1982

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?

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.

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

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Occasionally I post a book on Instagram which gets a chorus of approval from people who’ve loved it. Never more so than when I posted that I was reading Susan Hill’s 1982 The Magic Apple Tree. It sounds like a children’s book but it is not – the subtitle ‘A Country Year’ gives a bit more of a clue about what you’ll find inside. This is a non-fiction look at life in Hill’s Oxfordshire village – called Barley here, though I imagine that’s a pseudonym – over the course of a year.

The book is divided into the four seasons, and each section starts with a description of the titular apple tree (after, in my edition, a beautiful full-page engraving by John Lawrence. They look like woodcuts but are credited as engravings, so let’s go with that. Here is the opening to the section on spring:

The blossom opens slowly, slowly on the apple tree.  One day the boughs are grey, though with the swellings of the leaves to come visible if you look closely.  The next day and the next, here and there, a speck of white, and then a sprinkling, as though someone has thrown a handful of confetti up into the air and let it fall, anyhow, over the branches.

The weather is grey, it is cold still. The blossom looks like snow against the sky. And then, one morning, there is snow, snow at the very end of April, five or six inches of it, after a terrible stormy night, and rising from it, and set against the snow-filled sky, the little tree is puffed out with its blossom, a crazy sight, like some surrealist painting, and all around us, in every other garden, there is the white apple and the pink cherry blossom, thick as cream, in a winter landscape.

And another day, just before the blossom withers and shrinks back into the fast opening leaves, there is the softest of spring mornings, at last it is touched by the early sun, and the apple tree looks as it should look, if the world went aright, in springtime.

Though Hill is writing about one particular year, much of the book could be about any year. The seasons are, of course, roughly the same – though with enough differences to make each year distinct for a bit, before they all fade into one. But there is no plot that puts The Magic Apple Tree specifically into any particular 1980s year. In any approximate time could Hill have discussed what she grew, what she cooked, which village events she attended, how her neighbours dealt with cold weather and unpassable roads, and so on and so forth. In some ways, it could be similar to 40 years later – though now, living in my own Oxfordshire village, I am rather more easily connected with the outside world.

What I most loved in the book were flavours of the village community. The brothers who lived in a run-down house, selling illicitly made cider and completing each other’s sentences. The amiable rivalry at the village flower and produce show. The bartering system of goods, and the friendly competence of villagers who’ve lived in the same spot for decades or generations.

Hill and her then-husband Stanley Wells are not among those who’ve lived there for long. They are relative newcomers – and I can attest that it is quite easy to become part of an Oxfordshire village on short acquaintanceship. Certainly, Hill seems at the centre of activity. There is an element of sharpness that those of us who read her book blog will remember. She is certainly sure of her views, and offers them decidedly. It makes The Magic Apple Tree all the more distinct, as nobody else would or could have written this sort of book with precisely her perspective. Sometimes she offers her opinions as fact, but that is all part of the character of spending the year in her company.

Large sections of The Magic Apple Tree are about gardening and cooking, and these are the parts that I enjoyed a little less. Hill includes recipes and, while some recipes are eternal, others are curiously tied to their decade. And I am not a gardener, so am unlikely to take any of the advice she gives in that quarter – most of her advice being about the growing of fruit and vegetables, which she much prefers to growing flowers and non-edible plants.

But there is still plenty to delight, in the less practically minded parts of the book. Hill’s perceptive eye is turned not just on her fellow humans but on all the other living beings around her. Any description she gives of flora or fauna is done with beauty and accuracy, and without the cluttering of undue sentiment. She is able to delight in the active world of nature around her, and we can share in that delight, without it ever stepping in the fey. For example…

On the last Sunday in August, at about eleven o’clock, in the morning, I carried a pile of bolted lettuces and old pea haulms down to the compost heap, and, as I was stuffing it down, I glanced up into the Buttercup field. It was a fine morning, the early mist was rolling back across the Fen and cows and trees and fences were emerging from it in the sunshine. Near at hand, the grass was glittering with dew. And not ten yards away from me, looking straight into my face, was a dog fox, big and bold and handsome, sniffing the air. I waited. He waited. He had been on his way to our garden, there was no doubt, at all, he would have been up and over the stone wall and among the hens in seconds. And the hens were all out of their run and scratching about the garden.

Then the fox caught my scent and turned and went streaking away down the slope towards the willows and up the Rise on the opposite side, brush up, ears pricked, and I called the hens in with a handful of corn, and shut the gate on them, just in case.

I really loved The Magic Apple Tree. I might have loved it still more if there had been a little more on fellow villagers and less on practical advice, but that is by the by. It is charming and honest and vivid, with much to recognise and to remember.

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

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I loved this book! It was one of those times when I had to decide between racing through it and treating myself to a few pages at a time – and I went largely for the latter route, reading a bit with my breakfast each morning.

I bought The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne back in 2013 in Malvern, and have been a bit nervous about picking it off the shelves. I thought it might give away the endings to all the Christies I haven’t read, which is probably about half of them. My fears were allayed as soon as I read the preface – Osborne promises not to give away any murderers or major spoilers, and he sticks to this throughout.

The book goes through Christie’s works one by one, in order. Each section gives some context about Christie’s life at the time, a few details about the set up of the novel, what the critics and public thought etc. There’s about two pages per book – which, considering how many she wrote, comes together for a very satisfying book. Osborne is so good about giving you a taste of what makes each book original. In a short space, he might tell us how it fits into Poirot’s career, how Christie was inspired to begin, how it was reviewed, whether there were adaptations. He is remarkably good at hinting at a novel’s ingenuity – or, alternatively, if it repeated a trick or wasn’t as convincing as others – without giving a single jot away. There are plenty of biographical details about Christie, even though this isn’t quite  a biography. He gets the combination of elements perfectly.

And this is a critical work, in the sense that he shares his opinions. He’s not afraid to point out some of her weaker work, but he is obviously also an avid fan – most of the time he is enthusiastic and picks out the reasons why he likes the books. It’s not quite an out-and-out appreciation, but nor is it one of those dispiriting works where the writer seems to have chosen a subject they barely respect. Osborne writes very affectionately. And he is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Christie, and I enjoyed the times where he points out that other Christie critics got things a bit wrong.

I really enjoyed Osborne’s tone of voice, and his very English sense of humour. For example…

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so.

He’s also not afraid to point out errors in Christie’s novels, with the acuity of the superfan. This section is perhaps not quite representative, as it is more detailed than most, but…

Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were the singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews and in the novel Evil Under the Sun; (iv) the plot another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel A Murder is Announced; (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate.

This is one of the few times when he names which novels/stories share traits – a little unfair, if you happen to have read one but not the other. More often he’ll just say that something appeared earlier, without specifying where.

Osborne clearly knows a lot about opera and music, and it is these areas where he often picks up on errors. Elsewhere, he teasingly decides to pretend Christie deliberately included the mistakes – for instance, suggesting that Poirot’s inaccurate French is clearly a result of spending too much time in England, or that Miss Marple has got absent-minded and forgetful when certain details don’t line up.

I mostly enjoyed Osborne’s personality shining through. It’s a little less palatable when he goes on a tangent about how longer jail terms are needed for criminals, or a very unnecessarily impassioned defence of the use of the n-word in the original title to And Then There Were None. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is cut in the revised and updated edition from 2000, that I don’t have.

But his other quibbles are all part of the charm for me, and make it feel even more like you’re listening to a keen fan discussing their favourite author.

As I say, I’ve read about half or so of Christie’s books, and I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hadn’t read any or many. I definitely enjoyed reading about books I knew a bit more than those I didn’t. But to anybody who loves Christie – this is a total delight.

You’re So Unreliable!

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One of my holiday reads (yes, still working my way through reviewing those – it’ll probably coincide with my next holiday by the time I finish with it) was Wish Her Safe At Home (1982) by Stephen Benatar. I heard about it from this article, reprinted in The Week. I’ve only just noticed it was written by the usually rather imbecilic Cosmo Landesman (Col and I find his film reviews very useful – you can guarantee that whatever he writes, the exact opposite will be true) – had I spotted Landesman’s name on it before I wouldn’t have proceeded. Glad I did! And, had that article not appeared on my horizon, Aarti’s enthusiasm would surely have filtered through! To get an idea of how much she loves Wish Her Safe At Home, just think about me and Miss Hargreaves…

Benatar’s novel made the press mostly because of his determination to give it a readership. That article elaborates on how he (very gently) approached people in various bookshops, suggesting they might like to read Wish Her Safe At Home (and probably his other novels too). He also set up his own publisher to reprint his own novels. And it takes some gumption to approach Penguin Classics and suggest his own, moderately successful, novel should enter that hall of fame. They wanted an introduction from a notable name, John Carey was happy to oblige (if the name is familiar it might be because, like me, you’ve flicked through The Intellectuals and the Masses) – but Penguin still turned it down. The beautiful New York Review of Books Classics were, thankfully, more sensible – hence the novel’s current incarnation.

So that’s the story the newspapers enjoyed – man battles against odds; gritty determination rewarded. We Brits do love an underdog – but don’t let any of that stand in the way of Wish Her Safe At Home being read on its own merits. It’s worth remembering that it was shortlisted for the James Tait Memorial Prize (a better indication of a good book than the Man Booker Prize, I reckon). So let’s get onto the story that really matters – the one within the pages of Wish Her Safe At Home.

Rachel Waring – who had once been ‘almost pretty’ – has inherited her great-aunt’s Georgian mansion, and leaves her dull job and incompatible flatmate, having instantly fallen in love with the house when she visited it. Moving there hadn’t been the plan, but its lure is such that she is immediately certain that she must:

The exterior of the house was beautiful. Terraced, tall, eighteenth-century, elegant. Oh, the stonework needed cleaning and the window frames required attention – as did the front door and half a dozen other things. But it was beautiful. I don’t know why; I just hadn’t been expecting this.
I always find the attraction of houses fascinating in novels. As someone who could happily spend all day staring at a beautiful home, who gazes into estate agents’ windows at properties I could never possibly afford, and who regards Kirstie and Phil as something akin to surrogate parents… well, I can sympathise with Rachel thus far.

But that isn’t all – the house has a plaque to Horatio Gavin, ‘Philanthropist and politician’, who had lived there 1781-1793. Rachel develops an interest in Gavin, and determines to find out more about him…

It’s not just dead philanthropists who catch Rachel’s interest. Indeed, more or less anybody she meets is considered a potential conversational partner, even if she is appraising and judging them at the same time. Benatar’s skillful presentation of Rachel’s voice gives her inner thoughts and outer expressions all tangled up with one another, and also fuses in the odd line here and there which show that neither are quite right… more on that later. First, here’s an example of Rachel’s lack of edit-button in her outbursts to anybody in close proximity…
“I think I should like to have been somebody’s favourite aunt,” I said. “I think it might have been fun.” This, to the woman whose table at the teashop I had asked to share.

She smiled, hesitated, finally remarked: “Well, perhaps it’s not too late.”

“No brother no sister, no husband – somehow I get the feeling it might be!”

“Oh dear.”

“Did you ever see Dear Brutus?”

“Dear Brutus? Yes! A lovely play.”

“Wouldn’t it be fine if we all had second chances?”

She nodded, now looking more relaxed. “Oh, I’d have gone to university and got myself an education!” I reflected that she probably needed one. “But otherwise I don’t think I’d have wished things very different.” She gave a meaningless laugh and started gathering up her novel and her magazine. Poor woman. What a lack of imagination. (And what a dull, appalling hat.) Yet I realised that I envied her.
It’s not just strangers in cafes, though – Rachel becomes friendly with an assortment of local people, especially her youthful gardener and his wife, Roger and Celia. Their lives get increasingly tangled up, in the most cheerful and whimsical way imaginable… or so it seems.

For it quickly becomes apparent that Rachel is not a reliable narrator. Whenever this realisation dawns in a novel, I get a little shiver down my back – what to believe, what not to believe! At first she seems unhinged in a jolly way – singing to herself, accosting everyone with sunny optimism and faux-schoolma’am whimsy. She meanders along the line between being consciously eccentric and… something less healthy. She gets increasingly bizarre, and it becomes clear that she is not sane… As John Carey writes in his introduction, ‘It reminds us how thin the boundaries are between the mad and the imaginative, the mad and the sensitive, the mad and the acute.’ She becomes obsessed with Horatio Gavin, the philanthropist who’d once lived in her house. We can no longer trust her version of the events she narrates – but second-guessing the truth is a twisting and turning game, written with excellent subtlety by Benatar. So much cleverer, so much better than The Behaviour of Moths, which tried something similar.

And Rachel’s is truly a unique voice. Witty and biting and joyous and enthusiastic and… yes, rather unhinged. Whether or not it is convincingly female is another question – I don’t mean feminine, for a female’s voice needn’t be feminine, but somehow it seemed as though it might not be a million miles away from Benatar’s own voice – though presumably his is rather tempered! That aside, Wish Her Safe At Home is quite extraordinary, and would certainly bear a careful re-reading. It’s not remotely the sort of novel I was expecting from the cover, or even from the blurb. I was expecting a novel which felt much older – this novel is unmistakably modern. Not through expletives or slang or modern references, but perhaps in tone. [Edit: I think what I actually meant, having read Aarti’s comments and reassessed, is that the novel felt timeless. When I said ‘unmistakably modern’ I meant it obviously wasn’t a 1940s reprint, in the way that The Little Stranger could have been – this novel could have taken place at any time, and it takes a while to work out when it is set.] And yet it combines this with a sense of history, and a charm which is uncommon in post-war novels. It’s an extraordinary read, and I am glad that Benatar’s persistence and determination paid off.

It shouldn’t be unusual, but John Carey writes an unusually good Introduction. Not unusual for him, I mean, just unusual in general. I’ve now used the word ‘unusual’ so often that it has lost all meaning… Aside from some lazy anti-Christianity, Carey writes insightfully and with an eye that is both analytical and appreciative. More on that topic tomorrow, methinks…

Do let me know if there are any unreliable narrators I should meet (although don’t let me know if their unreliability is a huge spoiler for the book!)

Books to get Stuck into:

To be honest, this most reminded me of the book I read immediately beforehand – The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – because of the influence of a house, etc. etc. Instead, I’ll pick a couple novels with unreliable narrators, which is always an interesting angle…
Prince Rupert’s Teardrop by Lisa Glass – ok, being honest, this book was far too gruesome for me to enjoy – but it’s also the best and most unnerving unreliable narrator I’ve encountered.

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth – and this is the next most unnerving! The tale of a scarily obsessive neighbour… but told from the perspective of that self-deluded neighbour. Very clever, and decidedly gripping.