I’m in one of those moods where – though there are book group books and Shiny New Books I should be reading – I am impulsively picking up other, non-essential books, and reading them instead. Once I get them in my head, nothing else will quite do. Which is why I’ve recently read The Outlaws on Parnassus (1958) by Margaret Kennedy – which I bought when Jane ran Margaret Kennedy Reading Week.
It’s non-fiction – more specifically, a look at the art of the novel. In case the opaque title isn’t immediately clear, this is the opening paragraph, which might help:
The status of the novel, as a form of art, has never been clearly determined. No particular Muse was assigned to story-tellers. There are no Chairs of Fiction at our Universities. Criticism has never paid to the novel the degree of attention which it has accorded to other kinds of literature.
So, Kennedy’s title suggests that the novel is something of an outlaw among the other forms of literature, waiting for the gods on Mount Parnassus. While her opening statements are no longer true (there are plenty of Chairs of Fiction) and probably weren’t quite true in 1958, the doesn’t take away from the interesting discussion Kennedy launches into – interesting both on its own merits, and as a snapshot of literary opinion in the mid-century.
The Outlaws on Parnassus starts by looking through a brief history of the novel, dwelling on those names that were only a century or so old in the 1950s. (Indeed, throughout the reference points are intriguing – we expect to find Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf – and do – but how many books about the novel written today would return so often to Joyce Carey?) Kennedy writes some very interesting things about the difference between plot, story, and comment – not all of which I agree with, but it’s interesting nonetheless – and includes some very adroit comparisons of the skeletons of novels, convincingly identifying the same plot structures in Vanity Fair and To The Lighthouse, for instance.
But most of the book, Kennedy looks at different approaches to narrative forms and narrator personae. The latter she divides into autobiographical, author-observer, impersonal narrative, realist, and egocentric. I can’t imagine her categories becoming lasting pillars of literary criticism, but she argues her points well, giving specific examples for each of these styles of a woman entering a room and being found beautiful by those in it.
I’ve read quite a lot about realist fiction in my studies, as you might expect, having written about fantastic literature – and I wish I’d come across this earlier. It pretty much sums up what happened with realist fiction (and the backlash against it) in the early 20th century. I can’t work out if the echoes of Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ are intentional or not, but it plays out less condescendingly that Woolf’s (excellent and witty, but, yes, condescending) essay: (oh, by the way, the hypothetical Flora and her activities form Kennedy’s exemplar throughout the book)
In the early realistic novel Flora’s validity was established by surrounding her with intensely valid detail, of a kind which the reader could readily endorse from his own experience. If she cooked cabbage the house smelt of it. If the weather was warm she sweated. If she went to Penzance she started from Paddington and took a train which could be verified in Bradshaw. If she died she did so of an authentic disease described in clinical detail. Any doctor, reading an account of her symptoms, would agree that she had to die. No author could save her after ‘a coffee grounds vomit’.
This detail need not necessarily be sordid or disgusting; it was a matter of plain accuracy. The whole technique however came to be identified with this unseemly statement, because it was this aspect of it which most struck the average reader. He had never met such things in a novel before; a ‘realistic novel’ not only mentioned a privy but described minutely what went on there. Many realistic novels used such material sparingly, but liberty to employ cloacal, physical, or sexual detail was interpreted, by so many inferior novelists, as licence that the whole nature of the technique came to be misunderstood.
And then there are sections wherein Kennedy looks back at specific moments in critical history, as the novel began to be understood (or misunderstood) by a wider public. She is particularly reproving of those, in the 1930s, who chose to turn their focus away from the qualities of art:
A distinction between art and non-art may be useful, but it is not the most vital distinction to be made. The major service of criticism is to distinguish between bad art and good art, and, above all, to help us to understand why good art is good. It was a great misfortune for the cause of the novel that criticism should have gone off on a witch-hunting excursion, just when novelists had a chance of securing serious attention. They were not the only sufferers. Some attempt was also made, in the 1930s, to screen the poets for suspicious intentions and cynical attitudes, but the poets are better established. Enough sense has been talked about them, in the course of 2,500 years, to enable them to stand up against an occasional bombardment of nonsense. The case of the novelists was not so robust. Their public, long accustomed to think of them with a certain degree of disparagement, would have been reluctant enough, in any case, to changes its ideas. An opportunity was missed of establishing an art, claimed as great, by defining those qualities which make it so. It was neglected in favour of denunciations against naughty boys.
The only curious misstep in The Outlaws on Parnassus, to my mind, is the late chapter where Kennedy writes at length about the plot of The Odyssey without, so far as I can tell, much of a wider point to make. She makes a half-hearted attempt to call it the world’s first novel, but the chapter still feels a bit like she wrote it for something else, and thought she might as well include it to bulk out the number of pages.
But, that aside, it’s a really fun, interesting, and engaging little book. It’s no surprise that it didn’t revolutionise the world of literary theory, but those of us who love novelists like Margaret Kennedy and reading about novels (as well as reading novels themselves), then this is a bit of a find.
I actually read The Year of Reading Proust (1997) by Phyllis Rose round about the time I read her book The Shelf, which I loved so much. Indeed, like The Shelf, I bought and read The Year of Reading Proust while I was in Washington DC in April, reluctant to part company with an author I’d so quickly learned to love.
Fast forward four months, and somehow I still haven’t written about this book. It’s a difficult book to write about. But it is extremely good and enjoyable, so I didn’t want to overlook it altogether.
Perhaps the main difficulty is that the book doesn’t pay much attention to Rose’s project. While The Shelf took the shelf of a library as a starting point for many tangents and explorations, it remained a fixed and vital point for the whole book – Rose kept returning to the books on that shelf, explaining them and framing her discussions through her readings of them. I expected more of the same from The Year of Reading Proust, but Proust makes surprisingly few appearances. Instead, it’s essentially what the subtitle says: ‘a memoir in real time’.
It was while reading the introduction that I cottoned on to what Rose was trying to do. She doesn’t explain her project; she talks about the hamburger she ordered when she heard that JFK had been killed. Now, I haven’t read any of À la recherche du temps perdu (which is where her experiment with Proust begins and ends, perhaps unsurprisingly – you probably weren’t expecting this to focus on his handful of other works). But I do know, of course, about the madeleine that kicks things off at the beginning of the first volume: Rose was doing the same thing with a hamburger.
From here, I learned the key to the whole book. Rose described how Proust’s writing meandered and interwove, taking events separately and creating a pattern from them; using mundane incidents to discover profundities, and taking introspection to a new level. Ambitiously, Rose attempts the same. From dealing with her mother’s serious illness to buying a vase, she documents her life over the course of a year. She discusses her neighbour’s trees more than she does the text she is reading, yet successfully demonstrates how coming to love Proust illuminates her own experiences.
Proust had shown me the underlying laws. Like the Marxist who boasts that if you really understand history you can predict it and sneers at those who, not understanding it, are condemned to repeat it, like the Freudian smug in the face of human aberration because he thinks he can explain what produced it, I felt privileged, exempt, suddenly the master of the life I was observing. I had been given a key, a free subscription to some hitherto locked-out cable channel which in front of my eyes lost its frustrating distortion and transformed itself from blurred, wavy, taffy-pull mystery shapes into a clear and enjoyable picture.
As it’s been quite a while since I read it, I don’t remember many of the details that Rose shares – and I suppose it is a hallmark of the type of book she’s written that I don’t remember them. They aren’t individually significant (to the reader at least). But what I do remember is how much I enjoyed the experience of seeing the year through Rose’s eyes, and the glimpses into what she thought of Proust. Though she doesn’t write about the novel in any great depth, she does convey how much she valued reading him – and how she broke through, after not particularly enjoying the beginning, into near besottedness. The Year of Reading Proust did what nothing else had hitherto done: made me want to try À la recherche du temps perduat some point.
So, I didn’t love this book as much as I loved The Shelf, but it is an entirely different creature. If not quite the book-about-books that I was hoping for, it was a rather brilliant memoir – and a very ambitious one, in trying to echo what is considered one of the greatest ever literary works. Maybe it would have made more sense under a slightly different title, but I’ll forgive Rose that.
Even though The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t quite a book-about-books, it has helped confirm how dearly I love that category – so any suggestions for those are heartily welcomed…
I had dimly heard of Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) before somebody lent it to me, and I think that must have come through reading about Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett, both of whom were good friends with old T.H. Indeed, he dedicates this novel to Garnett’s daughter Amaryllis, to whom it is supposedly being read. White has been in the news recently, featuring in Helen Macdonald’s extremely successful H is for Hawk (which I have yet to read), but I don’t think many people have been talking about Mistress Masham’s Repose. Like me, you may have assumed it was a historical novel. Turns out, it isn’t – but it is a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels. Intrigued?
I have never read Gulliver’s Travels, to my shame, but I am (of course) aware of the Lilliputian characters – and that is pretty much all you need to be able to enjoy the context to this book. The repose of the title is a small, overgrown island in the middle of a lake in the grounds of Malplaquet, the estate where ten-year-old Maria lives. Though her governess Miss Brown, and the local vicar Mr Hater, torment and defraud her, she has enough freedom to wander around the grounds – which is how she discovers that the descendants of the Lilliputians are still living, and living on her lake, no less.
At first, she treats them as playthings – kidnapping a mother and daughter for her personal toys. White writes quite movingly about the mother/daughter relationship of these tiny people, viewed from the vantage of a not-especially tall child: we get something of her surprise at their humanity. Quickly, she realises she has gone about things the wrong way, replaces the child, and speaks with the schoolteacher of the group – who knows and speaks 18th-century English, having had it passed down through the generations from the Lilliputians who learnt it from Gulliver himself. (Gloriously, later, he speaks with the professor – Maria’s only human ally – in Latin, as being the correct way to address an educated man.)
Maria’s involvement with the Lilliputians sometimes goes well (they love making clothes from her fabric offerings) and sometimes disastrously (as you will find out if you read it) – but things take a turn for the worse when Miss Brown and Mr Hater get wind of the Lilliputians’ existence, and want to exploit them for money. Then the novel turns into a fairly conventional story of good vs evil, as Maria and her small friends try to outwit their rather cartoonishly evil nemeses.
That was a little less interesting for me – though perfectly right and proper for what is (I think?) a children’s book (so uncertain about that now). Luckily, this section also comes with some of the book’s funniest passages. There is light humour throughout, and White has a deft hand with it, but the introduction of the Lord Lieutenant is his comic masterstroke. The Professor goes to him for assistance, and the Lord Lieutenant is the epitome of absent-mindedness and loquacity…
“My dear old boy, look here, be advised by me. You drop the whole thing. You’ve got it muddled up. Perfectly natural, of course; no criticism intended. Anybody could get muddled on a thing like that, I should have done it myself. But when you’ve been a Lord Lieutenant as long as I have, or a Chief Constable, or whatever I am, you’ll know that the first thing a Lord Lieutenant has to get hold of is a motive. Can’t have a crime without you. I assure you, it’s an absolute fact. First thing a criminal must do is get a motive. It’s in a book I read. Printed. Now what motive could Miss What-you-may-call-it possibly have for wanting to handcuff young Thingummy in the what’s-it?”
I suspect I’d have got more from this novel if I’d read Gulliver’s Travels – and I probably should have done, considering my English degree background – but I still heartily enjoyed it. A great deal more than I would have done (I imagine) had it been the historical novel I’d thought it was…
In case you don’t know, for the past few years I’ve been writing recaps of the annual BBC reality show The Great British Bake Off, and people seem to enjoy them – if the (delightful) inundation with requests to recap this year’s episodes is anything to go by. I can’t promise recaps will be prompt this year BUT they will definitely happen. I’m not even going on holiday in the middle of the series this time. And it’s now with enormous pictures, because WordPress.
Things start precisely as you’d expect them to: with a pun. PUN KLAXON. And, guys, it’s a weak one. It’s based on ‘warrior’ and ‘worrier’ sounding alike. Things are off to a solid start.
They never sort out what they’re doing with their arms. They never do.
As usual, at this stage there are literally dozens of bakers. There doesn’t seem to be any real way of keeping track of them, although some have cottoned onto the fact that an impactful first impression can be made by signature outfits (Hat McGee has nose rings and a hat, at all times – can his scalp have suffered from some industrial burning at some point? Can it?) or being very similar to previous contestants. More on those anon; you should know that I am cheering on Marie, because I drew her name in the office sweepstake.
You go, girl!
Tamal – a ‘trainee anaethetist’, which sounds lethal – says it didn’t feel real until they saw the tent. At which point, this building looms into view. Since they haven’t for a moment explained where they are, this seems like an unnecessary waste of taxpayers’ money on a jolly in a helicopter.
Independent enquiry, amirite?
Oh, no, wait – there the tent is. I take it all back.
Flora (her nickname will come later in this recap) wins my love by showing proper respect for Mary – albeit adding that she wants to “make Mary swallow a piece of my cake”, which couldn’t sound more menacing. But she is so like Martha from last series that I can’t help feel fond of her already.
Alvin says simply “Nervous. Really nervous.” which, judging by the promotional images of him that have been released, is simply his nickname. He looks constantly terrified. Sandy, on the other hand – who I’m pretty sure is simply Nancy from last series putting on a slightly different Northern accent – claims that she often inadvertently makes meat pies when trying to make cakes. Well, this bodes well.
The opening credits haven’t changed. The little girl in them must be in her late forties by now.
More panning. More helicopters. Apparently we’re in Berkshire; Mel and Sue are in hoodies. Have they eschewed blazers for this series?! Will Boden go bankrupt?
Never mind.
For the first challenge of the series, they’re making – Madeira cake. Call me foolish, but I didn’t think you could add lots of other flavours to this without making something completely different. I’m with those bakers who make a ‘classic’ Madeira. I.e. a Madeira.
Sandy informs us that her sister’s ‘last words’ were something convoluted and meandering about greasing tins. Well, I guess we may as well fill the moments before passing to a Better Place with sound kitchen advice.
There is something rather alarming about a trainee anaesthetist not being able to use scissors.
YAY! Home videos! The first to get this treatment is Ugne, who lives in Essex with (by happy coincidence) her partner and children. Sadly they couldn’t be in the same shot together, so these have been cobbled together clumsily in Photoshop.
She also loves body-building, being a contract killer, etc.
Ian also has children; they bounce on trampolines. I was wearing the same jumper that Ian has on, while watching this episode. He waffles on about the rare, exotic ingredients he’s found while travelling in foreign climes – which turn out to be ginger and lime. But anybody who puts ginger, lime, and coconut together is a friend of mine. Oh, and let’s take a moment to welcome back the BBC Colouring Pencils Man.
Mat – in what I think might be the only ten seconds of screentime he gets this episode – says he’s making a gin and tonic Madeira cake. Mary’s eyes light up, as does the alarm bell in the producer’s office. Mary’s on the alcs.
My girl Marie bakes almost every day, we are told, ‘much to the delight of her five grandchildren’. Why doesn’t Voiceover Mel ever make any effort to do rudimentary counting?
Or are two grandchildren somewhat less delighted?
Marie seems like a treasure, and I wholeheartedly applaud Marie, Dorret, and Flora for making classic Madeiras without bells, whistles, or – indeed – any metal at all. Speaking of metal (THIS IS WHAT WE IN THE BUSINESS CALL A SEGUE) Flora’s sister is inexplicably riding a unicycle in her home-life-shot. Which is taken by somebody leaning out of the attic, apparently.
Back in the tent: “My chunks are well-dispersed,” says Sandy, trying perhaps a little too hard to be the Nancy of Series 6. Sandy walks through deserted corridors for a living.
Her Madeira has apricots and almond liquor, which does sound rather nice. Maybe I was too hasty with my purist judgements about Madeira.
Flora forgot to set her oven, because (wait for it) ‘at home we have an Aga’. Congrats, m’lady, you have earned yourself a nickname for the WHOLE SERIES. (Couldn’t you have made it something quicker to type out, srsly?)
If the baking thing doesn’t pan out, Nick Park will have a role for you.
Paul (the baker) is apparently a prison governor in Swansea who likes making sugar flowers. This is all an elaborate cover-up for the fact that he’s a seldom-employed professional Paul Hollywood impersonator. If he is connected with prisons, he should probably have a word with Ugne, who turns menacingly to the camera and says “looking for crack”. Send in the sniffer dogs, pronto. (But, really, apparently having a single crack along the top of a Madeira cake is Essential, and this episode’s Probably Arbitrary But Somehow Crucial decider. And it’s not even the technical challenge, where these things usually emerge.)
“Famous in Leeds is the three-crack Madeira” confides Sandra, with an accent calculated to be incomprehensible to anybody not from the UK.
Tamal. Now, Tamal, I think you might be my favourite so far. Your showstopper (more on that anon) was fantastic; you seem charming; you don’t freeze rigid with fear whenever Mel or Sue hove into view. But… are you sure you’re allowed to steal medical equipment from work?
He’d better win, because he’s definitely been fired.
The aforementioned syringe (obj. 1 in an impending trial, no doubt) is for putting in a rosewater syrup. I am heartily anti rose as a flavour. I’ve got nothing against it as either a flower or a name. Or a past tense.
Confusing the Signature Challenge with the Showstopper Challenge (where prolonged staring at your bake is not only accepted but encouraged), Paul fixes his gaze on his Madeira. Which pretty much underlines how non-showstoppery this challenge is. I’m sure his bake is fabs, but it looks like he’s ogling a lump of clay.
It’s probably got a good crack or whatever.
We interrupt a montage of people spreading, rolling, and candying and (in the case of At Home We Have An Aga, apparently adding tomatoes) with a shot of Marie drying pans.
BBC budget cuts hit hard. Poor Tamal is stuck wielding a boom mic.
Since you’ve seen so few images of actual food so far in this recap – knock yourself out:
Mary does a candied fruit drop test. It’s glorious. She’s trolling the show now.
Faaaaar too many people to tell you what Mary and Paul said about them all, but Nadiya, Tamal, Marie, and At Home We Have An Aga do well, Ian and Stu do badly (‘wallpaper paste’ / ‘everything’s wrong’), everyone else fall somewhere in between. Marie, fyi, has a wonderful line in anxious shifty-eyes, which are impossible to show aptly here. Take my word for it. She also seems a complete sweetie.
No History of Cake, guys. Have we… have we learned everything there is to know about cake?
Straight onto the technical challenge – which is one from Mary’s mind. It’s a walnut cake. I’m liking the simplicity of today’s challenges; things that people might actually want to make at home. No fondant fancies here. I mean, yes, they’ve picked something entirely to say ‘nuts’ as often as possible, but swings and roundabouts.
And suddenly the inspiration for Artex ceilings becomes clear.
“Where could they go wrong?” Paul queries. “They have to make a sponge mix,” starts Mary, somewhat underestimating the ability housed in the tent. She also sounds quite croaky in this scene, and I find myself wishing she were wearing a scarf and/or downing Strepsils by the packet. Then I remember: she’ll doubtless have a hipflask of whiskey within arm’s reach.
Have YOU ever wondered the correct size for a chopped walnut? Have you? No? Well, prepare yourself to fast-forward through a few minutes of in-depth discussion on the topic. Or pause on this shot, which Mat (or Ian?) proudly and unquestioning labels the perfect size.
“I don’t see how it can’t be,” he adds, demonstrating an alarming lack of imagination.
The downside to a simple challenge is that there isn’t very much to say. We all know how to make a sponge cake. Even Mel’s breathless prognostications about the dangers of not knowing precisely how long to leave them in the oven leave this particular viewer in no state of distress. Crystallising sugar is the pinnacle of the difficulties. We pan from pan to pan (*bows* thank you – no, thank you) until we land on Alvin’s.
Spoilers: he spends the rest of the episode making this caramel over and over again, Sisphyus-esque.
Stu goes off-piste with measurements for water, ignoring the fist-clenching alarums and discords from Mel, hovering over his shoulder. Has he seen the show before?
Alvin’s cake has slid to one side, for the prosaic reason that his shelf was at an angle. “Could you prop it up on some walnuts?” offers Mel, appearing from nowhere. Has she seen the show before? Alvin, being a nice man, simply pretends he hasn’t heard her. To her credit, she quickly acknowledges that the idea was ridiculous.
At Home We Have An Aga manages to concertina one of her layers, but the lack of attention paid to this by the cameraman is forewarning of greater disasters to befall the tent… in some episodes this would be given a ten minute montage from all angles, complete with interviews from all and sundry afterwards.
The oompah oompah Big Band are playing to their hearts’ content, and that must mean that the challenge is OVER. It’s a pretty impressive spread (though Stu’s caramelised walnuts became something more like brittle, and he was only able to dig one out). As always, the anonymity of the bakers is made a mockery of by their gurning and wincing while the judging takes place. Paul and Mary keep calling something ‘granular’, and I can’t work out whether they mean the icing or the sponge.
Anyway, some fairly uninspiring judging later, Nadiya and Stu are the bottom two – Marie, Alvin, and Ugne are our top three. Alvin looks very anxious about this. In the interview afterwards, he says “I’m pleased” in the tones of one undertaking a lie detector test with a penalty of death.
Back into the tent for the final challenge, and the establishing shot shows… this filthy sieve!
No *wonder* Marie has taken to doing her own dishes.
Paul and Mary talk about the fortunes of the bakers so far, while we see the bakers put on their aprons, seemingly over and over again. Paul – for avoidance of doubt – lets us know that walnuts should be cut in eighths, and no larger. He also entirely ignores everything Mel and Sue say to him, as per.
The Showstopper Challenge is a Black Forest Gateaux. Marie thinks wistfully of her youth, while At Home We Have An Aga says she hasn’t heard of it, but when she’ll ask for one when she turns 14 next birthday.
Tamal – and this is where he becomes my favourite – is planning to make this beauty. It also strikes me that the BBC Colouring Pencils Man’s approach feels a bit like that of a child who, worrying that people may not be able to identify his horse and cowboy from artistic merit alone, adds explanatory arrows to the side.
Hat McGee is making a Purple Forest Gateaux which, if anything, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Black Forest is.
Beetroot. More like beetNO.
Dorret – watch this space – is making two types of sponge, and a mousse. “It makes a very dense, rich sponge,” she says – dense being, of course, what everyone wants from a sponge.
Everything that everyone is making sounds delish. Nobody is trying a cardamom-based spin on it, nobody feels inspired to see what would happen if they used pineapple instead of cherry. The experimenting is minor, and I approve of it. Sandy talks of having recently made one that was “powerful”, whatever she might mean by that, and describes herself as “a bit random with a trendy twist”.
I mean, sure.
“I’m happy with the overall appearance,” says Alvin mournfully. Hat McGee has burnt his cakes a bit. And Marie staunchly ignores Mel comparing her with Rod Stewart. Who wants to be compared with Rod Stewart in this day and age? Not even Rod Stewart. Wisely, Marie is more concerned with Paul’s lack of enthusiasm for her envisaged cascading ganache.
One of my highlights is Paul (the Baker) and his complete lack of humour about security at the prison where he works. Sue reverses out of her joke so quickly that… if I knew more about cars I’d make a decent joke here.
Things aren’t going swimmingly over with Nadiya, whose cake looks like she accidentally baked a hamster into it.
And then we get to our annual explanation of what tempering chocolate is. I’d quite like to compare each year’s explanation, and see if they’re the same wording each time.
Lots of people are making trees. Ian is making… elephants. Sue’s quizzing on the topic doesn’t bring anything that could be considered a reason.
Well, why not?
Alcohol is poured copiously, buttercream is piped, layers are… layered. And we linger for some time on Dorret putting her mousse in the fridge. Mel resiliently makes references to forests that are intended to be innuendos, but don’t quite mean anything at all, on any level. And then…
Guys – it’s genuinely heartbreaking. The camera lingers on Dorret’s face as she whispers “no”, and I want to reach into my TV and give her a hug. Luckily Sue is there in my stead, and comforts her. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to go home,” she says – which should be a barefaced lie, but… well, spoilers. I love that Sue is so nice to Dorret, rather than waving a bin towards her with HEADLINES gleaming in her eyes.
Judgement time! So many wonderful looking cakes; I will restrict myself to showing only three that I loved the look of. And… Dorret’s.
A mixed bag of critiques, as you might expect. Despite Mary’s assurances that Dorret’s will doubtless taste lovely, she is quickly overruled by Paul’s declaration that it is like rubber. Marie, Tamal, and At Home We Have An Aga do well. And so on and so forth. It’s getting late. The bakers wander around outside in the cold while Mary and Paul repeat the whole show in brief.
So! The winner is….
And going home is…
Somehow Dorret lives to fight another day, and Hat McGee takes his hat back to Hatshire.
It’s nice to be back, guys! Hope you enjoyed the recap, and I’ll see you next week.
I will be writing Great British Bake Off recaps again this year, you may or may not be pleased to know – but I’m thinking that weekends are probably going to be the earliest I’m able to write them.
So, for today, I’ll point you towards another of my Shiny New Books reviews. This time it’s Reader for Hire (1986) by Raymond Jean, translated from French by Adriana Hunter.
Having just read Martin Edwards’ very entertaining The Golden Age of Murder (which I’m due to write about over at Vulpes Libris soon), I was in the mood for some Agatha – and decided to grab one which fulfilled one of the criteria on my Book Bingo. One of them is ‘Book set in Asia’, and so I grabbed They Came to Baghdad (1951), which my friend Simon gave me a few years ago.
I feel a bit guilty about it, since I don’t think it’s the most authentic portrayal of Asia imaginable (and I had been planning to read Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco), but at least Christie knew the area fairly well.
They Came to Baghdad has one of Christie’s most likeable heroines, the impetuous, charming, and accident-prone Victoria Jones. She starts the novel by getting fired from her position as a typist (for impersonating the boss’ wife) and wanders, bloody but unbowed, into the streets of London – whereupon she meets a gentleman as impetuous and charming as herself, the handsome Robert. They obviously rather fancy each other, but he is off to Baghdad the next day.
Luckily, Victoria manages to find someone willing to pay her board to Baghdad in exchange for helping her manage the journey, so she can go and surprise Robert. (Remember the impetuous thing?) Only… she doesn’t know his surname, and doesn’t have any money. A delight of a hotel proprietor gives her a room (he is forever offering her beautifully cooked meals, and describing everyone he knows as ‘very nice’) and she decides just to wait it out and see what happens. Only, what happens is that somebody ends up dead in her hotel room…
This isn’t a traditional Agatha Christie whodunnit, though, more’s the pity. The death doesn’t come until almost halfway through the book, for one thing, and long before that there has been much talk of intrigue and codes and meetings of international importance, etc. The novel is really a thriller, rather than a detective novel – and, had I known that, I might not have picked it up.
For much the same reasons I talked about in relation to spy novels recently, I am not enamoured with thrillers. I avoid anything with gore or sadism, which rules out many modern thrillers, but even Christie’s cosy approach to the thriller didn’t, er, thrill me. It is compellingly readable, as everything Christie wrote was, but I can’t bring myself to care about international plots and orchestrated assassinations and the like. I want Christie novels to revolve around anger that somebody knocked over a bird cage (for example) and to take place in a small village or country house.
There’s still a twist or two in the tale (though the main one is so obvious that I can’t really believe it was intended to be a twist), but there’s not really much to satisfy those on the lookout for the sort of clues and denouements that are the fabric of Christie’s archetypal output.
So, did I enjoy reading it? Sure, it was still pretty fun. But it’s probably one of the least enjoyable Agathas that I’ve read so far, and confirms my preference for Marples and Poirots. Speaking of which, I’ve just picked Nemesis off the shelf for my ‘one-word title’ square on Book Bingo…
I’m on a little holiday in Somerset, spending time with Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife some of the time, and spending other chunks of time looking after beautiful Sherpa with Colin. I haven’t seen Sherpa (my parents’ cat) since Christmas, and have missed her like crazy, so she’s been getting lots of hugs from me today.
But yesterday I went to Clevedon and Taunton, and bought myself some books. If you’re ever in the vicinity of Clevedon, Somerset, can I recommend that you check out Clevedon Community Bookshop? There is a good selection of books, very reasonably priced, and the staff are super friendly. I bought four books there, two in a bookshop in Taunton, and another couple in Clevedon charity shops. So, what were they?
The Last Tresilians – J.I.M. Stewart
Karyn loved this book back in 2011, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for it ever since – and was thrilled to see it in Clevedon Community Bookshop’s nice bookcase of Penguins (Karyn, you need to visit!)
How To Suppress Women’s Writing – Joanna Russ
I felt bad as this title was being read by one man to his colleague, to write down in their sales book – and I felt obliged to point out that it was ironic, and a feminist work. I saw it mentioned on Twitter recently, I think, and was chuffed to discover a copy so soon afterwards.
Circular Saws – Humbert Wolfe
I mostly know Wolfe as a book reviewer from the 1920s, and can’t quite work out if this is a selection of essays, stories, or arbitrary thoughts – but it certainly looks fun and 1920s-y.
Dear Austen – Nina Bawden
About Bawden losing her husband Austen in a railway accident.
Looking For Alaska – John Green
I liked The Fault in Our Stars, and Green is very engaging on YouTube, so I thought I’d try another of his books for teenagers (I totally refuse to use the term ‘young adult’ except when referring to young adults, rather than younger-than-adults).
The Gallery of Vanished Husbands – Natasha Solomons
I really liked Mr Rosenblum’s List, so grabbed this book. An intriguing title!
Tommy & Co.– Jerome K. Jerome
Did you know that JKJ had written this book? I didn’t. I would have done if I’d ever gotten around to reading the biography of JKJ that I have – which I WILL DO ONE DAY.
Still Missing – Beth Gutcheon
A Persephone novel that I don’t yet have, for £1.95?! Yes please!
Hope you’re having a lovely weekend, and reading lots. I’m knee-deep in Martin Edwards’ The Golden Age of Murder right now, and loving it.
