ACOB2018

The Pelee Project by Jane Christmas

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

When Post-Hypnotic Press sent me codes for various Betty MacDonald audiobooks, they kindly threw in one for The Pelee Project (2002) by Jane Christmas. Having listened to it, I can see why – it has a very similar premise to Onions in the Stew. But it is also extremely different – largely, I think, because of when it was written.

Jane Christmas is in a car crash that should have killed her, but somehow she walked away unscathed. But it was one of those wake up calls that happen more often in fiction than in memoir – she realises that she has been living on the edge for too long, with a fast-paced Toronto career, several failed marriages and relationships, and children that she doesn’t manage to spend enough time with.

Long story short – she moves to Pelee Island for a year, with her teenage daughter, with a contract to write a column about the experience for the newspaper at which she had previously been a copyeditor.

On the island, she has to get accustomed to its vagaries. Milk (bagged! Canada!) has to be pre-ordered, and the shop is only open at certain, fairly unpredictable, times. Everybody knows everybody, and many of them have lived on the island all their lives. It is a close-knit community that also has to serve tourists in season – but she is not there in season; she has come during winter.

Christmas writes engagingly and often amusingly about her experience – her confusion, her settling in, and the friends she makes. It quickly becomes clear that she is changing her views on life, and only her engaging tone stops it becoming too twee in its “rural life saved me” aesthetic. If it were fiction, it might have crossed that line.

This was the early days of the internet (or at least the early days of it being a big deal), so she gets instant feedback on her columns in a way that Betty MacDonald could never have done. But a more significant difference is the tone. MacDonald highlighted all the hilarious mishaps of her life on an island – whether a fridge floating away or a neighbour dumping her savage children on her – while Christmas is all about psychological transformation.

She keeps talking about the ‘new simplicity’. As somebody who has lived in villages and a city, I can tell you that nothing is simpler in the countryside. Christmas’s fast-paced career-driven life seems entirely like a normal job, and her ‘new simplicity’ is simply a long holiday. For people who have jobs on the island (i.e. all of them), their life is just as likely to be fast-paced, except they have less access to shops.

As somebody who loves living in a village, I do find the whole city vs village thing (where ‘city’ is all modern and ‘village’ is all atavistic) somewhere between disingenuous and insulting. I didn’t mind too much in this book, as I had to just choose to let it go, but it’s all rather odd – and not something you’d find MacDonald doing. There are only two main differences I’ve noticed about the way people live in a village and the way they live in a city – people are friendlier to each other in a village, and it’s not as convenient to get a pint of milk.

Perhaps an island is a bit different, and maybe it was even more different in the early 2000s – I don’t know. But it is interesting that Christmas (admittedly winningly) turns her memoir into some sort of self-help book, whereas MacDonald just writes a very funny book. Christmas later became a nun, and wrote the brilliantly-titled book And The There Were Nuns all about it, so perhaps the island was one step on some sort of spiritual journey? Whatever it was, it was enjoyable to listen to – even if not wholly convincing as an exploration of the ‘new simplicity’. (And, yes, I listened to it as I commuted from my village to my not-at-all-fast-paced career in the city.)

A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

Alberto Manguel is up there with Oliver Sacks as one of those writers who exudes so much warmth and humanity in simply writing about himself and the world he observes. I’ve loved reading his books about reading – and he seems to have an inexhaustible store of them – and stalled in his book on curiosity, but I had yet to read A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books (2004). In it, he revisits twelve of his favourite books – from June to the following May, slightly oddly. Maybe he had the idea in June and couldn’t wait.

Manguel has an amazingly eclectic taste. While my favourite books would span a couple of countries and the best part of a century, Manguel’s cover centuries and the whole globe. Margaret Atwood mingles with Goethe; Cervantes with H.G. Wells; Sei Shonagon with Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Each chapter is an enjoyable, curious meander through a book and Manguel’s life – heavy on the book and light on the life, but certainly a bit of both. Often Manguel will throw us right into the middle of his thoughts, not pausing to explain what the book is (and I’d be very impressed if anybody was familiar with all twelve disparate books). It feels a bit like a notebook of jottings – rather like Wittgenstein’s notebooks – because observations follow observations; a few pages of analysis are followed by a couple of quotations and then the gossip from the postwoman. What holds it all together is Manguel’s inquisitive personality – his clear love of literature, and the vitality he sees in it, and passes on to the reader.

Undeniably, I enjoyed the chapters most where I’d read the book in question. That was only three – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was familiar with a couple of others (who doesn’t know Sherlock Holmes?) but some meant nothing to me at all. That made me feel a bit more lost at the opening of each chapter, but I wasn’t here for specific literary criticism – more for the immersion in the delight of a life of reading. On that front, Manguel more than delivers.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

StuckinaBook All , , , 15 Comments

The always-reliable Daunt Books have recently reprinted Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) by Dorothy Baker – and it inspired me to get my copy down off the shelf. Mine is a Virago Modern Classic that I bought in London in 2011 – not my first Baker novel, that was Young Man With a Horn, but I’d heard great things about this one. And it is, indeed, great.

I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I’d come home the twenty-second. (June.) But everything went better than I expected – I had all the examinations corrected and graded and returned to the office by ten the morning of the twenty-first, and I went back to the apartment feeling so foot-loose, so restless, that I started having some second thoughts. It’s only a five-hour drive from the University to the ranch, if you move along – if you don’t stop for orange juice every fifty miles the way we used to, Judith and I, our first two years in college, or at bars, the way we did later, after e’d studied how to pass for over twenty-one at under twenty. As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

This is the long, winding opening paragraph – it’s Cassandra speaking. She is driving home for her twin sister’s wedding – and she hasn’t seen her twin, Judith, for nine months, after previously being constantly together. In case that “only a five-hour drive” didn’t clue you in, they’re in America. Cassandra hasn’t met her sister’s fiancee, and she hides her uncertainty and wariness behind a show of ironic bravado.

The plot of the novel is pretty slight – though there are also a few dramatic moments in among the everyday. It is all about the characters, and the way they try to understand and relate to each other. Cassandra is spiky and a little unkind, pretending not to remember Judith’s fiancee’s name and dropping in hints that she could still give up on the wedding; Judith is patient but also keen to assert her independence. Their grandmother hovers in a manner that is both conciliatory and domineering. There is always the spectre (not literally) of their dead mother – whom they always refer to only by her first name.

It’s a truly extraordinary novel. Baker is so subtle, so brilliant in both the narrative and the dialogue. Inch by inch, she unveils the characters and their similar but slightly colliding worlds. And, my goodness, she is good at twins. I was surprised to discover she was an only child, as she she perfectly understands the complex relationship of twins. How they (we) tread the path of being separate people but with identities that cannot be entirely separated – and the joy and, occasionally, the pain of establishing those dynamics in adult life. Cassandra’s fears of losing her sister, and self-destructive methods of trying to maintain their relationship, are drawn so perfectly.

Impressively, Baker is equally good at the moments of high drama. I won’t spoil what those are, but one in particular is dealt with so expertly – showing us the range of emotional responses in finely-observed style. Fine observation while maintaining pace and drama is a very admirable feat.

It’s a short book, but must be read slowly to be truly appreciated. The writing is so rich, so beautiful, and so intelligent that it feels like a reminder of what literature can achieve in exploring and depicting humanity. If that feels like a wild overstatement, I apologise – but reading it felt like a revelatory experience. Don’t be surprised if you see this one on my end of year Best Books list…

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

StuckinaBook All , , , 12 Comments

I bought The Millstone (1965) by Margaret Drabble in 2009, in Chester, but I think that must just have been based on name recognition – and on this extraordinary cover. Penguin really did have some interesting cover designs in the 1960s. But what made me pick it up recently is how often people have told me that it is very similar to my much-loved The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks. I recently re-read it, and it seemed like a good time to tackle The Millstone. And, man, it’s similar.

I’m glad I’m so familiar with The L-Shaped Room, otherwise reading them so close to each other would have confused me a lot. Both are about young pregnant women; both are living alone; both are pregnant after their first and only sexual encounter (and didn’t particularly enjoy that); both consider doing a makeshift abortion by getting drunk on gin. It’s hard not to think that Drabble might have got inspiration from Banks. But there are certainly differences too.

My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it. Take, for instance, the first time I tried spending a night a man in a hotel. I was nineteen at the time, an age appropriate for such adventures, and needless to say I was not married. I am still not married, a fact of some significance,but more of that later. The name of the boy, if I remember rightly, was Hamish. I do remember rightly. I really must try not to be deprecating. Confidence, not cowardice, is the part of myself which I admire, after all.

This is the opening paragraph, and the first person narrator is Rosamund. She is dealing with this pregnancy alone – but only because her parents have taken a convenient extended trip abroad. She is not in an l-shaped room; she is in her parents’ large home in a posh area. Her sister is not helpful, and she doesn’t want Hamish in the picture, but her friends are good and she can continue writing her thesis about Elizabethan poets. (The least realistic section of The Millstone is how easily Rosamund eventually gets her thesis published and then immediately gets a job in academia – perhaps this sort of thing was possible in the 1960s, but it certainly isn’t now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Again, like The L-Shaped Room, there is not much plot. It is, instead, more of an emotional portrait – seeing how Rosamund copes with every stage of this new life. Unlike Banks’ novel, the birth of the child is not the end but the middle – we also see how she copes with being a new mother, with its own crises. There are certainly funny moments, or perhaps rather a wry tone, but what makes The Millstone impressive is the nuanced and interesting way Drabble takes us on Rosamund’s journey. There is very little dramatic, but there is a lot of life – not idealised, certainly, and Rosamund is too real to be wholly sympathetic, but I really enjoyed it. A great deal more than the only other Drabble novel I’ve read, The Garrick Year, which was rather tedious. Drabble is much better on motherhood than casual adultery, it turns out.

Is it as good as The L-Shaped Room? To my heart, no. It couldn’t be. And I think perhaps to my mind, too – but it’s still rather good and has made me want to explore more of her novels. Any recommendations?

A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis

StuckinaBook All , , , , 1 Comment

I was given a copy of A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis by Frances (of Nonsuch Book) back in 2011 – I don’t even remember the context for that, but thank you Frances! We did eventually meet each other in 2015, which was lovely, but this book must have come across the Atlantic. When I was looking up which books I had waiting that would fit 1971, this one came up – and I knew it was about time that I finally read it. Though I had no idea what at all it was about.

Lowell Lake aspires to be a writer, but is actually in an uninspiring job and an uninspiring marriage. As the narrative later tells us, both he and his wife are married to the marriage more than each other – not only has love left their relatively-young relationship, but so has respect. In a masterpiece of writing a bit like the opening of Sense and Sensibility, Lowell’s wife gradually manipulates him into giving up a scholarship at Berkeley in favour of moving to New York – all while alleging that she doesn’t want to.

Their life in New York is no better. Davis’s writing is excellent, and we feel mired in this unhealthy, unhappy relationship – and stultified by Lowell’s mediocre life. Jonathan Lethem’s introduction to the NYRB Classics edition isn’t very good, but he does have one moment of brilliance where he describes Lowell as ‘chronically ill with self knowledge’. Lowell takes up writing full time, but does it largely at night – both he and his wife grimly determined that he will at least try to finish a novel. One of my favourite passages, because it rang so true, was Lowell’s response when he re-read his prose:

It read like mud. Totally by accident he had contrived to fashion a style that was both limp and dense at the same time, writing page upon page of flaccid, impenetrable description, pierced here and there by sudden, rather startling interludes of fustian and vainglory that neither adorned, advanced, nor illuminated the plot, although they did give the reader a keen insight on the kind of movies Lowell had seen as a child.

As you can see, hopefully, A Meaningful Life deals with unhappy people and a bleak situation, but it is very funny. I laughed quite a lot reading it – Davis has a turn of phrase that brings out the dark humour of a sad scene. He also judges just the right amount of surrealism to bring to the novel – and Lowell seems to have a small break down…

They spent the next couple of hours barricaded behind walls of newsprint, warily passing fresh sections back and forth as the need arose, and doing their best not to meet each other’s eyes. The last section to come before Lowell’s face was the ant ads. It was a moment before he realized what he was looking at. He wondered how it had come into his possession. Had he picked it up on purpose? Had his wife deliberatly placed it where he could reach it? Was he absolutely certain his shows were on the right feet?

This isn’t a turning point so much as one more milestone on a trek into misery. But a turning point does come, of sorts. And that’s when they decide they should buy property.

I have never come across a scene of house hunting that I didn’t enjoy – particularly in a comic novel. It provides such a rich seam of comedy. And in A Meaningful Life it is as strange as it is funny – particularly when they decide upon a rambling house that is currently occupied by seemingly dozens of people, each in their decrepit cells. It’s bizarre and dark and wonderful to read – and the rest of the novel looks at how the house affects Lowell and his marriage. It continues to be strange and funny and haunting right through to the final words – and Davis’s exceptional writing continues, perfectly judged. To pick one example, I loved the odd truth of something like this:

“My wife and I,” he began, striking an attitude, “bought our house six years ago.” He’d asked so many questions that this utterance of a simple declarative sentence sounded extremely strange, as though he’d begun to read aloud.”

I’d be intrigued to know what Davis’s other novels are like. This isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever read. Good as it is, I don’t know how often I’d be in the mood for more of the same – but I can certainly see it happening at least once every few years. And to leave you with a word of warning: if you have the NYRB Classics edition, don’t read the blurb – at least, don’t read it to the end. It gives away something that happens in the final 15 pages. You’re better than this, NYRB!

Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald

StuckinaBook All , , , , 5 Comments

The final of the Betty MacDonald audiobooks from Post-Hypnotic Press is 1955’s Onions in the Stew – the fourth of her four autobiographical books. And it’s just as enjoyable as the others, even if Anybody Can Do Anything remains my favourite of the series.

No chicken farms or TB wards in this one – rather, it documents MacDonald moving to Vashon Island with her new husband, Donald MacDonald. As always (always!) MacDonald meanders around vagaries connected with the topic before getting into the topic proper – but ultimately they decide that they can’t live in Seattle or the surrounding suburbs, but could make a home for themselves on one of the islands,

MacDonald does seem to make a rod for her own back. She describes her difficulties and obstacles extremely amusingly, but moving to an island that is often inaccessible, and to a house that doesn’t have a road leading to it, is hardly conducive to ease.

As in all the other books, MacDonald encounters any number of odd characters. There is a feeling of unity on the island, but the odd fly in the ointment – such as the woman who palms off her (many) children on anybody who’ll house and feed them, then makes out later that she has been horribly offended and abused by said person. In MacDonald’s writing, though, the incident is funny rather than traumatic – with just that dark edge to it to set it off. The most appalling character seems to be her angry and bellicose dog Tudor.

MacDonald does self-deprecation so well. It’s so fun, for instance, to read about her family’s attempts to manoeuvre a washing machine by boat. Her daughters make a proper appearance here, having been mysteriously absent from her previous memoir, and join in the family’s amiability and ineptitude.

As for Vashon Island – I was rather surprised to learn, from Wikipedia, that the population is over 10,000. I don’t know what it was in the mid-century, but I rather got the impression from the book that it was a few hundred. I suppose 10,000 is still a smallish place, but I live in a village of about 150 people, so everything’s relative.

I’m sad to have got to the end of MacDonald’s oeuvre, and enjoyed hearing Heather Henderson narrate them so well. But I do have all the books on my shelves, so next time around I can read them the old-fashioned way.

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm

StuckinaBook All , , , , 5 Comments

What an extraordinary little book. A while ago I read Blood on the Dining Room Floor by Gertrude Stein and found it more or less unreadable – the sort of High Modernism that renders every sequence of words gibberish – but I wanted to read more about her life. So when I saw a copy of Two Lives (2007) by Janet Malcolm, about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, I bought it – and thank goodness I did, because I have been introduced to a rather wonderful writer. And that writer is Malcolm, not Stein.

It’s quite an odd start. We are thrown immediately into comparing three different accounts of Stein and Toklas trying to rent a house that belonged to a lieutenant in France in World War Two. It’s a bit dizzying, this in media res, where we are exploring the details of competing versions of the story – two from different autobiographies Stein wrote; one from Toklas – before we’ve been told anything about them and their lives. And, indeed, Malcolm never writes about the women’s childhoods or lives apart from one another, nor do we see how and when they met, or anything that you might expect in a normal biography. This is not a normal biography.

For a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and too thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of the book’s weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable. As I read, I realised that in carving up the book I had unwittingly made a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness. It is a book that is actually a number of books. It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author’s refusal (and inability) to write a novel.

Indeed, it’s not really a biography at all. It has elements of that, alongside literary criticism, literary history, investigative reporting, and all shades in between. I found it beguiling and exciting. We would dart from Stein publishing a 900+ page novel that nobody could understand (and which Malcolm writes about brilliantly) to Malcolm’s own reluctance to read it, and then to notes on the discovery of manuscripts to the chequered history of interviews with Toklas. In between is much on the way Stein has been posthumously treated by critics, academics, and publishers – shown alongside conversations Malcolm has with other Stein enthusiasts.

If I loved Stein and wanted to know all about her life, it might have been frustrating. As it was, it was a wonderful experience – Malcolm is such an intriguing companion to walk alongside. Her thoughts are original and vivid, and her voice is so distinct. I immediately went to see what else she wrote, and ordered four more of her books – on Freudianism, journalism, and writers and artists.

It made me think of Julia Blackburn’s quirky and wonderful book about John Craske, and is in that category of non-fiction where all the usual tenets of biography are thrown out the window – or, rather, stirred and rearranged and made clear and new. It was a wonderful reading experience – and, while I still don’t know many details about the lives of Stein and Toklas, I feel as though I know their characters and personalities well and brightly. I’m really looking forward to reading more by Malcolm.

The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot

StuckinaBook All , , , , 8 Comments

It was only as I started writing this review that I noticed the title was The Gentlewomen and not The Gentlewoman – which certainly puts a different spin on this 1952 novel by Laura Talbot. When it was in the singular (in my head), it referred to Miss Bolby – in the plural, it tells us more about the world that Talbot has created.

Miss Bolby is a governess in the mid-1940s, and has recently accepted a new position with Lady Rushford. Miss Bolby is proud of her status as a gentlewoman, keen to tell everyone that her sister married a man with a title, and that she was born into a good family living in colonial India. The Indian bracelets she wears attest to this when her words do not.

But Miss Bolby finds herself in a world where such things are no longer valued as much as they used to be. She arrives at the railway station alongside Reenie, the kitchen maid, and they are treated fairly similarly. At the same time, the dignified family seem to be growing less dignified – no longer putting such an emphasis on the correct names and titles, or a strict hierarchy within the house. As the blurb of my Virago Modern Classic edition writes very well, ‘Miss Bolby needs her pretensions to gentility and, in a household where these are no longer of consequence, her identity begins to crumble’. And that plural title – it shows Miss Bolby striving to put herself on the same level of those above her – but also the threats from those below, as the term ‘gentlewoman’ loses its dignity.

I thought The Gentlewomen was very well written, in a style that didn’t quite fit with anything I’ve read before. There are hints of Ivy Compton-Burnett in the cool and proper ways characters address one another, but also the lightness of the middlebrow novelist – and, woven in between, the manners and mores of society-focused fiction. Miss Bolby is never a pleasant character, but nor does the reader wish her ill – even when she is petulantly using her power as a governess to take out her frustration on her infant charges.

Much of the novel looks at the dynamics between the different characters – but a couple of important plot points in the second half give a new momentum to the narrative, and Talbot skilfully pulls us through.

It’s an unusual and impressive book – looking not just at the world war atmosphere so familiar to us from novels and film, but seeing how one world order was beginning to disintegrate – and how that didn’t only affect and disorientate those at the top of the hierarchies.

The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp

StuckinaBook All , , , 13 Comments

After reading a lot of titles for A Century of Books during my 25 Books in 25 Days, I got too cocky and started reading quite a few that didn’t fit years. And my advantage slipped away. I tend to read about 100 books a year, so I can’t afford to get too distracted – so I went to my list of gaps and decided to pick one. It was 1954 and it was Margery Sharp – The Gipsy in the Parlour has been waiting on my shelves since 2011.

This is the fourth Sharp novel I’ve read – the first being back in about 2003 – and it is very different from those others. I really enjoyed the first three, but they were all comic novels, at least to some extent. The Gipsy in the Parlour is emphatically not a comic novel – but it is a wonderfully atmospheric and involving novel, and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. From the opening line onwards…

In the heat of a spacious August noon, in the heart of the great summer of 1870, the three famous Sylvester women waited in their parlour to receive and make welcome the fourth.

The novel is told from the perspective of a young girl (who, I only now suspect, might be unnamed) who is niece to the Sylvesters. She is a Londoner, but spends her summers in Devon with this family who all live together on a farm – the women are not related, but each has married a different Sylvester brother. The brothers are inconsequential in the novel and in life – essentially good-natured, easy-going, unexpressive men who work the land and let their wives run the house. The chief of these is Aunt Charlotte, who married the oldest son and is de facto leader of the household. It is she who has arranged for the other two wives to join the family.

But the youngest Sylvester brother, Stephen, has chosen his own wife – and Fanny arrives as the novel opens. She does not have the beauty of the other sisters – and she seems somehow wilder and less part of the domestic picture. Disconcertingly for the narrator, she sees Fanny wandering the garden at night, staring back at the house with an expression she cannot quite understand…

For the narrator, who is seven when the novel starts, this is a mysterious but halcyon world. She longs to return to the farm and to the security of her aunt’s plain speaking affection. (And, miracle of miracles for the reader, they speak in dialect but are neither unintelligible nor annoying.) She also longs to be at the wedding of Fanny and Stephen, but the timing is wrong for her start back to school – so she must leave shortly before it takes place, and waits to hear about it via letter in London. But the letter never comes.

On her next visit, the next summer, she discovers that Fanny is in a decline, of the sort common in the 1870s. She is weak, nervous, and spends all her time lying in bed or on the sofa – and tensions in the house grow steadily over the months and years, witnessed by the niece who sees all but does not understand all.

There are definite elements of The Go-Between in this novel. Sharp has drawn the child and her perspective so well – so she is never a dishonest narrator, but clearly cannot piece together all the different elements she witnesses. Her interpretations of characters are given to the reader, who must take a step back to try and understand the whole picture – it is all handled brilliantly, and with the feelings of rich nostalgia that a child would feel who can only return to a much-loved world once a year.

In fact, the whole of The Gipsy in the Parlour is pervaded with a wonderful atmosphere. I felt as though I were immersed in this 1870s farm, with the same limited scope and detailed canvas felt by those who seldom or never left the village. It is odd to read Sharp with so little levity, but her talent at this almost melancholic, elegiac domestic novel is quite something. It is not flawless, particularly in the later chapters, but it’s still an extraordinary achievement. If I had to pick between this and (say) Cluny Brown, I wouldn’t know quite which to choose – but I’m impressed that Sharp could do both so well, and delighted that I can read both.

A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

Yes, my love of Beverley continues apace – and I decided recently to pick up the next of his Allways trilogy, A Thatched Roof (1933). I rushed through, and adored, the Merry Hall series last year – but stalled after the first of the earlier Allways trilogy, Down the Garden Path. Would I prefer this one?

In short, yes. I certainly enjoyed Down the Garden Path, but it didn’t live up to my love for Merry Hall et al. A Thatched Roof definitely felt like a step in the right direction – with more humour, more rounding of the eccentric neighbours, and, crucially, less about gardening. Because here he moves inside.

The low lintels of the cottage have many disadvantages, but they have one supreme advantage. They afford an immediate topic of conversation. They make things start, quite literally, with a bang.

And so starts Beverley. I enjoy reading about gardens and gardening when it doesn’t rely on expertise or references to visuals that don’t appear – but I found Down the Garden Path a bit too heavy on gardening and light on narrative. I don’t mind the ratio so much when he is talking about putting a window into his study, or knocking down a section of wall and finding a surprise alcove. I love reading about interiors and renovations. I also love reading Beverley get snobbish on the topic of other people’s taste, because it is delightfully catty, and the outrage he directs on this topic to the people who rent it from him for a while is quite vicious, in a harmless sort of way. Great fun.

The locals begin to come to life more. There is Mrs M., the local busybody and interferer; there is Undine, who swears by water diviners and thinks everything heavenly (as long as it doesn’t smack of modernity). There are a cast of lesser characters, including a wonderfully lazy and cross housekeeper – none of them shine as brightly as the fond antagonists of Merry Hall, but they offer their own entertainment.

Not least when the topic of electric light comes up. This takes up much of the final section of the book – as they debate whether or not it should come to the village (and then Beverley rebels and gets it all for himself, listing for us the wonders of illuminating statues and stairways). He doesn’t care at all that others can’t share his electricity – indeed, he is not always the most likeable of people, but he writes beautifully and we can charitably assume that a lot of what he writes is self-lampooning or exaggeration. Hopefully…

I bought this book way back in 2004, on the strength of the title and the age of the book (and perhaps, had I flicked through the first few pages, the reference to The Provincial Lady Goes Further). It’s good to have finally read it – and I’m sure I’ll move on to the third of the trilogy before too long. I don’t know if I’ll revisit the Allways books, but it certainly fitted the mood I was in at the time, and that sort of dependability is to be cherished. Now, if only I had an edition with Rex Whistler’s illustrations on the dustjacket…