2001

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban #ABookADayInMay No.21

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

In case anybody is counting – yes, I did read No.20 in A Book A Day in May and didn’t blog about it. The book I read is Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and it’s one of the books in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I thought I’d wait until then to reveal my thoughts.

And onto today’s book. When I saw Annabel reviewing Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit the other day, it reminded me that I have a couple of his books to read and they’re quite short. Previously I’ve only read Turtle Diary, which I think is his most famous novel, and… well, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001) is very different.

Peter is an artist who first encounters Amaryllis at a distance in a dream. She is getting on a bus – the bus stop, mysteriously, says BALSAMIC and the bus says FINSEY-OBAY, a place he has never heard of. And the bus is made of bamboo and rice paper in yellows, oranges, and pinks, a bit like a Japanese lantern.

He is beguiled by her (and, yes, it’s the first of Russell Hoban being very Male Author Writing About Women’s Bodies, which did get a bit tiresome). But he has seemingly unrelated dreams and cannot recapture the strange scene – and then, at an exhibition, he meets Amaryllis in person.

When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.

I like how Peter, as an artist, sees the world through art references – and not in too forced a way. The Klein bottle, incidentally, is some sort of riff on a mobius strip in which a bottle is eternal surface, or something. I have to admit that I glazed over a little on those bits, complete with diagrams, but other readers will enjoy them.

Peter and Amaryllis have a drink and they want to see each other again – but in the dreamscape. He doesn’t know where she lives or even her last name, so has to rely on this hoped reunion. And… yes, they meet there again.

As their lives continue in dreams (which they call ‘glims’, because saying the word ‘dream’ will force them to awake) and in reality, they take part in a curious experiment. Amaryllis is keen that Peter gets on the bus with her, in the dream, though neither of them seem to know exactly why. And Peter is keen to love Amaryllis forever? I wasn’t sure how the insta-love played into the structure, but Amaryllis is clearly captivating.

The novel continues, with dream and reality becoming more and more aligned. Incidents that happen in dream seem to come true; experiences aren’t clearly dream or reality. The prose remains quite spare and straightforward, which I think is wise. We know where we are within the sentences, even if not within the scenes.

At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

I did like Amaryllis Night and Day, though nowhere near as much as I enjoyed Turtle Diary. I think that’s partly because I didn’t much care about either Peter or Amaryllis. Rather, the way Hoban constructed realities was interesting – not necessarily what happened within them. And I did find his erotic gaze a little tedious. He was in his mid-70s when he wrote it, and there’s something a little boring and sad, to me, about old men writing droolingly about 20-something women’s bodies.

So, an interesting experiment that I think deserved more worthy content. But keeping up with my May challenge featuring very different books most days!

Three To See The King by Magnus Mills – #NovNov Day 24

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.

My house has no windows because there’s nothing to see. Oh, there are shutters that can be used to let the light in when required, but they remain closed against the weather for most of the time. It stands in a wild place, my house, high up on the plain. At night it creaks and groans as the wind batters it for hour after hour, in search of a gap to get inside. Even the door has to be bolted top and bottom to stop it from being blown open. I used to worry in case one day I might lose the roof, but so far that hasn’t happened and now I’m certain the structure is quite sound. The man who built it made sure of that. I found the house empty a few years ago, and adopted it for my own use. At first sight I knew it had everything I could need: somewhere to eat and drink and sleep without disturbance, protected from the elements by a layer of corrugated metal and nothing more. A very modest dwelling I must say, but it looked clean and tidy so I moved in. For a long while I was quite content here, and remained convinced I would find no better place to be. Then one day a woman arrived at my door and said, ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

This is the opening to Magnus Mills’s strange, brilliant Three To See The King from 2001. It’s the sixth of his books I’ve read, though the third to be published, and there are certainly hallmarks that I recognise. A short narrative, told in a sparse way from a first-person narrator who doesn’t entirely know what’s happening to him. And the reader certainly doesn’t know either.

The anonymous ‘I’ lives in this tin house in a seemingly endless desert. He has a neighbour, Simon Painter, about three miles away – and knows another couple of men living in two other tin houses a bit further off. This is his entire community, though it can hardly be called that because he lives in contented isolation. We never learn how we gets his supplies, or how he ended up there, or why there are a handful of tin hits in a sandy wasteland. As other reviewers have noted, it is a bit Beckettian – though the tone feels less bleak and more like amiable confusion.

The woman who turns up and says ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding’ is Mary Petrie, a ‘friend of a friend’, who rather imposes upon the narrator. He can’t turn her away – and she ends up moving in. But she is quickly dissatisfied with the way he does things. She is an enigma, and becomes one that he doesn’t wish to leave.

Things start to change when the three other men in his makeshift community become interested in a man they meet who lives a little further off – Michael Hawkins. The narrator hasn’t met him, but Michael Hawkins clearly has charisma and personality. This newcomer – or is he? – begins to shift the dynamics of this peculiar environment. And then other people to start to appear.

Mills is a brilliantly careful writer, and his greatest talent is the way he can pervade a novel[la] with atmosphere – without ever revealing how it’s done. Three To See The King is unsettling almost from the beginning. What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.

Many of Mills’ novels have the cadence of a parable or fable, even if it isn’t clear what the hidden depth is. While this novella certainly has things to say about communities, power, and even cults, there is no ‘a-ha!’ moment where the puzzle falls into place and a central meaning is unveiled. The title puts you in mind of the Magi visiting Jesus, of course, as does the cover design of my edition – but that might just be another red herring. I feel rather unnerved, after finishing Three To See The King. But in a good way. I have spent time in the presence of a master.

The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

StuckinaBook All , , , 8 Comments

This beautiful Slightly Foxed edition has been on my shelf for a few years, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (originally published in 2001, and a SF Edition in 2013). I do remember that I accidentally gave the SF team the wrong address for my review copy, very embarrassingly, and bought my own after my rather unpleasant ex-landlords never forwarded anything to the address I gave them. OH WELL. I finally picked it up, and wolfed it down in a few days.

If the name Ysenda Maxtone Graham rings a bell, it might be because her oral history of girls’ boarding schools – Terms and Conditions – was a bit of a hit a couple of years ago, and deservedly. What you might not know is that she is Jan Struther’s granddaughter, though she was born some years after Struther died. The family connection is the perfect rationale behind this insightful, slightly gossipy, and largely unscholarly examination of Jan Struther’s life and career.

When I say unscholarly, I mean there are none of the apparatus of your Hermione-Lee-style biography: no footnotes, no index, no appendices. No anecdote is referenced and, in much the same delightful way as Terms and Conditions, it feels more like a friend telling you everything they know on a topic, vague anecdotes and all, than a biographer carefully weighing the evidence. I mean it all as a compliment.

I suspect most of you know who Mrs Miniver is, even if you haven’t read the book or watched the film (and I recommend heartily that you do both). She was the British everywoman (well, upper-middle-class everywoman) whose tales of everyday events – going to the dentist; hosting a tea party – became a bestseller when collected from the newspaper into a handy edition. And she then became Greer Garson, noble British housewife facing war – and one very over-the-top angry Nazi in her kitchen – in the film that apparently helped persuade the American people to join WW2. Even though the initial book was published before war was declared.

And Jan Struther (real name Joyce Anstruther, later Joyce Maxtone Graham), of course, was the woman who created her.

Joyce went out of Printing House Square and walked along Upper Thames Street, thinking of all the ‘M’-words she could. Every one she thought of was either too long or too short, or a real name, or didn’t sound like a name at all. Then she noticed a man carrying a bundle of skins out of one of the furriers’ warehouses, and this set her thinking about the heraldic names for fur which her father had taught her. Vair and counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, ermine and erminois… and what was the other one? It was on the tip of her tongue for several minutes. Then she remembered it. She went straight back to Printing House Square.

“What about calling her ‘Mrs Miniver’?”

That’s a pretty good example of the sort way Maxtone Graham approaches the biography – the account doesn’t have any sort of referencing, and we are taken into Struther’s mind almost as though we were reading a novel. It does occasionally mean I wanted to take her anecdotes with a pinch of salt, but it made them nonetheless interesting to read.

Unlike most Slightly Foxed Editions, The Real Mrs Miniver isn’t a memoir – and it doesn’t focus on only part of the subject’s life. We see Struther from cradle to grave, though Maxtone Graham wisely focuses on the story surrounding Mrs Miniver and her various incarnations. The title is something of a misnomer because, despite being inextricably linked in the public consciousness, Struther was really very different from Miniver – not least in her marriage. Where the Minivers were the perfect couple, Struther’s marriage started off joyfully and became strained. The other focus of this biography is the dwindling marriage, and the love affair Struther started next with a younger refugee escaping the Nazis.

I found anything connected with Mrs Miniver fascinating – from the origins of the columns to the whirlwind surrounding the film (and the welcome way in which Greer Garson took on the mantle of ‘the real Mrs Miniver’). Struther lived in America for several years during the war, and reading about her publicity tours and radio appearances was so interesting. And, truth be told, Struther didn’t achieve much else, career-wise. We don’t hear much about her hymn-writing (‘Lord of all Hopefulness’ is still very familiar to many of us, I’m sure) but do see how she struggled to follow up on a success that was due to serendipity perhaps as much as purpose or even talent.

Maxtone Graham writes sensitively and rather movingly about Struther’s romantic strife, writing block, and a period of mental breakdown. The whole book is crafted brilliantly because Maxtone Graham is such a good storyteller – not adhering to the usual forms of biographies, but creating her own unique and inspired version. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and it’s made me want to dash back to Mrs Miniver – both book and film.

Marrying Out – Harold Carlton

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 1 Comment

You know that I love Slightly Foxed Editions – I don’t shut up about it – and the latest one I read is up there with my favourites now. I pretty much read it all in one setting. It’s Marrying Out (2001) by Harold Carlton, originally published as The Most Handsome Sons in the World!, a memoir about the fall-out in a Jewish family when one of the sons wants to ‘marry out’.

More in the Shiny New Books review…

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn (a blog post with a twist)

StuckinaBook All , , , 26 Comments

About 15 months ago, I got a gift from a lady at my book group: Ella Minnow Pea (2001) by Mark Dunn. Fast forward a bit, and I finally got around to it, and found it a surprisingly brilliant small book.

I did know Ella Minnow Pea‘s main, and most original, ‘gimmick’, if you will – that Mark Dunn gradually lost a, b, c, so on and so forth, throughout his book – and had thought that it was simply a witty structuring and a prolonging of a trick. It had a possibility of growing a touch dull or awkward (thought I) but was still worth trying out.

And, it turns out, my worry was wholly without basis.  Ella Minnow Pea is a fairly brilliant out-working of a good trick – but it is also dark and disturbing, on occasion, and not at all a throwaway, whimsical sort of book. I hadn’t thought it would turn out so dark…

Dunn’s story all occurs on an island known as Nollop, in honour of Mr. Nollop, famous for composing an important pangram – which you might know (follow this link.)  I don’t know if Nollop is fictitious or not – Wiki is willfully ignoring him, if not – but Nollop is akin to a god for folk on his island.  So much so, that Town Councillors await his laws from on high – although Nollop is, sadly, long lost to this mortal world.  His command is, (so Councillors say), shown by Nollop Island’s local bust of his body – or, particularly, wording put by a sculptor on it, of Mr. Nollop’s pangram.  As parts of its wording fall off, Councillors claim that it is a dictat from Mr. Nollop, that island inhabitants must drop that part of vocabulary – by mouth or by writing.  If inhabitants do not comply: a warning for a first infraction, whipping for an additional slip, and banishing from Nollop for a third.

At first, as ‘z’ falls from Nollop’s famous pangram, nobody thinks much about it.  It will not significantly adjust island inhabitants’ communication – for how much do folk say ‘z’ anyway?

As ‘q’ follows ‘z’, and ‘j’ follows ‘q’, things start to grow in difficulty – and angst among inhabitants, many of whom unwittingly infract Nollop’s laws, with postliminary warning, whipping – or having to sail away from Nollop for good.  Many Nollopians opt to abandon an unhappy island voluntarily…

Fourth to go is ‘d’, which brings with it appalling frustration.  Ella Minnow Pea all consists of writing from inhabitant to inhabitant, mum to child, aunt to young girl – scrawlings which Councillors scan for contraband words, but nothing apart from that, so this lady’s inclusion of painful or incautious topics won’t occasion Councillors burning or taking a communication:

My sweet Mittie, it is strange, so terribly strange how taxing it has become for me to speak, to write without these four illegal letters, but especially without the fourth.  I cannot see how, given the loss of one letter more, I will be able to remain among those I love, for surely I will misstep.  So I have chosen to stop talking, to stop writing altogether.
I found it a tiny bit difficult to work out who was who (or whom was whom, mayhap) always, but Ella Minnow Pea is primarily about a girl with that lmnop-sounding alias, maintaining a campaign against Nollop’s Councillors – trying (with similarly stubborn island folk) to craft a rival to Nollop’s pangram, which will (curiously) abolish Nollop Island’s Town Council’s dominant control of vocabulary.

It was surprisingly moving, actually. I think Dunn might aim for Ella Minnow Pea to imply an analogy with a Fascist nation, or any sort of dictatorship which bans individual autonomy. It was chilling, as inhabitants of Nollop lost rights, all books in Nollop’s library – burnt, straightaway, for invariably having ‘z’ – and, following from that, inhabitants lost all availability for articulation.

As I said at this post’s start – Ella Minnow Pea is surprisingly dark – but not gratuitously so at all.

Mark Dunn isn’t original in writing a book which avoids using a particular part of A-Z – in fact, a book using this cunning trick is known as a ‘lipogram‘ (Dunn’s book is, if you will, lipogrammatic) – but not many authors could discard so many words and still craft a story so brilliant, almost as though this linguistic loss had no ability to limit his writing or imagination.  Only Dunn could craft a book so moving and full of wisdom, with this handicap – thank you so much, Ruth, for giving it to Simon’s Book Gift Mountain.

And now, that twist – did you spot that this blog post – I think! – was built (apart from citations and quoting ‘Ella Minnow Pea‘ in full), without using any ‘e‘s at all…?  Not with Dunn’s brilliant cunning at doing so, although I must admit that it was oddly tiring!

Congratulations, if you did spot that!