ACOB2024

Tea or Books? #126: Should Books Be Banned? and Lessons in Chemistry vs Dear Mrs Bird

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Banned books, Bonnie Garmus and A.J. Pearce – welcome to episode 126!

In the first half of the episode, we discuss banned books – should books ever be banned? Does a book being banned make us want to read it more? In the second half, we pit two recent novels set in the mid-century: Dear Mrs Bird by A.J. Pearce and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Strangers May Kiss by Ursula Parrott
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh
Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Barbara Pym
Day by Michael Cunningham
A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell
The Vicar’s Daughter by E.H. Young
The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts

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I picked up Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts in a wonderful, cavernous bookshop in Whitehaven, Cumbria, when I was there last year. I bought it off the strength of the title, and the fact that I’ve never quite disentangled Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts. The novel is from 1945, but if I’d found an original edition (rather than this reprint) then I wouldn’t have known it was by any Norah. It was originally published under the name Peter Curtis, perhaps to distinguish from the historical novels for which she was, and is, best known.

The lady of the title is Penelope Shadow (what a name!) She is ‘one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: a sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing’ – and she is not unattractive, but she has never been married. She is reaching the onset of middle age, or at least what was considered middle age in 1932 (when the novel is set), and realising that she is likely to remain single.

And again, however much women may wish to deny this fact, it is a fact that a woman who wishes a man to marry her must do a little – especially in the initial stages, towards bringing this desirable state of things about. After all, Pygmalion, falling in love with a beautiful and unresponsive statues, is unique enough to be remarkable; and even those women who most ardently wished matrimony upon their little friend could hardly say that Penelope ever ‘tried’. She didn’t; she hadn’t; and for the very simple reason that to be married was never one of Penelope’s ambitions.

OK, you might think, but how is Miss Shadow going to survive financially as an unmarried women in 1932? Well, she has recently come into a lot of money – because she turned out to be so chaotically bad at every job she turned her hand to, and decided as a last resort to write fiction. Her first efforts went unnoticed, but the latest novel – Mexican Flower – has become a runaway success. She can certainly afford to live alone. But she has an absolute terror of it.

In a convincing and delightful novel, this is a conceit that takes a bit to swallow. You can understand why someone might not like long stretches on their own, but Penelope Shadow cannot abide a single night. Rather than be alone for a full evening, she will wander the lanes and fields. Let’s assume this trait is believable, and move on.

Being the 1930s, Penelope Shadow has household staff – she can avoid being alone, because she always has a live-in servant who does more or less all the work needed to keep a single-person household going. But they routinely quit or have to be fired. Lofts is quite funny about some of the absurd ways these servants behave, and we rattle through a few. Indeed, particularly at the beginning of Lady Living Alone, Lofts has a delightfully amusing turn of phrase – a mixture of exaggeration, ridicule, and realism that makes a fun concoction. For instance…

The great future opened, as it was bound to do, with a happy burst of generosity towards Elsie and the children – now big enough to enjoy substantial presents. There was a car, too. And to everyone’s surprise and carefully suppressed horror, Miss Shadow herself learned to drive it. That is to say, she mastered the mysteries of making it start, increasing its speed, and bringing it to a standstill; nervous, inattentive, impulsive and completely lacking in road sense, as in most other kinds, she was quite the worst driver in four counties.

I love Miss Shadow’s combination of ineptitude and power. She is evidently, if accidentally, very good at writing a bestseller. She is single-minded in what her spirit needs and forgetful about what necessities she actually needs. She’s great fun to be around.

One evening, keen to evade a night’s loneliness, she sets off as chaotically as ever in her car. Eventually she ends up at a fairly rundown hotel, perhaps closer to a motel. For lack of other options, she decides to stay the night. The proprietress is unhelpful and unfriendly, but she becomes friendly with a young man who works there as a chef – but also as a general dogsbody. When they first meet, he goes off to find some help.

He disappeared, still calling, and several moments passed. Miss Shadow occupied them in staring about the hall. Empty it would have been lovely with its elegant proportions and creamy panelling; but its furnishings were hideous; the carpet looked as though pounds of liquorice all-sorts had been stamped viciously into mud; there was a fiercely bristling hatstand. a Windsor armchair painted a bright sticky red, and the panels were defiled by pairs of Victorian pictures, hung irregularly; Beckworth Bridge in summer and in winter; lovers parted and re-united, married couples quarrelling and making it up again.

Hopefully you can see why I enjoyed Lofts’ writing so much. She is brilliant at this sort of teasing, deprecatory fun. But the tone of the novel slowly becomes something else.

Spontaneously, after a disastrous night and breakfast, Miss Shadow asks this young man – Terry – if he would like to come and work for her instead. He is industrious and kind, clearly equipped for more than his role. Yes, he is muscular and good-looking, but Miss Shadow hardly has that on her mind – she simply sees a solution to her eternal problem. Here is a young man who will not abandon her. She need not be a lady living alone anymore.

I shan’t spoil what happens after that – but Lofts takes us from the funny, fun style at the beginning of the novel through something with more pathos – through to something closer to a thriller. Is Terry the man to protect her? And will their relationship remain one of mistress and servant?

I loved Lady Living Alone, and the way that Lofts expertly manages the shifting tone. It’s not a particularly long novel, but it takes the reader on a long and vivid journey. There are brilliant scenes later in the novel that could be from a psychologically tense film – but because we are bedded in the silliness of Miss Shadow and her whims, Lofts tethers her novel to the domestic and everyday. Her writing style continues to be brilliantly done, and the way she structures sentences is so well observed. It keeps anything from feeling over the top.

This is my first Norah Lofts. I’m not particularly interested in the historical novels, but I’ll certainly be looking out for the three other novels she wrote under the Peter Curtis pseudonym. In my opinion, it’s something unusual and special.

Why I’m Not A Millionaire by Nancy Spain

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Nancy Spain has been having a new lease of life recently, with the re-issue of her detective novels. To a certain generation, she is also remembered as a regular on radio and TV panel shows. For me, I first came across her as a young journalist mentioned in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne – and I knew that she talked about it in her 1956 autobiography, the eccentrically titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire.

The conceit of the title is that she explains how she has got to where she is – and why that path hasn’t led to untold riches. Along the way she covers her time at Roedean (a posh girls’ school), activities in war service, her big break in radio – adapting a novel by Winifred Watson, of all things, though not Miss Pettigrew – and her much-feted whirl through journalism, novel-writing, and celebrity. It’s such a delightfully insouciant and fun book which manages to bottle why she was so popular with public and stars alike.

We race through childhood rather quickly, though not without a few well-aimed barbs at Roedean and the type of woman who never moves on from her Roedean days. Quickly, we are thrown into her joyful 20s – moving with a wealthier crowd, but nobody appearing to give anything too much serious thought. Spain writes with exactly the right level of self-mockery, so you don’t dislike her younger self but also don’t particularly respect or envy her. Her abiding characteristic throughout the book could be described as ‘giving it a go’, and she doesn’t let experience, ability, or

All the West Hartlepool girls had a lot of money. They lived in big, prosperous houses with a full quota of maids cavorting in the back premises. They drank burgundy and fizzy lemonade for lunch and I was mad about them all. I thought they were a Very Fast Set Indeed. Considering that I was all the time mooning over Paddy or Michael they were very nice to me.

Then one day I ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay for my round of gins-and-tonics. Bin pointed out in words of one kindly syllable how I mustn’t allow this to happen again. I had already spent the £50 Father had given me on rushing about to Liverpool and so on. (And my share of the petrol.) What was I to do?

Basically, she describes her life like we imagine the Mitford sisters lived (albeit a little earlier). She writes with the same exuberant flippancy of Nancy Mitford. It’s so fun – I wondered if it might get wearing over this number of pages, but I never stopped enjoying it. She’ll start a paragraph with something like ‘It was about this time I discovered all my savings had been swallowed up and I was in an advanced stage of insolvency.’ That might irritate someone who likes their fictional and non-fictional heroines to be sensible and wise, but I am not that person. This isn’t the book to read for soul-searching, but it is a constant delight.

Spain’s multi-faceted rise through the entertainment world is interrupted by World War Two, and it’s the nearest we get to genuine pathos – when she describes some of the men she knew and lost. But mostly she takes the opportunity to be very funny about her experiences in the W.R.N.S – exploring the well-meaning chaos behind the scenes, and her own comic incompetency in the midst of it.

The Recruiting Department was very grand, seeing as how it was all the time in contact with the general public. Recruiting Officers were so terribly smart to look at that it hurt: some of them wore almost royal blue uniform monkey jackets and all of them wore black satin ties bought at Hope Brothers. I joined a circus of Third Officers whose business it was to whip around the London medical boards, making brief notes on the character and personality of candidates in the teeny weeny space provided on the interview form. People who engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin in their spare time might well take lessons from a W.R.N.S. Recruiting Officer. Contrary to general belief, however, all successful candidates for the Service were not (a) titled or (b) the Last First Sea Lord’s second cousin once removed.

Spain’s experiences in the W.R.N.S. were turned into his first book, a memoir (I haven’t read) called Thank You, Nelson. She details its chequered path to publication – and then its unexpected success. A copy was sent to A.A. Milne by some well-meaning publicist, and apparently he was livid at the idea of a woman writing a book about war – then read it, and considered it marvellous. His review in the Sunday Times was apparently responsible for Thank You, Nelson selling out its first and second editions more or less overnight. As Spain writes, “I knew the book must be a success when the Chief Officer Administration at W.R.N.S. Headquarters said, ‘The book was very disappointing after the review.'”

Spain wrote to thank Milne for his review and, in turn, he wrote to invite her to visit him at their home in Sussex. And thus we get the handful of pages which first led me to the book – and how I delighted in them. Not least because Spain is unaffectedly admiring of Milne. Her tone is often so light and unserious that her moments of genuine, unadulterated admiration are particularly noticeable. How I loved this paragraph, and how perfectly it describes any truly perfect, short period of time:

He said a lot more, that darling man, but I have forgotten the details. It has fused, shimmering into the golden light of that magic afternoon in the sun.

Once Spain was established as a successful writer, her adventures still seem surprisingly chaotic – jumping between different newspapers and periodicals, as well as different genres in her own books – the one after Thank You, Nelson was a biography of Mrs Beeton – always (at least in her depiction) moments away from some sort of literary or pecuniary crisis. A lot of 21st-century social media is taken up with self-deprecating humour, pretending that our lives and careers are forever on the point of collapse – and it’s a brand of humour I enjoy. It’s also a brand a humour that we see throughout humorous British writers of the early- and mid-20th centuries – particularly women. Think a more exuberant E.M. Delafield.

Something I particularly appreciated about Nancy Spain’s autobiography is that she is not ashamed to name drop. If you’re like me, you want the celebrity gossip – particularly about the authors and actors of the period. Many memoirists coyly pretend they never meet the great and the good, or treat them simply as everyday friends. Spain is canny enough to know her audience are starstruck by them, and treats each person as the Name they are. And she is delightfully pithy about some of them, without letting herself off the hook – here she is on Eudora Welty:

Eudora Welty still takes high marks as a Remarkable Author. She is very tall, pale, and slender, and she comes from Jackson, Mississippi, in the deep, deep South of North America. She has hands like graceful fish. Her books are always exclusively about those deep, deep parts and I cannot understand one single solitary word of them. In those days that pleased and impressed my very much. I longed to write a book that no one could understand. (Alas, when people read my books they understand me only too well.)

I started the dropped names. Here is an incomplete list of the authors, actors, and others that she writes about – just the ones she spends time with, not including those she relates about at second hand: Noel Coward, Osbert Sitwell, Clemence Dane, Barbara Beauchamp, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beverley Nichols, Wolf Mankowitz, Monica Dickens, Dorothy Parker, Cynthia Asquith, Mae West, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Henry Green, Francis Wyndham, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Nancy Mitford, Colette, Christian Dior, Joyce Grenfell and Winifred Atwell. I daresay Spain was discreet, but she gives a wonderful sense of indiscretion – or at least a lack of artifice.

The only really heartrending moment is the final line of the book – which is this:

Whatever the next forty years turn out to be, I am sure of one thing. They couldn’t possibly be more fun than the forty years that have gone before: whether I manage to become a millionaire or not.

When Why I’m Not A Millionaire was published, Nancy Spain was just under 40. She wouldn’t get another forty years – she would, in fact, die in a plane crash at the age of 46. What a lot of life she managed to pack into those few short decades – and what a joyful record of it. Every moment of this autobiography is a breath of fresh air, and I thoroughly recommend you spend the time with her.

The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

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It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.

Three quick reviews

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I don’t normally write about every book I read, but A Century of Books project means that… well, I do! So here are three short takes on books that I don’t want to write about in full. There are various reasons for that, so this time I’ve decided to give the reason too…

The Disappearing Duchess (1939) by Maud Cairnes

Maud Cairnes is the pseudonym of Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!) who wrote the wonderful body-swap novel Strange Journey, now reprinted as part of the British Library Women Writers series. It is light, fresh, clever, and touching – with the special touch of an extraordinarily adept novelist. Her second and final novel, The Disappearing Duchess, has been extremely difficult to track down – so I was thrilled to finally get a copy.

This is a sort of mystery novel, about a duchess who has gone missing (there is no supernatural element) and whose friends hire a detective to find her. Along the way they find an unlikely doppelganger, various long-lost secrets, and traipse off to France – but sadly lightning didn’t strike twice. There is none of the lightness of touch that makes Strange Journey such a marvel, and we don’t see enough of the duchess before her disappearance to really care.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? It’s almost impossible to find this book, so why write a disappointed review of a book nobody can get hold of anyway!

Basic Black With Pearls (1980) by Helen Weinzweig

There is some dispute online about whether this Canadian novel was published in 1980 or 1981, but my NYRB reprint edition says the former. It’s a curious novel about Shirley who travels the world to track down her soulmate, Coenraad. Shirley is married to another man, living a seemingly conventional life as a housewife in Toronto – but Coenraad leaves her clues to his whereabouts in National Geographic, and she travels around the world as ‘Lola Montez’ to find him – to Hong Kong, to Rome, to Tangier, and even back to Toronto. When she finds him, he is often so heavily in disguise as to have embodied another man altogether. She is recognisable by always being in basic black with pearls.

It’s an exquisitely written novel, where we can trust nothing. Surely none of these things are happening as she says? Coenraad cannot shape-shift. But is she even leaving Toronto? Weinzweig is giving us no answers – this novel is all atmosphere and beauty, and there is nothing firm for the reader to grasp onto. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand it.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? I simply don’t think I understood it enough to write about it at length! But that didn’t stop me enjoying it.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize and was the best-selling novel when it was published – and I listened to the audiobook recently. It’s about a rope bridge in 18th-century Peru that collapses, killing five people – and a friar who witnesses the tragedy goes to explore the lives of those who were lost, trying to establish if there is any moral reason why they were the victims.

It’s not clear why Wilder chose to set this in Peru (and the Pulitzer Prize is meant to be about American life, so go figure), but it’s an interesting conceit for a novel. But it’s also not really a novel – it’s three short stories, about the different people who will die on the bridge. In each story, Wilder traces the lives of those involved – often unhappy – and the various successful and unsuccessful relationships they have. Each story is very compelling, and Wilder is great at immersing us in the lives of very different people – from a wealthy marquesa whose daughter dislikes her to a devoted pair of twins to an orphan-turned-actress who tires of her Pygmalion-esque benefactor.

It is, as I say, well written and involving – though strange that nothing really coheres between the different strands, and that he chose to make the book so short. Since it’s separate character studies with a sort-of link, I think it would have worked better to have more of them. But what do I know, since the book is still well-loved and well-respected. I liked it too, but it feels like a successful attempt at an idea, rather than a finished product.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? It’s so revered and well-known that I don’t think I have anything much to add to the conversation!

Death and Mary Dazill by Mary Fitt

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With a title like Death and Mary Dazill (1941) and the cover you see above, I knew I couldn’t resist reading this novel. It went on my wishlist, and my friend Clare gave it to me for my birthday last year. I’ll have seen it mentioned somewhere in the blogosphere or on Instagram etc, but I don’t remember where – reveal yourself, if you are the one! It’s a reprint from Moonstone Press, a little publishing house specialising in detective novels, who have published a lot of Fitt’s books in lovely new editions.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, and this is her tenth detective novel under that name in a mere five years – but calling it a detective novel is misleading. There is a (at least one!) murder and there are people trying to work out who did it, but all of this has happened many years ago. The whole novel feels less like detective fiction and more like an elegy to a shadowy group of people whose vibrancy and passions have dulled over the decades – leaving only the legacy of long-ago decisions and acts.

We start in the present day, where Superintendent Mallett (apparently a series detective for Fitt) and two friends are attending the funeral of a friend. As they are leaving, they see something that strikes them:

As the Vicar reached the lych-gate, two tall old ladies entered: he swept off his hat to them, and paused for a moment to speak to them. Mallett and Jones slackened their pace, and, unwilling to be drawn into the encounter, stopped as if to wait for Fitzbrown. The two old ladies, after a few minutes’ gracious conversation, bowed to the Vicar, or rather inclined their heads like two queens, and passed on. They were followed at a respectful distance by a chauffeur in wine-coloured livery: he stopped when they stopped, and moved when they moved, keeping exactly the same distance between himself and them, as if drawn by an invisible wire. He carried an enormous circular wreath of hothouse flowers: arum lilies, scarlet amaryllis, gardenias.

These ladies are, it turns out, the fancifully named Lindisfarne and Arran de Boulter – sisters who are leaving flowers by the grave of their father and brother, who died a week apart. They bring a large wreath every week for these men who died half a century earlier – but, notes one of the observers, leave none at all on the nearby grave of Mary Dazill.

At this point, we go back to the past – knowing the three people who will be dead by the end. I was a bit worried that we would have to spend the whole novel with modern-day characters telling anecdotes about the past, but instead we are taken straight there. Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran are beautiful and naïve young women on the cusp of adulthood – so much on the cusp that you wouldn’t have thought they needed to replace a leaving governess, but their father decides they must. Enter Mary Dazill – lovely, not much older than the sisters, clever and a little mysterious. Perhaps her mystery is really only the contrast with everyone else in this late-Victorian period, as they are thoughtlessly open with one another.

That’s not quite true – among the mix is a secret engagement, secret romances and secret hopes. But even those with secrets tend to find someone else to confide in, and emotions are running high. By contrast, Mary Dazill is not driven by her emotions. It makes her seem manipulative by comparison with those who can’t control themselves, let alone others.

At first, I was a little unsure of the writing. There is a fey artificiality to it, in excerpts like this, that make it feel more like actors in a melodrama than real life:

“You can’t,” said Arran, in a voice so low that he could scarcely hear. But his hearing was acute enough, then, to catch every shade of Arran’s voice. He leaned forward and said, with his lips almost touching her hair:

“Forgive me, darling. I can’t help it. I love you.”

But I quickly decided to forgive it. The artificiality perhaps comes from these characters’ youth and inexperience. The passions are real, and have real consequences, but they don’t have mature language to express themselves.

It is these passions that lead to deaths… but who killed whom, and why?

Superintendent Mallett doesn’t get much to do in this novel, and if it’s only one of Fitt’s output that you’ve read then you wonder why these three random men are returned to so often in the narrative for their discussion and deduction. Their personalities are adroitly drawn but don’t really matter to the emotional thrust of the book. Since their detective work is based on memories of one of the women, passed on by her mother, and some fragments of evidence, it doesn’t really match what the reader is experiencing. It’s all to the good that we are transported to the past rather than hearing it all secondhand, but it does mean that the deduction element doesn’t quite make sense. Rather, we see events unfold and discover the answer ourselves.

It’s a short novel and, as mysteries go, I didn’t find I particularly cared who the culprit was. But that didn’t matter at all. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for taking me back into that late-Victorian period so well. I was reminded of The Go-Between more than of any detective novel – Fitt is excellent at the atmosphere and world she creates, and this was a lovely time spent in striking company.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.

The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.

In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.

Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.

Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.

I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.

Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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The Dictionary of Lost Words: Amazon.co.uk: Williams, Pip: 9780593160190: Books

I go to my village book group because I enjoy discussing books and getting to know people. I don’t particularly expect to enjoy the novels. It leans much more modern than my taste, and often towards the sort of historical fiction or issue-driven novel that are relatively well written and not (to me) at all interesting. They probably won’t be remembered in a decade’s time, and they’re often written in a very similar style.

Well, I’m more than happy to say that The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams is a pleasant exception to my rule. Yes, it’s historical fiction. Yes, it’s new(ish). And to be honest, yes, it probably isn’t going to enter any sort of canon – but I really enjoyed it. All 400+ pages of it, and we all know how I feel about books over 300 pages.

It helps that Williams is writing about a world I have known well. As the book opens, Esme is the daughter of a widowed man who works on the embryonic Oxford English Dictionary. He works under Dr James Murray, sorting slips of paper with quotations illustrating words. Each of these slips, stored in specially designed shelves in the Scriptorium, will contribute to evidence of how a word is used. Eventually, of course, every single word will be included in Murray’s ambitious OED.

The reason this is familiar to me is that I used to work for Oxford Dictionaries. I was in the marketing department, running a now-sadly-deleted blog about language, but we were all steeped in the lore of Murray and the origins of the dictionary. Williams has clearly researched all of this well, and I understand that one of my ex-colleagues was a consultant on the novel, making sure that it is a broadly accurate depiction of the early days of the dictionary.

But this is not a work of non-fiction, and so of course a lot is invented – not least Esme herself. As a young child, she is fascinated by what her dad is doing. The slips of paper have a special lure for her – and she can’t help but take one slip, for ‘bondmaid’, when it falls onto the floor. Bondmaid was, indeed, a word missing from the first edition of the OED. Williams’ suggested reason is fanciful, but I enjoyed the possibility.

It was a word, and it slipped off the end of the table. When it lands, I thought, I’ll rescue it, and hand it to Dr Murray myself.

I watched it. For a thousand moments I watched it ride some unseen current of air. I expect it to land on the unswept floor, but it didn’t. It glided like a bird, almost landing, then rose up to somersault as if bidden by a genie. I never imagined that it might land in my lap, that it could possibly travel so far. But it did.

[…]

I held the word up to the light. Black ink on white paper. Eight letters; the first, a butterfly B. I moved my mouth around the rest as Da had taught me: O for orange, N for naughty, D for dog, M for Murray, A for apple, I for ink, D for dog, again. I sounded them out in a whisper. The first part was easy: bond. The second part took a little longer, but then I remembered how the A and I went together. Maid.

As Esme grows older, the dictionary remains a mainstay in her life – but she is also interested in the words that are not included. Quotations in the early OED are disproportionately drawn from books by men – partly, of course, that books were disproportionately written by men. They also often represent upper- and middle-class authors. Esme – living as close to the servants as she does to her societal ‘equals’ – becomes interested in the words that are used by women and by working-class women in particular. She convinces a servant to accompany her through Oxford’s Covered Market, listening to the words of stallholders, noting down what they say on her own set of slips. While spoken sentences don’t ‘count’ for the OED, she stores them in her own treasure chest. She compiles her own dictionary of lost words.

I enjoyed all this dictionary stuff because I am fascinated by the creation of the dictionary – and by language, and by words. But Williams knows that not all her readers will find this sufficiently interesting – and The Dictionary of Lost Words incorporates a great deal more. Being set around the turn of the 20th century and following Esme as she grows older, we see all manner of contemporary issues – particularly the suffrage movement, and later the First World War. At times it does feel like Williams is ticking off the key contemporary topics – Esme is mistreated at boarding school, visits wounded soldiers, she goes to suffragist events, she is a lens for Stopes-esque sexual discovery etc. etc. It all works well, but I do wonder if a novel a hundred pages shorter with slightly less incident would have been even better.

In Esme, Williams has created a sympathetic, intelligent, rounded character that it’s a pleasure to spend time with – particularly for any likeminded reader who shares her fascination with words. Some of Williams’ attempts to de-patriarchy the dictionary are far from treading new ground – I mean, I did an undergraduate thesis on the same topic – but there’s no denying that turning it into an engaging novel is likely to reach a much wider audience. There aren’t really any villains here either (bar one sniffy lexicographer who doesn’t want Esme near the Scriptorium) and it’s a refreshingly sincere, well-researched and often heart-rending look at a fascinating time in history.

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

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When I read R.B. Russell’s very good Fifty Forgotten Books, there were a handful of books that particularly appealed – and one of them was Phyllis Paul’s much-admired but out-of-print Twice Lost (1960), even though Russell actually prefers her A Little Treachery. I set up an abebooks alert and patiently waited – and, hurrah, finally a copy come up! It was quite pricey and not very good condition, but I didn’t think I’d ever stumble across another chance to read it.

…days after this tatty Lancer Gothic edition arrived, I saw the news that a beautiful new edition was being printed by McNally Editions! I do wonder if the bookseller had caught wind of the news and wanted to sell off this copy quick-sticks. NEVER MIND. I may not have the lovely edition, but I do have the fun of a copy that clearly mystified its editors/marketers. Because the way they’ve tried to sell it is really quite bafflingly unlike the book you’ll find inside. ‘An innocent schoolgirl is the victim of evil, and in terror the people of Hilberry ask why!’ sets up a very different sort of novel, and I suspect quite a few purchasers of this edition ended up confused and disappointed. For one thing, it gets the name of the village – Hilbery – wrong.

It’s clear from the outset that Phyllis Paul is not writing disposable mass-market fiction. Her writing is lush and beautiful, more like the opening of an Edwardian novel of manners than a gothic thriller. Here’s the opening paragraph:

They had separated and were creeping about the grass, bowed over, with their eyes on the ground. But it was too near nightfall. Through the gateway with the flanking piers topped by urns, whose pale, classic shapes were enveloped in savage tufts of ivy, the rest of the tennis-party had already drifted, and out in the lane voices rose boldly above the din of bicycle bells and hooters, and the stuttering of a motor-cycle on the point of moving off. Christine Gray and a friend of her own age, Penelope, had good-naturedly stayed behind to help the little girl in her search for a lost treasure.

The little girl is a curious, adventurous child called Vivian. Don’t worry about Penelope because we don’t see much of her, but Christine becomes a key figure – she is young herself, with the carelessness and trust of youth. It seems inconceivable that anything could truly go wrong. Not here, in a large, beautiful house in the English countryside at a party for well-off, cheerful people.

And yet – of course it does. Little Vivian goes missing. A search is made for her, or for the treasure she was hunting. No trace of her is left behind.

Twice Lost isn’t a procedural mystery by any stretch of the imagination, and the reader never feels like they are the trail of a detection. While we wait to see if a resolution will be given, it feels for much of the novel that Phyllis Paul isn’t especially interested in the disappearance herself. It’s the catalyst for a few things, and the story continues through to the end of the novel, but Paul is far more invested in writing about this small community in lovely, languorous prose. She is very good at it. There are many scenes where we can simply relax into the comedy and drama of human relationships – particularly between newcomers to the village, a writer Thomas Antequin and his son named, of all things, Keith. They have come to Carlotta House with the idea of Thomas Antequin becoming a renowned playwright, if he can do so away from all the distractions of town. Descriptions of Carlotta House are as near as Twice Lost gets to truly being Gothic, in my opinion. The section I noted down to quote is actually about a different house, a minor cottage, but it’s an example of the vivid, gorgeous writing that I so enjoy – and which must have come as such a surprise to readers hoping for the sort of novel suggested by this cover. It’s also a great insight into village life and the ways that small issues can become major. (You get the feeling these elms preoccupy villagers more than Vivian’s disappearance.)

But crouched at the foot of these majestic trees, on an uncultivated piece of ground as spacious as a meadow, was one small, ancient cottage; a little garden patch before it, and all the rest wild. Here, in fact, was an outstanding example of that obstructive cottage property which many a good, full, tidy mind in Hilbery lusted to sweep away. It was felt to be the nearest approach to a slum that the district possessed.

This lonely relic of wild beauty caused much unease in Hilbery Village. For the elms were ‘wild’! Efforts were therefore continually being made to prove that they were dangerous. Everyone knew that this cry of danger was a bare-faced pretext; the elms, if dangerous at all, were not remotely as dangerous as the near-by road since that had been straightened and turned into a speed-track, and there was no proposal to scrap that. And in fact, as always in such cases, all sorts of humane and public-spirited reasons had been put forward to mask a simple lust for destruction.

There was, of course, the opposite camp. The elms had their partisans. Even in Hilbery there were those whom wanton destruction enrages – and those who are perhaps even more enraged by the tidy mind. And among the first of these was the owner of the ground, a Mr. Parmore, who lived opposite in one of the rejuvenated farmhouses, and he was a man as determined as wealthy, and doted on his view. In the second class was the tenant of the cottage.

How many Lancer Gothic writers were putting in things like that? (It did slightly amuse me, in a sad kinda way, that this would be a moot conversation within a decade or two – when Dutch elm disease would have laid these trees to waste.)

We continue seeing the affectionate squabbling between Antequin senior and Anetquin junior – affectionate, but with an element of malice – as well as Christine’s development towards adulthood. Vivian is given up for lost, and people are sadder about the idea in the abstract than because anybody particularly valued poor Vivian as a person. Her stepmother certainly doesn’t mourn her. Her disappearance is chalked up as a freak accident.

Suddenly, turning from one chapter to the next and hardly heralded, we are a significant amount of time in the future. I don’t want to give away anything from this point (though the blurb to my edition does – and, to a certain extent, the title does too). But relationships have been formed, suspicions have developed, and Vivian’s disappearance continues to haunt Hilbery and its residents in ways that aren’t entirely obvious to the undiscerning.

I really enjoyed Twice Lost. It is a fascinating novel. For the most part, it is beautifully written and a piercing but undisturbing psychological portrait. Phyllis Paul sees her characters keenly, with the insight of a writer who doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. But what also makes Twice Lost fascinating is how Paul seems to disregard many of the conventions of novelistic structure. It’s not even that she defies the rules of particular genres, or merges different genres together. There are parts that seem intentionally clumsy. There are significant characters and plot points hurriedly introduced in the final pages. The title only makes sense with enormous spoilers. There’s a lull in the momentum for the major part of the novel’s middle – that is fine, as a reader, because it’s so enjoyable to read – but it’s hard to imagine anybody advising on novelistic structure would let Vivian’s disappearance fade away for such a long stretch.

Only one of these strangenesses weakens the novel, in my opinion. The belatedly added characters feel like a cop out, and dent the sort of eerie elegance that the rest of Twice Lost has. For the rest – they just mark Paul out as an unusual novelist forging her own path. I can see why McNally republished this uncategorisable novel. One of the blurb quotes on my edition says, ‘A brilliant novel of suspense… haunting, fascinating, wonderful’. I don’t think it’s a novel of suspense – but I can’t disagree with the final three words.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

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I don’t usually stand behind the idea that the books we read in school are ruined for us – but I have to admit that I have no long-lasting love for Of Mice and Men. It was rewarding to analyse for my GCSE English, but I filed it away in ‘worthy’ rather than ‘enjoyable’. It’s only recently that I’ve come to enjoy Steinbeck for his portrayal of small-town America. Last year I read Cannery Row, and now I’ve read The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

I suggested the book for my book group because I thought it would make sense to read it during winter… well, it turns out the title (while obviously a quotation from Richard III) is only working on one level. The novel starts on a ‘fair gold morning of April’, and Ethan and Mary Hawley are waking up together.

Ethan work in a grocer’s – though he used to own the shop. His family used to own a number of shops, in fact, and were well-respected people of note in their small community. Steinbeck doesn’t go into too much detail about the financial gambles that Ethan made, but they went horribly wrong. His business prospects were destroyed, and he has ended up at the bottom of the ladder again. He still has his loyal wife and his young, eager children – he is the sort of man who cannot be openly affectionate with any of them, but shows his love through parries and quips. Steinbeck is very good at the sort of light-hearted banter that men like Ethan exchange with their friends and dole out to their family (and very good also, later in the novel, at the confusion that children feel when this sort of father suddenly becomes serious).

The Hawleys seem to have a broadly happy marriage, and the badinage between them is elegantly done too. But Ethan clearly hasn’t come to terms with his fall from grace – and even patient Mary isn’t beyond outbursts of frustration:

“You said it! You started it. I’m not going to let you hide in your words. Do I love money? No, I don’t love money. But I don’t love worry either. I’d like to be able to hold up my head in this town. I don’t like the children to be hang-dog because they can’t dress as good – as well – as some others. I’d love to hold up my head.”

“And money would prop up your head?”

“It would wipe the sneers off the face of your hold la-de-las.”

“No one sneers at Hawley.”

“That’s what you think! You just don’t see it.”

“Maybe because I don’t look for it.”

“Are you throwing your holy Hawleys up at me?”

“No, my darling. It’s not much of a weapon any more.”

“Well, I’m glad you found it out. In this town or any other town a Hawley grocery clerk is still a grocery clerk.”

“Do you blame me for my failure?”

“No. Of course I don’t. But I do blame you for sitting wallowing in it. You could climb out of it if you didn’t have your old-fashioned fancy-pants ideas. Everybody’s laughing at you. A grand gentleman without money is a bum.” The word exploded in her head, and she was silent and ashamed.

I think the Hawleys’ state is an interesting contrast between mid-century America and mid-century Britain. I’m not a social historian, so have just picked this up from literature – but, in the UK, a ‘grand gentleman without money’ is still a grand gentleman. America doesn’t seem to have impoverished gentry in the same way – class in this community, at least, is determined by money and success. Now Ethan has lost it, he has lost his status.

Mary is a complex, sympathetic character – but Steinbeck is less generous to other women, particularly Margie. She seems a jack of many trades – telling fortunes being among the least disreputable. Ethan dislikes but largely tolerates her, and other men sleep with her when they’re out of other options. All of that is fine – Margie is a ‘type’ in a lot of mid-century novels of small-town America – but it is awkward and unpleasant to read narrative lines like ‘It was a durable face that had taken it and could it, even violence, even punching’. Steinbeck seems incapable of describing her without lingering on her breasts, and she is probably the least successful of his characters. Someone should have taken him aside and told him to grow up a bit.

I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Margie and Mary have similar names. Together, one with supposed prophecy and one with hope, they think that Ethan has business success around the corner. Can he become content with his station in life, or will he try to change things? In the first half of the novel he is an exemplary portrait of a moral man. It wouldn’t be Steinbeck if things stayed that simple. And it wouldn’t be Steinbeck if he didn’t make some cynical comments about the state of the nation:

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honourable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonourable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad.

What I most liked about Cannery Row was its depiction of small-town life that relied on many portraits of different men, women and children. The Winter of Our Discontent is much more about a single central character – the secondary characters are almost all very well-drawn and compelling to spend time with, but this is Ethan Hawley’s novel. Indeed, the narrative has some chapters in first-person and some in third-person, moving back and forth. I think I prefer Steinbeck when he turns his attention to a wider cast, but The Winter of Our Discontent is excellent. I haven’t detailed much of the plot, partly because its simplicity means that even a handful of hints will give too much of the game away – it is very predictable, I suspect deliberately so, but also very affecting because Ethan is known so intimately to us and we want to retain our respect for him.

This was Steinbeck’s final novel, and his talent was clearly undiminished. I haven’t attempted the novels on which his reputation is often considered to rest most firmly – East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath – but perhaps now I should.