1980s

For Sylvia by Valentine Ackland

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When I started reading For Sylvia: An Honest Account by Valentine Ackland (published posthumously, in 1985) I was rather prepared to loathe the author.  I’ve recently read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries, and I haven’t come across more heartbreaking diary entries than those concerning the period when Ackland (STW’s partner for decades) decided to move her lover Elizabeth Wade White into their home, while Sylvia Townsend Warner moved out to a hotel, as some sort of experiment.  Although Warner is devoted to Ackland until Ackland’s death, and indeed until her own, she comes across as a selfish, cruel person.  It is perhaps unsurprising that when writing about herself, a more sympathetic portrait is drawn – and the fact that Ackland writes so well swept me along for a lot of it.  Although I have to say, a more miserable portrait than the cover photo I do not think I have ever seen.  I’m not sure a more miserable portrait is possible.  It didn’t make me immediately warm to her.

For Sylvia isn’t wholly an autobiography – it is, as the title suggests, an account of Ackland’s life, written for Sylvia. Having said that, the ‘for Sylvia’ bit doesn’t particularly influence the style or structure – she isn’t addressed as ‘you’ at any point, but remains ‘Sylvia’ – so perhaps it is safest to call For Sylvia a memoir.  In essentials it deals with two broad aspects of Ackland’s life – one being her romantic life, and the other being her battle with alcoholism.

Ackland starts by addressing that which every memoir needs: the pivotal moment of its subject’s life:

The ‘crisis’: it has been laid down that this should grip the reader’s interest, grapple him to the author, and amke it impossible for him to put the book down until he has finished it, or at least impossible for him to return it to the lending library by the next post.  But the ‘crisis’ in this particular life is very difficult to describe; for one thing, it is hard to know whether it happened in a flash or whether, in point of fact, it matured rather slowly and broke, as it were, creamily and in silence.  This ‘crisis’, too, is not directly concerned with a sexual upheaval, which makes it perhaps less enthralling to the reader than it was to the author.  However; it happened, and it was undoubtedly the sharpest possible crisis any life can know, for all it was so quiet and did not so much as cause a ripple on the surface of domestic life.

She is writing of her alcoholism, which had dominated much of her life for 19 years.  More particularly, the crisis is actually the end of this domination.  I know they say you cannot cure alcoholism, but the night in question – 8th October 1947 – was the last time Ackland felt the need for alchol.  Although with very, very little Christian faith at this point (she wavered quite a lot) she prayed to God.  ‘There was no reply.’  And yet, the following evening, after being ill all day, ‘I suddenly realised that I was walking in tranquility and with perfect confidence; and that tranquillity and assurance has never left me.’  I don’t wish to undermine the battles faced by those with alcoholism when trying to stop drinking; I am merely recounting the ‘crisis’ with which Ackland opens her memoir.

It is quite a structurally peculiar way to start.  Although Ackland does mention alcoholism at many points throughout For Sylvia (which, by the way, is short – 135 pages, including a 24-page introduction by Bea Howe) the rest of the memoir is structured chronologically, and focuses upon her various relationships, especially those with the anonymous R and X. 

I shan’t summarise Ackland’s accounts of her various love affairs – they take up most of the book.  I will simply write that (a) it is astonishing the number of women who throw themselves upon Valentine without the slightest provocation, and without knowing that she was a lesbian – Valentine herself didn’t know for the first few, and (b) that it can’t have made for very charming reading for Sylvia.  Although Ackland writes very well about her life, and has a simple, calm, flowing style which I had not expected of her, she isn’t being very kind to her intended audience.  I get the feeling that, just as I forgot that Sylvia had been apostrophised at the beginning, so Ackland forgot, and became too involved with the tangled webs of her love affairs.  And they are often very tangled.  Ackland got married to a poor, bewildered man after a lengthy engagement – saying, shortly beforehand, that she will either marry him tomorrow or not at all.  She refuses to consummate the marriage, but immediately commits adultery with her long-term female lover.  Indeed, there is barely a time when Ackland isn’t being, or considering being, unfaithful.  ‘I wonder,’ she writes at one point, ‘if anyone in the world was ever so idiotically vile as I was, for the best part of my youth.’  Ah!  A moment of self-awareness! (one thinks).  But one would be wrong.  Despite devoting paragraphs at various junctures to praise of Warner’s character and their love for one another, the reader then comes upon this:

I write this on a day when I have heard that I at any time now another one I love will come to live with me here, in this house where Sylvia and I have lived for twelve years together, through bitterness of private woe, through war, through my degradation and shame and throuhg the almost two years accomplished of my heavenly rescue and our increasing happiness and peace.  I do not know how this new thing has come about, nor whether it is the work of heaven of hell.  I cannot, for more than a moment at a time, realize what it will be like to be here without Sylvia – or anywhere without Sylvia.  But I have a conviction that this must be tried; although it is so dangerous that I can scarcely dare measure it even in my fancy.

I couldn’t remember, whilst reading For Sylvia, whether it has been written before or after this crisis in their relationship (for it was not permanent; Ackland chose Warner, and Warner came back to her own home, her own possessions) and was quite shocked that Ackland could write the above excerpt in the midst of eulogising their love.  I daresay I shouldn’t judge her, but it is difficult to read her wanton cruelty, having read Warner’s diaries.  In a book which centres on a person’s actions and motivations, it is impossible not to assess and respond to them.

Whilst I was reading For Sylvia, the genuine quality of Ackland’s writing, and (for some reason) its merit as good prose, made me feel a little more sympathetic to her.  I remain, of course, sympathetic to her plight with alcohol.  But in remembering her unkindness, her cruelty to Sylvia, and her absurd belief that it ‘must be’ done, I lose patience altogether.  It should be possible to separate writer and person, and I do admire Ackland more as a writer than I thought I would, but For Sylvia is an exercise in self-delusion – interesting, involving, but also infuriating.

Books I Borrowed…

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There are a few books I’ve borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I’m going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it’s fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll get carried away, and write far too much… well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today… I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence – V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he’d see more of human life if he adopted layman’s clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice – as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town – where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won’t recognise him…

Once in his position as canon, Smith’s new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology – improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don’t think one would need to have faith to love this.  It’s very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there’s even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages – E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and ‘Girl-of-the-Period’, Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments – and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 (‘We Meant To Be Happy’) Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many ‘surplus women’ – only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first – ‘The Marriage of Rose Barlow’.  It’s rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin – the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, ‘The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.’  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella – the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I’d expect from Delafield – but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny – Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny ‘rescues’ Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions… but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn’t seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel’s incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum… perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn’t much care what happened.  Even though it’s a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

Two Sparks: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Only Problem

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Although I’m actually writing this in advance of Muriel Spark Reading Week, I’m confidently going to predict that we’re all having a great time, and that you’re all putting up brilliant, thought-provoking pieces on this wonderful novelist… yes?  Yes.

Since it’s my day to post, I’m going to write fairly speedily about two Spark novels that I’ve read recently – and hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have finished at least one more.  (There will be no shortage of Spark reviews around the blogosphere this week, but if you fancy reading all my archive posts on Spark, including this one, click here.)  I chose The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) because my supervisor said it might be a useful comparison to Lolly Willowes, and The Only Problem (1984) because it looked really interesting, and also one that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else in the blogosphere.  Cutting a long story short, I thought they were both brilliant – neither take the crown away from Loitering With Intent as my favourite Spark novel yet, but both add to my cumulative for Spark.  You’ll be avidly reading Spark posts here, there, and everywhere, so I’ll try to keep my reviews brief… and hopefully enough to intrigue you to read them!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is centred, indeed, in Peckham Rye – and concerns the arrival and influence of one Dougal Douglas (sometimes going by the name of Douglas Dougal.)  The novel opens with the aftermath of a bride being jilted at the altar – indeed, with the bride’s mother insulting the jilting groom.  It’s all a little confusing (deliberately, one imagines) and it’s difficult to get the story straight – especially since everyone is superimposing their views and imaginings over the facts.  The brief chapter concludes:

But, in any case, within a few weeks, everyone forgot the details.  The affair is a legend referred to from time to time in the pubs when conversation takes a matrimonial turn.  Some say the bridegroom came back repentant and married the girl in the end.  Some say, no, he married another girl, while the bride married the best man.  It is wondered if the bride had been carrying on with the best man for some time past.  It is sometimes told that the bride died of grief and the groom shot himself on the Rye.  It is generally agreed that he answered ‘No’ at his wedding, that he went away alone on his wedding day and turned up again later.
This is a great example of how Spark plays irreverently with the normalities of narrative.  And if the reader expects everything to be neatly unfolded by the end of the novel, then he/she clearly hasn’t read much Spark before.  She obeys few authorial ‘rules’, and weaves her narratives with little concern for the reader’s expectation.  If she were writing a play (and she has; I should read them) she would unveil Chekhov’s gun in the first act, and nobody would ever lay a finger on it again.

But as someone notes on the first page of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, “It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here.”  She is quite right… although it is difficult to trace exactly how Dougal Douglas influences the community, his influence is undeniable.

He turns up somewhat out of the blue, and starts working at ‘Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles, a small but growing concern.’  His role is fairly vague.  Mr. Druce, the head of the company, is keen to hire ‘an Arts man’, and Mr. Druce places Douglas Douglas in charge of ‘human research.’

“I shall have to do research,” Dougal mused, “into their inner lives.  Research into the real Peckham.  It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.”

This research, it appears, chiefly constitutes attracting the workforce from their duties, calmly meddling in their lives, and undermining their confidences.  Dougal is all things to all people, and yet (although it is never asserted directly) it appears he might be an incarnation of the Devil.  He certainly has growths in his temple which rather resemble sawn-off horns – and the events which ensue from his presence have rather the hallmark of evil.

It is a fascinating concept, and one which has Spark written all over it.  She never gives us the certainty (as Sylvia Townsend Warner does in Lolly Willowes) that we are dealing with the Devil.  There isn’t really certainty about much, for either the reader of the residents of Peckham Rye – but events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal’s presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark’s brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

* * * * *

The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Spark’s fourth novel; The Only Problem comes somewhere towards the end of her almost half-century of novelising – but they are unmistakably by the same author.  The concept is quite different, but the manner of approaching it is still very Sparkian.  I say that the concept is different, but thinking about it, these two novels both concern the nature of evil, in some way – though both rather skirt round the issue.

‘The Only Problem’ of the title is, according to Harvey Gotham, the problem of suffering.  Accordingly, he has taken himself off to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job, and his mind rarely wanders from this topic.  His own suffering seems to take the form of interfering relatives and his ex-wife Effie, whom he abandoned in Italy over a stolen chocolate bar.  The sort of premise which makes me know I’m in the delightfully odd world of Muriel Spark.

Amongst the cast are Effie’s sister Ruth, and Ruth’s husband (Harvey’s old student friend) Edward.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together.  Harvey had never, to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten.

That is a very Sparkian relationship.  I can’t think of any uncomplicated friendships in the eight Spark novels I’ve read – there is always some element of uneasiness or sharpness, or simply the failure to communicate naturally which characterises so many exchanges throughout her work.  I love conversations and plot expositions which subvert the normal rules in some way, or ignore the anticipated responses – it’s on the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett – and here is an example from The Only Problem.  There are some spoilers in it, so skim past if you want to avoid them:

Anne-Marie had put some soup on the table.  Harvey and Ruth were silent before her, now that she wasn’t a maid but a police auxiliary.  When she had left, Ruth said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this down.  I’m pregnant.”
“How did that happen?” Harvey said.
“The same as it always happens.”
“How long have you known?”
“Three weeks.”
“Nobody tells me anything,” Harvey said.
“You don’t want to know anything.”

We aren’t long in the cerebal world of theological exegesis.  Effie – it is claimed – has become involved in a terrorist organisation, and the police think that Harvey is also somehow implicated.  In vain does he protest (although never especially animatedly – Spark’s characters tend towards the calm and detached) that he hasn’t spoken to Effie for years.  The rest of The Only Problem follows this mad chain of events – Harvey calmly continuing to offer his readings of Job, while the police interrogate him and his wife’s motives and actions remain mysterious.

Spark doesn’t, however, permit the obvious parallels.  A lesser novelist (had they been able to think of the juxtaposition) would have used the wider action of the novel as an example of the problem of suffering.  Instead, like in all the novels I’ve read by her, Spark just lets things happen.  There isn’t really any rhyme or reason, or grand overarching narrative point; there are no neat conclusions, just the brilliance of Spark’s eccentric but observant writing.

So, two more gems to the Spark canon!  I’m so pleased Muriel Spark Reading Week gave me the encouragement to read more Spark.  Do continue to put links in the comments box, if you’ve reviewed a Spark novel or written anything about our Muriel – and I hope you’re having a fun week!

Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

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I wasn’t intending to join in Australian Literature Month, because I didn’t have any unread Australian novels, nor did any of the suggested titles fill me with longing.  I’m trying to be sensible with money this academic year, since I’m no longer funded, and (believe it or not) I’m even being more circumspect when it comes to book purchases!  (Keep that in your mind when you read the following…)

I bought Maestro (1989) by Peter Goldsworthy because I liked the colour of the spine.  Ok, that’s not quite true – it was the minty-turquoisey colour which made me take it off the shelf; when I discovered that it was Australian, and sounded interesting, I decided it was worth £2 of my money.  I’m glad I did – not just because I get to join in with Kim et al, but because it was rather good.

Although it’s Australian – written by an Australian, set in 1967 Darwin, Australia (the location of choice for characters leaving Neighbours, incidentally, if they’re not going to London) – much of the impetus is tied to Europe.  Eduard Keller is a Viennese refugee who teaches piano to fifteen year old Paul Crabbe (already an experienced pianist) whose family have recently moved from South Australia to the dry heat of Darwin.  Except Keller doesn’t teach piano in any traditional sense – he forbids Paul to use the piano for the first few weeks, instead instructing him in the importance of each individual finger…

Keller waggled a forefinger in front of my nose.  It was our second lesson?  Our third?

“This finger is selfish.  Greedy.  A… a delinquent.  He will steal from his four friends, cheat, lie.”

He sheathed the forefinger in his closed fist as if it were the fleshy blade of a Swiss army knife and released the middle finger.

“Mr. goody-goody,” he said, banging the finger down on middle C repeatedly.  “Teacher’s pet.  Does what he is told.  Our best student.”

Last came the ring finger.

“Likes to follow his best friend,” he told me.  “Likes to… lean on him sometimes.”

He lifted his elbows upwards and outwards.

“Those are the pupils.  This is the teacher.  The elbow…”
I have an ambivalent relationship with novels about music.  I enjoyed The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles (although I was glad that Maestro didn’t follow it down the Notes on a Scandal-esque path, not least because of the sixty year gap between Keller and Paul, but also because it’s not a very original course to take.)  I loved The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart, which is non-fiction.  But novels leave me cold when they rely upon the ethos that music is the highest of all forms.  I played the piano from the age of seven onwards, and although I later became friends with my piano teacher (the lady who first told me of Miss Hargreaves) and eventually grew to like playing the piano, for many years I passionately hated it.  The best feeling in the world (and my brother agrees with me) was when you rang the doorbell for a piano lesson… and the teacher didn’t answer!  The worst feeling was when you thought the piano teacher wasn’t going to answer, and then, after a long gap… she did.  So, anyway, this has given me an odd relationship with stories about learning instruments, and my dislike of elitism comes into play with musical maestros.

I’m sure it’s possible to be a musical expert without being arrogant and rude, of course, but Keller is not one of these.  He is one of the most rude, supercilious characters I’ve ever encountered – but he is battling his own demons, and the love and respect Paul feels towards Keller are contagious.  Even so, I found it arrogant rather than inspiring when he said things like this:

“Perhaps you could play one of the exam pieces, Paul,” my father suggested.  “A private concert for the three of us.”

“The Brahms?”

“The Beethoven,” Keller injected, “might be preferable.”

I played Beethoven that night as well as I had ever played, and turned afterwards, smiling, ready for praise.

“Beautiful,” my mother breathed.  “Don’t you agree, Herr Keller?”

“An excellent forgery,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Technically perfect,” he said.

He drained his wineglass before continuing.  It was to be his longest monologue of the evening:

“At such moments I always remember a forged painting I once saw.  Each violent brushstroke was reproduced was painstaking, non-violent care.  The forgery must have taken many many times longer than the original to complete.  It was technically better than the original.”

He rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily towards the door: “And yet something was missing.  Not much – but something.“

At the door he paused, and turned: “And that small something may as well have been everything.”

I find music snobbery intensely irritating – no, that’s not quite true, I feel desperately sorry for people who are only content with perfection, in any field.  Doubtless it is a form of discernment, but if your discernment reaches the level that you castigate and despise almost everything you encounter, you’re setting yourself up for a miserable time.

But Keller is miserable for other reasons… it gradually becomes clear that he was more involved in the Second World War than he originally admits.  I shan’t give the game away, although it isn’t a big twist and doesn’t come as much of a surprise to the reader.  If you’re rolling your eyes at yet another long-shadow-of-war novel, then don’t.  It’s only one element in the interesting construction of the interaction between Keller and Paul – which is the really interesting central focus of Maestro.  Their relationship isn’t romantic or fatherly or even particularly close.  Keller resists any sort of emotional connection, and Paul is far too full of youthful insensitivity to do anything but blunder into conversations in which he is too immature to participate, even if Keller were willing.  But what Goldsworthy builds between Keller and the Crabbes is still somehow beautiful.  The connection between people who never open up to one another; the legacies left behind a relationship which could not even be called a friendship.  Goldsworthy has done this beautifully.

One of the things I’m realising, doing A Century of Books and stepping further outside the interwar period, where I am happiest, is the way a decade colours each novel, even without the author intentionally following the zeitgeist.  A bit like people who claim not to follow fashion, until they look back at old photographs and see how much they were unwittingly influenced by the style of the day.  So Maestro is filtered through the lens of the 1980s, whether Goldsworthy likes it or not.  I certainly wouldn’t read that people ‘made slow, muffled, reckless love’ in the pages of an Elizabeth von Arnim novel, for instance.  Indeed, the whole coming-of-age storyline (although much less irritating in Maestro than it is in some book) is very 1980s, and rather incidental to the main thrust of the novel – but perhaps it’s main purpose is to demonstrate that Keller does not completely occupy Paul’s thoughts.  He is not obsessed by Keller, but their relationship will alter a great deal in his life.

Maestro is a difficult little book to write about – it is wise, original, and rather beautiful.  I would love it a great deal more if someone could translate it into the sensitivities of the 1940s, say, but of course that cannot be done.  It reminded me a bit of Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker and Virginia by Jens Christian Grondahl, but I’m hard-pressed to say quite why – the influence of genius, for the former?  The lifelong effects of a brief connection, for the latter?  Perhaps, truth be told, Maestro isn’t quite like anything else I’ve read before, but does bring together themes and traits I’ve seen in many other authors, writing both before and after Goldsworthy.

As for whether it’s a representative Australian novel – well, of course there’s no such thing.  Goldsworthy conveyed the heat of Darwin very well, but aside from that… I’ll have to see which other novels are picked up across the blogs during what’s left of Australian Literature Month.  Thanks, Kim, for indirectly encouraging to find, buy, and enjoy a novel I would otherwise have left in the shop.  And thanks for helping fill 1989 in A Century of Books!

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

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I want to cry a little bit, because I just spent two hours writing a post on So Long, See You Tomorrow, which disappeared when I tried to add a picture.  Sometimes I hate Blogger… Well, I’m going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you’ll know why…

It has ended up being quite neat, though, that I’m blogging about a novella by William Maxwell – following on from other reviews in this vein this week.  I fell in love with Maxwell when I read They Came Like Swallows (thanks Karen!), bought up a few of his books, read half of The Chateau, and… stopped.  Not sure why.  But Rachel’s review of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) catapaulted it up my tbr pile, and while I didn’t love it quite as much as They Came Like Swallows, it’s not far off.

I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events – especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore.  That makes me sound a bit sadistic, doesn’t it?  But examples like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and, even better, Jens Christian Grondahl’s Virginia (reviewed here) show how this can create a structure of dual narratives, looking forwards and backwards, memories and regrets influencing the telling of past and present.  Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify.

The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell’s deceptively simple manner:

One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot.  Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.  Within a few seconds it had grown light.  No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road.  The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.

Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends.  Living on neighbouring farms, their families had grown alongside each other, and Maxwell builds up this dynamic between neighbours and friends in a believable, simple manner – until circumstances change and the friendship is gradually unwoven, with the tragic results already revealed to the reader at the outset.  The narrator’s guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart.  This guilt colours the narrator’s presentation of the past, and is a net from which he has not been able to escape.  The novel moves between past and present, developing each narrative line, and demonstrating the far-flung influence of long ago events – in a way which flows beautifully, never forced, quietly showing Maxwell’s novelistic expertise.

The narrator’s own life was not easy.  Crippling shy and suffering from the early loss of his mother, the narrator feels that he has disappointed his father, and is out of kilter with the sort of boy he is expected to be.  Maxwell touches gently on the father’s grief, in an example of his understated but powerful style:

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.  He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was.

Many lesser novelists would have spent several pages dissecting the narrator’s father’s emotions, but Maxwell’s talent is that he does not need to do so – he encapsulates everything we need to read in two short sentences.  It is this approach which exemplifies Maxwell’s brilliance, but also how easily he could be underestimated.

The father does remarry, and the family is moved to a new home.  I love portrayals of houses in literature, and the scenes of their new home being built make for some great sections – the narrator compares the building site to Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture ‘The Palace at 4am’.  There is no picture of the sculpture in the book, it is only described verbally, but I went and tracked down an image.  In its curious form, seemingly incomplete and distorted, it reflects not only a building site but the structures of memory:

 

For, despite the murder and the family tensions, the true subject of So Long, See You Tomorrow is memory and the fallibility of memory.  Not so much that facts may be altered, but the distortion of remembered emotions and responses; superimposing later feelings over old ones, and the overlap between past and present:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
A murder mystery usually has a fairly straightforward structure – clues must be laid, of course, and herrings must be red, but the masters have laid out the pattern.  By removing the mystery of whodunnit, Maxwell explores the much more human, fascinating dynamics of how circumstances and personalities led to murder – and how the aftermath continues for decades and decades.  To construct a narrative through the abstract themes of grief, regret, love, pain, and guilt, Maxwell sets himself a much more difficult task – and achieves it.  I’m excited eventually to read more of Maxwell, and it was worth having to write this post twice to tell you how good this little book is…

Others who got Stuck into it:
 
“I don’t think I have come across a finer work of modern fiction.” – Rachel, Book Snob
 
“Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose.” – Trevor, The Mookse and the Gripes
 
“This book will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time.” – Lynne, dovegreyreader

People Who Say Goodbye

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Continuing something of a theme, tonight I’ll be writing about P.Y. Betts’ People Who Say Goodbye, no.13 in the Slightly Foxed Editions series, and kindly sent to me by the lovely people at Slightly Foxed. This series of reprints seems to be mostly – perhaps wholly? – devoted to memoirs, and limited editions of 2000 of each are printed. Indeed, some have sold out completely, and others have fewer than a hundred copies left – and they are so beautiful that I at least now have a hunger to own the lot.
People Who Say Goodbye was originally published in 1989 by Souvenir Press, when I was three and the author was eighty – and looks back over the first couple of those eight decades, giving a rich and quirky vision of her childhood. Slightly Foxed Editions republished it earlier this year. Betts was apparently a successful writer in the 1930s, contributing to Graham Greene’s ‘prestigious but short-lived magazine Night and Day’, according to Hazel Wood in her preface. It is perhaps odd that she should return to the literary world fifty years later with a childhood memoir, but I’m very glad that she did – for no other justification need be given for her expecting the reading public to care about her childhood than that she has written about it in an entirely engaging, amusing, and refreshingly unmournful and unsentimental manner.

Phyllis Betts’ childhood in Wandsworth, South London is essentially an ordinary one – made historically extraordinary by having been lived through World War One. One of the most touching and amusing moments in this memoir comes after the war, when Phyllis and a friend are given a bag of sugar – long scarce – and head off to the woods to eat it, laughing hysterically after they have done so. It is moments like this which punctuate People Who Say Goodbye – keenly remembered moments of childhood which are not earth-shattering, but are a delight to read.

Phyllis Betts’ parents are a little unconventional, ignoring protocol and society a lot of the time (Phyllis had to attend a new school in her old gym uniform, for instance, since her mother couldn’t see the economic sense in changing it simply to fit in) and she has a wide range of relatives who shuttle on and off the page at various junctures.

But the ‘plot’, if one can have a plot in a memoir, is not what appeals – it is Betts’ voice throughout. If she reminded me of anyone, it was Barbara Comyns. No writer I’ve encountered understands the child’s perspective as well as Comyns did – with all its unpredictability, callousness, and odd humour. Well, Betts’ is a close second, remembering her own childhood and childlike voice so perfectly (one assumes) that this never feels as though it were written by an eighty year-old. Not that it is written with childish naivety and ignorance, as Emma Smith’s excellent memoir The Great Western Beach was – rather we see the world through a child’s surreal vantage, without forfeiting the knowledge and perspective of adulthood. It’s difficult to define, but it certainly works wonderfully well. To show you what I mean, especially in terms of the Comyns connection, I’d better just give a few examples… here are three from various points of the books:

‘People like to hear about other people going mad. It sort of cheers them up that it is not yet Madday for them.’

* * *

‘She was a dedicated Fabian and looked the part, with her serious grey eyes, wide intellectual forehead and her air of a pained saint always looking for the good in people and not finding much.’


* * *

Brattle Place was not, of course, the only place that I had been to for holidays. By the time I was six I had been to a number of different places and, by a coincidence that struck me as marvellous, they all began with a B: Broadstairs, Bournemouth, Brattle Place, Barton, Bagnor and Bexhill. For ages I had known the alphabet with its twenty-six letters, and as the tally of holiday places mounted, all beginning with B, the same as our surname, my sense of wonder increased. There were plenty of other places where people went for holidays, no farther away – Eastbourne, Ramsgate, Hastings, Torquay – yet all the places we went to began with B. The improbability of the thing hinted at the intellectual beauty of mathematics and engrossed me with a sense of the marvellous.

Betts often throws out all sorts of tid-bits which make me want to know more, and then sidles away from them with the insouciance of any raconteur who knows how to keep the audience wanting more, rather than bored by detail. She mentions the Isle of Wight – where, she had heard, ‘you could never be more than four miles from the sea, yet in the paper recently there had been a bit about an old lady, well into her eighties, who had lived on the island all her life but had never set eyes on the sea.’ Is this true? Why? How could anybody not be filled with curiosity at this! More personally to Betts is the question of her brother. Early in the novel she declares that she will barely write about her brother, since he wouldn’t want to be included (how like Barbara Comyns, who did the same with one of her sisters in Sisters By A River) and she is true to her word. Only occasionally is he mentioned, and she quietly says at one point that he ‘grew away from her’. How terribly, terribly sad – but left barely spoken, on the page. Betts gives the most extraordinary details and memories all over the place – the minutiae that children notice and remember – but in a strange way she is also reticent.

There is plenty to laugh at in the book, which, although it couldn’t be called a comic memoir, certainly makes use of humour along the way. One of the moments I’m sure I’ll remember involved Phyllis’ desperate hunt to find gifts for her relatives, invariably without success or receiving gratitude:

“… and she gave me a china dog,” exclaimed Aunt Ada in bitterness to my mother… “a china dog not fit to put in a servant’s bedroom”.

This remark, repeated at home by my injured mother, became a family catchphrase. Anything disliked or rejected, be it a pair of scuffed tennis shoes, a note sung flat, or a lump of unchewable gristle, was thereafter described as being ‘not fit to put in a servant’s bedroom’.

Isn’t that lovely? Family catchphrases are always enchanting to share (ours include such strange things as ‘it’s always the nose’, ‘HEAVY BOOTS’, and the mouthful ‘not as nice as you possibly could be if you tried your very hardest) although it is difficult to write much about them without leaving the reader feeling left out – it is one of Betts’ merits that the reader feels rather part of the family, or at least an accepted guest.

Lurking behind this unsentimental, energetic childhood memoir is, however, a sadness – the inevitable sadness of nostalgia, perhaps. Towards the end of People Who Say Goodbye, Betts includes a conversation which explains the title. She is talking to Clement, an unconventional boy with whom she has struck up a friendship. He is the first to speak in this excerpt:
“Will you be coming back to see us?”

“I shouldn’t think so. In a way I should like to but the way things are I don’t expect I shall.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve seen that people who come to say goodbye usually don’t come back.”

“When did you begin to notice this?”

“It came on gradually, from when I was about five right up to now. It’s true, you know.”

“You were young to notice that that is how things are.”

“Fairly young, I suppose, yes.”

“Do you remember the people who don’t come back?”

“Yes. I remember them all.”

“Will you remember me?”

“Of course I shall. If I live to be eighty I shall still remember you here playing the piano – playing ‘The Dance of the Blessed Spirits.’.”

It is probably a fanciful recollection of eighty-year old Phyllis which puts the age ‘eighty’ into the mouth of the child Phyllis – but that doesn’t affect the sadness of this belief, created in the maelstrom of war with the soldiers who came to say goodbye and never returned.

I don’t think I’d have chosen quite such a sombre title for the memoir. These people, who say goodbye, are certainly present in the book – but there is so much more. Who knows what happened to most of the figures in the book. I don’t even know what happened to Betts after she became an adult – there is no mention in the memoir, as though childhood were hermetically sealed, revisited now without any acknowledged link to what happened afterwards. And that is what comes most to the fore of People Who Say Goodbye – not the people who say goodbye, but the person to whom it was said. Betts’ memoir is not only a very honest and perceptive book about childhood, it is honest and perceptive about a real individual child – a much rarer quality.

I am indebted to Slightly Foxed for sending me a copy, and Lyn for telling me about it in the first place. Click on her name there to go over to the wonderful review she wrote in May. And then go and get a copy of this wonderful little book!

International Anita Brookner Day

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Happy 83rd birthday, Anita Brookner, and Happy International Anita Brookner Day to the rest of you – surely the most publicised literary event of the past decade, courtesy of Thomas (and Simon is co-hosting). Having intended to read Brookner for a number of years, this seemed like the perfect time to give the old girl a whirl. And so I duly took down her 1984 Booker Prize winning Hotel du Lac off my shelf, and have just finished reading it.

And oh dear, it is not in the spirit of the thing, but… this might be something of a lukewarm post. Thomas did warn us several times that Hotel du Lac, although Brookner’s most famous novel, is not her best – and I did listen to him – but it felt expedient to read the novel I had on my shelves already. So I shall judge merely Hotel du Lac; I will not try and extrapolate beyond that to Brookner as a writer.

Hotel du Lac is set in a hotel by Lake Geneva, and we see it all through the eyes of romance novelist Edith Hope. She describes herself thus:

this mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek neck, not wanting to go anywhere, but having given my word that I would stay away for a month until everyone decides that I am myself again.

And the hotel itself
seems to be permanently reserved for women. And for a certain kind of woman. Cast-off or abandoned, paid to stay away, or to do harmless womanly things, like spending money on clothes.

Amongst these women, and the most interesting characters in the novel, are mother and daughter Mrs. Pusey and Jennifer. Edith spends most of the first half of the novel revising the ages she considers them to be, from 40s and 20s to, eventually, 70s and 40s. They are rather desperate, and lonely, and put on false cheer. But, to be completely honest, they have already flown from my mind a little. Their portraits were painted a little too thinly, on too unstable a canvas.

Amongst these women there is only one man of note – Mr. Neville. I couldn’t describe the relationship between Edith and Mr. Neville as romantic, still less a love story, but he does offer opportunities for some interesting views from Edith, which are refreshingly neither old-fashioned nor modern, but an honest path between the two.
“My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.” “You are a romantic, Edith,” repeated Mr. Neville, with a smile. “It is you who are wrong,” she replied. “I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.”
And so the novel continues. Now for the negative.

What makes me a bit cross is that Hotel du Lac made me respond in a way I hate – using responses from which I would normally run a mile. I can’t stand it when critics sneer at ‘nothing happening’ in a book, or about boring heroines. The sort of ridiculous statement Saul Bellow made of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, that ‘I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups’ – which ought really to be a compliment. I wish I could have heard the tinkle of teacups in Hotel du Lac! But nothing felt vital or vivid to me. Edith is quite a boring person, but that wouldn’t matter if she had not also been a boring character. Austen’s Mr. Collins is boring; Mrs. Palfrey is pretty boring, if it comes to that, but neither of these are boring characters, because of the vitality with which their dry lives are evoked – one for humour, and the other for empathy. Edith Hope simply fades, fades, fades into a pretty backdrop.

You know me, I love books without much plot. I love novels which look gently, calmly, slowly at the ways in which people interact. I thought I would love Anita Brookner, but I certainly did not love Hotel du Lac. Which is not to say I hated it – more than anything, I was disappointed. There seem to be so many novelists who ‘do’ this sort of book rather better – E.H. Young, E.M. Delafield, even Richmal Crompton to a lesser extent. Brookner’s writing in Hotel du Lac is never glaringly bad, and is occasionally perceptive. She has a knack for using unusual adjectives or adverbs which unsettle (‘”I hate you,” she shouted, hopefully’) but… overall, I was not blown away by her style, or compelled by her prose. Often my eyes slipped to the end of the page, without taking in what had I had read. It all felt tolerable, I suppose, but…

Yet I will not let my lukewarm response to Hotel du Lac put me off. I shall remember that I was warned it wouldn’t be Brookner’s best. I will read the other reviews which will doubtless pop up around the blogosphere today. And I will wait a few years, and given Anita another go.

And now for something completely different

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“That’s the point of book groups, isn’t it? To make you read something you wouldn’t normally.” When I hear those words at book group, it usually comes after everyone has declared that they loathed the book in question. But sometimes something can come out of nowhere and be a total joy. Well, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole wasn’t a *total* joy, but it was near enough.

Ignatius J. Reilly is the biggest character of the book, in every sense of the word – he dominates the narrative, but his gargantuan size, fearsome dialogue, and sense of self-worth means he dominates more or less everything else too. He is a deliberately unattractive character – obese, flatulent, ‘full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chips.’ He is disgusting – and alarm bells were going off with me. I am a bit sensitive to these sorts of things. I could do without a character whose bodily functions are so uncontrolled, and whose preoccupation with his ‘valve’ is mentioned on more or less every page. To be honest, this was the aspect of the novel I could have done without even when I’d realised I loved the book – but it sets the scene for a completely over-the-top character.

Ignatius lives with his long-suffering widowed mother, Irene Reilly. I loved her. She mostly ignores Ignatius’ intellectual ramblings, and simply implores him to behave and get a job. It is a delight to read their dialogue together – while he brings Boethius and Marx and whoever else into conversation, she’ll reply about a cream cake and the need for a bottle of wine.

In an amazing opening scene, Ignatius is apprehended by a policeman, for looking suspicious. Somehow this is the catalyst for all manner of events – an old man with a Communist-obsession enters their life, as does the hapless policeman, Angelo Mancuso – who spends the rest of the novel being forced by his boss to don various costumes. Surreal. And then Mrs. Reilly accidentally drives her car into someones property, and gets the bill for it… meaning Ignatius has to get work. Ignatius explains to his mother how difficult he found it working at the New Orleans Public Library, since they employers ‘sensed in him a denial of their values’. She replies:
‘But, Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks.’

‘That is exactly what I mean,’ Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.

‘All you did was paste them little slips in the books.’

‘Yes, but I had my own aesthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing.’
Nevertheless, he starts off working for Levy Pants, ‘filing’ (for which read: throwing all the files into the bin, and trying to organise a factory uprising – one of the best scenes in the book, which had me laughing aloud on the train.) The office brings some more wonderful characters to the narrative, my favourite being Miss Trixie – an 80 year old who spends her workdays sleeping at her desk, forbidden from retiring by the interfering of Mr. Levy’s failed-psychologist wife.

And the plot winds on and on, incorporating Ignatius’ job as a hotdog-salesman; the efforts of a seedy club to bring in those customers who want to see a bird pulling a dress off a Southern belle; the flamboyant party of those in the ‘French quarter’; Mancuso being stationed in a toilet… it gets increasingly bizarre, but is structured brilliantly by Toole – plotlines overlap and intertwine, and the whole thing relies heavily upon coincidence – but that’s part of the delight.

But far and away the most delightful aspect of A Confederacy of Dunces is the language. It reminded me quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh, more especially Put Out More Flags and Decline and Fall. That is to say, selfish characters talking bombastically – hilarious put-downs or exaggerated philosophical ponderings. Here’s a bit that made me laugh. Mrs. Reilly ends up dating the old man with the fear of the communiss [sic] and leaves a pamphlet for Ignatius to read:
‘Yes, I saw one of those pamphlets in the hall this afternoon. You either dropped it there on purpose so that I could benefit from its message or you tossed it there accidentally during your regular afternoon wine orgy in the belief that it was a particularly elephantine bit of confetti. I imagine that your eyes have some trouble focusing at about two in the afternoon.’
He also starts a letter ‘Beloved Myrna. I have received your offensive communication. Do you seriously think that I am interested in your tawdry encounters with such sub-humans as folksingers?’ Genius. Each character has their verbal tics, which come back time and again (in the way that Dickens’ wonderful characters have their iterated phrases) – so that even Irene Reilly’s ‘honey’ and ‘precious’ could have me laughing; or Lana’s ‘investment’. And I haven’t even told you who Lana is. A Confederacy of Dunces is so rich in characters.

This is all a million miles away from the Provincial Lady or Jane Austen, or the usual stables of my literary loves. But it isn’t that far from the sort of silly things I say with my friends, especially my friend Clare – we talk nonsense to one another, hyperbolically, and teasingly. Not with Ignatius’ bile, I hope, but… I still find it hilarious, even if my views are (of course) far from being his. John Kennedy Toole, presumably, does not envision Ignatius as some sort of anti-hero – he must be being held up for pillory. Or rather you don’t stop to evaluate who is right or wrong, because you’re being swept along on a tidal wave of the bombastic, absurd, and exaggerated.

I can understand if this review doesn’t appeal. I don’t think there is anything I could have read which would persuade me that I’d enjoy A Confederacy of Dunces – except for the novel itself. It could easily have been dreadful, and if I were the author I’d have toned down a few of the more bodily elements, but I think it is a work of extraordinary energy, exaggeration, and creativity. Some people at book group were arguing that it showed genuine insight too – perhaps it did; I didn’t really want to know. I’m much happier taking the novel as a breathless, mad tour de force, writ large.

There is a sad story behind it. Toole finished writing the novel in the 1960s, and killed himself in 1969, partly because he couldn’t find a publisher for it. Only his mother’s perseverance and belief in him led to its eventual publication. She eventually persuaded author and college instructor Walker Percy to read it. He writes in the Preface: There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
Thus, in my own humbler way, did I approach A Confederacy of Dunces, certain – even determined – that I would hate it. And my reaction ended up being precisely the same.

Baker, Baker…

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Since we’ve had three posts about short stories this week, let’s have another! I didn’t plan to do any sort of themed week, and I rather suspect the theme will screech to a halt after this review, but for today… step forward Frank Baker and Stories of the Strange and Sinister.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that, although Frank Baker wrote one of my very favourite novels (Miss Hargreaves) I have only read one other of his books. It was Before I Go Hence, which I quite enjoyed – but it was nowhere near the standard of Miss H., and I worried that I’d like his work steadily less and less… so stopped. But it’s been three years since I read that, and short stories is moving the goalposts a little, so I tried again, with more reasonable expectations.

Stories of the Strange and Sinister was published over forty years after Miss Hargreaves, in 1983, the year Baker died. It was also his first work of fiction for twenty-two years, although including stories written between 1947 and 1983. The stories – as the title suggests – all touch upon the strange and sinister, but I don’t think any of them were intensely frightening. Which is good for me; I’d rather read strange stories than horror stories – which is why M.R. James has remained on the shelf for now.

Intense repugnance. That is one definition of horror to be found in the dictionary. Or, power of exciting such feeling. I think it is more. It is also what is totally unexpected: the long sunlit lane that has only a brick wall at the end, the worm in the rose, the sudden ravaged image of one’s own tormented face in a window pane. That which has sudden power to corrupt and defile. A stench where sweetness should be; darkness where light should be; a grin where a smile should be; a scream searing into a night where silence should be. An old withered hand where a young hand should be… And no escape from whatever it may be that has suddenly come upon the visitant. No escape.

This is the beginning to perhaps the creepiest story in the collection, ‘The Chocolate Box’, about a man who finds a severed hand in – you guessed it – a chocolate box. But, thankfully, it is a definition Baker doesn’t keep to. Even in his darkest moments, he can’t help introducing a touch of that whimsy which makes Miss Hargreaves so irresistible. For instance, in the middle of my favourite story in the book – ‘The Green Steps’ – the narrator refers to the disturbingly insane character as ‘about as talkative as a Trappist monk in Holy Week.’

In ‘The Chocolate Box’ the narrator writes:
But this is not a story about music. I must keep it out, otherwise it will flood the pages and consume me.
Baker suffers from the same predicament. He is obviously too great a music lover to allow it far from his mind. There is a story about warring partners in a music shop; one about a singer who morphs into a bird; a haunted piano…

But there are moments of terror too – the sack which follows its victim around the house; the presentiment of a steam-room murder… In Baker’s hand, we never wander too far into Gothic territory – but the sinister undertones to Miss Hargreaves have become much more alarming, and much less balanced out by humour. The whimsy still – as I said – hides in the corners, but there remains much to chill, even if not give nightmares.

As always with short story collections, I find it impossible to outline many of the stories, or give a proper feel for the collection as a whole – but I think Stories of the Strange and Sinister has convinced me not to abandon Baker just yet. It’s pretty expensive to track down, and probably isn’t really worth the £20 or £30 that various online sellers are requesting, but there are some interesting and original ideas and thoughtful writing – especially in that first story, ‘The Green Steps’. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from early in that story, which is both evocative of Baker’s atmospheric tone, and so many coastal villages in Cornwall (a county Baker loved) with their mysterious, historic and ambling paths:
I had observed him often and I had good reason to know where he lived, for it was very close to our cottage, up the cliff path, that bends sharply uphill over the harbour and the boatmasts that swing and sway in the gales; a path too narrow for any traffic, with rows of cottages, different sizes, shapes and colours, on one side. From the windows of our living-room which overlooks an area – a waste bit of land where kids keep rabbits in hutches and women dry clothes and men saw wood in winter – I would often, and still often see, the Scavenger. Above the area there are steps, the Green Steps they are called, worn away dangerously, all uneven, ground by the feet of many generations, the stone crumbling, little weeds growing from the cracks. I’d always had a curious familiar feeling about the Green Steps; they brought back a hint of the past to me, a paragraph of my boyhood, as though I’d been there years ago; and I knew I hadn’t.

Andrina

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Ages ago I won Andrina and other stories by George Mackay Brown on Hayley’s blog Desperate Reader. So enthused was she, and so keen that I read it, that I got it to the top of my pile in surprisingly quick time for me (putting this in perspective, I’m currently reading a book someone gave me over three years ago) – but then didn’t blog about it, and now am looking back in my memory to see what I thought. As such, I’m probably more likely to give impressions about the book as a whole, rather than individual stories.

Every time I write about short stories, I say how difficult it is. The themes will be so sprawling, the characters so diverse, that trying to find a unifying voice is tricky. Hayley suggests, in her review, that GMB is drawn to ‘time, tide, season, poetry, and faith’ – which is pretty wide, but probably fairly accurate. From the beautiful island photograph on the cover of my copy, I was expecting something from the same stable as Tove Jansson – with chilly descriptions, unsentimental characters, lots about the minutiae of human interaction, etc. etc. So I was a little surprised when the first story was all about a whaler, with some quite wordy letters being sent to a woman with the improbable name Williamina. I can’t say I was smitten.

But I persevered – and what I will say is that the collection is mixed, but mostly on the good side of that! George Mackay Brown is very interested in fables and legends, and the whole book feels a little as though it had been translated from Old Norse or Icelandic or a language with a similar oral tradition. What do I mean by that? I suppose it’s his odd choice of language – the sort of things we encounter in Anglo-Saxon literature, with turns of phrase relating to the most primitive forms of existence. This can be incredibly effective – I especially loved this line:

Days, months, years passed. A whole generation gathered and broke like a wave on the shore.
On the other hand, for those of us who never read historical fiction – which I recognise is a failing in myself, not the genre – it sometimes grates a little. Or, if not ‘grate’, does wear a little thin occasionally… but only occasionally.

The title story ‘Andrina’ is one of the best, and one of the few which felt more in the traditional mould of beginning-middle-twist-end. If I had to pick a favourite story from the collection, it would be ‘Poets’, which is actually a group of four stories, set in different times and places, carefully displaying four poets (some creating written poetry; some more metaphorical). In ‘The Lord of Silence’ within this group, Duncan is a poet who never utters a word:
He grew up. He was a young man. He learned to hunt, to herd, to plough. He learned to drink from the silver cup, pledging his companions in silence. His father went once on a cattle raid into the next glen, and did not return. They managed to get his body from the scree before the eagle and the wolf made their narrowing circles. The women of the glen, who mourned in a ritualistic way, had never seen such stark grief on a human face: the mouth of Duncan opened in a black silent wail.
Maybe it is when GMB’s own interest in poetry overrides, that I lose my way sometimes. As someone who has an admiration for poetry, but rarely an enjoyment, I think I was occasionally left on the sidelines with some of the stories. I could see that they were beautiful, and with many of them I could relish that beauty and engage with the characters, writing, themes – but with others I could only sense beauty, not feel it. There is no doubt that GMD is a talented and evocative writer, when he finds the right reader – and whilst I certainly wasn’t completely the wrong reader for Andrina and other stories, which I’m very glad I’ve read, and mostly enjoyed – I think there could be ideal readers out there for whom this would be an incredibly special book.