Author: StuckinaBook

Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens

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I love a book about reading, and I love a biography where the biographer’s experience is part of the story. And so I was really pleased when Picador sent me a review copy of Nell Stevens’ new book Mrs Gaskell & Me. I’d heard of her book Bleaker House but not read it yet – still, this sounded so up my street that I couldn’t resist starting it almost immediately, Century of Books be hanged.

The book is in two parallel timelines. In one timeline, Elizabeth Gaskell has written a controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte, and is heading off to Rome at the time of publication. In the other timeline, Nell Stevens is writing her PhD thesis about Gaskell. Both of them have romantic entanglements of some variety – Gaskell is charmed by the, indeed, charming Charles Eliot Norton; Stevens gets up the courage to tell her friend Max that she’s in love with him, and they start a slightly complex, often long-distance relationship. The parallels are clearly brought to the fore, but they are there nonetheless.

I deliberately didn’t look up anything about Gaskell’s life, because I didn’t want to know how much was documented and how much Stevens imagined. Much like ‘Nell Stevens’ herself in this book, it is a fictionalised version – or, rather, a selective and edited version. Every biography or autobiography is that, naturally, but I suspect Stevens had to edit a little more than most to make parts cohere.

While she writes well about Gaskell’s adventures, and imaginatively makes us feel like we are watching these tense moments of her life, I have to admit that I was drawn a lot more to the sections about Stevens’ own life. Perhaps any dual narrative will inevitably lead us enjoying one more than the other – I do find, in a novel, that the balance is more easily struck with three. In the strand that follows Stevens’ life, she writes with striking vividness about her romance – sometimes awkward, sometimes secure, sometimes fraught – and juggling it alongside writing her PhD thesis. Normally I find fiction or non-fiction about romance a bit tedious (unless it’s a romcom movie, then I’m right in) – but Stevens manages to write about her emotional experiences without being too vague or claiming too much worldwide significance for them – the two pitfalls people often fall into. By contrast, when she writes about Gaskell’s emotional life, the guesswork shows through. It’s all quite plausible, but inevitably loses some of the vitality that makes her sections so engaging. (I did like what she wrote about the reception to Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, though – I hadn’t known it was such a scandal.)

And then there is all that she writes about the academic student life. Perhaps I enjoyed this mostly because it reminds me my own doctorate, and the highs and lows of academic research – dealing with expectations, wondering about the future, revelling in the highs when research unearths gems, and panicking because nothing seems to cohere. Though Stevens’ course had a lot of expectations – she seemed to have substantial work and a strong idea of where she was going almost immediately. I didn’t really know where my thesis was going for at least 18 months.

The main divider in whether or not you’ll enjoy this is: do you like the fourth wall broken? This is all meta – all about the author, and doing the research, and breaking that wall. I love it and, if anything, would have welcomed more. The Gaskell bits held my attention, but it was the “and me” that made me really love this book. And, indeed, I’d bought a copy of Bleaker House before I got to the end.

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett

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Another audiobook I’ve been listening to is Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel Buried Alive, courtesy of Librivox (the free audiobook site). Each work is read by one or more volunteers, so the quality of the reader is pretty variable, but I will now be listening to more or less anything Simon Evers reads. He’s extraordinarily good – and I really enjoyed listening to Buried Alive.

If the title is bringing up your worst nightmare, then don’t worry – nobody is literally buried alive in the book. But it almost happens to the noted artist (and recluse) Priam Farll. His work is known and loved throughout the nation, but he has kept his face out of the press and doesn’t interact with the public. Not because he is obstreperous – he is simply very shy. And this is the sort of premise that leads almost inevitably to mistaken identity, isn’t it? When his valet, Henry Leek, suddenly dies – having taken ill to Farll’s own bed – it is natural that the policeman might believe that Farll has died. Partly out of awkwardness, partly seeing an opportunity to avoid the public glare, Farll goes along with it.

Things get more complicated when he has to leave his own home quickly, as it (and all his wealth) has been distributed in his will – some to a distant relative, but a large chunk to build a picture gallery in his honour. Which all feels a bit of a poor decision when he discovers he only has a few pounds to his name (and those few pounds are more than he was expecting Mr Leek to possess… he turns out to have been a bit of a ne’erdowell). The buried bit? Well, ‘Farll’ – actually Leek – is buried in Westminster Abbey.

We watch Farll try to live an ordinary life, having never been unwealthy – and witness the nation’s apparent response to his death. Bennett is very funny about this, even while we recognise the tumult of emotions that come with such an unusual experience.

Special large type! Titles stretching across two columns! Black borders round the pages! “Death of England’s greatest painter.” “Sudden death of Priam Farll.” “Sad death of a great genius.” “Puzzling career prematurely closed.” “Europe in mourning.” “Irreparable loss to the world’s art.” “It is with the most profound regret.” “Our readers will be shocked.” “The news will come as a personal blow to every lover of great painting.” So the papers went on, outvying each other in enthusiastic grief.

He ceased to be careless and condescending to them. The skin crept along his spine. There he lay, solitary, under the crimson glow, locked in his castle, human, with the outward semblance of a man like other men, and yet the cities of Europe were weeping for him. He heard them weeping. Every lover of great painting was under a sense of personal bereavement. The very voice of the world was hushed. After all, it was something to have done your best; after all, good stuff was appreciated by the mass of the race. The phenomena presented by the evening papers was certainly prodigious, and prodigiously affecting. Mankind was unpleasantly stunned by the report of his decease. He forgot that Mrs. Challice, for instance, had perfectly succeeded in hiding her grief for the irreparable loss, and that her questions about Priam Farll had been almost perfunctory. He forgot that he had witnessed absolutely no sign of overwhelming sorrow, or of any degree of sorrow, in the thoroughfares of the teeming capital, and that the hotels did not resound to sobbing. He knew only that all Europe was in mourning!

Isn’t that great? It’s passages like that, where Bennett shows his firm hold of irony, dry humour, and an underlying poignancy that show how Virginia Woolf was too sweeping in her condemnation of him. He is not a pompous writer at all, at least not in Buried Alive – it’s delicious stuff.

Wonderful in rather a different way is Alice. By a series of unlikely coincidences, which we will allow him, Farll ends up meeting Alice – whom Leek had arranged to marry. And, by a further series of unlikely steps, they do end up married. I shan’t spoil any more of the plot, but I had to talk about Alice. She is extremely fond of Farll, but completely no-nonsense. The world can no longer surprise her, and she takes everything in her stride – while also being kind and affectionate, and tolerant of her husband’s shyness and eccentricities. She’s a brilliant character, entirely lovable and mildly intimidating. Simon Evers voices her dialogue perfectly, but I think I’d have loved her even without that. Here she is on Farll’s legacy going towards a picture gallery:

“I call it just silly. It isn’t as if there wasn’t enough picture-galleries already. When what there are are so full that you can’t get in–then it will be time enough to think about fresh ones. I’ve been to the National Gallery twice, and upon my word I was almost the only person there! And it’s free too! People don’t want picture-galleries. If they did they’d go. Who ever saw a public-house empty, or Peter Robinson’s? And you have to pay there! Silly, I call it! Why couldn’t he have left his money to you, or at any rate to the hospitals or something of that? No, it isn’t silly. It’s scandalous! It ought to be stopped!”

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Bennett, and the second novel. Since Evers has narrated quite a few of his novels, I think I’ll be listening to quite a few more – hopefully they’re all as fun as this one was.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

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As the year draws to a close, I seem to be drawn to more new books than usual – to the detriment of A Century of Books. One area in which I’m particularly allowing myself to go rogue is audiobooks. While I am ticking off some ACOB years with it, I’m also going earlier (thanks to the copyright-free restrictions of Librivox) and later (thanks to… my wish to read the books in question).

I’ve been listening to the Chat 10: Looks 3 podcast for a while, hosted by Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. Those names meant nothing to me and, indeed, it was a while before I realised they were famous outside of the podcast – which was recommended to me by an Australian colleague. And, indeed, Australians will probably recognise those names as journalists/presenters/newscasters/etc. Leigh Sales presents a flagship news programme, but in a recent episode of Chat 10: Looks 3 (which is always hilarious) she talked about finding time to write her new book – Any Ordinary Day (2018).

The book stems from the idea that life-changing moments happen out of nowhere – that people get up, get dressed, leave the house as they do on any other day. And then the extraordinary happens, potentially ending their lives. Sales first thought about this when she experienced a life-changing event herself: a uterine rupture, while pregnant with her second child. Thankfully she had gone to the hospital earlier, with unfamiliar pains – and thus was able to be rushed straight to surgery, and survived something that is usually fatal. In the midst of other dramatic or traumatic family events, it put her in mind of speaking to people who experience or witness the extraordinarily tragic.

That ‘witness’ is fascinating, but let’s start with the ‘experience’. She speaks to the man whose wife and two children were murdered in the Port Arthur Massacre; she speaks with a woman who was in the Lindt cafe siege and has MS – with someone who lost his first wife in an avalanche and his second to cancer; with a man who survived over a month stranded in a snowdrift; with someone whose husband was murdered by his schizophrenic son. There is a panoply of grief and tragedy here.

Many of the names are famous, particularly in Australia – and that is part of what makes her conversations with them so interesting. People are changed by these things happening to them, or to people they love. But they are also expected to remain in a stasis of grief. The Port Arthur widow related people asking “Oh, you’re over it, then?” if they saw him laughing in public – as though being over that sort of event were possible. The man lost in the snow has had to live with a curious urban myth about a Mars bar in his bag – perhaps this will mean something to Australian readers! – and tells Sales that people joke about that Mars bar to him at least once a week. Discovering the after effects of these extraordinary moments is saddening in a wide range of ways but so interesting.

And then there are the people who walk alongside the mourners, or work with them. Some of the most fascinating parts of Any Ordinary Day were when Sales interviewed people whose jobs are connected with people’s most tragic days – particularly the empathetic, wise woman who worked in a morgue and accompanied those who had to identify dead bodies. In a similar vein, she speaks with the police officers who have to inform people that their loved ones have died, and a priest who particularly helped one widow. The meeting of ordinary and extraordinary is so unusual, and Sales writes about it brilliantly. This is their livelihoods; the other people engaged in each day will never forget the encounter.

Along the way, Sales tries to find out answers – how people cope with these events; if they try to find any reason in them; what responses are most likely to lead to emotional recovery. I had never heard of post-traumatic growth, but apparently it’s much more likely than the much-more-talked-about PTSD.

Several of the people Sales meets are Christians, and (as a Christian myself) I found it really interesting to see how she responded to that, as somebody predisposed to scepticism. She is a little patronising to them at times, and conflates the idea of a sovereign God with “this was meant to be” – the problem of evil and suffering is, of course, endlessly complex – but I thought it was intriguing how often she came upon people of faith.

Having said that, her writing and interviewing is extremely sensitive and thoughtful. Being a big name in the Australian media has granted her access to many people who might not speak out otherwise, and she draws together the stories and threads extremely well. It is not trying to be sensational, nor answer all the big questions – but by introducing the questions (and, indeed, some less eternal questions – like the idea of media intrusion and journalistic integrity) she creates a very good book. My biggest take away was the extraordinary bravery of survivors, kindness and wisdom of those who have helped them, and troubling way that the media and public at large treat tragedies. No answers, perhaps, but definitely worth a read to explore the issues – and I can definitely recommend the audiobook, narrated by Sales herself.

What should our next club be?

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Thanks to everyone for taking part! I’ve now updated the list in the previous post, so it should have everything that was newly published this week. And such variety. It’s the first year we’ve done which didn’t have any REALLY famous book published, I think – usually there’s been a Rebecca or something that people can turn to if nothing else appeals, and 1944 has made us all think outside the box a bit.

And what of next time? We do these clubs every six months, and made our way through the decades 1920s to 1970s. 1944 was drawn by a random number generator (and it was great to do a wartime year). For the next one – we’d like suggestions! Karen and I decided to turn things over to the readers – ideally between 1920 and 1979, but not inescapably – let us know if there’s any year you think we should be reading, and the reason why. Once we’ve got a healthy number of suggestions, Karen and I will put our heads together and make a decision. Criteria tbd!

Pop something in the comments here, or on Karen’s post.

#1944Club: round up

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It’s been another great week of club reading! Thanks so much to everyone who joined in. Here are the reviews that came out this week – let me know if I missed yours. (I should say, I’m still adding them – so if you’ve already put it in a comment, then I’ll add it soon!) It’s been really interesting to see how wartime made a difference to the writing going on – and, in some cases, how it didn’t. Another really fun, really illuminating club! News about the next one soon…

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

Annabel’s House of Books
Bag Full of Books

The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings / Mr Kaggsy
Staircase Wit

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Book Jotter
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

Briefer than Literal Statement

Gay from China at the Chalet School by Elinor Brent-Dyer

Gilt and Dust

Guignol’s Band by Céline

Intermittencies of the Mind

Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie

All the Vintage Ladies

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie

Ruthiella Reads

Gigi by Colette

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

The Literary Sisters
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Book of the Dead by Elizabeth Daly

Bitter Tea and Mystery

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Becky’s Book Reviews

Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge

Staircase Wit

Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham

She Reads Novels
Buried in Print

The Shrimp and the Anemone by L.P. Hartley

Harriet Devine’s Blog
Stuck in a Book

A Bell for Adano by John Hersey

Typings

Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer

What Me Read
Desperate Reader

Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

Staircase Wit

The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist

Winston’s Dad

No More Than Human by Maura Laverty

Sally Tarbox

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

Becky’s Book Reviews

The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann

Madame Bib Lophile Recommends

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte

Winston’s Dad Blog

Agostino by Albert Moravio

1streading’s Blog

Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange

Stuck in a Book

The Portable Dorothy Parker

Lizzy’s Literary Life
Pining for the West

A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair

Hopewell’s Public Library of Life

The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault

Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

What Me Read

Transit by Anna Seghers

Kaggsys Bookish Ramblings
Lizzy’s Literary Life

Dragonwyck by Anya Seton

Staircase Wit

V-Letter and other Poems by Karl Shapiro

Typings

Pastoral by Nevil Shute

Leaves and Pages

Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Winston’s Dad

Signe Picpus by Georges Simenon

Brona’s Books

Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout

Typings

The Clock Strikes Twelve by Patricia Wentworth

All the Vintage Ladies

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

What Me Read

 

The Shrimp and the Anemone by L.P. Hartley #1944Club

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My second (and probably final) read for the 1944 Club was L.P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, which i am grateful I am typing, because I can never say that word. It’s the first book of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, and covers about a year in the young lives of the brother and sister.

I bought the trilogy many years ago, and I think I also had this book separately until I realised that it was a duplicate. While I read The Go-Between a decade or so ago, it was only last year that I started to explore his other work – specifically The Boat, which was brilliant. And so I was pleased to see that one of my Hartleys could coincide with the 1944 Club, even if it meant lugging around the chunky book pictured above.

It opens at the beach, and we don’t have to wait long to see the shrimp and the anemone in question. Eustace is nine; his sister Hilda is four years older, and they are playing on the sands. Eustace is looking in a rockpool, and sees an anemone slowly swallowing a shrimp – he is a sensitive child, and is keen to save the shrimp. Hilda comes to help extricate it – but, in doing so, both the shrimp and the anemone are killed. It is rather a graphic depiction of a relationship that goes through the whole novel (and, I believe, the whole trilogy). Hilda is domineering and possessive; Eustace is anxious to please. It’s leaping ahead a bit, because this comes in the second half of the novel, but it crystallises their sibling relationship well:

For the first time, then, he obscurely felt that Hilda was treating him badly. She was a tyrant, and he was justified in resisting her. Nancy was right to taunt him with his dependence on her. His thoughts ran on. He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own. In all his actions he was propitiating somebody. This must stop. His lot was not, he saw in a flash of illumination, the common lot of children. Like him they were obedient, perhaps, and punished for disobedience, but obedience had not got into their blood, it was not a habit of mind, it was detachable, like the clothes they put on and off. As far as they could, they did what they liked; they were not haunted, as he was, with the fear of not giving satisfaction to someone else.

A lot of the novel is simply about this fraught relationship – one filled with love, because Hilda is not trying to inflict pain; she believes she is doing the best thing for both of them, to the extent that she considers the question at all. I found it fascinating, because I’ve never quite got my head around what it must be like to have a sibling who is either younger or older than you. I know that’s the norm, but it seems to me like it must be quite odd – not being on the same footing, as it were. And Hartley captures that inequality well.

Into this world comes Miss Fothergill, an old lady who is largely alienated from the community by her disabilities. We see these through Eustace’s eyes, so I’m not sure exactly what they were – but they lead to her being in a wheelchair, and having deformities in her hands and face. Hilda forces Eustace to speak to her when they encounter her on a walk – and, unexpectedly, he (after some misadventures on a paperchase!) ends up visiting and befriending her – leading to various seismic changes in Eustace and Hilda’s lives towards the end of the novel.

I didn’t find this as wonderful as The Boat, possibly because it doesn’t try to have the humour of that novel. And I’ve found every novel about children that I’ve read since Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler somewhat deficient in dialogue, because Schuyler captures so well how young siblings talk. And if Hartley’s child characters lean towards the adult in how they converse, they are wonderfully realised in how they think and relate. Eustace’s anxieties are drawn perfectly, and their relationship rang very true. I’m not very good at carrying on with a series after I’ve started it, but I should move onto the next two before I forget the first of the trilogy – it will certainly be intriguing to see how this relationship develops as the brother and sister age.

Mollie Panter-Downes on 1944 – #1944Club

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In previous clubs, I’ve quoted from Virginia Woolf’s diaries – and I was wondering who I could use as a perspective on 1944 (given that Woolf died in 1941). And then it hit me – of course! – Mollie Panter-Downes’ wonderful London War Notes. It is the collection of fortnightly letters she wrote for Americans about how WW2 looked in London. And here is part of her entry from 2 January 1944. 

The immense din of outgoing bombers which the capital recently heard on more than one fine morning provided a very inspiring sort of overture to 1944, too. All the same, Londoners who saw the year in by storming one of the packed places around town or by bringing out the precious bottle of Scotch or Algerian wine at home couldn’t wish each other a happy new year with a completely light heart. Now that the invasion seems so imminent, the conventional salutation sounded faintly ironic. There have been many other occasions when everyone you met confidently told you that the invasion of Europe would start next Wednesday at the latest, but the announcement of the new team of commanders appears to have really convinced the public that things will begin to move before their new calendars shed many more leaves.

Londoners seem to feel that things will get hot again at home just as soon as they warm up elsewhere, but their attitude remains nonchalant enough to annoy Doctor Goebbels. When a taxi had a particularly noisy blowout the other day, one of the apocryphal London hawkers, now peddling rare bobby pins and rarer elastic to Oxford Street matrons, is supposed to have said to a customer, “Hit must be the secret weapon, lidy.”

Another slight clue to just how happy this new year may turn out to be was provided by the government’s announcement that repairs to gas masks will be made free of charge for the next two months.Though this precaution possibly belongs in the knock-on-wood category. Britons thoughtfully hunting up their almost forgotten masks felt that it might also be an official hint that the Nazis have a few more tricks to try before they are forced to give in.

Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange #1944Club

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I loved the first Ursula Orange novel I read (Tom Tiddler’s Ground) and was glad that the 1944 Club provided an opportunity to read another. Company in the Evening is one of the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints – extremely welcome, especially given how much Scott has made us all want to read Ursula Orange over the years. And, yes, it’s another really good’un.

The novel is from the perspective of Vicky, a woman who has recently divorced and is looking after her young daughter (born after the divorce) while also working at a literary agency. She is managing life rather well, but her mother can’t believe this is possible – and decides that Vicky should take in her sister-in-law. Rene has been living with Vicky’s mother, after being widowed (a very WW2 element to the story) – and she makes the move to Vicky’s household, fitting neither in the role of servant or relative. She will provide, Vicky’s mother optimistically hopes, ‘company in the evening’.

Vicky is more a real character than a likeable one. Or, perhaps, she becomes likeable because she is so understandable. She does not particularly want Rene to move in with her, nor does she know quite how to speak to her. Orange is very good in the scenes where Vicky tries to reach across the intellectual and social chasm between herself and Rene, wanting to find the right topics and language, but also (because she is only ordinarily nice; nothing special) not putting in quite as much effort as is needed. She is definitely an intellectual snob and, to a lesser extent, a class snob – but it is undeniable that this chasm would exist, even if Vicky cared less about it. The women are two different to understand one another.

Meanwhile, she starts to reconnect with her ex-husband – recognising, for the first time, that he might want to make something of the role of father, and that she never really gave him the chance. Looping back to the title – might he become the aforementioned company?

The dynamics of the unusual household are done extremely well. We always know what people are or aren’t likely to say, do, and feel, and understand how awkwardly these elements cohere – or don’t cohere. It is a funny novel, but not in the way that Tom Tiddler’s Ground was. It’s the war – set in 1941, if memory serves – and a more sombre light is cast over the book.

Having said that, all the stuff at her literary agency is amusing – particularly her dealings with an author who sends all her best stories elsewhere, and is maddeningly unhelpful in meetings. I love reading about anybody engaged in literary work, and this was all rich material for what a literary agency was presumably like in the 1940s.

Dorothy Harper wafted herself out of the office, all pearls, fur-coat and scent. I am sure that she always pictured herself as bringing just a little colour and romance—a breath of the outside world—into our drab lives. As neither of us ever did anything but listen patiently while she talked her society prattle, perhaps we encouraged her in this conception. I was ‘Miss Sylvester’ to her, as I was to all our clients. I am sure that had she known that I was (like her) a divorcee, she would. have been deeply shocked. Little typists in offices (she would think) have no business to be also divorced women with private lives of their own.

The oddball humour is perhaps an odd fit with the social anxieties – and with all the motherhood aspect, particularly when Vicky’s daughter has a health crisis. But I think it works well together – because, of course, people’s lives have funny moments and unhappy moments, and Orange has written something that is naturalistic in tone, if not in every word spoken. I’m so grateful that Scott and Furrowed Middlebrow have brought Ursula Orange back into print – and you can read his detailed thoughts about this novel on his blog.

#1944Club – starts today!

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Happy #1944Club day, everyone! Until Sunday, we’re asking everyone to read and review books published (in any format, language, or place) in 1944. Pop your review up on your blog, and then let me or Karen know the link – at the end of the week, I’ll compile a round-up, and any thoughts that might lead out of that. If you don’t have a blog, we can link to reviews on LibraryThing or GoodReads, or you can put a review in the comments here.

Happy reading!