ACOB2014

Oh, Agatha

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Oh dear, have I really not blogged since last Wednesday? I’m sorry, I’m being very negligent – and I can’t even think of a reason why, as it hasn’t been an especially busy week. Perhaps it’s my general reading slump at the moment – and, if you’ve been around for any of my previous reading slumps, you’ll probably know what my solution has been. Dame Agatha Christie. If you hate spoilers of any variety (and I’ll only talking about the death which happens in the first few pages) then skim read this post…

Yes, that’s right, I’ve ignored the hundreds of unread books in my house – and the few that I’m reading at the moment – and taken myself to Oxford Central Library to borrow some Agathas. Almost all of mine are at home, and the ones I have here don’t fall into blank years in A Century of Books – and, if I’m reading Agatha, I may as well kill two birds with one stone.  Still, with the criteria of being (a) not read read, (b) filling blank years, and (c) currently in library stock, I managed to come away with two books – Hallowe’en Party and The Seven Dials Mystery, and whipped through the first in a couple of days.

I’d always steered clear of it, because of my distaste for Hallowe’en, but it’s pretty incidental to the plot. And, as plot is so important in Christie novels, I’m not going to tell you much beyond the initial murder – which is of a young girl at a Hallowe’en party, who is drowned in an apple bobbing bucket. Shortly before this, she has begun to tell people that she once witnessed a murder, only she didn’t realise it was a murder until much later. They won’t listen – but it seems that perhaps someone present has taken her comment seriously… Hercule Poirot, naturally, comes to sort things out, called there by Ariadne Oliver. I have five main things I want to say about this novel:

1.) I love Christie plots about misinterpretation – where a witness sees someone looking shocked that something is there, when in fact they’re shocked that something isn’t there; when a look of horror is about a memory rather than a current event – all those sorts of things, for some reason, are wonderful to me. So I loved that element of Hallowe’en Party.

2.) I’ve never read an Ariadne Oliver novel before, and I love her. And Agatha Christie obviously had a lot of fun creating her (she is a detective novelist, with a Finnish detective hero, and Christie uses her as a bit of a mouthpiece…)

3.) This is Christie’s child-killing novel… it’s interesting for the number of times (and this isn’t a spoiler) she talks about leniency for mentally imbalanced killers or those who’ve been through care, or whatever extenuating circumstances, and how Poirot doesn’t think justice should be considered less important than mercy.

4.) It was published in 1969 – so nearly 50 years after Poirot’s first case and Christie’s first novel. Amazing that she could still be on such good form after all that time.

5.) And it is a very good novel. I found the conclusion a little unsatisfying, mostly because I’d already guessed the solution, or at least most of it, and I much prefer being surprised by the end of a detective novel.

So, there you go. Onto The Seven Dials Mystery…

More Muriel

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My stream of reading Muriel Spark doesn’t look likely to come to an end any time soon – so was just so wonderfully prolific – and the latest one I’ve read is Territorial Rights (1979), given to me by Virago in their nice new edition, and reviewed over on Shiny New Books.  The copy I read, I will confess to you, was the copy given to me by Hayley after Muriel Spark Reading Week (and I gave the Virago copy to a deserving friend).

It’s not in the top two or three Spark novels – or maybe even top ten – but it’s still brilliant, with lots of recognisably Sparkian elements. Head on over to my Shiny New Books review to find out more…

Every Good Deed – Dorothy Whipple

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It wasn’t until I listed Every Good Deed among my purchases at the Bookbarn that I realised how scarce it was – as a couple of commenters pointed out.  That made me feel duty-bound to read it asap, despite having only read some of the Persephone Whipples available (Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr Knight, Greenbanks, High Wages, and The Closed Door – more than I’d thought, now I come to list them).  Well, judging by Persephone’s love for Dorothy Whipple, I predict that Every Good Deed (1946) will one day join that number – but perhaps they needn’t rush.  It was enjoyable and interesting, but it wasn’t Whipple on top form…

They general idea is that a couple of oldish spinster sisters adopt a child from a local sort of orphanage, and all does not go well.  Susan and Emily Topham are shy, caring, worried about what society thinks of them, and above all not ready for a trickster.  Their cook (Cook, if you will) is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely.  Enter Gwen.

She steals, she talks back, she lies, she is (when a little older) no better than she ought to be.  She abuses their care and runs amok – and runs away.  She’s not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters.

There were hundreds of children who, in the same circumstances, would have responded to their care, would have loved them and been grateful; but by mischance they had hit upon Gwen.
That’s Whipple’s slightly half-hearted attempt to make sure we know Every Good Deed isn’t supposed to be a universal cautionary tale.  The classism of the book did make me a little uneasy, and I’m not sure that sentence saved things…

There are a few more ins and outs in the narrative than this, but not many.  Although I enjoyed reading it, and Whipple is an expert at writing a very readable book, it did feel a lot like a short story which had got a bit long.  There is only one arc of the narrative – subplots not welcome – and the moments of crisis feel like the climaxes of a short story, not multifaceted moments in a novella.  Every Good Deed is only just over a hundred pages long, but I reckon it would have made more sense at, say, forty pages, in one of Whipple’s short story collections.  An enjoyable enough read, but if you’re struggling to find a copy anywhere… well, don’t feel too distraught about it.

Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

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Another month, another cold… and I still haven’t written properly about the book that got me through the last cold.  I did tell you that Swallows and Amazons (1930) by Arthur Ransome was being my solace – battling out with another 1930 book, actually, Diary of a Provincial Lady – and what a perfect solace it was too.  Thank you Vintage for sending me this stunning copy a year or so ago.  Not a word of it came as a surprise, devotee as I was of the film (watched when ill as a child), but that wasn’t really the point.

If anybody doesn’t know the book at all (can this be?) it is the first of a series about John, Susan, Titty, Roger, and various others (in this novel, the Blackett sisters) who join them or war with them in their boating adventures.  It kicks off with that famous message of parental care, telegrammed by their father: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.  There are those namby-pamby types among us who will argue that children are not better drowned than duffers, but I suspect we aren’t supposed to take his words entirely seriously.  The father knows whose side the novel is on, and that no calamity will befall the children – even if they are sent off as young as seven to fend for themselves (albeit in striking distance of home).

One advantage the film has over the book is that you can just watch them doing things to boats, and all is clear – I ended Swallows and Amazons as ignorant as I began, despite Ransome’s valiant effort to immerse the reader in the minutiae of sailing. Tacking this and gunwale that.  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t a clue what was happening.  It was all such fun.

But… I think Swallows and Amazons is probably best enjoyed as a child, or in a sickly state such as I was.  Something I’ve noticed while reading or re-reading classic children’s books as an adult – be it E. Nesbit, A.A. Milne, Richmal Crompton, or whoever – is that they are often funny in a way that is intended for the adult.  The child will still love the story, but something more sophisticated is going on too.  Well, unless I missed it completely, there is nothing at all sophisticated in Swallows and Amazons.  Ransome tells the story in tones of breathless excitement; the narrator is every bit as childlike as the children.  There isn’t really any humour (besides a good ‘ruthless’ pun), and there certainly isn’t any wryness or winking to the reader.  Everything is ingenuous and cheerful.  I don’t think I could have a reading diet which consisted just of this boys’/girls’ own variety of adventure, but, my goodness, it was perfect for my sickbed.

Letters from England – Karel Čapek

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When Claire recommended Letters from England (1924, translated by Paul Selver 1925) by Karel Čapek it was one of those very welcome recommendations – being for a book that I already had on my shelves.  Usually I note when and where I buy books, but this time I didn’t – I can only assume it was because the name rang a bell, the physical book is quintessentially 1920s, and I have a soft spot for books about England. And, oh, how fun this book is.

It doesn’t that Čapek shares my feelings about the relative merits of London and the rest of the country. It is amusing, in the 1920s, to hear him complaining about grim housing and traffic (goodness knows what he’d think if he visited it today), but I entirely agree with him about the ferocious busyness of the place.  It is rather easier to be funny when one is criticising than when one is praising, of course, and Čapek is very amusing in these early chapters.

These houses look rather like family vaults; I tried to make a drawing of them, but do what I would, I was unable to obtain a sufficiently hopeless appearance; besides, I have no grey paint to smear over them.
Oh, yes, he includes plenty of pen and ink illustrations, of the variety that are deceptively simplistic.  He is particularly good at animals, despite what he says in the text.

But – thankfully for the self esteem of the nation – he doesn’t just stay in London and criticise it.  Instead, he travels around the countryside and (belying his title) pays visits to Scotland and Wales, and writes about Ireland without actually going there.

Where are you to pick words fine enough to portray the quiet and verdant charms of the English countryside? I have been down in Surrey, and up in Essex; I have wandered along roads lined with quickset hedges, sheer quickset hedges which make England the real England, for they enclose, but do not oppress; half-opened gates lead you to ancient avenues of a park deeper than a forest; and here is a red house with high chimneys, a church-tower among the trees, a meadow with flocks of cows, a flock of horses which turn their beautiful and solemn eyes upon you; a pathway that seems to be swept as clean as a new pin, velvety pools with nenuphars and sword-lilies, parks, mansions, meadows, and meadows, no fields, nothing that might be a shrill reminder of human drudgery; a paradise where the Lord God Himself made paths of asphalt and sand, planted old trees and entwined ivy coverlets for the red houses.
You see his way with words, and his fondness for the long sentence.  We will forgive him referring to any group of animals as a flock, and believeing Essex to be ‘up’, because he is so expressive and enthusiastic an appreciator of the English countryside – which means so much to me too, in a way which transcends expression.  The countryside is the only place where I feel properly alive, and I would love to have accompanied Čapek on his travels, gasping at the beauty of the Lake District, admiring the simple aesthetic pleasure of a thatched cottage, and (for we are not perfect human beings) sharing eye-rolls at the sort of person who bustles hither and thither in a city all year, and never ventures out to visit a sheep.

The Pumpkin Eater – Penelope Mortimer

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Sorry to disappear suddenly – I went off to Somerset for an Easter weekend (the most dramatic moment: Sherpa getting stuck on the roof; eventually I pulled her through the bathroom window, with Our Vicar on a ladder and Our Vicar’s Wife & Colin holding a tarpaulin like a firefighters’ blanket).  Now I’m back in Oxford, and eyeing up the growing pile of books I’ve got waiting to review for you.  First up – one of those pesky Penelopes.

I had intended to read Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, as part of my vague project to read more of my unread Persephones, but it clashed with another title on my Century of Books – so instead I picked up The Pumpkin Eater (1962) in this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.  But, oh, aren’t they always beautiful?

I thought the image on the front was simply abstract, until I realised that it was a pram full of faces – Downhill in a Pram by Susan Bower, to be precise.  And that is apt for the recurring theme of The Pumpkin Eater (and possibly my favourite thing about the book) – the number of children the unnamed narrator has.  Cleverly, Mortimer gives us a heroine who has a lot of children – but by never specifying quite how many, we get the impression that they are numbered in their dozens.  People are always shocked by how many there are; her various husbands (she’s not short of them, but at least the number is given: four) baulk at them, and only one name is vouchsafed to us: Dinah.

The novel starts with the narrator in a therapy session.  These recur throughout the novel, and are very amusing (in a dark way), mostly because of the lack of progress that is made in them.  The therapist follows the narrator around in circles, expecting her to feel something about her husbands and children – but she is steadfastly stony-faced.

“And then?” he asked coldly.

“Then?  Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents.  I had Dinah there.  Of course he was dead by then.”

“And did that upset you?”

“Yes.  Yes, I suppose it did.  Naturally.  It must have done.”

He slumped in his chair.  He seemed tired out.  I said, “Look, need we go on with this?  I find it tremendously boring, and it’s not what I’m thinking about at all.  I just don’t think about those husbands except…”

“Except when?”

“I never think about them.”
She has something of a Barbara Comyns heroine about her – that undaunted matter-of-factness – but Mortimer does reveal some of her emotional fragility as the novel progresses, and Jake the current husband is knocked from whatever pedestal her might have briefly mounted.  “One’s past grows to a point where it is longer than one’s future, and then it can become too great a burden,” as she says in the narrative, towards the end.

And then there is the enormous glass tower Jack is building for them in the middle of the countryside.  It’s a curious part of the novel, and I don’t know how we are supposed to interpret it – as Freud would? As Ibsen would in The Master Builder? Or is a tower sometimes just a tower?

But, as with many of my favourite novels, the important feature is voice.  Mortimer does this brilliantly.  We are immersed in the worldview and experience of the unnamed narrator, even without for a moment believing that she could plausibly exist in the way she is presented.  Her upsets and anxieties are certainly real, but the character is more than that – the centrepiece of a black comedy with only a toe in reality.  And, designed that way, it is a glorious novel.

Tove Jansson

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You probably know that one of my very favourite authors is Tove Jansson – but I didn’t know very much about her beyond what she’d put of herself in her fiction. So I was thrilled to learn that a biography of her was going to be published by Sort Of Books – indeed, translated (by Silvester Mazzarella) as, unbeknown to me, it was actually published in 2007.

And you guessed it – I’m pointing you towards my Shiny New Books review of Boel Westin’s biography of Tove Jansson!  Not only that, though – Silvester Mazzarella very kindly agreed to write a brilliant piece about translating the book.  It’s a long and interesting book that I don’t feel I entirely did justice to in my review, written when cold-ridden, but I always think it’s difficult to write properly about a biography – because, almost by definition, they have so much, and so much variety, in them.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

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Thank you for all your lovely birthday greetings!  I will do the prize draw soon, and today bought the book I’m intending to send… it’s very good, by one of my favourite authors, and not all that easy to find.

Now onto another Shiny New Books review for my Century of Books – Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.  I volunteered to read the very beautiful new edition from Daunt Books, and was surprised by the date and description.  And after a bit of digging realised that, yet again, two authors with vaguely similar minds had become amalgamated in my mind – this was another case of the Penelopes (or V.S. Naipaul and V.S. Pritchett, etc. etc.) – Nathanael West was, of course, not the same as Nathaniel Hawthorne… embarrassing.

Anyway, enough preamble, do go over to Shiny New Books and read my thoughts on Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) – and don’t forget to check out Oliver’s Five Fascinating Facts about Nathanael West while you’re there.

As For Me And My House – Sinclair Ross

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Well, I hope you’ll still be having a wander around Shiny New Books, but that won’t (of course) stop me writing reviews here on Stuck-in-a-Book – although they may quieten down a bit when Issue 2 starts to loom!  (Incidentally, we’re keen to get lots of bloggers writing pieces for us – contact me on simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk, or all of us at info[at]shinynewbooks.co.uk if you’re interested.)

And onto a book that I’ve been reading for about six months – As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross, kindly given to me by… someone.  I think Thomas at My Porch – certainly he is a huge fan.  Am I?  Hmm.  I don’t know.  This is one of those cases where I know the book is very good… but I didn’t very much enjoy reading it.

As For Me and My House (1941) takes the form of a woman’s diary from provincial Canada – but Diary of a Provincial Lady this is not.  True, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife are the central characters – Philip Bentley and his (anonymous?) narrator wife – but that’s where the similarities end.  Basically, the narrator’s life is miserable.  The small town is rude and ungrateful for the hard work her husband does.  He, in turn, has lost his faith and wishes he were a painter.  They are poor, their marriage is rocky, and dissatisfaction soaks every word of the novel.

He’s a failure now, a preacher instead of a painter, and every minute of the day he’s mindful of it.  I’m a failure too, a small-town preacher’s wife instead of what I so faithfully set out to be – but I have to stop deliberately like this to remember.  To have him notice me, speak to me as if I really mattered in his life, after twelve years with him that’s all I want or need.  It arranges my world for me, strengthens and quickens it, makes it immune to all worlds.
Well, as you can see, the writing is beautiful.  There is a deep and emotional richness to the way Ross writes.  I’m not sure it benefited from being in the diary format – it would have worked equally well, and probably rather more convincingly, simply as a first person narrative – but he certainly offers a fully-realised voice.  Just as convincing are the husband and (later) sort-of-adopted son, although I wonder if Ross intends us to believe the narrator to be as perceptive as she seems.

Here’s another beautiful, dispiriting passage:

The sand and dust drifts everywhere.  It’s in the food, the bed-clothes, a film on the book you’re reading before you can turn the page.  In the morning it’s half an inch deep on the window sills.  Half an inch again by noon. Half an inch again by evening.  It begins to make an important place for itself in the routine of the day.  I watch the little drifts form.  If at dusting time they’re not quite high enough I’m disappointed, put off the dusting sometimes half an hour to let them grow.  But if the wind has been high and they have outdrifted themselves, then I look at them incredulous, and feel a strange kind of satisfaction, as if such height were an achievement for which credit was coming to me.
That rather aptly describes how it felt reading the novel.  Melancholy piled on melancholy.  It swept through all the pages, in every sentence, almost in every word.  The more I read, the more I felt outdrifted by it.  I don’t demand novels of unswerving cheeriness, but… surely life isn’t as bad as all this?  (“But a man’s tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him.”)  It was wearying.  Beautiful, but wearying.

Of course, I read As For Me and My House as someone who has lived in a vicarage for many years, and whose father is still a working vicar (and mother a working vicar’s wife).  I am well aware that it isn’t always easy – that some parishioners can be difficult or aggressive or ungrateful.  In this novel it is the purportedly faith-filled whose hypocrisy stands out; in real life, it is just as likely to be the thoughtless atheist who tells you he’d like the church to burn down, or the teenager who thinks the vicar’s sons are fair game to shout abuse at in the street.  But Ross gives only the tiniest mention (in Mrs Bird) of the positivity that comes with the profession.  The strangers who are kind to you as soon as you arrive in a new village, the people who selflessly give up their time to help with kids’ events and so forth.  There is a world of literature bemoaning the claustrophobia of the small town – which needs to be balanced by how really lovely it is when people all know each other, care for each other, and let nobody go lonely.

Part of this seems like I just wish that Ross had written a different book.  But I think I could have really loved this one if there were a bit more balance – something more to alleviate the melancholy and hopelessness.  As it is, I do admire As or Me and My House.  Ross is unarguably a brilliant writer.  One I’d definitely recommend to sturdier souls.  And maybe my soul will be sturdier next time I try this one.

Shirley Jackson – The Sundial, Hangsaman, and The Bird’s Nest

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Oh, this has been a difficult bunch of books to keep quiet about.  And I haven’t really managed it, looking back, but I could have been much less restrained.  Now that Shiny New Books is unveiled, I can finally start linking to my Century of Books reviews – and I have to kick off with the Penguin Classics reprints of Shirley Jackson’s novels. (Incidentally, they tick two dates on my Century of Books list.)

Best among them is The Sundial.  If I didn’t already have a Shirley Jackson title in my 50 Books You Must Read list, then this would be on it.  Annoyingly (and these are the sorts of things I keep quiet from Shiny New Books, but can’t hide from you, dear friends) I’d spent a mini fortune on a copy of The Sundial three years ago, back when it was very scarce… and yet hadn’t got around to reading it until the reprints came out.  Oops.

So this is what I’ll do with my links to SNB reviews.  A little bit of intro, and then the first line or two of the review, to hook you in… click on the link to read my review of Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial.

“You can more or less divide readers’ familiarity with Shirley Jackson’s works into separate levels”…