1968

Children at the Gate (1968) by Lynne Reid Banks

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Nobody immerses you in a world like Lynne Reid Banks. Given how devotedly I love The L-Shaped Room, it is curious how slowly I have read the rest of her works. But perhaps you’ve noticed one popping up here every year or so, and I’m enjoying getting more familiar with her wider work. I started with the ones set in the UK, since I always feel a little uneasy with a ‘Brits abroad!’ novel, particularly one from many decades ago – what sort of attitudes will it take for granted? I’d so much rather read about other countries from the perspective of someone from that country.

But Lynne Reid Banks has the honourable exception that she at least lived in Israel for a good number of years. And the protagonist of Children at the Gate (1968) is, like Lynne Reid Banks, an immigrant from a Western country – in the case of Gerda, Canada. Unlike Banks, Gerda is Jewish. And she has come to Acre (or Acco), Israel, following a recent divorce and a tragedy that we gradually piece together – one that has brought her to the brink.

Gerda’s only friend is Kofi, an Arab-Israeli man who is forthright and caring and suffering his own tragedies. He is easily the most lovable person in the novel, and Banks excels at creating men who are broken but kind – Kofi is like a stronger, more resilient version of Toby from The L-Shaped Room. He is, I suspect, something of authorial wish-fulfilment.

Reading a book set in the Middle East is, of course, a setting that comes with a lot of weight. Banks doesn’t skirt around the tensions between Israel and Palestine, or between Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis, but because the novel is focalised through Gerda, the narrative shares her narrow view. Gerda, of course, knows a good deal about the geopolitical situation. But she is more immediately invested in her own life and her own hurts.

I don’t know how Banks does it, but she takes me totally into any world she creates. We wholly inhabit the buildings or rooms she describes. They become the whole world, and the reader becomes enveloped in the isolation and loneliness that Gerda experiences. It is largely self-inflicted, but that never made pain any easier to bear.

The square outside was pitch dark except for a paraffin lamp hissing high up on one of the arched galleries opposite. Our house has iron balconies but the rest of the square was built much earlier and has a kind of cloister with beautiful arches at first-floor level which goes round three sides of the square. I say ‘beautiful’ because at night they are – this is  Acco’s second self, her night-self, when all the day-smells are lifted from her and replaced by cool sea-winds drifting through her narrow alleys and flooding softly into the open squares; when darkness covers the dirt and squalor like snow, leaving only the shapes, the smooth outlines of domes and minarets against the stars, the perfectly balanced archways, the mysterious broken flights of stairs and half-open doorways, the cold but not unkind flare of a paraffin lamp showing a brief interior, its walls painted in grotto shades of blue and green and hung with prints whose cheap tastelessness a passing glimpse does not show.

Gerda is not satisfied with the life she has jumped into. It is really just an escape from a different, distant life that needed to be over. ‘I walked home through the maze of cobbled alleys and archways and squares. My loneliness was, for once, simple and uncomplicated.’ Banks is a pro at the short, sharp observation, and that reflection on her type of loneliness is not only accurate – it also tells us about the sort of self-analyst that Gerda is. She can be self-pitying at times, but she is the first to assess and berate herself.

I’m going to have to tell you a bit more of the plot, so stop reading if you want to get Children at the Gate and go in completely blind. But, to be honest, the cover and the title of the novel might clue you into something else that is going to happen. And it is the only really clumsy thing that Banks does in the novel. Because, suddenly, all the Gerda can think about is her desperation to have a child. It goes from something she hasn’t really considered to an all-devouring obsession.

Kofi is the man to help her. To save her (from herself, or from loneliness, or fear), Kofi convinces her to join a kibbutz. Lynne Reid Banks lived on a kibbutz and loves writing about them in her novels, often from the perspective of an outsider who finds themselves at odds to the environment. And Gerda is not an easy fit. Even among the other North Americans there, she doesn’t seem to slip into the role with ease. And things get yet more complicated when she ‘adopts’ a young girl called Ella. Her fast-track to motherhood is complete in one fell swoop – and the emotional response has to trail after it.

Of course I don’t know yet the full extent of what I’ve undertaken, but what fills me with anxiety is trying to analyse my own feelings towards her. I am obsessed with the need to make her well, to see her fat and laughing, to hear her chattering away to other children. I watch her by the hour, trying to imagine her with a head of curly hair, with an expression of happiness on her face. And I want her to turn to me. I want that desperately, that, even more than her health, is why I am really doing all this.

But do I love her? Do I love her? Or do I just want her to love me?

Adoption – even the informal sort that Gerda has undertaken – certainly should never be done as spontaneously and selfishly as this. Gerda has clearly adopted Ella to fill a hole she perceives in her own life, and Ella herself is something of an afterthought. And, yes, there are two children on the cover. A second ‘adoption’ follows, of Ella’s brother, and the young boy is violent, angry, fearful and has a vicious, jealous relationship with Ella. Both the siblings are Arab, and that adds further to the unstable dynamic of this new, chaotic family that is ruled by uncertainty. And yet, over time, the uncertainty becomes a sort of fierce love.

I shan’t go any further with the plot, but it is often fraught and often sad, and people behave unwisely and sometimes unkindly. But there is still somehow a force through it – the power of different kinds of love to overcome all the oppositions stacked in front of them. And maybe even the irrationality of love, and the damage it can bring in its wake, even if it comes from the best motives.

And, truth be told, it often doesn’t. Gerda is an immensely flawed character, and if you’re the sort of reader who gets frustrated at people behaving foolishly, then you’ll find Children at the Gate frustrating. But I think I loved it. Lynne Reid Banks creates characters who are so infuriatingly real that I can’t help care about them and want to know more and more about them. They are certainly all deeply interesting – and interesting is the best thing for a fictional creation to be, in my book.

Children at the Gate doesn’t have the life-affirming comfort that I unexpectedly found amidst the squalor of The L-Shaped Room, but it is still rich in life. It has power, vividness, and certainly demands emotional investment from the reader. I’m not sure I’d read it again, but it reaffirms my belief in Lynne Reid Banks’ unusual and sometimes uncomfortable brilliance.

Two frenetic novellas #ABookADayInMay – Days 15+16

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

The Following Story

The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom

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

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

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

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

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

The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

The Bloater (1968) by Rosemary Tonks

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

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

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

“Pooh! What’s a chest?”

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

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

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

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

“He sounds genuinely nasty.”

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

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

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

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

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

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R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Five memoirs I’ve read recently

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Quite a large percentage of the non-fiction I read or listen to is accounted for by memoirs and biographies. While glancing at my pile of books to be written about on here, I realised that five of them fell into the category of memoir and autobiography – while covering an extraordinary range between them. And all by authors where I haven’t read anything else by them. Here they are…

My Father and Myself (1968) by J.R. Ackerley

I have four of Ackerley’s books, because I’ve always assumed I will enjoy his writing (and because they are delicious New York Review of Books Classics) – I took to Twitter to ask people which I should start with. While My Father and Myself didn’t win the poll, the replies were sufficient to convince me.

As the title suggests, this book is more or less equal parts about Ackerley and his father, Roger – a relationship that grows steadily more fascinating as the book continues. At times, they have a shocking openness, particularly around sexual matters – while there are other, major parts of Roger Ackerley’s life that his son had no idea about until after his death. I shan’t spoil what they are, because they are revealed rather late in this book – though I was already aware of them because I’ve read The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre.

From the attention-grabbing opening line onwards (‘I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919’), Ackerley is an excellent storyteller – particularly about the things that interest him. What most seems to interest him, for better or worse, is his own sexual exploits. There is an awful lot about the young men he encountered through life and what he did to them (and they to him). There is a startling candour in these passages. In a biographer, it would have felt unprofessionally prurient; in Ackerley’s own words, it seems like a lengthy attempt to understand his own fascination with this aspect of his life.

More interesting to me was his perspective on his parents’ marriage – people say that nobody knows a marriage except those in it, but constant onlookers can perhaps have a more even-handed view. His mother put up with a lot; his father was not a monster, but lived by a set of principles that combine curiously and don’t benefit many people, including himself.

Honesty and accuracy are not the same thing, of course, and Ackerley’s striking openness sits intriguingly alongside the limits of his self knowledge. It’s a fascinating read, often uncomfortable, but mesmerising too.

Diary of a Lone Twin (2019) by David Loftus

To talk of the death of one’s twin to surviving identical twins is almost impossible; the break of that bond is too painful and shocking to describe, too unbelievable to imagine.

Loftus was in his 20s when his identical twin brother died, not long after they had celebrated their birthday together. Three decades later, he takes us through the diary of a year – a year where nothing significant happens in relation to that death, but which is as good an opportunity as any to continue processing the grief, seeing what has happened to him over the years.

As you probably know, I have a twin brother (Colin, who is also reading Loftus’s memoir), and the idea of losing him is as unbelievable as that quote at the beginning suggests. My life doesn’t make sense without him. And that’s the world David Loftus was thrust into, from a brother who was also his best friend. We don’t learn at first how he died, and Loftus measures out the parts of that story throughout the first half of the book. It feels oddly like a thriller, as we piece together how it happened – eventually discovering that it was shocking medical malpractice.

Of course, Diary of a Lone Twin is not an objective account, nor should it be. Rather than simply a description of what happened, it is Loftus’s thoughts on life without John – and how it might have been different. It’s also about his recent second marriage, about his son, about his career as a food photographer. At times, it felt like other things were crowding out the story of John and its aftermath (I could particularly have done without the pages about how much he hates cats). But, even with the padding, this is a very engaging attempt to describe the unthinkable.

Delicacy (2021) by Katy Wix

I listened to Wix reading this extraordinary memoir – about cake and death, as the subtitle says (and isn’t it a brilliant title for that?). It looks through the significant moments of Wix’s life through the prism of cakes that she associates with each of them. And it’s about the deaths of her father, her mother, and her best friend.

I first encountered Wix as a contestant on Taskmaster, and she appears in almost every good British TV show of recent years. While she is extremely funny in character roles, her personality and comic sensibility is rather different on her own terms – it is still funny, but it is equally melancholy. In her narration, there were plenty of lines that would have made me laugh if I’d read them on the page, but she delivers them with calmness, almost a sadness, which makes them effective in a very different way. A possible exception is the chapter on a personal trainer, which does have moments of poignancy but is more unabashedly hilarious than other sections of Delicacy.

As well as discussing the loved ones she lost, in difficult and painful ways, Wix also writes about her career – the highs and the lows, and particularly about the way that she has been expected to look and behave as a woman in the industry. She doesn’t name many of the productions she’s been in, so it’s not a tell-all in that sense, but she is still very candid about the treatment she experienced. And there is a moving, tense chapter on a possible reunion on a project with a bully from her early life.

As you can perhaps tell from this overview, I don’t remember any of the specific cakes that Wix associates with different moments of her life. As a framing technique, it isn’t especially relevant – but if it helped her produce a book this good, then hurrah.

Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once (2021) by Phil Wang

Another comic I first encountered on Taskmaster, and a memoir published in the same year – which I also listened to as an audiobook read by the author. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia, and the second 16 in the UK – so this book is about a life split down the middle in years, but also in terms of identity. He writes of feeling not Malaysian enough for Malaysia and not British enough for Britain.

The book is divided into different categories – food, nature, language etc – which gives Wang opportunities for covering a vast amount of material. There is definitely some serious stuff about racism in here, and about the differences between cultures and the difficulties of trying to ‘be from two worlds’ without either of them suffering – but it’s also a very, very funny book. Wang’s writing is much more punchline-driven than Wix’s, and a lot of the book would feel equally at home as stand-up. I definitely recommend you try the audiobook, if you read Sidesplitter, because it really requires Wang’s insouciantly optimistic voice.

Raining Cats and Donkeys (1967) by Doreen Tovey

Definitely the most uncomplicatedly fun book on this list, it’s one of a series that Tovey wrote about having Siamese cats and a donkey. It opens with:

Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

At that moment we were in our donkey’s paddock dealing with the fact that she’d eaten too many apples, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

It’s representative of the entirety of this short memoir. The book is a collection of self-deprecating stories that show how complicated life can get when you fall in love with spirited pets. The stakes are not often particularly high, and that’s what makes them so entertaining to read – because things might go awry, but at the end of the day Doreen and Charles will be happy together, contentedly accompanied with a menagerie of animals.

Tovey is very good at conveying the characters of the two cats, Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey – without ever making the mistake of making them too twee or fanciful. She is a keen observer of genuine animal behaviour, in its ruthlessness and obstinacy as well as its more gentle moments, and describes them with humour and affection. My edition was given to me by my friend Kirsty and Paul, and has an earlier handwritten dedication from 1968: ‘For Alan, as a Bedside Book (to encourage earlier bedtimes). I can see that it would have done.

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

25 Books in 25 Days: #22 Several Perceptions

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I started At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept this morning, and was only a page in when I knew it wouldn’t work for today’s book. So I took a quick look through my paperback shelves, trying to find the sort of thing I fancied (at the right length, of course) – and landed upon Several Perceptions (1968) by Angela Carter.

I hadn’t heard of this until I came upon it in an Oxfam a year or two ago – I bought it despite this dreadful cover. I think it’s only the second Carter novel I’ve read, after Wise Children. It concerns Joseph – a moody, miserable gent who has recently broken up with his girlfriend (not his choice) and whose only friends seem to be an overly-sexed man called Viv, his prostitute mother, a slightly mad homeless man, and (perhaps) the mousy new resident in his building, Annie Blossom. Looking for purpose, Joseph releases a badger from a local zoo (did zoos ever cage badgers?!) and starts having flirty, desperate, or philosophical conversations – sometimes all three – with the aforementioned group of people.

This is a slightly baffling novel, not least because Joseph seems to sometimes wander into the unbalanced – and I never worked out what the title was about – but Carter is such a fine writer. Her choice of words is so clever – often unexpected, and yet finding the deeper truth in the cracks between cliches. Every page has an example, but one I particularly liked was his view of Annie:

Miss Blossom, the husk of a woman, what was she doing? Making herself a small lunch of beans on toast or performing some other flat, thin activity, ironing rayon underwear or filling in a form?

That ‘flat, thin activity’ is so unusual, and yet creates a vivid impression on the reader. Unusual and vivid is a pretty great description of Carter, actually. I’m not sure why Several Perceptions isn’t better known – or perhaps it is, and I just haven’t noticed it being mentioned – but it was quite the experience.

Btw, for a much more thorough review, check out Helen’s from a few years ago.

The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg

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When we did the 1947 Club and the 1951 Club, I noticed in my own reading – and I think in the reading across the blogosphere – that the war was surprisingly absent. I say ‘surprisingly’. Perhaps there is nothing unsurprising about people wanting to put hell behind them for a few years, either unwilling or unable to face what had passed. It’s interesting, in my 1968 reading, that two strands have emerged – the bright, bold, intoxicating world of the ’60s emerging, and a more concentrated look back over the shoulder at the past. Few books could be more eye-opening than Christabel Bielenberg’s 1968 memoir The Past is Myself, reprinted a few years ago in a beautiful Slightly Foxed Edition.

Bielenberg’s surname sounds German – and, indeed, is – but she was raised English. (Or Irish… it seems to be conflated. After Greensleeves, is this becoming a 1968 pattern?) She married Peter Bielenberg during the interwar period, and adopted German citizenship in 1934 – Germany was her home and she seems to have been broadly accepted. Oddly, her Englishness doesn’t seem to have been much of an issue throughout the Second World War – at least it isn’t mentioned as being so in The Past is Myself – but her staunch resistance to Nazism was a constant threat to her life. It starts in 1932, sort of, but much of the book (unsurprisingly) focuses on the bulk of the war. But I did think this was great:

The history of the years between 1935 and 1938 in Germany could be summarised by a conversation overheard between two Hamburg dock-workers, sitting over their beer in a riverside pub (Hamburg dock-workers are not renowned for their garrulity). “Ja, ja, ja,” sighed the one, and again after a long pause, “ja, ja, ja”.” “Listen,” said his friend, gazing mournfully into his beer-mug, “can’t you, for one moment, stop discussing politics?”

This memoir tells of life in Germany for somebody who despised Hitler and his policies – for somebody who was ‘Aryan’, but violently opposed every step of the Nazis’ campaign. Like Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg’s excellent On the Other Side, this gives an important perspective that helps us remember that an individual is not their country.

Bielenberg takes the reader painstakingly through the events of each month, each week, and for the first half the memoir it is a case of slowly escalating horror. We probably all know what happened – the Nuremberg laws and the gradual removal of the rights of Jewish people; the increase in political prisoners and Hitler-worship; the erosion of every public voice of dissent. Bielenberg expertly puts us into the world of somebody who hated Nazism but, after initial protest, realises that dissent means death – and then anybody could be an informant.

Just the same we knew that when meeting new people, they would probably play the game as we did. The conversation at first would be guarded and noncommittal. We knew that we were none of us Nazis, but were we all of us, drunk or sober, also discreet? Had we other mutual friends? Were they real friends or just names dropped to impress? I would find it hard to describe the wary approach, the half-finished sentence, the guarded reference which led at the time to mutual confidence, and to the realisation that the air had at last been cleared and all present could sit back and indulge in plain high treason. The procedure was a delicate one, one that had to be carefully learned if we valued our lives, and would trust our fellows sufficiently to put our lives in their hands.

Though published in 1968, Bielenberg delivers the narrative as she experienced it, day by day and moment by moment. She seldom, if ever, gives hints of what was to come for her own family and friends, nor does she include particularly detailed accounts of what later became widely known, in terms of concentration camps. So we don’t see the full scale of the horror that the Nazis implemented – though there are glimpses: a man she meets on a train who has been part of the SS extermination team, for instance, or the rumours of cattle trucks which come back to those in Berlin. Hers was not the worst experience of the war, of course. She was never sent to a concentration camp – though her husband spent time in dire conditions in a prison (through connections to those who organised the foiled plot to assassinate Hitler) and there is a significant section dealing with Christabel’s interrogation when trying to have him released.

It is revealing to read about somebody anti-Nazi, pro-Britain who also suffered at the hands of British and Allied bombers – caught between two enemies, in a way. She writes about the indiscriminate cruelty of bombing campaigns brilliantly:

There was no moon, and there were three air raids in the three nights that I was in Berlin. The bombs fell indiscriminately on Nazis and anti-Nazis, on women and children and works of art, on dogs and pet canaries. New and more ravaging bombs – blockbusters and incendiaries, and phosphorus bombs that burst and glowed green and emptied themselves down the walls and along the streets in flaming rivers of unquenchable flame, seeping down cellar stairs, and sealing the exits to the air-raid shelters.

Indeed, even without seeing the full evil of the concentration camps, I was still left afresh with the shock at how evil people can be. For how many thousands of Germans must have been coopted into targeting Jewish people, running death camps, being part of the cruel regime? The millions who felt helpless to prevent or oppose it – well, that I can understand. Particularly in the nationalistic, often xenophobic world we are seeing more and more of. People often talk about Trump and Hitler together, and say that Trump is no Hitler. I absolutely agree that he is not Hitler as Hitler was in, say, 1942. But the similarities between Hitler in 1933 and Trump in 2017 are many – targeting a faith group, playing on brash nationalism to do so, trying to quieten dissent from others and calling the unpatriotic if they do it. Reading this book brought home those similarities and dangers.

The Past is Myself (stupidly vague title aside) is in many ways a brilliant book, with an unstinting portrayal of what her life was like and, to the extent that she was able, what Germany was like. I’ve been very enthusiastic in this review. I can’t quite put my finger on why I don’t think it’s a brilliant book. Something in the writing style, or the structure? I don’t know. Usually I find it quite easy to pinpoint why I haven’t found a book worked perfectly, but there’s something elusive here. It’s still exceptionally valuable as a resource, and very good in doing what it does, but I probably wouldn’t rush to read anything Bielenberg wrote on any other topic.

Still, a sombre and poignant end to the 1968 Club for me.

 

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

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This is normally the time in our club weeks that I start to wind down, and maybe do a round up, but I’ve read so much for the 1968 club that I’m keeping going! Sorry that I’ve not been rounding up reviews quite as assiduously as I should have been, but it’s really exciting to see people join in – and I’ll put together a full list before too long. But still this review and another one to come before the end of the week!

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw is testament to the fact that I will eventually finish those books that I got halfway through and forgot about. I bought it after Jenny from Reading the End enthused about it somewhere… I thought it was on her blog, but her review was in 2008 and I bought it in 2015 so WHO KNOWS. Well, I read 150pp of it when it arrived, and somehow it fell down the pile of the books I was reading concurrently… it’s almost like I knew that the 1968 Club would come along and give me the proper moment to finish it.

Greensleeves was rescued from obscurity by (a) the aforementioned Jenny, and (b) Nancy Pearl, celebrity librarian – and the copy I have was published in her oddly-titled ‘Nancy Pearl Book Crush Rediscoveries’ series. The novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, Shannon, who has never quite felt she belonged – and not just for the reasons that most people that age feel that way. She has been shunted between various parents and parental figures, between parts of America and Ireland and England (‘Ireland’ is several times called ‘Britain’, I think. Hmm, McGraw, hmm), and she has serious misgivings about her future.

So, sure, she ends up going undercover as a spy in a boarding house, trying to work out whether or not there are grounds to contest a weird will left by a Mrs Dunningham – she has bequeathed money for people to go skydiving or maintain a weed garden or study useless subjects, etc. A change is as good as a holiday. And Shannon is so used to being several different people that adding another doesn’t seem too big an obstacle – so she disguises her accent (and her intellect) and becomes Georgetta. She has a towering 60s bouffant, bright clothes, and half the brain Shannon has – but more confidence and charm in speaking with people. That’s the idea, anyway – the number of made-up relatives, and a certain awkwardness and uncertainty which she can’t quite hide, prove stumbling blocks occasionally. Shannon/Georgetta becomes a waitress at the local restaurant (or ‘luncheonette’) – a perfect vantage from which to question people.

Only she didn’t quite account for the presence of Sherry (male despite name; friendly, charming, and optimistic regular of the restaurant, who nicknames her Greensleeves) or Dave (rude, but sexy, 20-something occupant of the boarding house). She finds herself in something of a love triangle.

What makes this novel not annoying, though, is that the central issue isn’t Boy A vs Boy B, but Shannon trying to come to terms with her own personality. She does this through trying to understand others – whether that be Sherry and Dave, the other beneficiaries of the will, or the deceased Mrs D. It’s a very true portrayal of what it means to be on the cusp of adulthood when your background is too myriad to make your path obvious.

But mostly the book is great because it’s so energetic. There is pep. The characters are slightly quirky, Sherry is a real love, and there is a sense of optimism and kindness that pervades it, somehow even when people aren’t behaving kindly.

As for the 1968 Club – this feels very representative of a certain sort of 1960s America, because of fashion and dialect, but it also feels extremely modern in the way it’s written. Other 1960s novels carry something of there period in each paragraph, for better or worse, whereas Greensleeves could have been written this week – I would totally have believed it was a historical novel, if a gap of 50 years makes something historical.

I imagine this novel would mean much more if one read it as a teenager – do press it upon any teenage readers who might enjoy it – but it’s still great fun to read as an adult, and has one of the few will-they-won’t-they narratives that made me actually care.

Thanks Jenny for bringing it to my attention initially, and thanks 1968 Club for making me finally finish it!

The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor – #1968Club

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When I was going through the 1968 titles I had for the 1968 Club, I spotted that there was an Elizabeth Taylor there that I don’t hear all that much about. And that’s probably going to change this week, of course! But The Wedding Group – one of her final novels – is one that I knew nothing at all about. I must have read a review or two occasionally, but it hadn’t stuck. And I thought – why not?

I don’t consider myself an Elizabeth Taylor superfan, though her writing is impeccable, and I truly love some of her novels. And yet, despite no superfan status, I seem to have read almost all of her novels. Spoilers for how I feel about this one: it’s not her best, but it’s good. My early sense is that it’s not going to remain with me in the way that others have done. But I read it on a plane, and that’s never an ideal reading scenario, so… take this review with a pinch of salt??

It starts with a description of a many-layered family in Quayne that we don’t end up seeing that much of – it’s more of a restrictive, mistrustful background to illustrate the world that Cressy has come from. It’s an artistic world – the blurb to my Virago edition tells me that the grandfather of the clan is based on Augustus John (though Chris’s post mentions other potentials) – but it’s one that is instinctively wary of elite intellectual sets, modern life, and everything that Cressy longs to explore. Mostly, she wants to escape her oppressive mother Rose. And the vision of what she wants to experience is very 1968:

It was to that world beyond the beech woods that Cressy was looking. She dreamed of Wimpy Bars and a young man with a sports car, of cheap and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them. In that world she might find a place for herself.

She rebels and gets a job in an antiques shop – which isn’t exactly the quintessence of teenage rebellion in 1968, but is, on the other hand, very Elizabeth Taylor. There she (re-)meets David, a journalist in his 30s who has previously visited Quayne and written about the family with some superior mild distaste. Indeed, he has wrongly labelled her in a photograph, and received a letter from her putting him right – he obviously thinks she is self-conscious, silly, and odd. What he doesn’t realise is that he is all those things too, in a slightly different way.

The strength of the novel, I think, is in the drawing of David’s mother Midge. As the novel starts, he lives with her – only later does he move (though no further than next door), and grows to question her influence on him. He feels that he cannot go to London, as he dreams of doing, because she is scared to be on her own – his father lives not too far away, oblivious and indifferent to the pain his selfishness has caused the family.

As with The Soul of Kindness, where Taylor shows us the real imprisoning agony of being a hypochondriac, in Midge we see a compassionate depiction of a woman whose terror of being alone is real – while still exasperating to those around her. In one scene, Midge believes she is about to be burgled – she leaves her jewellery on the stairs, and cowers in fear upstairs. It’s very moving, and shows that nothing is one-sided – for Midge is also a restrictive force when it comes to her son, though without the intentional stifling of Quayne. Rather, it is her need of him that has kept him tied to her apron strings. This is the fascinating relationship of the novel.

Oh, incidentally, I love when Taylor allows her own authorial comments to seep through. This is rather brilliant – I quote both paragraphs because it shows Taylor’s observational powers, and the way she makes the ordinary seem bizarrely profound – as well as the disjoint between what people are doing and the thoughts they vocalise:

The sandwiches they had ordered were now put in front of them, and Nell lifted a corner of one of hers and peered short-sightedly inside – hard-boiled egg, sliced, with dark rings round the yolk, a scattering of cress, black seeds as well.

“The reason, they say, that women novelists can’t write about men, is because they don’t know what they’re like when they’re alone together, what they talk about and so on. But I can’t think why they don’t know. I seem to hear them booming away all the time. Just listen to this lot, next to me.”

So, there is a lot to admire and appreciate in The Wedding Group, and it’s possible that I’d be raving about it if I’d never read another Taylor novel. But I almost take her writing talent and perceptiveness for granted – and this novel has too many scenes (and, dare I say, characters) that don’t quite go anywhere, and don’t leave much of a mark. Or perhaps it’s just because I read most of it on a plane, who knows. Unfair to judge her by her own standard, perhaps, but I don’t think 1968 was quite Taylor’s year – though, equally, she is incapable of writing a bad novel.

Another Part of the Wood by Beryl Bainbridge – #1968Club

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So much of my 1968 Club reading has been non-fiction about the first half of the 20th century, and it’s about time I interspersed a novel that is well and truly 1960s. Another Part of the Wood was Beryl Bainbridge’s second published novel, and there are already many hallmarks of what makes Bainbridge so unusual – a cast of unpleasant, warring characters; unexpected catastrophes; not quite letting you know what is going on. The copy I read is one I bought in 2012, and was from a Penguin series where each cover was designed by Allen Jones. I do love it when reprint series like this look beyond the obvious. We don’t need another edition of Frankenstein.

Another Part of the Wood takes place at a holiday camp, but one which feels very much like a prison camp – a group of people are staying in extremely basic huts, without plumbing or sufficient food. It’s in rural Wales, but the ‘holidaymakers’ have come from the town – George, the owner of the site, isn’t expecting all of them; nor is his stuttering, anxious assistant Balfour. Characters pop up out of nowhere, with unspecified pasts and past relationships, adding to the chaotic tangle Bainbridge creates. George is only really expecting Joseph – a man with big ideas and ideals, who has come from London intending to discuss politics and philosophy. He comes with Dotty, a girlfriend who is tiring of him, and his son Roland. And a mysterious boy (man? It’s unclear) with the ominous name Kidney. He is clearly disturbed in some way, and must take his pills regularly, though Joseph is keen to get him off them – and seems to believe that a bit of fresh air is all he needs. What does he need? We don’t know, because Bainbridge tells us so little – making him all the more sinister as an unpredictable entity.

This is a short novel, and much of it focuses on the claustrophobia of these characters (and Lionel and May, who also come; Lionel’s salient characteristic is that he had a buttock shot off once) and the fraught tension as they bicker and singularly fail to enjoy themselves. Lynn Barber writes in her introduction to this edition that Bainbridge’s initial drafts were often ten times the length of the final novel – that she’d cut away and cut away, making sure nothing superfluous came in. The sparseness works; her writing style is confident even at this early stage, and not a word is wasted – indeed, we aren’t told enough to know quite where we are.

We can feel a dread that something terrible will be the climax to the novel – but also that other moments of huge significance will be thrown away as everyday mundanities. And all I will add about the plot is another word: wasps.

In case you want proof that this is quintessential 1968, here’s a description of a coat that Dotty gets from a shop:

The flowered coat was made of some kind of velvet. It rippled and shone. It was orange and blue and green and black, with a mustard-yellow ground, and there were buttons small as beads going from wrist to elbow. Balfour thought it was terrible.

He prayed she wouldn’t wear it now. He visualised her stalking, swathed in velvet, through the busy market town, the bell-bottoms of her denim trousers flaring out beneath the long and violently coloured hem.

It’s not replaced my favourite Bainbridge (which is Injury Time), but this is my fifth book by her, and it’s helping build up a picture of a strange, assured, quirky novelist who knew exactly the sort of book she wanted to write, and wrote it.