a gallimaufry

The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb; translated by Len Rix

For weeks Belgium has lain under a thick grey cloud, our lives occasionally enlivened by a few hours of rain, no sunshine, no snow, just greyness. At such a time, what could be better than The Pendragon Legend, the first novel of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, published in 1934. It is gothic, comic, romantic, mysterious and utterly charming. It would be satirical, if satire was too strong a word for its affectionate, gentle mockery: it loves what it laughs at. It includes a ghost, ancient books, the Rosicrucians, north Wales, a ruined castle, a disputed inheritance and sinister goings-on. I love it and re-reading it has cheered me up no end.

Perhaps you too recognise the feeling that is described here? It is the moment when our narrator, János Bátky, first claps eyes on the precious Pendragon library:

I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.

János Bátky is a Hungarian scholar with an interest in the esoteric. At a party he falls into conversation with the Earl of Gwynedd, a recluse who shares his enthusiasm for Robert Fludd, and is invited to stay with him at Llanvygan Castle and examine his library of priceless manuscripts. Reading up about the Pendragon family (who are the earls of Gwynedd), Bátky befriends an Irish adventurer and fantasist named Maloney who, coincidentally, is also bound for Llanvygan in the company of Osborne Pendragon, the Earl’s nephew. But before they leave, a mysterious telephone caller warns Bátky to stay away.

At Llanvygan Bátky accidentally offends the Earl and so does not see much of him. Most of the Earl’s time is devoted to experiments with some gigantic axolotls he has bred and through whom he hopes to find the secret of the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Bátky enjoys his days in the library, especially when accompanied by the beautiful Cynthia, Osborne’s sister, but his nights are considerably less enjoyable, interrupted by a midnight rider with a flaming torch charging around the castle. Someone is trying to murder the Earl, there is a crazed prophet in the village, and the ruins of Pendragon Castle on the hill above hold a secret that may shed light on the mysteries, if only Bátky, Osborne and Maloney can find it.

So, melodrama, mystery and eccentrics a-plenty, all spiced with lashings of humour. It’s a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, like its narrator. As the quote about his feelings for libraries suggests, Bátky is sensual as well as scholarly, easily distracted by a beautiful woman. He is clever and curious but weedy, given to experiencing life through books and ill-equipped to face the more physical dangers the situation in Llanvygan foments. The telephone call almost puts him off even starting for Wales, and it is only academic vanity that spurs him on. He struggles to climb a cliff during a nocturnal escapade with Maloney and Osborne, and at a crucial point gets lost on a Welsh mountain because he cannot tell the difference between beech, birch and oak trees. He is a frightful snob and romantic and it is these qualities that support him and drive him on rather than any nobler attributes. He is somewhat in love with the idea of the British aristocracy, to put it mildly.

Here he is, experiencing that mainstay of gothic fiction, an eerie noise at night in a castle:

Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine [..] But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions ... And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. [...]
Of course, I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.

There is a clever balance here between self-deprecating humour and true creepiness, no mean feat to achieve. For underneath the jolly japes, the endearing eccentrics and the madcap pace, we glimpse a darkness: besides the horror of banal, lucre-worshipping criminality there arises the horror of an evil less easy to comprehend, and one which speaks to ancient terrors. Where does legitimate pursuit of truth end, and obsession and madness begin? At what point does the past grip the present too tightly? Dreams, prophesies, stories, lies, all have their own truths. The novel plays delicately too on bodily and literary immortality; it concludes with a sense that there are indeed mysteries that can never fully be understood.

The Pushkin Press edition which I read was translated by Len Rix so beautifully that not only does it flow as easily as if it had been written in 1930s English, it also captures Bátky’s personality and dry wit perfectly. The whole book is an absolute joy.

(Portrait of Antal Szerb, from the Pushkin Press website; Szerb was a Hungarian Jew and so his literary career was destroyed and he was murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945)

 

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.

Broomsticks over Flaxborough, by Colin Watson

I was reading one of Calmgrove’s reliably excellent posts, this one on Walpurgisnacht, when FictionFan quoted in the comments the opening line of Broomsticks over Flaxborough, by Colin Watson:

Naked as on the day she was born, save for a double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue, Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.

How could I resist? Moreover, a novel that combined witchcraft with detection? It is still (expensively) in print with Faber Finds, but second-hand copies are available and naturally I paid extra for one with a pretty cover because I am a Fool.

Shortly after Mrs Flora Pentatuke skips over the fire on Walpurgisnacht, at ‘the quarterly “Revel” of the Flaxborough, Chalmsbury and Brocklestone Folklore Society’, the car of one of its members is found abandoned in a wood. Where is Edna Hillyard? And then the parish church is desecrated. While the manufacturers of Lucillite washing-powder direct a marketing campaign at Flaxborough, the police wrestle with the possibility that the town has been gripped by Satanism. Is this merely an outlet for the bored occupants of suburbia? Or is something more sinister going on (perhaps even a covert Russian plan to subvert the Christian world)? Soon a corpse has turned up, dead animals are being nailed to people’s doors and Miss Lucilla Teatime of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation has been called in...

‘You cannot put handcuffs on Satan, my friend.’

Watson has a great comic touch (yes yes, a tad sexist but this is 1972) and a sharp eye for the telling detail, while the mystery of Edna Hillyard’s disappearance is enjoyable too. As well as Miss Teatime and Mrs Pentatuke, we meet Inspector Purbright, so laid back he is practically horizontal; his chief constable, Chubb, who cannot believe that members of the Conservative Club could be anything other than pillars of virtue; bloodthirsty Sister Gooding, baker of dread biscuits and owner of the vicious black dog ‘Meffie’; pedantic Warlock Parkin; Mrs Gloss OBE, chatelaine of Aleister Lodge; and Mrs Framlington, the whimsical vegetarian Coven chairman who worries about the effects of black magic on the carpet.

The world Watson creates is an ersatz world, a fallen world, stuffed with cheap imitations and petty strifes. People hide their televisions in ‘Jacobean’ sideboards. They eat KreemiKrunch Kookies, ‘a country-style combination of dehydrated milk solids, soya rusk, sodium monostearate and saccharin’, and wear ‘dinky nylon nightie[s]’. The advertising campaign is of course fake and manipulative. The coven is a painful modern approximation of Satanism, compelled to make do with black polythene, novelty mugs and home-made ‘pumpkin champagne laced with rum’ for their orgies. Good manners disguise hostility:

Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.
Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable Pook.

The novel seems redolent to me of those 1970s sitcoms, presided over by Penelope Keith. I see that there is a whole series of Flaxborough Chronicles, concerning the exploits of Inspector Purbright, and now I am wholeheartedly looking forward to reading them all.

(The photograph of Colin Watson is from the Curtis Brown website.)

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?

the detective novels of Joan Smith

The most unexpected way in which the past few months have affected my reading is that it is completely dominated by whim and obsession. There’s no discipline any more and no urge to read anything even remotely demanding. If I want to read something, I REALLY want to read it and I want to read it right now and then I want to read EVERYTHING like it. I have completely eschewed the literary equivalent of a wholesome balanced diet in favour of stuffing my face with chocolates. I owe two reviews and Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week looms and I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing.

(June will be the Month of Responsibility.)

(Felix Vallotton, A Woman Reading, 1922; oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

So, first there was the Frances Hardinge obsession. Then the Diana Wynne Jones. Then the Dorothy L. Sayers. (Actually, that is continuing, I just ran out of her work and so am awaiting three more at the point of whose arrival the obsession will resume.) And then I saw my copy of Joan Smith’s A Masculine Ending, which I bought about twenty years ago in a charity shop and quite liked. Suddenly, it was the ONLY book in the house I wanted to read. And then I wanted to read ALL the rest of the books in the series, so I ordered them and read them in less than two days.

Joan Smith is a respected British journalist and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she published a series of five ‘detective’ novels featuring a lecturer in English literature at London University, Loretta Lawson. I’ll list them all, not least because the titles are so good:

• A Masculine Ending (1987)
• Why Aren’t They Screaming? (1988)
• Don’t Leave Me This Way (1990)
• What Men Say (1993)
• Full Stop (1995)

I freely admit that for me much of their appeal is nostalgia. They cover the years of my late teens and early twenties, and during that time I studied English literature at university and went on to live in London for a while (as Loretta does). Detective novels are often concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, what people were doing and when, and so are full of reminders of things we did and technology we used. Smith’s novels focus very intensely on a few days and there is plenty of minutiae to please. Loretta sends faxes and uses answerphones, word processors and floppy disks – upgrading to a laptop in the last novel. There are a few fashion moments – a shocking pink handbag, a tube skirt, harem pants. There’s fresh pasta from the deli and Habitat sofas. There’s a sobering reminder of the casual sexism that still abounded at the time. And there’s plenty of politics: Why Aren’t They Screaming? is set around a women’s protest at a US air base similar though smaller to Greenham Common, the academics in What Men Say scoff about the government’s cutbacks to education and insistence on courses’ ‘relevance’.

But politics is not just a surface issue to the novels. As a series, they examine the often brutal nature of the power imbalance between men and women. Most significantly, they demonstrate how men’s potential for violence impacts women’s behaviour (and, in some cases, ability to live) while women’s concerns are easily dismissed as hysterical or unimportant. Against the macho world of the police forces she has to deal with and the rarefied sexism of some academics, Loretta strives to live a feminist life. She remains on good terms with her ex-husband, John (conveniently for many of the plots, he is a journalist), although he is convinced that their marriage was destroyed by Loretta’s joining a women’s group. She is loyal to her friends, most notably Bridget, a lecturer at Oxford University whose own late marriage and high-risk pregnancy are the focus of What Men Say. In A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way it’s her over-developed sense of guilt – a very female trait, Smith implicitly suggests – which spur her on to investigate.

The final and probably the best novel, Full Stop, finds Loretta staying in a friend’s apartment in an oppressively humid New York. She starts receiving obscene telephone calls. Gradually, her judgement is undermined. Is she being followed? Can she trust the police? Was the man in the theatre just being friendly or did he have another motive? She even starts to distrust her ex-husband. How can you navigate the world in this state of constant suspicion and alertness – and yet, how can you not? The discombobulation of being in a slightly alien culture adds to the sense of menace.

Smith is pretty meta in her approach and plays around a bit with the conventions of detective novels. Her heroine is not a detective (although this is nothing new in the genre) and not always very good at detecting. Still, the identity of the murderer is usually pretty clear and Smith isn’t interested in sudden twists – outwitting the reader is not her aim here. Every novel denies the reader a comfortable ending. The guilty often profit from their crimes; sometimes, the innocent are imprisoned.

Crime fiction is not really perceived as ‘women’s fiction’ and yet some of its greatest practitioners have been women. Perhaps, Loretta suggests, that is why it is looked down upon. In Don’t Leave Me This Way one of her lovers, Robert, sneers when she tells him she’s going to set up a course on female crime writers: he doesn’t believe that Agatha Christie is a fit subject for academic study (now that dates the novel! Things have moved on a lot since then). Later, she discusses the writers she’ll include on the course with a colleague:

‘[...] If it’s Americans you’re after, how about Sara Paretsky?’
‘I’ve got her. She’s wonderful.’
‘Amanda Cross?’
‘Oh, maybe.’ The conversation was having a calming effect on Loretta, and she elaborated. ‘I’m not so sure about academic mysteries. I tried one by Joan Smith the other day and she got all the details wrong...’

Guffaw. These novels aren’t great forgotten masterpieces, though I miss the characters, but I can only say that they hit the spot for me and if you see them, try them.

of face masks, cats and magic hens

Excitingly, things are changing here in lovely Belgium. This week my daughter E, clutching her two-months’ pocket money, and I went to actual shops for the first time since everything closed down. This was a careful exercise as each shop had subtly different variations on the theme of safety. How many people were permitted in the shop? Was it obligatory to carry a basket? If obligatory, did you have to disinfect the basket yourself or use one which the staff had already disinfected? Could you pay with cash? (Generally, not.) If you were paying with a card, did you have to use a little ear stick thing to tap in your PIN code?

Furthermore, although we plan to make our own face masks my husband K had bought a box of disposable ones and I had decided that this shopping trip might be a good opportunity to try out wearing one (we have to wear them on public transport and I will at some point before the end of June have to travel on the bus to school). There were instructions on the back but what sort of fool needs instructions to put on a face mask, for goodness’ sake? This sort of fool, obviously. We encountered a former student of mine who is a trained nurse. He helpfully pointed out that not only should I have pinched it over my nose but I was in fact wearing it inside out.

Wearing a face mask was irritating. Perhaps because I had put it on wrongly, it seemed to poke my right eye rather a lot. But it also changed my behaviour, I later realised. I felt surprisingly free of any urge to be friendly or chat. I did what I had to do in each shop with just enough politeness, and left. It is a little bit like when you wear sunglasses and think you’re invisible. Nobody could see the lower part of my face and whether or not I smiled, so I didn’t bother, and then I didn’t bother with much else in terms of sociable behaviour either. I felt disengaged, very separate from everyone except E. I didn’t even feel like talking to my former student, or other acquaintances we saw; there was too much to say and nothing to say and I wanted to go back home. Was it just the mask? Was it also the effect of isolating at home? Will it persist?

Home these days is a bit like a furry version of the set of Kill Bill. Nala (I didn’t choose her name) our cuddly fluffy tortoiseshell pussy-cat, has gone full psycho-killer and every sun rises on fresh corpses strewn around the kitchen. This morning was a record five. We bury the dead rats in the garden but individual graves and funerals are now a thing of the past and there’s a mass grave behind the greenhouse. I know rats are not exactly the most desirable of neighbours although I have a soft spot for them (before you think Dark Thoughts about my housekeeping skillz I should point out that our house is attached to a barn wherein our landlord keeps dozens of hay bales and the food for his chickens and donkeys in uncovered bins, total rat heaven) and if Nala doesn’t keep the numbers down then our landlord puts out poison which is a horrible death, but I can’t help feeling depressed at this wanton slaughter. (She does sometimes eat them, which at least ameliorates it a bit.)

(Nala, on patrol)

More cheerfully, we have some new hen friends. Frosty and Sparkle, the resident ladies (I didn’t choose their names either), had as good as given up laying in March. Sometimes an egg would carelessly drop out as they were strolling round, but like as not they’d tread on it. So a few weeks ago, when it was once more allowed, we acquired two pullets to keep them company: Dorothy Robin and Matilda Misty (no, nor their names). But Dorothy Robin turned out to be Not As Other Hens. Was she magic? Or was she just a supreme escapologist?

(Dorothy Robin and Matilda Misty at home)

As anyone with any chicken experience knows, introducing new hens is a fraught and upsetting time with bullying aplenty. Frosty immediately developed an intense hatred of Dorothy R and actually leapt on her (I’ve never seen that happen before). Then suddenly Dorothy was on the other side of the fence, looking surprised, among the gooseberries. How did that happen? Surely she could not have squeezed through one of the small holes in the fence?

(Frosty asks if you want some of this)

Over the next few days, Dorothy Robin kept appearing in odd places. We found her on top of the shed. We found her strolling through the potato trenches. We found her with next-door’s chickens, pretending not to know who we were. I did feel mean returning her to the run and we did separate the hens for a couple of days. On a few occasions, she took Matilda Misty with her, though Matilda didn’t like straying far from the run and would hang round the gate hoping to be let back in.

And then she just stopped. Perhaps, now that Frosty was being friendly, she felt no need to escape. Perhaps her magic powers wore off. Perhaps our alterations to the run thwarted her. But now she’s everyone’s best friend. And when the forces of evil next mass over Belgium, I think we know which little red hen will be the only one capable of defeating them.

(Dorothy Robin contemplates saving the world)

How are you all getting on? Are you reading, or not reading? Reading something different from usual? Far from getting stuck into all those demanding tomes I’d hoarded for years against some sustained reading time, I am unable to cope with anything more intellectually or emotionally demanding than selected vintage detective novels and children’s books. Worryingly, given that the Reading Week I’m organising is looming, I do not feel up to reading Sylvia Townsend Warner (she is just too disconcerting and too liable to slide a knife between your ribs for me at the moment, love her as I do). I’ve just rollicked my way through Alex Bell’s Polar Bear Explorers’ Club series, and am dusting down my elderly copy of Nine Tailors. I don’t seem capable of anything creative and I am still obsessed with reading the news to an unhealthy extent. Poor E has been finding it all very difficult and won’t be going back to school this term. For her, the Harry Potter audio books have been an absolute lifeline. She’s just starting book five but I am already worrying about what else I could find for her when she finishes them. Any suggestions (she’s ten) gratefully received.

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

(I love this painting. I saw it first on someone’s Twitter, I forget whose, so please accept my apologies if it was you. I feel it beautifully expresses my mood for much of this restricted period. After Breakfast (1890) by Elin Danielson-Gambogi, a Finnish artist whom Wikipedia tells me is best known for her portraits and realist paintings; found here)

Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t stuck terribly well to my initial coronavirus reading plans. Spending most of your time at home is not so very different to normal life for me, and I’d eagerly thought of it as giving me three extra evenings a week for reading instead of travelling to school and teaching: ideal for tackling some longer and more demanding books I had never quite felt up to. But somehow, it hasn’t worked out quite as I had anticipated. Switching to distance learning has been quite stressful; it’s involved more administration, adaptation and learning than I expected and furthermore a need to reconcile the very differing needs and capabilities of my students with the requirements of the school and the system. And there’s been other stuff too, which isn’t my business to write about here but which has been a struggle.

Still, the pleasant thing about reading plans is that you can toss them aside whenever you fancy and thus although I started No Name as soon as it arrived and love it, I had a bad patch the other day and suddenly the only book in the world I wished to reread was Gaudy Night. Fortunately, I have a copy and it was just the ticket.

I should say here that I am not an unqualified fan of Lord Peter Wimsey. I read quite a few of the Wimsey novels in my early twenties and while I enjoyed them I preferred the more silly-ass incarnation of Lord P to the character he had developed into by Gaudy Night, throwing out quotations from Latin and Elizabethan poetry and being nobly Right about everything. And don’t try to remonstrate by pointing out he has ‘faults’ – they’re the sort of ‘faults’ people claim in job interviews:  ‘And what would you say are your weaknesses, Helen?’ ‘Well now I am a perfectionist and find it difficult to stop working outside office hours.’ In fact, far from accepting any of Wimsey’s ‘faults’ that Dorothy Sayers might attribute to him, I have always secretly felt that he was deeply emotionally manipulative. And that marriage proposal! Ew.

However, this was the novel I now felt impelled to read and so I read it. Am I going soft in my old age? Was I unfair to Lord Peter all those years ago? By the end I felt actually affectionate towards him. It was a volte-face to compare with revising my opinion of Raskolnikov* and to be fair to Sayers is a tribute to her talent to write a complex and convincing character who can bear different interpretations.

I also thought that Gaudy Night was a splendid novel. Nominally a piece of detective fiction, the crime or series of crimes is seamlessly interwoven with Harriet’s central dilemma – the dilemma of educated women of her time. Career or marriage? In the 1930s, it was more or less impossible for a woman to have both. So Harriet Vane, still suffering from the notoriety of the murder for which she faced trial, returns to Oxford for her old college’s gaudy. Not all of her encounters with former friends and teachers are happy, but she falls back under the spell of her alma mater and the pleasures of scholarship. When a malicious prankster starts running amok the following term, Harriet is invited back by the fellows to investigate on the rather tenuous strength of her previous brush with justice and her detective novels giving her an insight into this sort of thing. Harriet, charmed by the beauty and intellectual rigour of the academic life, is happy to oblige and as a cover starts researching the gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. But the prankster proves elusive as well as increasingly macabre and Harriet begins to wonder if she can unmask her before something truly terrible happens.

(Undated photograph of women studying at Somerville College, Oxford, I would say roughly contemporary with Harriet Vane’s sojourn; from here)

Sayers uses the spookiness of a college at night, to increase the novel’s creepy atmosphere. The prankster seems driven by a startling malevolence but is unpredictable and directs her hatred at everyone. Fellows, students and staff begin to suspect each other and fear that they will fall victim to the almost supernatural rage. The authorities being unwilling to expose the college to scandal leaves the community isolated and turned in upon itself. The pranks defy any rational, scholarly interpretation. Far from being cerebral, the place simmers with suppressed hysteria.

(Photograph of Somerville College, from here)

And Harriet is also wrestling with the problem of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose annual proposal I have to say still strikes me as borderline stalkerish – although Harriet never entirely dismisses him, either. This time, however, he strikes me as more sensitive, even uncertain, than manipulative, and more natural than poseurish. More than just Wimsey, though, Harriet’s problem is what sort of person she wants to be. Staying at Shrewsbury College allows her to explore an alternative existence, Harriet the Scholar. Like all fantasies, it proves more complex when put into practice. It will also demand sacrifices, which she may not want to make.

There is a beautiful Chinese chess set in a nearby antique shop, which Harriet admires every day as she passes it. When Wimsey begs her to allow him to make her a gift, a proper gift, she chooses that. It’s an interesting moment because Harriet has been struggling for years with her gratitude to Wimsey and the obligations it brings, the complication to their relationship. Can she ever love him if she always has to be grateful to him? By choosing an expensive gift, she seems to relinquish that sense of obligation and allow herself to receive something valuable from him. And she chooses something of high quality, to show that she appreciates him too. Yet, it is something she has no need for and will not really use as she’s hardly a chess player: it’s decorative, even a little showy. Is she accepting his greater wealth? Allowing more frivolity and pleasure into her life? Still holding something back? Perhaps she’s choosing it partly to please him; realising that in receiving, she can give too.

Every part of the novel reflects this central question of mind or heart, and it’s compellingly done, with all the charm of the Oxford backdrop and the drive of detective fiction. I appreciate this novel much more than I did before, I think it’s one of the best detective novels I’ve read. And yes, I like Wimsey better too.

Have you ever changed your mind about a character in a novel?

* When I read Crime and Punishment in my late teens I thought he was a romantic tortured hero. Revisiting the book some twenty years later I discovered he was a spoilt, selfish brat. What will I make of him in my old age?

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?

The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin

‘The hands that wash dishes can be soft as your face,’ [the Major] suddenly sang at the Rector in a loud, crackling falsetto, ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid ... Liquid, Liquid,’ he sang. ‘I like that melodic turn, or whatever you call it, on “Liquid”. Very affecting.’
‘It’s your wits it’s affecting, if you ask me,’ said the Rector. ‘I suppose you haven’t been eating properly again. He doesn’t eat properly,’ he reported to Padmore.
‘Ah,’ said Padmore, pretending to have had a suspicion confirmed.
‘You’d better stay to lunch,’ the Rector told the Major. ‘Liver and bacon today, fill you up with vitamin B.’
‘Good,’ said the Major. He liked eating with the Rector, who not only had a first-rate cook but also declined to allow conversation during meals. Explaining this policy to his Bishop, who had been about to dine with him during the course of a visitation, ‘What is the good,’ the Rector had said, ‘of God giving us delicious-tasting foods, if every time we lift a forkful to our mouths we have to break off to cope with the inane prattling of our guest?’ [...]
‘A Dettol home is a happy home,’ the Major sang.
‘Can’t ask you other two,’ said the Rector, ‘because there’s not enough.’

The Glimpses of the Moon is part of the huge bookish plunder I dragged back to my lair with me after my holiday in England. It came courtesy of the Samaritan’s Bookshop in Ipswich, a place from where it is impossible to leave without at least one book, and on the cover the publisher has excitedly proclaimed, ‘Worth waiting for! His first novel for over twenty years’.  Does the book live up to this? Read on and find out, dear reader.

Edmund Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, is best known for The Moving Toyshop, but during the 1940s and 1950s he wrote seven other comic detective novels featuring the Oxford professor of English literature, Gervase Fen. A friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, Crisping was invited to join the Detection Club – whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr. He was also, under his real name, a composer of film scores; his work includes the music for some of the Carry On films. However, despite early success, Crispin/Montgomery’s life was far from happy. He suffered from ill health, was a chronic alcoholic and was to die of heart failure at only fifty-six. (All of this biographical information is from The Passing Tramp blog, where you can also find discussion of Crispin’s other works.)

The drink and the poor health seem to be the reasons why Crispin’s fans had to wait twenty-six years for The Glimpses of the Moon. The Passing Tramp describes it as ‘a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot’, so if you are new to Crispin’s work it probably isn’t the place to start. I have to say that I enjoyed it on the whole – though I felt the scenes with the hunt and the pylon were an unnecessary indulgence and dragged rather. It is certainly a very odd detective novel, perhaps not really a detective novel at all.

We begin in a Devonshire pub with Fen, the Major and Padmore, a journalist, eight weeks after the gruesome murder of Routh, a local farmer, for which an Australian farm-hand named Hagberd has been arrested and charged. Fen has with him a pig’s head in a sack. All of a sudden, an ancient man named Gobbo starts speaking to them, apparently providing Hagberd with an alibi; Padmore eagerly drags the Major and Fen off in pursuit of corroborating evidence. Soon there has been another murder and the pig’s head in the sack turns out to be not quite what it ought to be...

As The Passing Tramp notes, the structure of the book is indeed a series of comic vignettes involving ever more characters. Everyone is wildly eccentric and bizarrely named; the whole book is completely over the top. The solution to the murder is provided quite perfunctorily at the end of the novel and relies on information that has been withheld from the reader, thus making it impossible to work out in advance as in a more classic, puzzle mystery. Crispin holds back the details of Routh’s death until Chapter 3, which definitely feels like teasing. In a more conventional detective novel the amateur detective would be central; here, Fen is a minor character in the scenes in which he appears and absent for about a third of the book while the police detectives investigate, futilely. Although he does propose the line of inquiry which leads to the identification of the killer, he is hardly involved in the investigation and does not solve it himself – to the exasperation of the Major:

‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,’ said the Major plaintively. ‘We’re practically at the end of the book.’

There are similar metafictional moments spread out through the book, as when Fen tells Padmore that Crispin ‘writes up’ the accounts of his cases ‘in his own grotesque way’, and there are plenty of literary jokes too. Indeed, Fen explains that the solution to the murder relies on ‘the Chesterton Effect’, named after the author of the Father Brown mysteries. Crispin also pops in a surrogate-Montgomery character, Broderick Thouless, who composes scores for popular films – in this case horror rather than comedy. There is plenty of music in the novel too, from the singing Major to Fen deploring Mahler.

I couldn’t help but come away with the impression that in this book Crispin is really just playing about. The reluctance to divulge basic information about the first murder at the start of the book, the refusal to place his detective centre-stage or provide any clues and the constant divergence into comic scenes that have little to do with the murder plot, the abrupt solution at the end – all of these suggest to me that Crispin is deliberately toying with the reader’s expectations and indulging his own comic instincts (and also his wish to moan about various aspects of modern life, like pylons and hunt protesters). But as a result of jettisoning a more conventional plot Crispin I think loses drive and coherence in the book, and this is compounded by his inability to resist adding more and more characters. Still, it feels as if he was having fun writing it (I hope he was) and that sense of fun does communicate itself; I largely enjoyed it despite its weaknesses and I giggled a lot. It may not be up to his earlier work, but it is still very much worth reading.

Incidentally, the book seems to have no connexion with the Edith Wharton novel of the same title, which seems odd given how literary a writer Crispin is. I am not really sure what it means here, but I think it alludes to the moon as the source of lunacy and so is about flashes of madness.

Revelations of a Lady Detective, by William Stephens Hayward

No, I had never heard of either this book or this author before. My path here was a winding one, starting off with Hugh Greene’s collection of later Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. (Which I recommend!) Quite how I ended up ordering a second-hand copy of Revelations of a Lady Detective, I don’t now recall, but it began with looking up Loveday Brooke on the internet, thence to Victorian female detectives more generally. The only reason I was able to read it at all was its republication in 2013 by the British Library. It is now out of print again, but the BL copies mean that anyone can find a copy without having to pay vast sums for it.

Avoiding the urge to mention London buses, I’ll just say that this was first published in 1864, just months after Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective was issued, the very first work of fiction to feature a professional female detective as a heroine. Did William Stephens Hayward grind his teeth and throw his inkpot at the wall on discovering this? Quite possibly, and who can blame him. Yet this was not the beginning of a literary trend, for the next British lady detective did not recount her adventures in print for over twenty years (in Leonard Merrick’s Mr Bazalgette’s Agent, since you ask, and also reissued by the BL). All of this information appears in Mike Ashley’s excellent introduction to the BL edition.

(This appears to be the original cover illustration, in which Mrs Paschal is wearing the crinoline from which she wriggles in pursuit of a mysterious man in a black mask)

Our lady detective is Mrs Paschal, over forty and a widow who has taken up this ‘strange, exciting and mysterious’ career on the sudden death of her husband, which left her in dire financial straits. She tells us that her ‘brain was vigorous and subtle’, that she ‘was well born and educated, so that, like an accomplished actress, I could play my part in any drama in which I was instructed to take a part’ and that ‘For the parts I had to play, it was necessary to have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited, confidence’ and creativity. Later, she adds, ‘owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman’ and that she is often considered ‘a Jonathan Wild in petticoats’. She also casually lets slip that ‘in her younger days’ she had been ‘employed as a barmaid at a large refreshment saloon at one of the railway stations’, which raises a few questions either about her good birth and education or about her marriage. Certainly, whatever her cases throw at her – being locked in an underground tunnel, eavesdropping a band of murderous Italians in a ruined mill, disguising herself as a nun or entering a thieves’ den – she remains cool and ingenious. However, this does not win her everyone’s respect:

I have met people who have turned up their noses at me for being a female detective or thief-taker, as they have thought fit to term me, but I never forgot the insult, and have had my eye upon them [...]

Revelations of a Lady Detective is not a novel but a series of short stories, the reminiscences of Mrs Paschal. They are very different from twentieth- and twenty-first-century detective stories in that the identity of the villain is never secret, nor are there any surprising twists. Rather, we are invited to admire the ingenuity with which Mrs Paschal gets her (wo)man. There are few murders; instead, most of the cases concern threatened property or inheritance. As Mrs Wareham tells Mrs Paschal of her son:

I am not angry with him [...] I am only sorry and regretful. I know he will see his folly some day, and then I shall forgive him all his unkindness, all his insolence, and all his ungentlemanly conduct, without one word of reproach, because I know he is not to blame. [...] There is one thing, though, which is becoming very serious. She has designs upon his property. [...] it would be extremely mortifying to me to see the splendid estates which have been in the family for centuries pass into other hands.

Not everyone in Revelations of a Lady Detective is as concerned with material wealth as Mrs Wareham but I found it interesting to reflect that in our modern culture we gravitate towards stories about murder, whereas William Stephens Hayward judged his readers to be at least as interested in stories about theft and fraud. I wonder how representative this is of Victorian detective fiction in general?

Reading these stories I was struck by how clearly they are related to gothic and sensation fiction. So there is a mysterious countess, stolen diamonds, a wicked abbess, a secret society of Italian revolutionaries, moonlit catacombs, poison and identical twins, all stocks of the gothic. Only the supernatural is missing. Also interesting is the number of female characters besides Mrs Paschal, both victims and criminals; while they tend not to have great depth, the Countess of Vervaine and Incognita in particular are memorable characters and excite Mrs Paschal’s grudging admiration and sympathy, even as she works against them.

William Stephens Hayward may not have been the best writer of his generation – and there are some sloppy bits, most noticeably when a character’s father dies on one page and is alive again on the next, and the name Wareham is overused – but these stories are entertaining enough to be something more than literary curios and I’m very glad to have read them.