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.

 

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.

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600–1900, by Katie Hickman

Many of us have an idea of the memsahib, the white, middle-class British wife who lived in India during the years of the Raj, and it’s not a very complimentary one. A life of cocktail parties, bullying the servants and boredom springs to mind. It’s this easy stereotype that Katie Hickman seeks to challenge in this fascinating survey of British women who made a home, temporarily or permanently, in India before the twentieth century. If you’re remotely interested in this subject, I really can’t recommend this book enough – Hickman has a novelist’s eye for character and story, as well as a historian’s talent for analysis and research, and it’s a lively as well as informative read.

The recorded history of British women in India begins in 1617, with a Mrs Towerson, wife of an East India Company captain, voyaging to India with two female companions, Mrs Hudson and Frances Webb. Even before they reached Gujarat there was scandal, for Frances Webb secretly married a fellow-traveller, Richard Steele, and became pregnant by him. Horrors! When they arrived in the English community at Surat, it was to an unappetising all-male drinking and gaming club where they were not made welcome. The very act of embarking on a perilous eight-month journey to a land they could hardly have imagined in their wildest dreams surely marks out these women as unusually intrepid. Mrs Hudson, at least, proved also to be an astute businesswoman and left two years later with a rich cargo to sell on in Europe.

(Jan Van Ryne, A Perspective View of Fort William in the Kingdom of Bengal, belonging to the East India Company of England, 1754; found here)

In the eighteenth century, British women began travelling to India in larger numbers and recorded their experiences in diaries and letters. However, an adventurous spirit was still required of them. Eliza Fay, wife of an Irish advocate, arrived in Calicut just as a war was breaking out. Not only were she and her husband kept captive for a month in very unpleasant and frightening circumstances, but another Englishwoman nicked her teapot and tea caddy. Once freed, Mrs Fay went on to enjoy a fine life in Calcutta and write sharp-eyed letters home: little escaped her notice. (My liking for her, however, took a blow when I later read that she had a slave, Kitty Johnson, whom she abandoned on the island of St Helena.) Expatriate society was somewhat less rigid about morality than the mother country. Elizabeth Marsh was captured on a merchant ship sailing from Gibraltar to be given as a present to the Sultan of Morocco; for protection she pretended to be married to another prisoner, James Crisp. Some twenty years later she left Crisp, now in fact her husband, to travel around southern India with an unmarried man who was almost certainly her lover.

By the nineteenth century, enormous fortunes were being made in India (think of Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair). On the whole, British and Indian women did not mix and Hickman suggests that this was due to restrictive social codes on both sides, as well as of course a lack of cultural curiosity among the British and their habit of recreating Surrey in India rather than adapting to local lifestyles. Still, there were exceptions, Fanny Parkes being perhaps the most notable and the most ready to ‘see life from the Indian perspective’. She travelled all around India, made Indian friends, learnt Indian languages, learnt to play the sitar and ate opium as well as Indian food:

How much there is to delight the eye in this bright and beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab, one might be happy for ever... Oh the pleasure of vagabondizing through India!

(She also most entertainingly drove the grand and not-vagabondizing Eden sisters round the bend by popping up wherever they went on their own grand tour.)

The aristocratic Henrietta Clive was quite taken aback by the vulgarity of many of the British in India. Abjuring most of them, she learnt Persian and Hindi and interested herself in botany. She took her daughters to festivals and to visit temples and later on a seven-month tour of India, which required fourteen elephants to carry their tents and a hundred bullocks pulling carts for all their luggage (including a harp). The lands through which they travelled had just been taken by the East India Company after the Second Mysore War. Henrietta Clive marvelled unquestioningly at the plunder from Tipu Sultan’s palace: ‘What a wonderful people we are really...’

(Joshua Reynolds, Lady Henrietta Herbert [later Clive], ca. 1777; found here)

Gradually, the British became less and less open to India, and then we reach the uprising of 1857 and that’s it for tolerance. This section is very hard to read and what happened must have traumatised both the British, who could never forget the sheer horror of incidents like the massacre at Cawnpore and thus never feel secure again, and of course the Indians, who endured a terrible collective retribution.

Yet British women continued to go out to India and if they were not sympathetic to Indian culture they were undoubtedly industrious housekeepers, many of them in isolated outposts with husbands who proved less than satisfactory. Flora Annie Steel, author of the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, was a fine example of this. Housekeeping did not satisfy her, however. Owner of squirrels and arranger of reading parties, she soon turned her attentions to education and was appointed Inspectress of Schools in the Punjab.

(Cropped photograph of Flora Annie Steel, 1904; found here)

This fascinating social history has only one drawback: inevitably you want to know more about the individual women whom Hickman discusses than she has place for, and about the land they could not or would not understand. And of course, it would be nice to have more of a perspective on them from the Indians alongside whom they lived, if there were any such record. Nevertheless, it is a lively starting point and I heartily recommend it, as does Nala the cat, who tried to eat it.

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)

A Day to Remember to Forget, by Rosalind Brackenbury

It’s the late 1960s and Phil and Lucy have just decided to get married; they are still students but have fallen in love with an old farmhouse they intend to buy even if it’s not entirely clear how they’ll pay for it (‘when the loot runs out, I’ll sell books and vegetables,’ says Phil airily). They are on their way to Phil’s childhood home in suburbia, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday. This novel centres on that birthday and on the relationships between the members of Phil’s family, the Ridgelys. It explores the tensions between generations, the frustrations of love and the power of domesticity. By soaking the reader in the thoughts of Lucy, Phil, Phil’s mother Felicity, and Mrs Fletcher, the Ridgelys’ elderly neighbour, Rosalind Brackenbury weaves a striking and acute novel that has stayed with me. Unlike a lot of ‘stream-of-consciousness-type’ novels, it has a physicality, an earthiness to it. The characters are so deeply and solidly imagined that it’s impossible not to believe in them and I catch myself wondering what happened to them all, where is Lucy now aged almost seventy?

(Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Felicity Ridgely is the very definition of house-proud. Her home is spotlessly clean, she works ceaselessly to ensure that her kitchen is ordered and her linen ironed. Why this is so important, she no longer knows. She spends most of her birthday cooking, preparing and clearing up meals for the rest of the family: breakfast, a roast lunch, afternoon tea, supper. Her husband, George, and her sons try to lure her away, to have a drink, to rest, but she refuses. She takes no pleasure in all this housework – in fact, she deeply resents it and plays the martyr constantly. But if it were to be taken away from her, her life would be empty. She has nothing else.

She and George are conventional in their attitudes – pathologically so, in Phil’s eyes. They mistrust Mrs Fletcher, who lives next door in a dark, decaying house: her husband was a conscientious objector and died unhappily. They cannot express their love for their sons. Felicity feels her blunders painfully, but cannot pull herself out of the pattern that elicits them. But their worst crime, according to Phil, is their dishonesty. They lie about the past and Phil’s childhood.

Andrew, Phil’s elder brother, is kinder to them:

‘I see they had to invent it all,’ Andrew said, ‘because they’re so bloody miserable now. Because they can’t stand not having had a happy past to gloat over, so they invent one, they allow themselves to see it all different because otherwise life would be intolerable. [...] So don’t take it away from them. Because it’s cruel, and unnecessary. [...] Shit, they didn’t even have a chance to find out who they were and where they lived before they were slap-bang in the middle of a bloody war, shooting hell out of a bunch of other kids on the other side of Europe. They didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t say, me first, and this is what I want, and I want to live in a big house in the country and nobody bugging me please.’

Andrew has followed the path laid out by his parents – university, job, marriage, child – but he has adapted it to suit himself and sublimated his resentment. Phil, however, wants none of it, rejects ‘all the rubbish’ of this sort of life, ‘nothing natural or living or real’. Rejection is the only way he believes he can survive.

Phil said, ‘But how can one have a choice, really? Everything’s there before you’re born. All the things other generations have done, in their turn, I suppose, without a choice. And they go on after one’s dead. You can’t change anything. You can only decide not to accept it. You just have to go and do your own thing, as they say, and let the rest get stuffed, if they want to. It’s too late. One doesn’t have time.’
‘Just one life,’ Mrs Fletcher said, not answering him, her eyes blurred now with fatigue. ‘Just a few years. You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

Yet of course it’s a qualified rejection, because the life he envisages is, like Andrew’s, ultimately only a different version of the same thing. It’s property ownership, marriage and children, just with long hair and cigarettes and swearing. When he and Lucy visit Mrs Fletcher for a glass of sherry, they describe their dreams with great enthusiasm:

‘But a house,’ Lucy plunged in, her thin hands in the air, gesturing around a shape. ‘A house can mean more than just walls, more than just a place. You know? One makes something, expresses something. And sometimes, one just finds the perfect thing, the perfect place, something that’s been sort of waiting for one.’
‘And if one falls in love,’ said Mrs Fletcher, ‘one must act.’
‘Yes! That’s just what happened! It was as if it had been left there for us, just at the right moment. That’s why we have to have it, at whatever risk. Because I do think, don’t you...’ her hands moved again, swiftly, ‘that if one is offered something great one is offered a risk too; and if you can accept the risk, you get the greatness. Oh, dear, I am explaining it badly. But no, this is what happens, if you fall in love with a person, isn’t it? You risk your whole self, you give yourself away – oh, completely – and it’s the most awful risk, but if the person accepts you, then you have the greatness too, oh, and everything.’

Mrs Fletcher, who once also defied convention for the love of a man named Phil, is gently sceptical. And underneath, Lucy is a little sceptical too. Does she really want to marry Phil? (She’s only nineteen.) She imagines the perfect life, but will the house provide that, or will it prove a trap like the one that has caught Felicity? Will her marriage be a union of equals, or will she end up afraid of Phil? At the end of the novel she and Phil drive out at dusk to see the house, and it is surrounded by little fires as the farmers burn the stubble: a potent and ambiguous image.

Lucy and Phil’s dream is essentially static. They will achieve the perfect house, the perfect state. What will happen after they are perfectly married and living in the perfect house? They don’t seem to know, other than that it will be wonderful. Yet, Brackenbury’s novel warns, do not expect romantic love to endure, do not stake all your happiness on it. Do not assume that loving your children will be enough, because you will easily warp and damage that love. ‘You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

The edition of A Day to Remember to Forget which I read is a new one published by Michael Walmer (and sent to me to review months ago – I am really sorry Mike to have taken so long). It has an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble, which places it in its context (1971) and discusses its novelty and even shockingness. But it’s worth reading not just as a historical document of a particular socio-cultural shift in British society, between the Boomers and their parents, but because it is a really good novel and a painfully honest description of the limits of family love. In the end, we are all alone.

(Carel Weight, The Silence, 1965; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

So, this is the novel which you, dear readers, voted that I should read...

I had seen some good reviews of Hot Milk, which is the second of Deborah Levy’s novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I was very pleased when I found a copy in the English-language section of my local library. It did not disappoint.

The book is narrated by twenty-five-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis, former PhD candidate in anthropology, current waitress and coffee-maker in a West London café, who has accompanied her mother Rose to Almería in a last-ditch attempt to find a cure for Rose’s mysterious partial paralysis. Nestled between the barren hills and the poisoned sea is the clinic of Mr Gómez, built of veined white marble and shaped like a breast. As Rose submits to Gómez’s unorthodox treatments, Sofia ministers to her, swims in the sea and embarks on sexual relationships with Juan in the beach injury hut and Ingrid, the German seamstress.

Very subtly, the novel explores femininity. Sofia (‘wisdom’) perceives her world in terms of symbols, symbols that for the most part she chooses not to pin down with a specific, single interpretation but leave open, to accumulate layers of meaning. (And perhaps she is afraid of misreading them, as she misreads the word Ingrid embroiders on her silk top.) An example is the image of Medusa, enmeshed in ideas about female bodies and what they ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to do. Stung by ‘medusa’ jellyfish, Sofia identifies herself several times as a monster, despising her body as failing to match contemporary ideals of slenderness. Ingrid also self-identifies as a monster, perhaps because of what she did to her sister, perhaps because of her desire for Sofia. Sofia, however, usually perceives Ingrid as a hero figure, like Perseus rather than Medusa: Ingrid wears silver sandals laced up her calves, she has a bow and arrow to shoot lizards and is interested in decapitation. This is made very explicit near the end of the novel, when she rides a horse at Sofia, ‘in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse’. Rose is also associated with monstrousness, craving amputation like the beheaded Medusa, like the jellyfish ‘in limbo, like something cut loose’. Sofia experiences that desire of her mother’s to cut off her feet as being a desire to cut herself off from Sofia (‘Her legs are my legs. Her pain is my pain’).

In their different ways, Rose and Sofia are trying to reject what one might call the ideals of womanhood. Sofia destroys some images of females; she crushes a doll (already broken) under the wheel of her car and later hurls a vase to the floor. The vase is a ‘fake’, a copy of an Ancient Greek black figure vase, showing seven slave women fetching water. Its destruction inspires Sofia to visit her father in Greece, meeting him for the first time in fourteen years. It may also be part of her attempt to reject her current rôle as handmaiden to her mother. She does, however, purchase an air-freshener from the market in the shape of a woman with ‘massive belly and heavy breasts’, a form closer to her image of herself.

Rose, meanwhile, is withdrawing from the traditional definition of motherhood. Conventional mothers include Alexandra, the very young second wife of Sofia’s father, who devotes her time to breastfeeding her new baby in an atmosphere of stifling solicitousness, and – bathetically – Jodo the cat, who gives birth to kittens in the breast-shaped clinic. Jodo is also described suckling her kittens. Rose does not want to be nurturing and nourishing in this way any longer. Instead, she reverses things. She demands that her daughter tend to her, and bring her endless glasses of water (in place of milk?), water that is never the right water. The novel is set against the Greek government-debt crisis, and Greece seems to figure as a sort of cultural parental figure. What debts do Sofia, her father and Rose owe each other? Can and should they be repaid?

Sofia is content with this but also not content. She wants a bigger life, but her passivity and diffidence paralyse her. At the novel’s opening the screen of her laptop splinters, which she takes as a metaphor for herself: ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.’ From breakage may come rebirth: Sofia crushes the doll and smashes the vase, she visits her father, she starts laying plans to escape to the US and continue her PhD. The end of the novel, however, makes it seem unlikely  that she will succeed.

(Deborah Levy, 2013, photographed for the Observer)

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

I picked this up on a whim in the library last week. I’ve seen the film, a little while ago, and I’ve read a few reviews of it, so it didn’t hold any secrets plotwise. However, I was curious to see how it worked as a novel and what the writing was like – and whether it was actually all that good. I had quite low expectations, because I felt that the film had started well but then got schlocky. (I assume that I am the last person on Earth to read this novel so as usual there will be lots of spoilers in what I write so if I’m wrong and you are the last person on Earth to read this novel and you haven’t read it yet, stop here.)

Having low expectations and time to read it carefully instead of racing through to find out what happened really benefitted my experience with this book. It was miles better than I had anticipated, and the main characters were drawn with some subtlety. I still think the murder of Desi is a bit too much and Amy becomes too great a monster, but it worked better in the book and the ramifications of it were also well handled. Book-Amy was a more rounded and believable character than Film-Amy (in the novel, there is much more from her viewpoint).

It struck me that one at least of the core themes of the book is authenticity and fakery and the grey area in between. Early on in the investigation, Nick muses nihilistically:

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative [...] We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. [...] and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is cleaner, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point [...] If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul-mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

So saturated are we with these second-hand experiences, Nick argues, that we are lost. If we consciously model our behaviour on how a character from a film behaves, we have no authenticity. But if we try to avoid doing that, we confuse others (who do expect us to react like a character from a film) and make ourselves so self-conscious that we can’t behave ‘authentically’ anyway. This is what happens to Nick. He is so hyper-aware of all his second-hand experiences that he cannot behave as people expect him to behave; instead he is awkward and uncomfortable, with the result that everyone immediately assumes he must be guilty of murdering his wife. (I was reminded here of the way that many people treated Kate McCann, the mother of the little girl who vanished from her hotel room. Mrs McCann was considered to be insufficiently grief-stricken in public.)

(From the film: Ben Affleck as Nick, looking shifty; Rosamund Pike as Amy)

In order to be perceived as innocent, Nick has to fake genuineness. Meanwhile, as the reader progresses, his story and Amy’s diary diverge increasingly in their portraits of their marriage. Amy’s diary, as is suddenly revealed, is also fake and the mystery that everyone is trying to solve is fake too, with fake clues. Yet there is a real mystery too.

In her diary, Amy writes about how she feels compelled to play rôles – how we all do – although most of us never take is as far as Amy does. For the first few years of their relationship, Amy played a rôle and so, to some extent, did Nick. Both of them claim that they brought out the best in each other, but neither was being entirely ‘themselves’. As time passes, they come to know each other ‘better’, they see each other’s faults and the marriage starts to go wrong. Now they bring out the worst in each other. Yet are these selves really so much more authentic than the ‘better selves’ of the early relationship? Are they just different traits picked from the Automat at different times?

And at the end, Amy and Nick’s marriage is paradoxically a yet deeper sham but also, finally, more ‘authentic’, with less rôle playing. The couple know each other too well for that now. Living with a psycho-killer might not be everyone’s idea of a happy ending, but Nick understands that the ‘real’ Amy is more complex, surprising and interesting than the woman he thought he had married; he will never feel that this experience is second-hand, he will have always to be alert if he is to survive. This seems to suit him. Sometimes.

It is almost a feminist tale. Amy has had to sacrifice a lot for Nick: she’s left her home and family, she has been turned into a housewife (there’s nothing wrong with being a housewife but there is something wrong with being one against your will), she has given Nick all her money to set up a bar of dubious profitability. In return, he has been unsympathetic, neglectful and unfaithful. In both of their accounts, however self-justifying, that much is clear. Who wouldn’t, in such circumstances, spend a year plotting their fake murder and framing their spouse? Heh. But finally, Amy wins Nick’s respect. He has to be careful of her. He might be physically stronger than her, but she is infinitely cleverer and prepared to go to extremes he cannot. There is still no true equality in their relationship, because Amy has complete control over the situation and Nick has to do what she wants. I did not feel as sorry for Nick as I might have been expected to feel, as I did watching the film.

I wonder what will have happened to them in twenty years’ time? That’s a sequel I’d be curious to read.

I know that all of you reading this have already read Gone Girl (because I’m the last person etc. etc.). What were your impressions?

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A little while ago I started reading Juliet Barker’s The Brontës; in fact I even decided to write about it on here as I read it. Unfortunately, like so many Parry projects, it fell by the wayside. There were two causes for this failure: one was that the Barker book was just too big and heavy to bring on the bus with me, which meant that I had ‘bus reading’ and the Barker, and I can’t really cope with reading more than one book at once so in the end the bus reading conquered the Barker. And then Brexit happened and I was too absorbed in politics – and then suddenly months had passed and I’d lost the momentum. But of course, I felt guilty about it.

However, bus reading or no bus reading I am inspired to pick it up again and this is entirely due to Samantha Ellis’s Take Courage, which is a sort-of biography of Anne Brontë. According to Ellis, Anne is the neglected, forgotten Brontë, usually considered – when considered at all – as mouselike and pious – boring, really. (And I would certainly agree that when people think about the Brontës, they think first and foremost of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) Ellis herself had always been an Emily devotee, though she also admired Charlotte’s ‘toughness and spirit’. However, on a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth, Ellis reads Anne’s last letter:

‘I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.

Ellis is transfixed; she connects to Anne emotionally, and begins to suspect that what she had believed about Anne was untrue. So begins her journey to find a more interesting Anne, someone who turns out to be feminist, radical and courageous – not unlike Ellis herself, in fact. Reading Anne’s novels, she realises that they were not only undervalued when they were first published, they are still undervalued now.

Ellis’s first problem is that so little of what Anne wrote remains: two novels, some poems (though many have disappeared), five letters, four diary papers, two of which were co-written with Emily (they had a habit of writing a diary paper every four years, giving an update of their lives; they wrote them together if they could or separately if they were apart) and some marginalia in a few books. Otherwise she has to rely on what others wrote about Anne, and those of Anne’s possessions that still survive. Her solution is clever: she devotes each chapter of her book to one of the people closest to Anne – including the heroines of her two novels – ending with Anne herself. Each person ‘represents’ an aspect of Anne herself – so Maria, her mother, contains her origin story, her attitude towards motherhood and marriage; Tabby, the elderly servant, contains her love of the moors and nature. This approach reminded me of Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, which creates a frame around the central character by which we learn to know him. I thought this worked really well.

(Sketch of Anne by Charlotte Brontë, ca 1834; found here)

Ellis also eschews any attempt at objectivity or impartiality. This book is driven by her enthusiasm and liking for Anne, which gives it an enormous amount of energy and personality. She speculates fearlessly and, one can’t help feeling, perceptively, on how Anne might have felt or reacted to various situations (‘Anne must have...’ pops up frequently). She tells us about her own life as she researches Anne up in Haworth, visits the places associated with her life, contemplates her own life and new relationship, and she tells us too about her reactions to the material she reads about Anne’s life:

her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.

In doing this, Ellis takes some risks. One is that she mines Anne’s creative writing, especially her poetry, for Anne’s own opinions. Are her poems on her religious doubts, for instance, really expressions of her own struggles with faith? Might they not be partly or even entirely manipulated by Anne’s artistic skills to create certain effects? To give a doubting reader hope, for instance, rather than articulate her own fears? Or a mixture of both? She extends this to the writings of others: she implicitly suggests that the sisters Rose and Jessy Yorke in Shirley, for instance, are Charlotte and Anne – or how Charlotte perceived their relationship – based on no evidence I could see. I felt that Ellis might be right, but she might not be; I think the role of the imagination in shaping and transmuting biographical facts should never be underestimated and this made me uncomfortable sometimes.

Another risk is that Ellis’s partisanship for Anne, while cheering and necessary, colours her judgement and, for one thing, leads her to resent Charlotte. As I wrote above, I haven’t yet finished the Barker biography so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this, and from what I have read Charlotte does seem to have been quite a difficult person. However, Ellis does seem to put the worst interpretation on everything Charlotte does. For instance, Ellis believes that Charlotte suppressed Anne’s writing, but perhaps she was trying to protect her reputation (or doing a bit of both?); and it is just possible that in deciding to hold Anne’s funeral without her father, she was right and expecting Patrick to come and bury yet another child would have been too painful to him. It seems to be, in the world of the Brontës, that if you champion one you have to decry the others and that you can only be either/or about them. Ellis first goes to Haworth, after all, to promote her previous book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre.

Yet taking risks like these creates a lively and affectionate read, through which I zipped in marked contrast to my attempts on Barker’s monumental, scrupulous, scholarly work, and the nice thing about the literary world is that we can enjoy both books and their different strengths. For Ellis’s analysis of Anne’s literary works, especially her novels, is brilliant and rightly reveals their daring, their radicalness and their ‘realness’. In Agnes Grey Anne lifted the lid on life as a governess, showing the ugly reality in which even ‘proper gentry’ behaved badly (this piece of news seems to have shocked the gentry). She also crafted a romance between a man and a woman which was both realistic and based on mutual respect (no glowering Byronic heroes here). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not only went beyond the ‘marriage plot’ (in which a novel is concerned only with the story leading up to the wedding), it looked unflinchingly and scandalously on alcoholism and a husband’s abuse of his marital rights – and it gives us a feminist heroine who fights for her and her son’s future.

(The dining-room at Haworth Parsonage with – I think – Anne’s writing desk on the table; photograph found here)

AND did you know? because I did not – unless you are reading an edition of Tenant which is based on Stevie Davies’ 1996 edition – or a first or second edition (lucky you) – then you are almost certainly reading a butchered text. !!! Most modern editions are based on a rackety edition published in 1854, years after Anne’s death. The publisher, Thomas Hodgson, wanted to issue the book cheaply, so hacked bits out to make the book fit one volume. This version has become the one most frequently reprinted ever since. Ellis lays a ‘mutilated’ edition beside the Davies edition and is shocked at the difference. Some removals seem to have been purely to cut the page count; others to subtly reduce the radicalness of the original. When I read this I jumped right out of bed and ran to my bookcase to check my own copy: yes, I do have the framing story, but other parts, including Anne’s preface, have been removed. Horrors! I’ll have to buy another book! And I’ll have to buy Agnes Grey, because I’ve never read it. Oh dear. What a painful duty.

In short: if you don’t know much about the Brontës, this strikes me as a great place to start. If you already do know a lot about the Brontës, you will enjoy revisting them in the company of a clever and opinionated friend.

Disclaimer: Samantha Ellis generously donated this book as part of a bundle of her work to be auctioned in the Authors for Grenfell fundraiser; and when I won it she inscribed all the books for me. Of course I only bid on her bundle because I like her work anyway, but it’s always nice to know that an author is a kind person ...

shiny new books: Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s review & Q&A

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve written a review for Shiny New Books, and it’s now up!

The book I wrote about is Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba and it really is splendid. Sebba has done an enormous amount of research to put together a very detailed, year-by-year picture of life in Paris for women, and she’s written it in a way that is completely engrossing. If you are even slightly interested in the history of the Second World War or in how people navigate complex moral choices under a poisonous authoritarian régime, this is a fascinating book to read.

I was also able to do a Q&A with the author about the background to Les Parisiennes, which you can find here. Anne Sebba worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters before turning her hand to non-fiction and biographies, and has a website here if you are interested. I could have asked her about a billion more questions but I didn’t want to be too nosy...