little uncomfortable. Certainly, when Teresa Chilton arrives on the scene, it becomes a form of love triangle.

If you strip a Compton-Burnett novel down to essentials, it often resembles something like a detective novel or even a melodrama. In this one, there is a forged will, stolen letters, shocking romances, and the arrival of a man who may or may not be the secret father of someone else. But plot is always secondary to character and style. Much of the humour of the novel, to my mind, is the disparity between the drama and the reception of it by those involved.

Because what I’m really here for is how funny I find her writing. Here are a couple of examples of people being extremely bitchy to each other, but in the most elevated register. The first is when Hugo starts a romance with his niece – which, since he is adopted, is technically legal… but…

“Do you not congratulate me, Miss Starkie?” said Hugo.

“I have long done so in your character of uncle. This new one is too much for me. I cannot deny it. The disparity in age speaks for itself.”

“It could have saved itself the trouble,” said Lavinia.

And this is a gloriously biting exchange between Hugo, Ninian, and their mother, Selina:

“I wonder your grandchildren like you as much as they do.”

“I have the same wonder,” said Ninian.

“They may know I am sound at heart,” said Selina with her lips grave.

“But how can they know? There would have to be some signs.”

Glorious! How would I compare it to other Ivy Compton-Burnett novels? To some extent, they are all more or less the same. She fiercely denied this, but I don’t think her readers would. If you love one, you’ll love them all – and if you hate one, you never need go back to her. I loved reading The Mighty and Their Fall, but I think she is perhaps better in longer novels – this one is only 184 pages in my edition, and she really needs the longer novels to give space to her wide cast of characters and the Victoriana of their expansiveness.

A fun end to the 1961 Club for me. Incidentally, my edition says it was first published in 1955, but no other sources I can find seem to agree with that – so hopefully I haven’t finished on a false 1961 candidate!

Thanks so much for joining in, everyone, and we will be announcing the next club year very soon.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame – #1961Club

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I made a lot of notes on Faces in the Water while I was reading it, but I find that I don’t really know what to write now! It’s a novel about a woman who is in and out of psychiatric institutions – mostly in – and the treatment she receives from the staff there. Frame was famously going to have a lobotomy before she was awarded a literary prize, and her characters face and fear the same fate – as well as other brutal forms of treatment that were meted out to those deemed ‘mad’. It is clearly a heavily autobiographical book, despite what the note at the beginning protests.

I’m not going to write a full review, but will share some quotes and a couple of reasons why I didn’t love this book as much as I was hoping.

The strongest part of it is Frame’s ability to write moments of madness – getting into the curiously lucid incoherence of somebody in the throes of delusion.

I will write about the season of peril.  I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice. A blizzard came and I grew numb and wanted to lie down and sleep and I would have done so had not the strangers arrrived with scissors and cloth bags filled with lice and red-labelled bottles of poison, and other dangers which I had not realised before – mirrors, cloaks, corridors, furniture, square inches, bolted lengths of silence – plain and patterned, free samples of voices. And the strangers, without speaking, put up circular calico tents and camped with me, surrounded me with their merchanise of peril.

Elsewhere in the novel, where she is more lucid, she can write piercingly of the way that mentally unwell patients are treated in reality and fiction.

There is an aspect of madness which is seldom mentioned in fiction because it would damage the romantic popular idea of the insane as a person whose speech appeals as immediately poetic; but it is seldom the east Opheliana recited like pages of a seed catalog or the outpourings of Crazy Janes who provide, in fiction, an outlet for poetic abandon. Few of the people who roamed the dayroom would have qualified as acceptable heroines, in popular taste; few were charminginly uninhibited eccentrics. The mass provoke mostly irritation hostility and impatience. Their behavior affronted, caused uneasiness; they wept and moaned; they quarreled and complained. They were a nuisance and were treated as such. It was forgotten that they too possessed a prized humanity which needed care and love, that a tiny poetic essence could be distilled from their overflowing squalid truth.

Finally, I loved this darkly beautiful description of a possible lobotomy:

So Dr. Portman had changed his mind, he had decided they would bore two holes in the side of my head for my unsuitable personality to fly out like a migrating bird to another country and never return not even when spring came and the cherry blossom opened and the spindly wild plum showed white along the paddock fences.

So, with all this extraordinary writing, why did I end up not loving Faces in the Water? It was largely because so much of it was written in a general sense. For each different hospital or institution, the narrator tells us things that often happen – ‘We always did X, they always did Y’. It means that the story doesn’t have as much specificity or immediacy if she had spent more time on particular events. It also made everything feel more distanced. A slight change, to telling one-off stories in the moment, would have made Faces in the Water so much more effective and compelling, in my opinion.

That was my major criticism. Besides that, it moved between so many institutions that we didn’t get many characters to follow through the novel, leaving it feeling a bit disjointed – not in an effective way that mirrored the protagonist’s mental disjointment, but in a way that felt a bit clumsy.

So, very much a novel of parts. There are so many paragraphs you could quote that are extraordinary. But I’m not sure it worked well as a novel.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

War Isn’t Wonderful by Ursula Bloom – #1961Club

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It always feels slightly like cheating to pick a club book that is really about an earlier period… but with memoir, it’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it? Ursula Bloom wrote literally hundreds of books – including some excellent, funny novels under the name Mary Essex – and plenty of those were autobiographical. War Isn’t Wonderful is her take on the Second World War, drawing on her diaries of the period. Like so many war memoirs, it is a very personal, often idiosyncratic perspective on a world-dominating event – and, to my mind, thereby much more interesting than any attempt at objective overview. (Incidentally, my copy is signed!)

It is a mix of contemporary diary entries and narrative reflections from 1961. Naturally, those 1961 summaries have a level of considered distance, and the diary entries have immediacy. It’s an intriguing mix. From 1961, Bloom of course knows how long the war will last – she also knows which triumphs and tragedies lie ahead of the diarist, and when the particular highs and lows of wartime will ebb and flow. The 1940s diarist is in the moment. She may be looking back to the shifting experiences of war, and ahead with hope, but she is mostly preoccupied with the present moment. Particularly as war continues, and privations get worse and the intolerable length of it all seems to weigh more heavily.

And, yes, I imagine the contextual sections were added because there weren’t enough diary entries, or they wouldn’t have made sense on their own. Somehow the hybrid works well, combining immediacy and the perspective of years. Still, of the two, I think the diaries were what made War Isn’t Wonderful so interesting. Who could resist a detail like this?

April 29th, 1942

To what lengths will one fall! A friend rang me up and said she knew of a small leg of mutton, and not ewe mutton either. Ewe mutton is frantic! If I went to a certain address in a certain square, rang the bell and said I came from her about some mutton, they’d give it to me. I debated over this. I had not seen a complete leg of mutton in years, and what one could do with a beautiful thing like that in the larder filled me with a thrill. In the end I went round to the address. A charming young girl came to the door. I said what I had been told and she nodded, laid a finger to her lips and said ‘You want number 63’ and shut the door hurriedly. I went off to No.63, and a much older woman came to the door; apparently she had been warned that I was on the way, for she said with some delight, ‘Have you come for your chemise?’ I said that I had, and she pushed into my arms a great fat parcel that couldn’t have been anybody’s chemise ever. When I got home I opened it and there was a really nice little leg of mutton, and with it half a pound of butter and some biscuits in a tin. My lucky day!

I think the best book about the Second World War that I’ve read is London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes. One of the things I most appreciated was how steadily it takes you through the mood of the city through the months and weeks of the war. It’s easy to think of the war as one amorphous whole, from so many decades away, but Panter-Downes – and Bloom – are excellent at giving you a fuller sense of the shifting emotions of the individual, and of the wider populous.

January 9th, 1944

Perhaps the worst aspect of the war is its dullness. At this time of year it is mid-breakfast before we can get any light or air into the flat, which I find impossible. When black-out time comes (so early at this period) it means hours in airless rooms or plunging about the streets which is downright dangerous. Every restaurant has a queue waiting for it. Many shops have nothing to sell.

And, alongside this, something I appreciate is how much of Bloom’s attention is occupied by things that have little to do with the war. She notes in the introduction that ‘early in the thirties […] I had been stricken with paralysing headaches which had made me almost an invalid. These headaches were wrongly diagnosed and treated as being a form of migraine, but in the early fifties they were discovered to be caused by an arterial trouble and were cured by surgical operation’.

Twenty years of paralysing headaches is horrifying to think about, and goodness knows how she managed to write so much while suffering that. I once had a few months of terrible headaches that took ages to diagnose, and I don’t think I achieved much of anything during that time. Anyway, there are many diary entries where her headaches are all she can write about. Because, of course, intense pain in your own body is more immediate, more real, than news of any number of bombings – even if they are only a few streets away. It helps bring home how life continues – for better or worse – in the midst of any national or global crisis.

Another preoccupation is housing. Yes, there is the wartime-specific experience of having your home destroyed by bombing – but Bloom spends more time on the purchase, and instant regret about purchasing, a countryside cottage. Again, it could happen at any time and has little to do with war. But it is still paramount in her mind. In other writers’ hands, it could have been very funny – think Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. Bloom can certainly be wryly funny, but she is also authentic. When something has driven her to despair, she says so frankly. It isn’t cloaked with self-deprecating humour – we are there, at the heart of whatever she is feeling.

That extends to the end of war. There is a searing melancholy even in armistice, and that’s exactly the sort of accuracy we’re unlikely to see in historical fiction or adaptations.

There had been none of the eager rejoicing of 1918 when we had really believed that war had been removed for ever. Now we never thought that for a moment. Perhaps this was the most wretched part of a victory that was ice-cold. There is a limit to human endurance and we had had too much; we were not the same people who had gone out to fight. Perhaps the best of us had gone.

Bloom wrote so much, and it’s always hard to believe that anybody who wrote more than 500 books could have written any that were any good. I’ve certainly read some very sub-par books by Bloom and some excellent ones. War Isn’t Wonderful is closer to excellent than execrable. It might not be very 1961, but I thought it was fascinating, well-written and, above all, unforgettably honest.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North – #1961Club

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It’s always good to throw in some classic crime into a club year – though by the 1960s, we are well past the Golden Age. But thankfully there was still an option from my teetering piles of unread British Library Crime Classics: The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North.

Seven years ago, I read the first in the series, and had very mixed feelings. I liked Sergeant Cluff, but the book was so misogynistic that it was hard to get through. The number of times that every woman’s breasts were described was really quite something. I ended with ‘I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.’

And, has he?

Well, I think so. The victim is, again, a young woman who has been murdered – chemist assistant Jane Trundle is discovered dead in the street – and there are plenty of people (including her own parents) around to mutter that she was no better than she ought to be. But it doesn’t seem to permeate through the narrative as much as it did in the previous book. And breasts are only mentioned a normal amount! Cluff, indeed, stands up for her.

“I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,” the man said. “She asked for it.”

“You’d see her often.”

“Wasn’t she worth looking at?” The man paused. “She made the most of it.”

“She’d nothing else.”

Suspicion immediately lands on her boyfriend. Sergeant Cluff sets about investigating – though the official investigation is being done by a different police officer. Cluff’s involvement is not particularly welcomed, but he has a unique set of skills and attributes that make him persist: he refuses to jump to conclusions, he is stolidly humane, and he is also a local of Gunnarshaw. That gives him particular access to people who might not speak to an outsider, but it also means he can’t be fooled by the veneer of respectability that everyone in the community does their best to retain. And, at the same time, he sees honesty where others might not. I enjoyed how North spelled out the continuing internal conflict between Cluff the professional and Cluff the local:

The course he has to take nagged at him. He knew what he had to do and he had no clear idea of when he was going to do it, or whether he was going to do it at all. He was two men, the Sergeant of Police and Cluff. He feared that what the Sergeant might discover would prove mistaken the innocence in which Cluff believed, with nothing to support belief except Cluff’s identity with Gunnarshaw. The unreasoning emotions of Cluff warred with the detachment the Sergeant was obliged to maintain, the impersonality of the Sergeant with Cluff’s understanding and compassion for people like himself.

The strength of the book remains the character of Cluff, and his excellent dog, rather than the plot itself. But there was another element that I found interesting, that I don’t particularly remember being in the previous one – North’s use of dialogue. So often, throughout the novel, characters are talking slightly at cross purposes – or trying to achieve different things in the exchange. It meant that the conversations are always slightly disorienting, but in a way I found quite effective. It certainly felt realistic and appropriately unsettling, so the reader couldn’t quite relax. It’s Cluff’s way of keeping everyone on their toes, perhaps. I didn’t note down any examples, though I suppose the dialogue in the first quote does demonstrate it a little. It’s hard to exactly put my finger on how it’s done, but it worked well.

The Methods of Sergeant Cluff is pretty flimsy, plotwise, but that’s true of so many classic crime novels. It really rests on Cluff, and on those terms I’d call it a success – certainly much more satisfying than the first in the series.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

A couple more #1961Club titles

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As usual with the clubs, there were some books that didn’t work as well for me – and I didn’t have a whole blog post’s worth to say about them. But let’s add them to the 1961 Club list anyway!

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge

If only this could have lived up to its extraordinary first line! Here it is: ‘What amazed and affronted Penelope Hinton most about her husband’s death was that the fortune-teller had been right.’

Penelope is only 44, but has been married for 15 years. Widowhood is a jarring shift – but she quite quickly meets a man, Pye, who runs a laundrette-coffee-shop and finds an affinity with him that manages to evade the differences in lifestyle and class between them (though she rather overstates the class distinction to herself).

I think I’d have liked Rose Under Glass more if it focused on Penelope, which the blurb to my edition rather implies that it does. But we leave her behind and go over to another group of people, moving from the countryside (against the wife’s will) so that the husband can start a publishing house. And then there’s all sorts of narrative about that, about Pye’s possible involvement, and various outlandish figures in that world.

The whole thing feels like it doesn’t have a centre, or any particular reason to keep reading. The writing is good (sometimes very good, in its quieter, domestic moments) but I found what I often find with Berridge – she needs to be several degrees stranger for it to really work. She writes in a similar vein to Beryl Bainbridge or Barbara Comyns, but lacks their distinctive oddness. Rose Under Glass needs to be sharper in one direction or another, and feels a little pointless over all.

Owls and Satrys by David Pryce-Jones

Another one that starts extremely well, with a funny, strange scene of Henry discovering his mother’s lover leaving the house during the early hours. I really enjoyed the dry irony and the distorted take on family life. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

The room in which Henry and his mother were playing cards had not changed in appearance since it has been first done up in 1933, when the Bouchers had married. It had seemed reasonable then to settle into a house in Regent’s Park that required servants to run it; to paint some of the walls an interesting ochre, and to build a cocktail cabinet to hold thirty different bottles. A sick world of incendiary bombs and V.25 refugees and steels helmets had made no difference to the paster casts of Negro-minstral faces that adorned the walls, nor to the carefully collected Lalique glass all over the house.

Lying on the floor of the drawing-room, Henry shuffled the cards. Backed by a specially designed window-seat that had been covered in ersatz fur, they were playing racing-demon, not from pleasure, but from long-established habit. Both mother and son played with game with apparent negligence, but confident of victory, savouring a secret skill.

But, again, Pryce-Jones doesn’t quite live up to the opening. I thought it might be something like A Confederacy of Dunces, where extravagant selfishness bumps up alongside amusing grotesque versions of domesticity. But it becomes less funny, more normal, and… fine. Just nothing very exciting, particularly when the first chapter is so striking.

In A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor – #1961Club

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I have steadily made my way through all of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, and there’s a strong chance that this is the final one on my reading list? She is very like William Maxwell – that the amount I like her is dependent very much on my mood, and seems to shift almost hour by hour. When I’m in the right mood, she is an exceptionally perceptive, amusing, precise writer. When I’m in the wrong mood, her novels just seem to wash over me.

Thankfully, I think I was in broadly the right mood for In A Summer Season. Like Love by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I read for the previous club, this concerns an age-gap romance where the woman is rather older. Unlike Love, though, the romancing has all happened offscreen already. Kate Heron is a widow who has now married a man ten years younger than her – Dermot, who is filmed with ideas for businesses, but little acumen and even less willingness to see things through. Kate is wealthy enough to mean he doesn’t need to buckle down to anything – though there isn’t really any indication that he has married her for her money. More on that marriage later.

Also living with them are Kate’s two children from her previous marriage – Tom, who works for his grandfather’s family business and is desperate to prove himself, and Louisa, who is a faithful Christian but perhaps equally interested in the priest as she is in the faith. Taylor captures the disconnect between people who live alongside each other, even when they care for each other. One person’s priorities and obsessions will not be another’s. They live parallel lives, unable or unwilling to communicate the depth of their experiences.

Despite being a widow with two grown children, Kate is still pretty young – by modern standards, at least. Yet there are oceans between her and the younger generation. This is her, responding to a remark made by Tom’s current girl:

“Blue suits you so,” Prue now said.

“They condescend,” Kate thought. “They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish, and are led by that desire into an excess of insincerity. They are appalled for us that we are middle-aged.” She could remember trying to protect her own parents from the fact that their lives were virtually over.

She supposed blue did suit her, she agreed vaguely, to add something to the conversation; but talk about clothes bored her. It was like talk about sex. It had an enervating quality which had nothing to do with the subject herself.

Lest we forget, Kate is only in her 40s! And I love this paragraph, because it shows what Taylor does so often. Beneath the veneer of well-to-do people interacting amicably is a depth of feeling that continues to swirl and flow, even while the people obey the conventions of their class and milieu. I think Taylor is a very sexual writer, but it is seldom in the actions on the page. It is, instead, in the minds, motivations, and memories of her characters.

And what of the marriage between Kate and Dermot? In Kate’s mind, we see her considering Dermot as hovering between her generation and her children’s generation – ‘on the mezzanine floor as it were’. But it is not only their age that creates a disparity between them – though that is the factor that gossipy Aunt Ethel returns to, and the reason that most people attribute any fractures to. Instead, really, it is a clash of personalities. It’s clear that Kate’s first husband was more sensible, restrained, dispassionate, and that Kate has turned to an exciting, unreliable man who can bring something spontaneous and passionate out of her. But, in reality, it seems to bring out a reluctant maternal relationship instead.

There were voices in the kitchen, and then Kate came bustling in. Ever since a few evenings before, when Dermot returning drunk and late for dinner had spoken harshly to her, she had moved in a bright little whirlwind of her own making, with not a minute to spare for anyone. She was always on the wing, setting out on one errand after another, and no one could hope to detain her or say a word that would be listened to. Their words were what she dreaded – their thoughts she knew – and, trapped at mealtimes, she warded them off with a torrent of her own. The flow was more easily come by when she had had several drinks. In attaining this end, Dermot, full of uneasy contrition, was ready to encourage her.

A major flaw in In A Summer Season, to my mind, is that we never truly believe this is a happy marriage. We are told that they are deeply in love, but we are never really shown it. The quarrels and disconnect is the norm from the outset of the novel, and Dermot is too sulky and selfish for us to really believe that Kate has ever found an equal partner in him. There is a jarring difference between what Taylor expects us to believe about the marriage and what she is putting on the page, and that was a shame. Because we don’t really see emerging cracks – we just see the narrative catching up with what we’re already seeing. (And that’s when someone from Kate’s past comes back on the scene, but – unlike the blurb of my edition – I won’t spoil that.)

Because of this telling-but-not-showing, this isn’t one of my favourite Taylor novels. But it still definitely has her trademarks: complex and interesting characters, beautiful writing, and sharp wit. Just look at the last words of this paragraph, about Kate’s business-owner father:

At half past five, the factory gates were opened, and a policeman on point duty tried to untangle the traffic. In the swarm of bicycles, even Sir Alfred’s car was held up. He stared irritably before him, like a wasp caught in a spider’s web, impatient that he, for all his power, could not escape. His chaffeur blew softly but constantly on the horn, making slow progress through swerving and colliding bicycles. Nevertheless, Sir Alfred would not for anything have set out five minutes earlier to ease the congestion. He preferred to leave and be seen leaving at the same time as his men. There seemed some virtue in this to him, and he would not have believed that other people saw the thing differently. ‘I’ve never asked a man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, or haven’t done,’ he liked to say. This was untrue as well as uninteresting.

Just sublime. So, overall, I find the usual things to admire and enjoy in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, and I was mostly in the right mood to value them. I just wish she’d made Dermot a slightly more sympathetic character so that the trajectory of the plot had more impact.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.