The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant – #ABookADayInMay – Day 20

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I’m continuing my reading of Fairlight Moderns with The Driveway Has Two Sides (2018) by Sara Marchant – with another lovely cover illustration by Sam Kalda. Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of these editions. Their size and feel and the care taken over them are all wonderful.

And thankfully, in this case, the book is also excellent! I really enjoyed The Driveway Has Two Sides, and it has made me interested to read more by Marchant.

It’s set on an East Coast Island, onto which moves Delilah. She is a young woman who is, we are told quite often, beautiful and sexy (if the book were written by a man, I’d have questioned how often we needed to know that!) On the small island, any outsider is treated with a little suspicion – and she clearly doesn’t want to be at the heart of the community. But she shares her driveway with the yellow house next door, and the resident there is even less keen to communicate. They can be recluses near each other.

If you looked underneath you noticed certain signs that all was not as it should be. The man next door hardly ever went out and no visitors ever went in. When he did go, it was in his own car that he kept in the garage at the front of the shared drive, and he left the island on the ferry. He made no overtures of neighborliness to the girl, and to the villagers’ eyes she seemed either uninterested or maybe not even aware of his existence. This was odd because they shared a driveway.

But then Delilah gets to know the local sheriff, Ted. He is a widow, and I particularly enjoyed the detail that local women brought him meals a lot… until he saw Delilah for the third time, and the overtures and offerings ceased. All small communities are the same! Ted’s kindness starts to wear Delilah down a little… leaving her with three men to decide between. Ted, the mysterious man next door, and the married boyfriend who is paying for her home.

That makes The Driveway Has Two Sides sound like a romcom, and it probably doesn’t help that the Amazon subheading is ‘the perfect escapist beach read’. Because this novella is so much more interesting than a ‘who will she choose?’ plot (though I have to admit that Ted is one of the lovelier characters I’ve come across in a while). I found it much more a calming, beautiful look at someone trying to forge a home – and being gradually brought into contact with other people. Delilah is particularly interested in gardening, and over the course of the short book she manages to breath life into the gardens at the front and back of the house – causing gossip among the locals, and also inadvertently opening up a connection with her neighbour.

There are a few bigger ‘plotty’ moments, including a twist or two, and they did feel a bit like they belonged to a different, longer novel. The Driveway Has Two Sides was on firmer ground when it was about the subtle, poignant shifts in relationships between two people that happen almost reluctantly. I found it a beautiful, absorbing little book, creating a community I felt I knew well. Whether or not it had the ending I was hoping for is another question, but the fact I was invested in the outcome is a strong endorsement…

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig – #ABookADayInMay – Day 19

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It is appropriate that I follow a book by a translator with a book in translation. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig was published in Swedish in 1964 and has just been published in a translation by Saskia Vogel by Faber & Faber, who sent me a review copy. I am always interested in reading more Scandinavian literary fiction, and its description as a ‘haunting Swedish family saga’ won me over.

It’s very different from most novels I read. There is almost no dialogue in the whole book – I thought there would be none at all, but there are four or five exchanges throughout the book. Instead, it is all narrative, and often for page-long paragraphs. It is a poetic, atmospheric depiction of a melancholy family in a rural community. Judit is also known as ‘Queen’, which is a part of her personality that often wars with the more sombre, even hopeless, part of her that is ‘Judit’. She has a taciturn brother, Albert, and a much younger brother, Viktor. At length, Trotzig depicts the dysfunction of this family unit, who scarcely communicate or connect with each other. This is a paragraph about the relationship between Judit and Viktor:

And she sensed how she was being left alone. As young as he was he had made himself unreachable, slick and smooth like a sea-glazed stone, no longer to be grasped. Gray sky, black nettles, chicken scratch, the cat upon the rat, down among the meadows the gray expanse of sea – what did she have to do with this whole world? Alone were they, each and every one unto themself, like cast stones scattered in the empty water-dawn.

It’s beautiful writing, but I have to admit to feeling a bit oppressed by the amount of beautiful writing in this book. Obviously it was a choice to keep the characters’ voices from us, but the lack of dialogue did make the family seem cold and remote from the reader, as well as each other.

In the final 40 pages, a new character arrives – she is foretold by the blurb, but I shan’t spoil it – and it could have been transformative. And yet she, too, is curiously distant from us all. Even a sudden burst of plot couldn’t change that.

So I’m not sure I’m necessarily the right reader for Queen. I could tell it was beautiful, but I couldn’t connect with it. Perhaps that was the point… and yet it felt like a book I couldn’t really get to grips with.

Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn – #ABookADayInMay – Day 18

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I knew I had to buy Catching Fire (2022) by Daniel Hahn as soon as I heard about it – and, boom, it’s not even three years since I bought it and I’ve read it! Such speed and agility. I don’t know why it took me so long, since I was pretty certain I would love it – and I definitely did.

Catching Fire is a subtitled ‘A Translation Diary’ and that’s exactly what it is. Hahn is a literary translator, and the book documents his process of translating Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca from Spanish into English. It would eventually appear as Never Did The Fire, though in the earlier sections of the translation diary it is called Never The Fire Ever. Catching Fire began life as a blog, and it retains the structure of a series of dated entries, responding to people’s comments and occasionally referring to real-world events. Because it was a blog, Hahn cautions (in his introduction) against reading it all in one go. Well, Hahn, I have not taken your guidance, and it didn’t stop me absolutely loving this book.

Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. it’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.

So Hahn writes in his introduction, before going on to explain exactly how he does it. I like his own description of translation: ‘Translation is like copying a work of art in a different medium. We’re art forgers attempting to reproduce an oil painting using only pencils, but so skilfully you won’t be able to tell the difference.’

Like most readers, perhaps, when I read a work in translation, I’m not trying too hard to see the original text behind the text I’m reading. Indeed, I tend to sort of pretend it doesn’t exist. Trying to balance the book I can’t access without the translator’s help into my reception of the book I am reading feels too fraught with challenge. It’s that suspension of disbelief (or something like that) that makes reading a translation possible. And perhaps the translator’s job is to make that possible.

I don’t read any languages other than English, with the possible exception of a very easy children’s book in French, so I already marvel at anybody who could speak more than one language – let alone have the skill to do what Hahn does. My appreciation of translators was already pretty sky-high, but after reading Catching Fire, it has stratospheric.

His process starts by doing a quick translation of everything. It is speedy and unapologetically shoddy. Hahn courageously shares examples of this initial parse through, and it is littered with ‘this/that’ options, words still in Spanish because he can’t think for that moment how best to translate in context, and sentences that, if complete, are ugly. It is, I suppose, the sort of translation that AI is trying to convince us is sufficient – and it shows exactly why it isn’t, especially for literary fiction.

After this, he goes through and looks at many words to check their precise meaning – and, since Eltit is Chilean, this also includes checking for different uses that are specific to Chile. Future drafts are about getting the nuance exactly right, trying to capture what is in the original even when English doesn’t accommodate an easy transfer.

The bulk of Catching Fire are about these nuances. I loved it, and it didn’t matter at all that I don’t speak Spanish. Hahn explains very well for the monoglot. How to capture the way that Eltit lists adjectives after a noun? How to translate words which tell you the gender of the speaker in Spanish, but don’t in English? What to do about allusions that refract across the novel when the same reaching-out moments don’t make sense in English?

One of my favourites of these was a character complaining of pain in his wrist – muñeca – which Hahn at first translates unquestioningly as ‘wrist’. It is only in the ensuing dialogue does it become clear that muñeca’s other meaning (‘doll’) is also significant. How on earth do you retain this in translation? (I may have missed the answer, or he didn’t tell us.)

I mentioned very early in this diary that ambuity can be the hardest thing to translate. I think some people imagine ambiguity as a kind of vagueness, but to my mind you might better consider it exactly the opposite, as an extreme sort of precision, and that’s what makes it hard.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, then Catching Fire is rammed full of them. It reminded me a lot of Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, though they are tonally and structurally very different – both equally fascinating about translation.

It also helps that Hahn is great company for the ride. Perhaps because we are similar ages, I appreciated his humour and his character shines through as someone intellectually curious while also being a good hang. I also appreciated his evident patience with the number of non-translators who were clearly giving their thoughts in the comments – perhaps he liked getting these, though I suspect I would have found it hard to deal with quite so many non-experts sharing their thoughts on my job. Maybe Hahn is just a better person than me.

Well, it’s ridiculous that I waited so long to read this when I knew I’d fall for it completely. Now I wish every book in translation came with exactly this sort of companion book. I have to confess that nothing in it made me want to read Eltit’s novel, which doesn’t sound like my cup of tea at all, but that is beside the point. Catching Fire is a total triumph, and it feels like a privilege to have had this window into the translator’s world.

Letter To My Daughter by Maya Angelou – #ABookADayInMay – Day 17

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My village book club chose Letter To My Daughter (2008) by Maya Angelou and it’s handy that it’s 175 pages – indeed, because it is split into 28 short chapters, each of which gets a numbered page announcing it, it’s probably nearer 100 pages of actual text. And I raced through it in about an hour, because it is very easy to consume.

What is Letter To My Daughter? Well, first off, it isn’t a letter to Angelou’s daughter – she doesn’t have one. As she explains in a quick preface, ‘I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.’

And then, to be frank, the book is a miscellany of stray thoughts, anecdotes, poetry and life lessons. It is called a collection of essays, but that is a little generous. Some are profound, some are incidental, and many hover somewhere the two. She shares her experience of hiding a pregnancy, and the time she was almost murdered by an abusive boyfriend. She writes about faux pas that she committed in social settings, and an amusing case of mistaken identity. There is plenty that is deeply honest, and plenty that you could comfortably say to a stranger at a bus stop.

Along the way are some excellent short pieces. This moemnt in ‘In the Valley of Humility’ summed up a marriage with elegance and understated eloquence:

I was married to Paul DuFeu, a master builder, a writer, and a popular cartoonist in England. Within two days of our meeting we knew we were in love together and had to be in life together.

For ten years we surprised, amused, angered, and supported each other. Unexpectedly a storm cloud roared into that sunny climate of love. My queries annoyed him, my husband admitted that he had grown weary of monogamy and needed more provocation in his life.

We separated just as I was to begin a national lecture tour. Since my husband was a builder and his business was based in northern California, I decided to make him a gift of San Francisco and the bridges and the hills, and the gourmet restaurants and the beautiful bay view.

Divorce like every other rite of passage introduces new landscapes, new rhythms, new faces and places, and sometimes races.

There are plenty of gems in Letter To My Daughter, but I can’t help concluding that this is a book that could only be published by a well-respected, beloved author who has earned it over a career. On its own merits, it is enjoyable but would probably have to work rather harder to be published without a reputation. It is too slight, too scattergun.

And it surely shouldn’t have been my first book by Maya Angelou, but it was. I enjoyed it, but more as a tribute to an author I should know better, whose experience and wisdom seep through the pages – but who undoubtedly wrote more important, better things elsewhere.

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.3) by Solvej Balle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 16

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is personal growth. I’m actually reading a series without gaps of years between the books! I wrote about the second volume in Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series only a few weeks ago, and now I’ve finished the third (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). As you might expect, this review will contain pretty significant spoilers for the first two books, though I’ll try not to give too many twists and turns away from the third.

As a quick reminder, if you’re new to this series – Tara is stuck in a timeloop. It is endlessly 18 November. She has lived through several years of this now, and no longer truly believes that 19 November is possibly on the horizon. The first book was about finding peace and space in this timeloop; the second was about claustrophobia and exploration. And the third… well, the second book ended with a big reveal. And this is a major spoiler for the first two books. The big twist is… it turns out Tara is not alone in her timeloop! Another person has been living the same circular existence as her, for the same length of time. His name is Henry Dale.

There are several long entries in this volume, explaining how they first encountered each other in a lecture theatre – where, even before they knew for certain that the other was an anomaly in the loop, they recognised something distinct about each other. Even though they are strangers, this shared strangeness is, of course, soemthing that brings them together intimately.

The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.

I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.

It is surprisingly plain sailing for a long time. They live through dozens and dozens of days together – moving around, eating and talking and sharing their experiences. Henry has a young son in America, and has spent many of his days there – each day, doing an impromptu visit to his ex-wife and asking to spend the afternoon with his son. (As a reminder, they always start a day wherever they ended the previous one, so travel is possible.) Tara has spent years honing her own philosophy and approach to the extraordinary world she has found herself in, and it is understandably confronting to have to accommodate someone else’s. A blessing, but also a jolt to the rhythm she has established.

A world had opened up, and it was not all to the good; we were in some strange way bound together. There was a promise of more conversations, but not only that. There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibilities for their baggage.

Because there are so many volumes, Balle can be spacious in how she describes this world. There is time for tangents – about Romans and their obsession with grain, about historians and ‘female history’ and a dispute about whether such a thing exists separately from man’s. For a long while, the two separate – Tara goes back to her husband, and has less success with him than she did in the first book. And she continues to age. She is years older than when the story started, while the world remains the same, over and over. I imagine that will become increasingly a plot point. How can she continue to visit Thomas when, in his eyes, his wife will have aged significantly overnight?

I shan’t say more about what happens in this volume, but the world has certainly opened up more than I anticipated at the outset. I never really worried that Balle would run out of steam, because she writes so beautifully and engagingly about the utterly mundane and thus could never exhaust her material. But I love the direction the series is heading in, and the distinctive nature she manages to give each book – even while the same day repeats itself time and again. I think the first book remains my favourite of the three, but they are all triumphs, and I’m excited to get onto the third.

Fight by Preston Sprinkle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 15

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This is barely a blog post – just noting that, on an evening journey to visit a friend in Milton Keynes, I finished my audiobook of the moment: Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence (2014) by Preston Sprinkle.

Preston Sprinkle is my favourite Christian writer (theologian? I don’t know where the line is to become one) and I love his books on a wide range of topics – he also hosts an excellent and wide-ranging podcast called Theology in the Raw (so I guess he is a theologian). His books range from the very accessible to the quite academic, sometimes within the same chapter, and Fight is to the accessible side of things. I think the print version has a lot of supporting academic material in appendices.

Sprinkle’s thesis is basically that Christians are called to be non-violent – which I think is a more controversial claim in parts of right-wing America than it is here. And, as often with Sprinkle, it’s not a conclusion he comes to instinctively or even comfortably. He always looks to find his theology from the Bible, not from culture or history or assumption. He goes even further than most, and argues that Christians shouldn’t fight in the army, shouldn’t kill someone trying to attack them etc, and has beautiful, Christ-centred back-up.

I’ll be honest, this is perhaps the worst kind of theological reading – in that I’m reading something I know I’ll agree with. I’m instinctively a pacifist and find violence abhorrent in any form. So I’m glad to have scriptural back-up for it (though it also seems very self-evident of the Prince of Peace) – particularly for the trickier bits of the Old Testament or Revelation that people will wheel out in opposition to the idea, often without having actually read them.

So, when I say ‘worst kind’, I mean this book has not challenged my thinking at all – because it says what I want it to. And I know that’s kinda lazy… but also I’ll follow Preston Sprinkle anywhere he leads.

The 27th Kingdom by Alice Thomas Ellis – #ABookDayInMay – Day 14

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The 27th Kingdom (1982) by Alice Thomas Ellis sounds like it might be a fantasy novel, and the curious cover to my edition makes it seem like some sort of water-based dystopia. Well, the title is just a reference to the many countries that Aunt Irene’s ancestors have lived in before they land in the 27th – Chelsea. Aunt Irene (she is always called ‘Aunt Irene’ by the narrative) lives there in 1954 with her careless nephew Kyril, a lodger they’re sick of called Mr Sirocco, some feuding occasional domestic help, and a range of eccentric neighbours who regard one another with the usual mixture of goodwill and malice.

Into this world comes Valentine, a postulant at a nunnery for whom a stay with Aunt Irene might well be considered a test. She is sent there by the Reverend Mother for as long as an apple remains ripe in her desk drawer – just one of the many unusual details that are dealt out with a matter-of-factness by Alice Thomas Ellis’s immensely enjoyable narrative.

She read her letter again, and because it made her cross she ate another piece of toast, reflecting that it was always one’s family who annoyed one most and made one fat. Simply that her sister was now called ‘Reverend Mother’ made Aunt Irene cross and inclined to put too much butter on her toast. As far as she was concerned, her sister was a naughty girl called Berthe, with dark flying hair and a dipping hem to her dress. She hadn’t agreed particularly well with that girl, but she had forgotten; and she resented her transformation into the stately virgin in the stiff robes that were so alarmingly clean. Aunt Irene herself was clean, but her clothes were soft and scented.

Aunt Irene is a glorious character in a novel of glorious characters. She is obsessed with the tax man and certain that he is stalking her, she loves eating horseflesh and has an amicable relationship with an underhand butcher, and she has the sort of idiosyncratic Christian faith that is one of many things that reminds me of Muriel Spark’s writing. She certainly believes in God and angels, but largely because she can’t imagine anybody inventing the meringue without supernatural intervention. ‘To Aunt Irene the Ten Commandments seemed almost insignificant compared with the astonishing miracle of what you could do with an egg.’

Valentine is very different from the environment she finds herself in – mixed-race, from an unspecified distant island, and certainly less worldly than the other inhabitants of this unsalubrious part of Chelsea (for such things there were in 1954). I found that I understood her less than the other characters, and she seems more of a catalyst than a character to get to know deeply. But her reverence and good nature do not stop her being blunt and ironic. Alice Thomas Ellis’s dialogue is, again, very Sparkian – people saying exactly what they mean, often at cross-purposes, but with a directness that means even the strangest conversations do seem to be communicative.

And the narrative is my chief joy in The 27th Kingdom. The most unusual things are written with total matter-of-factness – and elegant, even profound, things are delivered pat alongside the everyday. Here are a couple of examples I enjoyed:

On the way home they passed the Bunch of Grapes, Major Mason visible through the open door of the public bar. Aunt Irene pointed him out to Valentine as one of the sights of the district.

Valentine said nothing, but Aunt Irene was suddenly visited by a sensation of the sea, very deep and green and cold, and shivered with the surprise she always felt when reminded that she truly possessed a psychic gift and was not a liar.

and

“It’s time something happened,” said Aunt Irene the next morning. “Something pleasant. Nothing’s happened in ages.”

Valentine was surprised to hear this. It seemed to her that things here happened every moment and she missed the convent where time was afforded the respect befitting one of God’s more subtle creations.

Some of the novellas I’ve read this month have been all about atmosphere over plot. Well, The 27th Kingdom – despite Aunt Irene’s protests – is rammed with plot. It’s equally rammed with characters, any one of whom could have helmed their own novel. We race through, enjoying the brio, and she maintains the same breakneck, bizarre, very funny tone throughout.

I didn’t particularly love the first one or two Alice Thomas Ellis books I read, but I’m so glad I persevered. The most recent two I’ve read – The Inn at the Edge of the World and The 27th Kingdom – have been absolute successes for me. Any favourites among her oeuvre for any Alice Thomas Ellis fans out there?

Horror! Horror! Horror! by Edith Olivier – #ABookADayInMay – Day 13

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Under normal circumstances, I would run in the other direction from a book with ‘horror’ in the title, let alone three times. But I also love Edith Olivier, and was interested when Snuggly Books (!) brought out a slim volume of three of Olivier’s short stories in the horror genre. Interested enough to buy it and, as is so often the way of things, read it two years later (and it took about half an hour to read).

Olivier is best-known for The Love-Child, a novella that I wrote a substantial about of my doctoral thesis on, and which I was delighted to bring back into print through the British Library Women Writers series. But I had either forgotten, or never knew, that she also wrote horror stories – and this book collects three of them, written in 1934-5: ‘The Caretaker’s Story’, ‘Dead Men’s Bones’, and ‘The Night Nurse’s Story’.

They’re so short that it’s hard to give an account of them without giving everything away. In brief, the first one concerns someone returning to his house that a caretaker has supposedly been looking after, but finds it abandoned – and gets attacked by a seagull, which is not as incidental as it seems. The second (and least successful, to my mind) is about the deceased being unhappy with how the bones of the dead have been combined – it is one of those stories related entirely by someone who wasn’t involved, which makes it lose any immediacy.

The third was definitely my favourite of the three. Nurse Webber is off on a dark and stormy winter night to be the nurse for an ill woman in the middle of nowhere.

The dark wet November night had evidently had no effect on the spirits of the stout little chauffeur; and he gaily drove Nurse Webber away to her first private case.

They were certainly going to an ‘out-of-the-way’ place, for they quickly left the main road and began climbing about the Moor, taking farm roads which zigzagged over steep hills, and turning ever into narrower lanes where no signposts marked the way. And Matron had been right. They met no one to ask.

When the chauffeur pulls over at the next house to ask, it turns out to be the one Nurse Webber is expected at. But the name doesn’t quite match, and there are other inconsistencies that trouble her…

I shan’t say more, but it was definitely the one of the three that most successfully used atmosphere to give a creeping sense of… well, if not terror, then intriguing unease. There’s nothing like a remote country house on a dark evening, is there?

They were fun stories, but it is interesting how unscary almost all ‘horror’ stories of this period are to me. I know there are some exceptions – I’ve never read M.R. James, but I understand he still has the capacity to chill – but ghost stories by the likes of E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton, and E.F. Benson have broadly left me unafraid. And I am afraid of everything. What is it that makes these period pieces less chilling? Is it because they tend towards the discursive, rather than the sudden jolts of modern horror?

I hate being scared, so I am quite happy not to be – though it can feel anticlimactic when the author clearly thinks he/she has done enough to leave the reader quivering. As it is, I could enjoy Olivier’s stories in a different way – I was not terrified, but I was entertained, and I’m glad to have expanded my Olivier knowledge.

A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam – #ABookADayInMay – Day 12

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I bought A Little Stranger (1989) by Candia McWilliam at a National Trust secondhand bookshop, not knowing anything about it but intrigued by the enthusiastic quotes on the back – and, I’ll admit, its brevity. At only 135 pages, I knew it could fit into one of my May reading projects. The quote that won me over was from an unnamed reviewer in the Guardian: “Compelling and unsettling… McWilliam uses the conventions of middlebrow fiction to slice away its usual reassurance… very funny too, a comedy of good manners in which each well-meaning utterance becomes a source of confusion and dismay.”

I think that’s a pretty good indicator of the novella’s tone. Daisy is the narrator – often unrealiable, to herself as much as anyone else. She lives with her husband Solomon and their son John in a large house with servants, and they need a new nanny for John: here enters Margaret Pride. From the outset, Daisy is looking for relationship and information, and Margaret is equally reticent on either front. She is engaged to a man she says nothing about, gives little detail about her previous employment, and quietly disregards the overtures of interest that Daisy offers.

She did not speak of her parents in the round. She appeared to have no childhood memories. When she released details, they were flat and lifeless as details from an instruction leaflet. It was as though she described self-assembly furniture.

As Daisy shows her round the house, it is clear that this won’t be the relationship she is hoping for.

She looked around like someone wondering whether or not to buy, and again said nothing. Sensible, really, not to be beguiled by things. After all, the child was the point. In ‘her’ sitting-room and the nursery bathroom she also passed no remark. She must perhaps be shy. Her last job has been in much the same sort of place, but perhaps I intimidated her. I am told I can. I am taller than most and have more hair. I also look at other people very hard.

Daisy and Margaret are both fascinating characters. Margaret is interesting because she is an enigma – and, as we can only see her through Daisy’s eyes, we have to glean what we can through this refraction. Daisy, on the other hand, is fascinating because she is such a bad interpreter of almost everything, including herself. She is constantly trying to understand other people, but superimposes her own weak, optimistic readings before she can come to any more justifiable conclusions. The reader is suspicious of Margaret long before Daisy is, though we can’t work out exactly why.

That’s what is so unsettling about the book. There is a sense that something will burst, or some truth will come to light. Too much is kept hidden for us to trust Daisy’s interpretation of events.

And yet Daisy is a sharp, funny character on other grounds. I really enjoyed some of the incidental irony at contemproary culture. She describes an author who ‘could not write but could not help selling’, and also:

I spent the evening, after a supper of sweetbreads and rye bread, reading. I could not see that there was much on television but serials about the effects of illness or of wealth. I could not differentiate between these programmes, though the outfits worn by the victims sometimes gave a hint, and the terminally ill, or those who impersonated them, appeared to wear even more make-up than the terminally rich.

As for the title, it does describe Margaret – but it is also, of course, a reference to pregnancy. ‘Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger.’ And not long into Margaret’s tenure, Daisy discovers she is pregnant – which becomes another thread in this unsettling story.

For much of this novella, I was filled with admiration. Particularly towards the beginning, I found the balance of intrigue, eeriness, and humour worked really well. Sometimes the floweriness of the language (which suited Daisy’s character) did go rather too far, to the point that I didn’t quite know what was going on in the scene – but it was an enjoyably engineered tone and the two characters were expertly handled.

But… I shan’t spoil it, but the end of the book is such a tonal shift – and, frankly, misogynistic – that it really coloured when beforehand. There are twists that felt unearned and inartistic. It was also increasingly confusing, and not in a way that I thought was deliberate. I found it such a pity, and it went from being a book I was delighted to have discovered to one that will probably be heading to a charity shop. It’s all the more frustrating, because McWilliam is clearly such a good writer and the premise was excellent.

Sorry to end on a sour note, but you can join in my frustration!

The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim – #ABookADayInMay – Day 11

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When I was looking through my Virago Modern Classics bookcase to see if I had anything that would work for this month, I was pleased to see that The Solitary Summer (1899), though about 190 pages, had such an enormous font that it would be pretty easy to get through in a day.

The Solitary Summer is a sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, the debut novel (/autofiction?) that was an enormous success and made Elizabeth von Arnim’s name. Or, rather, didn’t make her name. She remained anonymous on her books, which were subsequently published as being ‘by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden‘, and ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’ was a concoction created, I believe, by Virago in the 1980s.

I courted controversy when I ranked Elizabeth von Arnim’s books by putting Elizabeth and Her German Garden in last place. You know what, I stand by it, but I should add that I’ve liked all of her books. For me, it lacks the spark and irony of her better books – though a lot of that was present in the third in the series, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. So, how would the middle of the three compare?

Elizabeth loves her home and garden, and the title comes from her longing to enjoy this happiness without interruption. Characteristically, she wanders around this idea in philosophical, whimsical styile before landing on it:

Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves. They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how can you make a person happy against his will? […] Obviously happiness must come from within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.

She puts forward the idea to her husband, known as ‘the Man of Wrath’ in a way that is intended for humour but doesn’t take an archeologist to dig into the discontent behind the quip. It is a little uneasy to see the lightness of his portrayal here – not the clever irony of Otto in The Caravanners, or the amusing-but-awful Father in Father. In the Elizabeth series, the narrator doesn’t seem to quite know if she dislikes him, loves him or tolerates him, the extent of his wrath is not discussed or even hinted at. A later von Arnim novel would be cleverer about it, one way or another. He has a rather stereotypical response to her plan:

“Very well, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, “only do not grumble afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose, and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective punishment.”

But the idea of the solitary summer is really just a hook to hang on whatever Elizabeth wants to mull over. For quite a lot of the book, unsurprisingly, that is her garden. I don’t know anything about gardens or plants, but I could still enjoy her enthusiasm about them – she describes them not just visually, but in terms of the way they make people feel and the life and energy they can bring to a garden. There are some comic scenes with gardeners, because of course there are.

And then, sometimes, she will use the natural world to swerve into quite sombre material:

There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs all our courage—the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each of us lives and dies. 

It’s quite beautiful, and it’s a sort of sincerity that I’ve only seen her replicate (in-between the barbed comedy) in The Enchanted April. But it’s also a little jarring – I’m not sure she fully worked out the tone of the book. We have some enjoyable whimsy with her young children’s views on heaven; there is a section on a visiting soldier; there are homilies to the most delicious foods she’s eaten. Most awkwardly of all are her attempts to sympathise with the working-class community around her, though she is pretty sharply dismissive of a woman whose child dies in infancy, and let’s not say too much about her belief that she would thrive in poverty – a vision of poverty that is beyond Disneyfied.

This is sounding quite negative, but I did honestly enjoy reading the book. It had many funny moments and many poignant ones. Sometimes we moved swiftly from one to the other. But it all felt a little random and occasionally self-indulgent, and is clearly the work of an author who hasn’t honed her craft yet. If she hadn’t written such masterpieces later in her career, perhaps I would be more generous to The Solitary Summer. As it is, it’s a beautiful, entertaining… attempt.

Having said that, I had forgotten quite how old it was. Despite not really cohering into a novel, I had to admire the freshness to it. The verve of the writing feels much more 1920s/30s than late Victorian, and there is certainly a spirited energy to it. If you want to get the best of Elizabeth von Arnim, don’t forget those rankings. If you’re a completist, you’ll find a lot to love her. If you’re a gardener, you’ll find even more. But if you want to sample Elizabeth von Arnim and see if she’s the sort of author for you, I wouldn’t start here.