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Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley

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I’ve mentioned before how great Simon Evers’ narration is at Librivox – the free audiobook site where out of copyright books are read by members of the public. Understandably, it’s a mixed bag – but Simon Evers is brilliant, so I’ve been downloading whatever he reads. And the latest was Diana Tempest (1893) by Mary Cholmondeley.

This wasn’t completely at random. I have previously read Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, and thought it was brilliant. Diana Tempest does something similar – mixing sensation fiction with the sort of observational comedy of manners that we expect from a Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. It feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and I found Diana Tempest very funny and often nail-bitingly intriguing.

We don’t meet either Diana for a while – for there are two of them. One is Colonel Tempest’s wife, who died in childbirth. The other is his daughter. She, Colonel Tempest, and his son Archie are all left without a fortune when Colonel Tempest’s brother dies. The money, instead, goes to his brother’s son, John – whom everybody knows is illegitimate. Everybody except the infant John, of course, and it is a fact he is not told.

Colonel Tempest is a very unpleasant character – greedy, unfeeling, and with the sense that the world is very hard on him. It’s unclear what the dead Diana saw in him, because she is described as rather wonderful – not only that, she was engaged to his brother before he whisked her away. You can see why there’s no love lost.

And Colonel Tempest gets carried away, saying that he’ll give £10,000 (about £850,000 is today’s money, according to the National Archives calculator – or 1031 cows) to anybody who can redirect the fortune to him. In effect, he has put a bounty on John’s life.

Fast forward a few years, and daughter Diana has grown up. She is a charming, witty, wise, and rather delightful heroine – in the mould of Lizzie Bennett. Like Lizzie, she despises the idea of marrying for money alone, and has a friend who is clearly doing this. And like Lizzie, she finds herself admired in several quarters.

One of these quarters is John – who has grown up to be a rather serious, moral man. He tries to keep his cousin Archie is check, but is usually paying off his debts. Oh, and he keeps having brushes with death – whether that be almost burning to death, nearly being shot, etc. etc. It seems that the people who are trying to win that £10,000 aren’t super good at their job.

I loved listening to this. Cholmondeley has such a witty, ironic turn of phrase. Of course, because it was audio I have no examples – but imagine Austen’s way of exposing the ridiculousness of society in general and hypocrites in particular. On the one hand, we wait to see if she and John will discover that the other has fallen in love – on the other, we follow Colonel Tempest as he tries to track down the would-be assassins and undo his command. Will the relationship succeed, or will the killers get their target?

My only criticism is that, like many Victorian writers, Cholmondeley is never in a hurry. Chapters often begin with several minutes (/pages) of general thoughts about mankind, ambling through enjoyable aphorisms before we get to the crux of the matter. It all added to the enjoyment of the style, but sometimes I did wish she’d just get on with it, and curtail the flourishes a little.

I’m sure it would be fun to read – and it’s definitely a delight to listen to. Much recommended!

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

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Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?

After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.

Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:

  • Deanna, a woman who lives alone in the mountains, working as a park ranger, fascinated by predators. Her role is to protect the area, and she is very content without human intervention – which is, of course, exactly what she gets in the form of a passing young man…
  • Lusa (pronounced Luther) has recently moved to the area, living with her husband Cole and feeling ostracised by his extensive family. As the oldest brother, he has the most land – and Lusa is used to an urban life, where she was an entomologist.
  • Garnett, an old and widowed man whose remaining passion is cultivating chestnut trees to try to restore the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut. He has an ongoing enmity with his neighbour Nannie, who grows organic apples and hates pesticides.

It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.

Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.

So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.

The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.

And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.

On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.

Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.

 

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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I think it’s fair to say that my reading isn’t the most zeitgeisty. I usually only read a small handful of books published in the year I’m reading them, increasingly new non-fiction. But when I had audiobook credit towards the end of last year, I decided to spend it on one of the year’s bestsellers – Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming (2018). All 19 hours of it.

Those 19 hours were read by Obama herself – which was one of the reasons I was keen to get it, as I love her voice. And, yes, she reads very well; I’d certainly recommend this way of experiencing the book.

The book takes us from Obama’s earliest memories through to leaving the White House and the inauguration of Donald Trump – and the most amazing thing about it is her astonishing powers of recall. Steadily, step by step, she takes us through every stage of her life – seeming to remember vividly what she experienced and thought at each part. She gives the same rigorous attention to (say) watching her father suffer with MS, or her path to getting into law school, as she does the minutiae of her husband’s rise to the White House. It is all-engrossing, and throughout she reflects with wisdom, thoughtfulness, and clear-sightedness about her own journey – and how this has been influenced by being a black woman.

Clear-sightedness is, indeed, the hallmark of Obama’s writing. My favourite parts of the book were probably her view of the first election campaign – as Obama fought first for the Democratic nomination and then for the presidency. While obviously wanting her husband to win, and believing he would be the best choice for the job, she has no illusions about the downsides of campaigning and the way opponents and the press manipulate everything. She says at the beginning and end of the book that she is not a political person and has seen nothing over the past ten years to change her mind – no, she isn’t going to run for president – and my heart ached with sympathy for somebody thrust into this position she would not have chosen. With her blessing, of course, but not with joy.

Anybody interested in how politics works in America will find the campaign trail section extremely interesting, and I can’t imagine anybody else has written about it from quite her perspective (or, frankly, with her humanity and wisdom). The same is true for life as First Lady – from how she wanted to use the role for the nation’s good to how she tried to ensure that her daughters’ lives were as normal as humanly possible.

It closes with her hopes for the future. She is refreshingly open about her disdain for Donald Trump (which dated back to his endangering her family’s lives through his ‘birther’ attacks, which led to a gunman attacking the White House) – like many of us in and out of America, she couldn’t believe that America had seen him for what he was and chosen him.

The book is certainly long and every anecdote is thorough and detailed, even when it adds only background detail. But it works – all the details come together to show you who Michelle Obama is. And the only mystery I leave with is that somebody so modest, selfless, and unbombastic came to be persuaded to write an autobiography at all. She suggests it is to show other young black women what they can achieve. Well, I’m very pleased she did – and I think the book will continue her good work.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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I had a credit to use on Audible a while ago, and was looking to fill either 1980 or 1999 in A Century of Books – but couldn’t find anything that appealed. So, naturally, I took to Twitter. Twitter has been a real help with the tricky years, and Gareth kindly stepped forward with a suggestion…

I’d already read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow – and the fact that I really liked it would have made me trust Gareth’s suggestion even if I didn’t already trust his taste (which I did). So I promptly downloaded An Equal Music (1999) by Vikram Seth and listened, without really checking what it was about.

Which is just as well. If I had looked up the plot or theme, I might not have bothered. Because it’s about ardent musicians, and I tend to find that difficult to read about. It’s the sort of novel where people non-ironically say “Oh, I’d love to study that score”, and spend years tracking down the perfect viola. I struggle whenever characters are snobs in any area of the arts, or have the attitude that being brilliant is more important than enjoying yourself. It’s why I really disliked Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows earlier this year (because the author seemed to share her characters’ views). And I would have been wary about it in Vikram Seth.

Well, it was certainly there, at least to an extent – and the main character (Michael) isn’t particularly likeable. He is obsessed with reconnecting with Julia, a woman he loved many years ago in Vienna – and has been trying to track her down, unsuccessfully, for some time. At the same time, he and his string quartet are preparing to perform… erm… some arrangement of some piece, I forget which. Or maybe it was something arranged for a quintet that is better known as a piano piece, or something like that. (Again, the problem of listening to an audiobook – I can’t go back and check!) Of course, he does find her – she is married, with a child, and there is a twist in the narrative that I shan’t spoil, but is done very satisfyingly and intelligently.

Lovers of classical music (and, dare I say it, music snobs) will get a lot out of this that I probably didn’t. I do also wonder how much one might miss if you don’t play the piano and violin – I play both, which helped me understand various discussion points and technical moments, though I don’t think any of them were particularly essential and could probably be skated through.

Why did I like it, when it had quite a few ingredients that turn me off? Partly it was the excellent reading by Alan Bates, who never tries to do “voices” (except where accents are needed for, say, the American characters) but manages to convey character entirely through tone. The audiobook also meant they could include sections of music when they were referred to as being played, which was rather lovely. But mostly it was Seth’s quality of writing. He is very good at detailed depictions of changing emotions and relationships, so that one is deeply interested even if not particularly sympathetic.

I don’t know if I’m ready for the doorstopper A Suitable Boy just yet, but I’m very glad Gareth suggested this one. And it’s a useful reminder that good writing can overcome all the prejudices I have in terms of topic and character. I suppose every theme has its variations.

Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett

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Another audiobook I’ve been listening to is Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel Buried Alive, courtesy of Librivox (the free audiobook site). Each work is read by one or more volunteers, so the quality of the reader is pretty variable, but I will now be listening to more or less anything Simon Evers reads. He’s extraordinarily good – and I really enjoyed listening to Buried Alive.

If the title is bringing up your worst nightmare, then don’t worry – nobody is literally buried alive in the book. But it almost happens to the noted artist (and recluse) Priam Farll. His work is known and loved throughout the nation, but he has kept his face out of the press and doesn’t interact with the public. Not because he is obstreperous – he is simply very shy. And this is the sort of premise that leads almost inevitably to mistaken identity, isn’t it? When his valet, Henry Leek, suddenly dies – having taken ill to Farll’s own bed – it is natural that the policeman might believe that Farll has died. Partly out of awkwardness, partly seeing an opportunity to avoid the public glare, Farll goes along with it.

Things get more complicated when he has to leave his own home quickly, as it (and all his wealth) has been distributed in his will – some to a distant relative, but a large chunk to build a picture gallery in his honour. Which all feels a bit of a poor decision when he discovers he only has a few pounds to his name (and those few pounds are more than he was expecting Mr Leek to possess… he turns out to have been a bit of a ne’erdowell). The buried bit? Well, ‘Farll’ – actually Leek – is buried in Westminster Abbey.

We watch Farll try to live an ordinary life, having never been unwealthy – and witness the nation’s apparent response to his death. Bennett is very funny about this, even while we recognise the tumult of emotions that come with such an unusual experience.

Special large type! Titles stretching across two columns! Black borders round the pages! “Death of England’s greatest painter.” “Sudden death of Priam Farll.” “Sad death of a great genius.” “Puzzling career prematurely closed.” “Europe in mourning.” “Irreparable loss to the world’s art.” “It is with the most profound regret.” “Our readers will be shocked.” “The news will come as a personal blow to every lover of great painting.” So the papers went on, outvying each other in enthusiastic grief.

He ceased to be careless and condescending to them. The skin crept along his spine. There he lay, solitary, under the crimson glow, locked in his castle, human, with the outward semblance of a man like other men, and yet the cities of Europe were weeping for him. He heard them weeping. Every lover of great painting was under a sense of personal bereavement. The very voice of the world was hushed. After all, it was something to have done your best; after all, good stuff was appreciated by the mass of the race. The phenomena presented by the evening papers was certainly prodigious, and prodigiously affecting. Mankind was unpleasantly stunned by the report of his decease. He forgot that Mrs. Challice, for instance, had perfectly succeeded in hiding her grief for the irreparable loss, and that her questions about Priam Farll had been almost perfunctory. He forgot that he had witnessed absolutely no sign of overwhelming sorrow, or of any degree of sorrow, in the thoroughfares of the teeming capital, and that the hotels did not resound to sobbing. He knew only that all Europe was in mourning!

Isn’t that great? It’s passages like that, where Bennett shows his firm hold of irony, dry humour, and an underlying poignancy that show how Virginia Woolf was too sweeping in her condemnation of him. He is not a pompous writer at all, at least not in Buried Alive – it’s delicious stuff.

Wonderful in rather a different way is Alice. By a series of unlikely coincidences, which we will allow him, Farll ends up meeting Alice – whom Leek had arranged to marry. And, by a further series of unlikely steps, they do end up married. I shan’t spoil any more of the plot, but I had to talk about Alice. She is extremely fond of Farll, but completely no-nonsense. The world can no longer surprise her, and she takes everything in her stride – while also being kind and affectionate, and tolerant of her husband’s shyness and eccentricities. She’s a brilliant character, entirely lovable and mildly intimidating. Simon Evers voices her dialogue perfectly, but I think I’d have loved her even without that. Here she is on Farll’s legacy going towards a picture gallery:

“I call it just silly. It isn’t as if there wasn’t enough picture-galleries already. When what there are are so full that you can’t get in–then it will be time enough to think about fresh ones. I’ve been to the National Gallery twice, and upon my word I was almost the only person there! And it’s free too! People don’t want picture-galleries. If they did they’d go. Who ever saw a public-house empty, or Peter Robinson’s? And you have to pay there! Silly, I call it! Why couldn’t he have left his money to you, or at any rate to the hospitals or something of that? No, it isn’t silly. It’s scandalous! It ought to be stopped!”

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Bennett, and the second novel. Since Evers has narrated quite a few of his novels, I think I’ll be listening to quite a few more – hopefully they’re all as fun as this one was.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

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As the year draws to a close, I seem to be drawn to more new books than usual – to the detriment of A Century of Books. One area in which I’m particularly allowing myself to go rogue is audiobooks. While I am ticking off some ACOB years with it, I’m also going earlier (thanks to the copyright-free restrictions of Librivox) and later (thanks to… my wish to read the books in question).

I’ve been listening to the Chat 10: Looks 3 podcast for a while, hosted by Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. Those names meant nothing to me and, indeed, it was a while before I realised they were famous outside of the podcast – which was recommended to me by an Australian colleague. And, indeed, Australians will probably recognise those names as journalists/presenters/newscasters/etc. Leigh Sales presents a flagship news programme, but in a recent episode of Chat 10: Looks 3 (which is always hilarious) she talked about finding time to write her new book – Any Ordinary Day (2018).

The book stems from the idea that life-changing moments happen out of nowhere – that people get up, get dressed, leave the house as they do on any other day. And then the extraordinary happens, potentially ending their lives. Sales first thought about this when she experienced a life-changing event herself: a uterine rupture, while pregnant with her second child. Thankfully she had gone to the hospital earlier, with unfamiliar pains – and thus was able to be rushed straight to surgery, and survived something that is usually fatal. In the midst of other dramatic or traumatic family events, it put her in mind of speaking to people who experience or witness the extraordinarily tragic.

That ‘witness’ is fascinating, but let’s start with the ‘experience’. She speaks to the man whose wife and two children were murdered in the Port Arthur Massacre; she speaks with a woman who was in the Lindt cafe siege and has MS – with someone who lost his first wife in an avalanche and his second to cancer; with a man who survived over a month stranded in a snowdrift; with someone whose husband was murdered by his schizophrenic son. There is a panoply of grief and tragedy here.

Many of the names are famous, particularly in Australia – and that is part of what makes her conversations with them so interesting. People are changed by these things happening to them, or to people they love. But they are also expected to remain in a stasis of grief. The Port Arthur widow related people asking “Oh, you’re over it, then?” if they saw him laughing in public – as though being over that sort of event were possible. The man lost in the snow has had to live with a curious urban myth about a Mars bar in his bag – perhaps this will mean something to Australian readers! – and tells Sales that people joke about that Mars bar to him at least once a week. Discovering the after effects of these extraordinary moments is saddening in a wide range of ways but so interesting.

And then there are the people who walk alongside the mourners, or work with them. Some of the most fascinating parts of Any Ordinary Day were when Sales interviewed people whose jobs are connected with people’s most tragic days – particularly the empathetic, wise woman who worked in a morgue and accompanied those who had to identify dead bodies. In a similar vein, she speaks with the police officers who have to inform people that their loved ones have died, and a priest who particularly helped one widow. The meeting of ordinary and extraordinary is so unusual, and Sales writes about it brilliantly. This is their livelihoods; the other people engaged in each day will never forget the encounter.

Along the way, Sales tries to find out answers – how people cope with these events; if they try to find any reason in them; what responses are most likely to lead to emotional recovery. I had never heard of post-traumatic growth, but apparently it’s much more likely than the much-more-talked-about PTSD.

Several of the people Sales meets are Christians, and (as a Christian myself) I found it really interesting to see how she responded to that, as somebody predisposed to scepticism. She is a little patronising to them at times, and conflates the idea of a sovereign God with “this was meant to be” – the problem of evil and suffering is, of course, endlessly complex – but I thought it was intriguing how often she came upon people of faith.

Having said that, her writing and interviewing is extremely sensitive and thoughtful. Being a big name in the Australian media has granted her access to many people who might not speak out otherwise, and she draws together the stories and threads extremely well. It is not trying to be sensational, nor answer all the big questions – but by introducing the questions (and, indeed, some less eternal questions – like the idea of media intrusion and journalistic integrity) she creates a very good book. My biggest take away was the extraordinary bravery of survivors, kindness and wisdom of those who have helped them, and troubling way that the media and public at large treat tragedies. No answers, perhaps, but definitely worth a read to explore the issues – and I can definitely recommend the audiobook, narrated by Sales herself.

Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon

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Claire’s review of Brewster’s Millions (1902) by George Barr McCutcheon made it sound so delightful and funny that I couldn’t resist tracking it down myself – and decided that it would be a good candidate for an audiobook from Librivox. (For the uninitiated, Librivox offer free audiobooks of out-of-copyright titles, read by members of the public.) And what a curious book it was.

I believe it’s famous, or at least filmed versions of it are, but I hadn’t heard of it before. Two people have read it for Librivox, and I have to admit that neither of them have the most engaging delivery, but I picked one and went with it. As usual with audio, I can’t quote from it – but bear with me.

The premise of the novel is totally absurd, but you can just about buy it. Monty Brewster is a jolly young man out for a good time, when he discovers that he’s been left a million dollars by his grandfather – which, of course, was an even more enormous amount in 1902 than it is now. Happy days! But there is a complication – when, shortly afterwards, he inherits $7 million from an uncle he barely knew… but only if he is penniless after a year. And then the money will be his. There is some back story about a family feud meaning the uncle doesn’t want to mingle his money with another part of Brewster’s family, and all sorts of additional clauses – Brewster must show himself to be good with money, he mustn’t tell anybody etc. – that chiefly serve the purpose of giving the book a plot.

This absurdity out of the way, we can settle back to watch Monty try to squander $1 million while also seeming to be (for the cross-examination of his uncle’s lawyer) responsible with his finances. He throws large dinners. He buys expensive cutlery. He treats his friends left, right, and centre – and they are, at first, appreciative. Before long they start to think he might be mad.

And, quelle surprise, things start to go comically awry. He tries to gamble away money (playing fast and loose with the ‘sensible with money’ bit) but ends up winning more; he tries to invest unwisely, and becomes the toast of Wall Street. And, all along, he is dealing with – guess what? – a love triangle!

Well, a love triangle of sorts. Barbara and Peggy are both objects of his affection – and, unusually for this sort of novel, both seem like equally good options to the reader. Both are fond of him, like him for himself rather than his money, etc. etc. Naturally enough he does make a choice, but it could have gone either way without derailing the novel.

It was all great fun, and McCutcheon obviously had a lot of fun writing it. I could have enjoyed a whole novel about his financial escapades, so it was rather a surprise when it suddenly became much more dramatic and an evil sheik appears on the scene. And then there’s a battle at sea. Yep. And it all predates the (in)famous novel The Sheik by 17 years, so there was clearly something in the water. This whole section felt like it was just added to make the novel longer, and detracts rather than adds to it, but it’s not like the previous bit had clung to stark realism – so I’ll forgive it.

So, all very silly – some of it sillier than other bits – but as much fun as Claire suggested, and McCutcheon clearly has an able hand at taking the reader on a joyful, absurd journey.

Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald

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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.

Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald

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It’s been a while since I listened to all the Betty Macdonald books on audio, courtesy of review copies from Post-Hypnotic Press, and every now and then I remember to write about them. Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) is the third – after The Egg and I about chicken farming and The Plague and I about life in a TB hospital. This is the most general so far, and also my favourite of the four autobiographical books Macdonald wrote.

It takes place during the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce and Betty is desperate. So desperate, in fact, that she takes the advice of her go-getter sister Mary. Mary insists that anybody can do anything, and specifically that anybody can get any sort of job. Which is how, in the era of very little employment, Macdonald manages to secure (and lose) a vast number of jobs.

As usual with Macdonald, she meanders around the topic for a little too long before getting into it – each of her books would be slightly better with the first chapter lopped off – but once we’re in the sway, it’s hilarious. She works as a photo tinter, she works a stenographer, she works as a typist. She has various office jobs, she gets involved in a pyramid scheme, she organises the offices for a mining company – and gets in trouble for putting all the maps in size order, rather than by place or contract. Often we don’t see quite how she leaves these jobs, but there are dozens of them – each time, Macdonald describes her own ineptitudes extremely amusingly. She has self-deprecating down so well that you’d swear she was British.

This does all eventually lead to her sister forcing her to try writing, so there was definitely a happy ending. But the pinnacle of the book is a lengthy section that is creepy rather than simply an amusing catastrophe. It concerns a woman whose name I can’t remember but was something like Doritos. She turns up a shift of folding papers and putting them in envelopes (if I recall) and talks wildly, roots through Macdonald’s bag, and later starts stalking her. That doesn’t do this section justice – she is built up like something in a suspense novel, and it shows an element to Macdonald’s writing that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Masterfully done, and leaves us with nervous laughter rather than the empathetic, happy laughter of the rest.

Macdonald’s personal life is curiously absent from the page. Her time in the TB clinic is glossed over in a sentence (understandably, given the amount of time she spends on it in The Plague and I), but she also acquires a husband almost incidentally – and her children are scarcely mentioned at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to dilute what focus the book does has, but it is bizarre to remember that they exist, in the middle of some amusing exploits in an office Macdonald is comically ill-suited to.

As before, Heather Henderson does a brilliant job narrating this – I can’t imagine Betty Macdonald in any other hands now. Heartily recommended.

The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald

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The nice people at Post-Hypnotic Press gave me some codes for review copies of their Betty MacDonald audiobooks… approximately forever ago. I listened to The Egg and I (which I’d previously read) and finally remembered that the codes were still kicking around somewhere – so I recently downloaded and listened to The Plague and I (1948). As with The Egg and I, it was narrated by the excellent Heather Henderson.

I did a little poll on Twitter to try and establish whether ‘plague’ rhymes with ‘egg’ in American English – it sort of does when Henderson says it – to work out whether or not the title was intended to be a pun on The Egg and I. Jury’s out. But the ‘plague’ in question in TB. Back in the days when this was a much more real threat in America, Macdonald caught it from a man in her office – who, it turned out, had known he had TB and hadn’t bothered to do anything about it. The only cure is to go and rest in a sanatorium – not in the Swiss alps, as one might imagine, but in an American facility that was free to those who couldn’t afford the enormous bills of most places. As a young single mother, Macdonald was shunted high up the waiting list.

But we don’t get there for a while. I’ve discovered that Macdonald likes to ramble around a topic for a while before she gets to the gist of a book. And so we hear all about her family’s history of hypochondria and illness for a while – for rather too long a while, in my opinion, as by the time we get to the main point of The Plague and I, it feels as though we’ve been waiting impatiently in the wings for hours.

Once we get there, though, The Plague and I is dependably funny – Macdonald writes wonderfully about all the different roommates she has – but also rather harrowing at times. Fans of The Egg and I will know that Macdonald can write very amusingly about hardship, but there is a distinction between calamitous events on a farm and the Kafkaesque cruelty of the sanatorium. On the one hand, they are trying to save their patients, and perhaps have to be cruel to be kind. On the other hand, there are so many draconian rules (no talking, no coughing, no using the bathroom) – that they won’t tell people until they break them – and patients never have anything explained to them. To be suddenly moved into solitary confinement, or taken for an operation without being told what it will be – it must have been terrifying, and Macdonald manages to convey that, while also finding (with hindsight) the ridiculous in each situation, and laughing at it.

Her fellow patients include Kimi, a Japanese girl who is kind, delivers occasional sharp humour, and forever mourns that she is too tall to find a husband. I could have done without Henderson’s impersonations of a Japanese person – it felt a little uncomfortable – but I don’t really know what is usually done in such situations with an audiobook. And then there’s another sympathetic patient, whose name escapes me for the moment – who complains a lot, but is intelligent, and sees Macdonald as a comrade in arms. Besides them, most of the others get short shrift from Macdonald – whether the femme fatale type, forever talking about how sleepy she is, or the young woman who doesn’t take any of it seriously.

We know, of course, that Macdonald survived TB – but, from within, she never knew how long she’d be there, or how well she was. The whole experience sounds maddening and horrifying, but she turns it into an entertaining and often laugh-out-loud book. Henderson’s narration wonderfully judges the frustration, bonhomie, and nervousness that make up Macdonald’s persona in The Plague and I. If you haven’t read this, or any Macdonald memoir, I very much recommend listening to the audiobook.