a gallimaufry

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.)

 

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Shiny New Books: Pipers and a Dancer, by Stella Benson

I have a review up on Shiny New Books: it’s Michael Walmer's reissue of Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson. A strange and original novel of 1924, in which Ipsie Wilson voyages out to China to marry the boorish fiancé she hardly knows. Peopled by comic characters, haunted by the losses of the First World War, this novel is well worth your time and I loved it.

The Long View, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This is only the second novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard I have ever read: this is a slightly embarrassing admission because everyone loves her work and has read all the Cazalet Chronicles. Not I.

Here is an even worse admission: I disliked the novel I had read, and that novel was Falling, which I have seen described as a ‘late masterpiece’.

 The reason: what I call Jo Bettany Syndrome. For those of you who did not devote a substantial part of their youth to endlessly reading and rereading Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, Jo Bettany was the heroine of the first dozen or so novels. Jo was clever and kind, a talented writer, immensely popular with girls and teachers alike; she played pranks but good-hearted ones, she sang with a beautiful bell-like voice which regularly reduced listeners to tears and she saved someone from death in every other book or so. When she grew up, she settled near her beloved school where she offered wise guidance to foolish schoolgirls, she wrote bestselling yet critically acclaimed novels, married a doctor and had about 35 children all of whom went to the Chalet School. In other words, she was so perfect that even child-Helen suspected that there was some sort of wish-fulfilment going on here on the part of EMBD. And when I sense it in a novel, I find I really dislike it. And in Falling, I felt the character of Daisy was just too good, even her weaknesses weren’t really weaknesses, and this irritated me. (Subsequently, I discovered that Falling was based on something which had really happened to EJH, perhaps this is why?) And because I am superficial, this meant that although I appreciated EJH’s great skill as a writer, I didn’t like the book.

Still, everyone loves EJH’s work, so when I saw The Long View in my local charity shop among the elderly paperbacks by Dick Francis and Hammond Innes, I decided to give her another go.

‘Let us do whatever you would most enjoy.’
This made them both actually laugh; it was his age-old preface to doing exactly what he would most enjoy.

Written in 1956, The Long View is the portrait of a marriage, from even before Antonia and Conrad first meet to their imminent divorce. The novel is divided into five sections, gradually moving back in time, so that we begin with 1950 and then move back to 1942, 1937, 1927 and 1926. It is a really clever way to structure the book, because of course your curiosity is aroused: why did their marriage fail? In fact, why did they marry in the first place? (I can’t help but wonder whether Martin Amis, EJH’s stepson, was inspired by The Long View to write his own time-backwards novel, Time’s Arrow, albeit he handles it very differently.) Apparently, EJH chose this structure to discover ‘whether one could not better understand people and their situations by slowly stripping them of their experiences’: the result is an astonishing success.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard; found here)

At the outset, the Flemings appear to have an idyllic existence: class, taste, plenty of money, good looks, busy social lives. However, this is a façade; behind it lurks pain, infidelity and bullying. The first, 1950 section, is the only section which is written from multiple points of view; it presents our main characters as other people as well as themselves see them, and it also gives a more rounded perspective on their two children, Julian and Deirdre, who are poised to make many of the same mistakes their parents made. Neglected and despised by their father, protected as far as possible from him by their mother, they are more than usually distant from their parents than most children of that time and class.

For the rest, most of the novel is shown from Antonia’s point of view (‘Mrs Fleming’ as she is reduced to being called in the later part of her marriage) and she is presented usually in terms of her relationship to a man. Her beauty, her clothes, her jewellery, her gestures, are all very closely observed, as if she were an object. She is the sort of person who looks lovely even when she is tired or crying. Someone asks her what she does and she tries to explain that she doesn’t look after the children, she doesn’t cook:

‘I do the arranging of it. There is a lot of arranging, you know. I read, and look at pictures, and garden, and listen to music – and Conrad minds awfully about clothes so I spend a certain amount of time on them – [...] I suppose I’m a sort of scene-shifter for Conrad,’ she finished. ‘He likes an elaborate setting, and he likes it to vary. I try to do that for him.’

She has schooled herself to please men, particularly her husband, and attached her self-worth to succeeding in this, but it is at a cost to herself. Certainly the crushing of her spirit began long before Conrad entered her life, and the final section of the book, 1926, is powerful. Despite this, by the time I finished the novel I hoped that her divorce might finally free Antonia.

We also dip into Conrad’s perspective. This works well because not only does it prevent him from being a monster, we also see how reasonable, charming, restless and clever he is, how attractive that can be, and how that masks his total selfishness and contempt for women. We experience him as Antonia might have done, the surprise when he turns.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard and her first husband, Peter Scott; found here)

What I loved about this novel was EJH’s skill in describing the world as her characters see it, every word perfectly chosen. Plunged into the middle of this complex relationship as the reader is, the minute level of detail in which it’s chronicled makes it feel claustrophobic. EJH expertly delineates mood and emotion, and the constant shifts in them, in a way that seemed truthful and pinpoint accurate, and is always coolly observed. She shows someone absorbing pain and damage over years, feeling exquisitely differentiated degrees of shame, guilt, humiliation, someone who lives emotionally on the brink at all times, trying to provide that ‘elaborate setting’ and fearing the smallest slip.

So, yes, I shall be reading more of her work in the future... And yes, I did experience a soupçon of Jo Bettany Syndrome, but not much and this time it didn’t bother me, perhaps I am becoming a better person.

Clues to Christabel, by Mary Fitt

I can’t remember now where I came across Clues to Christabel. Originally published in 1944 (and set in the 1930s), it and a handful of other novels by Mary Fitt have been recently re-issued by Moonstone Press, an independent publisher specialising in republishing vintage crime and detective fiction. (Fortunately, as second-hand copies of most of Fitt’s novels are pricey.) Here is what they have to say about her work:

Her intellectual background produced elegantly written crime fiction with a strong sense of the literary and the overtones of Greek tragedy – dealing with love, loss, pride, the abuse of power and fraught relationships. But it is her method of upending the traditional format of whodunits that was unusual (perhaps unique) among Golden Age mystery writers.  Fitt’s novels do not follow the traditional “crime-followed-by-resolution-through-deduction” pattern; although they start with a death, it might appear to be from natural causes or an accident or a suicide. Some are virtually devoid of any detection and have no detective to speak of — the mystery in Fitt’s books is not whodunit, but whether it was done, and if so, why it was done. How a character is formed by environment and connected chains of circumstances is the puzzle to be solved.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman. Born in 1897 and daughter of a brewer’s traveller, despite her humble beginnings and her sex, Freeman taught herself Ancient Greek, studied Classics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire where she was appointed a lecturer and later received her Doctor of Letters, wrote twenty-nine mystery novels, was elected to the Detection Club and co-habited with her partner, Liliane Clopet, for a good thirty years. So, an impressive woman and an unusual approach to crime fiction, a difficult combination to resist.

(Portrait of Kathleen Freeman found on Wikipedia)

Clues for Christabel certainly falls into that category described as a whether or why dunnit rather than a whodunnit. The central character, Christabel Strange, has died of undulant fever (nowadays more commonly called brucellosis) a year before the novel begins. Only thirty-two, she was a very successful novelist; so successful that she was able to buy her ancestral home out of mortgage and allow the rest of her family to live there. In her Will she leaves the house to the family with the proviso that her friend Marcia Wentworth is permitted the use of one wing. She also bequeaths her diaries to her family, but Marcia is to write her biography. Alas, the family loathes Marcia and refuses to let her see the diaries or interview them about Christabel.

Not one to give up easily, Marcia assembles a group of people who knew Christabel at the family pile. The group includes Dr George Cardew, a childhood friend of Christabel’s, and is split between the family, headed by the manipulative and possibly mad Granny Strange, and Christabel’s more ‘bohemian’ friends. Hostility bubbles away and ends of course in murder.

The name Christabel conjures up Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem and while I wouldn’t say there is an overt connection between it and Clues to Christabel, it adds an atmospheric layer to the novel. The themes of a sort of vampirism or parasitism, and hatred returned for kindness, as well as something of Christabel’s character, do seem to be shared. Maybe there is also some repressed lesbianism?

If her depiction of her characters is pin-sharp, it’s Fitt’s structuring of her novel which distinguishes it from other crime novels of the time. Fitt shifts between omniscient, first-person and close third-person forms effortlessly, including entire sections narrated by one person and, near the end, Christabel’s stolen diary is reproduced. These shifts give us the sense of being presented with a range of ‘clues’ to the novel’s heart: the character of Christabel herself. What really happened to her, and why did she write a Will that frustrates everyone included within it? Eventually, the identity of the murderer is revealed but I don’t think it’s difficult to guess at all, because the real mystery is Christabel. You will have to draw your own conclusions from this clever but ultimately saddening novel.

(The other mystery is: what is a chippette box? The chemist shop issues Christabel’s pills in one. Even the OED can’t tell me what it is. Some sort of pulped wood? Cardboard?

on Beatrix Potter and Brer Rabbit

Perhaps you missed the slight kerfuffle about Beatrix Potter recently? I certainly did; it wasn’t until I was chatting on the phone on Sunday with M that it came to my attention. M had read about it in The Times; Beatrix Potter was being accused of cultural appropriation by some crazed academic because Peter Rabbit was a talking rabbit like Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit stories were originally told by enslaved Africans. We both thought this seemed a bit silly.

Curious, I found the article in The Conversation by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall. It is a really interesting article! I am so glad to have read it. If you are a Potter fan, I urge you to do the same. And if you are a fan of Enid Blyton, for once she comes out of it well!

(Beatrix Potter, illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne, London, 1902; found here)

Zobel Marshall makes a compelling case that Potter knew and loved the Brer Rabbit stories of ‘Uncle Remus’ and drew on them for the plots of some of her stories as well as some of the language. Fearful of plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism, Potter herself never publicly acknowledged the link; since then very few academics have acknowledged the link either.

Finally, Zobel Marshall sites this refusal to discuss Potter’s use of Brer Rabbit as part of a wider appropriation of Black culture, in which Black culture is used by predominantly white culture and not acknowledged.

I mean, can any of this actually be disputed? The article is measured and well argued. I do disagree with her claim that the plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, of the trickster stealing food, being the ‘plot [that] is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales’. The plots of most of her books are quite different. Still, I was curious about M’s interpretation of the article, based as it must have been on what they read in The Times. And a cursory Google brought up a list of furious headlines in the right-wing press.

I couldn’t read The Times article because it is behind a paywall. I think it must be this one. I note the use of the word ‘stole’; not a word that Zobel Marshall used once in her article, as far as I could see. However, inflammatory headlines in the Daily Express (‘Beatrix Potter Accused of ‘Copying’ African Slaves’ Stories for Peter Rabbit) and the so-called news site GB News (‘Now Peter Rabbit is Under Threat by Woke Mob as Beatrix Potter Attacked’) were followed by reasonable summaries of Zobel Marshall’s article so perhaps the Times article is also better balanced.

Not so Libby Purves’s reaction in the Daily Mail: ‘Academic Accusing Beatrix Potter of Stealing Peter Rabbit Needs a Lie Down.’ To be honest, I never have high hopes of the Mail and this is an opinion piece, but I do respect Purves and was therefore very disappointed by what I read. Purves admits that what Zobel Marshall writes is ‘fairly convincing’ but the problem is her tone: ‘her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, I suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt’. Purves then goes on to explain that cultures have always borrowed from and influenced each other, which is not Zobel Marshall’s point, and to complain about the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

(A.B. Frost, illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris, published by D. Appleton and Co., 1911; found here)

Purves uses Zobel Marshall’s article to make a wider point, and I intend to do the same with hers. I find her reaction absolutely typical of those people who lose their wigs when the National Trust dares to include information in their properties that a family enriched itself through slavery or who immediately tell you, when the topic of slavery comes up, that Black Africans profited from slave trading too. Why are they so frightened about accepting historical fact? Why can’t we say that some British families profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade? Why are we only supposed to feel pride in our past and not shame as well? Why can’t we acknowledge it if we draw on another cultural tradition for our own creative work?

Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated wonderful books that we still enjoy today, and she drew on the stories of Brer Rabbit to do so. See – it’s not difficult to make a start, is it?

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story is a novel that has hovered on the periphery of my reading attention for about a thousand years. It’s only the fact that it is being reissued in a very pretty edition by Michael Walmer books that I finally got round to reading it. Not knowing much about it before I started, I read it in a genuine state of suspense: however, I want to include spoilers in my discussion of it, so if you would like a similar experience to me, click away now!

Zuleika (pronounced, so I read after I’d finished it, Zu-LEE-ka) is an orphan, abandoned by her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford, because he disapproved of her parents’ marriage. She has to earn her living as a governess, a post she is unfit for, being herself ignorant of what she is supposed to teach and – perhaps more importantly – being devastatingly attractive. Having been shunted from school-room to school-room, she learns some fairly basic magic tricks and sets herself up as a ‘prestidigitator’. To stupendous success. While her abilities are mediocre, her beauty and allure catapult her to fame and wealth. Belatedly, her grandfather invites her to stay with him in Oxford, where she exerts her femme fatale charms with – well – fatal results.

Zuleika’s great problem is that in a world where all young men fall in love with her, she can only love a man who remains impervious to her. This man is the Duke of Dorset, a man perfect in every ability but who, like Zuleika, has never been in love.

The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls. [...] That he should be confronted with one of them – with such an one of them! – in Oxford, seemed to be sheer violation of sanctuary.

Zuleika is thrilled – but unfortunately the Duke has fallen for her after all. She rejects him, and so he vows to kill himself. This inspires all the other undergraduates in Oxford, similarly smitten, to swear they will die for Zuleika too. But will they?

(Illustration by George Him for the 1960 Heritage edition of Zuleika Dobson, found here; if you click on the link you can see more!)

What makes this novel so unsettling is its blend of light social comedy and really dark themes. And it is funny and well observed. Oxford is mockingly but affectionately portrayed in its traditions and eccentrics. The fellows of Judas College are happiest when all the undergraduates have gone, and they can jeer at Pedby’s bungled reading of the Latin grace for years without end. The Duke belongs to a club so exclusive that during his second year he is the only member. Realising that this is unsustainable for a club he, ‘not without reluctance, but unanimously’, elects a few new members. When Zuleika complains that the Second Division boats row before the First, the Duke tells her that ‘Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.’

But into this charming comedy are woven strands of delusion and cruelty. Everyone falls in love and often out of love again very easily. In the case of the mass of students, it is a form of hysteria – most of them have barely glimpsed the woman for whom they pledge to die. What then is the value of love? Is it just a trick, like Zuleika’s sleights of hand?

Zuleika and the Duke are powerful and careless of their power. Zuleika enjoys the tribute of men falling in love with her and doesn’t care what becomes of them. The Duke is so self-regarding and narcissistic he takes it as his due that the other students revere him. When he decides to kill himself, they emulate him. The deaths are not directly the fault of Zuleika or the Duke, because the undergraduates have after all freely chosen to give them their power and influence. Indeed, once the die is cast, the Duke attempts to prevent the tragedy. Zuleika, however, comes to desire it and revels in it; truly disturbing.

Zuleika Dobson was first published in 1911 and it is hard now to look back at the futile deaths of a large number of young men without the shadow of the First World War looming into mind, especially when Beerbohm describes the stormy moment before the Duke’s plunge thus:

A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky. Then there was consonance to split the drums of the world’s ears, followed by a horrific rattling as of actual artillery – tens of thousands of gun-carriages simultaneously at the gallop, colliding, crashing, heeling over in the blackness.
Then, and yet more awful, silence; the little earth cowering voiceless under the heavens’ menace.

I don’t think it is a stretch to link the Oxford students’ mindless romanticism, faux chivalry and death wish with an attitude that romanticised war and honour and brought its sons to the trenches. Furthermore, the Duke’s ridiculous notion of honour traps him into going ahead with his stupid suicide. The poisonous destructiveness of this veneration of honour and death is most clearly and horribly shown in the scene of Noaks’s death. Noaks has been too cowardly to drown himself with the other young men; he is goaded to fling himself to his death by Zuleika and the Batch family in a scene which switches rapidly from comedy to horror and is surely echoed by the later practice of women sending white feathers to men who did not want to fight.

(Max Beerbohm by himself; found here)

The Duke seems to die for love of Zuleika; actually, he hates her. Seeming and being are all too often distinct in this novel. For fun and also to reinforce this idea of delusion, Beerbohm frames his novel with classical motifs. There is a comic chorus, of sorts: the ‘high grim busts’ of the Roman emperors which decorate the Sheldonian theatre and watch over the drama that plays out. On seeing Zuleika when she arrives in Oxford:

sweat started from the brows of the Emperors. They at least saw the peril that was overhanging Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. [...] Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles.

The novel’s narrator claims to be ‘Clio’s servant’ – the servant of the Muse of history (although he fears that to be so is to be ‘not quite a gentleman’). Thus he pretends that his fiction is ‘true’. He pre-empts the reader’s disbelief in his ability to record all these conversations and even thoughts accurately, by spinning a tale of being given special powers by Zeus to travel invisibly and enter minds. It is typical of the novel that he lays claim to truthfulness with an outrageous explanation, and that he plays further with the difference between seeming and being that threads through this story of delusion.

It is a book quite unlike any other that I’ve read. It is delightful and cruel by turn, both frivolous and tragic. It ends with a surprising twist on the exhortation that you be true to yourself – given by the Warden to Zuleika. Apparently, a spoof sequel was written in which Zuleika goes to Cambridge. I can’t help wondering what that might be like...

(I was sent a copy of this book to review: you can order a copy from Michael Walmer books.)

 

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Over at Shiny New Books my review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s splendid biography of T.H. White is now up!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my love for STW’s writing. I had always wanted to read this biography but the prices of second-hand copies were too high (added now to the extra costs from Brexit of importing books to the EU gripe gripe).

Now Handheld Press has republished the book in a lovely new edition with an introduction by Gill Davies. I couldn’t crowbar much about the introduction into the review (which is already too long really, I can never stop myself), but it makes this edition far, far more valuable than the original. Davies discusses how STW researched and wrote the biography, how her talent for fiction inflected her writing, how she dealt with THW’s very dark side.

Thus it frames book very nicely and reminds us that it is a written and created artefact, the product of years of work and thought. It also, interestingly, centres STW rather than THW; I think it’s true to say that many if not most people who read the book now will read it because of their interest in her work rather than his, an unusual shift.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner at Frome Vauchurch, undated; from the Sylvia Townsend Warner website here)

 

 

 

The Agency for Scandal, by Laura Wood

I generally find January a difficult month. All the sparkly Christmas lights have been cleared away and the denuded Christmas trees lie dying on pavements or at the end of gardens. The weather is always grey and dispiriting. At our school, it is the end of one semester and the beginning of another, often demanding extra administration or meetings when really all you want to do is hide under a pile of blankets. And of course, I have blown all my New Year’s Resolutions by the end of the first week and feel disgusted and frustrated with myself.

(Walter Sickert, Girl at Window, Little Rachel, 1907, oil on canvas; Tate Gallery, London; found here)

In short, Dry January or any of the other improving initiatives on which people embark this month are not for me. I require all the booze, chocolate and hot-water bottles I can lay my hands on to get through it without becoming a right old git.

It may therefore come as no surprise to you when I write that I steer well away from challenging books in January. It’s a month of children’s books and classic detective stories for me (Children of Blood and Bone was outside my comfort zone but so compelling I had to read it anyway). And fortunately for me, the perfect antidote to January was published this month, and it comes in the form of Laura Wood’s novel The Agency for Scandal.

At the back of the book the author notes her love of Georgette Heyer and essentially The Agency for Scandal is a Heyer novel – of The Talisman Ring or The Masqueraders strain – set in Sherlock Holmes’s London and as such is absolutely perfectly pitched. If this sounds like your area of interest, then run don’t walk to the nearest library or bookshop and don’t pay attention to the YA marketing.

Our heroine is Isobel Stanhope, daughter of a baron who died leaving his family with no money. In order to keep her beloved little brother at school and her fragile mamma from learning the true horrors of the family finances, Isobel has secretly taken a job. One that makes use of her skills in acting, quick thinking and lock-picking. She works for the Aviary, an agency that investigates wrongs done to women and either rights them – or gives the women the material to blackmail their awful husbands into giving them a better life. Isobel is also hopelessly in love with the Duke of Roxton, who is of course desperately rich and handsome and unaware of her existence. Life begins to get even more interesting when the Aviary is asked to investigate Lord Morland, who just happens to fancy himself as the next prime minister – and who runs the British secret service... Soon there are burglaries, mysterious jewels, double-crossing and all-round dastardliness...

It is charming and well-paced, the characters are delightful and it is just a pleasure to spend an afternoon reading it. Yes, isobel’s skills with a lockpick and sleight of hand do rather strain credulity at times. I hope there will be sequels and I am looking forward to seeing how Wood will square a heroine who despises the empire and challenges the status quo with a hero who works for the secret service. Perhaps, though, that would be to smash with a hammer a light and skilfully written romantic comedy – and a good romantic comedy is a precious thing indeed.

(Louis Anquetin, Two Ladies in the Forest, 1889; pastel on paper; found here; a little too early for The Agency for Scandal but it captures something of the Aviary's spirit for me)