A memoir of sitting for a Lucian Freud portrait

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I don’t remember where I first heard about Man with a Blue Scarf (2010) by Martin Gayford, but it had been on my mental tbr list for a good while before I stumbled across a copy in Hay-on-Wye. It’s such an unusual perspective, which the subtitle explains: ‘On sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud’. And that is the premise of the memoir. Martin Gayford, a friend of Freud’s, spent many hours sitting for the portrait that ends up on the cover and in the title.

I love reading books about art and artists, particularly those which have plenty of paintings featured in the book – and this edition doesn’t stint on those. Along the way, there are colour prints of many of Freud’s artworks from across his career, but also reproductions of lots of artists that are referenced – whether inspirations, or simply creators that Freud admires. God bless whoever did the rights management for this book.

Freud is notorious for being extremely slow in doing his painting, always from the flesh, and working each area to completion before moving onto the next. There are one or two incomplete paintings featured in the book, which shows his technique perhaps better than a finished portrait does – and it surprised me, an extremely amateur painter, that Freud would do great detail in one area before even touching another. Because Freud is so gradual, Gayford often ends sitting sessions with only the most minor of additions or alterations being done, and he has extraordinary patience. Sometimes Freud discards paintings halfway through, after hours and hours of sittings. And one wonders how the horses and dogs that feature in a lot of paintings are encouraged to be equally patient.

My favourite sections of the book are those that do what it says on the tin – explaining Freud’s approach from the perspective of the model. Such as…

LF leans forward sometimes, shading his eyes like a sailor in search of land. His demeanour when painting is that of an explorer or hunter in some dark forest. He peers at me, holding his palette in his hand, with the brushes he is not using held between his little finger and the next, protruding like arrows in a quiver. His attitude is a combination of audacity with caution: an intense determination to get the thing exactly right.

Often before making a stroke LF expels air in a little sigh with the effort of concentration. The same attention is applied to the mixing of colours: “I think just a little”, “No, that’s not it.” He will often sigh again and give a little gesture between a shrug and a triumphant wave of the arms after a successful application of the brush, as though while building a house of cards he has just successfully placed a particularly tricky one. When he is really concentrating he mutters constantly, giving himself instructions: “Yes, perhaps – a bit”, “Quite!”, “No-o, I don’t think so”, “A bit more yellow.” Once or twice he is about to apply a stroke, then withdraws, considers again, then re-scruntinizes, measuring my face with little mapping movements of the brush, describing a small curve in the air or moving it upwards. The whole procedure is hugely deliberative.

I don’t love the use of ‘LF’ rather the Freud – or, indeed, Lucian – but if we set that aside, I absolutely loved this sort of scene. The diary entries give Gayford’s experience a sense of immediacy, and help separate out into parts something that possibly became more unified when remembered from a distance. Along the way, there are also fascinating discussions of art, other artists, and the experience of painting – for example, how Freud believed his emotions while painting would appear in the finished work (“I was painting the paisley patterns on her dress and I remember worrying that my sadness would get into the paisley shapes and I suppose perhaps it did.”)

Presumably there were not enough diary entries, or they did cover enough ground, because they are linked by sections with less immediacy, considering Freud’s work and life in a more abstract way. They were also interesting, though perhaps Gayford’s subjectivity is more welcome when he is actually writing ‘on sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud’, per the subtitle, rather than equally subjective reflections as Freud’s friend that don’t have the same need for subjectivity. Which I suppose is my way of criticising any sense that Man with a Blue Scarf is a memoir or biography of Freud – because, if it were, it leaves out too much. Having read Celia Paul’s excellent Letters to Gwen John, it seems impossible to write about Freud without acknowledging his relationships and the toxic elements to them. I don’t think there is any non-abusive way for a 55-year-old man to have a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old woman, even if it is just the right side of legal. And that’s before we mention his enormous numbers of children, the exact number of which seems to be unknown even to him. Perhaps you’ll say that this is all prurient irrelevance in a book about an artist, but I did feel a bit uncomfortable at the sense of a pally-pally men’s club, where Gayford wouldn’t challenge anything uncomfortable in Freud’s personal life. Maybe none of this matters because it isn’t the sort of book Gayford wanted to write – and I’d agree if he’d stuck just to the experience of sitting for the portrait, but by going a fair stretch beyond that, it raises questions about what he leaves out. (Speaking of leaving out – I think he should definitely have left out a final section about sitting for an etching after the portrait is finished, which feels anti-climactic and rushed.)

Misgivings aside, I loved a lot of Man with a Blue Scarf. Gayford is enjoyable company when he is sitting for the portrait, with enough artistic knowledge to give him an attuned interest in Freud’s methods – and yet enough of an outsider to the artists’ world to give a perspective that the average reader can empathise with. The book made me wish we had a similar sort of narrative for all the famous portraits, and it does feel like a privilege to have such an unusal experience ably documented. It isn’t a biography of Freud and shouldn’t be taken as such, and perhaps should have had slightly more curtailed perimetres. But I do think it helps to understand Freud the artist, and puts the reader in a place we are unlikely ever to sit.

The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe

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And the Canadian reading continues! I read The Book of Eve (1973) by Constance Beresford-Howe on the plane home from Canada having picked it up in Fair’s Fair in Calgary. It was one of the bookshops that very considerately had bookcases dedicated to Canadian authors, and I spent a good while going through an awful lot of promising-looking books. I’d never heard of this author or title, but it had the magical words ‘boarding house’ in the blurb – and that was enough to swing it for me.

Here is the opening paragraph:

The real surprise – to me anyway – was not really what I did, but how I felt afterwards. Shocked, of course. But not guilty. You might say, and be right, that the very least a woman can be is shocked when she walks out on a sick and blameless husband after forty years. But to feel no guilt at all – feel nothing, in fact, but simple relief and pleasure – that did seem odd, to say the least. How annoying for God (not to mention Adam), after all, if Eve had just walked out of Eden without waiting to be evicted, and left behind her pangs of guilt, as it were, with her leaf apron?

That’s about the only time the Bible is mentioned, perhaps to justify Beresford-Howe’s attention-grabbing title, though there are also letters that the narrator writes to God scattered occasionally through the book. Eva (why not Eve?) Carroll is that narrator – a 65-year-old wife and mother who walks out of a marriage to Burt that, to external observers, seems ordinary and content. There is no other man or other women; there is no domestic violence. There isn’t even really unkindness. Eve has simply had enough of a world in which she feels constantly trammeled and stifled.

She takes herself to the other side of Montreal, where she lies low for a while. She phones her 38-year-old son, Neil, to let him know that she is ok – and agrees to meet with him.

My dear son, my Neil and his kind heart with its rare flashes of insight and clumsy tact. He was the enemy, not Burt; with his sweetness and reason he was the real threat. All his life I’d fought against loving Neil too much, and that was all that helped me now.

“No, dear. I’m not going to New York. Or to Florida. Or back to your father. So if that’s all you can suggest, we might as well let you get back to the office.”

Burt refuses to make her an allowance, and Eva has no legal claim to the house she has tended for decades. There is a small pension to live on, and she refuses her son’s offers of financial help – which she knows he can’t afford. A fair amount of the story involves Eva trying to make ends meet, so she can afford the rent on her tiny apartment and the daily necessities. She does this by finding discarded things on the street on pawning them, to complement her meagre pension. In the story of a woman walking out of her life and surviving in unlikely circumstances, I was reminded of The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks and The Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. But those women are (respectively) much younger and rather younger than Eva. There is still something so shocking, so taboo, about a woman of Eva’s age choosing independence without a ‘good reason’. And that’s in inverted commas because, of course, Eva’s reason is fundamentally good in her eyes. In the 1970s, I’m sure that 65 felt much older than 65 does today – making Eva’s decision-making all the more unexpected.

While there are a handful of residents in the boarding house, it isn’t really a boarding house novel in the way I’d imagined – it isn’t, that is to say, a novel about a collection of unlikely people brought together. They are largely peripheral – with the exception of Johnny, a Hungarian immigrant a decade or more younger than her with whom she starts a love affair. Or is ‘love affair’ the right terminology? The Book of Eve is certainly not a romance novel, and while Eva’s connection with Johnny has excitement, passion, humour and intrigue, he is not a knight in shining armour and Beresford-Howe resists any simple conclusions about whether a different man is really a solution to whatever problem Eva is experiencing. But, again, how many 1970s novels have thoughtful scenes of passion involving a woman of Eva’s age?

The Book of Eve really rests on the character of Eva, and I think she was a real success. Beresford-Howe concentrates on making her a nuanced character rather than necessarily an empathetic one. This is no Lady Sloane in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, whom we unquestioningly cheer on. While no reader is likely to feel sorry for Eva’s abandoned husband, her son is more sympathetic and her granddaughter still more so. Eva treats other characters with occasional thoughtlessness, and can be frustrating in her refusal to address things head on.

And yet, and yet… I found her absolutely compelling. I loved spending time with her in all her complexities, and was fascinated to see how she would survive and what she would discover in this brave new world. I’d always rather read about interesting characters than morally upright ones – haven’t we all been annoyed by characters whose only purpose is to carry forth whatever message the author thinks is important? It is Eva’s moral grey area, and Beresford-Howe’s resistance to easy answers and pat plot points, that makes The Book of Eve such a brilliant read. I believe it is a Canadian classic, probably well known by readers in that nation – but I think rather less well-known in the UK. If you haven’t heard of it, and you love nuanced feminist novels about authentic, believable women – and, of course, if you a boarding house novel – then I urge you to lay your hands on it. If you are an aficianado of Canadian literature, do let me know what else I should read by her!

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrey

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When I was in Canada, one of the books I was looking out for was Wild Dogs (2004) by Helen Humphreys. I believe she has only written two novels set in contemporary Canada, and that was precisely the sort of novel I was on the hunt for. Having really admired her memoir Nocturne and novel Rabbit Foot Bill, I was keen to complete a trio. Even better, the copy I found in the basement of a bookshop in Inglewood, Calgary, was signed! I got to reading it pretty quickly, drawn in by these excellent opening paragraphs:

The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Their eyes flash, bright stars in the woods at night and they weave like fire through the dry grass towards the edge of the city, looking for something to kill and eat.

Love is like those wild dogs. If it hunts you down, it will not let you go. And what you can never know from the beginning is how hard or how long you’ll love something; how even when it has gone the love you felt will still chase you down, loping like dark flame through your blood.

The wild dogs are real. They are out there, beyond the safety of the streets and houses, beyond the lights of the city. And one of those wild dogs is mine.

Alice’s dog is one of several in the neighbourhood who has turned wild, with surprising rapidity. Every night, she and five other people congregate at the edge of the forest, trying to call their dogs home. They proffer toys, food, affection – and every night, they are rejected. Or perhaps they don’t even see the dogs in the distance.

It is a brilliantly arresting image for a novel to open with, and apparently based loosely on a real event. It also gives Humphreys a ready-made community of unlikely companions, which is an excellent way to organise an intriguing novel. There is a man called Malcolm who lives with his mother – perhaps. A teenager, Jamie, who avoids home because of an angry stepfather. Lily, in her 20s, who has suffered brain damage. Walter, an older man whose Jack Russell terrier has somehow joined the pack of larger dogs. And there is the person that the narrator addresses as ‘you’, with whom (as we learn in a narrative that gently plays outside of time) Alice has had a love affair. That is, it happens after the events being narrated, and has ended by the time the narrator is looking back.

Another dimension to the novel: most of these dogs have not escaped. In almost every case, there is someone who has deliberately taken the dog to the forest’s edge and let it loose – whether as punishment, or because they don’t want a dog near their baby, or they don’t think the owner is capable of having a dog. In Alice’s case, it is her boyfriend who abandoned her dog there – from a mix of anger of hopelessness. Somehow, this is not the immediate death knell to their relationship – though it comes pretty soon. And so the book charts the bonding of these disparate people, their shared and yet separate hopes, and the evolution of Alice’s affections for the mysterious ‘you’.

I think it’s a very clever arrangement for a novel. The only bit that felt heavy-handedly ‘novelistic’ was when they take turns walking the usual dog-walk routes of each dog – supposedly to feel closer to the dogs, but really a slightly clumsy way of taking the six to different places together. And I wondered quite where the novel could go, formally – and I was surprised when Alice’s narrative ended. And, instead, we turn to Jamie’s perspective, about halfway through the novel. It gives Humphreys an opportunity to write a really moving, sharp, uncomfortable account of what it’s like to live with somebody violent. Somebody unpredictable, and yet somebody you have to desperately try to predict.

It’s fifteen steps from the back door to the fridge. If I pull the fridge door back against the hinge, it will open without a sound. The bread wrapper will crinkle. Yogurt makes that suction scoop when you pull the foil top off. The cheese drawer sticks on its runners. Peanut butter will be all right. I can twist the plastic cap off slowly and it won’t make any noise. I can stand here at the fridge and shove my fingers into the jar instead of risking the rustle of the cutlery drawer.

It’s not the final shift in narrator – and, as well as various members of our six, we spend time with another character who is involved in the novel’s shocking, and yet somehow inevitable, twist.

In another Humphreys book I bought and read in Canada – And A Dog Called Fig,her memoir of writing and dogs – she writes about the genesis of Wild Dogs:

When I was thinking up my next novel, Wild Dogs, I decided to structure it after the way that a dog turns and turns before settling to sleep. I wanted the story to turn like that, to circle back on itself and then continue before coming to rest. The novel is about dogs, or rather it is about our relationship with dogs, about wildness and domesticity and belonging.

I don’t think I would have ever have guessed that was the origin, but I can definitely see what she means. When the perspective shifts, it doesn’t go back to the beginning of the story – but it does take a few steps back. And it does come to a sort of rest – though I must warn sensitive readers that not all the dogs in the novel survive.

In those opening paragraphs that struck me so much, I did have some qualms that the metaphors would be too strident and the comparison between human relationships and wild dogs a little too pointed. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Humphreys is a subtle writer for the most part, and manages to swerve anything too heavy-handed. And yet it is, as she says, a novel about wildness and domesticity and belonging. It also does that very hard thing: taking a striking opening scenario, and making the rest of the novel equally compelling. The energy doesn’t fizzle out, but it becomes something more immersive, more telling. Yes, even this cat person loved it.

Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr

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We’re continuing the Canadian literature here, and there will be others to come, as I get around to writing about the books I read on my holiday to Calgary and Vancouver. Up today is the first book that the booksellers in Pages, Books in Calgary recommended when I said “I’d like to read books by Canadians, about Canada, that I wouldn’t be able to get easily in the UK.” I don’t know how much of a struggle it would be to find this in the UK, but I’m really glad they put Prairie Edge (2024) by Conor Kerr into my hands – I thought it was excellent. Even better, it was set in Alberta (the province I was staying in), and even mentioned in passing one or two of the places I visited in Calgary.

And it’s all about releasing bison into downtown Edmonton.

After a brief prologue from inhabitants of the district in the 1870s, we are straight into the action from Ezzy’s point of view. Here’s the first paragraph of his first chapter:

Around two in the morning, Grey dropped me off at an outskirt suburb of Edmonton. The kind where there were no numbers to tell you where you were on the grid, just the name of a landscape feature like Rolling Meadows, followed by a Blvd., Way, Point, Lane. I assumed that rich people loved not having numbers in their addresses. Why else would you live out here? Grey took off down the block in her beat-up Honda Cr-v. I watched the taillights until they disappeared around a suburb bend. Rich people also loved curves in the road.

Ezzy and his cousin Grey are Métis, a First Nations group that has lived in the area for many years, but has faced considerable historical discrimination and persecution. Nor is it solely in the past – their Métis identity still exposes them to these things, be it suspicion from the police, inescapable forms of poverty, or limits to their educational and career prospects.

Grey is passionate about these things. She lives to protest injustice – against Métis, against the environment, against animals. Along the way, she often joins with other protestors, but she also has well-worn disdain for the sort of wealthy white person who can protest as a hobby before they move on to their secure futures. Ezzy also sees this injustice, but he has less hope for change in the world – his world, or the whole world. His disaffection is sometimes a wedge between the two of them. But it is understandable.

I felt like most of my life so far had been waiting. When I was a kid, I waited for someone to adopt me. When I turned twelve and realized that was never going to happen, I waited until I aged out of foster families. After that, group homes. Then I went out on my own, and I waited for something, anything, to happen to give me direction or purpose. Floating through life was fine, but I felt like there must be something missing. What motivated people to try to do something different than the generations before them? I couldn’t grasp it. All I knew was survival mode. If there was food, eat it as quick as possible before someone took it from you. If there were drugs or booze, do them all before someone else could. If there was money, spend it now, or else it’d just be whittled away. Survive. Survive. Survive. No purpose, no direction, nothing – just waiting for that moment to happen.

He spends time in jail, during which Grey and he didn’t communicate at all – but they reunite when he comes out, having been close as children. She has had a different path, going to university, but they are still able to bond over their feelings of rejection from so many parts of society. Grey’s stubborn idealism and Ezzy’s shrugging nihilism clash but somehow they are a unit. One person who doesn’t reject them is Auntie May, who takes Ezzy in, and is very much the more centre of this book. A beacon of possible hope in the midst of the petty crime, joyriding and empty future that define Ezzy’s current life.

So, releasing the bison! This is an act of defiance by the two: Grey is trying to make a point about environmentalism and the reclaiming of urban land, while you feel like Ezzy just finds some peace in destruction. Between them, they manage to steal bison from someone’s land and transport them to the city, leaving them roaming and quickly scarpering themselves. It becomes a local mystery on the news – and a wider mystery, when copycat bison-releasings happen.

It’s such a brilliant image for a novel, and also makes a great way of marketing the book to make it sound fascinating: “This is the novel about bison released in downtown Edmonton.” I loved the idea, but the novel is far more than a cleverly constructed set piece. It’s such an interesting interplay of characters, entirely convincing – and more layers are added when, after a while, we switch to Grey’s perspective. She thinks more poetically, perhaps, and certainly with more decision.

There is plenty of darkness in the novel, including attempted sexual assault, murder, and drug taking. But it didn’t feel gratuitous, because it is anchored by the novel being chiefly about two fascinating characters. There was the odd page or two of viscera that I skimmed past, but mostly I really loved spending time with Kerr’s writing, his intriguing slant on modern Canadian life, and the vivid creations of Grey and Ezzy – deeply flawed, and hurt, people I couldn’t help rooting for.

This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence

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It’s no secret that I love Margaret Laurence, particularly her novel A Jest of God, but I’ve always been a bit nervous of reading her debut novel. This Side Jordan (1960) breaks one of my cardinal rules for choosing novels. I call it ‘the Brits abroad’ rule in my head and, though Laurence is Canadian, it still stands. If I’m reading a novel set in a country other than mine, I prefer it to be by someone from that country – and that is doubly true when it’s a white person writing about an African country.

And yet – I thought I’d trust Laurence and risk this novel, set in Ghana. More particularly, it is set in 1957 on the cusp of independence, as Ghana was about to get that name after decades as a British colony called the Gold Coast. Laurence herself spent five years there as her husband, Jack, was stationed in the country as an engineer. She had a first-hand view of what life was like as a colonial immigrant (I never use the word ‘ex-pat’, which is almost always a whitewash of ‘economic migrant’) but how would that read nearly 70 years later?

I’ll be honest, the opening scene wasn’t promising. Here’s how the novel starts:

The six boys were playing the Fire Highlife, playing it with a beat urgent as love. And Johnnie Kestoe, who didn’t like Africans, was dancing the highlife with an African girl.

Charity’s scarlet smile mocked his attempts to rotate his shoulders and wriggle his European hips to the music. Her own fleshy hips and buttocks swayed easily, and her big young breasts, unspoiled by children and only lightly held by her pnik blouse, rose and fell as though the music were her breath. Johnnie grinned awkwardly at her, then he jerked his head away.

Oooof. The description of Charity seems both animalistic and overly sexualised, and the whole scene is pretty awkward. Johnnie is castigated by his fellow men for shaming himself by dancing with an African woman, and it was at this point that I googled ‘Is This Side Jordan racist?’ The answer was in the negative, for what it’s worth, so I carried on…

…and I quickly realised that Laurence is mocking the racists. She is showing us the attitudes, behaviours and (focalised through the third person) the perspectives of the sort of people who doubtless proliferated in this world. As it became clear that their time in the sun was coming to an end, they were becoming more protective, more vicious, more afraid of what would replace them.

The real hero of the novel appears in the next chapter. Nathaniel is a schoolteacher, and one of the more interesting, complex, sympathetic, flawed characters I’ve ever come across. As we meet him, he is anxious about money. As the educated member of the extended family who has left the village, he is expected to financially support a wide array of relatives. Yet his income is low, the school he teaches in is poor, and even the students who work hard have little chance of making anything of the shoddy education provided.

A slim hand flicked at the books on Nathaniel’s desk.

“You really prepare your lectures, Nathaniel? You crazy, man?”

“It’s a new course,” Nathaniel said stiffly.

Lamptey made him feel raw, a bush boy, a villager. Angery swelled again.

“What’s so terrible about preparing a lecture, anyway?” he snapped. “You ought to try it sometime.”

“What’s the use?” Lamptey said candidly. “The stuff I teach don’t make sense anyway. So I just tell them to memorize everything. Nobody do it, but that’s their business.”

The other teachers in the school, as you see, don’t worry too much about the substandard teaching they provide. They know the boys in their school won’t amount to much in the world. But, on the eve of independence, Nathaniel has ambitions and hopes: for himself, for his soon-to-be-born child, and for his class. It is his hope that leads to his unhappiness. He is not content with what he has, but is too poor, too unconnected, and too ground down by the context of colonialism to achieve all his intelligence warrants. Happier are those without his abilities.

One such is his wife – and she is only unhappy because Nathaniel is constantly trying to ‘better’ her, in ways she doesn’t understand. He wants their baby born in a hospital, rather than back in their village. He has encouraged her to attend the local church, rather than follow her ancestral faith – and her Christian faith seems genuine, but then he worries she is worshipping with too much fervour. As she sorrowfully points out, she can do nothing to please him.

Another complex, expertly drawn, relationship is between Nathaniel and Johnnie’s wife, Miranda. She is much kinder, more thoughtful than her husband. She admires Nathaniel, is interested in his work, and sees his capabilities – and he hates and despises her for it. Laurence is so clever in the way she shows that Miranda’s kind sympathy is more painful to receive than Johnnie’s ignorant unkindness.

Perhaps I’ve made Nathaniel seem unpleasant, but he is too real for that. There is a section in the novel where he is put in an impossible moral quandary, and the decision he makes – and its discovery – is scarletly shaming. And yet the reader has total sympathy with him. I think he is a staggeringly good creation. Laurence is so good at writing characters who invite both our sympathy and our pity. Characters who are trapped by their own shortcomings – who are, for want of a better word, pathetic. And all the sadder to read because we care about them.

Also pathetic, but less sympathetic, is James. He is in charge of things in this part of the Gold Coast, but there are rumours circulating of ‘Africanisation’ – that is, African people getting roles in the local governance of their own country, rather than everything being done by white immigrants. There is plenty of blather about this from the racist characters, but it also exposes how lost people like James are without these colonial structures to hold them up.

Johnnie, shocked into sharp vision by the Squire’s tears and by the pain in the old man’s voice, saw for the first time what James’s true position here had been. Bumbling and pompous, the Squire would likely have spent his life as a mole-like ledger-keeper, had he stayed in England. But here – here he had walked on Mount Olympus. He had dispensed justice as he saw it – rewards for the compliant ones, punishments for the unruly. A frail and balding Jupiter, he had paced his temple in time of riot, waving an old army rife, subduing and chastening his erring children.

The Squire had spoken as a god might speak, who had created a world only to have its creatures mock and finally destroy him by their disbelief.

It is right that a mediocre man like him be displaced, and that Ghana be truly independent. But Laurence is subtle enough a writer to make the reader feel a moment’s – perhaps irrational – sympathy for him.

She is, indeed, so subtle and clever a writer that I should never have allowed that opening chapter to put me on my guard. Of course Laurence wouldn’t write the sort of novel I’d feared I was reading. While I’d still rather read about Ghana in a novel or non-fiction by a Ghanaian, I do think This Side Jordan is excellent. It is peopled with unforgettable characters, a plot that is nuanced and a page-turner, and has challenged some of my preconceptions about what a ‘Brit Canadian abroad’ might bring to the table.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Obviously all any of us can talk about is the heatwave. Oooof! I am very grateful for aircon in the office, and just about surviving the nights (even Hargreaves the cat has decided that sleeping under the duvet, on my legs, is no longer appropriate). But maybe a book, a blog post, and a link will help cool you down…

1.) The book – I just happened to google Michael Cunningham, to see if there was another book on the way. I didn’t have much hope but, excitingly, there is a memoir coming out in July! Unsayable is about his writing life, and I’m already putting it speculatively on my Best Books of 2026 without having read a word.

2.) The blog post – a couple of reviews of the latest British Library Women Writers title are out. I’m so excited that we managed to get The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith onto the list. It’s an absolutely brilliant, sensitive, moving and often funny portrait of a young woman whose ancestral home is turned into a hospital for injured soldiers. Liz and Books and Wine Gums have both written about it glowingly.

3.) The link – I’ve really got into the podcast All British Comedy Explained recently. A British guy shows classic sitcoms and other comedies to an American comedian who hasn’t seen them, and she gives her hot takes. Very nostalgic for those of us who grew up loving The Good Life, Dad’s Army etc, though possibly not as fun if you don’t already know the sitcoms they’re discussing.

A century of brilliant books

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Apropos of nothing, I decided to put together a list of a book I’d recommend for every year of the 20th century. Because, why not! And also, I’m musing over doing A Century of Books again next year, and it’s good to throw out some suggestions now in case anybody fancies joining me. I tried not to repeat authors, but there were some years where I couldn’t manage without a bit of repetition. I’m grateful to Elizabeth von Arnim for the first decade of the century.

As I decided to do this, I had a vague memory of having done it before… and, yes, I compiled a list back in 2011. I’m going to make my new list without looking back at that one – and when I’m done, I’ll see how much crossover there is.

So, here are 100 books I think are great from 1900-1999! (I’m going by the dates in my LibraryThing catalogue, so if you spot any discrepancies, let me know and I’ll sub something else in.)

1900: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
1901: The Benefactress by Elizabeth von Arnim
1902: The Red House by E. Nesbit
1903: Oxford by Edward Thomas
1904: The Canon in Residence by V.L. Whitechurch
1905: Lovers in London by A.A. Milne
1906: The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
1907: Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim
1908: Crossriggs by Jane and Mary Findlater
1909: The Caravanners by Elizabeth von Arnim
1910: Howards End by E.M. Forster
1911: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1912: The Unbearable Bassington by Saki
1913: Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton
1914: The Three Sisters by May Sinclair
1915: Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
1916: Further Foolishness by Stephen Leacock
1917: Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
1918: Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins
1919: Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie
1920: Tension by E.M. Delafield
1921: Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
1922: The Heir by Vita Sackville-West
1923: A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
1924: The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
1925: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
1926: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1927: The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
1928: War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott
1929: Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
1930: Miss Mole by E.H. Young
1931: The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
1932: Economy Must Be Our Watchword by Joyce Dennys
1933: Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
1934: A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
1935: Mr Pim Passes By by A.A. Milne
1936: Greengates by R.C. Sherriff
1937: They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1939: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
1940: Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
1941: The Empty Room by Charles Morgan
1942: One Year’s Time by Angela Milne
1943: O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
1944: Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
1945: Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts
1946: Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd
1947: One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
1948: The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp
1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
1950: Murder Included by Joanna Cannan
1951: Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols
1952: The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson
1953: Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
1954: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
1955: Mother and Son by Ivy Compton-Burnett
1956: Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill
1957: A House in the Country by Ruth Adam
1958: The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff
1959: The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson
1960: The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
1961: Told in Winter by Jon Godden
1962: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
1963: A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr
1964: The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor
1965: The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
1966: A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
1967: At The Jerusalem by Paul Bailey
1968: A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford
1969: Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
1970: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
1971: The Home by Penelope Mortimer
1972: The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
1973: In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill
1974: The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne
1975: Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
1976: The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
1977: The House By The Sea by May Sarton
1978: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
1979: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
1980: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1981: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm
1982: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
1983: Heartburn by Nora Ephron
1984: The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
1985: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
1986: Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett
1987: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
1988: Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale
1989: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1990: Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido
1991: Wise Children by Angela Carter
1992: The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon
1993: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
1994: Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro
1995: Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham
1996: Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
1997: The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose
1998: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
1999: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Now that my list is complete, how many overlaps did I have with my list from 15 years ago? By a rough count, I make it 21 (including Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I attributed to the wrong year last time). I think that is still a good list, but I’m more pleased with this one – it doesn’t rely so heavily in the later century on books about the earlier century!

How many of my hundred have you read?

Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge – #ReadingTheMeow2026

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I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door!

It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this is the first I’ve managed to get to – and even if it weren’t for Reading the Meow, I might not have been able to resist the stare of the cat on the cover.

This is Smoky – and let me assure you that Smoky survives the book without injury. I’d put money on her to survive a war. Here is how she opens the first paragraph of the book:

Smoky’s eyes shone yellow and green in the rainy darkness, but her body was only a black shadow punctuated by a dot of white at the tip of her tail. She slid around the corner of the building noiselessly and ran up the railing to the porch. Here she stopped abruptly, her ears back, her wet fur beginning to ruffle. A large object lay on the porch floor, dark and unmoving. Smoky spat at it warningly, received no answer, sat down and regarded it patiently. She circled it, sniffing. Finally satisfied as to its harmlessness and lack of interest to her, she walked over it to get to the window sill. She saw no signs within of what she was seeking, so she walked over it again, descended from the porch, and ran up the large maple tree in front of the building. Halfway up she transferred herself to the roof above the porch, crossed it and landed with a quiet plop on the upstairs window sill.

“Mraw!” wailed Smoky. “Mraw! MRAW!”
A sleepy groan from within. “Go away, cat. Scat!”
“MRAWWW!”
“All right, all right. Pipe down. I’m coming.”
“Mraw,” came mildly from Smoky.

For quite a lot of the book, only Smoky knows of the existence of this object – we can probably work out it is a body – but she does trail blood through the house. Smoky’s owner, Killian McBean, assumes that she has killed some prey and doesn’t think much more about it (which is, admittedly, the first of many things in the novel that don’t quite stand up to examination). Killian McBean writes and edits the local newspaper and is a conscientious, if misanthropic, man.

Killian McBean was a man of perhaps forty, whose lean tough body made him seem younger, and whose tired eyes and face made him seem older. There was grey at the temples of his black hair and it was thinning at the sides. His nose was rather prominent, as was a front gold tooth. Even for his five feet ten his arms were disproportionately long, and his hands exceptionally large and powerful.

But it was his eyes that were his most outstanding feature: cold grey eyes, aloof and disbelieving. Occasionally a twinkle came into them, or a momentary softness, but it soon faded into a granite hardness. His smile, too, was sceptical, almost mocking.

You can see he isn’t necessarily a man to warm to. Easily his best trait, in my eyes, is the respect and kindness he shows to Smoky. I loved Smoky, and I loved their relationship – independent of each other, certainly, but McBean will defend Smoky against anybody. Smoky tolerates him with the secret love of a cat. Rutledge obviously understands cats, and Smoky is very believable.

Ok, so what is the murder mystery? After a few dozen pages, McBean comes across the local wealthy man, tyrannical and disliked by all, dead in his hotel room with a kitchen knife in his back. His name is Bennet Farr. Naturally, McBean pretends not to have been there. But who could have offed him? The candidates are Farr’s son, his prospective daughter-in-law, the local librarian, the local schoolteacher, McBean’s printer, his printer’s daughter, and McBean himself. They all have motives, more or less, and they all seem to have processed through the hotel in a matter of minutes shortly before or after the time Farr died. Again, this novel is not strong on believability.

Things are complicated further by a young woman being found unconscious in a car nearby, and evidence that someone else was in the car with her – missing, but having left plenty of blood behind. When this woman wakes up, she has amnesia and can’t remember who she is. Within the space of 24 hours, she and McBean have fallen in love with each other and she is discussing marriage (!)

What to make of Blood on the Cat? It’s an entertaining novel, and McBean is in the noted American tradition of hardboiled men who seek justice while being unpleasant to everyone. Actually, he is mostly unpleasant to other men, while quite a lot of the women seem curiously charmed by him, and he does behave a bit better towards them. It’s often amusing, and Rutledge keeps the tension up well. There are a couple more deaths along the way to keep us amused.

The downside is that the solution to the mystery is both terrible and obvious. While I guessed who probably did it early on, I never really worked out what their motive was – and the solution relies on a plot hole so ludicrous that Agatha Christie is spinning in her grave that anybody could put it to paper and call themselves a mystery novelist.

Appropriately for Reading the Meow, the strongest part of the novel is Smoky – in my eyes, at least. And it’s a rattling good time, with memorable characters, even if it’s very weak in terms of plot. I’m not sure I’d race to read more by Rutledge because the plotting is maddening, but I still had a fun couple of days with this one. If you go in knowing that it won’t quite make sense, you’d probably have a fun time too.

Unnecessary Rankings! Magnus Mills

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I thought I had read almost all of Magnus Mills’ books, but I’ve just checked the list on Wikipedia and I’m still wading in the shallow waters. He’s written 16 novels (or novellas) and four collections of short stories, and I’ve read a paltry eight of them. Still, I shan’t let that get in the way of doing some unnecessary rankings of this interesting, eccentric, very British novelist.

8. The Maintenance of Headway (2009)

I’ve never read a book by Mills that I disliked, but I didn’t quite chime with him on my first outing. That might change if I re-read it, but this short book about bus drivers left me a bit nonplussed. Having introduced my book group to his writing yesterday, I saw the same bafflement in many faces – so perhaps it just takes a while to get to grips with Mills’ particular style?

7. The Scheme For Full Employment (2003)

And this was the book that I got my book group to read! I wish I’d gone for one I love more, in retrospect, but I still found much to enjoy and admire. It’s about a group of men working for UniVan, driving between various depots seemingly pointlessly – under a scheme where everyone is employed, however uselessly. It has Mills’ trademark simplicity and matter-of-factness that gradually reveals itself as satire, but I found it rather less funny than other examples.

6. Screwtop Thompson (2010)

The only short story collection I’ve read by Mills has many brilliantly odd stories in it, alongside one or two that worked less well for me. In a commentary that will become familiar, they are really horror stories disguised as funny stories disguised as stories about nothing.

5. The Trouble With Sunbathers (2020)

Since 2020, Mills has self-published his books and been pretty prolific, with at least one every year. This is the only of those books I’ve read, and it is excellent – gatekeepers man the gates along the British coast that keep everyone out of the now-American-owned land. As ever, totally odd and very matter-of-fact, which somehow makes it odder.

4. All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999)

Mills really has an eye, or perhaps ear, for excellent titles. This is a cautionary tale for those of us who find it impossible to say ‘no’, as the unnamed narrator is asked for a favour which becomes another and somehow spirals into indentered slavery. But in a lighthearted way?

3. The Restraint of Beasts (1998)

These top three are absolute masterpieces. Mills had worked as a fencer (building fencers, rather than thrusting swords) and turned his experience into this novel that has a dark, funny twist on the job. No less than Thomas Pynchon described it as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’, which I think is very accurate. It was my third book by him, and when I realised I loved him.

2. The Forensic Records Society (2017)

Mills’ final ‘mainstream’ book is about a group who gather to listen to records in a room where time seems to pass at a different rate to the world outside. Rival factions start up, and the whole thing is an excellent example of how Mills’ novels are somehow laced with threat and surrealism even when you can’t work out why.

1. Three To See The King (2001)

My favourite of Mills’ books is about someone who has built a tin hut in the middle of nowhere in a desert. Someone else has another one a few miles away, and another pair aren’t much further away. But then rumours come of a charismatic man arriving in the region. As I wrote in my review, ‘What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.’

Have you read any Mills? Are you tempted to try any of these? And which of the remaining 12 books should I prioritise?