Rachel and I will be recording episode 150 of ‘Tea or Books?’ soon, and we are following a tradition of doing a Q&A episode every 50 episodes. So, please, give us your questions!
Whether it’s about the podcast, our favourite writers, our least favourite writers – or even something totally unconnected with books – we’d love to hear from you. Pop your questions in the comments, and they’re more or less guaranteed to appear in the episode…
Back in January, I raved about the first volume of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. Uncharacteristically, it has only taken me a handful of months to read the second – and I have the third and fourth on my tbr piles, so watch this space.
If you’re catching up, the series is about Tara Selter, a dealer in antiquarian books with her husband Thomas, who is stuck in a timeloop. Every day is the eighteenth of November. Every day, everyone else is doing the same thing – with a twist on the usual conceit, in that Tara starts the day wherever she ended the previous one. She is stuck in time, but not in space. And she can keep some things that she has near her – but the food she eats one day has disappeared from the world by its next iteration, so she is in danger of wiping out restaurants’ stock. The mechanics aren’t the main thing, but Balle has clearly thought about them.
If the first book had a curious optimism, with Tara finding space and peace in a trope that is usually about power battles and struggles, then the optimism has ebbed a little by the second one. She spends some time with her parents towards the beginning of the novel (like Thomas in the first, they believe her account without any doubts, which goes to show what a trustworthy person Tara is) but, besides this, is largely alone. Or, rather, separated from people she knows. She is always surrounded by people, but they do not think about her and her predicament.
I am surrounded by people in motion. Suddenly they are all walking in the same direction. I look around me and, sure enough, there is a metro station and that is where they are headed. There are lines of people pointing towards the way down. I am outside of the lines. If I get too close to their lines I am in the way. I am a foreign body, an error. I am Tara Selter, lost in the eighteenth of November. Not lost and forsaken, just lost. I have simply fallen out of the world. I have not been hurt in the fall, I got up and brushed a little grit off my knee, that is all.
Having passed a full year of 18 Novembers, Tara is feeling the claustrophobia of her experience. She lives in a hotel for a long time – asking for a room that hasn’t been slept in for a while, with the excuse that she is allergic to cleaning supplies, so that she doesn’t wake up in bed with somebody else the next morning. Even a fire alarm doesn’t rock her from her feelings of stasis.
A few days ago I would have jumped to my feet, scenting change, but I just sat there with my half-eaten sandwich and did nothing and the sandwich is still lying here on the table next to me, not because it was left in haste due to an evacuation, but because it is a bit dry round the edges. I no longer believe in variation, I don’t look for differences and not even a fire alarm can alter my expectations of a day that comes round again and again.
Since she cannot experience variety in time, she decides to go hunting for variety in weather. A lot of this volume is about Tara travelling in pursuit of spring, summer, autumn and winter on this eternal 18 November. For some reason, she never considers travelling to the southern hemisphere or, indeed, outside of Europe, where she could find these seasons more authentically. Perhaps it’s to do with allowances on her passport, or shorter journey times. If you are willing to swallow the idea that she can find springlike weather in a November London day, then you can enjoy her travels. More than the actual climates she finds, it is about her longing and her purpose. When a strange twist of fate has stopped her achieving any of the normal things that give people the reason to keep going, she has found a different reason.
Now I cannot get enough of winter. It is not enough that it resembles winter as I know it. I cannot content myself with snow that doesn’t last, a light sprinkling. I am searching for the heart of winter, consummate winter, concentrated winter. I travel through mountains, I move upwards, northwards and along narrow roads where the snow has already settled as if it means to stay. I gaze at the landscape and write names in my notebook. Place after place. Name after name. I make a note of streets and restaurants. I write the addresses of empty houses and recipes for winter dishes in my book.
Overall, book two sees Tara trying to assess her role in the world a bit more than in book one. It goes through a longer time period – two years of November eighteenths, compared to one – but there is perhaps less plot. The biggest story point is when somebody steals her bag. She struggles through the tedium and self-analysis into something approaching peace – a peace that seemed to come more naturally in the first book, and is more hard-won in this one.
And it continues to be a beautiful reading experience. Balle’s writing is gentle, rhythmic, unshowy and mesmerising.
#754
I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that is what is happening. Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is a life with no drama, with no poverty or diseaee or natural disasters. I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear: the calamities and catastrophes of real life – loss, betrayal and crime.
My disasters are little ones and my accidents are fleeting: a minor burn, a twisted ankle, a car crash averted by a braking system. The greatest crime I have experienced is the theft of my bag, a crime perpetuated by a football fan on a rattly bike. The only things I have lost, apart from the passage of time, are a bundle of euros, an olive-green, cloth-bound notebook and two sets of keys. I have what I need. I don’t starve. I can buy whatever I want. I can go back to Thomas and slip into his pattern. He is still alive. I am sure that he is still there, in his house in Clarion. In his pattern, I have suffered no loss, I have not been betrayed, rejected, forsaken. Nothing has happened that one might fear. Nothing fearful.
I could read many more books of writing this striking – and thank goodness I get the chance two. Volume 2 ends on something that is quite shocking, given the lack of twists and turns so far – and I can’t wait to see how this new information is explored in the third volume.
Last Saturday, I had a lovely bookish treat – going bookshopping with Madame Bibi Lophile! We’ve known each other in the blogosphere for goodness knows how long – well over a decade – but never met before. When I posted a lament about all the best secondhand bookshops in London closing or worsening, she put forward recommendations for travelling further south – and so I asked her to give me a tour of some of her faves. Since they’re spread out, Madame B put together an itinerary of a handful – and I suspect there is scope for a second trip for others.
We had such a fun morning/afternoon – the sun was shining, the company was excellent, and (thank goodness) we both bought lots of books. I’ve been bookshopping before with people who are very abstemious, and it is lovely but not the same as finding someone else also ready to load up with literature.
The photo is what I bought (out of order) – let’s go through it, place by place.
We started at Greenwich Oxfam – a little bookshop, very well stocked. There was an awful lot of good-quality recent literature there, so clearly Greenwich has some book reviewers and/or people who pass on books to charity quick-sticks. I bought my first couple of books:
1. The Literary Almanac by Francesca Beauman
I remember this one being promoted a lot around the time it was published, and I love the idea of seasonal reading in it – particularly since she treads far beyond the usual recommendations.
2. Starlight by Stella Gibbons
Somehow this is a Gibbons I hadn’t got my hands on yet. Which is a terrible oversight, since it is about impoverished sisters living together who are imposed upon by a new landlord, which sounds very up my street.
Next up was Bookshop on the Heath in Blackheath ‘Village’ (I am a bit allergic to Londoners who claim their corner of London is ‘just like a village!’ because it really just proves they’ve never lived in a village.) This bookshop had an excellent stock and a surprise downstairs, and while they definitely had the highest prices of the day, I found some gems I was happy to pay a bit extra for.
3. The Devil We Know by Pamela Frankau
Finding early Frankau is pretty difficult, so it was exciting to stumble across this one, even if it did break my always-pretty-flimsy resolution not to buy anything big and heavy to lug around London.
4. Garden Open Today by Beverley Nichols
5. Men Do Not Weep by Beverley Nichols
This bookshop had SO many books by Beverley Nichols – spread liberally through the shop, since he wrote so many difference genres. They even had two copies of his detective novel The Moonflower, and you could decide whether you wanted to may £30 or £75 for it… Anyway, I found a couple I didn’t have, and was very glad to snaffle them away.
We stopped for lunch in Blackheath, and a lovely ice cream for our ongoing walk. Before we got to the cafe, we walked past Blackheath Bookshop – which turned out to be a Waterstones. I do like how they let the shops they take over retain their local identity. We popped in quickly because I wanted to buy…
6. On the Calculation of Volume vol.4 by Solvej Balle
I haven’t read the third one yet, but when I learned that the fourth one was out, I decided I had to get it. And somehow I had £10 on my Waterstones card, which always seems to accrue without me spending a lot. The lady in front of me had her Waterstones card on her watch, so I felt very atavistic to use a plastic card.
Our next stop was Halcyon Books, which has a cafe and everything. They have a lot of secondhand paperbacks at a very reasonable price – and an extremely tiny hardback fiction selection, though apparently it used to be bigger. It was also the place I saw the first of two British Library Women Writers titles – Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. I still find it thrilling to find them in the wild. I bought…
7. The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
I sometimes love her and sometimes don’t, but very willing to give this one a try.
8. A Childhood by Jona Oberski
I didn’t know anything about this novel of World War Two, but I love Pushkin Press editions and can generally rely on them to be well-written and interesting. Whether I have the stamina for something this possibly bleak is another question.
9. Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
Since I read and loved the New York Trilogy last year, I’ve been keen to try more Auster. There were a few to choose from on this book-buying trip, but this was the one that spoke to me most.
Onwards! Our next stop was a shop that Madame Bibi hadn’t been to before – Crofton Books. It was definitely a bookshop in the fine tradition of teetering piles on the floor – and, indeed, one of them almost teetered right onto my head. There might have been books that I would have loved in the midst of those stacks, but I wasn’t feeling like embracing danger. I found one book, on the more orderly shelves.
10. Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
I absolutely loved Such A Fun Age, and have been meaning to get hold of her next novel. I’ve heard less positive things about it, but now I can give it a try myself.
And finally we stopped at Kirkdale Books, whom I’m followed on social media for many years. It’s a beautiful mix of new and secondhand books, as well as some lovely gifty things – but it was the only shop I came away from empty-handed. A shame, but I would definitely go back – I think it was just luck of the draw this time.
Such a fun day! And it continued to be fun, as I took my bags of books out to see Night Shift by Rachel (my Tea or Books? c0-host) at Drayton Arms pub theatre. It was so good! Very proud of her.
Now, which of my books should I read first?
Happy weekend! I had my wisdom tooth out mid-1961 Club and I am kinda done with it being sore (they did warn me it could be at least two weeks) so hoping for some sunshine and book-related-fun to distract me over the weekend. In fact, I’ll be seeing Rachel’s play tonight. I’d invite you along, but it is sold out! There’s another bookish plan that I’ll tell you about afterwards…
1.) The book – or several books! My book group recently read Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed, which I thought was excellent. It’s part of a series of rewriting/updating Shakespeare’s plays, and is based on The Tempest. It all lay dormant for a while but, excitingly, I see they’ve recently republished all the titles in beautiful new editions – and added a couple to the list too. Mark Haddon has covered Pericles in The Porpoise and Isaac Merion has taken on Romeo and Juliet in Warm Bodies. And now, of course, I need all of these. (Image borrowed from here.)
2.) The link – over at This Reading Life, Brona has reviewed the latest On the Calculation of Volume book. I’m a couple of books behind, so have only skimmed the review – but thought I’d reshare her link to an interview with Solvej Balle that looks really interesting.
3.) The blog post – WHY have I never read Shirley Hazzard? Cathy’s review of The Bay of Noon has made me, yet again, keen to get to her sooner rather than later.
Amusingly, when I was drafting my 1961 Club posts, I discovered a 1925 Club post buried in my drafts that I apparently forgot to publish last October. Oops! Anyway, here are my thoughts on Mr Tasker’s Gods by T.F. Powys, six months late…
T.F. Powys is probably best known for Mr Weston’s Good Wine, a very good novel about God visiting a rural community (with a title somewhat inexplicably drawn from Jane Austen’s Emma). I’ve tried a few of his other novels in the years since I read that one, and there’s a lot I like about him, but a lot I find less appealing – he has a wit that combines lightness and savagery, but almost no sense of momentum. How would Mr Tasker’s Gods fare?
Well, largely more of the same. His writing is unusual, sharp, and blackly comic – his characters are largely reprehensible – and his plots are hard to identify. To give you a sense of the writing, here is a section that is fairly incidental to whatever plot there is:
His daughters did not object to the source of the money, as long as they received it. Corpses cut down from bedposts, corpses fished up from backwaters, dead infants taken from sewers, shepherds from barns, girls from rivers, and old gentlemen from under trains, all generously helped to provide these young ladies with new hats. So, from their point of view, killing oneself or getting murdered became a deed of Christian charity. And an extra decayed corpse or two in the year gave them a chance to buy a king’s box of milk-chocolate or a motor veil.
Mr Tasker is in the title, but I’m not sure he’s the main character. He is a single-minded pig farmer, and the focus of that mind is, indeed, pigs: they are the ‘gods’ of the title. He treats them reverently and kindly, while abusing his daughter and ignoring everyone else. As the novel opens, his wastrel father is arriving in the village, cruel and stupid and bound to make life harder for everyone.
But perhaps the main characters are Reverend Turnbull and his three sons. One of is a worldly vicar, one is a penny-pinching doctor, and the third is put-upon innocent. Henry is a simpleton, in the parlance of the time, and has had an unpleasant time in Canada before returning to the family home to be treated as the lowliest family servant. He is horrified about a cow’s carcass being fed to the pigs, and his only friend is the vicar of a neighbouring parish (also called Henry, for reasons best known to Powys, but referred to by his surname, Neville). Neville is loathed by his parishioners, simply because the ball rolled in that direction, but the two Henrys are the only sympathetic characters in Mr Tasker’s Gods.
On the novel goes, with characters harming each other intentionally or (more rarely) unintentionally. A maid becomes a prostitute when she goes to town, and when one of the better known villagers dies during an ‘appointment’, things have to get covered up. Which sounds like a plot but, again, it really just adds to the atmosphere of the book, rather than to a storyline with any sense of beginning, middle, or end.
I’ve read a review referring to Mr Tasker’s Gods as a ‘horrible fable of darkness swamping the light’, and I can see how the reviewer came to that conclusion. For me, it has the tone of a fable – but not the message. It is worth reading for how distinct it is – Powys really does have a sensibility all of his own – but not if you want any conclusions. You enter a horrible world, you are alternatively amused and reviled by what goes on in it, and you leave. Neither you nor any of the characters have learned anything. I recommend Mr Tasker’s Gods as an experience, and as a writer doing exactly what he purposed to do, and doing it rather well. But why he chose to do it, I couldn’t say.
Wow, what a lot of 1961 Club reviews we had! As always, I have zillions still to read, but I’m looking forward to keeping my exploring going beyond the week. My highlight, from my own reading, was probably The Chateau, but there were plenty of great reads (and the usual one or two duds).
And, of course, we’ll be back in October! Karen and I had a chat, and landed on *drum roll* the 1949 Club!
Your six months to prepare starts now…
My final 1961 Club read is by an author I’ve loved for years, and the most divisive writer out there – Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. For those not in the know, her novels are told almost entirely in dialogue. That dialogue is very eccentric and unrealistic, and people will spend pages arguing about small points of grammar before something of seismic importance happens in an aside.
The main story in The Mighty and Their Fall is the (possible) second marriage of Ninian Middleton. After the death of his first wife, he lives with his mother Selina, his adoptive brother Hugo, his various children and their governness Miss Starkie. Like almost all of Compton-Burnett’s novels, this one is set in a vague late-Victorian period in a large, upper-class house – and the inhabitants of it seem to live in uneasy harmony, where anyone might turn on anyone else at any moment. And will do so in the most elastic language. There is a distinctive Compton-Burnett dialogue style, which relies upon syllogisms (real and false) combined with a sort of unchangeable naivety.
“Do all men have two wives?” said Leah’s voice. “I mean before they die.”
“No, of course not,” said Miss Starkie. “But when they lose the first wife, they sometimes have a second.”
“But would they always like the first one best?”
“No, it would depend on many things.”
“The first would be the real choice,” said Hengist.
“I would never be a second,” said Leah. “I wonder she agreed to it.”
“I wonder she did,” said Ninian. “I am grateful to her. And so should you be, if you think of my happiness.”
“We haven’t ever thought of it,” said Hengist. “We didn’t know you weren’t happy. And we didn’t know she was coming.”
“Well, you know she is here now.”
“Yes, we can see her.”
If you like that, and find it as funny as I do, you’ll love Ivy Compton-Burnett. The arrival of the proposed second wife is particularly unsettling for Lavinia, Ninian’s oldest daughter, who has been elevated to a sort of companion. Many of Compton-Burnett’s novels have the uneasy sense of incestuous love in the air – some of them, in fact have outright incestuous relationships – and the love between Ninian and Lavinia is never transgressive but always a little uncomfortable. Certainly, when Teresa Chilton arrives on the scene, it becomes a form of love triangle.
If you strip a Compton-Burnett novel down to essentials, it often resembles something like a detective novel or even a melodrama. In this one, there is a forged will, stolen letters, shocking romances, and the arrival of a man who may or may not be the secret father of someone else. But plot is always secondary to character and style. Much of the humour of the novel, to my mind, is the disparity between the drama and the reception of it by those involved.
Because what I’m really here for is how funny I find her writing. Here are a couple of examples of people being extremely bitchy to each other, but in the most elevated register. The first is when Hugo starts a romance with his niece – which, since he is adopted, is technically legal… but…
“Do you not congratulate me, Miss Starkie?” said Hugo.
“I have long done so in your character of uncle. This new one is too much for me. I cannot deny it. The disparity in age speaks for itself.”
“It could have saved itself the trouble,” said Lavinia.
And this is a gloriously biting exchange between Hugo, Ninian, and their mother, Selina:
“I wonder your grandchildren like you as much as they do.”
“I have the same wonder,” said Ninian.
“They may know I am sound at heart,” said Selina with her lips grave.
“But how can they know? There would have to be some signs.”
Glorious! How would I compare it to other Ivy Compton-Burnett novels? To some extent, they are all more or less the same. She fiercely denied this, but I don’t think her readers would. If you love one, you’ll love them all – and if you hate one, you never need go back to her. I loved reading The Mighty and Their Fall, but I think she is perhaps better in longer novels – this one is only 184 pages in my edition, and she really needs the longer novels to give space to her wide cast of characters and the Victoriana of their expansiveness.
A fun end to the 1961 Club for me. Incidentally, my edition says it was first published in 1955, but no other sources I can find seem to agree with that – so hopefully I haven’t finished on a false 1961 candidate!
Thanks so much for joining in, everyone, and we will be announcing the next club year very soon.
I made a lot of notes on Faces in the Water while I was reading it, but I find that I don’t really know what to write now! It’s a novel about a woman who is in and out of psychiatric institutions – mostly in – and the treatment she receives from the staff there. Frame was famously going to have a lobotomy before she was awarded a literary prize, and her characters face and fear the same fate – as well as other brutal forms of treatment that were meted out to those deemed ‘mad’. It is clearly a heavily autobiographical book, despite what the note at the beginning protests.
I’m not going to write a full review, but will share some quotes and a couple of reasons why I didn’t love this book as much as I was hoping.
The strongest part of it is Frame’s ability to write moments of madness – getting into the curiously lucid incoherence of somebody in the throes of delusion.
I will write about the season of peril. I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice. A blizzard came and I grew numb and wanted to lie down and sleep and I would have done so had not the strangers arrrived with scissors and cloth bags filled with lice and red-labelled bottles of poison, and other dangers which I had not realised before – mirrors, cloaks, corridors, furniture, square inches, bolted lengths of silence – plain and patterned, free samples of voices. And the strangers, without speaking, put up circular calico tents and camped with me, surrounded me with their merchanise of peril.
Elsewhere in the novel, where she is more lucid, she can write piercingly of the way that mentally unwell patients are treated in reality and fiction.
There is an aspect of madness which is seldom mentioned in fiction because it would damage the romantic popular idea of the insane as a person whose speech appeals as immediately poetic; but it is seldom the east Opheliana recited like pages of a seed catalog or the outpourings of Crazy Janes who provide, in fiction, an outlet for poetic abandon. Few of the people who roamed the dayroom would have qualified as acceptable heroines, in popular taste; few were charminginly uninhibited eccentrics. The mass provoke mostly irritation hostility and impatience. Their behavior affronted, caused uneasiness; they wept and moaned; they quarreled and complained. They were a nuisance and were treated as such. It was forgotten that they too possessed a prized humanity which needed care and love, that a tiny poetic essence could be distilled from their overflowing squalid truth.
Finally, I loved this darkly beautiful description of a possible lobotomy:
So Dr. Portman had changed his mind, he had decided they would bore two holes in the side of my head for my unsuitable personality to fly out like a migrating bird to another country and never return not even when spring came and the cherry blossom opened and the spindly wild plum showed white along the paddock fences.
So, with all this extraordinary writing, why did I end up not loving Faces in the Water? It was largely because so much of it was written in a general sense. For each different hospital or institution, the narrator tells us things that often happen – ‘We always did X, they always did Y’. It means that the story doesn’t have as much specificity or immediacy if she had spent more time on particular events. It also made everything feel more distanced. A slight change, to telling one-off stories in the moment, would have made Faces in the Water so much more effective and compelling, in my opinion.
That was my major criticism. Besides that, it moved between so many institutions that we didn’t get many characters to follow through the novel, leaving it feeling a bit disjointed – not in an effective way that mirrored the protagonist’s mental disjointment, but in a way that felt a bit clumsy.
So, very much a novel of parts. There are so many paragraphs you could quote that are extraordinary. But I’m not sure it worked well as a novel.
It always feels slightly like cheating to pick a club book that is really about an earlier period… but with memoir, it’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it? Ursula Bloom wrote literally hundreds of books – including some excellent, funny novels under the name Mary Essex – and plenty of those were autobiographical. War Isn’t Wonderful is her take on the Second World War, drawing on her diaries of the period. Like so many war memoirs, it is a very personal, often idiosyncratic perspective on a world-dominating event – and, to my mind, thereby much more interesting than any attempt at objective overview. (Incidentally, my copy is signed!)
It is a mix of contemporary diary entries and narrative reflections from 1961. Naturally, those 1961 summaries have a level of considered distance, and the diary entries have immediacy. It’s an intriguing mix. From 1961, Bloom of course knows how long the war will last – she also knows which triumphs and tragedies lie ahead of the diarist, and when the particular highs and lows of wartime will ebb and flow. The 1940s diarist is in the moment. She may be looking back to the shifting experiences of war, and ahead with hope, but she is mostly preoccupied with the present moment. Particularly as war continues, and privations get worse and the intolerable length of it all seems to weigh more heavily.
And, yes, I imagine the contextual sections were added because there weren’t enough diary entries, or they wouldn’t have made sense on their own. Somehow the hybrid works well, combining immediacy and the perspective of years. Still, of the two, I think the diaries were what made War Isn’t Wonderful so interesting. Who could resist a detail like this?
April 29th, 1942
To what lengths will one fall! A friend rang me up and said she knew of a small leg of mutton, and not ewe mutton either. Ewe mutton is frantic! If I went to a certain address in a certain square, rang the bell and said I came from her about some mutton, they’d give it to me. I debated over this. I had not seen a complete leg of mutton in years, and what one could do with a beautiful thing like that in the larder filled me with a thrill. In the end I went round to the address. A charming young girl came to the door. I said what I had been told and she nodded, laid a finger to her lips and said ‘You want number 63’ and shut the door hurriedly. I went off to No.63, and a much older woman came to the door; apparently she had been warned that I was on the way, for she said with some delight, ‘Have you come for your chemise?’ I said that I had, and she pushed into my arms a great fat parcel that couldn’t have been anybody’s chemise ever. When I got home I opened it and there was a really nice little leg of mutton, and with it half a pound of butter and some biscuits in a tin. My lucky day!
I think the best book about the Second World War that I’ve read is London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes. One of the things I most appreciated was how steadily it takes you through the mood of the city through the months and weeks of the war. It’s easy to think of the war as one amorphous whole, from so many decades away, but Panter-Downes – and Bloom – are excellent at giving you a fuller sense of the shifting emotions of the individual, and of the wider populous.
January 9th, 1944
Perhaps the worst aspect of the war is its dullness. At this time of year it is mid-breakfast before we can get any light or air into the flat, which I find impossible. When black-out time comes (so early at this period) it means hours in airless rooms or plunging about the streets which is downright dangerous. Every restaurant has a queue waiting for it. Many shops have nothing to sell.
And, alongside this, something I appreciate is how much of Bloom’s attention is occupied by things that have little to do with the war. She notes in the introduction that ‘early in the thirties […] I had been stricken with paralysing headaches which had made me almost an invalid. These headaches were wrongly diagnosed and treated as being a form of migraine, but in the early fifties they were discovered to be caused by an arterial trouble and were cured by surgical operation’.
Twenty years of paralysing headaches is horrifying to think about, and goodness knows how she managed to write so much while suffering that. I once had a few months of terrible headaches that took ages to diagnose, and I don’t think I achieved much of anything during that time. Anyway, there are many diary entries where her headaches are all she can write about. Because, of course, intense pain in your own body is more immediate, more real, than news of any number of bombings – even if they are only a few streets away. It helps bring home how life continues – for better or worse – in the midst of any national or global crisis.
Another preoccupation is housing. Yes, there is the wartime-specific experience of having your home destroyed by bombing – but Bloom spends more time on the purchase, and instant regret about purchasing, a countryside cottage. Again, it could happen at any time and has little to do with war. But it is still paramount in her mind. In other writers’ hands, it could have been very funny – think Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. Bloom can certainly be wryly funny, but she is also authentic. When something has driven her to despair, she says so frankly. It isn’t cloaked with self-deprecating humour – we are there, at the heart of whatever she is feeling.
That extends to the end of war. There is a searing melancholy even in armistice, and that’s exactly the sort of accuracy we’re unlikely to see in historical fiction or adaptations.
There had been none of the eager rejoicing of 1918 when we had really believed that war had been removed for ever. Now we never thought that for a moment. Perhaps this was the most wretched part of a victory that was ice-cold. There is a limit to human endurance and we had had too much; we were not the same people who had gone out to fight. Perhaps the best of us had gone.
Bloom wrote so much, and it’s always hard to believe that anybody who wrote more than 500 books could have written any that were any good. I’ve certainly read some very sub-par books by Bloom and some excellent ones. War Isn’t Wonderful is closer to excellent than execrable. It might not be very 1961, but I thought it was fascinating, well-written and, above all, unforgettably honest.
It’s always good to throw in some classic crime into a club year – though by the 1960s, we are well past the Golden Age. But thankfully there was still an option from my teetering piles of unread British Library Crime Classics: The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North.
Seven years ago, I read the first in the series, and had very mixed feelings. I liked Sergeant Cluff, but the book was so misogynistic that it was hard to get through. The number of times that every woman’s breasts were described was really quite something. I ended with ‘I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.’
And, has he?
Well, I think so. The victim is, again, a young woman who has been murdered – chemist assistant Jane Trundle is discovered dead in the street – and there are plenty of people (including her own parents) around to mutter that she was no better than she ought to be. But it doesn’t seem to permeate through the narrative as much as it did in the previous book. And breasts are only mentioned a normal amount! Cluff, indeed, stands up for her.
“I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,” the man said. “She asked for it.”
“You’d see her often.”
“Wasn’t she worth looking at?” The man paused. “She made the most of it.”
“She’d nothing else.”
Suspicion immediately lands on her boyfriend. Sergeant Cluff sets about investigating – though the official investigation is being done by a different police officer. Cluff’s involvement is not particularly welcomed, but he has a unique set of skills and attributes that make him persist: he refuses to jump to conclusions, he is stolidly humane, and he is also a local of Gunnarshaw. That gives him particular access to people who might not speak to an outsider, but it also means he can’t be fooled by the veneer of respectability that everyone in the community does their best to retain. And, at the same time, he sees honesty where others might not. I enjoyed how North spelled out the continuing internal conflict between Cluff the professional and Cluff the local:
The course he has to take nagged at him. He knew what he had to do and he had no clear idea of when he was going to do it, or whether he was going to do it at all. He was two men, the Sergeant of Police and Cluff. He feared that what the Sergeant might discover would prove mistaken the innocence in which Cluff believed, with nothing to support belief except Cluff’s identity with Gunnarshaw. The unreasoning emotions of Cluff warred with the detachment the Sergeant was obliged to maintain, the impersonality of the Sergeant with Cluff’s understanding and compassion for people like himself.
The strength of the book remains the character of Cluff, and his excellent dog, rather than the plot itself. But there was another element that I found interesting, that I don’t particularly remember being in the previous one – North’s use of dialogue. So often, throughout the novel, characters are talking slightly at cross purposes – or trying to achieve different things in the exchange. It meant that the conversations are always slightly disorienting, but in a way I found quite effective. It certainly felt realistic and appropriately unsettling, so the reader couldn’t quite relax. It’s Cluff’s way of keeping everyone on their toes, perhaps. I didn’t note down any examples, though I suppose the dialogue in the first quote does demonstrate it a little. It’s hard to exactly put my finger on how it’s done, but it worked well.
The Methods of Sergeant Cluff is pretty flimsy, plotwise, but that’s true of so many classic crime novels. It really rests on Cluff, and on those terms I’d call it a success – certainly much more satisfying than the first in the series.