1970s

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – #ABookADayInMay Day 26

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I have long meant to read Joan Didion, but didn’t really know what her writing would be like. I knew she wrote about grief in My Year of Magical Thinking, but – despite having read various reviews of her books over the years – hadn’t really pieced together what sort of style her fiction might be. I certainly hadn’t expected anything as hard-boiled as Play It As It Lays (1970).

As the novel opens, we get short chapers from the perspectives of Maria, Helene, and Carter – and the rest of the novel is in short, numbered sections that look at what have led to the opening: which is Maria in a psychiatric institution. Why is she there? Helene explains it to us, briefly, sort of, in the midst of accounting trying to visit Maria in the institutino:

I drove all the way out there, took the entire morning and packed a box for her, all the new books and a chiffon scarf she left at the beach once (she was careless, it must have cost $30, she was always careless) and a pound of caviar, maybe not Beluga but Maria shouldn’t bitch now, plus a letter from Ivan Costello and a long profile somebody did in The New York Times about Carter, you’d think that would at least interest her except Maria has never been able to bear Carter’s success, all that, and Maria wouldn’t see me. “Mrs. Lang is resting,” the nurse said. I could see her resting, I could see her down by the pool in the same bikini she was wearing the summer she killed BZ, lying by that swimming pool with a shade over her eyes as if she hadn’t a care or a responsibility in the world. 

Maria has had an unhappy, chaotic childhood – shaped by her father’s reckless gambling, which leads them to losing their home and moving to a town that he won in another game. The town doesn’t even exist in the ‘present day’ of the novel; nor does the motel, that her father installed where he hoped a highway might conveniently put an exit. She is used to instability and disappointment when she moves to the town characterised by it: Hollywood.

Apparently Play It As It Lays helped to shape the way that mid-century Hollywood was understood. It reminded me of A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) by Darcy O’Brien and, to a less extent, Prater Violet (1946) by Christopher Isherwood – which both demonstrate the chaotic insincerity of tinsel town. But, stylistically, Didion is very different. A lot of the short chapters are short, sharp dialogue exchanges between Maria and the people she forms unhealthy, dependent relationships with – her erstwhile husband, Carter; her lover Les; the film producer BZ; his wife Helene. For instance…

“I wasn’t just crazy about your asking Helene how much money BZ’s mother gives them to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach.

The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen’s at seven o’clock. “I wasn’t just crazy about that at all.”

“Well, she does.”

“Does what.”

“Carlotta gives them money to stay married.

‘So what.”

“I’m sick of everybody’s sick arrangements.”

‘You’ve got a fantastic vocabulary.”

She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.

“I’ve got a fantastic vocabulary and I’m having a baby.”

Carter slowed the car down. ‘I missed a transition,’ he said finally.

Maria did not look at him.

There are other characters who play significant roles – such as Ivan Costello, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘psychopathic blackmailer’, but he didn’t seem much more psychopathic than anybody else in the novel, to me. Because Didion gives everyone the same staccato, apathetic tone of voice, I did find it hard to disintinguish between characters. It seems deliberate – Play It As It Lays is a composite portrait of emotionless despair – but it did mean, to me, that there wasn’t much nuance between people. It scarcely mattered which absence of empathy Maria spent time with.

As well as exposing the heartlessness of Hollywood, and Maria’s limited and misogynistic experience on two movies (one successful and the other an unreleased critical darling), Play It As It Lays is a thorough portrait of dusty, hot California. Towards the middle of the novel, Maria is mostly occupied with driving – long drives along the freeway, aimless but vital to her continuation. It is oppressive and enveloping for the reader:

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky. 

There are key scenes that stand out in the choppy, sparse narrative – perhaps most significantly, the illegal abortion that Maria undertakes, the confusing ways she has to book and find her appointment, and the disastrous aftermath. Didion writes it with relentless reality, resisting any urge to make it a political point.

As Play It As It Lays closes, we learn the truth about what has led Maria to her institution (even though we don’t learn the specifics of why her and Carter’s young daughter is in a different institution). Rather surprisingly, she seems to receive a lot of visits from characters whose behaviour wouldn’t lead you to believe they’d bother.

And it ends, without any real sense of hope (maybe?). Didion is ruthless in her realism. The title is another way of saying ‘play the cards you are dealt’ – and there is a sense that the characters have done, are doing, will do this – and that the result is a moral and emotional neutral. As I said, I didn’t know what to expect from Didion, and it certainly wasn’t this sort of novel. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it. Play It As It Lays certainly has its fan base (Jacqui calls it ‘blisteringly good‘) and I’m a bit less clear about my view. There is certainly a lot to admire, but I found its sparseness and melancholy a little hard to parse. There is a laudable consistency to the tone, but I ended feeling like I knew surprisingly little about Maria, let alone anybody else in the novel. I think I liked the book nonetheless, but perhaps one to revisit to be sure what I think.

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan – #ABookADayInMay Day 10

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It’s been a busy day, but I finished an audiobook that I borrowed from the library: The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan. And boy, what a journey that novella is. I don’t have much time today, so we’re going to do a bullet point post…

  • Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories
  • I have a checkered history with McEwan, mostly positive – I love Black Dogs, Amsterdam, and Atonement. I like On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. I thought Saturday was pretty bad, and I haven’t anything he’s published since 2007.
  • The Cement Garden is narrated by Jack, aged 13 at the beginning, with an older sister, a younger sister, and a rather younger brother.
  • Their father dies – and, a year later, their mother dies. Worried about being taken into care, they decide to encase her body in cement in the cellar – and then begin dysfunctionally living without any supervision.
  • Jack’s voice is captivating and convincing, as a young man whose competing concerns make it hard for him to discern or prioritise between the everyday and the shocking.
  • I think there’s a very good novella in here about a family of children failing to cope in a terrible situation, and the gradual falling apart of their fragile ecosystem (the addition of Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, is very good at expanding their world and showing how horribly flawed it is).
  • But…
  • Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children? What do Jack’s unexplained incestuous desires add to the novella? To me, they just make it self-consciously abhorrent, and detract from a subtler novella hiding within it.
  • SO much of the book is preoccupied with bodily fluids, disgusting smells, masturbation – oh gosh, has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masturbation? It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.
  • It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why. There is the promise of a novelist here, but covered over by the belief that the only way to be real is to be sordid. The sordid is no more real than the beautiful, Ian.
  • Here is an excellent quote from Anne Tyler’s review in The New York Times: “these children are not – we trust – real people at all. They are so consistently unpleasant, unlikable and bitter that we can’t believe in them (even hardened criminals, after all, have some good points) and we certainly can’t identify with them. Jack’s eyes, through which we’re viewing this story, have an uncanny ability to settle upon the one distasteful detail in every scene, and to dwell on it, and to allow only that detail to pierce the cotton wool that insulates him. […] It seems weak-stomached to criticize a novel on these grounds, but if what we read makes us avert our gaze entirely, isn’t the purpose defeated?”

I probably haven’t read enough McEwan to do an Unnecessary Rankings! of him, but The Cement Garden would certainly be toying for bottom place.

The Woods in Winter by Stella Gibbons – #ABookADayInMay Day 6

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Many people have spoken highly of Stella Gibbons’ The Woods in Winter (1970) – including when I ranked her novels. It comes very late in her body of work, though is almost entirely set several decades early than its publication date – and is one of several Gibbons’ novels that were republished by Dean Street Press. My parents kindly gave me a copy, and I finished it off for today’s book.

When I started the novel (when it was actually winter), I found the opening extremely promising. An unlikely friendship, of sorts, is struck up between middle-aged Ivy Gover and Helen Green, one of the people for whom Ivy is charwoman. Helen is gentle, intelligent, and moves in the literati without feeling fully confident there. Ivy, meanwhile, is fierce but fair, ruthlessly unsentimental (except perhaps about one of her three past husbands) and not very good at reading – which sends her to Helen when she gets a letter that she can’t decipher.

She [Helen] tried to get around her difficulties by murmuring the letter aloud.

“… Gardener, Elliot and Son, 24 High Street, Nethersham, Buckinghamshire… beg to inform you…”

“I don’t want nothing to do with beggars, Miss. Got no use for that sort. Bone-idle, mostly.”

“It doesn’t mean that kind of begging, Ivy. It’s just an old-fashioned way…” (here Helen was pulled up by remembering that, to Ivy, ‘old-fashioned’ would mean something quite different from what it would mean to herself) “… just a way of being polite.”

Ivy’s face said nothing and neither did her lips. But her eyes under the hat sent out an impatience to hear.

“… The late George Coatley, you great-uncle… deceased October the twenty-fourth… The cottage known as Catts Corner… vacant possession… leasehold… would be glad if you could call upon us at your convenience… They will then be pleased to hand over to you the key. And they sign themsevles your obedient servants.”

Helen looked up, tucking a plume of hair behind one ear with a slowly-moving finger.

“Reckon it’s a take-in?” Ivy demanded.

It is not a ‘take-in’, but you can see why Ivy is suspicious. Her life has not been one of good fortune or the generosity of man. This windfall is unexpected – and, once Ivy has visited the cottage, you’d be forgiven for seeing it as a mixed blessing. The home hasn’t been lived in for a while and it’s falling apart. It’s in the middle of nowhere, far from the city life she is used to. She would be totally isolated. And yet she craves all these things – in her no-nonsense, unsentimental way. She moves there.

And sadly we don’t see much more of Helen for the rest of the novel. I’ll confess I was disappointed that this unlikely pairing doesn’t get much space on the page – I thought it was very entertaining, as well as filled with potential to be eccentrically heartwarming. Instead, we are introduced to a whole host of other characters – Coral and Pearl Cartaret, who inexpertly run The Tea Shoppe; Angela Mordaunt, mourning her beau killed in war; the vicar; the Lord of the Manor. It all adds local colour, of course, but it also takes away from the central character, Ivy, who is left with a slightly predictable story about adopting an unloved dog – which does feel a bit of heavy-handed imagery.

I still enjoyed The Woods in Winter, but I had the problem I often have with Gibbons: she is so good at amusing, eccentric characters and the meeting of people who feel awkward with each other but grow into companionship. And then she ditches all that for a lukewarm romance story with some other characters, with very little at stake for the reader. (I’ve never got over how brilliant her novel Bassett started and how tedious it ended up. This one certainly isn’t that bad.)

Most readers seem to have fallen deeply for The Woods in Winter, and I wish I could have loved it more. It was an enjoyable novel but it could have been a really brilliant one – or perhaps I just mean that it could have been much more to my tastes. But I think I’m being a little more objective than that when I saw that the structure of The Woods in Winter doesn’t quite work – burgeoning out to a lot of characters in moments when narrowing in would have been more satisfactory. I’d certainly suggest you read Enbury Heath, Miss Linsey and Pa, or Westwood before you read this one – and, of course, Cold Comfort Farm. But I am quite an outlier on this one, so maybe try it and see for yourself!

A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam

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I have well over a hundred Persephone Books, and the hit rate of successes is astonishingly high. There’s a reason that they have the devotion and respect of legions of readers. And so why had I left A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam neglected since I bought it 2008(!)? Even after reading – and loving – Adam’s memoir A House in the Country in 2020, I didn’t race to my shelves and devour more by her. More fool me! Because A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 is a remarkable, and incredibly readable, achievement.

Over the course of the book, Adam traces the most significant societal changes affecting (and effected by) women in the UK. We see the fight for suffrage, the impact of two world wars, changing attitudes to sex and so much more. Adam covers an astonishing range of topics – divorce, abortion, equal pay, employment law, female MPs – and does so with a level of research that would be impressive with the internet. I’ve no idea how she has so many statistics, as well as anecdotes and quotations from major historical figures.

She is so good at putting her finger on significant moments, and she balances her research with a total accessibility. You can tell she is a novelist, because characters (albeit real people) are so well-drawn and impress, inspire, frustrate, or move us in turn. I’m going to end up quoting an awful lot of this book – let’s start with one of the moments that she demonstrates as seismic in altering women’s lives:

The change from a large nineteenth-century family to the small twentieth-century one, as a social custom, took place with startling speed, so that mothers could be shocked or envious (probably both) at the difference between the life of their married daughters and their own past. The transformation was brough about – not by a Lysistrata-type political campaign or by a change of heart on the part of the male sex – but, like most of the landmarks in women’s emancipation, by a material fact: which in this case was the invention of convenient birth-control equipment.

And I’m going to immediately move onto another quotation, about nursing, as it’s a very representative example of Adam’s approach to social history:

The second-largest professional women’s group was that of the nurses, who were 78,000 strong in 1911. Their record in the women’s struggle for work-status was less single-minded and less successful than that of teachers. One reason was that, since Florence Nightingale, they had been brainwashed about making sacrifices for their vocation, such as putting up with long hours, low pay and dismal working conditions, which was extremely convenient for their employers. The other, less creditable, reason was because the leaders of the profession wasted a lot of time and energy on in-fighting, mostly on the subject of class distinctions, when they should have been united against an all-male government which refused to give them even the standing of a recognised profession until it came to the point where they dare not refuse.

What makes it so representative? It’s partly because it combines a statistic with the stories of women behind the number – but it’s also a great example of the subjectivity she weaves into her history. She is unafraid of putting forward her own opinion, highlighting where people have acted poorly in history, or bringing out elements of the treatment of women that infuriate her. A Woman’s Place certainly isn’t dry. You can feel Adam’s passion throughout her record, and it makes for a much better book than if it had been otherwise.

To structure her book, Adam characterises decades by significant events and movements. It does mean that these get hermetically sealed within certain periods – so we see changing attitudes to sex in one chapter, or marriage in another, or the role of women in parliament in another, and so on. Naturally these are not things that begin and end within a decade, and you can find yourself thinking (in the middle of a section on divorce law, say) – what about the job market? It was a wise decision on Adam’s part to compartmentalise to an extent, so you just have to go with it.

While I knew a large amount of what Adam covers – as much of it overlaps with things I’ve studied in my own academic research – there was still an awful lot that was new to me. As one instance, I didn’t know about the way the suffrage movement turned their efforts fully to the war effort at the outbreak of the First World War – putting their original mission on hold in an instant. Adam describes Millicent Fawcett’s decision in a very evocative way: ‘Only the age-old obligation of women, to be self-effacing and self-sacrificing, to give up their own less important interests when a men’s crisis arose, still remained.’

Note that she says ‘obligation’ rather than ‘character’. This isn’t something that is inherent to Fawcett and her ilk – it is an expectation imposed on them, and to women throught this book. So much of this book is really a history of the way men have treated women – how their decisions and impositions either expanded or limited women’s lives. That’s not to do down the work women did to effect change (and a small group of men who battled alongside them) – just to comment that, sadly often, change happened when powerful men stopped being obstacles.

During the war, women’s lives changed dramatically: they were not only allowed to start working, but actually encouraged to. Adam turns her attention to the ways this worked, particularly on the question of equal pay. It’s a theme that recurs throughout A Woman’s Place – and I hope you’re prepared to be infuriated by the different, feeble reasons that powerful men gave to avoid passing equal pay legislation, and the similarly callous ways that they evaded paying it once legislation was passed. From the outset, though, two workplaces offered equal pay without quibble. I could have guessed for a week and I don’t think I’d have come up with the correct two:

The London bus conductresses were one of the only two groups of women workers who were given equal pay for equal work at once, without question. The others were the women welders, who had been trained by an organisation set up by the one-time London Society for Women’s Suffrage

Speaking of war, Adam says ‘a quick change of character has been demanded of them [women] every ten years or so of this century. Men are not required to be flexible in the same way.’ That seemed a rare misfire in A Woman’s Place. What greater ‘flexibility’ could be required then to be taken from your office job or factory and be told you have to start killing people in a foreign trench? There is no onus on A Woman’s Place to cover men’s 20th-century experiences, but – while I see what she’s getting at – this is quite a silly statement.

And the downside to a book that relishes in its subjectivity is, of course, that it might date horribly. Surprisingly little of substance has dated in the book since it’s 1975 publication – the two things that struck me were the assumption that there would be no minimum wage, and the other assumption that university education was free. But then there are paragraphs like this, about the high death count in the First World War leading to large numbers of unmarried women:

The war years, which had yielded such a rich harvest to the women struggling for sex equality, had cost them too much. All the gains in status and freedom and independence were, in the end, arid and tasteless without their men there to witness them. It meant that young women and girls had to face the prospect of forced virginity, and parents the long boredom of waiting for death without grandchildren to give any meaning to their old age.

This earned three pencilled exclamation marks in my margin! Women’s independence is ‘arid and tasteless’ without men?? Old people have no meaning in their life without grandchildren??? Yikes, Ruth Adam, yikes. I’ll charitably assume you are doing a bit of character work, here. (And let’s not get started on her statement that ‘The Lesbians’ – her capitals – were ‘partly a product of the mutilated society; that is, young women pairing together as a second-best because there were not enough men to go round.’)

But these are minor quibbles in a book that is an extraordinary achievement. I’d bought it, as I will buy any Persephone Book, but I hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic about actually reading it. If it weren’t for A Century of Books, A Woman’s Place could have lived on my shelves for many more years – but I’m so glad it didn’t. Ruth Adam combines an incredible amount of thorough research with a real gift for storytelling. Of course this book doesn’t tell the whole story of British women over the course of 65 years – how could it? – but it is a detailed, captivating portrait of a sizeable portion of that population. Or, to be more accurate, of the expectations they faced and the achievements they managed in the face of them. I’ll close with Adam’s final paragraph:

A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ‘feminine’ and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse; three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.

The Listeners by Monica Dickens – #1970Club

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The 1970 Club is drawing to an end, and I have a LOT of reviews to catch up on – perhaps foolishly, I’ve been away since Thursday. But it’s been great, as always, and Karen and I will be announcing the next club soon.

But, sneaking in to the final hours, I want to write quickly about The Listeners by Monica Dickens. It’s been years since I read any Dickens, M. – I first fell for her for the wonderful comic memoirs One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet (and the slightly less wonderful third in the trilogy, My Turn To Make The Tea). Far more of her output, though, were more serious novels. I bought The Listeners back in 2009 and had long been intrigued by its premise: it follows people who phone the Samaritans and people who answer those calls.

For those not in the know, the Samaritans run a suicide prevention hotline (I don’t know if they’d use that terminology, so forgive me if not), and I believe you can also walk in. It’s been going for a very long time, and Dickens was involved in setting up the first American branch a few years after The Listeners was published. I’m sure the Samaritans has changed a fair bit since the 1970s, and I know a bit about them from when Mum volunteered there a decade or so ago. What hasn’t changed is the non-judgemental way volunteers answer the phones – having absolutely no idea what will be on the other side. Here’s a kind, overworked volunteer called Victoria:

When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

“Samaritans — can I help you?”

The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

We do later learn who is calling, and it is a genuine call. Dickens goes back and forth into different lives, picking up their crises or mundanities. Victoria is sort-of engaged to a man she doesn’t respect; Paul is married to an alcoholic who mocks the Samaritans; Sarah is young and idealistic. On the other side – the people phoning in – we have Billie, who tries to provoke but clearly needs a friend; desperate, sad Tim who ends up in hospital where he’s too scared to give his name, etc etc.

Oh, I really wanted to like this novel. It’s a theme I’ve never read elsewhere, and I trusted Dickens to portray the characters with empathy and warmth. And I think she does that. But what she doesn’t include is any sort of momentum at all. Despite many of these people being in literal life-or-death situations, somehow the novel is turgid and tedious. I believe a thrilling novel can be written about the lowest possible stakes. These characters have huge stakes – but maybe Dickens took that as excitement enough, and forgot to make any of the writing or plotting interesting. We just pop in and out of lives, with minimal character development and no narrative urgency. I ended up skimming the second half of the novel.

Sorry to end the 1970 Club on a downer, but it’s always helpful in any club to give a full overview of the year – including the books that will be going straight to the charity shop!

Island in Moonlight by Kathleen Sully – #1970Club

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You may well know Brad’s blog Neglected Books. As the name suggests, he reads and reviews books that are neglected – but we’re not talking about authors who could do with a boost, like E.M. Delafield or Rose Macaulay. We’re talking authors who have almost entirely disappeared from the world – their books are near-impossible to track down, and often Brad is the only person to have written anything substantial about them online. One author he often mentions is Kathleen Sully.

Knowing how much he admired Sully, I popped her name on my mental list and kept an eye out – little expecting to stumble across one in the antiques shop in the village next to mine. It was especially surprising, given that they only have about 100 books for sale. But I came away with a proof copy of Island in Midnight (1970).

There is a slightly odd opening, of two young women sat in a high-class restaurant. They spot an attractive man who comes in – but, as one woman tells the other, ‘he played a mean trick on me’. She thought she was accompanying him to a party – but, instead, he delivered her to a friend who wanted to have an affair. And the friend was blind.

That’s the last we see of those women, but we are introduced to Alex (the blind man) and his friend Max, who goes out of his way to help Alex cheat on his wife. From this introduction, we shift into Alex’s first-person viewpoint. This is how it starts…

Until you’re blind, you don’t know what sight is – that is, if you go blind after having perfect sight. Close your eyes, bandage them, then walk about in the room you know the best – perhaps your bedroom. You thought you knew where the dresser was – eh? You’ve banged your shin, knocked over a lamp – broken the damned thing, no doubt, and landed up in a corner. And you think you know which corner. But it isn’t. And you’re so damned confused that you’re afraid to move again for a minute or two. When you do, you move slowly, cautiously, ready for anything – even a stuffed tiger that your wife bought from a sale that day and didn’t tell you about. And all the while – and this is the worst part – you expect a light to be switched on.

Alex lost his sight in an accident that we never really learn about. I quite liked Sully’s refusal to dress up the narrative with unnecessary plot details – the reader needs to know that Alex is blind, and isn’t able to come to terms with it; we don’t need to know the ins and outs of how it happened. Sully has a stripped-back approach to storytelling, more invested in how people react to their immediate and latest environment, without dwelling unduly on the past.

After an unfortunate sexual exploit, Alex’s wife intends to file for divorce and he determines to leave his current life and his homeland. Though his powers of visual recall are fading, there is one exception to this rule: an island he visited when he was only 20 years old. This is many decades in the past, but he has carried the experience with him ever since as some sort of exemplar of paradise.

Even as I write this, I can see the sweep of the bay as the ship pulled up to the tiny landing stage. The water was as transparent as the air and sky. And blue: the kind of blue you never see in this country. The white buildings set the blue off and the sand was pure gold, with gold’s soft glitter. There were oranges and lemons ripening in the orchards and the leaves of those trees were dark and polished, casting purple shadows. All shadows had intense colour on the island – no greys. The natives of the island were as beautiful as the flowers – and as innocent. And it seemed to me that there was always music: everybody had an instrument and played the thing. I promised myself an accordion but never bought one.

You can see how this sort of idyllic vision would have stayed with him. Impetuously, Alex determines to return to the island and start a new life there. He’s as selfish in this decision as he is in every other. Sully doesn’t waste too much time trying to make Alex a sympathetic character: he is monstrously self-interested, with affections for others but no pretence that he would ever put their needs ahead of his.

His chauffeur, Pell, is persuaded to accompany Alex to the island and get him set up there. As it approaches, Pell (whose perspective we get throughout his chapter) struggles to align what he’s seeing with Alex’s memories. Rather than lapping Meditterean shores in bright sunshine, he sees ‘grey water lashing at the low concrete wall of the water-front’.

Out of season, the island is miserable. Alex is spared the bleakness of the visuals, and can superimpose his recollections of the island of his youth – but he can’t ignore how abandoned and hopeless the island feels. There are no tourists, little industry, and a crowd of locals without much going for them. There’s Lyn, a tart-with-a-heart type who is running low on ‘heart’; there’s the proprietor of Joe’s restaurant whose fondness for Alex will only run as far as his income; there’s Willis, who agrees to be a sort of Man Friday for Alex while supposedly looking out for somewhere he can live – though, knowing this will be the end of their financial relationship, is in no hurry to secure anywhere.

As the story develops, perhaps the most important relationship is one suffused in memories – the woman he had a brief affair with back when he was 20, and the possible consequences of that affair all these decades later…

I know Brad doesn’t think much of Island in Moonlight, but I thought it was really good. I can’t compare with Sully’s other writing, as this is my first of her novels, but I was very much attracted by her writing style. It is sparse, often dialogue-heavy, and the shifts into different characters’ first-person narratives is done sharply, entering straight into their mindset without any fanfare. The plot whizzes by, if it can be called a plot, and there is precious little character development. But there is such an assurance to Sully’s writing that I felt totally confident in being taken wherever she wanted to take me. Island in Moonlight is an odd, sparse book that breaks a whole lot of conventional novelistic rules without putting anything too experimental in their place – and it sold me on Sully. I’ll definitely keep looking out for her.

Trespasses by Paul Bailey – #1970Club

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When I reviewed Jenny Offill’s brilliant novel Dept. of Speculation earlier in the year, I asked for recommendations for other books told in fragments or vignettes. The comment section has lots of brilliant suggestions, but I don’t think anybody mentioned Paul Bailey’s Trespasses (1970). The fragmentary style may be in vogue now, but Bailey shows that some authors were doing it more than half a century ago.

Trespasses is mostly (by not entirely) told in short, sharp vignettes. They are often headed HER or HIM or THEM or BOY or BEFORE or AFTER – being, in turn, about Ralph, Ellie, them as a couple, Ralph as a child, and then before and after the big event. We learn what that is almost immediately: Ellie died by suicide. With chronology thrown out the window, the reader is flung instantly into a maelstrom of perspectives, events, and memories. Here’s a taste – this is the first page or so:

EARLY

It is May and the sun is shining. It is warm.
Early this morning, walking in the grounds, I stopped before an apple tree. I looked up at its branches, which seemed to droop under the weight of so much white and pink.
My head was empty; I could enjoy the blossom.

HER

She has been dead some weeks. Mrs Dinsdale complained – the state of her bathroom due to all that blood. People who disposed of themselves, she told me, were as inconsiderate as they were wicked. If wicked was putting it too strong, perhaps unnatural was nearer the mark. My wife had gone against nature.

PEACE

Endless green and blue: below and above. And one apple tree – white and pink, because it is always spring – darkening the earth, and fiercely light against the sky.
Some birds, occasionally singing, and a sun just strong enough to look into.

THEN

It was not a scream in the strict sense of the word. It was more like a howl.

We can’t rest in reflections on Ellie’s act, because of the constant jumps in time. Indeed, a funeral is mentioned in the opening pages – but we quickly realise it is Ralph’s father’s funeral, many years earlier. We are wrong-footed so often that you quickly give up trying to work out where you are, and instead take it all in like an abstract painting. What it conveys brilliantly is Ralph’s state of mind, after his wife’s suicide – unable to process anything properly, and disoriented to the point of mental collapse.

But considering how fragmentary, achronological and formally experimental Trespasses is, I was very impressed by how clearly the secondary characters come to life. Through a jigsaw of fleeting encounters, we get to know comic creations like landlady Mrs Dinsdale and her vicious relationship with her daughter, who would now probably be described as ‘sex positive’. Ellie and Ralph’s respective and contrasting upbringings speak a lot to their meeting across class barriers, and their mothers are fun and oddly poignant to spend time with.

I couldn’t decide if their gay friend Bernard was surprisingly progressive for a 1970 novel or not – he is a camp caricature of arch sayings, but nobody seems bothered about his sexuality. He speaks of his own actions with a mixture of shame and shamelessness, and he is one of two background characters given long, non-fragmented sections to narrative about themselves in the second half of the novel. Bailey keeps us on our toes, with this traditional approach to novel writing feeling fresh and even jarring, coming in the midst of the experimental.

The one thing we never get a grasp of (and I think this is a good narrative choice) is why Ellie made the decision to kill herself. When the novel came out, suicide had only been decriminalised in the England for nine years, and I’m sure it wasn’t considered with as much understanding as it is now. It is a bold topic for a novel, and Bailey writes it brilliantly. The experimentalism is never allowed to overshadow character, and Trespasses is first and foremost a book about character – often very amusingly, but there is something deeply moving about Ralph’s raking back and forth through his memories, for clues about what would happen.

I’ve read two Paul Bailey novels – his debut, At the Jerusalem, and now his second. I’ve been unintentionally reading them in order. I don’t see him much discussed now, though he is in fact still alive, but I’d love to hear from anyone else who admires and enjoys his work. And I’m glad the 1970 Club sent me back to my Bailey shelf. In my year of loving fragmentary novels, this is an excellent find.

Treasures of Time by Penelope Lively

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One of the things I love about my book group is how varied our book choices are – not just the latest hit novels, but ranging back over a century and more. Somebody suggested we read some Penelope Lively (she was a local, after all) and we landed on her second novel, Treasures of Time (1979).

The concept feels both modern and somehow very old-fashioned: a TV crew is making a documentary about a late archeologist, Hugh Paxton, and we witness what this exploration looks like in the lives of his widow, daughter, sister-in-law and so on. What makes it feel old-fashioned is how unintrusive the documentary crew is – they aren’t trying to sensationalise anything, and any secrets that are dug up will be a byproduct of a fairly earnest attempt to Hugh Paxton’s life. (The resultant documentary, which we see towards the end of the novel, seems laughably slow.)

But the late Hugh Paxton is not the most interesting person in this book, nor is his relationship with anybody paramount. To me, the most fascinating dynamic in this novel is between Hugh’s widow, Laura, and their daughter Kate. (Could Lively have chosen any more stereotypical middle-class white women’s names than Laura and Kate! Endless mid-century novels have one or the other.)

Laura is not a monster. To most of her acquaintance, she is probably considered charming and capable. But to Kate, she is often brutal – brutal with the polite kindness of a mother who ‘wants what’s best’ for her daughter and continually belittles her. She makes constantly clear that Kate is a disappointment: not beautiful enough, not successful enough, not elegant enough, not married enough. There is a very telling moment early on where Kate tries to decide what to wear to see her mother – knowing that she will be criticised if it is too casual (as being disrespectful and unflattering) and equally criticsed if she dresses up (silly and over the top). But she can’t help try, forever reframing her understanding of herself through her mother’s gaze.

Kate is no pushover herself. She is clearly damaged by her domineering, probably well-meaning mother – and it comes out as determination and bad decision making.

There are a scattering of sympathetic characters in Treasures of Time, with my favourite perhaps being the enthusiastic, wrong-footed documentary maker. But Lively isn’t very interested in whether people are sympathetic or not. Rather, she is searing in how she presents any human relationships – perhaps more at home when describing familial relationships than romantic ones.

Lively is also very good on class. I thought this was brilliant (and heaven knows I still encounter enough middle-class people desperate to be considered busy beyond belief in their very ordinary lives):

He had discovered with surprise, on his arrival in the southern white-collar counties, the furious busyness of the professional classes. You could not hold up your head in society, it seemed, if you were unable to claim intolerable pressures, both inside an occupation and, even more, outside it. At a sherry party in his supervisors house, he had listened with interest to a group of (he gathered) unemployed women vying with one another in their accounts of lives have never a spare moment to, dizzy in the service of Parent Teacher Associations, Conservation Societies, adult literacy campaigns and ornithology. Going home again, he found himself taking a new view of his parents’ untroubled appreciation of the eight hour day in the five day week. If he had asked his father if he was busy, he would have stared in incomprehension: if you were at work, you were at work, and if you were at home you were at home, and that was all there was to it.

This is all sounding like a very positive review, and I do admire a lot about Penelope Lively’s writing. But I’ll end by admitting that I do struggle to love her novels. I’ve read a handful, and indeed some with very overlapping themes (a biographer in According to Mark; reflections on a long life in Moon Tiger) and it can feel like I’ve looking through a clouded pane of class. It is expertly done, but I don’t quite feel connected to it. I admire, but I haven’t yet felt touched by her writing.

My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

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It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

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My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.

 

A couple of #ABookADayInMay disappointments

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Inevitably, not every book in A Book A Day in May is going to be a success. The past couple of days have both been novellas that are gonna go straight to a charity shop (unless someone from the UK would like me to post to you – in which case, let me know). (You might not want to when you’ve read the reviews.)

The Cheval Glass (1973) by Ursula Bloom

When I read Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex – one of Bloom’s pseudonyms, and now in the British Library Women Writers series – I was amazed that a book so enjoyable and well-crafted could be written by an author of 500+ novels. How could one maintain that level of quantity AND quality? Well, I’ve long suspected that she saved her best work for the ‘Mary Essex’ name – and The Cheval Glass suggests that might be the case. It’s the first fiction I’ve read under her own name, and it’s pretty bad.

Pearl is a young girl living in a family’s ancestral home. Her mother Mary was taken very ill during childbirth and becomes an invalid, having to stay in bed most of the time – so Pearl entertains herself by rambling around the large house and its attics, inventing friends to play with. More on that later.

While Mary is ill, her husband (James) falls in love with Hilary, an artist who has rented a house in the village. This happens entirely off the page. We no sooner encounter her than this love is taken as read. Curiously (in one of several signs of terrible editing), we hear about the meeting twice. We also hear, twice, about Mary getting terminal cancer. Quite how that relates to difficult childbirth, I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s the sort of novel where people decide to Honourably Do The Right Thing and then tell each other about it thoroughly unnatural dialogue. Here’s James, speaking to Hilary…

In a low voice he said, “I could never part with you, Hilary. This love has come to pass and is for ever. When the hour comes and she goes,” he choked a trigle uneasily, for it hurt him, “when the hour is here, we will marry after a reasonable waiting period, and the neighbourhood will think that we became so accustomed to each other during her illness that this automatically ensued. They will accept it as being that.”

Alongside all of this is the significance of the cheval glass. It has been in the family for generations – and, in it, Pearl starts to see one of her ancestors from generations ago. Here she is, telling Hilary about it:

“There is a lady here,” she whispered, complacemently and calmly. “Another lady,” she said, as though this was merely a piece of information which she accepted as being true. No more.

“Another lady?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the glass,” said the child, and stared up at her with a curious look in her eyes. She went on more slowly. “It is so very difficult to tell anybody who is grown-up, but she lives here. She does not always come when I want her. But most times. She is here.”

It’s a promising premise, but Bloom does very little about it. Everybody more or less immediately accepts that the mirror is a portal to the past, and ‘the lady’ (always in inverted commas) doesn’t seem to have anything more pressing to pass on than vague relationship advice to Hilary. Poor Pearl seems to disappear from the novel after the first half, having been seemingly its heroine, and The Cheval Glass becomes about Hilary’s rather tedious love triangle/square.

It’s a very weak novel, and shows clear signs of having been written at speed without any editing. Every sentence is clunky, and I found it rather a chore to get through. From now on, I think I’ll stick to Bloom when she appears as Mary Essex. Such a shame, since the cover is so striking.

The Grasshoppers Come (1931) by David Garnett

This one isn’t bad so much as it is not my taste. From the title, I thought it would be about nature – and that is how things start, with a three-page description of the heat and the ‘stridulations’ of grasshoppers:

As each day of the early summer passed, the sun grew hotter, the fine windless weather more settled, and the stridulation noisier, more incessant, and the little whirlpools, which seemed to catch up the flying insects over the reeds, larger and more powerful, holding them up longer in flight.

But then it becomes clear that it’s other flying things that are going to take centre stage – for this is also an aerodrome. Garnett cleverly describes the planes in similar manner:

Round and round they flew, some higher up wandering off a little way over the surrounding country, others lower down, and these lower machines were continually shutting off their engines and gliding almost silently in to land, dropping their tails as they settled down and bounced upon the earth, when, after a short run, they stopped until suddenly the engine was opened up again, and they would roar across the grass into the eye of the wind and fly away.

From here, it becomes a novella about life at an air base and descriptions of flying, with a variety of pilots I struggled to tell apart except one of them is a woman (in an era where all female pilots seemed to be celebrities). I suppose, in 1931, reading about flying was quite thrilling. I found it all a little tepid.

The Grasshoppers Come then gets into adventure mode, I think, with all manner of challenges and obstacles to the flying. Towards the end someone is stranded after a crash and has to survive of the self-same grasshoppers of the title, and I found this section the most compelling – perhaps because it didn’t rely on flying as inherently interesting.

So, there we go. Two more novellas off the shelf and off to a charity shop!