As usual with the clubs, there were some books that didn’t work as well for me – and I didn’t have a whole blog post’s worth to say about them. But let’s add them to the 1961 Club list anyway!
Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge
If only this could have lived up to its extraordinary first line! Here it is: ‘What amazed and affronted Penelope Hinton most about her husband’s death was that the fortune-teller had been right.’
Penelope is only 44, but has been married for 15 years. Widowhood is a jarring shift – but she quite quickly meets a man, Pye, who runs a laundrette-coffee-shop and finds an affinity with him that manages to evade the differences in lifestyle and class between them (though she rather overstates the class distinction to herself).
I think I’d have liked Rose Under Glass more if it focused on Penelope, which the blurb to my edition rather implies that it does. But we leave her behind and go over to another group of people, moving from the countryside (against the wife’s will) so that the husband can start a publishing house. And then there’s all sorts of narrative about that, about Pye’s possible involvement, and various outlandish figures in that world.
The whole thing feels like it doesn’t have a centre, or any particular reason to keep reading. The writing is good (sometimes very good, in its quieter, domestic moments) but I found what I often find with Berridge – she needs to be several degrees stranger for it to really work. She writes in a similar vein to Beryl Bainbridge or Barbara Comyns, but lacks their distinctive oddness. Rose Under Glass needs to be sharper in one direction or another, and feels a little pointless over all.
Owls and Satrys by David Pryce-Jones
Another one that starts extremely well, with a funny, strange scene of Henry discovering his mother’s lover leaving the house during the early hours. I really enjoyed the dry irony and the distorted take on family life. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:
The room in which Henry and his mother were playing cards had not changed in appearance since it has been first done up in 1933, when the Bouchers had married. It had seemed reasonable then to settle into a house in Regent’s Park that required servants to run it; to paint some of the walls an interesting ochre, and to build a cocktail cabinet to hold thirty different bottles. A sick world of incendiary bombs and V.25 refugees and steels helmets had made no difference to the paster casts of Negro-minstral faces that adorned the walls, nor to the carefully collected Lalique glass all over the house.
Lying on the floor of the drawing-room, Henry shuffled the cards. Backed by a specially designed window-seat that had been covered in ersatz fur, they were playing racing-demon, not from pleasure, but from long-established habit. Both mother and son played with game with apparent negligence, but confident of victory, savouring a secret skill.
But, again, Pryce-Jones doesn’t quite live up to the opening. I thought it might be something like A Confederacy of Dunces, where extravagant selfishness bumps up alongside amusing grotesque versions of domesticity. But it becomes less funny, more normal, and… fine. Just nothing very exciting, particularly when the first chapter is so striking.
I read a book published by Michael Walmer yesterday, albeit in a different edition – and today I read one that was published by his imprint and sent to me as a review copy last year: The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge, from 1945. It is so short a novella that it is practically a long short story – coming in at only 75 pages.