a gallimaufry

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

round-up: August 2024

This month I’m still not up to reading anything very challenging, but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t read some excellent books.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (reread)

Still seeking something to quench my The Secret History thirst, at the beginning of this month I turned to a novel with some similarities in its set-up. Blue Van Meer’s life with her professor father has been peripatetic, with never more than a term or two in any one town. But then they arrive in Stockton, NC, where Blue is to spend her final year of school preparing for Harvard. Lonely Blue is flattered to be invited to join the Bluebloods, a group of students favoured by the film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who hosts them at her house every week. And then on a camping trip in the forest, Blue finds Hannah hanged from a tree. I enjoyed this novel a great deal more than when I first read it and it was massively hyped: now I can see it more clearly. Blue’s narrative is precocious, snobbish and perceptive, and the story twists satisfyingly, though I could have done with a lot fewer of the mainly invented bibliographical references with which the text is increasingly unconvincingly and annoyingly peppered. Also features probably the most insufferable father figure in literature.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

Finally had the chance to fill the void left by The Secret History when this arrived in the post. Lacking the narrative drive of TSH, The Little Friend is a very slow and immersive novel to read, but I alone perhaps of all readers everywhere think it’s a better book, stuffed with extraordinarily vivid writing. When she was a baby, Harriet’s brother was murdered and his killer never caught. This summer, twelve-year-old Harriet intends to avenge him, a journey that takes her to dark places and dangerous people. Tartt explores the effects of the original traumatic event on Robin’s family and friends, and the deeply unequal society in which they live. Awful and amazing.

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwoord (reread)

Marian is engaged to be married but her subconscious seems to have doubts. An entertaining look at the life prospects of a young female graduate in 1960s Toronto, it was Atwood’s first published novel and impresses with its wry, pragmatic humour. In some ways, life has improved so much for us since then. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

Barbara Comyms: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner

I have been waiting for years for this, a life of one of my favourite writers, and this is a good solid biography. Comyns drew closely on her own life for some of her fiction, and that life was pretty colourful, which makes for an interesting biography: a childhood filled with animals and eccentric, neglectful parents; early artistic ambition blighted by extreme poverty and a useless husband; racketeering in World War II; marriage to a second husband who was suspected of being a spy; ex-patriot life in Spain. Even in the middle of the last century, publishing was fickle and it wasn’t until Virago championed Comyns’s works in the 1980s that her talent was properly recognised. Time to reread her novels again…

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (reread)

Read this first so long ago that I had forgotten most of it but odd whiffs came back to me, usually minor details. What a smart writer Chandler was, how ably he constructs his world, every word really works for its place. Not always convinced by his female characters, if I want to carp.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

My first le Carré! Not what I was expecting, very cynical, very sordid, very good.

In the Forests of Serre, by Patricia McKillip

In every way, the diametric opposite of le Carré. McKillip’s fiction, especially her later works, are what I read when I am sad. They are magical, ambiguous, beautiful and hopeful. Even the villains are noble. It is quite hard to describe them, as they tend to have a chorus of characters rather than a central character, who must somehow achieve harmony together in order to resolve a problem which they may not even understand after it has been resolved. A big wallow in loveliness.

Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Byron, and A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

In Cinderella is Dead, a cruel king oversees a society where the legend of Cinderella is used to oppress women. In A Study in Drowning, a student of architecture is commissioned to design a house by the sea for the heir of her favourite writer. I’ve chosen to put these two YA novels together because I thought they both had lots going for them, considered theme both flawed, yet felt more forgiving of the flaws of one than of the other. And I have been wondering why that was, and yes it depends on the flaws. I suppose that it always comes down to a quality of the writing, that it does a bit more than just tell you a story but creates a mood or atmosphere, or conveys more than just what is on the surface. And secondly I suppose that if you have a mysterious dead author, Welsh mythic vibes, fairies and a vast, mouldering house, I am always going to cut you more slack.

Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit, by Clare Harlow

There’s a lot of really good children’s fantasy being published at the moment and this is a prime example. In Shelwich, people have been being snatched by monstrous grilk, including Ista Flit’s father. And magic, which is fuller when the tide is high, is growing stronger. Can Ista and her friends find the missing people and discover the secrets hidden in the caverns under Shelwich before it’s too late? I think you know the answer, but it’s a fun adventure getting there.

October, October, by Katya Balen

Have been wanting to read this since it was first published and it was absolutely worth the wait. October lives an idyllic life in the woods with her father until he has an accident and she has to go and live in London with her mother, from whom she is estranged. Magical and astoundingly written in a child’s stream of consciousness, so hard to do well and this was just perfect.

 

round-up: July 2024

This month I stuck with easy reads but ventured away from rereads to new books.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

After finishing The Secret History I wanted to carry on reading more of it but of course, that isn’t possible. Reading Babel was my attempt to stay in that mood. I admit, I started it anxiously, the subtitle and Kuang’s reputation suggested that my squeamishness would take a battering. Fellow wimps: it is not too graphic. The story is set in an alternative nineteenth century and it has a brilliant concept, which Kuang uses to explore both the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism. The concept is this: if you inscribe in silver two words from different languages with approximately the same meaning, the gap in meaning becomes charged, magical. So you can use these silver bars to power everything. Had Kuang left it at that, it would have been terrific, but she couldn’t resist elaborating on the idea at length, which (a) became a clog on the story and (b) resulted in some contradictions. I am not usually that bothered about show vs tell but there was an awful lot of telling in this book and this held it back from greatness, though it was good.

Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

Like Babel, this is a novel which I think needed a few more edits to refine. This is the sequel to Bardugo’s first novel for adults, Ninth House, and again it’s set in a version of Yale where there are secret societies practising magic. The whole Yale university scene is so weird I was astonished to find elements I assumed Bardugo had invented are in fact true. There are indeed secret societies and they are called things like Skull and Bones and they do have special houses they call tombs… Anyway, Ninth House was clever and fun but Hell Bent, while very readable, is messy. The central problem is too much plot, with insufficient foreshadowing so it feels as if things are being made up on the hoof just to enable another plot twist, and characters reduced to mere puppets of the narrative. Plenty to enjoy but it did feel like a missed opportunity.

Five Bad Deeds, by Caz Frear

Married with three children, up for a good teaching job and planning the extensive renovation of her dream house, Ellen has an enviable life with solid friendships. Unfortunately, someone sets out to destroy it. Also unfortunately, pretty much everyone in this novel – which is told from the viewpoints of several different characters – loathes Ellen, and she’s pretty unkind about them too. Although the constant sniping did get me down a bit, this well-plotted thriller bowls along at a neat pace and gave a few deft swipes at middle-England’s values.

The Harp of the Grey Rose, by Charles de Lint

Loved this. Very much in the mood of The Hobbit or the Prydain Chronicles, it’s a gentle fantasy about a harpist who falls in love with a young lady who is not all she seems to be and embarks on a quest to save her and overcome an evil that will destroy the world. The music, the delicately melancholic feeling, the talking bear and magical creatures – this is a fantasy world you would like to live in.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green

Although I’ve read Arthurian romances, lais and poems, I’ve never made it through a whole cycle and when I saw this in an Oxfam bookshop it just fell into my hand. A quick and easy read, as you’d expect. Surprises: Arthur doesn’t seem to be that great a king and just sends out his knights to sort out problems. It’s a relief when Nimue carts Merlin off, since as soon as anyone does anything, he bobs up and says, ‘Oh no you’re doomed now and Logres shall founder and the darkness will return,’ which has a damping effect one would imagine. Gearing up for Malory now.

Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston

Amari joins the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs when her brother disappears, determined to find him. As a trainee, she’ll have to pass a series of competitive assessments. Since she is smart and possesses extraordinarily strong powers, this should be straightforward: unfortunately the sort of powers she has are reviled and make her an object of suspicion. Very Men in Black meets magical school story, this is funny and endearing.

High Rise Mystery, by Sharna Jackson

Meticulous Nik and her dramatic sister Norva are horrified to discover the body of their art teacher, Hugo Knightley-Webb, at the bottom of the rubbish chute in their block of flats. Knowing everyone in the Tri, they are ideally placed to solve the murder and make a perfect team. The story crackles along, and you will hear Nik and Norva in your head long after you’ve closed the book.

The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett

Not sure why I felt like reading about Christmas in July, but I did. How did a skeleton end up inside the Fairway Players’ panto prop beanstalk? This short novel follows a similar structure to The Appeal, with our two plucky young lawyers Charlotte and Femi once again sifting through emails, text messages and other documents to ascertain the truth. The solution is pretty obvious but this isn’t important as the pleasure lies in the Players’ constant backstabbing and sniping, culminating in an unforgettable performance of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Only proviso: read The Appeal first.

 

On governesses in adult & children's fiction

I was thinking about fictional governesses, as I’ve just read two gothicky novels of the 1960s featuring them as heroes: Joan Aiken’s The Silence of Herondale and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. Although it was serendipitous that I read one after the other, there are striking similarities between them. Both play on the reader’s knowledge of the ur-governess novel, Jane Eyre, and feature resourceful heroines, madness, secrets and romance – plus the addition of sinister accidents which keep befalling the child for whom they’re responsible.

Joan Aiken’s approach is playful. In The Silence of Herondale, Deborah Lindsey finds herself in an isolated house on the snowy Yorkshire moors with a child prodigy to care for, a dark and stormy young man and ‘the Slipper Killer’ on the loose from Broadmoor. Mary Stewart’s heroine, Linda, refers overtly to Jane Eyre as she takes up her position in the Château Valmy – as well as drawing on other literary references such as Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi. Nine Coaches Waiting hews much more closely to Jane Eyre than does the Aiken novel. The Rochester figure – darker and more troubling than Aiken’s Jeremy – is actually split between Léon, Raoul and Philippe. There is a party with a beautiful blonde, a mad woman, a flight through the countryside. It is all very cleverly done and it is one of my favourites of Stewart’s novels.

Both Linda and Deborah are young, brave, practical and kind. What about other fictional governesses? I hypothesised that governesses in adult fiction are generally sympathetically portrayed, and those in children’s fiction are not, and this is because of the power differential. For adults, the governess is a vulnerable figure, caught between two layers of society. For children, the governess is a symbol of unwanted authority. But how true is that? Bearing in mind this is only drawing on novels that I’ve read and can remember reading...

The first governess in fiction I can think of is Miss Taylor, in Emma, who becomes Mrs Weston. She is sympathetically portrayed, kind and sensible. Then there is Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Charles Dickens’s Ruth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit. Again, we warm to them and sympathise with their plight, poorly treated and exploited by their employers.

But complications with my thesis now set in. Being a governess to her own children, who do not know her, is the punishment endured by Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) for her adultery – she has slid down the social scale. Miss Wade’s treatment in Little Dorrit contributes to souring her. Not every governess will have a happy ending or survive her work unscathed. Further: she may pose a threat, stepping outside her class and failing to know her place. Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair; William Makepeace Thackaray) and Lucy Graham (Lady Audley’s Secret; Mary Elizabeth Braddon) turn the tables, using their somewhat liminal social position to marry up and improve their status, and this is portrayed as threatening. Worst of all must be witchy Madame de la Rougierre, the murderous governess in Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu). Not only does she have the dubious social position of being a governess, but she’s French.

The last governess I can think of in adult fiction is the narrator of The Turn of the Screw. Here the character’s uncertain social status is reflected in her experience of an uncertain reality – whether it is her own disintegrating mental health or the supernatural intruding grotesquely into her charges’ lives.

Disappointingly, I am very limited when it comes to governesses in children’s literature. This makes my hypothesis – even thinner. The two magnificent villainesses who spring to mind are Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (The Midnight Folk by John Masefield) and Miss Slighcarp (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken). Miss Pouncer is literally a broomstick-flying witch, who looks both old and young, confiscates toys and forces poor Kay to learn Latin declensions. She returns in The Box of Delights as the wife of wicked Abner Brown. Miss Slighcarp, tall and bony, cannot practise magic but is similarly cruel – wolflike, even – and intends to deprive Bonnie of her inheritance. These ladies are perhaps heirs to Madame de la Rougierre.

They are counterbalanced by the lovely Miss Heliotrope, Maria’s kind and elderly governess in The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). Unfortunately, I have an unusual copy of The Little White Horse: I often notice it – and even think, ah, there it is! – but when I actually want to find it, it vanishes. So I cannot refresh my memory of Miss Heliotrope at the moment, except that I think she has forget-me-not blue eyes, mild ill health and a large nose, and finds happiness marrying the Old Parson.

Thus, I can only find three examples of governesses of children’s literature and one of these apparently disproves my hypothesis that they are always portrayed unsympathetically. However, I would argue that Miss Heliotrope bucks the trend because she is very clearly without much power, thus closer to the governesses in adult fiction than the domineering figures in children’s literature. And my brief survey of adult literature suggests that while some novels treat governesses with sympathy, alert to their ambiguous position in the household, others perceive them as disturbing or even threatening the established order because of this position.

So – do you agree? Can you think of some more fictional governesses? What happens if we add lady companions to the mix, I wonder?

(Illustration from Jane Eyre by Edward A. Wilson; Illustrated Modern Library, 1944; illustration of Becky Sharp up to no good from Vanity Fair by Lewis Baumer; Hodder & Stoughton, 1913; illustration from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Pat Marriott; Jonathan Cape, 1962)

Death and Mary Dazill, by Mary Fitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from the Henhouse, by Elspeth Barker

Do not be misled by the cover of this book, or even the title, both of which suggest the memoirs of Barbara from The Good Life. If you pick up a copy of Notes from the Henhouse, you are picking up a collection of essays and stories whose loose theme is perhaps Et in Arcadia ego written by someone with a sharp eye, a dry wit and a deep love for animals and poetry.

Born in 1940, Barker grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a prep school for boys. (I can’t help thinking of Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater here, although there probably wasn’t much similarity at all.) Here she rescued a jackdaw with a crossed bill, named him Claws, fed him with a silver mustard spoon and raised him (her bedroom becoming ‘a guano-ridden cavern’) to become her constant companion:

The most marvellous of all his gifts to me was in essence metaphysical. I would see him, a dark speck among the tumbling clouds, and see him swoop from the heavens in an unfaltering ellipse to my shoulder. To call a bird from the air is so extraordinary, rivalled in my experience only by the appearance of one’s abstraction of thoughts and images in the tangible form of a book. And even then, the bird wins.

Claws lived with Barker for eleven years before tragedy struck when she left to study Classics at Oxford. From childhood she ‘used to pray to the moon with tightly clasped hands and pray “Bring me a poet”, and when she was about twenty-one she met and fell in love with George Barker. They moved to a ‘ramshackle’ farmhouse in Norfolk where they had five children, zillions of animals and plenty of parties oiled with ‘Bulgarian vintage’. Barker taught Latin and wrote a single, brilliant novel, O, Caledonia, she also clearly charmed everyone who met her and, while being clear-sighted about life’s realities, sprinkled a sort of wild magic over everything she encountered. Perhaps you might describe her writing as revealing the quotidian as pulsing with the dark, eternal forces of the classical past.

I mention all of this because Barker drew on her own life for her fiction and non-fiction; often it is hard to guess where one begins and the other ends in the pieces in Notes from the Henhouse and one can’t help feeling that she didn’t much care about drawing a line between them since they are both full of truth. She was a storyteller and it’s the story that matters.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker from The Times, here)

Barker writes with great pleasure about animals. Her hens are ‘romantic, racist, cruel, heroic beings’, who huddle ‘malevolently along the kitchen dresser shelves, beady eyes fixed in triumph on the egg cups smashed below’. Her brave Bantams are slaughtered by dogs as they attempt to protect their chicks. She rescues a frog, massaging it back to life, only for a passing hen to swallow it down. Portia the pig, wine drinker and kitchen haunter, ‘a gambolling pig, a pig fleet of foot, bucking and caracoling’, dislikes ‘most men’ and bites them. There’s a ‘gallimaufry of dogs’:

Dogs are us in heart and soul, but better. How privileged we are to love them and know them and make guesses about them, and how painfully do we even as infants learn that the price of love is loss, but also that love and memory will outlive death.

(Some of the dogs do sound horrific: there is the Dobermann pinscher which roams the village terrorising people and trapping them in the telephone box; for reasons undisclosed but perhaps not too mysterious, Barker is forbidden from keeping lurchers after ‘problems with a nearby commercial enterprise involving pheasants’; and of course there are the hen murderers.)

This love infused with the knowledge of death runs through the whole book. Barker writes about the death of a mother, perhaps in part her own; about the loss of her beloved animals; about her widowhood and immense longing for her departed husband. Even her driving lessons end in a fatal accident. In ‘Dogs of Athens’, the narrator (who may be Barker, but not exactly) arrives in Athens to visit her acquaintance Christina, passing in the airport some ‘cheerful’ stray dogs and :

Three ancient crones, wrapped in black. The Three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and something. Why couldn’t I remember the third one’s name? It is depressing to survive for fifty years only to begin to forget things you have always known.

But Christina is now in hospital, which the narrator reaches despite her fifth-century Attic Greek. Christina is ‘in disguise; she had dolled herself up as some kind of invalid country and western lady’. The narrator tells her a story, and then:

I felt a pang of terror. [Christina’s] eyes seemed to have receded into her skull; she gazed out as though from a cavern, withdrawn from the rest of the world, unreachable. And then she was back...

Then Christina tells a story, of how she once met Rudolf Nureyev on a path by a lake.

When the narrator gets home, in London, she learns that Christina has died. ‘I thought of Christina and the crones and the dogs of Athens, sleeping by their own cathedral, littered in shaggy heaps about its glassy forecourt’. Nothing is insignificant; on the contrary, everything is freighted with ancient and enduring symbolism. An airport lounge, three old ladies and some dogs suggest other journeys to other realms; in the particular is the universal.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker at home, from the Telegraph, here)

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Shiny New Books: Pipers and a Dancer, by Stella Benson

I have a review up on Shiny New Books: it’s Michael Walmer's reissue of Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson. A strange and original novel of 1924, in which Ipsie Wilson voyages out to China to marry the boorish fiancé she hardly knows. Peopled by comic characters, haunted by the losses of the First World War, this novel is well worth your time and I loved it.

The Long View, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This is only the second novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard I have ever read: this is a slightly embarrassing admission because everyone loves her work and has read all the Cazalet Chronicles. Not I.

Here is an even worse admission: I disliked the novel I had read, and that novel was Falling, which I have seen described as a ‘late masterpiece’.

 The reason: what I call Jo Bettany Syndrome. For those of you who did not devote a substantial part of their youth to endlessly reading and rereading Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, Jo Bettany was the heroine of the first dozen or so novels. Jo was clever and kind, a talented writer, immensely popular with girls and teachers alike; she played pranks but good-hearted ones, she sang with a beautiful bell-like voice which regularly reduced listeners to tears and she saved someone from death in every other book or so. When she grew up, she settled near her beloved school where she offered wise guidance to foolish schoolgirls, she wrote bestselling yet critically acclaimed novels, married a doctor and had about 35 children all of whom went to the Chalet School. In other words, she was so perfect that even child-Helen suspected that there was some sort of wish-fulfilment going on here on the part of EMBD. And when I sense it in a novel, I find I really dislike it. And in Falling, I felt the character of Daisy was just too good, even her weaknesses weren’t really weaknesses, and this irritated me. (Subsequently, I discovered that Falling was based on something which had really happened to EJH, perhaps this is why?) And because I am superficial, this meant that although I appreciated EJH’s great skill as a writer, I didn’t like the book.

Still, everyone loves EJH’s work, so when I saw The Long View in my local charity shop among the elderly paperbacks by Dick Francis and Hammond Innes, I decided to give her another go.

‘Let us do whatever you would most enjoy.’
This made them both actually laugh; it was his age-old preface to doing exactly what he would most enjoy.

Written in 1956, The Long View is the portrait of a marriage, from even before Antonia and Conrad first meet to their imminent divorce. The novel is divided into five sections, gradually moving back in time, so that we begin with 1950 and then move back to 1942, 1937, 1927 and 1926. It is a really clever way to structure the book, because of course your curiosity is aroused: why did their marriage fail? In fact, why did they marry in the first place? (I can’t help but wonder whether Martin Amis, EJH’s stepson, was inspired by The Long View to write his own time-backwards novel, Time’s Arrow, albeit he handles it very differently.) Apparently, EJH chose this structure to discover ‘whether one could not better understand people and their situations by slowly stripping them of their experiences’: the result is an astonishing success.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard; found here)

At the outset, the Flemings appear to have an idyllic existence: class, taste, plenty of money, good looks, busy social lives. However, this is a façade; behind it lurks pain, infidelity and bullying. The first, 1950 section, is the only section which is written from multiple points of view; it presents our main characters as other people as well as themselves see them, and it also gives a more rounded perspective on their two children, Julian and Deirdre, who are poised to make many of the same mistakes their parents made. Neglected and despised by their father, protected as far as possible from him by their mother, they are more than usually distant from their parents than most children of that time and class.

For the rest, most of the novel is shown from Antonia’s point of view (‘Mrs Fleming’ as she is reduced to being called in the later part of her marriage) and she is presented usually in terms of her relationship to a man. Her beauty, her clothes, her jewellery, her gestures, are all very closely observed, as if she were an object. She is the sort of person who looks lovely even when she is tired or crying. Someone asks her what she does and she tries to explain that she doesn’t look after the children, she doesn’t cook:

‘I do the arranging of it. There is a lot of arranging, you know. I read, and look at pictures, and garden, and listen to music – and Conrad minds awfully about clothes so I spend a certain amount of time on them – [...] I suppose I’m a sort of scene-shifter for Conrad,’ she finished. ‘He likes an elaborate setting, and he likes it to vary. I try to do that for him.’

She has schooled herself to please men, particularly her husband, and attached her self-worth to succeeding in this, but it is at a cost to herself. Certainly the crushing of her spirit began long before Conrad entered her life, and the final section of the book, 1926, is powerful. Despite this, by the time I finished the novel I hoped that her divorce might finally free Antonia.

We also dip into Conrad’s perspective. This works well because not only does it prevent him from being a monster, we also see how reasonable, charming, restless and clever he is, how attractive that can be, and how that masks his total selfishness and contempt for women. We experience him as Antonia might have done, the surprise when he turns.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard and her first husband, Peter Scott; found here)

What I loved about this novel was EJH’s skill in describing the world as her characters see it, every word perfectly chosen. Plunged into the middle of this complex relationship as the reader is, the minute level of detail in which it’s chronicled makes it feel claustrophobic. EJH expertly delineates mood and emotion, and the constant shifts in them, in a way that seemed truthful and pinpoint accurate, and is always coolly observed. She shows someone absorbing pain and damage over years, feeling exquisitely differentiated degrees of shame, guilt, humiliation, someone who lives emotionally on the brink at all times, trying to provide that ‘elaborate setting’ and fearing the smallest slip.

So, yes, I shall be reading more of her work in the future... And yes, I did experience a soupçon of Jo Bettany Syndrome, but not much and this time it didn’t bother me, perhaps I am becoming a better person.

Clues to Christabel, by Mary Fitt

I can’t remember now where I came across Clues to Christabel. Originally published in 1944 (and set in the 1930s), it and a handful of other novels by Mary Fitt have been recently re-issued by Moonstone Press, an independent publisher specialising in republishing vintage crime and detective fiction. (Fortunately, as second-hand copies of most of Fitt’s novels are pricey.) Here is what they have to say about her work:

Her intellectual background produced elegantly written crime fiction with a strong sense of the literary and the overtones of Greek tragedy – dealing with love, loss, pride, the abuse of power and fraught relationships. But it is her method of upending the traditional format of whodunits that was unusual (perhaps unique) among Golden Age mystery writers.  Fitt’s novels do not follow the traditional “crime-followed-by-resolution-through-deduction” pattern; although they start with a death, it might appear to be from natural causes or an accident or a suicide. Some are virtually devoid of any detection and have no detective to speak of — the mystery in Fitt’s books is not whodunit, but whether it was done, and if so, why it was done. How a character is formed by environment and connected chains of circumstances is the puzzle to be solved.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman. Born in 1897 and daughter of a brewer’s traveller, despite her humble beginnings and her sex, Freeman taught herself Ancient Greek, studied Classics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire where she was appointed a lecturer and later received her Doctor of Letters, wrote twenty-nine mystery novels, was elected to the Detection Club and co-habited with her partner, Liliane Clopet, for a good thirty years. So, an impressive woman and an unusual approach to crime fiction, a difficult combination to resist.

(Portrait of Kathleen Freeman found on Wikipedia)

Clues for Christabel certainly falls into that category described as a whether or why dunnit rather than a whodunnit. The central character, Christabel Strange, has died of undulant fever (nowadays more commonly called brucellosis) a year before the novel begins. Only thirty-two, she was a very successful novelist; so successful that she was able to buy her ancestral home out of mortgage and allow the rest of her family to live there. In her Will she leaves the house to the family with the proviso that her friend Marcia Wentworth is permitted the use of one wing. She also bequeaths her diaries to her family, but Marcia is to write her biography. Alas, the family loathes Marcia and refuses to let her see the diaries or interview them about Christabel.

Not one to give up easily, Marcia assembles a group of people who knew Christabel at the family pile. The group includes Dr George Cardew, a childhood friend of Christabel’s, and is split between the family, headed by the manipulative and possibly mad Granny Strange, and Christabel’s more ‘bohemian’ friends. Hostility bubbles away and ends of course in murder.

The name Christabel conjures up Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem and while I wouldn’t say there is an overt connection between it and Clues to Christabel, it adds an atmospheric layer to the novel. The themes of a sort of vampirism or parasitism, and hatred returned for kindness, as well as something of Christabel’s character, do seem to be shared. Maybe there is also some repressed lesbianism?

If her depiction of her characters is pin-sharp, it’s Fitt’s structuring of her novel which distinguishes it from other crime novels of the time. Fitt shifts between omniscient, first-person and close third-person forms effortlessly, including entire sections narrated by one person and, near the end, Christabel’s stolen diary is reproduced. These shifts give us the sense of being presented with a range of ‘clues’ to the novel’s heart: the character of Christabel herself. What really happened to her, and why did she write a Will that frustrates everyone included within it? Eventually, the identity of the murderer is revealed but I don’t think it’s difficult to guess at all, because the real mystery is Christabel. You will have to draw your own conclusions from this clever but ultimately saddening novel.

(The other mystery is: what is a chippette box? The chemist shop issues Christabel’s pills in one. Even the OED can’t tell me what it is. Some sort of pulped wood? Cardboard?