a gallimaufry

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.

 

Death and Mary Dazill, by Mary Fitt

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

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

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Boulters were living at Chetwynde Lodge, a grand house near Chode: Ralph had recently retired from service in Burma and withdrawn his teenaged daughters from boarding school to live with him.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

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

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

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

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

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

The Agency for Scandal, by Laura Wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

I read a lot of books which I never write about here. For one thing, it takes me aaages to write a post, I’d never keep up with my reading. For another, even if I enjoy a book, I don’t necessarily have anything to say about it – other than, ‘I think it’s really good’.

In the last few weeks I’ve read two novels which fall into this category. I don’t have anything to say about them, other than, ‘I think they’re really good’. And both have been widely reviewed, so you can easily find out more about them elsewhere. Why bother to even write this, then? Well, perhaps you’ve walked past one – or both – of them in a library or bookshop and almost picked them up – and after reading this post, you might decide next time to actually pick them up and have a look.

The first one is Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi was born in Ghana and brought up in the US, and this is her first novel – or short-story collection, since each chapter concerns a different member of the same family and builds on what has come before but is also entirely self-contained. The novel opens in the late eighteenth century with Effia, born during a fire in Fanteland (in present-day Ghana). Effia’s mother, Baaba, seems to hate her and ruins her chances of marriage to the young chief Abeeku. Instead, Effia marries James Collins, a white Englishman, and is taken to the Cape Coast Castle. In the dungeons of the Castle languish slaves, awaiting transport to the plantations in the most horrific conditions. One of these slaves, we discover in the next chapter, ‘Esi’, is a young woman who is Effia’s half-sister.

In alternating chapters we follow each generations of these two branches of the family. One, Effia’s, remains in west Africa; Esi’s endures slavery and finally freedom in the United States. On the one side, Quey becomes a slave trader and his son flees that life; on the other, H works the mines in Pratt City and Willie longs for a career as a singer. Through their stories of hardship, hope and grief, the history of the slave trade and its consequences right up to the present day are traced. Much of it is very sad but also fascinating, as each character struggles to carve a life and a destiny from what they have inherited. They are fiction, but they stand in for real people and this makes their suffering more appalling.

The other book is probably the most stressful novel I have ever read: The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm (the German title is Der Reisende). It’s Kristallnacht and Otto Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, belatedly realises he needs to flee Germany. Forced to escape from his apartment as Nazi storm-troopers bang on the door, he makes for the railway station. Can he escape?

The novel is amazingly tense. We are kept close to Silbermann, we feel his emotions and follow his trains of thought as if they are ours. Every encounter could lead to Silbermann’s arrest. ‘Don’t trust him!’ you are muttering as he engages someone in conversation. ‘Keep hold of your suitcase!’ Apart from keeping you on the edge of your seat, the great strength of this novel is that it shows how everyone, including Silbermann and we readers, becomes implicated in the horrors of Nazism. Silbermann does not ‘look like a Jew’. He resents how his non-Jewish friend Becker is embarrassed – afraid even – to be seen with him, and we resent this too. ‘Help him!’ But then, when Silbermann meets more ‘obviously’ Jewish people, he is anxious and we are anxious too – and then, Silbermann tries to distance himself just as Becker tries to distance himself, and we accept that too because we fear for him. And everything is all the more stressful because we ‘know’ what will happen to most of the Jewish characters, and even though they are fictional, they represent real people who really died. Just as in Homegoing. And the tension of The Passenger is maintained right up until the very end.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 round-up – and competition!

Thank you to everyone who has written a post and sent me the link to it! There are some wonderful reviews out there for any readers or potential readers of Sylvia Townsend Warner to look at – and I recommend you do...

Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle wrote about The Corner That Held Them:

The Corner That Held Them is a striking evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer’s pilgrims, it’s not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end. Though it’s set within and around a community of women religious, the imaginary English convent of Oby, it never becomes otherworldly and distant from the everyday; the world and its concerns are always present in the microcosm of this subset of flawed humanity.

So did Harriet Devine:

What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today.

Meanwhile, Ali at HeavenAli has written about English Climate: Wartime Stories:

It feels as if these are the very people Sylvia Townsend Warner saw around her, perhaps interacted with, took part in, or listened to, their conversations – there is such an authenticity to the exchanges between characters. [...] These stories are really excellent providing some rich texture to the times in which they were first written. Witty, lively with a slight seam of darkness running through them, these show Sylvia Townsend Warner to have been a consummate short story writer.

Simon at StuckInABook wrote about another collection of short stories, from the 1960s, A Spirit Rises:

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another. [...]
A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as [Swans on an Autumn River], but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

Hayley at Desperate Reader enjoyed The Flint Anchor:

The book is also surprisingly open about homosexuality in the fishing community of Loseby. It was still a criminalized when the book was published, and considered as an unspeakable sin by the Barnard family, but in the working part of the town love is love and they're not fussy about where it's found. It's a powerful contrast to the Barnard's who remain in Anchor house with their limited understanding of love and the petrifying value they place on respectability. […]
What I most admire about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and find in abundance here, is her clear eyed ability to pick something apart and lay it out for our inspection without judgement or emotion. We might feel sorry for the Barnard's, we might recognise something of ourselves in them, or we might just be fascinated by the spectacle - I found this book compelling for all of those reasons and more.

And David at David’s Book World wrote a double review – of Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart:

Mr Fortune’s Maggot is focused tightly on these two characters, and in that it makes broader points about faith and colonialism. The change in Fortune’s thinking is carefully drawn, and I found the ending deeply affecting.
There’s a heightened quality to The True Heart that I really appreciated – Sukey even takes her plight to Queen Victoria – as well as a vivid sense of place.

lethe also read The True Heart and reviewed it on GoodReads:

The story has a certain dreamlike quality, which is heightened by a few sudden time-lapses. It is also probably the most light-hearted and fairytale-like of all STW's novels. There is never really any doubt that Sukey will succeed in her quest. Whenever things start to look hopeless, there is always a kind stranger that will help her on her way, so that even being received by Queen Victoria, whom she intends to implore for assistance, does not seem quite such an outlandish idea.

lethe wrote about Lolly Willowes too – a re-read, which is always interesting, especially if you can compare it to your first encounter:

I still love Parts 1 and 2 as much as I did when I first read it back in 2002, but I'm still not happy about the turn of events in Part 3.

 

 

If you have written a review and haven’t sent me a link yet, please do! Even if it’s after the end of the week – I can still add it over the next fortnight or so.

Thank you to everyone who has joined in this week, reading and/or writing, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in any of the STW Reading Weeks. For me, this is the last one – though I’d be delighted if anyone else felt like continuing it. To mark this, I am holding an actual competition, the first one I’ve ever done.

COMPETITION!!!

I have an unread Penguin Modern Classics edition of each of The Flint Anchor and The True Heart. (The back story: I ordered them a few months ago from the Book Depository and they did not arrive; the Book Depository very kindly sent me replacement copies and then of course another week later the original books arrived, their packaging plastered in cross yellow stickers about infringing some article or other, and the Book Depository said I could keep them.)

If you would like to win a copy, please write your name in the comments + which book you’d prefer (you can write both and I’ll add your name to both draws) before midnight next Sunday (10th July). The competition is open to anyone in the EU or UK but not further afield for regrettable reasons of stinginess.

NEXT YEAR?

And finally! I think I’d like to host another reading week next year – but who should it be? Ideally it’s someone who should have a bit more attention, whose work is reasonably easy to acquire. I’m thinking about Storm Jameson or Alice Thomas Ellis at the moment, but if you’ve any ideas I’d love to hear them.

The True Heart, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Published in 1929, following Mr Fortune’s Maggot, The True Heart shares with Lolly Willowes the claim to be Sylvia Townsend Warner’s sunniest and most charming novel. Which doesn’t mean nobody is gored to death by a bull, but does mean that both tone and ending are predominantly happy and the whole book is infused with a spirit of optimism, of a love of nature and of the naturalness of love. This isn’t a spoiler: The True Heart is based on Apuleius’ story of Eros and Psyche, as STW explains in her foreword. Set in Victorian England, this isn’t a straightforward re-telling of the story; before STW wrote her foreword, only her mother (she claims) recognised the origins of the novel. Instead, STW transforms the tale into an entirely original work.

Sukey Bond is an innocent orphan sent off to work on a farm (New Easter) on the Essex marshes. Here she falls in love with Eric, a kind and gentle young man who is referred to by the other characters as an ‘idiot’ but whose fine qualities Sukey soon appreciates. Sukey believes him to be one of the farmer’s sons, but in fact his parents are the Rector of Southend and his wife. After a crisis, Mrs Seaborn takes Eric away back to Southend. But Sukey determines to find Eric and marry him. Her adventures take her even to London, where she intends to meet Queen Victoria.

(Edward Seago, Ludham Marshes From Upper Horning; found here)

This is a very beautiful book, full of lovely moments. Sukey and Eric’s love for each other develops outdoors, among the animals and trees, it is entirely natural and right – although the natural worlds is not sentimentalised. Here, the Essex marshes are both beautiful and menacing:

Sukey shuddered and looked reproachfully about her. The solitude of the landscape weighed upon her vision; she felt afraid of the marsh. Turning once more to Eric, she found he was gone. Her fears blazed up like a straw fire [...]
‘Oh, where are you?’ [...]
‘Here – in the orchard.’
The words came from beyond a straggling belt of thorn-trees. She ran towards them and scrambled through their defences.[...]
‘Now you can pick all the apples you want.’
The thorns had once hedged in a little orchard. Here were cankered apple-trees, plum-trees weighed down with fruit small and thickly-bloomed as grapes, cherries, sloes and bullaces, and in the midst of these, like a queen, a pear-tree with its straight round stem. The fruit lay scattered in the long grass – small, sour apples, insipid pears fallen unripe from the tree, sloes tasting of iron [...] Sukey spread out the contents of the darning basket and wondered at her fears: this was a peaceful place in which to play at keeping house.

This is like a little East Anglian Garden of Eden before the Fall; and indeed Sukey eats apples (or apple pies) at significant moments; they symbolise perhaps the getting of wisdom.

Something I really liked about this novel is the presentation of Eric. He has what we would call today a learning disability, but although Prudence and some other characters are dismissive of him, he is shown to us as a sensitive, gentle person who is fun, likeable and affectionate. He is not shown at all as lacking in any way. Also, Sukey is exactly the right person for him – or becomes exactly the right person.

As in many fairy tales in which the heroine must embark on a journey or undergo a series of trials, Sukey must develop to be ‘worthy’ of Eric. When she leaves New Easter to follow Eric, she is still little more than a child: indeed, she believes that she must be pregnant simply because she loves Eric. Her experiences draw out qualities she will need to love and support Eric: practical skills, such as the ability to run a household, as well as courage and tenacity. Throughout she retains her innocence and an inner happiness to which people respond by wanting to help her. They seem to feel this connection of naturalness and goodness in her, and feel it is natural and good to help her.

When she is working for the Mulleins, Sukey becomes fascinated by an engraving of a painting on their parlour wall:

The title was: The True Secret of England’s Greatness. The story was simple, but at the same time magnificent. Queen Victoria stood on the steps of her throne, as upright as a pillar-box. Round her, at a lower level and in a suitable shading of perspective, were grouped statesmen, courtiers, field-marshals, bishops, pages, and ladies-in-waiting. At the foot of the throne knelt a negro, a heathen obviously, but how different from those other heathen, for with her gloved hand she was extending to him the gift of a Bible. Sukey would stand in front of this picture and sigh. She wanted to marry Eric beyond all things, but she had also a natural wish to go to court.

 In the description of this image STW is – successfully, I think – listing the principal elements of the picture, conveying the distastefulness of it while also evoking Sukey’s naïve and admiring response. Already she is connecting the picture with her desire for Eric; in her mind she calls it The True Secret, an echo of the novel’s title which suggests its central importance to the book. Sukey imagines herself in the place of the African receiving the Bible; the powerless subject, the recipient of imperial benevolence. However, Sukey’s ‘stratagem’, as it transpires, is to receive the Bible but use it to win Eric’s freedom ‘by barter’. She will trade the gift, placing herself in the Queen’s position as donor: the position of power.

(Thomas Jones Barker, The Secret of England’s Greatness, 1862–63; National Portrait Gallery; found here; the addition of the word ‘true’ to the painting’s title in the novel suggests that STW wanted to highlight the connection of the ‘secret’ and the ‘heart’)

But in the world of the novel, the ‘true secret’ does not really hold. Gifts are given, especially to Sukey, but they are freely given out of kindness, not with an ulterior motive. And when Sukey does meet the Queen to receive her Bible, first she lies to her and then later she leaves the book ruffling its pages in the wind in a Herefordshire meadow. Relationships are not transactional or to establish domination, despite the painting. In The True Heart it is love that is the great power, that conquers all, and kindness that oils its wheels. This is perhaps not the most STWish sentiment, but it is a happy place on which to finish my reading of her work this week.

The Flint Anchor, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Flint Anchor was Sylvia Townsend Warner’s last novel, published in 1954. Like The Corner That Held Them, which preceded it by six years, it is concerned with passage of time and its workings on a small group of people. It is even more detached from its characters than Corner and, to the probable horror of modern writing instructors across the land, it eschews ‘showing’ what happens for relating it, like a history told by a rather wry old person. Partly because of this technique and the distance between reader and characters, there are no stabs to the heart, as one gets from reading After the Death of Don Juan or Summer will Show. It is comic and beautiful, but increasingly bleak.

Have I put you off yet? (And ’tis only the start of STW Reading Week.) To be sure, it’s not STW’s easiest book, and perhaps not the place to begin if you want to read her, but we are readers not wimps and The Flint Anchor is fascinating and, yes, very enjoyable too. The more I think about it, the more clever the structure seems, the way that scenes and images resonate with each other, the more impressive the whole book becomes.

(Robert Ladbrooke, Yarmouth Harbour, Moonlight, c.1813; Norwich Museums; found here)

The action takes place over the first half of the nineteenth century, during the adult life of John Barnard. Barnard inherits a thriving import-export business from his father and the family home, Anchor House, in Loseby on the Norfolk coast. The house is decorated with a flint anchor embedded in the brickwork between two first-floor windows. This anchor is clearly symbolic: it is the house itself, which physically holds the Barnard family and keeps its members on chains of various lengths; it is John Barnard, who controls the lives of his dependents as only a Victorian paterfamilias can; and going even farther in it is John Barnard’s stony heart, which holds down the ship of his family. This heart remains impervious to love for his wife or children with one, disastrous exception: his daughter Mary, upon whom he dotes to an unhealthy degree. Here he is, watching her in the garden:

Mary was walking up and down the gravel path with a book on her head. To the gate into the kitchen garden, overhung by the elder bush’s swag of purple berries and bronze leaves, and back to the arbour, and to the gate again, she passed and repassed. [...] She wore a white dress and her long white drawers reached her ankles. It was as though all the colours of the autumnal garden were in a conspiracy to enrich her whiteness with their scarlet and crimson and purple and gold, just as rich aunts might bestow their Indian shawls on a favourite niece, knowing that they themselves had only a little longer to wear them. Seeing her so white and dutiful, he naturally began to think of angels [...]

He calls her to him and demands that she repeat to him ‘the sixth of Dr Watts’s Divine Songs’.

Barnard’s love for his daughter is excessive but it has no physical expression. Instead, it lays him briefly open to a sensitivity to beauty he does not otherwise experience; a sense of beauty that is tinged with mortality and which then shades into an association with his Christian faith and ultimately to a need to control and direct her behaviour. It is no coincidence that Mary is in the garden; nor that the garden brings forth thoughts of ripeness, angels and death since just under Barnard’s consciousness is the symbol of the Garden of Eden, with its overtones of innocence, knowledge, disobedience and mortality. Later in the novel, Mary will be seen in the garden kissing Thomas Kettle.

And STW sandwiches this loving, anguished scene of Barnard and his beloved Mary, with the news that his son Joseph has been sent down from Cambridge in disgrace because ‘to win a wager of ten pounds he had climbed onto the roof of the college chapel, naked, and carrying a stuffed owl which he placed on a crocket’, and then the news from Joseph himself that he is emigrating. He will run a plantation in the West Indies.

(Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, 1820s or 1830s; Victoria and Albert Museum; found here)

Barnard’s wife, Julia, bears him eleven children, four of whom die young, and then takes to her sofa and discreet alcoholism: ‘It was called keeping her strength up’. Barnard doesn’t notice – or he does, briefly (‘Might not Julia be as comfortable with peppermint tea?’), before turning away from it. Those who flee the flint anchor (like Joseph) can only do so by putting the sea between them, a different sort of liquid escape. The younger two children, Ellen and Wilberforce, have slightly more freedom. Ellen is born with a large port-wine stain on her face and thus seems to be liberated from the expectations placed upon her sisters; clearly no one could possibly want to marry her and at times the family consider her somewhat ‘backward’, yet she carves out the space to do as she pleases and by the end of the novel is establishing a (genteel) literary career of sorts. On the other hand the adored Mary grows into the Victorian male ideal of womanhood and oh how limited that turns out to be.

(Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, 1790s; National Gallery of Scotland: found here)

It is not that he is malignant; on the contrary, he dispenses a large part of the profits of his successful business to the poor of Loseby and he has a very strict moral code. It is that he lacks any understanding of himself or other people, and, lacking love, he has no curiosity about them. It is easy for him to deceive himself. Long before his death, he is spending his days sitting in a graveyard (another sort of garden, I suppose). The book begins and ends with his headstone; it is only when we reach the end that we understand the inscription upon it and how utterly inadequate and false it is.

Falseness and hypocrisy are endemic to the middle classes in The Flint Anchor and to some extent contrasted with the working-class culture of Loseby, which is rough but less devious. STW also gives free rein to her talent for portraying the delicate spite of middle-class manners:

Speaking with a strong Yorkshire accent, [Miss Mutley] began to probe Euphemia about Madame Bon; was she not a wonderful lady, so well educated too, a quite remarkable mind, so Mr Kettle said, almost masculine in its grasp of business. It was a pity that she should have these headaches, but they always come if a female is so very intellectual. Miss Mutley expressed a warm desire to see more of Madame Bon, and Euphemia got an impression that she would be glad to hear that Madame Bon was at the bottom of the sea.

In the end, as John Barnard begins to perceive the sham of his life, it is to Sophie Bon’s hypocrisy that he is drawn for comfort.

If you’re interested in reading more about The Flint Anchor, there’s a superb examination of it on the Mumpsimus blog in which, among other excellent points, the author makes a case for STW as a perverse author wilfully denying the reader the pleasures they crave from a novel of this sort (here the novel is the flint anchor which traps us with John Barnard in Loseby when we’d rather be on the high seas with Thomas Kettle). There’s also a link to a truly fascinating paper: ‘Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor’, by Jennifer P. Nesbitt, I cannot recommend this enough.

(John Crome, Road with Pollards; Norwich Museums; found here)

Told by an Idiot, by Rose Macaulay

This is the third novel of Rose Macaulay’s I’ve read, the other two being The World My Wilderness, a very
long time ago, and The Towers of Trebizond, which I reread more recently.  I loved them both, and so when I saw a copy of Told by an Idiot in a second-hand bookshop I snapped it up. (I note that its previous owner was H.P. Hulbert of St Barnabas Vicarage in Bristol, who dated its acquisition as 23rd June 1938, and I (another HP) paid £5 for this nice hardback copy and brought it to Belgium; where will it go next, I wonder?) And then I didn’t read it for twenty years. Ah well, its time has finally come.

Told by an Idiot was first published in 1923 and follows the fortunes of the Garden family from the late nineteenth century until after the First World War. It has an arresting opening:

One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief in the year 1879, – Mrs Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, ‘Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.’

Papa being a vicar, this loss of faith is rather a pity, especially since the Gardens really like the vicarage they are living in. However, Papa, an inveterate seeker of truth, has had and continues to have during the novel many losses of faith and many discoveries of new faiths: Anglicanism, Roman Catholicisim, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, he works through them all...

His six children, all very different characters, grow up, marry (or not), work (or not), have children (or not). The years pass. Indeed, this book reminded me very strongly of Virginia Woolf’s (later) The Years, which I had read as an undergraduate and not since. When I got it down to look at it, I found it quite different to Macaulay’s novel. Woolf focuses on the individual’s experience in the moment. Macaulay, however, shifts the emphasis so that it is on time passing and on the larger movements – political, social, artistic – that churn through the years. Her characters play out their little lives against this.

(Undated photograph of Rose Macaulay, found here)

So, Macaulay discusses the Irish Question, militant suffragettes, nationalism, imperialism. Her discussions are dry, amused and partisan, they are not histories. (One thing surprised me, in these days of the pandemic: not one mention of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919.) She gives her novel two epigraphs which form the principal themes of the novel and explain its emphasis. One is the quote from King Lear from which the title is drawn, and which expresses the smallness of our lives, ‘full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The other is a line by Paul Morand, from Fermé la nuit: ‘L’histoire, comme une idiote, mécaniquement se répète’ – history repeats itself. And what is striking, and perfectly illustrates her point, is that we are still discussing the same ideas today – for instance:

To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. [...] A rapprochement took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies are supposed to be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgements[...]

More subtly, Macaulay notes the latest vogues in literature, for example the rise of George Bernard Shaw, but infuses her own prose with echoes of earlier writers (most obviously Shakespeare). Thus in art it is the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

There are six Garden children: Vicky, conventional and full of joy in life; Maurice, the embittered editor of a radical magazine; Rome, the distant cynic; Stanley, enthusiastic and idealistic; Irving, comfortable and rich; and Una, placid and content. They possess characteristics of their parents but are also very much themselves. The ones who interest Macaulay most are Maurice, Rome and Stanley, as well as Imogen, Vicky’s daughter, who longs to be a boy and join the Navy.

There is a necessary difficulty to writing a novel like this, which is keeping in balance the discussions of the wider context of the times with the individual lives of the characters. Macaulay’s characters are vivid and interesting and sometimes one wants more of them and less of the politics, or at least I did. But that would be to wish the novel to be something other than it is. The strength of this strategy is that the reader gets a real taste of the times, in particular the intellectual currents of the times, which would not be easily – not so pithily, anyway – conveyed in a more character-centric novel.

(Philip Wilson Steer, The Swiss Alps at the Earls Court Exhibition, 1887; Tate Gallery)

Some of the most sensitive writing is about Imogen, so I will end with a particularly lovely passage about her when she is in her early twenties and writing.

Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant cry of joy. [...] Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great, gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was as sweet as a dream of apple blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away.

What I particularly like about this description is I think it tells you something of Imogen’s writing, joyful and romantic, original and with echoes of earlier writers, and that she writes in response to the world around her but that her writing then further shapes that response. in an endless loop of delight.

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.

Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.

The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.

(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)

I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:

It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.

People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.

White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.

(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)