Norah Lofts – now in British Library Women Writers series!

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I realise I haven’t yet said that Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts is out in the British Library Women Writers series – with another lovely cover:

It’s another quick turnaround – I only read it for the first time in March, and loved it so much that I instantly recommended it to the series. Here’s what I wrote at the time. I’m so glad the editorial team said yes, and that fans of Norah Lofts’s historical fiction will be able to discover her under a different mode. It starts out as a witty, fun domestic novel with a delightfully eccentric heroine – hard to beat ‘Penelope Shadow’ for excellent character naming. It becomes something much darker and more page-turning and unexpected.

I’m very excited to see how this one goes down!

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

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Such a Fun Age: 'The book of the year' Independent (Bloomsbury Publishing): Amazon.co.uk: Reid, Kiley: 9781526612144: Books

I don’t hear much about the latest fiction, but there are some titles that break through my early-20th-century mindset. Everyone was talking about Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid five years ago, including being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and I think it became even bigger during the pandemic. Better late than never, I listened to the audiobook – and, yes, everyone was right. It’s one of the best 21st-century novels I’ve read.

The novel opens with a brilliant ‘set piece’. Emira is out for the night with friends, in her party clothes and a few drinks down. She gets an emergency phone call from Alix, asking her to take Briar for the evening. Briar is a three-year-old whom Emira often babysits, and she agrees to come straight away and takes Briar to a nearby supermarket. Emira is African-American; Briar (and her parents) are white. When an older white woman sees them together, she thinks Briar is in danger and speaks to a security guard. He refuses to believe Emira is the babysitter.

It’s an excellent way in to a clever and nuanced novel about race in contemporary America. None of Reid’s central characters are out-and-out racists. What makes it so thought-provoking, and often hard to read, is that Reid is spearing the white progressives who are so self-conscious about being anti-racism. Alix is a writer and influencer whose project LetHer Speak has unexpectedly spiralled her into fame, while Emira starts a romantic relationship with a white man, Kelley, who witnessed the supermarket incident and urges her to go public about it. He doesn’t understand what repercussions Amira would face.

There is much more going on in Such A Fun Age than race, though. Emira is a brilliant portrait of a millennial who is overly qualified for the job she has, and is about to fall off her parent’s healthcare plan, but has no sense of her future. “Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.” Alix is a complex character, swinging between sympathetic and the reverse, anxious and ambitious and never entirely comfortable in what she is doing.

There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like ‘Dope Bitch’ and ‘Y’all Already Know’, then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed.

And, for a zeitgeisty novel, it’s much more than an opinion piece with fictional characters. Reid’s plotting is brilliant. Two of the main characters are connected in a way I didn’t see coming, and Reid is so clever in her creation of their lasting resentments from a shared memory differently remembered. Everyone is so believable, and all the novel’s morals are in convincing shades of grey. Honestly, the only bad thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the title. It’s so flimsy and nothingy, and doesn’t tell you anything about the book.

The audiobook is also up there with the best I’ve listened to. Nicole Lewis is a brilliant narrator, and manages to present Emira’s detailed character so well. Emira often replies briefly – things like “Oh, ok” – and Lewis does an exceptional job of using those small moments to show her discomfort, her intelligence, her refusal to accept everything expected of her.

I bought Such A Fun Age in an Audible sale, and wasn’t even sure I’d ever get round to listening to it. I’m so glad I did. It’s gone from a novel I dimly knew about to one of my best reads of the year.

#132: Interview: Edward Carey on Edith Holler

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Edward Carey joins us to discuss his latest novel, Edith Holler. Welcome to episode 132!

Rachel and I both love Edward Carey’s novels, so it was a real joy to have the opportunity to interview him. We discuss how he first got published, what inspired Edith Holler and what his books might have in common. Among his books, we discuss Observatory Mansions, Alva and Irva, The Swallowed Man, and Little.

For Patreon subscribers – as a thank you for your support, you can listen to Rachel interview me about the British Library Women Writers at the Marlborough Literary Festival! (If you’re not a Patreon subscriber and would like to be, follow that link to find out more.)

Do get in touch at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com with any questions or suggestions, and don’t forget you can listen to (and rate and review!) the podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
A Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk
The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith
Way Far Away by Evilio Rosero
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Weird Stone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
Diana Wynne Jones
Watership Down by Richard Adams
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Elizabeth McCracken
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

And the next club will be…

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Thanks so much for your contributions to the 1970 Club! There are so many books I now want to read (with The Woods in Winter by Stella Gibbons head of the pack) – and some I now know to avoid… There were also quite a few on my shelves that I hoped to get and didn’t, especially Losing Battles by Eudora Welty.

ANYWAY, it’s been fun as ever – and more and more people seem to join in every time. Next year will be the tenth (!!) anniversary of the club, but that’s not until October. First, in April, we will be doing… the 1952 Club!

It’s 21-27 April, but we will warn you nearer the time, of course. Thanks to Karen, as ever, for co-hosting so wonderfully!

The Listeners by Monica Dickens – #1970Club

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The 1970 Club is drawing to an end, and I have a LOT of reviews to catch up on – perhaps foolishly, I’ve been away since Thursday. But it’s been great, as always, and Karen and I will be announcing the next club soon.

But, sneaking in to the final hours, I want to write quickly about The Listeners by Monica Dickens. It’s been years since I read any Dickens, M. – I first fell for her for the wonderful comic memoirs One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet (and the slightly less wonderful third in the trilogy, My Turn To Make The Tea). Far more of her output, though, were more serious novels. I bought The Listeners back in 2009 and had long been intrigued by its premise: it follows people who phone the Samaritans and people who answer those calls.

For those not in the know, the Samaritans run a suicide prevention hotline (I don’t know if they’d use that terminology, so forgive me if not), and I believe you can also walk in. It’s been going for a very long time, and Dickens was involved in setting up the first American branch a few years after The Listeners was published. I’m sure the Samaritans has changed a fair bit since the 1970s, and I know a bit about them from when Mum volunteered there a decade or so ago. What hasn’t changed is the non-judgemental way volunteers answer the phones – having absolutely no idea what will be on the other side. Here’s a kind, overworked volunteer called Victoria:

When she hung up the telephone, it rang again before she had taken her hand off it.

“Samaritans — can I help you?”

The beeps again, replaced by heavy breathing. A man.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

The breathing continued. It could be anxiety. It could be a joke. It could be a sex call. It could be fear or pain. Whatever it was, you waited. You never rang off first.

You tried to offer help without being officious. You tried to make contact, but if no one spoke, all you could do was show that you were there. That you were still listening. That you would listen all night if that was what they wanted. Friendship. Caring. Love. Your voice had to convey your heart.

We do later learn who is calling, and it is a genuine call. Dickens goes back and forth into different lives, picking up their crises or mundanities. Victoria is sort-of engaged to a man she doesn’t respect; Paul is married to an alcoholic who mocks the Samaritans; Sarah is young and idealistic. On the other side – the people phoning in – we have Billie, who tries to provoke but clearly needs a friend; desperate, sad Tim who ends up in hospital where he’s too scared to give his name, etc etc.

Oh, I really wanted to like this novel. It’s a theme I’ve never read elsewhere, and I trusted Dickens to portray the characters with empathy and warmth. And I think she does that. But what she doesn’t include is any sort of momentum at all. Despite many of these people being in literal life-or-death situations, somehow the novel is turgid and tedious. I believe a thrilling novel can be written about the lowest possible stakes. These characters have huge stakes – but maybe Dickens took that as excitement enough, and forgot to make any of the writing or plotting interesting. We just pop in and out of lives, with minimal character development and no narrative urgency. I ended up skimming the second half of the novel.

Sorry to end the 1970 Club on a downer, but it’s always helpful in any club to give a full overview of the year – including the books that will be going straight to the charity shop!

Island in Moonlight by Kathleen Sully – #1970Club

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You may well know Brad’s blog Neglected Books. As the name suggests, he reads and reviews books that are neglected – but we’re not talking about authors who could do with a boost, like E.M. Delafield or Rose Macaulay. We’re talking authors who have almost entirely disappeared from the world – their books are near-impossible to track down, and often Brad is the only person to have written anything substantial about them online. One author he often mentions is Kathleen Sully.

Knowing how much he admired Sully, I popped her name on my mental list and kept an eye out – little expecting to stumble across one in the antiques shop in the village next to mine. It was especially surprising, given that they only have about 100 books for sale. But I came away with a proof copy of Island in Midnight (1970).

There is a slightly odd opening, of two young women sat in a high-class restaurant. They spot an attractive man who comes in – but, as one woman tells the other, ‘he played a mean trick on me’. She thought she was accompanying him to a party – but, instead, he delivered her to a friend who wanted to have an affair. And the friend was blind.

That’s the last we see of those women, but we are introduced to Alex (the blind man) and his friend Max, who goes out of his way to help Alex cheat on his wife. From this introduction, we shift into Alex’s first-person viewpoint. This is how it starts…

Until you’re blind, you don’t know what sight is – that is, if you go blind after having perfect sight. Close your eyes, bandage them, then walk about in the room you know the best – perhaps your bedroom. You thought you knew where the dresser was – eh? You’ve banged your shin, knocked over a lamp – broken the damned thing, no doubt, and landed up in a corner. And you think you know which corner. But it isn’t. And you’re so damned confused that you’re afraid to move again for a minute or two. When you do, you move slowly, cautiously, ready for anything – even a stuffed tiger that your wife bought from a sale that day and didn’t tell you about. And all the while – and this is the worst part – you expect a light to be switched on.

Alex lost his sight in an accident that we never really learn about. I quite liked Sully’s refusal to dress up the narrative with unnecessary plot details – the reader needs to know that Alex is blind, and isn’t able to come to terms with it; we don’t need to know the ins and outs of how it happened. Sully has a stripped-back approach to storytelling, more invested in how people react to their immediate and latest environment, without dwelling unduly on the past.

After an unfortunate sexual exploit, Alex’s wife intends to file for divorce and he determines to leave his current life and his homeland. Though his powers of visual recall are fading, there is one exception to this rule: an island he visited when he was only 20 years old. This is many decades in the past, but he has carried the experience with him ever since as some sort of exemplar of paradise.

Even as I write this, I can see the sweep of the bay as the ship pulled up to the tiny landing stage. The water was as transparent as the air and sky. And blue: the kind of blue you never see in this country. The white buildings set the blue off and the sand was pure gold, with gold’s soft glitter. There were oranges and lemons ripening in the orchards and the leaves of those trees were dark and polished, casting purple shadows. All shadows had intense colour on the island – no greys. The natives of the island were as beautiful as the flowers – and as innocent. And it seemed to me that there was always music: everybody had an instrument and played the thing. I promised myself an accordion but never bought one.

You can see how this sort of idyllic vision would have stayed with him. Impetuously, Alex determines to return to the island and start a new life there. He’s as selfish in this decision as he is in every other. Sully doesn’t waste too much time trying to make Alex a sympathetic character: he is monstrously self-interested, with affections for others but no pretence that he would ever put their needs ahead of his.

His chauffeur, Pell, is persuaded to accompany Alex to the island and get him set up there. As it approaches, Pell (whose perspective we get throughout his chapter) struggles to align what he’s seeing with Alex’s memories. Rather than lapping Meditterean shores in bright sunshine, he sees ‘grey water lashing at the low concrete wall of the water-front’.

Out of season, the island is miserable. Alex is spared the bleakness of the visuals, and can superimpose his recollections of the island of his youth – but he can’t ignore how abandoned and hopeless the island feels. There are no tourists, little industry, and a crowd of locals without much going for them. There’s Lyn, a tart-with-a-heart type who is running low on ‘heart’; there’s the proprietor of Joe’s restaurant whose fondness for Alex will only run as far as his income; there’s Willis, who agrees to be a sort of Man Friday for Alex while supposedly looking out for somewhere he can live – though, knowing this will be the end of their financial relationship, is in no hurry to secure anywhere.

As the story develops, perhaps the most important relationship is one suffused in memories – the woman he had a brief affair with back when he was 20, and the possible consequences of that affair all these decades later…

I know Brad doesn’t think much of Island in Moonlight, but I thought it was really good. I can’t compare with Sully’s other writing, as this is my first of her novels, but I was very much attracted by her writing style. It is sparse, often dialogue-heavy, and the shifts into different characters’ first-person narratives is done sharply, entering straight into their mindset without any fanfare. The plot whizzes by, if it can be called a plot, and there is precious little character development. But there is such an assurance to Sully’s writing that I felt totally confident in being taken wherever she wanted to take me. Island in Moonlight is an odd, sparse book that breaks a whole lot of conventional novelistic rules without putting anything too experimental in their place – and it sold me on Sully. I’ll definitely keep looking out for her.

Trespasses by Paul Bailey – #1970Club

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When I reviewed Jenny Offill’s brilliant novel Dept. of Speculation earlier in the year, I asked for recommendations for other books told in fragments or vignettes. The comment section has lots of brilliant suggestions, but I don’t think anybody mentioned Paul Bailey’s Trespasses (1970). The fragmentary style may be in vogue now, but Bailey shows that some authors were doing it more than half a century ago.

Trespasses is mostly (by not entirely) told in short, sharp vignettes. They are often headed HER or HIM or THEM or BOY or BEFORE or AFTER – being, in turn, about Ralph, Ellie, them as a couple, Ralph as a child, and then before and after the big event. We learn what that is almost immediately: Ellie died by suicide. With chronology thrown out the window, the reader is flung instantly into a maelstrom of perspectives, events, and memories. Here’s a taste – this is the first page or so:

EARLY

It is May and the sun is shining. It is warm.
Early this morning, walking in the grounds, I stopped before an apple tree. I looked up at its branches, which seemed to droop under the weight of so much white and pink.
My head was empty; I could enjoy the blossom.

HER

She has been dead some weeks. Mrs Dinsdale complained – the state of her bathroom due to all that blood. People who disposed of themselves, she told me, were as inconsiderate as they were wicked. If wicked was putting it too strong, perhaps unnatural was nearer the mark. My wife had gone against nature.

PEACE

Endless green and blue: below and above. And one apple tree – white and pink, because it is always spring – darkening the earth, and fiercely light against the sky.
Some birds, occasionally singing, and a sun just strong enough to look into.

THEN

It was not a scream in the strict sense of the word. It was more like a howl.

We can’t rest in reflections on Ellie’s act, because of the constant jumps in time. Indeed, a funeral is mentioned in the opening pages – but we quickly realise it is Ralph’s father’s funeral, many years earlier. We are wrong-footed so often that you quickly give up trying to work out where you are, and instead take it all in like an abstract painting. What it conveys brilliantly is Ralph’s state of mind, after his wife’s suicide – unable to process anything properly, and disoriented to the point of mental collapse.

But considering how fragmentary, achronological and formally experimental Trespasses is, I was very impressed by how clearly the secondary characters come to life. Through a jigsaw of fleeting encounters, we get to know comic creations like landlady Mrs Dinsdale and her vicious relationship with her daughter, who would now probably be described as ‘sex positive’. Ellie and Ralph’s respective and contrasting upbringings speak a lot to their meeting across class barriers, and their mothers are fun and oddly poignant to spend time with.

I couldn’t decide if their gay friend Bernard was surprisingly progressive for a 1970 novel or not – he is a camp caricature of arch sayings, but nobody seems bothered about his sexuality. He speaks of his own actions with a mixture of shame and shamelessness, and he is one of two background characters given long, non-fragmented sections to narrative about themselves in the second half of the novel. Bailey keeps us on our toes, with this traditional approach to novel writing feeling fresh and even jarring, coming in the midst of the experimental.

The one thing we never get a grasp of (and I think this is a good narrative choice) is why Ellie made the decision to kill herself. When the novel came out, suicide had only been decriminalised in the England for nine years, and I’m sure it wasn’t considered with as much understanding as it is now. It is a bold topic for a novel, and Bailey writes it brilliantly. The experimentalism is never allowed to overshadow character, and Trespasses is first and foremost a book about character – often very amusingly, but there is something deeply moving about Ralph’s raking back and forth through his memories, for clues about what would happen.

I’ve read two Paul Bailey novels – his debut, At the Jerusalem, and now his second. I’ve been unintentionally reading them in order. I don’t see him much discussed now, though he is in fact still alive, but I’d love to hear from anyone else who admires and enjoys his work. And I’m glad the 1970 Club sent me back to my Bailey shelf. In my year of loving fragmentary novels, this is an excellent find.