1980s

Old Soldiers by Paul Bailey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 21

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I really should read more by Paul Bailey. Whenever I do, I’m reminded what an excellent writer he is. And Old Soldiers (1980) is another tour de force from him.

It feels odd to call a novella a tour de force, but in 130 pages he manages to create a world – or perhaps several. It opens with this excellent line:

Too sick with grief for tears, Victor Harker arrived in London smiling.

Victor Harker is starting a new life without his wife, Stella. Throughout the novella, Stella floats in snapshots – she was clearly a plain-speaking, kind, lively woman. Perhaps it is easier to show a successful marriage in retrospect than on the page, but Bailey does a very impressive job, in these fleeting glances of a marriage, to show how deeply they loved and needed each other – and how alone Victor Harker now feels without her.

But Harker is not allowed to be lonely for long. Bursting into assumed friendship with him is Captain Hal Standish. He is boisterous, vulgar, and unstoppable. Harker doesn’t necessarily want to stop him. While he finds a lot about Standish overpowering, he is also passively open to whatever overtures are being made. You get the sense that he is most content in passivity.

After a funny, energetic scene, we follow Captain Hal. Or, as the narrative says, ‘The man who was sometimes known as Captain Hal’. It quickly becomes clear that this is only one of several aliases he goes by – apparently for his sheer self-entertainment.

And a curious entertainment it is, too. You might assume he masquerades as a relatively well-to-do Captain to swindle people of a higher class – but his next character is a beggar with no teeth and filthy clothing. He stumbles into a shelter, hob-nobbing with down and outs. It is clear that whatever is motivating him to adopt these different personalities, it is not avarice.

Old Soldiers follows the two of them, together and apart, and Bailey manages to hold humour and poignancy in tension expertly. There are some lines that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the more literary dirty magazines…

Sex with Augusta or Myfanwy was always a robust business; with Chloe it had gone beyond the merely lively into a state that verged on gladiatorial.

…but there are also moments, particularly with Harker, which are beautiful reflections on lost love. He is also very adept at dialogue, and much of the book is in that form. I think the humour stands out more than the poignancy in the novella over all, and Bailey has a lightness of touch to it all that means Hal’s oddities are played for curious oddness rather than psychologised. Until… well, the ending is very satisfying, I’ll say that.

I’ve read three or four Bailey novels/novellas now and they’re always masterly. And yet I seldom see his name mentioned in the blogosphere. Any recommendations for others to try?

The 27th Kingdom by Alice Thomas Ellis – #ABookDayInMay – Day 14

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The 27th Kingdom (1982) by Alice Thomas Ellis sounds like it might be a fantasy novel, and the curious cover to my edition makes it seem like some sort of water-based dystopia. Well, the title is just a reference to the many countries that Aunt Irene’s ancestors have lived in before they land in the 27th – Chelsea. Aunt Irene (she is always called ‘Aunt Irene’ by the narrative) lives there in 1954 with her careless nephew Kyril, a lodger they’re sick of called Mr Sirocco, some feuding occasional domestic help, and a range of eccentric neighbours who regard one another with the usual mixture of goodwill and malice.

Into this world comes Valentine, a postulant at a nunnery for whom a stay with Aunt Irene might well be considered a test. She is sent there by the Reverend Mother for as long as an apple remains ripe in her desk drawer – just one of the many unusual details that are dealt out with a matter-of-factness by Alice Thomas Ellis’s immensely enjoyable narrative.

She read her letter again, and because it made her cross she ate another piece of toast, reflecting that it was always one’s family who annoyed one most and made one fat. Simply that her sister was now called ‘Reverend Mother’ made Aunt Irene cross and inclined to put too much butter on her toast. As far as she was concerned, her sister was a naughty girl called Berthe, with dark flying hair and a dipping hem to her dress. She hadn’t agreed particularly well with that girl, but she had forgotten; and she resented her transformation into the stately virgin in the stiff robes that were so alarmingly clean. Aunt Irene herself was clean, but her clothes were soft and scented.

Aunt Irene is a glorious character in a novel of glorious characters. She is obsessed with the tax man and certain that he is stalking her, she loves eating horseflesh and has an amicable relationship with an underhand butcher, and she has the sort of idiosyncratic Christian faith that is one of many things that reminds me of Muriel Spark’s writing. She certainly believes in God and angels, but largely because she can’t imagine anybody inventing the meringue without supernatural intervention. ‘To Aunt Irene the Ten Commandments seemed almost insignificant compared with the astonishing miracle of what you could do with an egg.’

Valentine is very different from the environment she finds herself in – mixed-race, from an unspecified distant island, and certainly less worldly than the other inhabitants of this unsalubrious part of Chelsea (for such things there were in 1954). I found that I understood her less than the other characters, and she seems more of a catalyst than a character to get to know deeply. But her reverence and good nature do not stop her being blunt and ironic. Alice Thomas Ellis’s dialogue is, again, very Sparkian – people saying exactly what they mean, often at cross-purposes, but with a directness that means even the strangest conversations do seem to be communicative.

And the narrative is my chief joy in The 27th Kingdom. The most unusual things are written with total matter-of-factness – and elegant, even profound, things are delivered pat alongside the everyday. Here are a couple of examples I enjoyed:

On the way home they passed the Bunch of Grapes, Major Mason visible through the open door of the public bar. Aunt Irene pointed him out to Valentine as one of the sights of the district.

Valentine said nothing, but Aunt Irene was suddenly visited by a sensation of the sea, very deep and green and cold, and shivered with the surprise she always felt when reminded that she truly possessed a psychic gift and was not a liar.

and

“It’s time something happened,” said Aunt Irene the next morning. “Something pleasant. Nothing’s happened in ages.”

Valentine was surprised to hear this. It seemed to her that things here happened every moment and she missed the convent where time was afforded the respect befitting one of God’s more subtle creations.

Some of the novellas I’ve read this month have been all about atmosphere over plot. Well, The 27th Kingdom – despite Aunt Irene’s protests – is rammed with plot. It’s equally rammed with characters, any one of whom could have helmed their own novel. We race through, enjoying the brio, and she maintains the same breakneck, bizarre, very funny tone throughout.

I didn’t particularly love the first one or two Alice Thomas Ellis books I read, but I’m so glad I persevered. The most recent two I’ve read – The Inn at the Edge of the World and The 27th Kingdom – have been absolute successes for me. Any favourites among her oeuvre for any Alice Thomas Ellis fans out there?

A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam – #ABookADayInMay – Day 12

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I bought A Little Stranger (1989) by Candia McWilliam at a National Trust secondhand bookshop, not knowing anything about it but intrigued by the enthusiastic quotes on the back – and, I’ll admit, its brevity. At only 135 pages, I knew it could fit into one of my May reading projects. The quote that won me over was from an unnamed reviewer in the Guardian: “Compelling and unsettling… McWilliam uses the conventions of middlebrow fiction to slice away its usual reassurance… very funny too, a comedy of good manners in which each well-meaning utterance becomes a source of confusion and dismay.”

I think that’s a pretty good indicator of the novella’s tone. Daisy is the narrator – often unrealiable, to herself as much as anyone else. She lives with her husband Solomon and their son John in a large house with servants, and they need a new nanny for John: here enters Margaret Pride. From the outset, Daisy is looking for relationship and information, and Margaret is equally reticent on either front. She is engaged to a man she says nothing about, gives little detail about her previous employment, and quietly disregards the overtures of interest that Daisy offers.

She did not speak of her parents in the round. She appeared to have no childhood memories. When she released details, they were flat and lifeless as details from an instruction leaflet. It was as though she described self-assembly furniture.

As Daisy shows her round the house, it is clear that this won’t be the relationship she is hoping for.

She looked around like someone wondering whether or not to buy, and again said nothing. Sensible, really, not to be beguiled by things. After all, the child was the point. In ‘her’ sitting-room and the nursery bathroom she also passed no remark. She must perhaps be shy. Her last job has been in much the same sort of place, but perhaps I intimidated her. I am told I can. I am taller than most and have more hair. I also look at other people very hard.

Daisy and Margaret are both fascinating characters. Margaret is interesting because she is an enigma – and, as we can only see her through Daisy’s eyes, we have to glean what we can through this refraction. Daisy, on the other hand, is fascinating because she is such a bad interpreter of almost everything, including herself. She is constantly trying to understand other people, but superimposes her own weak, optimistic readings before she can come to any more justifiable conclusions. The reader is suspicious of Margaret long before Daisy is, though we can’t work out exactly why.

That’s what is so unsettling about the book. There is a sense that something will burst, or some truth will come to light. Too much is kept hidden for us to trust Daisy’s interpretation of events.

And yet Daisy is a sharp, funny character on other grounds. I really enjoyed some of the incidental irony at contemproary culture. She describes an author who ‘could not write but could not help selling’, and also:

I spent the evening, after a supper of sweetbreads and rye bread, reading. I could not see that there was much on television but serials about the effects of illness or of wealth. I could not differentiate between these programmes, though the outfits worn by the victims sometimes gave a hint, and the terminally ill, or those who impersonated them, appeared to wear even more make-up than the terminally rich.

As for the title, it does describe Margaret – but it is also, of course, a reference to pregnancy. ‘Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger.’ And not long into Margaret’s tenure, Daisy discovers she is pregnant – which becomes another thread in this unsettling story.

For much of this novella, I was filled with admiration. Particularly towards the beginning, I found the balance of intrigue, eeriness, and humour worked really well. Sometimes the floweriness of the language (which suited Daisy’s character) did go rather too far, to the point that I didn’t quite know what was going on in the scene – but it was an enjoyably engineered tone and the two characters were expertly handled.

But… I shan’t spoil it, but the end of the book is such a tonal shift – and, frankly, misogynistic – that it really coloured when beforehand. There are twists that felt unearned and inartistic. It was also increasingly confusing, and not in a way that I thought was deliberate. I found it such a pity, and it went from being a book I was delighted to have discovered to one that will probably be heading to a charity shop. It’s all the more frustrating, because McWilliam is clearly such a good writer and the premise was excellent.

Sorry to end on a sour note, but you can join in my frustration!

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls – #ABookADayInMay – Day 6

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Cover of Mrs Caliban, showing cartoon illustrations of Dorothy and Larry swimming

Mrs Caliban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls was all over the place when it was reprinted by Faber a few years ago – one of those reprints that dominated end-of-year lists. It certainly caught my attention, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my friend Clare gave me a copy for my birthday last year, and I raced through its 117 pages this evening.

The title obviously reminds us of the monstrous figure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but Mrs Caliban is, in fact, a very ordinary housewife – Dorothy Caliban. She has gone through the unbearable trauma of a child dying, followed shortly by a miscarriage. Her husband is having an affair, not very subtly. A vision of the American dream of white-picket domesticity has been systematically torn apart, and yet Dorothy cannot escape from the role she had anticipated playing in it. Despite having to grieve the children and being poorly treated by the husband, she must still be the housewife. She must still wash and fold laundry, clean the house, cook the meals.

The only thing that disturbs this picture is that she might well be going mad. The announcers on the TV sometimes talk directly to her, for instance. It seems like this paranoia might become the plot – but it is sidelined for something more significant, which happens right in the middle of a very domestic scene.

Back in the kitchen again, she had all the salad ingredients out, chopping up carrots and celery with her favourite sharp vegetable knife, had put some potato chips and nuts in bowls and just slid some cheese on crackers under the grill. Then she raced for the bathroom in the spare room.

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy had earlier seen that ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’ had escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research, with warnings on the news about his terrible dangerousness. He has, in his escape, killed two of the scientists in brutal ways. And yet – she offers him some vegetables. He politely accepts. She slips out of the room to give her husband his anticipated meal, but returns to have a gentle, quiet conversation with this ‘Aquarius’ – who is, in fact, called Larry. He speaks perfect English, and seems to post no danger to her. And she scarcely seems surprised. I suppose, when so many terrible, dramatic things have happened in your life, you can take something like this in your stride.

Larry has a head like a frog, a body like a man, and strong, green arms. It is difficult for Ingalls to describe him in a way that doesn’t make him feel a little gross or like a figure from a supernatural movie – but we see him through Dorothy’s eyes, and she doesn’t flinch. Indeed, his kindness and interest in her are beguiling. It isn’t long before they are having sex (he is, it turns out, very human in that department). They have sex over and over, in any room of the house. It isn’t described at any length, and it certainly isn’t included for titillation. It is just further evidence of Dorothy’s new-found satisfaction in a life that is so deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.

And it turns out that Larry isn’t dangerous, really. He can easily kill – but he only killed his captors because they tortured him sadistically.

“Thank you,” he said. He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she knew of the brutal methods that had been used to ram home the Institute’s policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body.

Dorothy continues to conceal Larry, not even telling her best friend Estelle anything about it. I haven’t mentioned her yet, but she is a bright light in the novella, particularly in the beginning – somebody who has kept her exuberance, and encourages Dorothy, despite the sad and difficult lives they lead.

The end of the novella takes a lurch to the dramatic, with shocking events and revelations that are very different from the domestic scenes and the philosophical discussions between Dorothy and Larry that precede it. Somehow it works – perhaps because they are described with the same steady calmness that seems to shroud the rest of the book, however strange the events described. Because this is, of course, really a novella about the breakdown of a marriage and a life. There is a well-played ambiguity about Larry’s existence – could he be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination, like the TV newsreaders? – but it hardly matters, because either way this is a feminist subversion of the lives lived behind the immaculate front doors of suburbia. Ingalls plays the bizarreness of the plot with a steady hand that leaves the reader feeling that Dorothy’s unexceptional, unhappy life is the real point of fascination – right through to a final line that is very moving, even if you’re not exactly why.

Two wintery novellas

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I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas! Perhaps I should apologise for being quite an intermittent blogger for the past month or two, but those sorts of apologies always presuppose that anybody has noticed! Let’s not flatter ourselves that your festive season was spoiled by my absence.

And since the festive season is not over, I wanted to share a couple of wintery novellas that I read recently. It’s a bit late to get in the mood for Christmas, but I think these would be rather lovely at any point during this time of year.

Lanterns Across the Snow (1987) by Susan Hill

There is a real luxury to this book – or at least to my 1987 edition from Michael Joseph. It’s less than 80 pages, but the wide margins, hardback cover, and occasional woodcut-esque illustraiionss by Kathleen Lindsley make it feel precious. I don’t doubt that it was designed to appeal as a Christmas present – and that is exactly what it was for me in 2019. This is how it opens:

Last night, the snow fell. And then I began to remember. I remembered all the things that I had forgotten. Or so it had seemed.

But not forgotten after all. They were all there, stored away like treasures.

Last night, the snow fell.

Fanny is an old woman. There is nobody left who remembers her childhood – which must be around the turn of the century. But she remembers – and she settles down to reflect on one particular Christmas, when she was nine years old.

Her father was a rector, and so Christmas is a time where the whole household is busy: not just the busyness of celebration and family, but the high point of the church calendar. While there will be a church-full on Christmas Day, the first day that Fanny remembers is Christmas Eve – and she slips down the path between rectory and church to join in a service that her father is giving to one man, the verger. Nobody else has attended, but Fanny’s presence is noticed by her father, even if he doesn’t comment. The words of Evensong are there in the dialogue – “O Lord, save they people / And bless thine inheritance” – that have a beautiful timelessness to them. They are words I say and hear once a month in our local church still, and they are woven into Fanny’s memories as the rhythm of everyday life – and communication with a much-loved, now long-gone, Father.

Over Christmas Day itself, two important things happen to people in the parish. A baby is born; an elderly parishioner dies. We see them through the excited, cautious, wondering perspective of young Fanny – filtered quietly through the distanct perspective of old Fanny. Though birth and death are, of course, defining experiences, this particular birth and death do not define Fanny. These are important things that once happened to other people, near her – remembered as a particularly significant Christmas, but moreso as representative of a world that she once lived in that is far away now.

Lanterns Across the Snow is a simple story, simply told, but more than the sum of its parts. Hill laces it beautifully with emotion and reflection that is too subtle to be simply nostalgia – and yet, nostalgia is the best word I can think for it. The novella is moving and poignant. There are no surprise twists or sudden ironies. It is a beautiful little tale and perfect for a cold winter evening.

Snowflake (1952) by Paul Gallico

There is something about Michael Joseph and beautiful little wintery books, as they also published this 64-page novella by Paul Gallico. If you have much familiarity with Gallico, you’ll know that he can veer in different directions. Some of his books are fey, whimsical, and maybe even sickly sweet. Some are vicious, dark, even shocking. And many combine elements of the two in a way that feels distinctly Gallicoian.

Here’s how the story opens:

The Snowflake was born on a cold, winter’s day far up in the sky, many miles above the earth.

Her birth took place in the heart of a grey cloud that sswept over the land driven by icy winds.

It all came about from one moment to the next. At first there was only the swollen cloud moving over the tops of the mountains. Then it began to snow. And where but a second before there had been nothing, now there was Snowflake and all her brothers and sisters falling from the sky.

The rest of the novella follows Snowflake’s life – and Gallico does lean into anthropomorphism. Depending on your taste, he may lean too far into it. It’s this element of the story that brings both the fey and the occasional shock. Snowflake finds herself lying on the ground, enjoying the beautiful surroundings – then in sharp pain when a sledge cuts through her. Being piled on by further layers of snow crushes her shape and makes it hard to breath. Respite seems to come in being massed into the form of a snowman – but it is also humiliating and sore.

Who would ever think of snowflakes feeling pain? There is much that is about beauty, performance and sparkle – the sort of things you might expect from a Disneyfication of snow – but Gallico insists upon the rough with the smooth. Melting is next – but don’t worry, it isn’t armageddon for little Snowflake. Instead, she meets Raindrop in a stream. They marry (!) and have children (!!) and despite how ridiculous that sounds, there is something curiously magical in the way Gallico describes their contented time living together in a lake.

But this is temporary. They eventually are siphoned out of the lake – and, worst of worst fears, used in a firefighter’s hose to be sprayed into a fire. And so the exciting, unexpected story continues.

If someone described Snowflake to me, I’m not sure I would rush towards it. But Gallico is so unusual and excellent a writer that he persuadses the reader – this reader, at least – to come along for the ride in the most unusual of stories. It is curiously emotional, and he whirls together the beautiful, poignant, fanciful and dark into one surprisingly successful mix.

Don’t be fooled by that lovely cover. This isn’t a story for children. Rather, it ends up being a strangely affecting take on the highs and lows of almost any life – and the hope for satisfaction when it is all looked back upon as one whole.

A couple of underwhelming #ABookADayInMay choices – Days 28 + 29

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Coming towards the end of A Book A Day In May, I’ve read a couple of books that weren’t particularly bad, but left me pretty underwhelmed. So let’s race through them.

One Writer's Beginnings: Amazon.co.uk: Welty, Eudora: 9781982152109: Books

One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) by Eudora Welty

I’ve only read two of Eudora Welty’s novels – The Optimist’s Daughter, which I thought was brilliant, and Delta Wedding, which I didn’t. Years and years ago I started One Writer’s Beginnings but somehow never finished it – and, considering it’s 102 pages, I should have taken that as a red flag. Well, I started again and now I’ve read it, but it felt very meh.

One Writer’s Beginnings comes from three lectures that Welty gave at Harvard, and I wonder what they made of them there. Really, this is my fault though. I always find the childhood sections of autobiographies the least interesting sections – and One Writer’s Beginnings told me in the title that that’s what it would be. Welty’s three chapters are basically childhood anecdotes and family folklore, and only right at the end do we get anything hinting at her writing career (beyond the odd mention here and there, which presumably reminded Harvard that they’d invited her as a Pulitzer prizewinning author, rather than someone with a diverting childhood).

There’s nothing wrong with her stories, and some of the things her family experienced were heartrending (there is a poignant section where she accidentally learns about the brother who died, and even more poignant that she adds that her parents never mentioned him again). But I found that her novelist’s craft rather deserted her. Even anecdotes that should be interesting in fundamentals come across as curiously uninteresting. I recognise that I’ve not detailed what many of them are, and that’s because I’ve already forgotten almost all of them. I don’t know why One Writer’s Beginnings was so bland to me, but it was. Your mileage may vary.

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Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) by Becky Albertalli

I listened to this young adult novel, having previously watched the film – adaptated under the more crowdpleasing title Love, Simon. It’s about a gay teenager (Simon) who has been emailing another gay teenager – both of them using pseudonyms. The novel is about this e-friendship, wondering who ‘Blue’ might be, and the wider group of Simon’s friends and family.

I’d enjoyed the film, but found the book a bit slow by comparison. I didn’t much care about any of Simon’s friends, and the subplots involving them were a bit of a slog. The book picked up towards the end – and, thank you fading memory, I had misremembered the identity of ‘Blue’ – so that revelation came as a surprise the second time around. I guess either I’m too old for this sort of book, or the makers of the film turned it into something a bit zippier. (As a sidenote, and I’ve found this a few times, listening to an audiobook with lots of emails in it is a mistake, cos you can skim over the email address / time stamp / subject line when you’re reading it, and it is tedious to hear all these read out over and over again in an audiobook.)

So, not the best couple of days, so let’s be optimistic for finishing off May well with my next two choices.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster – #ABookADayInMay Days 23-25

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I was away for the weekend with my church, and so I thought what better what to efficiently cover off three titles for A Book A Day In May than with a trilogy in one paperback? I was also chatting to my friend Tom recently, who has been reading the graphic novel versions of The New York Trilogy, and his descriptions of the original novels were enough to intrigue me. Clearly I’d been intrigued enough already to buy a copy in 2019, but it might have languished on my shelves indefinitely without that final push.

The New York Trilogy consists of three novels – City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986) – but you’ll almost invariably find them put together into this trilogy. They are totally separate novellas (well, so we presume for most of the time), but they are consistently, delicately, mysteriously interwoven – well, ‘interwoven’ feels too closely connected. Rather, they comment on each other by sheer proximity, and while you could disentangle any one from the others, there is a richness that comes from considering them as a whole.

It always feels strange to write about a book so well-known – though the sparseness of the Wikipedia page does make me question if I really am the last person to read them. They have been described as postmodernist takes on detective fiction, but if that description leaves you cold then fear not. I found this trilogy extraordinary – exactly the right amount of cleverness, so we are relish it alongside the author, rather than feeling alienated by it.

Ok, Simon, but what are they actually about? Let’s start with City of Glass. Daniel Quinn writes detective fiction under the name William Wilson. One day, he gets a telephone call asking if he is Paul Auster (!) – and he decides to assume that name to meet with Peter Stillman and his wife, to investigate the future murder of Peter Stillman by his father (since Peter Stillman is sure that his father will soon kill him). Along the way, Quinn-as-Auster also adopts the name of the detective he writes. The slippage of identity is a key theme of all three novellas, but particularly City of Glass. The person you pretend to be, or the person you are assumed to be, is elevated to a level of power that destabilises your own identity.

As he wandered through the station, he reminded himself of who he was supposed to be. The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was not altogether unpleasant. Although he still had the same body, the same mind, the same thoughts, he felt as though he had somehow been taken out of himself, as if he no longer had to walk around with the burden of his own consciousness. By a simple trick of the intelligence, a deft little twist of naming, he felt incomparably lighter and freer. 

Quinn starts shadowing the suspect, gradually losing his grip on reality. Adopting different identities is a key component of much detective and mystery fiction, of course, but Auster lifts it from its usually functionality in a novel – because it is usually done in order to get more information to convey to the reader, or to accelerate the revelation that comes at the end of the novel. In City of Glass, these sorts of disguises might bring more revelation, in terms of examining Quinn’s multi-layered psyche, but they certainly don’t remove ambiguity. There is no ultimate revelation here. We are taught to find our satisfaction in an entirely different mode from most novels with a detective.

What makes Auster so good is the quality of his writing – and what makes it so refreshing is that he isn’t playing needless games with it. So much postmodern fiction ends up being convoluted and self-indulgent. Or, even if we are being more charitable, the style is co-opted as part of the postmodernism: it intends to confuse, or blur the boundaries between reality and irreality, or highlight the fictionality of what you are reading. In City of Glass, he lets all of those fascinating things come through character and plot. The writing is just very good, engaging, with a simple lyricism. The sole example of the style itself being used to wrongfoot us is in Peter Stillman the Younger’s dialogue – which reads like a Beckett play:

“So I am telling you about the father. It is a good story, even if I do not understand it. I can tell it to you because I know the words. And that is something, is it not? To know the wards, I mean. Sometimes I am so proud of myself! Excuse me. This is what my wife says. She says the father talked about God. That is a funny word to me. When you put it backwards, it spells dog. And a dog is not much like God, is it? Woof woof. Bow wow. Those are dog words. I think they are beautiful. So pretty and true. Like the words I make up.”

One novella in, I was already hooked. The second novella is rather shorter than the other two (which worked very well for me, as the only full day I was away, with a busy timetable). I don’t have much to say about Ghosts, to be honest. It is also about a private eye (Blue) who is paid by White to investigate Black. Other characters are called Brown, Green, Rose, Gray… you get the idea. There is, incidentally, a lovely call-back to this naming in the final novella. A lot of the things I admired and enjoyed in City of Glass were also present in Ghosts, but to me it felt like a less ambitious and less successful version of the earlier novella.

And, finally, The Locked Room. On the surface of it, this is the most straightforward of the three. The unnamed narrator is a writer who hasn’t amounted to his ambitions – but discovers that his childhood best friend, Fanshawe, has abandoned his wife (in each novella, someone walks out of their life completely) and left behind suitcases of manuscripts. The narrator knew that Fanshawe had written as a teenager, but didn’t realise how diligently he had continued – or how brilliant he was. The narrator becomes as a sort of agent for the absent Fanshawe, to the extent that some people believe he is the author of the resultant novels, poetry, and plays. He also falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife and adopts his son, so that their lives begin to merge – but then Fanshawe writes to the narrator.

Towards the close of the novella, we realise how it relates to the other two – particularly to the first. But, before that, it offers a clearer example of what a talented writer Auster is. Without the same level of identity trickeries of the first two novellas, we can simply admire the storytelling, the prose, the exploration of character. The title The Locked Room obviously refers to a classic subset of detective fiction – but we are told that the locked room is the mind.

There are a couple of telling moments, offered as conclusions. ‘In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose’ – and ‘In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself’. They are the narrator’s conclusions rather than the author’s, of course, but they are also clearly untrue in the crafting of a novel. A crafted work of fiction is not chance, and every life portrayed must be reduced, truncated, into a synecdochal whole. Subtly – more subtly than most postmodernist works I’ve read – Auster sews a seam of self-awareness: this is a novella, but no novella can achieve the aim of portraying reality. It can only succeed by acknowledging its limitations.

I was often reminded of Milan Kundera, my favourite postmodernist writer, particularly in the way unusual anecdotes, historical figures, and other famous works of fiction are referenced and incorporated into a sort of intertextual patchwork. Sometimes the link between the tangent and the story isn’t clear (e.g. the man sent to starve on an island, rescued, then eaten on a drifting ship when he drew the shortest straw) – at others time, they are engaged with directly by the characters: Paul Auster (the character, rather than the author) is writing about Don Quixote; Peter Stillman The Older is obsessed with the Tower of Babel. I’d say that Auster does postmodernism in the least showy possible way. You could easily read these novellas – particularly the first and last – simply for the pleasure of the stories and characters, and not worry too much about the literary trickery. But the two elements merge together beautifully, making these novellas enjoyable to read with an added exhiliration from Auster’s intellectual playfulness. I loved the experience, join others in mourning his death last year, and look forward to reading more by him. Anywhere I should look first?

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

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I bought The Children’s Bach (1984) by Helen Garner in Oxford’s newest bookshop, Caper, a while ago. I might have mentioned the shop before. From the outside, it looks like a children’s bookshop – all joyful colours and suchlike – and it is, indeed, a children’s specialist. But there is a sizeable section at the back for adult books, all arranged together under headings like ‘the mundane everyday’ and ‘incredible journeys’. It’s a fun idea that invites serendipitous finds. When I came across the W&N Essentials reprint of The Children’s Bach, I couldn’t resist. This cover is so beautiful – one of my favourites of recent years.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner | W&N - Ground-breaking, award-winning, thought-provoking books since 1949

I’ve been listening to a lot of Garner’s non-fiction in the past couple of years, but I did start my reading journey with her about 15 years ago with The Spare Room. My return to her fiction – only my second novel by her – reminds me of how taughtly she tells stories of disrupted domesticity.

In The Children’s Bach, Dexter and Elizabeth meet after years apart. They were at university together but drifted apart – yet, when they reunite, they almost unquestioningly bring their attendant worlds together. Dexter and his wife have two young children, Arthur and Billy (whose unspecific disability is dealt with in a way that felt quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t be done now). Elizabeth is dating an untamed musician, Philip, and he has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth’s closest relationship is with her much younger sister, Vicki, who is still on the cusp of adulthood while Elizabeth is heading into middle-age. The coming together of these families ultimately brings about a crisis.

A synopsis of Garner’s book is one thing. The reading experience is quite another. Garner has cut away at the plot until what is left is really an impression of a plot. There is an excellent scene where each line of dialogue and narrative is clearly a moment from an extended evening – it is the most filmic scene I’ve ever read; the most clearly like a film montage. It’s extremely effective. Writ on a larger scale, that is what the whole of The Children’s Bach does. You won’t find lengthy examinations of motivations and emotions – rather, Garner gives us stark glimpses into these people’s lives. That means that the choices people make play out almost before you realise they’ve made them.

And then, on the other hand, Garner gives some scenes unexpected breathing room. As David Nicholls highlights in his enjoyable introduction: ‘Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand.’

But the main star of The Children’s Bach is Garner’s writing. The unwavering, merciless observation she brings to her non-fiction is less intimidating in fiction, but no less present. She is exceptionally good on small domestic moments – and, much harder, equally good on the occasional abstract or nebulous moments. Here’s something which combines most – the recognisable ‘braced for more sobbing’ leading into a lovely dream scene.

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

Threaded throughout the novel is music. The soundtrack – of Bach, of Philip’s grungier music – is never used heavy-handedly, but at the same time gives us insight and a rhythm to the story.

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

The only drawback I found with The Children’s Bach is how unknowable the characters are. Or is that a drawback, or simply a choice? Garner’s impressionistic writing is stunning to read, and every paragraph has the weight and confidence of a poem. I often stopped and reread sentences simply because they were so beautiful with such well-judged balance to them. But I don’t think I could describe the characters. Philip and Vicki are the exceptions to that rule, but the others felt like ciphers – or perhaps like containers for Garner’s beautiful observations and discrete moments. Is it deliberate, or a casualty of the novel’s sparseness?

Some critic apparently said The Children’s Bach was one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, which is the sort of silly thing that critics say when they want to get noticed. I can think of many short novels that I think are probably better, though perhaps not many that are as delicately and deftly done. With stronger depths to her characters, it would be a masterpiece. And perhaps those depths would come with rereading – my main takeaway from the experience is that I’m keen to reread, and perhaps find still more than I did this time. While googling for reviews, I discovered that Whispering Gums did exactly that.

So, how to conclude? I think there’s a strong chance that this is a brilliant novel, and it’s certainly a brilliant piece of writing. And perhaps it couldn’t have been such a beautiful reading experience if it had been more grounded. Or perhaps it would feel more grounded the second time around? Well, why not find out for yourself?

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann #ABookADayInMay Day 8

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Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I first heard of Lucy Ellmann when her behemoth, one-sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport made a big splash. I was and am intrigued to read it, but rather put off by the length. So when I came across a copy of her first novel, Sweet Desserts (1988), and it was only 145 pages – well, that felt much more manageable. A quick few thoughts about it… but also please watch Rick’s video and Jill’s response.

The novella is about Suzy and Franny, sisters from Illinois who grow to adulthood in a curious kind of dependent competition. They are forever watching what the other is doing, perhaps sabotaging it, and self-destructively bound by something that must be quite close to love.

Over the course of the novella, they move to Oxford with their academic father and develop as adults. Suzy is perhaps the dominant voice, and we see her failing career as a would-be academic alongside her erstwhile relationships with unsuitable or uncaring men – some of which last years, and none of which seem wise or happy. But Ellmann finds the humour in this bleakness. I’m not sure I’d necessarily call Sweet Desserts a comic novel, even a black comedy, but it is strewn with bitterly funny lines and observations.

Suzy is drawn with some depth, but is also driven as a character by her dual appetites: for food and for sex. Binging food is a way she copes with trauma, and seeking sex is a way she tries to find self-worth. The through-theme about her eating and her weight is curious. I don’t think it would be written about in quite the same way today, but nor is it a disparaging or mocking portrayal. Rather, Ellmann explores Suzy’s relationship with eating and weight with a sort of wry detachment.

It was in Oxford that the secret eating began in earnest: I caught Franny hovering around the fridge with suspicious frequency and started to copy her. My hips soon seemed enormous in their circumference. It was all a great revenge on Daddy, fascinated as he was by his own repugnance towards Rubens’ women.

Sweet Desserts jumps around timelines a bit, but the most distinctive thing about it is the way the narrative is interspersed with a miscellany of other texts. From art criticism to recipes to self-help books, they make the novella feel a bit like it is found in a maelstrom of the everyday. It is immersed in the world of Suzy and Franny, whether that is cereal boxes or radio programmes.

Frachipan Fancies

Fill the boat with the franchipan mixing, and then pipe lines across the sweet paste which has been previously thinned with water to piping consistency. When baked, wash over with hot apricot jelly.

It’s an ambitious and interesting first novel, and I think Ellmann has a brilliantly distinctive voice. I’m not sure why she chose to make it so short – Sweet Desserts doesn’t feel like it needed to be a novella, and could easily have sustained another 100 pages or more. But then who knows if I’d actually have picked it up – and I’m definitely glad I did.