a gallimaufry

The Dark Labyrinth, by Lawrence Durrell

During the early part of June, 1947, a small party of sightseers found itself trapped in what was then the newly discovered labyrinth of Cefalû, in the island of Crete. They had penetrated the network of caves and corridors with a guide from a tourist agency, their intention being to examine the so-called ‘City in the Rock’ – whose discovery early in the preceding year had set a seal upon the long archaeological career of Sir Juan Axelos. By a sudden and unforeseen accident, the guide in charge of the party was killed. Falls of rock separated several members of the party from the main body, and it was only the sheerest chance that led one of them, Lord Graecen, to find his own way out.

So begins this strange novel. Lord Graecen recovers at the nearby house of Axelos, which is also called Cefalû. A desultory search party is sent out; it transpires that this is not the first party to have been lost in the labyrinth and never seen again. There is a rumour that a violent creature – a minotaur, even – lives in the labyrinth and has been killing villagers. The passenger ship on which they were travelling is called the Europa, to continue the bull analogy and highlight the journey from one realm into another.

But no, this is not that sort of novel at all. I suppose it is a philosophical exploration, but with powerfully realised characters and settings. Straight away it skips back in time, to explore why some of the members of that party had a compelling reason to visit Crete. Lord Graecen, a moderately successful poet with only a few months to live, is to inspect the City in the Rock which Axelos discovered. John Baird is haunted by the ghost of a German soldier he killed in one of the caves at the entrance to the labyrinth and believes that if he re-inters the remains on sanctified ground he will be freed. Campion, brilliant painter of ‘innocent, powerful paintings’ and deeply objectionable human being, is sent to Crete by the War Office to paint some war graves. He and Baird are acquaintances. Olaf Fearmax, a spiritualist who has been abandoned by his spirit guide, has no special reason to visit Crete: he is en route to Egypt. However, he is linked to Graecen and Baird through the figure of Hogarth, a psycho-analyst who has been treating him and Baird, and who is friends with Graecen. Because of this connection, they all decide to travel on the Europa.

The other passengers we meet on the ship (at which point for me at least the novel picks up; the back stories of Graecen et al. are necessary and interesting and yet also a bit dull). Awaiting the Second Coming, Miss Dombey is known to Baird from his youth; she is a peppery, rigidly religious woman with a little dog, planning to convert the heathen and horrified by the presence of a bidet in the bathroom of her cabin. Mr and Mrs Truman won their tickets in a competition; although they are slightly lower class than the other characters, their charm and good spirits win them over. Virginia Dale, on the other hand, young, beautiful and convalescent, turns out to be – horrors! – Cockney! And poorly educated! Poor Virginia is the only character whose thoughts we never share, although Durrell is too clever a writer not to make her intriguing. And despite their snobbery, both Graecen and Campion are drawn to her.

All the names are deliberately suggestive.

I am afraid I will include spoilers so be warned if you haven’t read the novel... And this is a pity, because I think it is important to read it at least once not knowing what lies ahead, not least because small crumbs of information are dropped on the way which entirely change your perception of a person, an event. This is most marked as regards Axelos and the minotaur.

(Pablo Picasso, ‘Blind Minotaur guided by Girl in the Night’, from La Suite Vollard (1934); found here)

On the voyage out, the odious Campion confesses to Fearmax that he has been profoundly affected by the medium’s writings:

[...] when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it – watching it happen as an extraneous thing – one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon [...]
When one begins, as you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm – it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his [...] immortal self is enshrined. [...] What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role [...]

Later on, Fearmax explains that he has spent his life creating a ‘system’, a philosophy, of how the world works. He knows that it may be incorrect; he accepts that when he reaches Egypt, if he learns anything, he will forget the elements that don’t align with his system and integrate the ones that do. For him, the value is the process, the working-out of the system for himself. He is horrified by the idea of disciples, who latch on to the system he has developed without doing the necessary work of thinking for themselves.

What both men seem to agree upon is that our reality and sense of self are created by us in reaction to death. They are an act of will. Later, Ruth Adams says of her brother, ‘He [...] used to say that the whole of the Western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and destruction.’ In the direct aftermath of the Second World War, this must have felt very sharp to Durrell’s readers. Within the novel itself, the traumatic shadow of the conflict lies on all the characters, not just Baird.

The dark labyrinth, therefore, is in one sense the human brain (which even looks labyrinthine, doesn’t it?), creating our cocoons and shaping our reality. For this reason, Hogarth, the man who seeks to understand the human mind, is prominent in the first half of the book. In the second, he is replaced perhaps by Axelos, a man whose relation to objective truth is complex and bewildering. In this way the actual labyrinth which the tourists enter becomes an embodiment of their own minds. What happens to each of them after the rockfall is not a coincidence, it is predicated on their psyches, it is the changed face of their realities in the face of death. That is reductive; the novel is not. It remains mysterious and beautiful and surprising.

The Trumans find themselves in an enforced paradise, along with an old lady who has been trapped there for over twenty years, but who experiences a sort of radical freedom. She tells Elsie Truman:

I remembered how life was before [...] I was outside everything in a certain way. Now I participate with everything. I feel joined to everything in a new kind of way. [...] In my own mind, inside (not as something I think or feel, but as something I am) inside there I no longer prohibit and select. I include. It’s the purely scientific meaning of the word ‘love’.

Have they found the ideal existence? Nothing is so simple, perhaps. Elsie Truman realises, contentedly, one evening, that this place doesn’t ‘really exist, except in their imaginations’. And the final chapter is unexpected too.

A Share of the World, by Hugo Charteris

Moonlight made a world of the near and the far. The near was vast and black, split up by spaces of nothing, and the far was pale and precise. A bush beside him was a gigantic black, but a star, a remoter sun, was a pin-hole in a bling between shoals of cloud in the low tide of weather. Light was pale smoke which showed things best when it got behind them rather than on them. [...]
Voices clamoured in his head, I can’t go on, I must go on. They’re there, just in front, they’ll wait till you’re on top of them and the shots will go through and through you like the needle of a sewing-machine through linen.

Described in the blurb (accurately, I think) as ‘a lost classic’, this is a reissue by Michael Walmer of Charteris’s first novel. It was originally published in 1953 to instant critical acclaim – there is praise from Rosamund Lehmann and Francis Wyndham on the cover, and Evelyn Waugh selected it as Sunday Times best first novel for that year. I read it as part of the Read Indies month hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

John Grant is a very young officer who has just been dispatched to the front in Italy, during the Second World War. He has been ordered to lead a recce to a farmhouse to see if German troops are still there, or if they’ve withdrawn. The first part of this novel tracks him moving through the moonlit countryside on this mission, his fear, his doubt. It will come as no surprise that things end badly. The second part of the novel is concerned with John’s life after the war has ended, and his decision to court and marry Jane. Linking these two parts is the sinister figure of Bright, embodiment of John’s shame and self-loathing; the dynamic of hunting; a sense of mysticism:

John found himself on his knees holding the wounded man’s hand. [...] All the tension and ache of his own impotence was now flooded away in a purge of pity. This he understood. This freed him, expanded him with a general affinity which went beyond the lines.
Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody’s face all the time.

With incredible skill, Charteris evokes the weirdness of life on the front lines and the almost unbearable tension of Grant’s nocturnal foray into the unknown. His vivid similes are unexpected, his immersing of us in John’s thoughts and feelings so complete that everything is strange, and everything is psychological. He filters everything so completely his own preoccupations, nobody else has an existence beyond their relation to himself. The white Italian farmhouse becomes emblematic of his struggle to overcome the parts of his character he despises; the Matlock family home where he tries to seduce Jane is a sort of trap. In both situations, John is tested by John and found wanting, by John.

(British infantry moving cautiously through the ruined streets of Impruneta, Italy, 3 August 1944. By Johnson (Sgt), No 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit, photograph NA 17570. Imperial War Museum, found here)

Woven into the wartime scenes are flashbacks to John’s (even) younger days, in which he became inculcated with the standards of masculinity he fails to live up to. Most of them are concerned with his experiences at Eton and his officer training, but the earliest is a disturbing childhood memory. John has crept out of bed to sit on the stairs, listening to the grown-ups at dinner. And then:

John heard a creak above him. […] He looked round and up. A man stood at the top of the stairs. The sudden sight of him was the cold end and blank of thought. The sick wait for this to be different – the sick reluctance to have anything to do with his eyes.
The man had blue sandshoes on, a black overcoat with a collar up and a torch, and the bristles on his peel-coloured face looked like some sort of patchy disease. No sound came from him. He seemed to be looking straight at John; then at his hand and sucked a finger. […]
The man came down ten steps as though he had slid down a wire on a velvet loop […]

Everything is there: the very slightly discombobulating prose, John alone and shut out, the feeling of horror and powerlessness, the malignant figure who I think later becomes elided with Bright in John’s mind.

The destructiveness of John’s self-disgust and solipsism is reflected in love as well as war. John has two romances, if they can be called that. The first is with Susan, who is fourteen and comes to his bed one night. It’s not clear how old exactly John is, charitably let us say he is eighteen, but he feels guilty about this and carries on a secret correspondence with her, deceiving himself that they should marry when in fact it is clear that they have nothing in common. Fortunately, Susan turns out to have more sense than him. His love for Jane is built on an even weaker foundation: he sees her dancing at a party, having never met her, and decides to marry her. Marriage will prove that he is a man and save him from ‘the web of himself’. Jane is preoccupied with her dying father and uncertain in her response to John. His anguish confuses her. Never have I hoped so ardently that a character would refuse another – for both their sakes.

 

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker

She knew that she was behaving horribly, she knew she was indeed horrible, a despicable compound of arrogance, covetousness and self-centred rage. She was like one of those seething, stinking mud spouts which boil up in Iceland and lob burning rocks at passers-by. She felt guilt for blighting Vera’s pleasure and excitement; she felt shame. Her shame and guilt only made her angrier.

I’ve long wanted to read this portrayal of a gothic Scottish childhood, and the dark days before Christmas was as good a moment as any to settle down with it. Elspeth Barker published it, her only novel, in 1991. In it, she reworks elements of her own life (she was born during the Second World War, hand-reared a jackdaw, and grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a boys’ boarding school) for her story of Janet; indeed, Janet may not be too different to her (unorthodox, a devout animal-lover and an enthusiast for poetry and the Classics). While occasionally this gives a flavour of the writer’s own resentments being channelled unmediated through Janet, this novel’s magic lies in the beauty of its prose, its effortless conjuration of atmosphere and its depiction of someone who cannot and will not fit in.

The first thing we learn about Janet is that she is already dead, aged only sixteen; pushed down the staircase in her family’s castle home ‘oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress’, her body dappled by the colours of the stained-glass window above her. Her family is ambivalent about her death; Janet was too different to them, she ‘had blighted their lives’. ‘[T]he speywives, the fishwives, the midwives, the ill-wishers’ blame Janet for her own murder, and her jackdaw is her only mourner. This beginning flavours everything that follows with poignancy.

After establishing Janet’s unhappy demise, the narrative skips back to her birth and her early life in her grandparents’ Glaswegian manse; her father’s return at the end of World War II and the family’s removal to the castle of Auchnasaugh, where Janet’s parents set up their school. Janet, now the eldest of five siblings, at first doesn’t understand and later refuses to understand conventional behaviour. She withdraws into literature and the ‘stern and wild’ landscape around her which strikes a chord with her nature, in contrast to the narrow-minded stupidity she sees in people.

But then it was summer and a rare, exquisite summer. [...] Janet forgot her earthly doom and rose before daylight to ride bareback up the grassy tracks through the woods to the moors. She watched the sun rise over the far hills, the mist float in steamy filaments off the glen and the silent golden day bring glory to the sombre pines. She was the first person in the world; only she disturbed the dew.

Any possible human allies she has are ineffective and easily disposed of, by fate or her parents – her grandparents are elderly, her beloved grandmother Ningning dies, alcoholic Cousin Lila is too self-absorbed and frail to offer much in the way of companionship. So Janet finds some comfort with birds and animals, ‘whom she loved without qualification’ and of whom there are many: a parrot, the jackdaw, ponies, the dogs and cats who roam the castle and ‘lick the butter’ to the disgust of a hearty visiting family.

The novel’s title comes from its epigraph, by Sir Walter Scott:

O Caledonia, stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Friends and family reveal to Janet her shortcomings as a social being. She acts according to what her own common sense or desires dictate: these are not society’s codes. It becomes hard to know what to do in any given situation. Once, when they’re driving to the dentist’s, Janet’s little sister Lulu opens the car door and falls out, and Janet says nothing. Instead, she waits, knowing that she will somehow be blamed as soon as the adults notice.

What Caledonia, the ‘meet nurse’, reveals to Janet is the beauty and the brutality of existence, the ever-presence of death. The universal truths that lie beneath the thin film of modern society. Janet’s rural castle life is far from glamorous (although it is Romantic). Weasels kill rabbits; lobsters are boiled alive; a headless deer hangs by the sawmill. In Arcadia ego, as Janet would appreciate.

And as we already know, the ‘poetic child’ will never have to test the nurse’s lessons against an independent existence in the world. She will never grow up.

The child’s-eye view is faultlessly depicted: elaborate ways to dispose of nasty lunches, the wince of tight pigtails, the problem of siblings (‘A nasty rat has buried your baby. She’s gone now,’ the infant Janet announces to her mother, after she’s filled her baby sister’s pram with dead leaves), the bizarre terrors (such as Janet’s conviction that a witch lives in a ruin near her school). In her instinct for the grotesque and the absurd, and her sympathy for children, Barker has a spiritual sister in Barbara Comyns.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker by Jane Bown, 1991; found here)

Barker offsets her novel’s rich gothic tones with a dark humour; there is ridiculousness even in horrible moments. When Rab the dog slaughters the escaped hens, he has to wear a dead chicken around his neck (a blackly comic ‘primitive aversion therapy’). Everything is vividly, even unnervingly evoked: each word perfectly chosen, the prose full of wonderful rhythms. Barker weaves a dark, glittering spell that draws you into Janet’s world, her restless imagination and her savage refusal to compromise herself. I kept hoping that magically she would not die after all...

What fun she would have as a ghost. She could hardly wait.

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.

 

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)

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...

 

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.

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)