1960s

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

StuckinaBook All , 13 Comments

Recently at work my colleague Sarah started telling me about a book she hadn’t read, but heard might be interesting. It was about an old spinster who starts to invest her household objects with personalities, and is obsessed with her fox fur… Sarah was still in the middle of her sentence when I ordered a copy of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc. It ticked lots of boxes for me, and I was quite excited – that very brief synopsis could have been written with me in mind.

Violette Leduc wasn’t very well known until she wrote her autobiography La Batarde, at which point she apparently became the darling of French literary culture. I hadn’t heard of her, but 1960s France is hardly my area of specialist knowledge. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur (originally La Femme au petit renard) was published in 1965, and became a bestseller. My edition is translated by Derek Coltman, and was published in 1967. It’s back in print, still with Peter Owen and Coltman’s translation, but the cover was so hideous that I had to get an earlier copy. And accidentally tore the dustjacket when I opened the package.


I’m always a bit cautious about saying characters are unnamed, because I never notice or remember names in novels, but I’m *pretty* certain that the old-ish lady (‘She was handling her sixtieth year as lightly as we touch the lint when dressing a wound’) is unnamed. The plot of this novella (104pp) is very simple – this unnamed narrator is living in dire poverty. She subsists on bits of sugar and dry rolls, and scrounges through bins and gutters. What money she has tends to be spent on travelling on the Metro, rather than food – she gains her nourishment from the company of others. She is, I should add, rather unhinged. Everyday events and insignificant acts by others are interpreted as being of great importance. As the novel continues, she gets more and more unbalanced – developing a deep closeness with the inanimate objects in her flat (somehow she scrapes together rent, but fears this may be last month there). Above all, she is besotted with an old fox fur that she once found, thrown out by someone else. Let’s have a quick glance at how she treats it:

As each day passed, she kept him more and more closely confined, eventually refusing him even the flattering light of the moon. She would squander a match for him on dark and moonless nights; she would move the flame to and fro along his length, enchanted at burning her fingers for his sake. Then, in the same dark night-time, he would warm up that place behind her ear where we need other people so much. What had to happen happened: he grew more beautiful as he acquired greater value, and he gave her what she asked of him.

I had, in my mind, the sort of novel I was expecting. A bit like Barbara Comyns, perhaps, but a bit madder. Well, it was certainly pretty mad, but sadly it didn’t click for me quite in the way that Comyns does. I enjoyed reading The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, and thought there were some brilliant and poignant moments – but Leduc’s style rather defeated me. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it veers in that direction – a style that I often love, but has to be done really well to succeed. In Leduc’s novel it comes paired with an attempt to portray mental instability through language – which I always find a bit hazardous. I love the idea in theory, but I don’t think I’ve read any novel where it really worked – I’ll have to think on that and get back to you; that might deserve a post of its own.

Part of the issue might well be Derek Coltman’s translation – or maybe just the fact that it was in translation at all. It’s unfair of me to bad-mouth Coltman’s work without knowing what the original is like; either Leduc or Coltman is responsible for the stilted feeling I got whilst reading the novella.


Do you ever get the feeling that you should go back and re-read a novel very slowly? I have an inkling that’s what I should do to get the most out of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur. Perhaps I’m being critical because I had such high hopes for loving this novella – I don’t want you to come away this review thinking it’s bad. The idea is lovely and quirky; the unhinged mind of the lady is convincing – to the extent that I didn’t always know what was going on! It just wasn’t quite the gem I was hoping I’d found. Still, a much more interesting book to read than the latest top ten hardback – I love throwing a quirky little book into my reading now and then – and I think I’ll re-read it in ten or twenty years’ time, and perhaps come to a different conclusion.

In an awkward fashion, I’m going to peter out with a quotation – the lady is standing outside a cinema. I liked these paragraphs, and it’s also fairly representative of the style, and of the woman’s character. What’s your response to Leduc’s writing?

On Wednesdays they always changed the programme, so that on Tuesdays the photographs outside were always neglected, abandoned: she could pretend they were her transfer. A dark-haired man, a blonde woman; a blonde woman, a dark-haired man. The actors’ names left her utterly indifferent: their real names for her were the names of the people she saw kissing one another on the streets. Her forefinger followed the broken line of the hair, stopped up the eyesockets, crushed the mouth, or paused if the lovers’ mouths were pressed together in a kiss. Prudish and indiscreet, at those moments she would look down with blind eyes at the drawing-pin in one corner of the photograph. She was a sack of stones holding itself up of its own volition, this woman who had never had anything, who had never asked for anything. If the edge of the wind had caressed her neck at that moment, had caressed her neck just below the ear, then her heart would have stopped. She would have given her life and her death for another’s breath that close.

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns

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It’s about time I paid heed to Virago Reading Week, which has been popping up all over the blogosphere this, er, week. Thanks Rachel and Carolyn! I love it when publishers are hailed in this manner – long-term SiaB readers may recall I ran an I Love Hesperus week many moons ago, and of course have enjoyed Persephone readalongs, and cheered from the sidelines for NYRB Classics. As luck would have it – it certainly wasn’t my organisational ability – I happened to be halfway through a Virago when the week began, and even my current sluggish reading pace has allowed me to finish off The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns.


Props to Thomas (that’s a good American expression, right? As is that ‘right?’ there.) for his Virago banner, by the way. If you think you recognise those pics, head over here for Thomas’ competition.

It’s no secret that I love Barbara Comyns – she’s probably in my top five favourite authors, certainly top ten – and I’m fast reaching the end of her books. Just two novels to go… so I’m treasuring them as I go, and The Skin Chairs is no exception.

When I first started reading Comyns, I thought her novels were bizarrely different from one another, in terms of style. It’s only now, looking back, that I realise I started off with the three most disparate I could have chosen – Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and The Juniper Tree. Having read more of her books, I realise that she does have an identifiable tone – surreal but matter-of-fact; an unnerving but captivating mixture, and one which leads to a very unusual angle on events. As shown most effectively in The Vet’s Daughter, but also on occasion in The Skin Chairs, even cruelties are dealt with in this unshockable, even tone. Here’s an example:

When she had gone we let Esme’s mice loose in the sitting-room, although they didn’t seem to enjoy it much, keeping close to the skirting board most of the time. There used to be a girl in our village who was continually beaten by her parents and I remembered she used to walk like that, close to the walls.

Lest you think this is a miserable book, I must add the scolding given to children when they sit on some graves: ‘Nanny found us and said that we had no respect for our bottoms or the dead.’ There are plenty of laugh-aloud moments.

The Skin Chairs is told in the voice of ten-year-old Frances, one of six children, who must go and stay with her Great-Aunt’s family: ‘My mother[…] sometimes became tired of us and would dispatch us to any relation who would agree to have one or two of the family to stay.’ Shortly after this, and having endured Aunt Lawrence’s unwelcoming home, Frances’ father dies and the rest of her family move to an unlikeable, small modern house. Relative poverty is a theme throughout Comyns’ writing, and she relishes writing of their privations – nightdresses made out of old sheets; ‘not being able to play with paint’, and so forth.

As with other Comyns novels, not much happens. This one has a little more of a central thread through it than some, in terms of the family’s destiny, but Comyns is best at her bizarre hangers-on. Chief amongst these is Mrs. Alexander, with her red-purple hair, turbans, mustard-coloured car, and golden shoes (repainted each evening by her chauffeur.) She keeps monkeys, and cleverly builds a wall after buying a piano, so that the bailiffs can’t remove it when she goes into debt. Then there is young widow Vanda, who neglects her baby, but thinks she’s doing a good job as the infant never goes short of orange juice. How Comyns thinks of all the tiny details, I can’t imagine. So many are bizarre and wonderful – unexpected, but not dwelt upon – and always mentioned so calmly.
The first day at school was not so bad as I expected. The worst part was when most of the girls trooped off into the dining-room and we had to eat our sandwiches in one of the classrooms. The only other occupant was a particularly plain girl wearing a patch plaid blouse and eating a pork pie. She said she adored eating pork pies and ate them in her bath.

And those skin chairs of the title? Yes, they’re human skin, and belong to a Major who lives in a large house in the village. They pop up near the beginning of the novel, and reappear every now and then – with some significance, but the true justification for the novel being called The Skin Chairs doesn’t rest with that. I think they’re the perfect symbol for what Comyns does best: the domestication of the surreal; the macabre passed over with matter-of-fact interest, and no more – there is probably a girl eating a pork pie close by, which will be equally involving.

If you haven’t read any Comyns yet, I urge you to do so (The Skin Chairs is going for a penny on Amazon.) The more I read of her, the more I feel sure that she has been unjustly neglected – and is one of the most intriguing novelists of the twentieth-century.

I’ve got an idea…

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

…but, thankfully for three men called Mike, Steve, and Dan, it is not the same idea as the title of Rohan O’Grady’s novel republished in the latest batch from the unutterably wonderful Bloomsbury Group. I can’t believe how little I’ve been heralding the return of this series, and I promise to Do Better. First stop, Let’s Kill Uncle.

On the face of it, this is an unusual choice for inclusion. The rest of the books have been in the first half of the twentieth century, more or less, and funny in an insouciant and harmless way. Let’s Kill Uncle was published in 1963, and is rather more sinister than anything else Bloomsbury have published in this series. There are large dollops of humour too, but you’re unlikely to find the following sentence in Miss Hargreaves or Henrietta’s War: “Maudie and I never had a family,” said Uncle sadly, “although we wanted one. So you see, Barnaby is doubly precious to me. I adore children.”

He did indeed. Several little girls to whom he had taken a fancy had vanished into thin air.But I’m getting ahead of myself. O’Grady’s novel is about an orphan called Barnaby Gaunt (wouldn’t Dickens be proud of that name?) who is sent for a holiday to a beautiful Canadian island. He’s renowned as a bit of a trouble-maker, and the gentle couple who take him in don’t quite know how to respond. They lost their son in the war, and Barnaby is a supposed substitute – but doesn’t live up to this image. He is disobedient and mischievous, although not a mean-spirited child… there are reasons for his behaviour, which will become apparent.

And there is Christie. She is the only other child on the island, and equally wild in spirits, though rather more inclined to obedience in front of adults. Their escapades together could have been the stuff of Enid Blyton (with perhaps a little edge) – except the fable-esque anxieties about smugglers become a much more real, and thus more chilling, threat from a murderous uncle. For Barnaby is due to inherit ten million dollars, and Uncle doesn’t want that happen. Uncle is a seriously twisted character – very psychologically manipulative (he beats Barnaby for being good, for instance, or tells him he may go to bed, but continually calls him back with idle comments) and with a history of many murders – but the exterior of a placid, harmless man. So, when Uncle turns up on the island, Barnaby and Christie resolve to take the only logical path: kill Uncle first.

The plan goes into action – whether they succeed or not I won’t tell you, but suffice to say there are all manner of adventures along the way. This is such a difficult novel to categorise. It’s not really like the other Bloomsbury Group novels I’ve read – it’s not cosy, it’s not really a novel to be loved and cherished; it’s too chilling for that. Uncle is simply too evil. But neither is it a ‘scary book’ – there are flashes of humour (‘The children loved the little church; it was such a pleasant, peaceful spot in which to plan a murder’) and a light-heartedness to the children’s activities which was at odds with their murderous plans. When I read in the blurb that Donna Tartt had called Let’s Kill Uncle a ‘dark, whimsical, startling book’, I was a little confused. Surely those words clash a bit when placed together? And I’m still not sure that there is much whimsy in the novel, unless you describe any scene without blood as whimsical – but it’s certainly the lightest dark book I’ve ever read. Or possibly the darkest light book.

So, there you go! Perhaps not what I expected from the Bloomsbury Group series, but certainly a good read – both dark and light, a strange and clever mixture. And not a little unnerving…

I haven’t seen the 1966 film, but found the trailer on YouTube – it seems to be quite a loose adaptation. For those who share my fear of s***ers, don’t watch the last ten seconds of the clip:

Books to get Stuck into:

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns – I chose this one because it’s got another depiction of an evil parent-figure. Alice’s dad is like Uncle, in that they are all the more chilling for not being exaggerated. The portrait in The Vet’s Daughter is far more unsettling and brilliantly drawn, but the similarities are there…

Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd – not really much of a link, but I struggling to find similar books – the link here is an island!!

Travels With My Aunt

StuckinaBook All , 17 Comments

As far as I’m aware, until this month I had never read a book with the word ‘Aunt’ in the title – and now I find myself reading two of them. Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene, and Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse – both very funny. Perhaps Aunts are a source of untapped hilarity (also languishing on my shelf is Cordial Relations: The Maiden Aunt in Fact and Fiction by Katharine Moore, so more to discover there, too…)

My lovely book group has themed months, where the shortlist for voting must be suggested within a theme or idea. Next month, for example, is books set in Oxford (I’m holding out for Jill by Philip Larkin). Last month was books about geographical journeys – and I suggested Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene, which was eventually victorious. I hadn’t read it – indeed, I knew almost nothing about it – but has been told by one or two people that I should read some Greene. And I’m very glad that I did.

Henry has never met his Aunt Augusta before she turns up at his mother’s funeral: “It’s odd how we seem to meet only at religious ceremonies. The last time I saw you was at your baptism.” His quiet life working in a bank, tending his dahlias, and generally not doing very much – it’s all about to be wildly disrupted. His is not a spirit of adventure – ‘The bank had taught me to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.” But Augusta is no-nonsense, fairly eccentric, and determined to change him. But I’ll let Henry do the describing:

I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, old-world in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the odd setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

For Aunt A is well-travelled. When she suggests a trip, Henry thinks Brighton would be a good destination, and it does offer an interesting excursion – little does he know that their travels will later include Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay… Truth be told, the destinations aren’t hugely important in themselves (which rather relieved me, as I’m not usually a fan of travel literature, and was glad that the novel didn’t turn into it) but rather act as settings for the illicit and extraordinary activities with which Augusta is involved. I don’t want to spoil them for you, but safe to say the police get involved along the way.

Having written that, you might be surprised to learn that the character I was reminded of most, from the earliest chapters onwards, was Miss Hargreaves. In the unlikely event that you’ve missed me talking about Miss Hargreaves, probably by favourite novel, you can read my eulogies here. Miss H was written in 1939; Travels With My Aunt came out in 1969 – and Aunt Augusta is more or less what I’d expect Miss Hargreaves to be if she’d lived thirty years later, and been rather less respectable. I can’t imagine Miss Hargreaves saying, for instance, “A brothel is after all a kind of school.” But the characters have the same indomitable spirit, eccentric manner, and amusingly unpredictable speech. The success of Greene’s novel, for me, is through character – through Augusta and Henry’s conversations, where two wholly different characters meet and travel together. The first half of the novel focuses upon character (broadly speaking) and the second half more on plot – which I found perhaps less interesting, though apparently it is more akin to Greene’s literary thrillers.

I haven’t read anything else by Greene, and I’ve been told that Travels With My Aunt is the unGreenelike Greene novel, but I was so charmed and amused by this spirited novel that I’ll definitely be trying some others. Anybody got anything to suggest? I’m also keen to see Maggie Smith in the film, but (of course) it hasn’t been released on DVD… (Oh, and for the thoughts of another member of the book group – I’ve just spotted Harriet’s review!)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

28. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

Well done to those who correctly guessed We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the image I shared the other day – and well done to those with the foresight to have bought the book already. As well as being my favourite ever book title (doesn’t it make you want to read the book, without reading a word more about it?) this is a quite brilliant novel. Initially published in 1962, this great image is from the new Penguin reprint in the UK. I first read the novel in 2006, I think, and re-read it yesterday, just to make sure it was still great… a second read removed some of the suspense, of course, because the questions were no longer unanswered – but it actually brought a new dimension to the tale, too, as I shall explain…

I’m going to do my best to write about this book sans-spoilers, since it has so many wonderful twists and turns. I’m going to give away much less than most reviews do, so if you want to try We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the same starting point I did, perhaps don’t follow the links at the bottom…

The opening paragraph gives a few important bits of information:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
The first chapter shows Mary Katherine – also known as Merricat – walking through the local town, seeing the trip like a board game; she ‘misses turns’ if she crosses the street, for example. ‘The people of the village have always hated us.’ What a stunning first chapter Shirley Jackson has written – without knowing why the Blackwood family are pariahs, we feel such tension, such awkwardness and fear as Merricat makes her way through the village. And she is the victim of childish chants:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
Once home, she is not in a world of normality. Merricat believes she can protect her family and her house through nailing books to trees, burying marbles on the land, and storing away words – melody, Gloucester, Pegasus – which, so long as they aren’t spoken aloud, will prevent danger. Because the novel is from Merricat’s first person perspective, these superstitions are spoken without any defensiveness or recognition of a lack of logic. Which transports the reader into a surreal, unsettling viewpoint… Constance is more normal, though agoraphobic, unable to move beyond the perimetres of Blackwood land. Uncle Julian, the other remaining Blackwood, is obsessively creating a history of what happened to the family, especially the night they died. He is also mentally disintegrating, every bit as unsettling as Merricat’s bizarre internal logic. Oh, and then there’s the rather wonderful cat, Jonas, the only truly sane member of the family.

Though a short novel, Jackson packs a huge amount in. Not only the readers’ curiosity to discover what happened to the rest of the Blackwood family, but also a consuming tension in the atmosphere of the novel. This was Jackson’s last novel, and (of the three I’ve read) the best – suffering from agoraphobia herself whilst writing it, she perfectly creates the joint security and terror of the home. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Gothic from the title onwards, but Jackson also writes a fascinating psychological study – this slim book has everything, and on re-reading is all the more impressive, for the clues and presentiments scattered throughout. The pace quickens, the events escalate, but the tone never eases and Merricat’s unique angle on the world never lessens.

When I first read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I hadn’t heard of either the book or the author – it was in a postal book group, sent by Lisa from Bluestalking Reader. I feel a bit bad including it in a ‘books you might not have heard of’ list, since it’s been all over the blogosphere since then, but just maybe you’ve missed one of the following reviews (I’ve only included blogs I know and like – a search reveals dozens and dozens more! Search via Fyrefly’s Blog Search Engine, linked to the left, under People To See):

Books Please (spoiler-free)
The Bookling
Read-Warbler
The Asylum
A Striped Armchair
Books and Cooks
Things Mean A Lot

Picnic at Hanging Rock

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

This does feel strange, writing my blog posts in a row on the 20th, knowing they won’t appear for a few days. I say ‘knowing’ – I’m still living in doubt that it will come to fruitition. Hopefully Blogger will prove me wrong… in fact, if anybody is reading this, then I have been proved wrong! As you read this, Col and I will be in deepest, darkest Devon, probably eating an ice cream and reading a book. Actually, those activities rarely go hand-in-hand (pun, if there is one, intended).

My book group in Oxford recently read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. I can’t remember whether I suggested it or if it was Angela, our Antipodean member. We were certainly trying to find a classic of Australian fiction to read, having just done Tim Winton’s Breath (which is quite good, though also quite a lot of content I shall euphemistically call ‘dodgy’). Picnic at Hanging Rock was one which none of us had read, or seen, but which I’d heard lauded a few times.


Oh. My. I warn you that this post contains a few spoilers from the novel, especially towards the end of the post, so don’t read beyond the following paragraph if you want to keep the plot unknown.

Only three of us turned up to the meeting to discuss it, and none of us liked it, I’m sorry to say. I thought it a curate’s egg; good in places. At the beginning a school party goes into the Australian bush, to see the Hanging Rock (which apparently exists) – four girls wander off, as does a schoolteacher. One of them comes running back in tears, but the others have disappeared. Will they ever return? Dot dot dot.

As premises go, that’s pretty promising. I had thought the picnic would occupy the whole novel, but far from it. The rest of the work details the effects of this mystery on the people involved – though not from the perspective of those lost. Again, potentially very interesting. But a big problem with the novel is its myriad styles – sometimes girls’ school story, sometimes grisly detective mystery, sometimes Prince and the Pauper-esque in a rather odd storyline about the close bond between an illiterate stablehand and a rich Englishman. A bit like Enid Blyton meets John Grisham meets Mark Twain. And not in a good way. The narrative jumps all over the place, stories and characters picked up and dropped and forgotten.

My overriding issue with Picnic at Hanging Rock, however, is (and this is a huge spoiler, so look away now if you want to) that we never find out what happens to the lost people. A mystery needs a conclusion, in my view of narrative. Apparently this open-endedness is credited with making the book and film a big success, but I just found it unsatisfying. Although it is better than what Joan Lindsay was *going* to put as the ending, later published as The Secret of Hanging Rock – time stands still, corsets hover in mid-air, and the girls turn into lizards. I kid you not. Completely incongruous.

One thing I did like about the novel was the way it was made to seem like fact. Quite a few people I spoke to thought it *was* based on true events – Lindsay is ambivalent in the preface, but uses footnotes and drops hints that it is true, though in fact none of it is. Obviously similar events happened – people going missing, I mean, rather than turning into lizards.

My question – why is this novel an Australian classic? I think it has some good passages, some clever lines, but overall it bears all the marks of an unedited first novel, with the author trying to cram absolutely everything in. Perhaps the film is better, and accounts for the novel’s continuing success? I am willing to hear the case for the defence, and I hope somebody here can offer it.

The Road to Revolution

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

I mentioned that I’d read Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road last week, for part of my Masters course, and Lucy added in the comments that a film is coming out – which probably means the novel (complete with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover, no doubt) will be rocketing up bestseller lists again. Well, whatever small amount my influence can do will, I hope, give the book a start on its way.

Published in the early 1960s, Revolutionary Road was successful in some respects, but widespread popularity doesn’t seem to have been one of them, at least not for very long – Yates’ is now described as a ‘writer’s writer’, whatever that means. Has to be a good thing, one assumes. Revolutionary Road tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, idealists who live in non-ideal suburbia. The novel opens with a play in which April plays the lead – and it is an unmitigated failure. So (watch out for the simple transferral of allegory) is April’s performance as a housewife; so is her performance as a latent revolutionary. The Wheelers dream of better things, and think they are hiding their gold amongst dross – but the credentials of that gold come under question when April decides to put their long-held plans into action.

Revolutionary Road is unmistakably American, and I don’t know why. It’s not just the “Geez, baby”s that crop up from time to time, but… well, I just don’t know. The American Dream in the background, perhaps. The striving for an achievement, even when that achievement is impossible – striving where the English would have cynically given up and put on a pot of tea.

Similarly, I don’t know why this novel is so good. All the usual – writing that grabs you, situations which need resolution, a subtle wit throughout – though undeniably sad, too. As I was reading (and before I knew that the Titanic co-stars would be reuniting) I kept thinking the book would make an excellent film – the plot is so event-led. Lots of emotions on the surface, or lots of surface emotions anyway. Kate Winslet rarely does a bad film, and never turns in a bad performance, so I’m quite excited at the prospect of seeing this one on the silver screen. Hopefully Yates will become a readers’ writer.

I’m back! / Mockingbirds and Cousins

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Hurray! The internet has arrived at Marlborough Road!

For those of you thinking “That’s not news, you blogged on Saturday”, I have to say – that wasn’t me. Well, in a way it was, but it was a phantom post – I tried to link to the video on Youtube a couple of weeks ago, and failed. Obviously it was hanging around in the ether, waiting for someone to authorise it or something, and suddenly it appeared at the weekend. Strange.

I’m afraid my return to the blogosphere will be short-lived, since I’m away on holiday on Friday, and back on 29th August – so more then. I do hope some people are still here, even with all the disruptions of late… blame the world of technology which eludes me. Thankfully one of my housemates has a very savvy boyfriend, who kindly tip-tip-tapped away at the keyboard and got everything sorted out. I am living proof that young + male doesn’t necessarily = good at internetty things. In fact, if you use the word ‘internetty’, then you probably don’t qualify. Though I once plugged an ethernet cable in upside down (no easy task), so I’m in a league of my own.

In the time I’ve been away from blogging, I’ve had quite a build-up of books to talk about, so that will probably take us up til I head off to Northern Ireland. Today I’m going to write about the last two book group books I’ve read in recent weeks, both classics of the twentieth century.

My Cousin Rachel is the third novel I’ve read by Daphne du Maurier – I wrote about The Flight of the Falcon here, having not been overwhelmed, but Rebecca is one of my favourite novels. My Cousin Rachel probably fell between the two. (There are some spoilers here, but not too many…) It tells the story of Ambrose and Philip Ashley, cousins who are more or less father and son, living in Cornish rural simplicity, away from women and contentedly reliant upon one another. Ambrose is taken off to Italy, and it is here that he meets and marries Rachel – and dies. Rachel comes to see Philip in England, and he is prepared to hate her – but their relationship becomes increasingly complicated, as does the readers’ thoughts about Rachel’s potential culpability.

The novel has a lot in common with Rebecca – and not just the setting. The same intrigue, power, and issues about what is left unspoken in relationships. Though not as successful as Rebecca – I found the first 80 pages dragged a little, in fact until Rachel arrived – My Cousin Rachel is brilliantly successful in the sense that I have never left a novel so uncertain as to a character’s guilt or lack of it – and either interpretation seems quite valid. Brilliantly done. There are such sophisticated themes of obsession and attracting obsession without being aware of it, the cyclical nature of the men’s experiences… The group discussing the novel were divided from absolute loathing to absolute loving, and thus an ‘interesting’ meeting was held!

My other book group were rather more agreed on To Kill A Mockingbird. This is one The Carbon Copy has been telling me to read for years, and I’ve continually meant to, so was glad when someone recommended it for book group and spurred me on. What a great book. I don’t think there’s any point in me giving a synopsis, since almost everyone has read this novel before me, but having seen the film I was surprised that so little of the book was concerned with the trial of Tom Robinson. To Kill A Mockingbird is much more a depiction of Southern life for the Finch family, and a portrait of a daughter’s relationship with her father – and a beautiful portrait at that. When I did the Booking Through Thursday about heroes, Colin put forward Atticus Finch, and I have to agree. The man is incredible – a very worthy father, a moralistic lawyer and a humble citizen, a combination which is tricky to write without seeming unrealistic or irritating. Atticus, though, remains wholly admirable and likeable throughout, and is one of the great male characters in literature, I’d say. I could eulogise about him, and this novel, for ages – but I won’t. I want to hear what you think.

There, written about two books without quoting from either of them. Tsk. Here’s one I like: “If I didn’t take this case (Scout) then I wouldn’t be able to hold my head up, I wouldn’t be about to tell anyone what to do, not even you and Jem.” Or this:

“I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system – that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.”

Letter-Shaped Living

StuckinaBook All , , 7 Comments

Oh, but you’re good. Well done to everyone who correctly identified The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, whichever method you used to spot it. It feels a bit fraudulent to label a book you May Not Have Heard About, but it’s so good that it’s going on my 50 Books nonetheless.

I read The L-Shaped Room back in 2001, having bought it on a whim for 10p, and utterly loved it. It was with some trepidation that I returned to it in 2008 – after all, though seven years may not seem like a very long time, I only really started reading Proper Books in 2000, so it’s a long time for me. I needn’t have worried – this 1960 novel of Jane Graham, unmarried and pregnant, moving into her L-shaped room, was still brilliant. I was just as gripped this time, though I knew (in surprisingly close detail) what would happen throughout the novel.

Jane is thrown out by her father when he finds out she is pregnant, and she must become independent. She chooses “an ugly, degraded district in which to find myself a room… in some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation.” Determined not to engage with the other occupants of the building, to suffer her solitude, she cannot help learn about them and grow to like them. There’s John, a kind, black jazz-player in the room next door; Mavis, an elderly spinster with a mania for collecting ornaments; Doris her constantly indignant landlady; even the prostitutes on the basement floor. Most importantly, there is Toby – a writer who hides his Jewishness and is irrepressibly friendly.

Banks’ strength is her characters – all of them had stayed in my head from 2001, and it was like greeting old friends. None are stereotypical (which makes it difficult to describe them, above, truth be told) and none are too nice, either – they are real people, with real motives and emotions and consequences. You love them for it, but it makes their trials and tribulations all the more traumatic for the reader.

I’ve read the sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two Is Lonely, back in 2001/2, and remember them both being good – though not as good. Last night I watched the film. I do love a black and white film – it makes one feel effortlessly intelligent. If I hadn’t just read the book, I’d probably have really loved it – but there are so many deviations. I can cope with a film missing out bits of the book, time constraints and all, but this one changed all sorts of details needlessly. Jane was French (actress can’t do an accent, I expect), her mother wasn’t dead and we never get to see her father, such an important aspect of the book. And why they gave her a baby girl instead of a boy, I can’t imagine. Still, the actors are brilliant – each looks and acts just right. Shame about the writing.

If you’ve not read The L-Shaped Room, do get a copy. Lots cheap on Amazon. And it’s also in print, which is rare enough for the books I recommend as favourites! Jane Graham will stay with you for years, as will her L-shaped room.

EnhpaD

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

My ‘Backwards With Daphne’ project hasn’t been roaring along, has it? I told you all about my great intentions back in this post, in early April, and only now have I finished the first one – The Flight of the Falcon. It’s not Daphne du Maurier’s last novel, but it’s the last one which came in my boxset – and the plan was to start at the end and work backwards, as it were.

The Flight of the Falcon is set in Italy, a long way from Cornwall and the only du Mauriers I’d previously encountered – our hero is Armino Fabbio, a tour guide who accidentally becomes involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome. He leaves his tour group, and travels back to his home town Ruffiano, which he hasn’t visited in two decades. In the same city, five hundred years previously, cruel Duke Claudio – known as The Falcon – had terrorised the people of Ruffiano with his meglomania and brutality. Has anything really changed in Ruffiano, or are events mysteriously repeating themselves?

That – like the synopsis of Rebecca, I suppose – sounds rather more melodramatic than Daphne du Maurier’s writing allows it to be. Having said that, Backwards With Daphne almost drew to a halt, as The Flight of the Falcon didn’t work for me at all. I could appreciate why she was writing it – an interesting idea, with a host of familial issues to untangle at the centre – but I didn’t much care what went on. Do students of different departments really hate each other that much? I’d be bored stiff studying a Science subject, not to mention completely incapable, but I didn’t want to burn any of the students at stake…

My other main problem, I’m afraid, was names. I can’t remember names at the best of times, and when they all end in ‘-io’, I had no chance. Daphne du Maurier couldn’t do much else, in Italy, but I spent much of my time hopelessly baffled.

I think I’m painting a worse picture than it was – The Flight of the Falcon isn’t a bad book, at all, but when you know the same pen had already produced Rebecca (oops, supposed to be reading backwards, this should be a blank canvas for me… sorry) – just goes to show the flaws in this intriguing reading project. If this were my first Daphne du Maurier novel, I probably wouldn’t bother with any others… BUT, I had the fun experience of reading the same book as a library colleague sat opposite me at teabreak, and we could chat about it.

Anyone else read it? Any thoughts? Our Vicar’s Wife? Karen, my co-Daphne reader, have you got this far yet?