a gallimaufry

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?

Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Dedicated to Valentine Ackland, Summer Will Show was the first novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote after the two women had met and fallen in love. It is a sort-of historical novel, although – as in the two other historical novels of hers I have read, After the Death of Don Juan and The Corner That Held Them – it is unusual for a historical novel. It is written in four ‘movements’ and in a decidedly modernist manner – the action is entirely from the perspective of one character, Sophia Willoughby; the characters are fluid and mysterious; there is little historical detail, just enough to locate the novel in 1848, a vinaigrette hurled here, a fashionable bonnet pawned there. In fact, I had to look up the 1848 revolution in France because there is absolutely no info-dumping in this novel.

(Barricades rue Saint-Maur, Paris, June 1848; found here)

At the beginning of the novel Sophia Willoughby, young and beautiful, is the mother to two young children and heiress to the estate of Blandamer. Unfortunately, her husband Frederick has taken up with Minna Lemuel:

A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels [...]

and lives with Minna in Paris on an income Sophia provides for him. Sophia’s children are delicate and she takes them to be swung over the lime kiln, a treatment she believes has been responsible for her own good health but which causes their deaths. Until now, Sophia’s life has had purpose, to manage Blandamer, breed and pass on the estate, she has been a link in a chain. Now her life is without purpose. Clearly the solution is to breed more heirs, so Sophia sets off for Paris and Frederick, whom she expects to do his duty. However, she arrives in time for the overthrowing of the French king Louis Philippe in February 1848 and, searching for Frederick, finds herself in Minna’s apartment during a party at which Minna is telling a story:

 At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. Then, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. The glance, mournfully numbering, moved on. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile – small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child.

In my post on Voices from Fairyland we saw that STW’s poems found a way of speaking about a love which could not be spoken about, lesbian love. And so in this novel STW is actually quite circumspect. It is both abundantly clear that Sophia and Minna fall in love and yet at the same time if you were wilful you could read it as concerning a close friendship. Sophia feels, her emotions fluctuate, through her we experience them too; but she is not given to romanticism and her expressions of love tend to take a practical turn such as managing finances, shopping or comforting.

The story which Minna is telling when Sophia first meets her is a story of her childhood, in Lithuania, and it is a story of poverty and violence, a pogrom of the Jews. Later she tells Sophia a little more about her youth, again a tale of cruelty and penury. Her background is as different from Sophia’s as it could be; and so are her philosophies of life. She is an artist, without youth or beauty; she is an excellent thief, ‘magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering’. She is Jewish, a complete outsider. Most of all, she is a liar but one whose lies and stories contain a greater truth than any fidelity to facts could provide. Her improvidence and generosity counter Sophia’s hereditary avarice and soon Sophia finds a sort of exhilaration in having to scrabble for money and sing for her supper (she sings hymns in the street, pretending to be an escaped Protestant nun).

Sophia is drawn into the shabby, artistic world of the revolutionaries by her love for Minna; it is only gradually that she rejects the exploitative system from which she had until that moment profited. The exploitation is of peasants, workers and former slaves. Blandamer, so bucolic and ordered, prettifies this repression, in contrast to the dirty, populated city of ideas that is Paris. The political philosophy of the novel is supplied by the Communist Ingelbracht. Ingelbracht distinguishes between ‘true’ revolutionaries and revolutionaries like Minna, romantic, undisciplined and doomed to one grand gesture only. Sophia he characterises as a bourgeois hanger-on and a danger to the movement. But at the end of the novel, Sophia sits alone reading Ingelbracht’s tract, penniless, surely herself now a true revolutionary.

(Chettle House, Dorset, from here; perhaps Blandamer looked a bit like this)

Politics is central to the novel, as it is in After the Death of Don Juan, but this is a wonderful book because of the way that it is written, the light touch of Sophia’s particular gaze and responses, the dispassionate air, the patter of conversation, the comedy and affection beside the pain. It has great charm and the characters, even Frederick and wicked old Léocadie, have great charm too. Trying to discuss it makes me realise how leaden my writing is and how much better it is to lay a quote at your feet to sample – this is a conversation between Sophia and Minna, when Sophia has returned to Minna to find her in deep poverty:

‘You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.’
‘Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?’
‘Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. [...] And after she had gone I found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.’
‘A monkey’s tail?’
‘A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.’ [...]
‘I suppose,’ [Sophia] said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, ‘it’s because you’re so patently a liar.’
‘A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.’
And she flipped the dusters out of the window [...]
‘Was it from this balcony,’ enquired Sophia, ‘that the wine was lowered?’
Minna feigned inattention to this lure.
‘I would lay down my life for the truth,’ she added serenely.

As ever, the last STW I read is always my favourite STW, until the next one...

sylvia townsend warner reading week 2020, join in, all the best people are!

Cunningly timing my announcement for the later part of January and thus after everyone has already made lots of resolutions and reading plans for the year, I am delighted to tell you that once again I intend to spend the first week in July reading and writing about the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and I invite you to join me!

As an added lure, a new selection of her short stories has just been published, Of Cats and Elfins, by Handheld Press. The Guardian reviews it briefly here. According to Handheld Press’s website (from which you can order a copy), it brings together four of STW’s Elfin stories that were not published in The Kingdom of Elfin with the collection The Cat’s Cradle Book. It is putting my vow to buy no more books under considerable strain just days after I made it.

Here is a link to my introductory post to last year’s reading week, with a list of her books. And here is a round-up of everyone’s reviews from last year’s reading week, and here are all my STW posts. Here is a link to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, which is packed with information about her.

Readers, you have plenty of time to track down one of STW’s books and read it. Last year, many people* wept bitter tears over missing the Reading Week. Don’t let that be you this year! If you have never read her before, this is your moment!  And if you have – well, it’s a FACT that no one has ever disliked anything she ever wrote, so treat yourself to some more time with one of her lovely books.

STW wrote novels and stories that are witty, melancholic, waspish, fantastical and beautiful, and she was also a formidable poet. She wrote about cats, fairies, nuns, revolutionaries, aristocrats and stifled women. Her fans include Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. She is the antidote to all that is plodding, dull or hypocritical. She deserves to be wider read, and you deserve to have her in your life. Joining in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year is thus a win–win situation for all concerned!

* Actually, no one.

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Well, I missed Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week with this review and so I am grateful to myself for extending the week by a fortnight... I am also very grateful to have read The Corner that Held Them. While it hasn’t quite dethroned After the Death of Don Juan from its place as favourite in my heart, it is a close-run thing.

A tray of buns, a tray of nuns...

I must admit to a slight sense of trepidation since the little ‘nun fiction’ I have read tends to favour hysteria in convents, but the only bout of this in The Corner that Held Them occurs when a group of novices tries to levitate while playing Flying St Katherine, and all is handled with STW’s customary sense of absurdity tempered with compassion. (Even the murder is low key.)

The novel concerns a nunnery in Norfolk and the lives of those who inhabit it during the main part of the fourteenth century. Like After the Death of Don Juan, it dips in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, here to emphasise not only the sense of shared community but also to give a sense of time passing. Essentially plotless but more interwoven and inconclusive than a series of short stories, it often feels more historical than novel, more a record of something unfolding than a constructed narrative. Perhaps one might compare it to a mediaeval chronicle, which wove fact and fiction seamlessly together (although little here is unmediated historical fact so perhaps one might not). It is certainly an unusual structure.

(This lovely picture of some nuns I found here)

The convent of Our Lady and St Leonard at Oby has an inauspicious beginning. Alianor de Retteville is surprised in flagrante by her husband Brian and his cousins and forced to watch the murder of her lover. Her life is spared and continues miserably for some years, yet on her death Brian discovers a dormant affection for her – perhaps – and after a sumptuous funeral he founds a Benedictine nunnery to her memory. Although the nuns do not know Alianor, the spectre of such a marriage hangs over them. While they generally possess no vocation and are given to the convent by their families, for them the community offers a potentially pleasanter existence than wedlock and childbirth. Within the convent, life can be harsh and restrictive, but the nuns have a modicum of independence and responsibility. Those with talents, like Dame Susanna for music or Dame Matilda for figures, have the chance to make use of them. And it is generally a safe place compared to the outside world, as Dame Adela learns to her cost.

In this rich and dense novel two motifs recur: the tuft of wormwood by the gatehouse and the spire raised by Prioress Alicia. The wormwood is from the natural world at the mercy of which mediaeval people existed, the spire from the world of human achievement. Wormwood is edible but bitter and, in excess, toxic. It was used as a flavouring for mead in the Middle Ages and more recently in absinthe; it is also mentioned in the Bible as being mixed with vinegar and given to the dying Jesus. Its presence at the gate of the convent warns of a life of bitterness but also of succour. The raising of the spire is a long business, fraught with problems and delays, and in its first incarnation it collapses during a gale and kills one of the nuns. Yet finally it stands, a landmark for miles around. For many, like Sir Ralph, it is an object of beauty. For others, a sign of the nuns’ arrogance and profligacy. For Dame Lilias it is a symbol of failed escape. In collapsing it ‘had tried to get away’, as she has failed to do.

The fourteenth century was a dramatic period in British history: famine, war, plague and revolt ravaged it. Oby is fairly remote but suffers like everywhere else from the horrors of the Black Death, the subsequent labour shortages, the violence that followed the Peasants’ Revolt. Nor is the nunnery immune to dramatic occurrences such as the collapse of the first spire and the murder in the fishpond. But such incidents are exceptional. The rhythm of life at Oby is one of observing the rules, bickering and trying to balance the books and keep in with whoever is the current bishop. Worldly affairs and the relationships between the sisters take precedence over spiritual matters. The Black Death poses a threat but so does a possible lawsuit, the failure of tenants to pay their rents.

STW has presented us with an alternative for women to marriage, but she certainly has not idealised the religious life. In fact, she even slyly undermines it. St Leonard, to whom the convent is dedicated, is the patron saint of prisoners and captives. Few of the women – girls, when most of them arrive – have any influence over whether or not their families hand them over to the nunnery and while most settle in and appreciate their freedom from husbands some, like Dame Lilias, feel trapped. The novel ends abruptly with an escape by another nun who resents confinement. It’s an ending that is destabilising, for us as readers as well as the convent as institution.

(Nuns smuggling a man into a convent; from here)

There are other fundamental problems with life at Oby. Sir Ralph, the priest who serves the convent for most of the book, is not only idle, self-indulgent and lecherous (if loyal and good-hearted), and thus hardly an example of the religious life, he is also not really an ordained priest, just a lay clerk, and as such has no right to administer Holy Communion to the nuns or hear their confessions. Unwittingly, they are all living in a state of sin. Then there is the collapse of the spire – what, wonder the nuns, might that mean? Nothing good. And finally, the constant resentment of the peasants who have to work for what they perceive as a parcel of idle, pampered women reminds us of the unfairness of the social system in which they all struggle to survive. What really is the point of the convent?

There is so much more to this novel, it definitely requires rereading. I haven’t quoted very much because it doesn’t really lend itself to being quoted, all the strands of life are so neatly woven together that it’s difficult to extract a chunk. It’s also quite hard to write about as it has no central plot or characters and refuses the shapeliness, if you like, of conventional novel forms in favour of attempting to reflect more closely the vagaries of life as it is lived, rambling, inconclusive. This unusual structure and the distance it keeps from its characters make it difficult to place, perhaps it is not unlike Virginia Woolf’s The Years? But to anyone who fancies steeping themselves in the weirdness of mediaeval life as mediated by STW’s brilliant mind it is highly recommended.

(Bagpipe-playing bishop and dancing nun, from here)

After the Death of Don Juan, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

(Don Giovanni and Doña Ana, from here)

‘Don Saturno. Prepare yourself for solemn and terrible news. Your son, Don Juan, is no longer on earth.’

‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I sit down?’

Leaning back in his chair by the writing-table, Don Saturno signalled to Ana to go on.

[Ana] went on. [...] Don Saturno listened with attention. It shocked Ottavio to see how sympathetically, how naturally, as it were, he followed the course of Ana’s narrative, fine shades of surprise, critical interest, disapproval or compassion flickering over his countenance. Hearing of Don Juan’s taunting visit to the cemetery he shook his head, but he might, so Ottavio thought, have been shaking it over a false note in a sonata.

‘The evening came. Supper was prepared, supper for two. At the appointed hour a heavy knocking was heard. Your son, reckless with wine, lost in some dreadful transport of impiety ordered his valet to open the door. More terrified of the dead than of the living, the man refused. The door opened, my father, in his living likeness but white as alabaster, appeared. He rebuked your son. He bade him take this last chance of heaven’s mercy. He spoke in vain. Pointing downwards with a marble finger he consigned Don Juan to perdition. And the jaws of hell opened. With shrieks, with lamentations, with vain appeals, Don Juan struggled in the clutch of demons. The lightning quivered around them, the sentence of heaven spoke in a peal of thunder. And they bore him down to hell.’

Pale as death, with the stately exhaustion of the martyr, she sank into a chair.

[...] ‘And there was no trace of my son’s body?’

‘How could there be?’ enquired Don Isidro reasonably. ‘Your son was taken to hell.’

‘Frankly,’ said Don Saturno, ‘I find this story very difficult to make head or tail of.’

After the Death of Don Juan begins shortly after the end of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Don Juan had tried to assault the virtuous young lady Doña Ana, but had been interrupted by the arrival of Doña Ana’s father, whom Don Juan then murdered. Subsequently, Don Juan visited the cemetery to invite the father’s ghost to dinner. This occasion did not end happily for him, according to his servant Leporello, who maintains that Don Juan was dragged down to hell by demons. Doña Ana is moved to travel to Tenorio Viejo to inform Don Juan’s father, Don Saturno, of his son’s demise, accompanied by her new husband Don Ottavio, her duenna and her priest, Don Isidro (how I love that ‘reasonably’ in the quotation above).

(Design for the cemetery scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, French, nineteenth century; British Museum)

The journey lasts a relentless seven days and Tenorio Viejo is far from the earthly paradise Leporello, now in Doña Ana’s employ, had led the party to believe. Clinging to the dusty mountainside, the village is no more than a few dozen hovels surrounded by olive groves that, lacking water, wither in the heat. The villagers are aware that Don Saturno’s meagre interest in their livelihoods has been diverted for years by the need to pay for Don Juan’s lavish lifestyle. But now that the heir is dead, surely Don Saturno could be persuaded of the benefits to everyone of funding an irrigation system for the village fields?

While Doña Ana embarks on a vigil of prayer ostensibly for her father’s soul, her husband frets about ghosts shrieking at him while he sleeps and Doña Pilar, the duenna, embroiders grey pansies on a petticoat with sour little stabs of her needle, Don Saturno wrestles with the improbable story of his son’s death and the peasants dare to hope for a better future.

I first read this novel about twenty years ago and although I vaguely remembered most of what happened I had forgotten how extraordinarily good it is. It is a novel about rural Spanish society (which makes it sound boring – it is not boring) and so, rather than tracing the story of any particular character, it is told from multiple perspectives, the points of view of many characters from all social strata. While the focus begins with Doña Ana and her party, once they arrive at the village it expands to encompass Don Saturno and many of the peasants – the creepy sacristan and his housekeeper, the miller and his daughter, the schoolmaster and the thoughtful Ramez. Everyone is brought vividly to life. We are privy to Don Ottavio’s musings on his astonishing attractiveness as well as Celestina’s desire to flee the mill and join a convent. Just as Jacob’s Room built up a portrait of Jacob by presenting the memories and consciousnesses of a group of people who knew him, so After the Death of Don Juan reveals an entire society through the individuals that comprise it.

After the Death of Don Juan was published in 1938 and although it is ostensibly a historical novel, set in the 1760s, it was STW’s response to the Spanish Civil War – which, as an ambulance driver, she witnessed first-hand. The novel exposes the tensions within Spanish society – the desperately poor peasants, the aristocratic landlords who fail to invest in their tenants for one reason or another, the controlling hand of the Church – and the story it tells, ending in a violent clash, foreshadows the conflict of the 1930s. Ultimately, it is the values of Don Juan, the cynical, cruel and dishonest parasite, which will prevail in the village. (In the Virago edition there is a really brilliant foreword by Wendy Mulford which explores all of this, though if you don’t like spoilers, wait to read it until after you’ve finished the novel.)

If there are tensions between peasant and aristocrat, however, there are other tensions in the novel too: between town and country, between some of the villagers (the miller and the sacristan are particularly unpopular). The book maintains an exquisite balance between the demands of a parable (of the Civil War) and fiction (which requires that Tenorio Viejo feel like a ‘real’ place, its inhabitants like ‘real’ people), between realism (the daily tasks of peasant life) and fantasy (Don Juan’s terrifying death), between comedy and tragedy. There is a whiff of artifice about some of the scenes, either their setting or in the reliance of dialogue, which reminds us of the story’s roots in opera. It’s a very funny novel, alert to absurdity and delusion, until it becomes a tragic novel. It has a Comynsish feeling for the grotesque. It is now my new favourite STW novel – until the next one, perhaps...

(An English Delegate [Sylvia Townsend Warner] (The International Congress of Writers, Valencia 1937), by Gerda Taro, who was also a fascinating figure, 1937; International Center for Photography, The Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, Gift of Cornell and Edith Capa, 2002; from here)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week begins!

Welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! (I feel like a game-show host, typing that...)

Almost as soon as I had decided to host this I was consumed by panic and also a weird reluctance to read anything by STW, as if I were turning her into A Project and thus draining out all the fun. I kept accidentally reading Edgar Wallace... Fortunately, I was able to overcome this reluctance and actually read quite a bit of her work so we won’t be confronted with an embarrassing blank space here this week. And after all, it has been fun and I am as enthusiastic about the work as I was before I began.

So if you haven’t yet started, do rush to your bookcase and seize one of her books and join in...

Here is the plan. I am going to post here six times this week. If you’ve written a post somewhere on the internet – your blog, facebook, goodreads, whatever – leave the link in the comments to any of my STW posts and I’ll collect them all together in the final post so we can find each other more easily.

If you don’t have anywhere on the internet, you can write something in the comments and I’ll copy/paste it into the final round-up post. Or you could email it to me and I’ll put it up here as a guest post.

STW wrote in different forms and I’ve tried to reflect that in what I’ve read and written about. This is my posting schedule. Excitingly, I haven’t actually finished The Corner that Held Them yet but am terror-reading in the hope I can have something ready in time for Friday.

• Later today: After the Death of Don Juan (novel)
• Tuesday: The Innocent and the Guilty (short stories)
• Wednesday: Selected Poems
• Thursday: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Friday (I hope!): The Corner that Held Them (novel)
• Sunday: round-up post with links to all your posts

So put up your feet with a cat or two to hand, pour yourself a generous glass of sherry and light a Sobranie. Happy reading!

(Sylvia Townsend Warner by Cecil Beaton; bromide print, 1930; NPG P182; National Portrait Gallery, London; from here)

Castle Dor, by Daphne Du Maurier and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Only very belatedly did I discover that this week has been Daphne Du Maurier Reading Week, hosted by heavenali, so this, my contribution, is rushed. As it happens the last time I was in the UK I acquired a second-hand copy of Castle Dor; obviously it was destined for this moment. Appropriate, really, since the novel concerns a sort of predestination in the guise of the past replaying itself.

Castle Dor is set in Cornwall in the 1860s; events are set in motion when Linnet Lewarne, the beautiful young wife of a publican, first claps eyes on Amyot Trestane, a Breton sailor saved from a beating by a French notary. This notary, Ledru, has come to Cornwall seeking the ‘true’ locations of events in the story of Tristan and Iseult. With the local physician, Dr Carfax, he becomes convinced that in Castle Dor and its surroundings he has succeeded. But Carfax is increasingly concerned about the bond between Amyot and Linnet. Could the ancient story of Tristan and Iseult be repeating itself through them? And if so, can disaster be averted?

Like The House on the Strand, published eight years later, Castle Dor explores how the past affects the present, and how it is stored up in places. In The House on the Strand, Dick accesses the past by means of a drug, but it only transports his mind and not his body. If he takes the drug in an old farmhouse, he will witness what happened in that farmhouse. It is the place that holds the history. Amyot and Iseult, on the other hand, do not time-travel. They are possessed at certain moments by powers beyond themselves: they speak or even appear different to their normal selves but remain unconscious of the drama they are re-enacting. But their actions are governed by place and what happened in that place centuries before: were they not in this particular part of Cornwall, their behaviour would be quite different.

The genesis of the book is slightly unusual: it was started by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and after his death his daughter gave the half-finished manuscript to Daphne Du Maurier to complete. I should love to know how much of the published book is his work and how much hers; certainly it hangs seamlessly together and is perfectly paced. Although it isn’t one of her best-known works it is really very good with Du Maurier’s trademark atmospheric setting, convincing characterisation and whiff of the supernatural (how much of a trademark of Quiller-Couch’s anything I cannot say since I’ve never read anything else by him).

some short reviews

Time has passed and I haven’t written here.

I’ve been busy gardening...

...collecting some odd eggs from the hens...

...releasing a frog back into the wild (don’t be like Some People in my family and bring them home, leave frogs be where you find them)...

...attending to the whims of cats...

...and actually working too.

I have also been reading! But since my reviewing energies are all focused on preparing something for Shiny New Books, I thought I’d just mention some other books briefly here.

• Bath Tangle, by Georgette Heyer – If Heyer ever wrote an anti-Heyer novel, this is it. Her hero is so atrocious that you are simply begging the heroine not to marry him, quite opposite from the usual dynamic. He shares characteristics with some of her other, more likeable, heroes, but here we see only the dark side of them. Arrogant, rude, snobbish, bullying and guilty of sexual assault if not worse (his crime is alluded to in rather vague terms), Rotherham has not one redeeming feature and after reading this I doubt you will be able to look at Avon, Beaumaris and Alistair quite so indulgently ever again.
  (Though I did always worry about Avon and Léonie, even as a teenager that struck me as rather a dodgy relationship...)
• The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons – A rather brittle but engaging spin on the detective novel which pokes fun at the art establishment. Immaterialism is an art movement that believes in the value of what is not there, so the subject of a painting is what is omitted from it. During the opening of an exhibition of Immaterial art Stephen Follett, a universally loathed art critic, is found murdered.
  The case is narrated in turn by one of the suspects, a fairly dreadful amateur detective and a professional detective, somewhat in the manner of the multiple narratives of The Moonstone. The comedy is occasionally a little heavy-handed but I enjoyed Immaterialism a lot.
• Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden – I started this hoping for something Mary-Stewartesque and it had a good premise: Grace receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who now lives in Stockholm, which is signed with their childhood code for ‘help’. When she arrives in Sweden, Willa has vanished.
  Overlooking the rather leaden writing and uninspired characterisation I read on but the dénouement was disappointing and basically everyone was an idiot. The only surprise was Grace’s callous victim-blaming at the end. Eden seems to have been very popular so perhaps this is not representative of her work?
• The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge – I read this over quite a long time as it has a slow pace and bears being put down and picked up again well. It’s a historical novel set during the English Civil War, and explores how a group of characters are tested by the conflict: Robert Haslewood, the squire; Froniga, his cousin and the white witch of the title; and Francis, a nobleman masquerading as an artist in order to spy for the Royalists.
  Goudge shows how courage on the battlefield is only one sort of courage, and that those without much power – children, women, gypsies, the elderly – are no less brave than the rich men who are prepared to die for their ideals. It was very soothing while Brexit madness was whirling about and a helpful antidote to cynicism.
• Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi – As ever Oyeyemi’s work defies expectations, categorisations, and cleverly seduces you into accepting whatever she throws at you. A country that may or may not exist? Gingerbread that tastes like revenge? A childhood friend who might be secretly influencing every step of your life?
  I can’t even begin to summarise this novel and am still reeling from finishing it last night, it’s rich, playful and mysterious to the end.
• The Diaries of Sylvia Warner, edited by Claire Harman – I am slowly reading these for Sylvia Townsend Warner week and they are wonderful.

Friday evening and a glass of wine are calling. Happy weekend everyone! Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

When [the door] opened, and Geertje Van Loon wide in bright silks stood there, with Flora and Anne crowding behind her to see, a myriad of little flames spangling the dark hall, it looked as if a treasure-house had opened, a winter cavern set with jewels, and an air laden with spices flowed out.

First published in 2016, Golden Hill has been at the back of my mind ever since, one of those books that you don’t quite leap to buy or borrow when you see it but have a vague intention of reading. It was the sort of book that I might choose to make up a ‘buy one get one free’ offer. Then just before Christmas I was ordering some books as presents and I saw this and just on the spur of the moment bought it. And now I have read it and if you’ve heard that it is amazing, well then you heard aright.

The basic plot is this: in 1746 a charming Englishman disembarks in New York and hurries straight to a counting-house in Golden Hill Street where he presents an order to cash a thousand pounds – an unimaginably large sum which will put the merchant, Mr Lovell, to great trouble to realise. Suspicious, Mr Lovell strikes a bargain with Mr Smith: if the corroborating documents, which have not yet arrived, reach New York in the next sixty days, Smith shall have his money; if  not, he’ll take him to court.

Mr Smith agrees, establishes himself in lodgings, almost immediately has all his cash stolen, and waits. Of course, he is not what he seems to be. But what does he seem to be?

What I loved most of all about this novel was the way that the story was told, in language inflected with the eighteenth century but not weighed down by it. His sentences are often long and rich, but supple and vivid. His characters are pleasingly complex. Although I don’t usually care about spoilers, I am not going to give anything away about the plot because part of the book’s charm is its unexpectedness and its feeling of anything being possible. Also, the ending flips everything on its head and you realise that, like Smith, Golden Hill wasn’t what you thought it was about at all. It may seem to be about the solid centre of New York society but in fact it was about the margins all along. More I shall not write, particularly as I have to rush out into the garden and plant some bulbs now, but I do urge you to read it if you like clever and entertaining novels of great charm (and bonus: it’s also educational! I learnt a lot about American currency in the eighteenth century that I hadn’t known I hadn’t known).

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey

Many many many moons ago, Oscar and Lucinda won What Shall Helen Read Next? and indeed I did start reading it but despite enjoying it for some reason put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last week. Fortunately, and this is testament to the strength of Carey’s writing, it was very easy to get back into, and I have just finished it.

And finished it in a rage! Jenny was not wrong to warn me in her comment to that earlier post. Peter Carey, how could you? If you will go and create intriguing, complex characters with whom the reader falls in love, then you had better have a very good reason for degrading and killing them off, and I refuse to believe that this was necessary to your artistic enterprise here. It’s not that I insist upon happy endings, by no means, but the ending felt rushed, scrappy and suddenly cruel in a novel which until now had been generous, and what happened seemed a betrayal.

The novel chronicles the childhoods, eventual meeting (they do not meet until page 231!) and subsequent parting of the two titular characters, one born in rural Devon, the other in rural Australia, in the nineteenth century. Brought together by a passion for gambling, their great endeavour is to create and ship to the outback a glass church (and they turn this plan into a wager as well), an airy dream made solid, impractical but beautiful, a triumph of belief over practicality. The novel draws together the ways in which life is a game of chance; from religion (‘We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.’) to love, business to conception, glass-blowing to meeting our future spouse. Gambling gives one the feeling, fleeting, of power and control, of harnessing Fortune to one’s own desires. The end of the novel, in which luck runs out in every way, suggests that this is all a gamble we are destined to lose. We may seem to float along the surface but eventually we will sink. (I found that disappointing.)

Yet still I loved this novel, and I loved it for the characters and for Carey’s writing, which is dry and witty and perfect. He has an amazing talent for juxtaposing elements in a description to bring out their oddness, he studs his prose with precise and unexpected metaphors and he has an ear for the droll in how people speak and behave. I could quote endlessly. Here is how Theophilus, Oscar’s father, sees the boy Oscar: ‘His son was long-necked and delicate. He was light, airy, made from the quills of a bird. He was white and frail. [...] The eyes were so clean and unprotected, like freshly peeled fruit.’ And here is Hugh Stratton’s face: ‘[it] showed, on closer examination, all the fine marks of pain and disappointment that buttered rum could not smooth over’. Here is Theophilus himself: ‘He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, a silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity.’ And here is Elizabeth, Lucinda’s mother, at her husband’s graveside: ‘But it was anger, not grief, that was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher’s trap ready to snare the unwary.’ I will forgive a lot for writing like this.