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A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – #1962Club

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Cat in the Window - Tangye, Derek: 9780722183960 - AbeBooksWow, there are so many 1962 Club reviews coming in! I am behind with updating the page and not even managing to read all the reviews at the moment, but will go back and explore them. And I did manage to read one more, very short, book for my own 1962 Club contributions – A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye.

I picked this up in a brilliant bookshop in Whitehaven earlier this year – they had an awful lot of books by Derek Tangye and I foolishly only bought this one. They all seem to be about his life in Minack, Cornwall, with his wife and a series of different animals. In the previous book in the series, A Gull on the Roof, he apparently introduced Monty the cat. And A Cat in the Window takes us back to tell us about Monty in more detail.

Novels about cats are very hit-and-miss in my experience, often being too fey or leaning into a kind of kooky magical realism that isn’t my cup of tea. But non-fiction about cats, like Tangye’s, are almost always wonderful in my experience. Because they are written by people who love and know cats – who appreciate their character, their dignity, their independence. And who form loving friendships with cats, knowing that the cat isn’t slavishly desperate to please them but, rather, any affection is earned.

But Derek was not such a man at the outset, as he confesses in this book:

Dogs, then, had been entities in my life. Cats, as if they were wasps with four legs, had been there to shoo away. They did not belong in my life nor in my family’s life. All of us were united that whenever we saw a cat the most important thing to do was to see it out of sight.

But as I moved slowly out of the environment of my family, I found naturally enough people and homes who accepted cats as we accepted dogs. Cats were not vulgar as, in some mysterious way, I had been led to believe. I began to note that cats were able to bestow a subtle accolade upon their apparent owners which made these owners rapturous with delight.

One such cat-lover was Jeannie – the woman that Derek fell in love with. And she, with the cunning of all of us who adore cats, introduced a little kitten to the household – saying that living with them was his only chance of survival. Derek is reluctant. He has never known the charm of a cat. He allows the kitten only if it stays outside and in the kitchen. Certainly Monty will not be allowed upstairs.

We all know what’s going to happen don’t we?

My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.

Nobody has the zeal of the convert. The rest of this slim volume is about the joy of living with a cat (one cannot say ‘ownership’). He understands Monty’s character beautifully, not fabricating things that are not feline. He also understands Monty’s place in the food chain – killing rodents, but also under threat from neighbourhood foxes.

Perhaps only a cat lover would love this book, but I heartily recommend it to anybody who understands the majesty of cats and the privilege it is to share a home with one or more. I certainly felt more affected by Monty’s death (thankfully at the end of a long and happy cat life) than by most human deaths in the books I read.

Reading for club years is always enjoyable for seeing how times have changed and what’s stayed the same. Most of the 1962 choices I’ve seen mentioned (including my other two reads for this week) couldn’t be written in the same way today. But A Cat in the Window could. Cats are happily unchangeable – and the way a felinophile would write about cats hasn’t changed at all either.

The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper – #1962Club

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I didn’t manage to read a huge amount for the 1962 Club, and I seem to have specialised in authors better remembered for other books. After Lynne Reid Banks, I’ve turned my attention to Lettice Cooper and The Double Heart, a book I picked up in a little sale box outside a church in about 2005. Its moment has come!

Lettice Cooper is best remembered for The New House, once a Virago Modern Classic and now a Persephone book. She had an astonishingly long publishing career, spanning 1925 to 1994 – so while The Double Heart came 26 years after The New House, it was far from a swansong in her bibliography. But she is not a early-century writer still turning out the same books after they have ceased to be fashionable: this feels very 1960s, and even a bit startlingly modern at times.

The novel didn’t open super promisingly, in my opinion. Hervey is a failing playwright (my second failing playwright for the 1962 Club!) and meets a beautiful young woman called Bell, short for Belinda. This is their moment of encounter:

Then Jonathan moved and beyond him Hervey saw a girl, who turned round on her stool and glanced towards him. She was very young, with smooth fair hair falling round her long neck, with large, light grey eyes under heavily painted lids. She wore a close-fitting black jersey and a green tartan skirt that belled out round her stool. She was half listening to Jonathan, obviously bored. She looked full at Hervey. He felt he jolting shock of a collision. He stood still returning her stare. Her lips just parted, hardly smiling. It was as though she had lowered a gangway for him. He walked towards her across the room.

Love at first sight might happen in real life sometimes, but it’s very tedious in a novel. More tedious still is the sort of things they say to each other almost immediately. Because there is a pesky little obstacle to their era-defining romance: Bell is married with a young son. She decides that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Lucas, and starts to psychoanalyse herself in the bar.

“I still can’t partly because a person that Lucas expects me to be. I know now that I don’t want to, and so I do it badly. I’m neither one thing nor the other, and it makes me half hate Lucas, though it’s not his fault. And I don’t want to hate him, he’s not a person to hate. And then there’s Toby, my baby. I’m very fond of him, but he’s something tying me down to this life that isn’t really mine.”

It was at this point, on p.17, that I considered giving up on the novel. Nobody speaks like this outside of novels, and Bell and Hervey are tiresome, unpleasant people whose love affair I couldn’t care less about.

BUT – it turned out that Cooper was doing something much cleverer than I’d given her credit for. This sort of talk takes up the first chapter, and then the rest of the novel is really about the fall-out. How does it impact relatives and friends when two young people make a selfish decision? What are the knock-on effects?

First, of course, is Lucas. He is a slightly dull but dependable young man who is unbelieving and angry that Bell has left him in the most casual way possible. Despite the anger, he wants her to come home and quietly forget the whole thing. This all makes him sound like the staid villain of the piece, but Lucas really has out sympathy. He and Bell have had a fairly happy marriage so far, from his perspective at least, and he is ready to forgive and forget her curious blip. But he has a job and can’t look after baby Toby – and so he gets shepherded off initially to a lady in another flat (who is indignant) and next to Lucas’s mother.

Lucas’s widowed mother, Dorothy Marsden, is perhaps my favourite character. She is one of the few who could have stepped out of The New House. An eminently sensible woman, we meet her coming in from the garden with a dripping bunch of chrysanthemums to answer the telephone – couldn’t that be in any interwar middlebrow novel? She takes Lucas in with a mix of grandmotherly happiness and, as a person with her own life, a certain reluctance. We hardly get to know Lucas at all – he is a burden to outsource rather than a character on the page – but he certainly disrupts Dorothy’s life. The fall-out of Hervey and Bell’s decision even covers Dorothy’s dear friend Hatty – there are intriguing suggestions that their relationship might be more than friends, and Hatty is furious to be cast aside.

We also see Hervey’s mother – a fluttery, nervous woman who feels very overwhelmed by the situation. Then there’s Bell’s parents – an emotionless man whose main regret is marrying the beautiful young woman who fell pregnant with his baby and thus had to get an engagement ring. He resents Bell for being too like her mother (even though the pregnancy in question turned out to be a son, much more like himself than his wife.)

I’m racing through characters because there are an awful lot of people we get to know well – Lucas, Hervey and Bell also each have friends, some of whom have spouses and children to meet too. I think Cooper spread her net perhaps a little too wide, and sometimes I struggled to remember who people were or if we’d met them before. She is great at getting deep into someone’s personality, but slightly fewer people would have made this trait pay off a little better, in my opinion.

As for Hervey and Bell themselves – the lustre doesn’t last super long on their relationship, as anyone could tell. Hervey is monstrously selfish. He thinks it ‘makes sense’ for him to finish his play first rather than get a menial job, because then he will be a rich and successful playwright. But he hasn’t actually started the play yet, nor does he have any ideas for it. He lets Bell believe that her son will come and live with them, but secretly will refuse to allow this. He has, essentially, no redeeming qualities. Bell, on the other hand, is more floaty than selfish. She seems to live on another plane, where consequences of actions don’t quite exist. She means nobody any malice, but also doesn’t seem to walk with her feet on the ground. Perhaps the most touching relationship in this novel of flawed relationships is the platonic one she forms with a workman who shouts her a full English breakfast (because she has no money for meals) and they form an extraordinary friendship. It becomes the main plot of the latter section of The Double Heart, but I won’t say any more on that.

How representative of 1962 is this maelstrom of characters and storylines? It comes across when they talk about marriage:

“Your idea is what it [marriage] used to be. When our parents were young they could believe in things lasting. How can we, when it’s obvious that we shall probably all be blown up in a year or two?”

“I think the only to take that situation is to go on living as if it wasn’t going to happen. Just as a solider must behave as if he wasn’t going to be killed.”

Perhaps every generation thinks that the previous generation had more stability – and every generation thinks that theirs is more liberal in marriage. But only a handful would have had that genuine fear that they could be ‘blown up in a year or two’. I suppose that might be the sort of thing that would make someone abandon their family on a whim?

Whether or not the catalysing moment for The Double Heart is plausible, I really enjoyed what Cooper did with it. It’s an interesting way of looking at sudden romance that throws caution to the wind. Following all the people left hurt and disoriented by this caution-throwing gives opportunity for a compelling plot and a wide range of characters – and Cooper shows that she is every bit as adept at writing about 1960s society as she is at 1930s. Hopefully more of her books will be read and discovered – she’s far from a one-trick, or even a one-decade, pony.

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks #1962Club

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(I wrote this review before the recent shocking violence in Israel and Gaza, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned.)

One of my favourite books is Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, which was also one of the first adult novels I discovered for myself. I’d loved her children’s books and it was a great step from one world of reading to another. I read the two sequels, but didn’t read all that many of her other novels for a long while – despite buying An End To Running back in 2002. (I should say – I got a bit of déjà vu reading it, but I think that’s because it has similarities to her children’s book One More River.)

This was Lynne Reid Banks’ second novel and there are elements that could remind you of her first. The male lead is a Jewish writer, for instance – but the female protagonist, Martha, is nothing like The L-Shaped Room‘s Jane. Martha is a no-nonsense, articulate, intelligent young woman looking for work as a secretary – preferably something literature-adjacent. As the novel opens, she is being interviewed for a job with Aaron Franks. She instantly dislikes him. He has a cruelty to his demeanour and a self-importance as a writer that comes across as childishly arrogant. But he is supported in this by his sister – the real power behind the throne – who believes Aaron to be a genius, and takes against Martha immediately.

Martha is offered the job, and takes it because she needs the money – and because she is undeniably intrigued by this man. She thinks the writing his sister most prizes is pretentious, meaningless waffle – but there is a novel about his father’s experience as a Jewish immigrant that seems clearer and deeper. In all honesty, Banks takes us from their initial mistrust and disdain for each other to a friendship rather quickly and slightly unconvincingly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot.

Somewhere along the way, Aaron comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea. Sick of his sister’s bullying and misguided views on literature, he decides to write a play entirely in the style that she likes. It is meaningless nonsense, and Banks clearly enjoys giving us excerpts from it. And it is an admirable pastiche of a certain sort of play. This is 1962, and presumably the stage of the day was suffering from an influx of playwrights trying to emulate works like Waiting for Godot (1953 in French; 1955 in English) and Harold Pinter’s (The Birthday Party was 1957; The Caretaker was 1959 etc.) Actually, two of the novels I’ve read for the 1962 Club have would-be playwrights as lead characters, so it was clearly in the air.

Meanwhile, Aaron is preoccupied with his Jewish identity. That’s a common theme of Banks’ work – and we mustn’t forget, of course, that this is only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Characters like Aaron grew up with the most violent anti-Semitism being loud and clear across Europe. Early on, his sister rejects Martha’s suggestion that he write a play about Jewish people:

“Why not Jews? I want to understand this.” 

“Primarily because we want the play to be a success.”

“Why should Jewish characters hinder that?”

“Because it’s esoteric. It’s all right to put shaggy old East End pawnbrokers or sharp-nosed shysters or hand-spreading fat crooks into a play for laughs or a gentle tear or two. But you can’t write a serious play exploring Jewish feelings and expect anybody but Jews to understand it.”

Anti-Semitism is sadly all too present in 2023, but I hope no novelist would feel that the above dialogue was an accurate reflection of the arts today. As a sidenote, I can’t find out whether Lynne Reid Banks is Jewish or not, and it does make a difference to how I respond to her writing. She so often returns to ‘Jewishness’ as a theme, particularly people who are ashamed of being Jewish – which feels like a vulnerable thing to explore if she is Jewish, and… well, opinions vary on whether or not it’s appropriate if she isn’t Jewish.

Aaron writes his play and it is put on by a small theatre group – and, twist, it becomes a big success. Aaron at first finds this amusing – but Martha points out that his reputation as a writer is now settled. He can’t become a new novelist without this reputation. One thing leads to another, and they decide to move together to a kibbutz in Israel – a sort of communal living compound. They are able to move there under the then-rule that any Jewish person around the world could move to Israel (I believe it’s a bit more stringent now).

It was one thing not to be wanted in the place you were born in. That might not be enough to make you get out – it might only make you more stubbornly determined to dig in. But if there was a place that did want you – wanted you so badly it didn’t even ask whether you had tuberculosis or a criminal record, let alone whether you were popular in the place you came from or whether you liked yourself or whether you had the guts to stand on your own two feet – then what sort of a bloody fool would you have to be not to go there? Surely there, if anywhere, you could start again with nothing chalked up against you, even in your own mind.

Yes, it is a bit of a jump! But somehow it feels plausible in the novel. What works slightly less well is jumping to another country and another voice – because the first half has been in Martha’s first-person perspective, and the second half (such as that quote above) is from Aaron’s first-person perspective. By changing all the parameters in one fell swoop, it does feel like two very different novels.

Though Martha is not Jewish, they are accepted onto the kibbutz because they lie that they’re married. From the start, it doesn’t go well. Aaron is not built for physical labour, and finds the hours in baking heat harvesting vegetables both exhausting and mindless. He doesn’t particularly like the communal way of eating, or having other people’s children everywhere. Perhaps because he is escaping somewhere rather than being excited about the arrival, he resists everything. Even though we are in his mind, he is not a sympathetic character. It is evident that he considers himself too good for this.

Martha, meanwhile, is a better fit. She seems to have changed a lot from the first half – perhaps a convincing contrast of the way she sees herself, versus how Aaron sees her. She is more compliant, more liked. Banks lived on a kibbutz herself for a while, and she certainly conveys it very well. I can see why it’s a setting she returns to in several of her books.

I shan’t give any more of the plot – but I will say I liked An End To Running very much. Lynne Reid Banks is brilliant at enveloping you in a world and making it deeply familiar to you – bringing across both the pain and the discomfort of familiarity. My qualms about the novel are really that it is two novels, barely hinged together. If one were the sequel to the other, I think it could have worked. But as it is, the leap of perspective and setting, and the concomitant change of tone, means it’s hard to think of An End To Running as one whole.

And how representative of 1962 is this club choice? There are certain things that could only be from this period – from the vogue for a certain form of highbrow theatre to the relatively recent re-creation of Israel as an independent country. The cover does its best to seem racy, but this is a fairly minor part of the plot – it would have been shocking three decades earlier, but is pretty tame for 1962.

I’d never recommend this as the best place to start with Lynne Reid Banks, and it certainly won’t dislodge The L-Shaped Room in my affections – but I do think, beside that novel, she is not as widely read as she deserves. Perhaps her interest in Jewishness means her novels are more vulnerable to dating poorly, but she is an exceptionally good writer and I hope more people read her.

The 1962 Club: Your Reviews!

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I’m delighted that the 1962 Club is here – join Karen and me in reading and reviewing books from 1962. Any language, format, genre – we’d love to build up a picture of 1962 between us. We’ve been doing these club years for such a long time now, and it’s always a highlight of my reading/blogging year.

If you have a blog/GoodReads/Instagram or wherever you write reviews, pop a link in the comments. If you don’t, feel free to write your review in the comments.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
Harriet Devine
She Reads Novels

Portrait in Brownstone by Louis Auchincloss
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
Pining for the West
1streading’s Blog

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks
Stuck in a Book

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassini
Lizzy’s Literary Life
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury
Buried in Print

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
746 Books

Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown
The Captive Reader

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess
1streading’s Blog

Unlawful Occasions by Henry Cecil
Literary Potpourri

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
My Book Trunk
Sarah Matthews

The World in Winter by John Christopher
Calmgrove

The Twelve and the Genii by Pauline Clarke
Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home

The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper
Stuck in a Book

The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton
AnnaBookBel
Pining for the West

The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany
Elle Thinks

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt
Dominika on GoodReads

Whistle for the Crows by Dorothy Eden
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Reivers by William Faulkner
What Me Read

The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming
Mr Kaggsy

The Case of the Reluctant Model by Erle Stanley Gardener
Literary Potpourri

Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn by Eve Garnett
Fanda Classiclit
Scones and Chaise Longues

Hissing Tales by Romain Gary
1st Reading’s

The Cactus and the Crown by Catherine Gavin
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Weather at Tregulla by Stella Gibbons
Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home
Fanda Classiclit

No Dust in the Attic by Anthony Gilbert
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

An Error of Judgement by Pamela Hansford Johnson
HeavenAli

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer
She Reads Novels
Staircase Wit

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith
746 Books

Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery
My Reader’s Block

Kirkland Rivals by Victoria Holt
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
What Me Read
Biisbooks

Cover Her Face by P.D. James
Fanda Classiclit

Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley
Gallimaufrey Book Studio

Due to a Death by Mary Kelly
She Reads Novels

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Winston’s Dad

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Words and Peace

A Murder of Quality by John Le Carre
Entering the Enchanted Castle
What Me Read

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Let’s Read

Mine for Keeps by Jean Little
Staircase Wit

Death & Chicanery by Philip MacDonald
My Reader’s Block

Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz
Winston’ s Dad

Combat of Shadows by Manohar Malgonkar
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh
HeavenAli
Typings
Sarah Matthews via Mastodon

Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima
Words and Peace

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
What Me Read

Something Wholesale by Eric Newby
Bitter Tea and Mystery

The Courage of His Convictions by Tony Parker and Robert Allerton
Somewhere Boy

A Dog So Small by Philippa Pearce
Somewhere Boy

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
Scones and Chaises Longues

The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

Morte d’Urban by J. F. Powers
Typings

Do It Yourself Doom by Stephen Prickett
Briefer Than Literal Statement

Close of Play by Simon Raven
Somewhere Boy

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross
Neglected Books

It’s Perfectly Easy by Mary Scott
The Captive Reader

Martha in Paris by Margery Sharp
Dominika on GoodReads

The Wells of St. Mary’s by R.C. Sherriff
HeavenAli

Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse by Georges Simenon
Literary Potpourri

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Typings

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Literary Potpourri
Dominika on GoodReads

Fletcher’s End by D.E. Stevenson
Staircase Wit

The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart
Scones and Chaises Longues

Apple Bough by Noel Streatfeild
Somewhere Boy
Bag Full of Books

Gambit by Rex Stout
Bitter Tea and Mystery

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye
Stuck in a Book

The Will of the Tribe by Arthur W. Upfield
My Reader’s Block

Hopjoy Was Here by Colin Watson
My Reader’s Block

Witch of the Glens by Sally Watson
Staircase Wit

Conversation of Three Wayfarers by Peter Weiss
Winston’s Dad

Chips with Everything by Arnold Wesker
Somewhere Boy

The Points of My Compass by E.B. White
The Captive Reader

Birds by Judith Wright
Brona’s Books

The Clue of the Dead Duck by Scott Young
The Dusty Bookcase

Red Cats by various
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Six Degrees of Separation: from I Capture the Castle to William

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Whenever the Six Degrees of Separation tag starts with a book I’ve read, I try to join in – and this month’s starts with a favourite, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Find out more about the tag at Books Are My Favourite And Best – and let’s get on with the show!

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE | Forever Young Adult

Starting book: Which of us doesn’t love I Capture the Castle? I read it when I was about 17, and it wasn’t much later that the brilliant film came out. It tells of Cassandra and Rose – sisters living in a castle in the depths of Suffolk – and their eccentric family. A total delight, and Smith’s most assured success.

Stuck in a Book: Guard Your Daughters - Diana Tutton

1st degree of separation: It has to be Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters, doesn’t it? So close to I Capture the Castle in plot and theme that it nears plagiarism – but more sisters, and a darker undertone. I think it’s even better than Smith’s book – one of those reading experiences where I had to pause after a couple of pages because I couldn’t believe quite how brilliant the book was.

2nd degree of separation: “How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters” is how Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went To Woolworths begins – she could have been talking about Guard Your Daughters (only it wouldn’t be published for a while) but it’s also exactly the sort of novel The Brontes Went To Woolworths is. An eccentric, close-knit family live halfway between reality and fantasy, never sure how much they’re making up and how much is real. I love it more every time I read it.

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker | Goodreads

3rd degree of separation: Oh, how could I not put Miss Hargreaves in, if we’re talking about people making things up that become real? That is, of course, exactly how Norman Huntley accidentally conjures up the octogenarian wonder that is Miss Hargreaves in Frank Baker’s novel.

Blithe Spirit (Modern Classics) eBook : Coward, Noël: Amazon.co.uk: Books

4th degree of separation: Where to go next? Well, since Margaret Rutherford played Miss Hargreaves on stage, let’s go for another Margaret Rutherford classic – her role as Madame Arcati the medium in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. This is, of course, a play – about a love triangle between a man, his wife and… his dead wife. A hilarious play which exactly matches Rutherford’s brand of comedy.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham - Penguin Books Australia

5th degree of separation: I’m quite pleased with this link. The title of Blithe Spirit is taken from Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ – and his sonnet ‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life’ is the source of the title of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. If I’m honest, I don’t remember masses about this, except that I liked it and it was a bit bleak.

A Penguin a week: Penguin no. 8: William by E.H. Young

6th degree of separation: And finally, a book published the same year as The Painted Veil: 1925. I could have picked big hitters like Mrs Dalloway or The Great Gatsby, but I’m going with a neglected one – William by E.H. Young. Even fans of Young don’t seem to talk about this one as much as others, and I think it’s up there with her best. It focuses on the fall-out of a woman running off for a very inappropriate marriage, and how everyone in the family reacts – particularly her father, William. It was also one of the first ten orange Penguins. And we’ve come full circle to eccentric families!

That was fun. I’d love to know your six degrees?

Unnecessary Rankings! Barbara Comyns

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I’m back with two of my favourite things – ranking, and needlessness! I have lots of fun with this occasional series of ranking the works of authors I’ve read a fair bit by – and by seeing how much you do or don’t agree. So far I’ve done Michael Cunningham, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Margery Sharp (click the ‘rankings‘ tag up the top to see them all) and today I’m back with an author beloved by the blogosphere.

I don’t know how well known Barbara Comyns is in the wider world, though certainly there have been some lovely reprints in recent years. But in the bookish corner of the internet, she is practically a patron saint. There is one of her novels I’ve not read (A Touch of Mistletoe) because I can’t face the idea of running out. But here are her other books, in order…

10. Birds in Tiny Cages (1964)

This is a case of ‘the hardest one to find isn’t the best’, in my opinion. Based in Spain, with a very Comyns-like lead character in the naïve Flora, it’s still good. But I think Comyns is better when she can make more of English eccentricity.

9. Out of the Red, Into the Blue (1960)

And the same thing affects this – Comyns’ only memoir, about her time in Spain. It’s still entertaining, but misses a bit of the magic of her best work.

8. The Juniper Tree (1985)

When Virago started reprinting Comyns’ novels as Modern Classics, she turned her hand to writing again – or, rather, dug out some books that she’d written in the past. I’m not sure when The Juniper Tree was written, but the reason I’ve put it lower is that it’s a retelling of a fairy tale that I hadn’t heard of, so I missed a lot of nuance.

7. The House of Dolls (1989)

You’ll have noticed I’ve grouped her three later-published novels, and I do think they’re not quite her best – which is a shame, because The House of Dolls is set in a boarding house, and you know how I love them. Being Comyns, the old women in this novel have not settled down to a life of calm routine. Quite the opposite.

6. Mr Fox (1987) 

Mr Fox is a wartime spiv who lives with another typical Comyns heroine – the hopeful, muddled, surreal Caroline. Comyns is great on the countryside, but in this novel she does London excellently too. The best of her later-published books, in my opinion, and that’s perhaps because she apparently wrote it in the 1940s.

5. Sisters By A River (1947)

Comyns’ first novel is heavily autobiographical about growing up in an eccentric family by the Avon in Warwickshire. I might put it higher, but the misspellings and poor grammar (while apparently genuine) feel a bit gimmicky. In later novels, she kept the naivety without needing the gimmick.

4. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950)

For a while this was her best-known novel, perhaps because of that excellent title, though it seems to have been superseded now. It’s a novel of chaotic young married life, including some deeply poignant moments dealt with matter-of-factly – the first of hers I read, I was bewildered more than anything. I need to revisit.

3. The Vet’s Daughter (1959)

And perhaps this is her best-known novel now? The vet of the title is a monstrously selfish man, domineering over young Alice’s life. It’s Comyns’ darkest book, yet with the same surreal humour that she can never leave behind. An ending unlike any of her other works, which dips into fantasy in the most brilliant way.

2. The Skin Chairs (1962)

Yes, there are chairs and they are made of human skin. But that’s just one bizarre piece of the mosaic of ten-year-old Frances’s life. I think this is Comyns at her most assuredly unhinged. I wish it could be reprinted, but publishers have shied away from those chairs (and particularly the race implications about them).

1. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954)

My favourite opening line from any novel is “The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows.” So compelling – and combining the surreal and domestic in a way that is quintessentially Comyns. This funny, strange novel (title quoting a Longfellow poem) is about a village which is simultaneously struck by flooding and an apparent outbreak of madness – all ruled over by the extraordinary and indomitable Grandmother Willoweed.

Comyns fans – do you agree with my rankings? How would you order her books? And where do you think A Touch of Mistletoe will end up on my list, when I finally read it?

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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First things first – your reminder that the 1962 Club is coming up around the corner! Join in a week of reading books published in 1962 and share your thoughts wherever you share bookish thoughts online. Looking forward to it!

Ok, onto the usual miscellany…

1.) The blog post – I always love Jacqui’s thematic round-ups, and the most recent is on monstrous women. Go and enjoy her excellent suggestions, and throw in your own…

2.) The book – have I mentioned Stories for Winter, the next British Library Women Writers anthology? It comes out in a few weeks and I think it’s a really good selection of stories. Find out a little more on the only link I could find.

3.) The link – I really enjoyed the latest episode of Risking Enchantment – a podcast about art, culture and faith – which looks at two books I love and what they tell us about how to be on holiday: The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. Listen here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson

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Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.

I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.

Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witnesses to a tragedy at a cliff edge – Tom’s best friend Rob takes his own life.

He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing–the only thing–that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.

Until this moment the fear that it would accompany him to the end, enter eternity with him, had left him paralyzed, but the lynx had freed him to act. He thought it was possible that if he focused on the big cat, if by a great effort of will he managed to hold it in the forefront of his mind, it might stay with him long enough to be the last thing he saw, and its silence the last thing he heard above the thunder of the falls.

Oh Mary Lawson, what an extraordinary writer you are. Just absolutely stunning. And she leaves us with the mystery of why Rob has done this – who is the child mentioned? What has left Rob unable to escape from this memory?

We don’t get quick answers. Instead, we look at three people in some other timelines – in Megan in 1966 (a year before that opening chapter), and Edward and Tom in 1969 (two years after that climactic event). They are all members of the same large, dysfunctional family. Edward is the father – Tom and Megan are two of his children who are recent adults, while he has various other children right down to an ill-advised newborn. His wife Emily has retreated into caring for this baby, totally abandoning all her other children and seemingly losing her grip on reality.

At the heart of this family is a toxic assumption that only a woman can look after the young children. In 1969, with Emily incapacitated by all-consuming obsession with a baby, nobody is caring for the other young children. There is no food in the house, no clean clothes, and no structure or even conversation. None of the men quite express that it isn’t a man’s job, but it is the underlying belief – and Lawson is too subtle a writer to rail against this patriarchal nonsense in the narrative. She simply shows us how attitudes in rural 1960s Ontario are destroying a family.

Things are no better among the adults – Tom and Edward barely speak. Edward is a bank manager preoccupied with his mother’s diaries and his own tragic, violent past – desperately trying not to turn into his father, and missing that he is becoming a terrible parent in a different way. His is the only one of the three voices we hear in the first person – while he is emotionally unavailable to everyone, we do get access to his stumbling attempts to understand himself and his history, and how he has ended up where he is.

Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in the bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.

That phrase they use in a court of law – “The balance of his mind was disturbed” – sums it up very well. I married Emily while the balance of my mind was disturbed.

His son Tom, meanwhile, is in deep grief for Rob and has isolated himself from the world. He is a talented scientist, but has decided to stick to snow ploughing, where he needn’t interact with anyone. Lawson showed in Crow Lake that she is exceptionally good at families who are close-knit (even when they are stubborn and intractable) – she is equally good at families who dislike and distrust one another.

Fans of A Town Called Solace will remember one of the main characters beginning to thaw and get to know the community. While he is a newcomer to town, I also loved seeing Tom’s own thawing. He knows the place inside out, but not all the people – and it is a talkative young woman and her long-suffering brother who begin to bring him back to life. Spoilers: readers of Crow Lake will already know these two – it was such a delight for me to realise who they were, and encounter them a few years after the events of Lawson’s first novel.

So, where is Megan? She has been de facto mother to her younger brothers – but, as we see in the 1966 timeline, she has boldly decided to move to London. Not London, Ontario, but London, England. Despite never having been to a city before, she needs to escape her family and home and moves to stay with an old friend – only, when she gets there, she discovers the friend no longer lives at the address she has. She doesn’t even live in the country.

Megan is taken in by the houseshare nonetheless – she could scarcely be more naïve in some ways, but in other ways has lived a far fuller life than any of her new friends. The capabilities she has had to learn set her off on an unexpected career – and she begins to emerge from the shadow of her family. Over her years in London, she grows to find her group of people – including the handsome man across the corridor, whom she becomes infatuated with. But that, of course, is not a smooth journey. (Lawson moved to England around the same period and age as Megan, and I’d be interested to know how much autobiography seeps in here.)

Wow, what a novel – what characters. Because they are spread out, and there is so much sadness at the heart of the book, I don’t think it will call me back quite as often as Crow Lake. But, like all Lawson’s novels, it is a masterpiece. Her ability to balance brilliant writing, detailed characters who feel absolutely real, and compelling, page-turning prose sets her apart from almost every living writer I’ve read.

So, c’mon Mary Lawson, I need another novel before too long. Please!

Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson #SpinsterSeptember

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I haven’t actually read very much of the book I had decided to read for Spinster September – a brilliant brainchild of Nora aka pear.jelly – but one of the other books I was reading also qualifies. Ethel Wilson was one of the Canadian authors I was keen to find on my recent holiday, and while I was there I bought and read her final novel, Love and Salt Water (1956).

The novel follows Ellen Guppy through large sections of her life, starting in childhood. Of course, nobody would call a young girl a ‘spinster’, so not all of this novel qualifies – but it’s clear from the opening paragraph that Ellen doesn’t have the stereotypical views of marriage that other girls of her generation are expected to:

When Ellen Cuppy was eleven years old and sat on the foot of the bed, getting in the way of her big sister Nora who was packing her suitcases with great care, she thought how sad it was for Nora, who was so fair and pretty, to marry that old Mr. Morgan Peake who was all of forty; yet Nora did not seem to mind, but shook out the crêpe de Chine nightdresses and laid them on the bed and slowly folded them again with tissue paper in between, and Ellen thought that Nora was like a lamb getting ready for the sacrifice; and thinking of lambs and sacrifices she thought of garlands and timbrels and damsels and maidens and vestal virgins, such things as she read about and liked the sound of but did not understand.

Not long into the novel, Ellen’s mother dies – in fact, Ellen discovers her. Wilson is such a good writer that the scene of this discovery is haunting, and she shows us a reaction that is unusual and yet entirely right. In many ways, the Bildungsroman plot of Love and Sea Water treads some expected paths – but Wilson’s observant eye means that, within this, nothing is ever quite as you’d expect. I thought young Ellen’s response to her mother’s dead body was brilliant:

She stretched out her hand toward her mother’s telephone and drew it back, to defend her mother and herself – and her father too – just for a few more moments, against her mother having died. Yet she was sure her mother had died. This must be what that is.

When she had cried awhile, standing there in her nightdress in the stillness of the room, very frightened with this quiet stranger her dear mother, she managed to pick up the telephone because she must at some time pick it up, and all the while she never took her eyes off her mother whom she was now giving over to other people’s talk and arrangements (it was strange how strongly Ellen felt this as the minutes advanced).

The first hints of the ‘salt water’ of the title come to prominence when Ellen is whisked away by her grieving father on a cruise. She is disorientated and confused, and trying to behave well and keep her father happy. Wilson shows us this in the background, but swirling around is the life of the ship – including the tragedy of a bo’sun swept overboard. She balances Ellen’s internal narrative with reality: her grief is not as significant to the other passengers as the day-to-day gossip and drama that they are experiencing themselves.

As the years pass, Ellen’s sister Nora follows conventions – marrying an older man, having a child, relishing the trajectory that is held up as the ideal. Ellen, meanwhile, is not self-consciously maverick. Her character is fairly quiet and unassuming, and she doesn’t make ripples for the sake of it. But this conventional path doesn’t work for her. She meets some suitable men, but is not interested in them – or at least not sufficiently – despite the urging of her relatives. I think this passage, coming after a proposal from a man she is merely fond of, could be a mantra for a certain group of the fictional women being remembered during Spinster September:

[…] at once her freedom became essential to her again. This free life-without-an-object, which had become so boring, was suddenly necessary to her security. She knew this life well, and would not exchange it for some other life which might be only a new conformity, and then perhaps a prison far away with a stranger.

Will Ellen end the novel a spinster? Well, I shan’t spoil it for you – but I will say that it was a very satisfying ending, true to her character. My edition has an afterword by Anne Marriott and she mentions an alternative ending that Wilson wrote – and I’m very glad she didn’t use it. The one that was published is excellent.

I really enjoyed Love and Salt Water – a short novel, and where some scenes and stages of Ellen’s life are truncated and could perhaps have been explored in more depth. But also one which comes with the wisdom and clarity of a full life and a long writing career. And I particularly enjoyed recognising the settings, as parts of the novel take place in both of the cities I visited – Vancouver and Toronto.

An accidental addition to Spinster September, but glad I could contribute!

Canada: the books I bought, and why

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I am now back from two jam-packed, sunny, lovely weeks in Canada. Naturally I did not see all of Canada in that time, but my brother and I spent a week in Vancouver and a week in Toronto – both of which have plenty of bookshops that were eager to send a British man back over the Atlantic with luggage full to the brim of Canadian literature.

I didn’t buy entirely Canadian authors, but I did focus on books that aren’t as easy to find here in the UK – and I think I bought entirely North American authors. One of the things I did discover is how loose and broad the definition of ‘Canadian’ is to literary circles. Born in Canada and spent most of your life somewhere else? Canadian. Born somewhere else and then moved to Canada? Canadian. Passed through Canada among many other countries? Canadian. Authors I’d always considered other nationalities – who turn out to be Canadian – included Brian Moore, Michael Ondaatje, and Ned Beauman, though I think the last of those must have simply been mis-shelving?

My wishlist wasn’t extensive, but I had two books I was particularly intending to buy: A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence and Road Ends by Mary Lawson, both of which I found on the first day! As you’ll see, there was no limit to the amount of Margaret Laurence I was willing to buy.

Anyway, here is a break down of what I got – I’d love to know your thoughts on any and all of them:

A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence
This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence
The Tomorrow-Tamer by Margaret Laurence
The Prophet’s Camel Bell by Margaret Laurence
Heart of a Stranger by Margaret Laurence
The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence by Clara Thomas
Margaret Laurence: A Spiritual Biography by Noelle Boughton
And would you believe there are still some Laurence books I didn’t find? I do have all her fiction now – I went looking for A Bird in the House, the only one of the Manawaka Sequence that I didn’t have, but was pleased to scoop up any number of other ones. I somehow don’t seem to have included Heart of a Stranger in the picture – her essays, which I was reading on the plane.

My Financial Career and other follies by Stephen Leacock
Model Memoirs by Stephen Leacock
Leacock is one of my other most-loved Canadian authors – I’m not entirely sure if these are new collections to me, or if they are simply gathered from other existing collections, but I took a risk.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson
The only Mary Lawson novel I didn’t already have – she has only written four, sadly – and it’s not that hard to find in the UK, but it felt right to get it in Canada. And it was there, for two dollars, in a sale at the Vancouver Public Library! If you’re ever in Vancouver, head up to their rooftop garden – it’s lovely. I read Road Ends on the four-hour flight from Vancouver to Toronto and definitely recommend something this captivating and wonderful for a plane journey.

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill
One evening, I had the fun of meeting up with Debra – a listener to the Tea or Books? podcast who got in touch when she saw I was coming to her hometown. She recommended lots of Canadian authors as we browsed a BMV Books – by this point in the holiday I had bought SO many books that I was trying to restrict myself a bit, but I couldn’t resist her recommendation of this novel about discovering a doppelganger. Debra said she read it three times! And the cover is beautiful.

Brother by David Chariandy
This was the other book I bought on Debra’s recommendation – I forget exactly why now, but she must have sold it well!

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
And this book was a kind gift from Debra – one of those authors I have long intended to read, and now I have one of her books on my shelf ready to go.

Show Boat by Edna Ferber
When Claire/Captive Reader made a guest appearance on a recent podcast episode, she mentioned how much she was enjoyed Edna Ferber – and this lovely edition of Show Boat had to come home with me.

Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
Stories from the Vinyl Café by Stuart McLean
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
Speaking of Claire, while in Vancouver I had a lovely evening going book shopping with her, then having some dinner. What fun to hang out on her home turf! These three books are ones I bought because she mentioned they were good’uns.

Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson
Having enjoyed a couple of Wilsons, I was pleased to find her final novel – and it’s one of the books I read while I was there.

One of Ours by Willa Cather
I hadn’t heard of this Cather – and, no, I probably didn’t need more unread Cather books on my shelves, but it is a lovely edition. I’m such a sucker for the floop of a North American paperback.

Killing Yourself To Live by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman IV
I hadn’t particularly thought to look out for Klosterman, but turns out his books are much easier to find in Canada than here in the UK. He’s an American author I’ve mentioned a few times – I haven’t tried his fiction, but his non-fiction is brilliant at bringing together links and connections between pop cultural moments that many commentators would consider too trivial.

Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon
I only know Gutcheon her Persephone title Still Missing, but this one looked really interesting.

Frequently Asked White Questions by Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish
This one was just among some books on someone’s lawn in Toronto. The Annex neighbourhood is a lovely leafy suburb with lots of independent shops, and the sort of place where people might have ‘little free libraries’ and the like. Indeed, I left one of my holiday reads – Tin Man by Sarah Winman – in one of those little libraries. (I enjoyed it, but the absence of speech marks meant it wasn’t going to be a keeper.)

May Sinclair by H.D. Zegger
This American series of critical works seems to have largely been about lesser-discussed British writers – I have the books on E.M. Delafield and A.A. Milne from the series, and was pleased to find the May Sinclair one.

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
I haven’t actually read the Irby essay collection I was given a few years ago, but that’s not the sort of thing that need impede me buying another.

Nocturne by Helen Humphreys
Humphreys was one of the Canadian authors I’d seen recommended by a few people. I did come across some of her fiction, but almost all of it was set in the UK – and I wanted to have the proper Canadian experience of reading Canadian authors writing about Canada. So I bought her memoir about her brother dying – and read it on the plane. Beautifully written and, of course, very sad.

Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You by Alice Munro
Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro
Well, you can’t go book shopping in Canada and come back without any Alice Munro, can you?