1960s

The Colour of Evening by Robert Nathan (Novella a Day in May #27)

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I love Robert Nathan novel(la)s for when I need something simple and lovely. He is best remembered now for the film adaptations of his works – The Bishop’s Wife, The Preacher’s Wife, and Portrait of Jennie – and far easier to find in the US than the UK, but I snap up any I come across. They are never at all demanding, and have no claims to being great literature. But there is something refreshing about spending time in one.

The Colour of Evening (1960) came towards the end of his long and prolific career. (Incidentally, it was also filmed in 1990.) It concerns an old painter called Max Loeb who lives south of Santa Monica, painting portraits and getting enough interest from the public to get by, just barely. He is filled with disdain about modern art – which seems to encompass artists who were well past being ‘modern’ by the time this book came out – and Nathan seems to assume his readership will have the same outlook. This disdain stretches out to include the idea of realism in art and literature, as opposed to anything idealised or beautiful.

“Realism,” grumbled Max, sketching away. “You call it realism what we get? Is a bone with gristle on it realism? Maybe – for a cemetery. Do you know what true realism is? It is the bone inside the flesh, under the living tissue: paint that, or write about it! Even in the newspapers you can find out what is going on with our artists, or sometimes in a magazine at the barber shop. Do you know what I think about these books you read? They are not like life, because in life everybody is not such a good-for-nothing.”

Alongside Max is his landlady, Mrs Hermione Bloemendal, and Jon Kuzik. Or sometimes ‘John’, which I think was a failing in the copyeditor, rather than a deliberate trick. Mrs Bloemendal sometimes poses for portraits; Jon is Max’s pupil, and pays him in money or, more often, in kind. They have a quiet, contented dynamic between the three of them. They care for each other, but in a calm way.

Into this world comes Halys – a young woman in a dirty dress, desperate for any work or way to keep going. Well, desperate in the sort of picturesque way of a Robert Nathan novel, which will never get too unpleasant. She moves into this delicate ecosystem, earning her keep by cleaning and posing for portraits. Only things start to go awry when Max wonders if he is in love with her, and the careful balance of the existing friendships get challenged…

This sort of plot could make for a very dramatic novel, but The Colour of Evening remains quiet and contemplative even when Nathan is infusing it with event. I think that’s largely because characters are often given to philosophising, or exchanging moral conclusions that are a little bit saccharine. The sort of tropes that might belong in a chatty magazine.

It’s all perfectly enjoyable, though I think Nathan is better when these maxims and pronouncements about life and love are offset by his quirky plots. In other books of his I’ve read, there is often a fantastic streak – a girl whose ageing is off-kilter, a character who comes to life, a boat that sails through roads to the sea. Without that whimsy or fantasia, it feels a bit fey. He needs to add in the strange and unworldly to balance out his sentimental tone.

But I still always enjoy my time with Nathan. I wouldn’t recommend this one to start, but it was what I needed today.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (Novella a Day in May #15)

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Wow. A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence is absolutely brilliant. I bought it in 2007, and 15 years later it has come off my shelf and been devoured in a couple of sittings. It might not quite be a novella, at 202 pages, but its scope is compact in time and space – and a spectacular success.

This is the second in Laurence’s Manawaka series of novels – I’ve now read the first, fifth, and second (in that order) – set in a fictional town in Manitoba, Canada, though with a different set of characters each time. Having read the lengthy, spacious The Diviners for ‘Tea or Books?’ and finding it astonishingly good, I wanted to see which other Laurence treasures I’d been neglecting.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing then.

Rachel Cameron isn’t just living in the same small town where she grew up – she is living in the same house, and working as a second grade teacher at the same school she attended as a child. Her life has not progressed in any of the ways she’d imagined. Her days are spent at work with children who know her deeply for a year and then move on – still in the same school, the same town, but no longer part of her life. Her evenings are spent with her widowed mother, living above the funeral parlour that Rachel’s father used to run. Like some of the other books I’ve read this month, the mother/daughter relationship is too dependent, too stultifying, too thoroughly tangled with guilt and resentment, as well as love. Rachel seems to have few friends and no intimates – and she tries to avoid the closeness sought by her colleagues, such as the teacher who wants her to come along to her charismatic church.

Into this unchanging world comes Nick Kazlik. Or, rather, into it he returns.

“Hello, Rachel.”

Has someone spoken to me? A man’s voice, familiar. Who is it?

“It is Rachel, isn’t it?” he says, stopping, smiling enquiringly.

He is about the same height as myself. Not thickly built, really, but with the solidity of heavy bones. Straight hair, black. Eyes rather Slavic, slightly slanted, seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery in them from years ago.

Nick was the milkman’s son, returned to stay with his elderly parents – he left; he went to teach high school in the city. He and Rachel weren’t particularly close, but now they are drawn to each other. Soon, they are spending most evenings together – clandestinely, for both know their parents wouldn’t approve of anything so sudden.

In another genre, this would be a romantic release from drudgery. But in A Jest of God, Rachel cannot get release from herself. Though there is happiness in this new fling, Rachel has the self-consciousness of an adolescent. She second guesses everything she does or says, constantly imagining how it might be interpreted, what sort of impression she is making, whether she will be accepted or rejected.

Laurence writes with astonishing psychological acuity. The Diviners was sprawling in time and space – A Jest of God takes place over just a few weeks in a town so insular that it’s hard to conceive the rest of the world exists in any meaningful way. Rachel is so detailed and complete a character that the reader loves her, wants the best for her, and knows how unlikely it is that she will get it – because of flaws in herself and her upbringing, as much as the environment in which she lives. The tension between the possibility of Rachel’s future and her own hubris is what keeps this novel pacy and compelling, even when very little is happening on the surface.

It is a fantastic success of a novel, showing how adept Laurence is at whichever scope she sets herself.

Novella a Day in May: Days 13 and 14

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I’m watching Eurovision; I’m typing up thoughts about novellas. What a day.

Day 13: Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes

Ooof. I’ve read a couple of Barnes novels before this one, and never really seen what the fuss was about. But I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad Elizabeth Finch would be.

The narrator is remembering a teacher – Elizabeth Finch, referred to often as EF – who has had a lasting effect on his life. Think someone with the unusual pith and dignity of Jean Brodie, dispensing philosophical insights that have her pupils thinking for decades. Except that everything she says is only a couple of notches above a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign in terms of profundity.

One of the things she introduces the class to is Julian the Apostate, who hated Christians sometime many centuries ago. Don’t know much about him? Don’t worry, Barnes then includes an ‘essay’ by the narrator where he dumps all the knowledge he has about Julian. It reads like a Wikipedia article, only it’s 50 pages long. We get the facts and theories about Julian the Apostate, It’s astonishingly inelegant, in terms of novel writing.

Elsewhere, in the first and final sections, his writing is serviceable and only occasionally embarrassing (some of the dialogue he gives Elizabeth Finch is really awkward, and clearly she is a mouthpiece for a middle-aged man). But the best this novella gets to is mediocre, and at worst it is bafflingly poorly done.

 

Day 14: Sing Me Who You Are (1967) by Elizabeth Berridge

I bought this back in 2009 because I knew her name from the Persephone collection of her short stories, but I might equally have bought it for this glorious cover. The illustrator – Reg Cartwright – did three or four Berridge reprints in the 1980s and they are so characterful and wonderful.

What’s more, it is accurate to the premise of the novel. Harriet Cooper and her two Siamese cats arrive at the farm which belonged to her recently dead aunt, and where her cousin Magda and her husband Gregg live. Her aunt hasn’t left her the farm, or the land, or anything – except, pictured there on the cover, the bus.

Wading through the still-dewy grass – for the bus lived in shadow half the year, and this was autumn – Harriet went through the wooden gate set in a gap in the hedge and up on to the step. She unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door, which folded inwards down the middle. Stepping inside she became aware of the musty smell of disuse. How long, a month, six weeks? Enough for damp to invade this thin shell. She would open windows, light a fire, banish it.

She has stayed there on and off over the years, and now she has brought her few possessions to live there indefinitely.

The story then looks at how her life alongside Magda and Gregg brings up past and present tensions, as well as affinities. Central to them is the memory of a man known as Scrubbs – who deeply affected each of the three. He has been dead for a long time, but he is still impacting all of their lives, and the way they interact with each other. Along the way, secrets come out…

I’ve read three other Berridge books, and have yet to find one that I really love. This is a good novel, and Harriet is an interesting, layered character – but I think I’m really hoping for a book that will live up to those wonderful covers. If Berridge were a little weirder, or a little more stylised in her prose – a dash of Beryl Bainbridge, say – then I think I’d love her. As it is, her realism lacks a little something. And yet I’ll keep reading them, because I feel like there might be something even better in her oeuvre – and something that lives up to those covers.

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

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I will try to keep doing these daily, and I am reading novellas daily, but I had so little to say about Day 9 that I thought I’d better roll these into one…

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

One of the shortest Persephone books, I’d somehow started and quit this one before. And I thought I’d go back and… well, I can see why I didn’t much bother about it before. It’s about Hatty going away away on honeymoon with a much younger husband, Stephen. That’s the present day plot, but much of it looks back at previous journeys, previous relationships, and particularly her aunt Cynthia and Hatty’s ill-fated relationship with a man called Jasper.

Some people really love this book, but I found the whole thing both confusing and negligible. I often didn’t know which timeline we were in, as it flitted back and half between paragraphs, and there was nothing in it to capture my attention. The writing, in isolation, is precise and rather lovely – but in such a way that I never felt particularly keen to look at sentences out of isolation. As a whole, it felt like a stagnant 119 pages to me.

A Change for the Better - WikipediaDay 10: A Change for the Better (1969) by Susan Hill

I had much more success with today’s novella, which I loved. Hill was still only her mid-20s when she wrote this story of people in a seaside community – and if you are immediately reminded of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, then keep that comparison in mind. If Hill’s writing is not quite like Taylor’s, being here a little less piercing and a little more comforting, these characters and stories could easily have been lifted from a Taylor novel.

The canvas is a little less wide, and I think that is to the novel’s advantage – many books that take a small society as their scene end up cramming in too many characters. Here, it is really two households that are focal. One is Deirdre Fount and her mother Mrs Oddicott, who run the draper’s, and Deirdre Fount’s 11-year-old son from her brief marriage. The marriage had been impetuous and ended in a wise divorce, with the absent Fount mentioned as seldom as possible.

Deirdre Fount had never questioned her mother’s view of the whole affair, had been entirely influenced in her behaviour and beliefs by Mrs Oddicott. She found it hard now to separate what actually had happened from what her mother had always predicted would happen, and she could remember no conversations with Aubrey, no relationship, no intimacy, that was not intruded upon by her mother. It was as though, having used men to provide them with a status and offspring, to ward off the shames of spinsterhood, they were ready to discard them and sink back into their closed, female society.

As you can see, they don’t have the healthiest relationship – but Hill gives subtlety to the usual portrait of a domineering mother, because the power shifts back and forth between them. It even passes to the 11 year old. Each needs the others, but also needs freedom, and the uneasy dynamic never stays still.

The other household is an older couple living in a hotel – Major Carpenter and his wife Flora. He is one of the most realistically infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His life is spent in selfish complaining, but each complaint is phrased in a way that makes Flora seem selfish, thoughtless or hectoring. Throughout the book, but particularly in scenes with these characters, Hill is brilliant at dialogue. It’s impossible to refute what Major Carpenter says, because he uses logic like a weapon. But, oh, he is appalling. But even he is treated with some sympathy – part of his unkind and self-centred nature comes from a terrible fear of illness and death.

Alongside nuanced character portraits, there is plenty that happens in A Change for the Better. Nothing is static, even in lives that don’t feel like they are developing. It all reminded me a little of the ‘well-made play’ – characters neatly doing enough to make a good, solid plot. And I found it absolutely enthralling and wonderful, a perfect balance between event and observation.

The only thing I would add, which could be either criticism or praise depending on your point of view, is that A Change for the Better feels very like a novel by someone who has learned more from reading than from life. I suppose most of us end up learning more from reading, since it encompasses much wider experience – but this feels especially like a novel built from reading many other novels. A few details suggest that it’s set contemporaneously, in the 1960s, but without those I could easily have believed it 1930s or even earlier. All this means that it doesn’t quite have the vividness of lived experience, but that is a quality that I am willing to sacrifice for something as satisfying as A Change for the Better.

In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp (Novella a Day in May #6)

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When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #3)

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I’m playing cold-or-Covid roulette at the moment – it would be unlucky to get Covid again so soon, but you never know – and Penelope Mortimer accompanied me while I wasn’t working or napping today. My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is the curious title of this 1967 novel(la), somewhere in the middle of her writing career. A few of her books have come back into print through various houses, but I am still surprised that she has not survived as unstoppably as other contemporaries. Her style is assured, odd, and captivating.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is about Muriel Rowbridge – the only women in a group of journalists who have been flown to Canada. They aren’t there for a particular event so much as to soak in the culture of the area, and report back on it in their various ways. Muriel’s writerly output is a column in a woman’s magazine (though they avoid the term). She has some aspirations of writing novels, though lies about this, and doesn’t seem particularly fulfilled by her job. Though nor is she ashamed of it as some people expect her to be.

Muriel is in something of a turbulent period of her life. Only a few months before the novel starts, she has had a mastectomy. She has a brassiere with a fake breast, and is far from getting used to the change in her body, and in the way she believes that people see her. After the mastectomy, she ended her relationship – a long-term affair with a married man called Ramsey.

Then they told her she was not going to die and her concern changed to a sense of outrage; she became convinced that no one could ever feel anything for her, sexually, but pity and disgust. She sent Ramsey away, his mirror after him. They said she would get over this too, and suggested therapy. But she did not want to get over it, the cheat she was perpetrating on the world by pretending to be a normal woman gave her a kind of terrible liveliness; without that liveliness, that feeling of perpetual shock, she believed that she would drift into an apathy which would be worse than death. she went back to work in new clothes, everything hidden. They called her brave behind her back, but treated her, according to the General’s directions, with affectionate indifference. Very few people telephoned her at home, or asked her out, in case she should feel pitied or find it difficult to refuse. The men who had previously patted or stroked her. out of friendliness, avoided her; the women, in her presence, avoided the men, obscurely ashamed of themselves.

Mortimer writes about this experience with a sort of brutal sensitivity, if that isn’t an oxymoron. Muriel’s feelings are not given anywhere to hide, but there is somehow a kindness in the unflinching way her new life is examined.

She certainly needn’t have worried about men finding her attractive, though. While there is a complexity to each of them, the crux of the novel is Muriel forming a relationship with every man on the trip. More than one are sexual. Some are based on shared disappointment, some on a meeting of minds and questions, and some simply on unstoppable interest in one another. I’ll be honest, I did struggle to separate the men – they did have distinctive traits, but I couldn’t remember which traits went together, or with which name. She shuttles between them all, one by one and back again, often in the form of sparse back-and-forth conversations. There is definitely something Spark-like in the way Mortimer presents conversations – a sort of emotional openness that never quite answers the questions the reader is probably asking.

I thought My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof was very good, and the writing is exactly the sort of curious, spare prose I love from this period. Mortimer is expert at conveying the damage that Muriel feels. I think the only thing that stopped me really loving this book is that I was a bit too confused by it. But maybe that was part of the point.

The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler

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I can’t quite remember why I bought The Initials in the Heart (1964) by Laurence Whistler back in 2012. It might be because of his connection with his brother Rex Whistler – though I didn’t know much about him then – or it might be because my friend Carol mentioned it. Either way, it spent almost exactly a decade on my shelves before I finally took it down. I don’t really know what I was expecting, since I didn’t know anything about it, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The Initials in the Heart is Whistler’s ode to his wife, an actress called Jill Furse. They courted and wed, but the marriage only lasted five years – Jill has ill health throughout their time together, and the end is written in from the beginning. We know, from the epigraph onwards, that this is a tribute from a man who only got to be a husband for a brief span.

Grief memoirs are very common now, and I find them fascinating and compelling. Whistler writes in a different mode. It truly is a tribute to a life, without dwelling on anything after the time they had together. It is less introspective, and perhaps less cathartic, but it does mean that joy and hopefulness can be experienced as Whistler experienced it. Here’s the opening:

The best thing my poetry ever did for me was to bring about the story of this book. But that is enough to compensate in advance for the inevitable death-bed recognition of failure.

To be. a poet! Not relinquishing this hope, from the age of fifteen or so until now when I was twenty-four, I published in November 1936 a third book of verse called The Emperor Heart, and at my elder brother Rex’s suggestion sent a copy to the novelist Edith Olivier at Wilton, that well-read, vivacious, slightly eccentric person who was his closest friend, though perhaps twice his age, and who lived in the Daye House, the converted dairy at one side of the park. Staying with her when it arrived was a young actress, then twenty-one, whose career of great promise on the London stage had been interrupted by illness—paratyphoid, it was said. 

Of course, I know many details about Edith Olivier’s friendship with Laurence’s brother Rex, from Anna Thomasson’s wonderful biography of them called A Curious Friendship. Maybe it was seeing Olivier’s name on the first page that made me buy this book, and my beloved author of The Love-Child does make occasional appearances throughout Whistler’s memoir. But this isn’t her story, and she chiefly serves as the introducer of the central couple.

There is a gentleness at the heart of this memoir. It is, softly and generously, a story of young love – of building a home together, and then several other homes as they move around. It is a story of war interrupting time together; it is a story of a young actress who is feted by many but whose health often denies her the opportunities she is given. Perhaps we see Jill in an idyllic light, from her husband who adored her, but the portrait of a kind, ambitious, thwarted woman comes alive. It is a skilled portrayal of someone who combined contentedness and discontent – somehow both resigned to her limitations while continually fighting against them. The illnesses she experienced are never completely clear, even down to the exact details of the one that cost her life. But those illnesses are the bare facts of Jill’s life: more important is the voice and the person. She kept diaries and wrote letters, and Whistler incorporates many of these – giving us a firm sense of who she was. Here is a passage she wrote while pregnant with their second child:

Last night I lay watching a troubled moon through the plane leaves, very peaceful and happy. There is something about a family house, ugly though it’s been made outside. I like thinking of my ancestors back in the 17th Century lying in bed and waiting for their children to be born. And particularly in the autumn it has a shabby melancholy that’s friendly and kind – great tawny drifts of leaves swirling in the weedy drive, and idiotic geese screaming in the wind from time to time. The leaves are beautiful, mobbing one’s feet in the wind, and lying like footprints on the stones. So I’m glad you arranged this. I have all your serene confidence to lean on. It’s stronger than anything else and makes me perfectly at rest.

Since this is the story of their relationship, and of Jill, other elements of Whistler’s story are skated over. He began to make money as a glass engraver (see, for instance, the cover of the book) but this path to success is only told piecemeal. He includes a little of his war experiences, but chiefly as they mean separation from Jill. I think this approach was wise. It means the story of Laurence and Jill is not diluted.

Whistler writes beautifully, with occasional striking turns of phrase. This moment, in his initial shock of grief, really moved me: ‘I went back to my room, knowing all privation in a moment, and as yet nearly nothing about it. It was like dying, I imagine – at once too strange and familiar to explain – and it was, in a way, dying.” Throughout, his prose is sensitive and perceptive, deeply personal while remaining calm and evenly paced.

The Initials in the Heart is an unusual little book. It’s special.

The Small Room by May Sarton

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When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.

I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.

I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.

Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.

The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.

Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.

Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:

Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.

A couple of recent audiobooks

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I go back and forth with my Audible subscription. I’m currently back in – and have discovered the Audible Plus catalogue, where you can download free audiobooks that have been added to that collection. There are thousands of the things, with no clear criteria why they’re in – some classics, some look to be self-published with audiobook covers designed in Paint. It takes some scrolling through, but I have managed to find some books of interest. (Any recommendations?)

And here are a couple of books I’d already added to my Audible wishlist – and I was pleased to see, when I re-joined, that they were labelled as freely available to me.

The Elephants in My Backyard eBook by Rajiv Surendra | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UKThe Elephants in My Backyard by Rajiv Surendra

If you know Rajiv Surendra’s work at all, it’s probably as the rapping mathlete Kevin G from teen classic Mean Girls. I think I read about this 2016 memoir in a Buzzfeed article – but I’m really glad I did. Perhaps against the odds of that opening description, it’s really very good.

Surendra was on the set of Mean Girls when a member of the crew recommended that he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – because it’s “a book about you”. Naturally intrigued, Surendra reads – and is instantly captivated. While he doesn’t live the same life as Pi, a Tamil boy in India who is shipwrecked with a tiger, there are other things the same. Surendra’s parents are Tamil and from Sri Lanka; Surendra matches the physical description of Pi. He becomes determined to play the role of Pi in a film.

At this point, there isn’t even a film in the offing. But Surendra starts planning – and even gets in touch with Martel, who proves a remarkably kind and patient correspondent over the coming years (his emails are included in the book). The determination to play the role really becomes an obsession. Over the next few years, Surendra moves for a period to India, he learns some Tamil, he learns to swim, he turns down other acting work on the off-chance that casting for Life of Pi will happen.

In the background to all of this, he naturally shares his own life. And much of that is quite desperate. An alcoholic father, prone to violent outbursts, haunts his home life. His work is mostly playing a character at an interactive historic farm. We get to know him, and he is mostly likeable and interesting – able to laugh at himself, and to convey what it’s like to be so single-minded in pursuit of a goal. (There are some regrettable body shaming moments, and some of the humour doesn’t quite land, but those are only small annoyances in the grand scheme of the book.)

Usually this sort of book is written by someone explaining how they got to where they are. But if you’ve seen Life of Pi, then you’ll know… Rajiv Surendra doesn’t get the part. In the end, despite having a good chat with the casting director, he doesn’t even get an audition. Six years of his life have been dedicated to something that didn’t work out. His lasting acting credit on iMDB is 2005. It’s fascinating to listen to a book like this from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. There are, of course, any number of actors who commit utterly to their dream and end up not making it. Those stories are probably more valuable to hear. The ones who didn’t luck out.

And it’s a really good, interesting memoir. I’ve never read or seen Life of Pi, but I think all you need to enjoy it is an interest in people and what motivates them.

 

The Wall cover artThe Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ve not managed to track down who recommended this Austrian novel from 1963 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside). I must have seen it somewhere and found the premise interesting enough to pop on my list. And that premise is: an unnamed narrator is visiting a couple friends in a remote farmhouse. They go off to a nearby town for an evening meal, leaving her behind. In the morning, they still haven’t returned.

On her wandering to see what’s happened to them, she finds something impossible. An invisible wall is stopping her going any further. Beyond it, she can see that people and animals are all frozen – clearly having died instantly.

Within the wall are acres and acres of empty land. It’s never clear quite how big it is, but she can travel for hours and find nobody and nothing – except animals. There are enough trout and deer for her to eat, and there is a dog (Lynx), a cat (Cat), and a cow (Bella). From the vantage of a couple of years on, she documents her experiences in surviving, and in developing a deep kinship with those animals.

Haushofer’s story is told quite slowly and gently, never flashing past an experience that she can detail. She is particularly good at the behaviour of animals – well, she’s very good at cats, and I assume she is good at dogs and cows. But over it all is a sense of looming dread – because the narrator has told us that the animals die, and that something bad has caused it.

I did find the end weirdly rushed and odd, after the gentle pacing of the rest of the story. I’m assuming it is a parable for something, or done with deliberate effect, but I am not at all convinced that it worked. Similarly unsuccessful (to my mind) were the occasional attempts to rationalise why she thought the wall was there, and who might be to blame – it worked better as something inexplicable.

These quibbles apart, it is a very impressive work. I do find that fine writing doesn’t work as well for me in audio as on the page. Maybe I’m more into story than prose when I’m listening? And the reader of the audiobook was a bit breathy and soft, which didn’t feel quite right. ANYWAY in summary perhaps I should have read this one as a book, but I still found it really interesting and would recommend. Not least because I want to talk to anyone and everyone about that ending, to try and understand why she did it.

Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing – #NovNov Day 17

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Particularly Cats (1967) is the third book by Doris Lessing that I’ve read – but nothing in the dystopian Memoirs of a Survivor or the grim The Fifth Child would have led me to expect something like Particularly Cats. It is 108 pages of absolute joy for a cat lover.

In a way, it’s like Elizabeth von Arnim’s All the Dogs of My Life, in that it is a memoir that concentrates on cats that Lessing has owned, or who have owned Lessing. But though it mentions various cats from different stages of Lessing’s life, it’s really about two – known as grey cat and black cat.

Before we get to their lives, we do get a whistle-stop tour of Lessing’s experience of cats in her Zimbabwean childhood – there are many, living unbridled lives that interweave with those of wild cats. Sometimes domestic cats mate with wild cats; sometimes they become wild. They are at the mercy of hawks, and they are many miles from the nearest vet. It is a tumultuous environment to have pets.

Then Lessing fast forwards to cats in London, and particularly to the black cat and grey cat. At the time she is writing the book they are only two and four years old respectively, and so very much present concerns – and they cannot abide each other. Lessing’s descriptions of their ongoing feud, and the forms it takes, is more fascinating than any battle I have read about.

Writing about cats can be tricky. Lessing is beautifully successful – because she is loving without being sentimental, and observant without being fanciful. She clearly understands cats deeply, and never tries to credit them with any anthropomorphism that doesn’t fit. And, at the same time, she recognises the nuanced and varied behaviours that different cats have. Lessing describes them with an anthropologist’s fervour, and with an affection that knows they can never be fully understood by a non-cat.

To love Particularly Cats as much as I did, you probably have to love cats as much as I do – or at least find them as fascinating as I do. I would happily read about cats’ doings and habits for many more pages, but I’ll leave you with just one moment. If cats don’t interest you, this wouldn’t be for you – the book would be far less enjoyable for me if it were about dogs, for instance. But if you’re a felinophile, and can cope with the reality of nature red in tooth and claw, then I urge you to get hold of a copy.

As a kitten, this cat never slept on the outside of the bed. She waited until I was in it, then she walked all over me, considering possibilities. She would get right down into the bed, by my feet, or on to my shoulder, or crept under the pillow. If I moved too much, she huffily changed quarters, making her annoyance felt.

When I was the making the bed, she was happy to be made into it; and stayed, visible as a tiny lump, quite happily, sometimes for hours, between the blankets. If you stroked the lump, it purred and mewed. But she would not come out she had to.