a gallimaufry

round-up: August 2024

This month I’m still not up to reading anything very challenging, but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t read some excellent books.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (reread)

Still seeking something to quench my The Secret History thirst, at the beginning of this month I turned to a novel with some similarities in its set-up. Blue Van Meer’s life with her professor father has been peripatetic, with never more than a term or two in any one town. But then they arrive in Stockton, NC, where Blue is to spend her final year of school preparing for Harvard. Lonely Blue is flattered to be invited to join the Bluebloods, a group of students favoured by the film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who hosts them at her house every week. And then on a camping trip in the forest, Blue finds Hannah hanged from a tree. I enjoyed this novel a great deal more than when I first read it and it was massively hyped: now I can see it more clearly. Blue’s narrative is precocious, snobbish and perceptive, and the story twists satisfyingly, though I could have done with a lot fewer of the mainly invented bibliographical references with which the text is increasingly unconvincingly and annoyingly peppered. Also features probably the most insufferable father figure in literature.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

Finally had the chance to fill the void left by The Secret History when this arrived in the post. Lacking the narrative drive of TSH, The Little Friend is a very slow and immersive novel to read, but I alone perhaps of all readers everywhere think it’s a better book, stuffed with extraordinarily vivid writing. When she was a baby, Harriet’s brother was murdered and his killer never caught. This summer, twelve-year-old Harriet intends to avenge him, a journey that takes her to dark places and dangerous people. Tartt explores the effects of the original traumatic event on Robin’s family and friends, and the deeply unequal society in which they live. Awful and amazing.

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwoord (reread)

Marian is engaged to be married but her subconscious seems to have doubts. An entertaining look at the life prospects of a young female graduate in 1960s Toronto, it was Atwood’s first published novel and impresses with its wry, pragmatic humour. In some ways, life has improved so much for us since then. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

Barbara Comyms: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner

I have been waiting for years for this, a life of one of my favourite writers, and this is a good solid biography. Comyns drew closely on her own life for some of her fiction, and that life was pretty colourful, which makes for an interesting biography: a childhood filled with animals and eccentric, neglectful parents; early artistic ambition blighted by extreme poverty and a useless husband; racketeering in World War II; marriage to a second husband who was suspected of being a spy; ex-patriot life in Spain. Even in the middle of the last century, publishing was fickle and it wasn’t until Virago championed Comyns’s works in the 1980s that her talent was properly recognised. Time to reread her novels again…

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (reread)

Read this first so long ago that I had forgotten most of it but odd whiffs came back to me, usually minor details. What a smart writer Chandler was, how ably he constructs his world, every word really works for its place. Not always convinced by his female characters, if I want to carp.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

My first le Carré! Not what I was expecting, very cynical, very sordid, very good.

In the Forests of Serre, by Patricia McKillip

In every way, the diametric opposite of le Carré. McKillip’s fiction, especially her later works, are what I read when I am sad. They are magical, ambiguous, beautiful and hopeful. Even the villains are noble. It is quite hard to describe them, as they tend to have a chorus of characters rather than a central character, who must somehow achieve harmony together in order to resolve a problem which they may not even understand after it has been resolved. A big wallow in loveliness.

Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Byron, and A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

In Cinderella is Dead, a cruel king oversees a society where the legend of Cinderella is used to oppress women. In A Study in Drowning, a student of architecture is commissioned to design a house by the sea for the heir of her favourite writer. I’ve chosen to put these two YA novels together because I thought they both had lots going for them, considered theme both flawed, yet felt more forgiving of the flaws of one than of the other. And I have been wondering why that was, and yes it depends on the flaws. I suppose that it always comes down to a quality of the writing, that it does a bit more than just tell you a story but creates a mood or atmosphere, or conveys more than just what is on the surface. And secondly I suppose that if you have a mysterious dead author, Welsh mythic vibes, fairies and a vast, mouldering house, I am always going to cut you more slack.

Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit, by Clare Harlow

There’s a lot of really good children’s fantasy being published at the moment and this is a prime example. In Shelwich, people have been being snatched by monstrous grilk, including Ista Flit’s father. And magic, which is fuller when the tide is high, is growing stronger. Can Ista and her friends find the missing people and discover the secrets hidden in the caverns under Shelwich before it’s too late? I think you know the answer, but it’s a fun adventure getting there.

October, October, by Katya Balen

Have been wanting to read this since it was first published and it was absolutely worth the wait. October lives an idyllic life in the woods with her father until he has an accident and she has to go and live in London with her mother, from whom she is estranged. Magical and astoundingly written in a child’s stream of consciousness, so hard to do well and this was just perfect.

 

round-up: July 2024

This month I stuck with easy reads but ventured away from rereads to new books.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

After finishing The Secret History I wanted to carry on reading more of it but of course, that isn’t possible. Reading Babel was my attempt to stay in that mood. I admit, I started it anxiously, the subtitle and Kuang’s reputation suggested that my squeamishness would take a battering. Fellow wimps: it is not too graphic. The story is set in an alternative nineteenth century and it has a brilliant concept, which Kuang uses to explore both the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism. The concept is this: if you inscribe in silver two words from different languages with approximately the same meaning, the gap in meaning becomes charged, magical. So you can use these silver bars to power everything. Had Kuang left it at that, it would have been terrific, but she couldn’t resist elaborating on the idea at length, which (a) became a clog on the story and (b) resulted in some contradictions. I am not usually that bothered about show vs tell but there was an awful lot of telling in this book and this held it back from greatness, though it was good.

Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

Like Babel, this is a novel which I think needed a few more edits to refine. This is the sequel to Bardugo’s first novel for adults, Ninth House, and again it’s set in a version of Yale where there are secret societies practising magic. The whole Yale university scene is so weird I was astonished to find elements I assumed Bardugo had invented are in fact true. There are indeed secret societies and they are called things like Skull and Bones and they do have special houses they call tombs… Anyway, Ninth House was clever and fun but Hell Bent, while very readable, is messy. The central problem is too much plot, with insufficient foreshadowing so it feels as if things are being made up on the hoof just to enable another plot twist, and characters reduced to mere puppets of the narrative. Plenty to enjoy but it did feel like a missed opportunity.

Five Bad Deeds, by Caz Frear

Married with three children, up for a good teaching job and planning the extensive renovation of her dream house, Ellen has an enviable life with solid friendships. Unfortunately, someone sets out to destroy it. Also unfortunately, pretty much everyone in this novel – which is told from the viewpoints of several different characters – loathes Ellen, and she’s pretty unkind about them too. Although the constant sniping did get me down a bit, this well-plotted thriller bowls along at a neat pace and gave a few deft swipes at middle-England’s values.

The Harp of the Grey Rose, by Charles de Lint

Loved this. Very much in the mood of The Hobbit or the Prydain Chronicles, it’s a gentle fantasy about a harpist who falls in love with a young lady who is not all she seems to be and embarks on a quest to save her and overcome an evil that will destroy the world. The music, the delicately melancholic feeling, the talking bear and magical creatures – this is a fantasy world you would like to live in.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green

Although I’ve read Arthurian romances, lais and poems, I’ve never made it through a whole cycle and when I saw this in an Oxfam bookshop it just fell into my hand. A quick and easy read, as you’d expect. Surprises: Arthur doesn’t seem to be that great a king and just sends out his knights to sort out problems. It’s a relief when Nimue carts Merlin off, since as soon as anyone does anything, he bobs up and says, ‘Oh no you’re doomed now and Logres shall founder and the darkness will return,’ which has a damping effect one would imagine. Gearing up for Malory now.

Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston

Amari joins the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs when her brother disappears, determined to find him. As a trainee, she’ll have to pass a series of competitive assessments. Since she is smart and possesses extraordinarily strong powers, this should be straightforward: unfortunately the sort of powers she has are reviled and make her an object of suspicion. Very Men in Black meets magical school story, this is funny and endearing.

High Rise Mystery, by Sharna Jackson

Meticulous Nik and her dramatic sister Norva are horrified to discover the body of their art teacher, Hugo Knightley-Webb, at the bottom of the rubbish chute in their block of flats. Knowing everyone in the Tri, they are ideally placed to solve the murder and make a perfect team. The story crackles along, and you will hear Nik and Norva in your head long after you’ve closed the book.

The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett

Not sure why I felt like reading about Christmas in July, but I did. How did a skeleton end up inside the Fairway Players’ panto prop beanstalk? This short novel follows a similar structure to The Appeal, with our two plucky young lawyers Charlotte and Femi once again sifting through emails, text messages and other documents to ascertain the truth. The solution is pretty obvious but this isn’t important as the pleasure lies in the Players’ constant backstabbing and sniping, culminating in an unforgettable performance of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Only proviso: read The Appeal first.

 

round-up: June 2024

This blog has been neglected too long!

I am busy wrestling with the children’s book I’m writing, and this takes up most of my spare headspace and time. The long book reviews I used to write here would take hours and hours. So! New plan. Every month I’ll write a round-up of what I’ve been reading – or a selection of it, anyway.

This month, for reasons I don’t intend to go into here, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything demanding or complex, and I started a lot of books I was unable to finish. Now I’ve typed them up, I can also see that most of them were rereads. So, essentially, this is a comfort-read edit.

Black Maria, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Delightfully bonkers Wynne Jones novel, one of the ones where she throws about a dozen plates in the air, keeps them spinning beautifully and then resolves everything in time for tea (see also: Archer’s Goon).

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Wynne Jones was unlucky with many of her covers; this one is, to my mind, genius, passing beyond the merely bad to a new level of marvellousness. I am confident I would never have picked this up as a child, and first read it as an adult. Quintessential Wynne Jones: multiple worlds, magic, at the centre, enterprising and realistically portrayed children.

Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer (reread). When you are in the mood for a Georgette Heyer, nothing else quite hits the spot, and this is one of her good ones. It is the one where Kitty will inherit nothing unless she marries one of Mr Penicuik’s four nephews; fortunately, she is in love with one of them; unfortunately, he refuses to play along, so she devises a Cunning Strategem. Spirited heroine (part-French, of course!), ridiculous intrigue, enormous good humour, nice frocks and a happy ending – all present and correct and great fun too.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie (reread). The first novel to feature Poirot, a Belgian refugee during the First World War to Styles St Mary, an Essex village, and narrated by a rather self-regarding Hastings. Who has poisoned the wealthy Mrs Inglethorpe, and how? A neat and excellent mystery which I failed to solve correctly (despite having read it in my teens) (that was a long time ago, in fairness) but which has a very satisfying ending.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (reread). Must have first read this shortly after it came out in paperback, when I was a student or recently graduated, and had forgotten all but the broadest lines. It still holds up! Richard’s enchantment with Henry, Francis and the twins is so convincingly rendered, the desperation and complicity, the slow unravelling.

Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge (reread). One of those books that just makes you feel happy. Old houses, beautiful countryside, animals, magic, humour and reconciliation. (I wrote more about it here.)

Shadowstitch, by Cari Thomas. This is the sequel to Threadneedle and evidently there is at least one more book to come. The world-building is as absorbing and imaginative as ever, but this instalment is a bit flabby, with the pacing too slow in the middle and too fast at the end. There are two main threads (ho ho). The first involves Anna and Effie’s investigation of their family curse, which drew out the best parts of the story and allows Thomas to explore her wonderful magical worlds. The second concerns the rise of an inquisitorial group; I found this thin and not really very believable. Still, I enjoyed it and I will be reading the next book.

 

On governesses in adult & children's fiction

I was thinking about fictional governesses, as I’ve just read two gothicky novels of the 1960s featuring them as heroes: Joan Aiken’s The Silence of Herondale and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. Although it was serendipitous that I read one after the other, there are striking similarities between them. Both play on the reader’s knowledge of the ur-governess novel, Jane Eyre, and feature resourceful heroines, madness, secrets and romance – plus the addition of sinister accidents which keep befalling the child for whom they’re responsible.

Joan Aiken’s approach is playful. In The Silence of Herondale, Deborah Lindsey finds herself in an isolated house on the snowy Yorkshire moors with a child prodigy to care for, a dark and stormy young man and ‘the Slipper Killer’ on the loose from Broadmoor. Mary Stewart’s heroine, Linda, refers overtly to Jane Eyre as she takes up her position in the Château Valmy – as well as drawing on other literary references such as Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi. Nine Coaches Waiting hews much more closely to Jane Eyre than does the Aiken novel. The Rochester figure – darker and more troubling than Aiken’s Jeremy – is actually split between Léon, Raoul and Philippe. There is a party with a beautiful blonde, a mad woman, a flight through the countryside. It is all very cleverly done and it is one of my favourites of Stewart’s novels.

Both Linda and Deborah are young, brave, practical and kind. What about other fictional governesses? I hypothesised that governesses in adult fiction are generally sympathetically portrayed, and those in children’s fiction are not, and this is because of the power differential. For adults, the governess is a vulnerable figure, caught between two layers of society. For children, the governess is a symbol of unwanted authority. But how true is that? Bearing in mind this is only drawing on novels that I’ve read and can remember reading...

The first governess in fiction I can think of is Miss Taylor, in Emma, who becomes Mrs Weston. She is sympathetically portrayed, kind and sensible. Then there is Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Charles Dickens’s Ruth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit. Again, we warm to them and sympathise with their plight, poorly treated and exploited by their employers.

But complications with my thesis now set in. Being a governess to her own children, who do not know her, is the punishment endured by Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) for her adultery – she has slid down the social scale. Miss Wade’s treatment in Little Dorrit contributes to souring her. Not every governess will have a happy ending or survive her work unscathed. Further: she may pose a threat, stepping outside her class and failing to know her place. Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair; William Makepeace Thackaray) and Lucy Graham (Lady Audley’s Secret; Mary Elizabeth Braddon) turn the tables, using their somewhat liminal social position to marry up and improve their status, and this is portrayed as threatening. Worst of all must be witchy Madame de la Rougierre, the murderous governess in Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu). Not only does she have the dubious social position of being a governess, but she’s French.

The last governess I can think of in adult fiction is the narrator of The Turn of the Screw. Here the character’s uncertain social status is reflected in her experience of an uncertain reality – whether it is her own disintegrating mental health or the supernatural intruding grotesquely into her charges’ lives.

Disappointingly, I am very limited when it comes to governesses in children’s literature. This makes my hypothesis – even thinner. The two magnificent villainesses who spring to mind are Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (The Midnight Folk by John Masefield) and Miss Slighcarp (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken). Miss Pouncer is literally a broomstick-flying witch, who looks both old and young, confiscates toys and forces poor Kay to learn Latin declensions. She returns in The Box of Delights as the wife of wicked Abner Brown. Miss Slighcarp, tall and bony, cannot practise magic but is similarly cruel – wolflike, even – and intends to deprive Bonnie of her inheritance. These ladies are perhaps heirs to Madame de la Rougierre.

They are counterbalanced by the lovely Miss Heliotrope, Maria’s kind and elderly governess in The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). Unfortunately, I have an unusual copy of The Little White Horse: I often notice it – and even think, ah, there it is! – but when I actually want to find it, it vanishes. So I cannot refresh my memory of Miss Heliotrope at the moment, except that I think she has forget-me-not blue eyes, mild ill health and a large nose, and finds happiness marrying the Old Parson.

Thus, I can only find three examples of governesses of children’s literature and one of these apparently disproves my hypothesis that they are always portrayed unsympathetically. However, I would argue that Miss Heliotrope bucks the trend because she is very clearly without much power, thus closer to the governesses in adult fiction than the domineering figures in children’s literature. And my brief survey of adult literature suggests that while some novels treat governesses with sympathy, alert to their ambiguous position in the household, others perceive them as disturbing or even threatening the established order because of this position.

So – do you agree? Can you think of some more fictional governesses? What happens if we add lady companions to the mix, I wonder?

(Illustration from Jane Eyre by Edward A. Wilson; Illustrated Modern Library, 1944; illustration of Becky Sharp up to no good from Vanity Fair by Lewis Baumer; Hodder & Stoughton, 1913; illustration from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Pat Marriott; Jonathan Cape, 1962)

Habetrot

‘Habetrot’ is an Anglo-Scottish version of ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Brothers Grimm) or the East Anglian ‘Tom Tit Tot’; I read it in The Virago Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh Husain (the original source is A Dictionary of Fairies by Kate Briggs and if anyone would like to republish this so I could afford to buy a copy please do, I would be so happy). Funny and female centred, it is now definitely my favourite version.

In both ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the heroine is brought to the attention of a king through the vain boasting of a parent, and in both these stories the king is hardly ideal husband material since he threatens the girl with death if she fails to spin either straw into gold or five skeins a day for a month each year. The girl’s saviour demands a high price: Rumplestiltskin wants her first-born child; Tom Tit Tot wants her. In each case, the girl can avoid this price if she discovers the creature’s name – which she does, by accident and via someone else.

‘Habetrot’ is very different. The story has a very domestic and even comic feel to it, with a lassie who hates spinning and instead scampers about the countryside, and an exasperated mother who needs her to earn some money so locks her up until she’s spun seven skeins. After a day of failing to produce anything decent, the lassie escapes and discovers Habetrot, who offers to spin the skeins for her. The price? There is no price. Habetrot swears the lassie to secrecy and tells her to call on her if ever she needs help.

(Illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from Elizabeth W. Grierson, The Scottish Fairy Book; London: Fisher Unwin, 1910; found here)

‘Habetrot’ seems to be either in explicit conversation with one of both of the other versions of this tale, or truncated. The lassie discovers Habetrot’s name herself quite easily, but there is no especial reason why she shouldn’t know it as Habetrot is kind and helpful and never seeks to take advantage of her. So this seems an odd detail to include. Perhaps there was once a longer version where it was significant? Or perhaps it is because the tale is built on one of the other versions, and this detail has persisted.

After Habetrot has spun and delivered the skeins, the lassie, feeling peckish, cooks and eats seven black puddings. On discovering this her mother rushes out and shouts:

‘My dawtie ha’ spun se’en, se’en
My dawtie ha’ ate se’en, se’en
An a’ afore daylicht.’

This catches the attention of the young laird. In ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the mother sings ‘My darter ha' ate five, five pies today’, but quickly changes it to ‘My darter ha' spun five, five skeins today’ out of embarrassment when the passing king shows an interest. The clear difference here is that the East Anglian mother lies out of shame over her daughter’s greed, but the Scottish mother is equally proud of her daughter’s spinning and her appetite. The joke presumably is that the appetite is not for eating black pudding but for another activity which might prove attractive to a young man. And as soon as he sees the lassie he asks to marry her.

But it is the ending that particularly pleases me. The laird never threatens his fiancée but he does witter on about all the lovely skeins she’ll spin for him after they’re married, so Habetrot tells her to bring him down to the burnside. She then lets the couple into a chamber where she and her friends are. The laird is horrified at their long lips, and they explain that although they were once bonnie, their lips have grown long from spinning. Habetrot tells him,

‘Yir ain lassie’ll be the same, bonnie an she is noo, for she’s fair mad about the spinning.’
‘She’ll not!’ said the laird. ‘Not another spindle shall she touch from this day on.’

And so everyone gets what they want. The laird marries the pretty lassie, she can roam the countryside with him instead of spinning, ‘and every head of lint that grew on that land went to old Habetrot to be spun’, presumably enriching her.

(Illustration by John D. Batten from Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales; London: David Nutt, 1894; found here)

It is hard to know, without being aware of the story’s origins, whether the differences of ‘Habetrot’ from the German and East Anglian tales are intended to be directly compared with them, or not. It is definitely tempting to see this as a consciously female ‘retelling’ of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Tom Tit Tot’ but I don’t have any evidence for this.

In the other versions, there is a real power imbalance between the king and the girl and he threatens with death; in ‘Habetrot’ the laird seems amiable and with the help of Habetrot the lassie can manage him and achieve the life she wants. In this version, laziness (or dislike of domestic tasks) is rewarded – after all, isn’t the point of marrying a rich man to get out of having to do those tasks you don’t like? – and apart from being locked up for a day the lassie suffers very little.

The lone male imp or little man of the other two stories is replaced in ‘Habetrot’ by a small community of women who are ready to help the lassie rather than exploit her. While we might not be delighted at the reinforcement of the primacy of female beauty as currency in the world, the sly way in which Habetrot uses it against the laird to help the lassie feels like a victory. So too does the idea of a secret group of magical little women hidden on the other side of a self-bored stone who feel no need to aspire to beauty. With female characters driving the story and with humour, ‘Habetrot’ strips out the darkness of the other tales to give our female characters a more unequivocally happy ending.

Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang

I love a novel about the publishing world! This dark comedy was catnip for me and it absolutely lived up to expectation.

June Hayward is a writer whose only published novel fared poorly. She is sort-of friends with Athena Liu, who is beautiful, successful and rich, author of novels that not only sell well but are critically acclaimed. Ultimately, though, Athena’s luck runs out and she dies in a freak pancake-related accident. June has the chance to steal her next manuscript – and she does, passing it off as her own. Soon she has a deal with a massive advance, an attentive publishing team who throw money at development and marketing, and a buzz attached to her name – everything she ever wanted. Can she keep her secret?

June is funny, clever, manipulative, jealous and self-absorbed; she wrestles with her guilt mainly by casting herself as a victim and by weaving sophistries about honouring Athena’s memory. One of Kuang’s great skills is to make her really quite sympathetic; spiteful one moment, anxious the next, and then buckling under the onslaught of social media hate the next. We see the US publishing scene through her eyes, and Kuang gleefully portrays it as venal and cynical, pitting authors against each other, feigning its interest in diversity and only concerned with the next bestseller. For June, reviewers are driven by their biases and Twitter is a mob dominated by extreme emotions, quick to turn even on those they adored five seconds earlier. In other words, everyone in this novel is enjoyably awful.

Yellowface gets its title because June allows her editor to persuade her into using her full first name and her second name as her nom de plume – Juniper Song – which of course sounds Chinese or Korean when June is actually white. This is significant because Athena’s novel is about the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British Army to serve on the Front during the First World War, now largely forgotten. On discovering that June has no East Asian heritage, many readers are disappointed. Others are angry: if you are not at least part Chinese, what right do you have to tell this story?

June’s reply (to us, not her critics as it would give her away!) is that Athena’s ethnicity gives her no special insight into the experiences of the Chinese labourers she wrote about, which were so very different from her own privileged twenty-first-century life in the US. She had to do just as much research as June did, and exercise her imagination just as far:

Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? [...] I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

But June’s point is undermined by her lack of understanding of the ethnicity and culture she is taking over, which she struggles to distinguish from other East Asian cultures. She makes crass changes to Athena’s book, such as softening the white characters, whom she considers ‘almost embarrassingly biased ... cartoonishly racist’ and adding a trite epilogue. For her, publishing’s commitment to diverse writers discriminates against her; she never considers how much discrimination gets thrown at non-white writers.

Kuang sprinkles metafictional jokes throughout the book, and at one point teases us with the possibility that what we are reading is itself June’s next manuscript. Sometimes it feels as if she is taking a cheeky wink at us. And she asks: stealing a manuscript crosses a line, but are there not degrees of appropriation here? Athena is always on the lookout for new material for her fiction, which she takes from other people. June calls her ‘a vampire [...] She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced reader’. She uses an experience of June’s for a story. Her ex-boyfriend says:

Sometimes, when we fought, she would give me this very cool, narrow-eyed look. I knew that look, because it was the same look she got when she was drafting a scene. [...] Sometimes she would say things that made me upset, or ask about things I’d been through – and as time went on, all I could think was that she was mining me, using me as fodder.

Isn’t Athena, then, as parasitic as June? Whether the words you rewrite are a manuscript written by a dead author or the painful secret your friend tells you, is creating fiction inherently exploitative, vampiric? And where does that leave the publishers who make money from them and the readers who consume them and enjoy the suffering of others vicariously?

Death and Mary Dazill, by Mary Fitt

How should I describe this short and compelling novel? It takes elements of the detective novel (although more The Moonstone than Agatha Christie), gothic fiction and Greek tragedy and blends them into a novel which feels like a ghost story by M.R. James (although there is nothing supernatural in it), but retold by Patricia Highsmith, and with a clever structure divided between around 1890 and around fifty years later. Now republished by Moonstone Press, it is astonishing that a novel of this quality has languished out of print for so long.

Dr Fitzbrown, Superintendent Mallett and Dr Jones are attending a funeral in Chode churchyard when they witness two old ladies drive up in an expensive car and walk to a tomb, where their chauffeur lays a wreath of hothouse flowers. Curious, they ask about them while taking tea with the local vicar. The vicar explains that they are the de Boulter sisters, Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran, the tomb is that of their father and brother, and that the sisters are responsible for the destruction of Mary Dazill, who occupies another grave on the far side of the churchyard. All three – Ralph and Leonard de Boulter, and Mary Dazill – died within year of each other. The vicar’s wife, Mrs Barratt, furnishes the story; her mother, Lucy Brown, was a close friend of Lindy’s and told her daughter the story.

In 1890 the de Boulters were living at Chetwynde Lodge, a grand house near Chode: Ralph had recently retired from service in Burma and withdrawn his teenaged daughters from boarding school to live with him. Frequent visitors were Leonard, his friend from Oxford, John, and Lucy Brown. Shocked at how poorly his daughters had been educated, Ralph engaged a companion-governess sort of person for them: Mary Dazill. Beautiful, self-possessed and passive, Mary’s very existence aroused great love and great fear in equal measures. Of course, it all ended very badly.

‘You don’t believe in the power of the dead, Doctor? You don’t believe that, whatever happens to their poor souls, their influence reaches out of the past – their loves, their hatreds, live on and touch the living? [...] Those two women you saw just now,’ she said, ‘Lindy and Arran de Boulter – they are living and walking monuments to the power of Mary Dazill.’

Ostensibly, most of the book consists of Mrs Barratt narrating the events of 1890ish to the pipe-smoking gentlemen in the dusty vicarage sitting-room; their reactions frame the story and provide its epilogue. In fact, Mary Fitt completely subverts this first by including the characters’ dialogue and feelings, which naturally Mrs Barratt via Lucy Brown would be unable to relate in any detail, and second by relaying scenes at which Lucy Brown was not even present and therefore could not have described to her daughter.

This is perhaps a borrowing from cinema and actually works really well. The framing device of a story told at second hand intensifies its creepiness and ambiguity, and the speculations of the listening men build in further uncertainty about how we should understand it. Is Mary Dazill (is it pronounced ‘dazzle’ or more devilishly ‘dee-el’?) a poor woman making the best of her chances, a threat to family cohesiveness (and wealth) – or something more malevolent? This double narrative creates a tension between the fictive ‘realness’ of the Victorian scenes, which we experience as if we are there, and their impossibility, because we are reminded that we could not have experienced them. As with many literary ghost stories which use a framing device, the novel’s pointing to the fact that it’s a story makes it easier for us to suspend our disbelief and accept it but at the same time doubt it.

I wrote about a later novel by Mary Fitt here, and there are similarities: an enigmatic dead woman, a sophisticated narrative structure, mysteries that are never completely resolved. Death and Mary Dazill is, I think, pacier and more succinct, stranger and more atmospheric. It is a classic and you should read it.

(Photograph of Mary Fitt, pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, found here, where you can also read more about her)

Notes from the Henhouse, by Elspeth Barker

Do not be misled by the cover of this book, or even the title, both of which suggest the memoirs of Barbara from The Good Life. If you pick up a copy of Notes from the Henhouse, you are picking up a collection of essays and stories whose loose theme is perhaps Et in Arcadia ego written by someone with a sharp eye, a dry wit and a deep love for animals and poetry.

Born in 1940, Barker grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a prep school for boys. (I can’t help thinking of Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater here, although there probably wasn’t much similarity at all.) Here she rescued a jackdaw with a crossed bill, named him Claws, fed him with a silver mustard spoon and raised him (her bedroom becoming ‘a guano-ridden cavern’) to become her constant companion:

The most marvellous of all his gifts to me was in essence metaphysical. I would see him, a dark speck among the tumbling clouds, and see him swoop from the heavens in an unfaltering ellipse to my shoulder. To call a bird from the air is so extraordinary, rivalled in my experience only by the appearance of one’s abstraction of thoughts and images in the tangible form of a book. And even then, the bird wins.

Claws lived with Barker for eleven years before tragedy struck when she left to study Classics at Oxford. From childhood she ‘used to pray to the moon with tightly clasped hands and pray “Bring me a poet”, and when she was about twenty-one she met and fell in love with George Barker. They moved to a ‘ramshackle’ farmhouse in Norfolk where they had five children, zillions of animals and plenty of parties oiled with ‘Bulgarian vintage’. Barker taught Latin and wrote a single, brilliant novel, O, Caledonia, she also clearly charmed everyone who met her and, while being clear-sighted about life’s realities, sprinkled a sort of wild magic over everything she encountered. Perhaps you might describe her writing as revealing the quotidian as pulsing with the dark, eternal forces of the classical past.

I mention all of this because Barker drew on her own life for her fiction and non-fiction; often it is hard to guess where one begins and the other ends in the pieces in Notes from the Henhouse and one can’t help feeling that she didn’t much care about drawing a line between them since they are both full of truth. She was a storyteller and it’s the story that matters.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker from The Times, here)

Barker writes with great pleasure about animals. Her hens are ‘romantic, racist, cruel, heroic beings’, who huddle ‘malevolently along the kitchen dresser shelves, beady eyes fixed in triumph on the egg cups smashed below’. Her brave Bantams are slaughtered by dogs as they attempt to protect their chicks. She rescues a frog, massaging it back to life, only for a passing hen to swallow it down. Portia the pig, wine drinker and kitchen haunter, ‘a gambolling pig, a pig fleet of foot, bucking and caracoling’, dislikes ‘most men’ and bites them. There’s a ‘gallimaufry of dogs’:

Dogs are us in heart and soul, but better. How privileged we are to love them and know them and make guesses about them, and how painfully do we even as infants learn that the price of love is loss, but also that love and memory will outlive death.

(Some of the dogs do sound horrific: there is the Dobermann pinscher which roams the village terrorising people and trapping them in the telephone box; for reasons undisclosed but perhaps not too mysterious, Barker is forbidden from keeping lurchers after ‘problems with a nearby commercial enterprise involving pheasants’; and of course there are the hen murderers.)

This love infused with the knowledge of death runs through the whole book. Barker writes about the death of a mother, perhaps in part her own; about the loss of her beloved animals; about her widowhood and immense longing for her departed husband. Even her driving lessons end in a fatal accident. In ‘Dogs of Athens’, the narrator (who may be Barker, but not exactly) arrives in Athens to visit her acquaintance Christina, passing in the airport some ‘cheerful’ stray dogs and :

Three ancient crones, wrapped in black. The Three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and something. Why couldn’t I remember the third one’s name? It is depressing to survive for fifty years only to begin to forget things you have always known.

But Christina is now in hospital, which the narrator reaches despite her fifth-century Attic Greek. Christina is ‘in disguise; she had dolled herself up as some kind of invalid country and western lady’. The narrator tells her a story, and then:

I felt a pang of terror. [Christina’s] eyes seemed to have receded into her skull; she gazed out as though from a cavern, withdrawn from the rest of the world, unreachable. And then she was back...

Then Christina tells a story, of how she once met Rudolf Nureyev on a path by a lake.

When the narrator gets home, in London, she learns that Christina has died. ‘I thought of Christina and the crones and the dogs of Athens, sleeping by their own cathedral, littered in shaggy heaps about its glassy forecourt’. Nothing is insignificant; on the contrary, everything is freighted with ancient and enduring symbolism. An airport lounge, three old ladies and some dogs suggest other journeys to other realms; in the particular is the universal.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker at home, from the Telegraph, here)

on books & blogs & being a bit crap

I haven’t been here very often recently and I have been once again pondering the future of a gallimaufry.

As ever, the problem mainly boils down to a lack of time.

I am still reading lots of books I’d like to write about here. The trouble is that I generally don’t have a spare moment to type something up until days and days have elapsed and I’m already far into another book and have lost the desire to write about the previous one. And the details have faded a bit from my memory. Plus, for reasons that are about to become apparent, I am reading a lot of children’s books and I am not sure that people want to read about them.

Why am I rather strapped for time? Well, I would here like to make the point that I am somehow much slower about everything than most people. It takes me a day to write a review. It takes me anything between three and eighteen hours to prepare a three-hour English lesson. And I seem to require a certain amount of time staring blankly out of a window or disappearing down Internet rabbit holes in order to get round to doing anything constructive with my time (such as earning a living). I would hate you to imagine for one nano-second that I am a dynamic and busy person achieving lots of important stuff all the time. I am just inefficient and a bit lazy.

Meanwhile, I have decided to pursue my dream of becoming a professional fiction writer. Like probably eighty per cent of people, this was my fantasy as a child. As I grew up, I discovered that writing was not as easy as I’d imagined as a seven-year-old, when you just wrote a story about a witch and drew a picture, bam finished, everyone loves it. Writing involved putting in a lot of work and – horrors! – maybe having something to say. At university, I studied English literature and learnt that the world was already full of amazing books, who was I to be troubling readers with my hollow-ringing efforts. Other Eng. Lit. students published their work in the college magazine and it was very obviously in a different league to mine. So I stopped, and a forest of trees breathed a sigh of relief.

When I became a parent, I started reading to my daughter. Children’s books! How amazing they are – so many wonderful ones to choose from! And I felt inspired by them. I realised that I wanted to write for children, and that I did have some stories to write but they were better suited to children than to adults. I wrote one. I finished it! That’s about all that’s good that could be said of it. I tinkered around with it, and to my eternal shame sent it out to a few agents, none of whom ever replied (thankfully).

I started writing a second book and that is what I am working on now. It’s taking much longer than the first because I keep changing my mind about fundamental aspects of it and because I am actually learning how to write a book rather than believing I can just do it. I’ve read books on writing. I’ve joined the Golden Egg Academy, who specialise in teaching the craft of writing for children and young adults, and completed their twelve-week course, which was brilliant and very practical. I applied for their twelve-month course and didn’t get in the first time but was accepted the second. I started it in September and tomorrow I have my first one-to-one meeting with my assigned editor to discuss my synopsis and first 10,000 words. On the one hand, I can’t wait, it’ll be so useful; on the other hand, maybe I’m going to discover that I’ve been deluding myself and I should consign my book to the nearest bonfire and take up knitting.

Anyway, endlessly thinking and writing and rewriting, joining a critique group with some of my fellow Eggers and discussing our work (so amazingly helpful), doing the coursework and reading lots of children’s books has kind of killed off this blog as a book-reviewing space. Maybe I will write something else though, something that comes a bit more easily than a book review. I want to use this for something…

If you’re really unlucky, I’ll end up posting my book here.

 

Shiny New Books: Emmeline, by Charlotte Smith

I’ve a new review up at Shiny New Books!

It’s of Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle, Charlotte Smith’s first novel, originally published in 1788 and now re-issued in an elegant paperback by Michael Walmer.

It’s a big and absorbing read for a winter evening (or ten). Fun fact: Jane Austen mocked Charlotte Smith but was influenced by her too...

(There’s also an excellent review by Rob Spence here.)