The Tin Men by Michael Frayn – #ABookADayInMay Day 21

StuckinaBook All , , 1 Comment

The Tin Men by Michael FRAYN on Between the Covers

I’ve read a couple of books by Michael Frayn from later in his career, but it’s quite a departure to read his debut novel – The Tin Men (1965). It is a raucous satire of – well, of quite a few things. And it is prescient in quite an astonishing way about one thing in particular.

We are at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research – chosen by Frayn because of the irony of being named after the artist William Morris, I assume, given his abhorrence of mass-production. The William Morris who made cars would presumably approve. Everything that is being achieved by the institute is a ludicrous extension of normal office practices, and Frayn writes in highly ironic terms about it all:

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

The various figures in charge of departments are a little interchangeable – or, at least, they are all eccentric and incompetent, though their eccentricities and incompetences differ a little in kind. There’s silent, almost immobile Chiddingfold, in charge of everything. There’s Riddle, the sole woman, cigarette always dangling from her lips and given to unexpected displays at company dos. There’s Hugh Rowe, using office hours to write a novel – but deciding it’s easiest to start by writing the fawning jacket copy or glowing reviews. It’s a joke that should get old, but someone remains amusing – even when we get to examples of his prose, which are clearly satirising something and ended up being maybe too good for satire.

My favourite example of the automation is run by Macintosh, doing research into automating morality – by creating Samaritan (and later Samaritan II and Samaritan III) which are programmed to sacrifice themselves in the event of a shipwreck, so long as they can identify that the other objects involved are humans. It’s an example of the humour in The Tin Men – which I found witty rather than laugh-out-loud, and which could be wearing if it weren’t for a certain variety in its applications. I kept being reminded of David Lodge’s Nice Work (though thankfully without Lodge’s fixed belief that writing about going to the toilet is hilarious) – and I thought it was a similar idea done much better and much less annoyingly. Of course, Nice Work came out a couple of decades later, so Lodge might well have been influenced by Frayn.

The humour does feel very of its time – and very of a certain milieu. Perhaps in the 1960s it was a daring, new humour. It now very much feels like the voice of older, middle-class men who can’t punch up, because there is no ‘up’, and so just punch around. We are expected to recognise these worlds, not as an outsider but as people mere steps away from this level of absurdity. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the tone, particularly after falling foul with Lodge, but I ended up rather liking it. Somehow it feels more dated than humour from decades earlier, but you can see how it could have been very fresh in the 1960s.

And what is the most prescient thing? Another worker, Goldwasser, is working on the automation of newspapers – and it sounds extraordinarily like AI:

The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article. With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them.

Frayn’s vision is still tethered to the concrete, piecing through physical cards to form a newspaper-article-by-prediction, but it is still astonishingly similar to what generative AI is doing now. Musings about whether the automation machines can take over the ‘work’ of prayer are clearly satire, but still incredibly close to current conversations about the ways in which AI might remove spiritual or soulful elements of creativity.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to say that this isn’t simply a string of funny ideas and people – though the funny ideas are probably the strong point of The Tin Men. There is also an ongoing plotline about the Queen being on her way to open the new wing. It gives some momentum to a novel that could otherwise feel a bit scattergun.

The Tin Men has very little in common – stylistically or thematically – with the later Frayn books I’ve read, and I’m glad I read it. As well as being a fun, silly, eerily farsighted novel, it helps fill in a part of literary history that I’m less aware of and which seems less ripe for rediscovery than others.

The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann – #ABookADayInMay Day 20

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

The Swan In The Evening: B Format: Fragments of an Inner Life (Virago Modern Classics) : Lehmann, Rosamond: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Crossing Day 20 feels like we’re on the home stretch, and I am still really enjoying doing A Book A Day in May – certainly finding it much easier than last year, when my eyes were still pretty ropey eight months after Covid. And there’s something I particularly like about reading books that have been on my shelves for ages – such as Rosamond Lehmann’s The Swan in the Evening (1967), which I bought in 2011.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Fragments of an Inner Life’, and fragments is the word. The first section is a fairly impressionistic take on her childhood – stray memories coming together to form some sort of image, however imprecise. Or, rather, she goes for very precise scenes that flow into other precise scenes, without really trying to cohere into anything very detailed. Some of it is in the present tense, giving it a childlike immediacy.

I am in the Parish Hall; it is a Sale of Work. I circulate among the visitors with a trayful of lavender bags which I proffer to the long lean sallow nurse in a grey uniform. I know her: she looks after a little boy with a squint and a funny way of talking, who is said to have tantrums and beat his head against his nursery wall, who once presented me with a letter that said, in grimy reeling print: ‘Dear Rosy sprinkel me with kisses if you want my luv to gro yore everlasting Joey.’ The nurse bends down to me, smiling, and says in a low confidential voice: ‘I’m stony broke.‘ At once such terror grips me that I almost swoon. Why? How was it that this harmless if unfamiliar slang phrase took sinister form as she uttered it and dropped on me with the chill weight of granite! Absurd, morbid child… Mad, like all children…: or so very little madder.

Among the memories given their sudden spotlights is one that a longer-lasting impression: the death of the six-year-old daughter of a man who works on the family estate. Without being able to truly understand the depths of this tragedy, young Rosamond sees its impact. It lingers with her as an incomprehensible sadness – and, later, becomes something all too comprehensible for her.

The second section of The Swan in the Evening tells us about the death of Lehmann’s daughter, Sally. Or, rather, the death is focalised through Lehmann’s own absence – her daughter is fairly newly married, in a distant country, and Lehmann is innocently going about everyday life. There are hints at a premonition, understood only in retrospect, and a veil drawn over the shock of the phone call – and the days and weeks after that.

But she picks up some time later, where she starts trying to communicate with Sally beyond on the grave – explained in no more metaphysical terms than that Sally is still alive, though not in the way such things are usually considered. From here, Lehmann goes through a curious mix of sharing how she believes Sally is communicating with her – and a defence of this belief. I’ll be honest, the combination was quite confusing. Lehmann is adamantly not part of any traditional religion, but she does piece together her beliefs from various different writers and influential figures.

It’s clear that her real reason for writing The Swan in the Evening is to relay her experiences and explain why they are reasonable. How could it be anything other than poignant. But it’s also quite abstract, even when she seems to be mounting her defence. This is from earlier in the book, but it’s a good example of the style I mean. Fluid, flowing from one thought to another, quite hard to pin down. Rather less firmly constructed than her novels, from my limited reading of them.

Myself in extremis, floored; myself saved, rejoicing: each of these opposed conditions deemed while it lasts, to be perpetual; yet even then a shadowy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, in the wings… Perhaps this is an abstract of anybody’s childhood. But of course it is only one aspect of the truth, or of illusion.

I think perhaps the most interesting part of my edition was the afterword she wrote when Virago Modern Classics reprinted it – highlighting bits she would have liked to phrase differently, and sharing some of the public and private responses she got to the initial publication. The Swan in the Evening is an interesting addendum to the life of a very good novelist, and of course a grieving mother is unlikely to be able to express that level of sorrow to anybody who hasn’t experienced it (and yet should certainly be allowed to try). I’m just not sure what the book is trying to be, and so it ends up being a jumble of different things that are not limited enough for memoir or wide enough for proper autobiography. I would, for example, have liked a lot more about her writing career. I hope the book was helpful for her to write, and it’s diverting to read, but it certainly earns the word ‘fragments’ from the subtitle.

#ABookADayInMay – Days 17,18,19

StuckinaBook All , , 3 Comments

Unlike Madame Bibi, I am getting behind with my reviewing – I am still managing to finish a book a day in May, and that’s the main thing, but telling you about them is another thing. My latest excuse is that I was away for the weekend (Eurovision!) and, let’s be honest, I’m sure you’re coping. Here are some quick thoughts about the latest three books, and fingers crossed I find time to be more thorough for the next ones.

Day 17 – The Tick of Two Clocks (2021) by Joan Bakewell

I don’t know how well known Joan Bakewell is outside the UK, but here she has been a mainstay for many decades. She is well-respected as a journalist and presenter, and has been in the House of Lords for a fair while. The Tick of Two Clocks is a memoir about deciding to downsize at the age of 87, and I loved reading about the experience of house-hunting and redesigning a new home to be more suitable for her older age – and saying goodbye to her large London home. I lap up anything about houses. Other parts of the book felt a bit hasty – like notes for a book – in which she skirts through any number of cultural and historical points, such as naming the Bloomsbury Group and then immediately moving on. But it was a quick, enjoyable read – even while dealing with the weighty topic of old age.

Day 18 – A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood

George is a man in his early 50s whose long-time partner, Jim, has died just before the novel opens. He tells people that Jim has moved away, rather than dealing with other people’s responses to his grief, and Isherwood has crafted a brilliant novel about that grief. What makes it so good is that grief is barely addressed – instead, it suffuses everything. George is in turns furious, melancholy, desperate, distracted. He wishes violent tortures on other people; he lusts after the inconsequential virility of younger men; he is alternately rude and reluctantly considerate to a woman who might provide a sort of friendship. At his work, as a university professor in literature, he seems to put aside his mourning – able to discuss an Aldous Huxley novel while analysing the behaviour of a roomful of students – but Isherwood shows with infinite subtlety how grief gets deep into every moment.

The style of A Single Man is quite different from other Isherwood novels I’ve read. It starts in quite an experimental way, with the ‘it’ of George’s body gradually becoming a ‘he’ – and then calms down into a style less experimental but more abstract and poetic than his early novels. It is a very powerful book, all the more powerful for its restraint. And has there ever been a more satisfactory image of a relationship than ‘Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of the other’s presence’.

Day 18 – One Sparkling Wave (1943) by Cynthia Asquith

If I’d read the wartime economy note in the front – that ‘There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times […] this novel would ordinarily make a book of about 352 pages’ – then I probably wouldn’t have tried to finish it for A Book A Day In May, even though I’d read half already.

Anyway, I absolutely loved Lady Cynthia Asquith’s previous novel – The Spring House – and was keen to read One Sparkling Wave, which is her second and final novel. The title comes from a William Barnes’ poem about a daughter’s beauty picking up where the mother’s leaves off – and there are three generations of women who fit the bill. Lady Glade is an older woman used to getting her way; Daphne is a sensible, middle-aged woman who isn’t used to this, and Lark is a flighty young woman given to theatrics romantically and professionally. These inter-generational dynamics are fraught with miscommunication and exasperation – but there is one woman who understands and sympathises with them all. Indeed, she is called on to perform this role constantly – a woman, the real heart of the novel even if not the community, who has the universal nickname ‘Available’. I will say that I never became used to a character being called Available, and it felt unnatural throughout.

The writing in One Sparkling Wave is good, but the plotting is a bit all over the place. The action takes a while to get going, as Available goes between three frustrated generations of this family (in consternation over Lark’s ill-advised romantic attachment) – and, in the second half of the novel, we are suddenly taken off on a cruise with a whole bunch of new characters seemingly introduced for comedy alone. Finally, we have the amusing situation of Daphne becoming an anonymous playwright and Lark the play’s anonymous star – with only Available knowing both mother’s and daughter’s secrets. It is fun and works well, but comes a bit too late in the novel.

I was surprised by how much less accomplished One Sparkling Wave felt than The Spring House – enjoyable to read, but with many fairly significant flaws in its structure. But I did like that the main character is a middle-aged woman who is settled into spinsterhood and remorselessly aware of her own plain looks. This paragraph is something I have often thought myself:

Not for the first time it occurred to Available how much suffering she herself had escaped by having no beauty to lose. What did it matter when her colourless hair turned white, and what had her unchiselled face to fear from time? She would never know the strain of that long agonizing rearguard action against an unrepellent enemy, whose attack might be so stealthy that his inevitable advance was almost imperceptible, and yet all the while you knew that insidiously but surely he was gaining ground, ground that could never be won back. How inextricably profit and loss were entangled in life!

Amen, Available! If you are on the hunt for Cynthia Asquith’s novels, please by aware how hard they are to track down – and I recommend concentrating your efforts on The Spring House rather than this one.

#ABookADayInMay: Days 14,15,16

StuckinaBook All , , , , 5 Comments

Playing catch up with some quick thoughts about three books – one of which was excellent, one of which was very good, and one of which is absolutely not my cup of tea.

Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops : Robey, Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Day 14 – Box Office Poison (2024) by Tim Robey

I downloaded the audiobook after a mention by Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast, I believe, and very much enjoyed Robey’s forensic look at big movie flops over the past hundred or so years of cinema, chronologically. The criteria was solely financial – meaning some notorious ‘flops’ like Waterworld don’t get in (because it actually broke even) and critical mauling isn’t sufficient, if the film did well. And, indeed, some of these flops were actually decent films, ably defended by Robey.

I’ve only seen one of the films that gets a chapter – the truly unbearable Cats. That’s probably largely because big blockbusters don’t appeal to me, and the sort of films I like were never going to have £100m to lose. But it didn’t matter – I loved delving through the decisions that led to each failure, the unjustfiably crucified ones, the very justifiably crucified ones, and the aftermath and legacies for those involved. Robey has clearly devoted his working life to this world and is hugely knowledgable, as well as having a diverse and non-snobbish taste, and I ended Box Office Poison feeling curiously more affectionate for the medium as a whole.

The Trouble With Sunbathers eBook : Mills, Magnus: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Day 15 – The Trouble With Sunbathers (2020) by Magnus Mills

Are there other examples of well-regarded novelists – shortlisted for the Booker, no less – who leave mainstream publishing and start self-publishing? I don’t know for sure, but I’d be surprised if Mills were forced out from traditional publishing. His final book from Bloomsbury, the excellent and unnerving The Forensic Records Society, got a lavish edition in 2017. But, from 2020, he has been doing his own thing – and The Trouble With Sunbathers was his second self-published novel.

It is very recognisably Mills, and I mean that as a compliment. We are in a world that is both recognisable and surreal, and we can’t quite put our finger on what makes it surreal. The premise is certainly unusual: America has bought the UK and turned it into a National Park. Almost all the population have moved to the coastline, where they sunbathe 24/7, and there are various gates to let people into the non-coastal UK – gates which are supposed to be always open, but still have gatekeepers. The narrator, alongside his friend Rupert, performs this function.

Rupert and I had done quite well out of ‘the purchase’ (as it was known at the time). We were in charge of the western gate and enjoyed all the benefits that went with the job. The four main gates had been inaugurated on the day Great Britain was officially declared a national park. They were elaborate structures of wrought iron and looked rather imposing when they were closed. Their purpose, nonetheless, was largely symbolic. The park was supposed to be open to anyone who wished to visit, and it followed that the gates should likewise remain open at all times. It so happened that the gates were fitted with locks, but there were no keys because keys weren’t required. The gates stood open on a permanent basis and it was the role of the gatekeepers to greet people as they passed through. Or at least give them a friendly nod. It was undemanding work, but Rupert and I performed our duties without complaint.

Of course, things do not remain that simple. They start to get visitors from higher authorities, and there are rumours of an important visit from the US. There is mysterious vandalism, and some experimentation with closing the gate for periods of time. The stakes are somehow very low and very high simultaneously – because the reader doesn’t truly know the ‘code’ of this world, or what might signify a crisis.

Mills has such an individual worldview, and I can’t think of any who are imitating his approach, let alone imitating it well. The prose is sparse and plain, but he gets such extraordinary mystery into it – even scenes that, on the surface, seem resolutely ordinary. I love all his books, and The Trouble With Sunbathers is absolutely as good as anything else he’s written – and, judging by titles alone, it looks like there are a couple of sequels.

Mills may not get the attention that he used to from critics, and I doubt these books are being shelves in Waterstones any more, but he is on top form – and I think there’s a strong argument that he’s one of the best, and certainly one of the most distinctive, writers alive today.

I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You: From bestselling author and the nation's favourite comedian: Amazon.co.uk: Hart, Miranda: 9781405958332: ...

Day 16 – I Haven’t Been Completely Honest With You (2024) by Miranda Hart

I enjoy Miranda Hart’s brand of middle-class, silly enthusiasm (I can’t call it schtick because it’s totally genuine) and I thought a memoir about her decade-long experience of ME-like symptoms from Lyme disease would be a good mix of poignant, educational and amusing (because a good comic writer can make anything amusing). It was those things, but it was mostly a self-help book – a genre I find incredibly trying. This one wasn’t really for me.

Messages From My Father by Calvin Trillin – #ABookADayInMay Day 13

StuckinaBook All , , 1 Comment

There is something very reassuring about Calvin Trillin’s non-fiction. In the UK I think he is best known, if at all, as the author of Tepper Isn’t Going Out. That was my first encounter with his work, after Thomas/Hogglestock correctly thought I’d love it and kindly gave it to me. Since then I’ve only read one more novel from his limited fiction output, but have gradually been reading my way through his much more prolific non-fiction.

What makes it reassuring is that he is such safe, steady hands. Whether he is writing about his poetry, an old Yale classmate, or his late wife, he seems to approach them all with the same thoroughness – and the same restrained emotion. You might expect a portrait of his father to lead to greater angst or joy, but Trillin has a certain depth of emotion that he is willing to show you and stays at it. Which is quite deep, I should say. It’s just very consistent and controlled, and will never give way to anything approaching hysteria.

He starts Messages From My Father (1996) by telling us how stubborn his dad, Abe, was. ‘Stubborn’ is his choice of word, and he returns to it often:

He didn’t drink coffee because at some point in his childhood he had sworn that he never would. My father had sworn off any number of things. As a young man, he smoked for a few years and then swore off cigarettes. He swore off liquor before he was old enough to taste any – supposedly because of his disgust at the smell of stale beer in the tavern where he sold newspapers as a boy. As far as I can remember, he never gave any specific reason for swearing off coffee. It may be that coffee just got caught up in the boyhood oath against liquor, tossed in because it was something grownups drank. I think he also must have sworn off swearing; if you ran him out of patience, his strongest expression was “For cryin’ out loud!” I sometimes imagine my father as swearing off things just to keep in practice – the sort of person who looks at himself in the mirror after shaving one day and, for no particular reason, says to the image he sees, “You have hit your last bucket of driving-range balls” or “No more popcorn for you, young fella.”

Having established a keynote in his character, Trillin then looks at his father’s career – specifically his years as a grocer, getting up at 4am every day to market. He traces back through the previous generations, who had lived in Kiev, and the ways in which being Jewish immigrants in the country had developed his father’s sense of identity – and his mother’s, who gets quite a large share of a book without her name in the title. It isn’t always the easiest to find because, though his father’s conversation is peppered with Yiddish and they observe the most popular Jewish festivals, it seems that their Jewish identity wasn’t overwhelmingly significant – and, thankfully, Trillin doesn’t seem to have experienced much antisemitism growing up. As he says, ‘he didn’t raise me to be a Jew; he raised me to be an American’.

But there is one telling moment, on a Yale campus tour together:

My father asked if Yale had any sort of Jewish quota that could keep me out even if qualified in every other way. (The representative said that he knew of no such quota. A decade later, it was revealed, to my great surprise, that the percentage of Jews in Yale College was not only the lowest in the Ivy League but also suspiciously consistent from year to year.) Although I had heard of quotas, which I associated with medical schools, I had never heard my father bring up the subject. I had never heard him acknowledge any limitations on what was available to me.

You get the sense that there is plenty unspoken in Abe’s mind, and Trillin can no longer delve very far into what was never expressed. He seems to believe that their loving reticence is typical of all father/son relationships, and perhaps it does characterise many of them. In parallel, the relationship between his mother and sister is much more open and certainly much louder. There is no sense of regret in what could have been, though: it is an affectionate portrait that doesn’t stumble into hagiography, but also is absent of reproach. Anything negative is described with near-total objectivity, and the positive sections are only mildly more personal. Abe’s determination that Trillin would go to Yale is portrayed as something representative of his determination, single-mindedness, and limited worldview – not as something draconian or pressuring. Trillin did go to Yale and so, Trillin’s conclusion is, it clearly worked.

Messages From My Father is a patchwork of other memories and incidents, spun together in a way that seems to use each one to prove a point – the point being that, yes, here is my father. I have understood his character. These attributes are illustrated by these words and actions, and they build a man that I like. Trillin seems to recognise that he can describe a character, and draws the line at understanding his father’s thoughts, motivations, passions, regrets.

I enjoyed reading the book, and there is a definite fondness throughout. It is a tribute of love, even though it is curiously journalistic. How does he combine the loving and the dispassionate into one successful whole? I don’t know, but it’s something that feels quintessentially Trillin. And I got the sense that his dad would have totally approved.

Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys – #ABookADayInMay Day 12

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for Canadian writers – but with the proviso that I wanted them to be writing about Canada. On the plane on the way home, I read one of my new purchases: Helen Humphreys’ brilliant memoir about her late brother, Nocturne. But I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her best-known novels, as they were set in the UK, and that wouldn’t quite scratch my Canadophile itch.

Thankfully, Debra very kindly stepped up! She posted Rabbit Foot Bill (2020) across the ocean to me – a novel by Humphreys that is firmly placed in Canada. Saskatchewan, to be precise.

The novel opens in 1947. The narrator is 12-year-old Leonard Flint – a misfit in his community, bullied at school and without any friends. Except for one: Rabbit Foot Bill.

The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

Rabbit Foot Bill has his nickname from one of his ways of earning money: he kills and cleans rabbits, then sells their feet for good luck. Leonard has amassed six of them from his friend, for free. There is a real friendship between the two of them, though it is unusual – more a sympathy of souls than anything based on conversation or even shared activities. Somehow, proximity between them is enough. There is no suggestion of anything sordid. They simply enliven each other, in a calm, undemonstrative way.

This all changes one day when there is a shocking, sudden murder. And there ends the first section.

We fast forward to 1959 and Leonard is now a young doctor, starting working at a psychiatric hospital. Many of the patients have lived there for decades, and some have even been born in this place. One of the staff estimates that half of the patients (who are more or less inmates) have no real mental health problems, but have become so conditioned by their surroundings that they would struggle to survive outside of the hospital anyway. Leonard’s job is to help the men get work and get used to the outside world, as well as monitoring them from a medical perspective.

And who should one of the patients be, but… Rabbit Foot Bill. Leonard is shocked, but perhaps the reader isn’t. They stumble back towards a form of friendship. Bill doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before penitentiary, which has clearly been torture, often literally. Leonard doesn’t quite know how to relate to this man who is his patient but was also a sort of silent mentor. Humphreys does this beautifully. She is so good at the strange nuances of their relationship, often deeply moving even when you aren’t exactly sure why.

I think there are moments when the human soul is visible, and what I was seeing when I looked over the side of the bed at Bill curled up on the floor, was a glimpse of his soul. And what is a soul? Something between the inherent nature of an individual, and their desires – a tangible truth and a reaching, all bound up together. Like the movement of the rabbit in flight, how it runs so fast that its feet don’t touch the ground.

You can see that Leonard is not your stereotypical doctor. And, indeed, he struggles in his role. There is little guidance and he is left to his own devices – and his own devices repeatedly take him back to Rabbit Foot Bill. It means that he scarcely gets to know the other patients, and he feels like an inconvenience whenever he does approach them. Humphreys is very good at conveying the feeling of being useless and unsure in a workplace, which perhaps many of us have experienced in different workplaces. She is great at uncertainty in general.

Uncertainty develops more and more, particularly as Leonard revisits the unhappiness of his childhood. There is no rug-pulled-out-from-under-our-feet moment – simply the gradual unravelling of a complex life, without the chance of firm conclusions. It’s all written in spare prose that felt tonally very different from Nocturne, and initially I wasn’t sure what I thought of it – but it wasn’t long until I was totally captivated. Humphreys doesn’t put a foot wrong in character, tone or style.

There are a couple of sub-plots I haven’t mentioned – one is Leonard’s affair with his boss’s wife (the unforgivably named Agatha Christiansen); the other, more substantial, is experiments with LSD as an attempt to cure patients. The doctors dose themselves to a lesser amount, in the name of science, and this was an interesting element of the novel – Humphreys does the near-impossible of narrating a drug trip without becoming tedious – though I’m not sure it entirely cohered with the main story.

What makes Rabbit Foot Bill succeed so well is Humphreys’ control of voice and the restraint she shows in almost everything – it’s a subtle novel, even with its shocking moments, and she keeps steady reins on everything she includes. It will stay with me, and I’d love to know if any other of her novels are set in Canada. I’d snap them up.

My Late Wives by Carter Dickson – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

StuckinaBook All , , 10 Comments

Carter Dickson is the not-especially-hidden pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, and he wrote murder mysteries under both names and a handful more. He specialises in the locked-room mystery, which is one of my favourite tropes – though I have only read one of his books, his first novel It Walks By Night, which I thought was pretty poor. Thankfully, My Late Wives (1947) is a significant improvement on that novel, particularly in character and in writing style, and it has restored my hopes in pursuing him as a writer.

There’s quite a convoluted set up to the novel, so bear with me. It somehow makes sense on the page. We open with the speedy account of Roger Bewlay – a serial killer, who has murdered four wives in turn, while living under different aliases. None of their bodies have ever been discovered – despite there being a young woman who witnessed the final dead body through the window, watching Roger Bewlay casually lighting a cigarette.

Fast forward 11 years. A lawyer called Dennis Forster – an upstanding, stolid, not especially characterful character – is going to see his friend Beryl, a theatre producer. Her big theatre star, Bruce Ransom, is coming to the end of a long run and is eyeing up his new project. An anonymous script has come through the post about the life and crimes of Roger Bewlay – and a bet about the likelihood of the ending gets out of hand. Ransom vows to masquerade as Roger Bewlay – or, rather, as someone pretending not to be Roger Bewlay, but deliberately making a poor job of it. As part of this, he must woo a naive young woman of his choosing. As I said, it’s quite convolted, and it’s impressive that Dickson makes it very clear what’s going on.

Dennis wants to warn Scotland Yard, so that they at least won’t burst onto the scene and arrest Bruce Ransom – and that’s how series detective Sir Henry Merrivale (‘H.M.’) gets involved. It’s strange to encounter a series detective in his 17th outing, because so little is done to contextualise him. There’s really no reason for him to be involved in this story, and his disappears for long stretches of time. It often felt like he was fighting with Dennis in being our primary perspective and, particularly towards the end, seemed to only turn up to be needlessly cryptic about what he’d worked out.

From what I can gather, he is a jumble of affable eccentricities – with a bullish, toughman overlay, so he doesn’t feel too much like a P.G. Wodehouse character. E.g. ‘H.M., if the truth must be told, is a notoriously bad driver with an absentminded habit of leaving the handbrake on, or of sitting and thinking about something else while the car bears straight towards a stone wall.’ Or this explosion:

“I really am a meek sort of feller, my wench. Honest. I’m a man of mild language. I never use profantiy, God damn it. Otherwise, so help me! I’d have told him to take his ruddy file and stick it…

“What I mean is,” coughed H.M., suddenly remembering his high-mindedness and assuming an air of piety, “that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do; now was it?”

He is ebullient and larger-than-life and I’m sure Dickson had many longstanding readers who rejoiced and seeing him again. I quite enjoyed my time with him, but he didn’t really feel like he matched the tone of the novel or contributed much to its plot. And his insistence on calling Beryl ‘my wench’ was pretty tiring.

In the final quarter or so of the novel, My Late Wives does what so many novels of this genre seem to do – become suddenly an adventure novel. I prefer detective novels to maintain their even tone right to the end, keeping to the drama of the drawing room rather than car chases, overblown fights etc. But this one was so overblown that I could enjoy the theatrical silliness of it – and maybe Dickson was reflecting the theatrical lives of his main characters.

Dickson’s writing in My Late Wives is so much better than his debut novel. Witty, pacy, shrewd – and not overwritten in the way of my only other experience with him. I really enjoyed rattling through the plot, and particularly Beryl as a character. What I will say about the plot is that it is not subtle. I am terrible at working things out, and the solution to this one was pretty glaring. (This isn’t really a locked-rooom mystery, incidentally.) Some ‘clues’ stood out a mile and, to be honest, there just weren’t enough male characters in the book for Roger Bewlay’s true identity to be much of a mystery. One key ‘shock twist’ is more or less spelled out earlier in the novel, to the point where it didn’t even seem like it needed revealing. But there was one element that was hidden in plain sight and which totally passed me by, and I thought that was an excellent gamble.

Normally, a weak plot or an easy-to-guess plot would spoil this sort of novel for me, but there was something in the spirit and vim of My Late Wives that meant it didn’t much matter. I still really joyed this one, and I’m glad I’ve got a couple more on my shelves.

 

#138: Do We Care About Authors’ Personal Lives? and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne vs The Beautiful Visit

StuckinaBook Tea or Books? , , 6 Comments

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Brian Moore, and authors’ personal lives – welcome to episode 138!

In the first half of the episode, we do a question that Lindsey suggested: do we care about authors’ personal lives? It takes us to questions both of ethics and of privacy. In the second half, we pit The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore against The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you, even if I’m quite bad at replying quickly. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us. And you can support the podcast at Patreon.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Recommended! by Nicola Wilson
Hugh Walpole
J.B. Priestley
Sylvia Lynd
Clemence Dane
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Stasiland by Anna Funder
Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Virginia Woolf
Stella Gibbons
Enid Blyton
Neil Gaiman
Mary Lawson
The Other Elizabeth Taylor by Nicola Beauman
Jane Austen
Dorothy L. Sayers
Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis
Echo by Violet Trefusis
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Elena Ferrante
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
J.K. Rowling
Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson
Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater
John Keats
Percy Shelley
Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
Invitiation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
R.C. Sherriff
The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan – #ABookADayInMay Day 10

StuckinaBook All , , 22 Comments

It’s been a busy day, but I finished an audiobook that I borrowed from the library: The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan. And boy, what a journey that novella is. I don’t have much time today, so we’re going to do a bullet point post…

  • Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories
  • I have a checkered history with McEwan, mostly positive – I love Black Dogs, Amsterdam, and Atonement. I like On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. I thought Saturday was pretty bad, and I haven’t anything he’s published since 2007.
  • The Cement Garden is narrated by Jack, aged 13 at the beginning, with an older sister, a younger sister, and a rather younger brother.
  • Their father dies – and, a year later, their mother dies. Worried about being taken into care, they decide to encase her body in cement in the cellar – and then begin dysfunctionally living without any supervision.
  • Jack’s voice is captivating and convincing, as a young man whose competing concerns make it hard for him to discern or prioritise between the everyday and the shocking.
  • I think there’s a very good novella in here about a family of children failing to cope in a terrible situation, and the gradual falling apart of their fragile ecosystem (the addition of Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, is very good at expanding their world and showing how horribly flawed it is).
  • But…
  • Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children? What do Jack’s unexplained incestuous desires add to the novella? To me, they just make it self-consciously abhorrent, and detract from a subtler novella hiding within it.
  • SO much of the book is preoccupied with bodily fluids, disgusting smells, masturbation – oh gosh, has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masturbation? It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.
  • It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why. There is the promise of a novelist here, but covered over by the belief that the only way to be real is to be sordid. The sordid is no more real than the beautiful, Ian.
  • Here is an excellent quote from Anne Tyler’s review in The New York Times: “these children are not – we trust – real people at all. They are so consistently unpleasant, unlikable and bitter that we can’t believe in them (even hardened criminals, after all, have some good points) and we certainly can’t identify with them. Jack’s eyes, through which we’re viewing this story, have an uncanny ability to settle upon the one distasteful detail in every scene, and to dwell on it, and to allow only that detail to pierce the cotton wool that insulates him. […] It seems weak-stomached to criticize a novel on these grounds, but if what we read makes us avert our gaze entirely, isn’t the purpose defeated?”

I probably haven’t read enough McEwan to do an Unnecessary Rankings! of him, but The Cement Garden would certainly be toying for bottom place.

The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway – #ABookADayInMay Day 9

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

Ernest Hemingway is one of those big-name authors that I’ve never previously read. Truth be told, I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t like his books, and that’s only partly because he seems so unlikeable as a person. When I think toxic masculinity, I think Hemingway.

BUT at some point I must have bought The Torrents of Spring (1926) – and, according to the pencil mark inside, it cost me 30p, so potentially I’ve had it a long time. And look at that Penguin cover I had – which takes various themes of the novella and puts them together in quite an unsettling still life.

I should say from the outset that I probably didn’t pick a very good starting point for Hemingway. Having finished the novella and doing a little bit of reading around it, apparently The Torrents of Spring was written speedily as a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. I – like, I imagine, everyone alive today – haven’t read Dark Laughter. I know the name ‘Sherwood Anderson’ but wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about him or his work. So if The Torrents of Spring is a parody of a style, genre, and author that I am very unfamiliar with… I’m not sure I got out of it all that Hemingway put in.

So, what is the book about? Scripps O’Neil and Yogi Johnson are two men who work at a pump factory (I never truly worked out what a pump factory was). Scripps has a wife back home that he is estranged from, and rather suddenly has a bigamous marriage with a woman who is introduced and repeatedly referred to as an ‘elderly waitress’.

Along the way, the men (separately and together) muse on the ideal women, on fulfilment, on baked beans. Sometimes a simple narrative exposes unexpected psychological depth. Sometimes it’s just shallow. I’m afraid I didn’t get much depth from The Torrents of Spring but, as a satire, that may well have been deliberate.

For some periods, the prose reminded me of Truman Capote’s famous barb about Jack Kerouac: ‘This isn’t writing; it’s typing’. I was aware that Hemingway wrote sparse prose in short sentences, but then there’s something like this…

Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door that led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?

Writing that sparse and repetitive must be deliberate, and I daresay it is satirising something that Sherwood Anderson does. It doesn’t make for the most enjoyable reading, though I suppose it’s better than being very overwritten. Indeed, in the hands of another writer perhaps I’d have admired it. Here (again, perhaps because it’s a satire) it felt insincere.

Something more openly insincere, but which I did somehow enjoy, were the times that Hemingway broke the fourth wall. Quite often he addresses the reader, checking what they thought about the previous chapter and explaining various techniques and authorial choices:

I would like the reader to particularly remark the way the complicated threads of the lives of the various characters in the book are gathered together, and then held there in that memorable scene in the beanery. It was when I read this chapter aloud to him that Mr Dos Passos exclaimed, ‘Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece’.

It’s all a very bold choice for an author who had previously only published one volume of short stories. In that same year he would publish The Sun Also Rises which, of course, has had a more significant impact on literary history. I honestly have no idea if The Torrents of Spring succeeds on its aims, because I have no real sense of what its aims were.

So I hoped I had ticked off a major author with my choice today, but reading this particular book by Ernest Hemingway has really only raised more questions than it answers. Can any Hemingway aficiando tell me how similar this is to the rest of his oeuvre?