Project Names

The Romance of Dr Dinah by Mary Essex (25 Books in 25 Days: #23)

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I stumbled across Mary Essex’s books in a charity shop a long time ago, and started with the delightful and funny Tea Is So Intoxicating. I’ve read a few since then, and the final one waiting on my shelves was 1967’s The Romance of Dr Dinah. With the cover you see, the title, and being published by the Romance Book Club, I was a bit wary that it might not be quite as up my street…

Mary Essex was one of the pen-names used by Ursula Bloom, who wrote a staggeringly high number of books. Over 500, I believe, which is some sort of record. And this one turned out to be rather enjoyable – though definitely her with a different persona than some of her other novels.

Apparently one of the genres she wrote in was medical romance. One of her many pen-names specialised in this, while this authoritative site tells me that the later Essex novels also fell into this sphere. Taking a look at some of the titles she wrote as Essex, we can see a theme: The Love Story of Dr Duke, Doctor on Call, Date With a Doctor, Nurse from Killarney, The Hard-Hearted Doctor, A Strange Patient for Sister Smith, Doctor and Lover etc. etc.

Before you get visions of fluffy Mills and Boon, The Romance of Dr Dinah isn’t quite like that. Indeed, the book is much more about her career than her love life. Dinah is the daughter of a doctor who doesn’t think much of her prospects. Keen to prove him wrong, she becomes a medical student – which is where she meets and falls in love with another medical student, Mark. But when he lets her take the blame for a potentially fatal mistake (and also gets grumpy even when she does), she starts to see him in a new light. At which point she heads off to cover for a rural doctor who is having an operation.

There is a romantic element to the novel – or, more accurately, a relationship one. But it is never gushing, and she is pretty clear-eyed about the flawed Mark. I found it much more interesting as a novel looking at the way female doctors were perceived in the 1950s (when this is set), and there are also an interesting section on plastic surgery – it’s not all stuck in a Lark Rise to Candleford world, by any means.

But the main difference between The Romance of Dr Dinah and the Mary Essex novels I’ve enjoyed most is that this one isn’t funny. It’s not trying to be funny, but the dry wit of the other books was sadly missing. At the same time, the writing is good, and would fit perfectly well alongside other middlebrow novels of the period.

Right, four Ursula Bloom names to go – only 496 to go!

Albert and the Dragonettes by Rosemary Weir (25 Books in 25 Days: #22)

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Last time I did 25 Books in 25 Days, I finished off with Albert’s World Tour, so it was only fitting that I picked up Albert and the Dragonettes (1977) for a busy day this time around. I squeezed it into a few spare moments – and it’s the final of the Albert the Dragon books on my shelves (since I don’t yet have Albert the Dragon and the Centaur).

For those who don’t know, the series is about Albert – a vegetarian dragon who lives on seaweed, and wins over the mistrustful villagers thanks to a young boy called Tony. Albert is gentle and thoughtful, and only breathes fire when he gets angry. The original books have illustrations from Quentin Blake, while the later ones in the series have various imitators (successful and less so). Albert and the Dragonettes is illustrated by Gerald Rose, and I don’t love them – particularly compared to Blake’s delightful originals.

The dragonettes are the two baby dragons that Albert adopted at the end of the previous book – Alberto (Berto) and Albertina (Tina). While they’re in the title, the book is mostly about trying to persuade a sea monster to leave the cave that Albert and the dragonettes have their eye on for their new home. It’s much less episodic than the previous books, which gives it a nice overarching theme.

Look, yes, this is a children’s book – but Albert and his world is a feast of nostalgia for me, remembering how much I loved them as a child. This was a fun pick.

The Death of Noble Godavary by Vita Sackville-West (25 Books in 25 Days: #20)

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Vita Sackville-West is certainly a name that’s known in the blogosphere. Sometimes that’s for her relationship to Virginia Woolf; sometimes for Sissinghurst and her garden design; sometimes for The Edwardians, All Passion Spent, and The Heir. I love all three of those books, but it is amazing how many of her novels and novellas are almost unmentioned online. One such is The Death of Noble Godavary (1932). The only review I can find is at Smithereens.

I started this ages ago, and set it aside for some reason. I went back to the beginning this time, and had much more success – it’s 100 pages of atmospheric writing, and shows that nobody is better than Sackville-West at showing the power of houses. The Heir is a wonderful example of somebody falling in love with a house and home – The Death of Noble Godavary is sort of the opposite.

Gervase Godavary is reluctantly taking a long journey back to the house he used to live in. He is going for his uncle’s funeral, and you get the feeling that nothing else would persuade him to return. He certainly hasn’t stayed in touch with the people there – his brother, cousin, uncle, and various other family members whose relationships to each other did rather confuse me. Among them (his cousin’s half-sister?) is the mysterious Paola, who feels like she’s plucked from a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Gervase is fascinated by her – not enamoured, but struck by her power over the household.

The house and the area are wet, dark, gloomy. Gervase is not excited about being back in his childhood bedroom, but he does feel the power and influence of these familiar surroundings. And when his uncle’s will is read out, things get particularly interesting…

I thought this was a good novella, but it becomes truly great in the final 20 pages. I shan’t say what happens, but it is an extended powerful, destructive image – combining the power of nature with the influence of houses. And hopefully that intrigues you enough for you to seek it out. It’s worth reading for the ending alone. One I won’t forget for a long time, not least because it leaves you with far more questions than answers.

Dickens by Osbert Sitwell (25 Books in 25 Days: #19)

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I’ve gone for a still shorter book today – 47 pages – and it’s in the series of Dolphin Books that I’ve written about before. This set of slim hardbacks from the 1930s are very varied – poetry, essays, plays, all sorts – and I love them. I love how they look; I love that such an eccentric imprint existed at all. Though it didn’t last very long, so I guess it wasn’t successful – but it’s fun to see what they chose.

Osbert Sitwell was, of course, one of the famous Sitwell family – and in this volume he takes it upon himself to defend Dickens. I don’t know quite what status Dickens had in the 1930s, but apparently some sort of defence was needed. This is essentially a 47-page essay on why Dickens is great, with illustrative examples. It’s also often quite funny:

It was said he was unable to portray ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ has to be content – for such a deliberate choice was unthinkable – to concern himself with low life, the unpleasant low life of the industrial cities, and never, it was evident, could have dealt, on the one hand, in the subtle psychological reactions of baronets, after the manner of George Meredith, then in his heyday, nor, on the other, have portrayed, with the pen of a Thomas Hardy, the ever-recurring woes of simple-minded by suicidal peasants.

Sitwell manages to keep it quite broad (a lot of it does feel like YAY DICKENS) while dipping into specific examples. So we see how he beautifully he describes a scene, how he shows us a character’s essential traits in a few lines of dialogue, how he presents literary morality. We get an overall sense that he’s a very English, very era-defining writer. And Sitwell is obviously influenced by the long, winding sentences of Dickens.

It’s slightly dizzying to read such a short book with such a vast thesis, and there are plenty of novels that aren’t mentioned at all – but it was fun and intriguing, and certainly left me wanting to read more Dickens soon.

Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm by Gil North (25 Books in 25 Days: #18)

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I tend to buy British Library Crime Classics whenever I come across them, and have been lucky enough to have quite a few as review copies – but it seems like I don’t get around to actually reading them as much as I’d like. So I went for the shortest one I own with a name in the title, for a meeting of projects – step forward Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm (1960) by Gil North. It was the first in a long series of crime novels with Sergeant Cluff at the helm.

I will say ‘crime’ rather than ‘detective fiction’, because North seems to be more interested in the psychology of the investigating sergeant, the victim, and the probable murder than with a twisty, turny novel. I prefer the twists, but I was willing to get on board – and I liked that Sergeant Cluff is a mainstay of his little village. When he begins to explore the death of Amy Snowden, we’re quickly aware that Cluff knew her, her recent (much younger) husband, her neighbour. He knows everyone, and they all know him – and his father before him – because this is rural England in the 1960s. It’s something that other members of the force can’t quite appreciate properly.

I did like Cluff and his humanness – his pity for the ill-treated, and his quiet thirst for justice. What I liked rather less is how misogynistic this novel is. At first I thought maybe it was just some characters who were misogynistic (why, for instance, is everyone transfixed with the idea of a woman marrying a younger man?) – but it saturated the novel. I am not exaggerating when I say that no woman is ever introduced without her breasts being described. This includes the dead woman. Seriously, there was one character whose breasts were mentioned every time she was mentioned. It felt like satire.

So, this wasn’t a massive success for me. If it had had a brilliant detective plot, I might have been able to latch onto that and set aside other elements of the novel – but since North was going for the higher ground, as it were, that option isn’t left to me. So… I guess I enjoyed some elements of it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth? I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.

Mrs Tim Carries On by D.E. Stevenson (25 Books in 25 Days: #17)

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Like a lot of people who read Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson when Bloomsbury republished it about ten years ago, I was keen to read the rest of the series. And, like a lot of those people, I came up against the extortionate secondhand prices one had to pay. So hurrah and hurray for Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press for bringing them back into print! And an extra hurrah for sending me review copies – I wolfed down Mrs Tim Carries On (1941) today.

I should probably be avoiding 243pp books during 25 Books in 25 Days, but I couldn’t resist. And Mrs Tim is just as lovable as I remembered her – dependable, wise, but not with rose-tinted glasses. Her diaries give her exasperated opinions of locals, but also affectionate ones. They show her anxieties and pride as a parent, while also finding humour in everyday life. Only this time, of course, it is wartime.

It’s interesting to see how Stevenson adapts the character to the difficulties of war. Like the Provincial Lady books (which remain a very evident influence on Stevenson), she has taken a humorous character from the 30s and brought her into the war-torn 1940s. While the Provincial Lady looks at the most farcical elements of war, and the hypocrisies of those caught up in the civilian effort, Mrs Tim is a bit more restrained.

I proceed to explain my own particular method of “carrying on”. None of us could bear the war if we allowed ourselves to brood upon the wickedness of it and the misery it has entailed, so the only thing to do is not to allow oneself to think about it seriously, but just to skitter about on the surface of life like a water beetle. In this way one can carry on and do one’s bit and remain moderately cheerful.

This isn’t quite true, though. Mr Tim is an active soldier, and there is more anxiety tied in than this statement suggests. Not only for his fate, but around the possibility of invasion, and the threat of bombs. It is less all-out funny than the Provincial Lady (and, if we’re being honest, not quite as good) – but a more poignant portrait. And, to be honest, almost nothing is as good as the Provincial Lady. If this isn’t quite, then it’s still rather wonderful – and all the more wonderful for being readily available again.

Frank by Jon Ronson (25 Books in 25 Days: #16)

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I haven’t had that much reading time today, and so today’s book is the shortest so far – under 70 pages. Which is unusual for Jon Ronson, who tends to write quite chunky things – filled with the surreal and extraordinary things he has witnessed or investigated. I’ve enjoyed several of his other books, and was particularly impressed by one that wasn’t particularly about the surreal so much as the unpleasantly common, in So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

I’m not sure of the genesis of Frank (2014), though I suspect it might have been put out quickly to support the film. It tells of Ronson’s time as an almost accidental member of Frank Sidebottom’s band – Frank Sidebottom being the pseudonym of a musician called Craig who performed wearing an enormous cartoon head. In this slight volume, Ronson talks about the band’s meandering creation and lack of success – as well as all the people they bumped into who went onto bigger and better things. There is enough insight into Craig’s psychology to make me wish Ronson had written a rather longer book. And I still haven’t quite worked out how Frank ever became famous or notable – his legacy seems to come from nowhere.

But Ronson is always a fascinating and empathetic writer, managing to make the reader marvel alongside him, and become interested in whatever he is interested in. This was a fun one to pick up on a day I needed a short book.

What Hetty Did by J.L. Carr (25 Books in 25 Days: #15)

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What Hetty Did (1988) is the fourth novel I’ve read by J.L. Carr, and each time I feel like I understand him as a writer a little less. He’s so varied! The one he is probably best known for is the elegiac, lovely A Month in the Country. Well, What Hetty Did is not much like that – though it does include one of the same characters. Indeed, characters from at least four of his other novels pop up in this one.

Hetty (actually Ethel) is a bright A Level student who is not much liked by her mother and openly disliked by her father. She decides to up and leave – at least until such time as she might get a place at Cambridge. A chance encounter on a train gets her recommended for a guest house. While staying there she decides to try and find the biological mother who gave her up for adoption. Various other eccentric characters mill around the outskirts.

Eccentric is definitely the key term for this novel. Carr seems to have got odder and odder, as a writer, as he got older – and was in his mid-70s when What Hetty Did was published by an imprint that Carr had set up. Hetty is a whirlwind of a character, and not a very likeable one – more determined than pleasant. And the strange way in which things are described is due to some sort of disconcerting energy in the narrative. It’s like Angela Carter but the events are mundane, even if the prose is not.

Did I like it? I honestly don’t know. It’s an impressive feat, and quite distinctive – but such an odd way of telling a relatively simple plot that I never quite felt I could find myself on stable ground. But if nothing else, it’s nice to read a novel set in my homeland of Worcestershire – that doesn’t happen too often. And Bredon Hill even gets a mention, which was the hill abutting my village!

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (25 Books in 25 Days #14)

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I still haven’t read any Proust, but I have read three books about reading Proust, or about Proust more generally. One was a few days ago (Proust’s Overcoat), and Phyllis Rose’s wonderful The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t that long ago. I’ve now made it a trio with 1997’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, published when Alain de Botton was only 28.

It’s an intriguing book that combines many different genres. It’s styled as some sort of self help guide – or rather a Proust help guide, where a reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can help give life lessons. This covers all manner of things, from friendship to romance to how to read a book. But there are layers – and de Botton incorporates biographical details of Proust and a literary analysis of his writing. Indeed, it often seems like he is making no distinction between Proust’s letters, his fiction, and his actual life events – all are mixed together to draw out potential advice, filtered through a philosophical lens. Each section ends with a ‘the moral?’ conclusion.

The moral? To recognise that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the gratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

What holds it all together is de Botton’s engaging prose and his wit. And it’s often a very amusing book, being light with Proust’s life as well as the various friends, relatives, and critics who popped up in it. It’s all an odd concoction, and perhaps on that would make more sense reading after I’d read some Proust – but with enough verve and confidence to keep me enjoying it throughout.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (25 Books in 25 Days #13)

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You know what #13 means? It means that 25 Books in 25 Days is officially half over already! It feels like it’s been doing super fast – and has, indeed, so far been pretty doable. And almost all of them have also qualified for Project Names – including today’s, An Abundance of Katherines (2006) by John Green.

I started watching John Green’s YouTube channel around 2008, and still watch it now and then – it’s called vlogbrothers, and he alternates videos with his brother Hank. This was my entry to Green, and then I read The Fault in Our Stars a couple of years after everybody else read it. Since then, I’ve bought a few of his books, but had yet to read any others. I decided to pick up An Abundance of Katherines because Rachel and I will be talking about YA fiction on the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ and I haven’t read a huge amount.

The main character of An Abundance of Katherines is Colin Singleton (not many Colins in fiction, so that was a plus!) who has dated 19 girls called Katherine. Not Kate, not Katie, but Katherine. And he’s only just leaving high school. As we subsequently learn, some of these ‘datings’ lasted rather less an hour, and started when his age was in single digits – but, to his mathematical mind, there must be some meaning to his having only dated Katherines. And to his heart, there has to be a reason that he is always the one who is dumped. He decides to put together a theorem to explain his relationships – and which will predict who will be dumper and who will be dumpee.

Meanwhile, he and his best friend Hassan head off on a road trip – deciding to stop in a small town which claims to have the burial place of Franz Ferdinand, and where he and Hassan can get jobs at a factory making the strings for tampons. Naturally there is also a gang of people their age that they can get involved with – including Lindsey, who captivates Colin.

There are quite a few boxes ticked along the way, and the novel is quite self-consciously quirky, but in an entirely enjoyable way. I rolled my eyes a bit at Colin’s thought process about how women don’t NEED to wear make up and he PREFERS them that way, but he is otherwise an engaging and sympathetic lead. Once a child prodigy, he is struggling to live up to that – and navigating his unpopularity and uncertainty about his future. Hassan is very funny, much more charismatic, but without a clue where his life is heading. Lindsey is entirely too much a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it was 2006 and perhaps YA authors didn’t know better yet.

It definitely helped that I have an existing fondness for John Green, and I found this a page-turner, enjoying every moment, even while recognising that I’m not really the audience. Someone half my age would doubtless find a lot of solace in this sort of book – I didn’t learn any life lessons, but I had a ball reading it.