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R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

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R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Some books from Michael Moon’s in Whitehaven

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I’m up at the Keswick Convention this week, in the Lake District, and one of the things on my list was to visit Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven. It’s perhaps not as well known as nearby Bookcase in Carlisle, but it’s almost as wonderful a treasure trove. A warren of rooms, very reasonable prices, and a huge amount of older books – many of which seem to be the sort of books that were read by the masses (piles of Warwick Deeping, Ethel M. Dell etc.).

I went last year but was doing Project 24 – this year, I could be a lot less restrained. I bought one to give away (a compilation of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s best sketches in That’s Me All Over), and this lot for myself… I leant towards authors I’ve heard of but not read, and would be particularly interested in any recommendations from this haul.

Cleo by Mary Lutyens
A very 1970s cover for this (signed!) novel about a 15-year-old and her first romantic experience – and how her understanding of it changes in the years that follow. I don’t know if this will be insensitive or ahead of its time – time will tell.

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice by Stephen Leacock
Only the other day I was wondering which Leacock books I was still missing – and then I stumbled across this one, which looks like it is Leacock in serious rather than comic mode. The opening line, ‘These are troubled times’, reminds me that every period feels more or less like that.

The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis
One of my favourite tropes is a group of strangers gathering together – And Then There Were None and The Enchanted April being two excellent examples. This novella by Alice Thomas Ellis seems to do the same thing – five people at a remote Scottish island at Christmas.

Young Claudia by Rose Franken
I don’t know why I know the name Rose Franken, but it hovers on the peripheries of my knowledge. This one caught my eye, and I was sold by the opening line – ‘Half-way through the job, Claudia knew she was a fool to have begun with the hedge in the first place.’ I now see from Scott/Furrowed Middlebrow that she wrote a lot of novels about Claudia, so I’m not sure where this falls in that series.

The City of Pleasure by Arnold Bennett
There’s always room for another Arnold Bennett on the shelves.

So Many Loves by Leo Walmsley
Having loved Walmsley’s autobiographical trilogy of moving to Cornwall (or at least the first two, as I have yet to read the third), I was happy to pick up a book that I don’t know anything about. It turns out that this is straight autobiography, particularly about his childhood.

A Porch At My Door by Rex Matthews
The bookshop had quite a lot of books from The Country Book Club (which, rather thrillingly, say they must not be sold to the general public – what a maverick I am!). I bought a couple – I don’t know anything about Rex Matthews, but the lure of a book about house-hunting was enough for me.

Village in the Sun by Dane Chandos
This was the one Country Book Club choice, and an author I have read – only one book, Abbie, but I enjoyed it a lot. If memory serves, Dane Chandos is the pseudonym of a pair writing together. I rather expected this book to be about England, but it turns out it’s set in Ajijic, Mexico.

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts
I get Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts confused. The latter is predominantly a historical novelist, but she wrote four suspense novels under the pseudonym Peter Curtis – at least one of them, Lady Living Alone, was reprinted under Lofts own name in the 1980s. I’m intrigued by the story of a historical novelist with a phobia for being alone, and how she gets involved with a man who may or may not help…

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye
The bookshop had quite a few books by Tangye, all apparently about moving to Cornwall and life there – I toyed with buying the lot, but chose instead just to get the small volume dedicated to a cat.

No Lady With A Pen by Ursula Bloom
Bloom was the incredibly prolific writer (500+ books) among whose output was the British Library title Tea Is So Intoxicating, under the name Mary Essex. I’ve bought a few of her non-fiction titles, and this book about her early career on Fleet Street looks interesting.

Quorum by Phyllis Bentley
Another name I’ve seen around a lot, I certainly had plenty of Bentley books to choose from in the bookshop. In the end I chose Quorum because it looks like an interesting structure – it’s about a committee, and the chapters are dedicated to different committee members and then different matters (minutes, finance, analysis of project etc.) It could be successful or not, but it looks like an innovative and unusual approach,

And all that for £30! I’m excited to see what gems are among them – I think the Norah Lofts will be my first port of call. Any recommendations – and where would you start with this haul?

Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

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I think I started buying Elizabeth Jolley books because Kim at Reading Matters made them sound really interesting – I bought a few but never got around to reading any under Lisa at ANZ LitLovers said she would be turning to Jolley to celebrate her birthday. I started Foxybaby (1985) then, but it took me a while to finish. And then even longer to write about it.

What an unusual writer, and I honestly can’t decide if I liked Foxybaby or not. It’s a very misleading title – ‘Foxybaby’ is the name of a play that Alma Porch introduces to a group of people at a weight loss camp in a remote part of Australia. It is a residential summer school, supposedly, but people are there primarily with weight loss in mind – the other bits are simply extras. They have many activities at this pricey camp – one of which is putting on a performance, though there are considerable disagreements between Alma Porch and the camp leader Miss Josephine Peycroft. The novel opens with a glorious exchange of letters between the women, which reveal that they are already temperamentally and tonally at total odds with one another. Miss Porch isn’t particularly enthusiastic about going, but cannot turn down the offer.

As she is nearing the destination, this happens…

An ancient bus, once the property of a reputable boarding school for young ladies from good families, still bearing an uplifting motto and emblazoned with crests and colours, travelling in an easterly direction some distance ahead and, because of starting to round the long bend, out of sight, stopped to pick up an elderly woman who was proceeding slowly on foot in the same direction.

The woman, who was dressed in respectable black, Miss Porch thought in the briefest possible time for any thought, must have walked a tremendous distance to be in that remote and lonely place. As she was about to raise a heavy and obviously weary foot to the iron step, Miss Porch, reaching top G, took the first part of the bend in a style suitable for a prima donna and crashed into the substantial fender at the back of the bus.

Her car and another car are badly crumpled in the crash, though thankfully nobody has any serious injuries. It turns out that this is all devised by the ruthless Miles Finch to drum up business for his nearby garage, and the old woman in respectable black has been paid a sum for her services to vehicular collision. Miles pops up throughout the novel and I found him a convincingly infuriating man – caring only about chances of profit, he steals the props and sells them, looks for any opportunity to make charges, and is generally a tolerated thorn in the side of everyone at the college.

Alma Porch is an eccentric character, fixated on Samuel Johnson and incapable of making any sort of utterance you might expect – but she meets her match in a world of eccentric characters. There are the cloak-and-dagger lesbian infatuations between women who don’t seem to much like each other, the dominant older woman who is determined to be in charge of everything, the mother and child who are constantly on the edge of hysteria. There could hardly be group less qualified or less prepared to put on a searing play about drug abuse (for such, unexpectedly, is ‘Foxybaby’). They do their best, and their best is bad. Miss Porch continues in her role, an intriguing mix of helpless and unmoved by the chaos.

Reading Foxybaby was quite a surreal experience. At the beginning, I loved Jolley’s precision with words which I often found very funny. She felt like Australia’s answer to novelists like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles who write with careful, odd brilliance. But along the way the plot and characters became a bit too stodgy for me, and I never find the introduction of a secondary narrative – here, the play ‘Foxybaby’ – works very well for me. Even Virginia Woolf couldn’t convince me it was a success in Between the Acts, so who else has a chance?

I’ll definitely still read more from my Jolley shelf, but I think I’d prefer her with a slightly less chaotic, overstuffed plot. And perhaps some standout eccentric characters, rather than a cast who are all dizzyingly bizarre. I enjoyed much of Foxybaby, but also wasn’t particularly enthused to keep going at times.

I’ll finish with a couple of sentences that show Jolley’s ability to dive from sublime to ridiculous:

She knew too that this profound despair was a part of the loneliness which accompanied writing. Added to this was the emotional stress of offering a partly-written work to a group of people who were concerned chiefly with losing weight.

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

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It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s fully summer now, and we have our annual village drinks this Saturday. Fingers crossed for sunshine? I hope you’re also enjoying suitably summery activities – unless, of course, you are in the southern hemisphere. In which case I hope you’re having a lovely winter.

Onto the usual miscellany!

1.) The blog post – a melancholy but lovely post from Scott about the books that Furrowed Middlebrow would have published, were it not for the tragically early death of Rupert.

2.) The link – it’s a Spotify link, but I’m sure you’ll find the Independent Teacher podcast on other platforms. I enjoyed listening to my ‘Tea or Books?’ co-host Rachel on an episode about ending sexism in schools – sharing her research on sexism in the choice of books taught in English lessons in the UK.

3.) The book – for pre-orderers – my friend Tom has a novel out in October called Blight, which I’m excited to read. Below the pic is what it’s about…

1897. James Harringley is summoned home from London to his rambling family mansion in the north of England. His father is sick, deranged, and James must return, confronting the horrors he tried to forget: the labyrinthine house, the madness and secrets which poison their bloodline and, most frightening of all, the spectre of the tall man – an eerie visage who promises to whisk children away and make them royalty in the land of Faery.

James returns to the house and finds his father and brother at war, and the nebulous substance of his childhood brought into unbearable relief. He remembers the whispers about the tall man. But can he trust his own memories? Then the groundskeeper Janey has had her baby kidnapped, one of many child disappearances connected with the house and the nearby village. There are those who blame the tall man, while others believe a more earthly culprit is responsible. James must sift through the ramblings of his father, the scepticism of his power-hungry brother and the uncertain fabric of his own memories to discover the truth.

Unnecessary Rankings! Margery Sharp

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Another in my Unnecessary Rankings series – and another of my favourite authors (and one that so much of the book blogging world loves too). I haven’t read everything by Margery Sharp by any means, but here are the 12 that I have read. And they are, of course, RANKED.

I’d love to know which you’d put top of your list, or if my rankings provoke any reaction.

12. The Nymph and the Nobleman (1932)

There’s nothing wrong with this book, and I believe it attracts fans of Anna Zinkeisen’s artwork, but it’s only 75 pages of wide margins and big text. It’s basically a fairy tale short story.

11. Lise Lillywhite (1951)

I don’t dislike this novel (I like all of Sharp’s books), but I found Lise quite a passive, uninteresting heroine and the love triangle she finds herself in between a distant relative and a Polish count a bit lacklustre. But I did enjoy all the relentless pursuit for nylons!

10. The Flowering Thorn (1934)

People often list this story of Lesley impetuously adopting a young boy among their favourite Sharps… for me, it doesn’t have the joy or wit of my favourite Sharps. It’s also curious how the boy (Pat) is so sketchily drawn and scarcely seems to have any relationship with his adoptive mother.

9. In Pious Memory (1967)

A late, short Sharp novel, In Pious Memory is about the death of Mr Prelude – and then his family wondering that he might in fact still be alive. Even late in her career, Sharp is delightfully witty and pulls the rug from under the feet of anybody with pretensions.

8. The Eye of Love (1957)

If I’m honest, I’ve just put this here because I don’t remember very much about it. Looking back at my review, it is about a couple breaking up because of their disparate stations. Dolores’s niece Martha is an impassive viewer of the central couple, used devastatingly by Sharp. I think this would be higher if I re-read it – and I need to read the others in the Martha trilogy.

7. Britannia Mews (1946)

This is Sharp in most sombre mode. We follow all of Adelaide Culver’s long life living in Britannia Mews, exiled by her family after an elopement. Over the decades that follow, we watch the streets changing fortunes and Adelaide’s evolution from a young, naive girl into someone worn down her experiences. It is a very good but surprisingly melancholy book.

6. The Foolish Gentlewoman (1948)

My first experience with Sharp – back in 2003 – after seeing it mentioned glowingly in an edition of P.G. Wodehouse letters. A wealthy widow hears a sermon about the need to expiate old sins, and tries to do so my inviting a relative, Tilly, to live with her – where a motley crew of others already live. Sharp has great fun with this fable of good turns not always working out well.

5. Four Gardens (1935)

There’s a lot to love in Four Gardens, which takes us through the life of Caroline Smith through the four gardens she develops in her life. She is a lovable, wise character and this novel is witty but also Sharp at her most poignant.

4. The Nutmeg Tree (1937)

…whereas there is nothing poignant about the irrepressible Julia and this delight of a novel. In the glorious opening scene she is in the bath to avoid bailiffs, and that’s about the most conventional thing she does. She decides she should go and see her abandoned daughter, now on the brink of adulthood, and causes well-meaning chaos as she does so. It’s a joyful novel, with a lot more nuance than you might imagine.

3. The Gipsy in the Parlour (1954)

Sharp’s novels can be very silly or very serious, and The Gipsy in the Parlour falls towards the serious end of the scale – she is absolutely brilliant at atmosphere too. The young narrator is a niece to the Sylvester family and spends her summers at their Devon farm. Over the years, she sees shifting dynamics in the family – and how everything shifts when Fanny marries into the family and very soon becomes a permanent invalid. It’s quite dark and very, very good.

2. The Stone of Chastity (1940)

But I also love Sharp when she is being ridiculous. The Stone of Chastity is about a scientist who believes he has found a village which had a stepping stone which unchaste women would slip off. And doesn’t see why he shouldn’t interview the village about their chastity, for an experiment. It’s so silly and I loved every second.

1. Cluny Brown (1944)

I think this novel might well be number one because it’s where I first fell head over heels for Sharp – if I’d read The Nutmeg Tree first, it could have made number one. Because it was the first time I discovered what Sharp could create, in terms of a lively, well-meaning, disastrous heroine. Cluny is often told by her uncle that she ‘doesn’t know her place’, and so he puts her in service as a maid in Devon. She is naturally ill-suited to it, and it’s through this comic lens that we also take in the rest of the house – from a Polish intellectual to Betty, a woman every man is besotted with and who remains unmoved by these attentions. Lady Carmel is wonderful. As I wrote in my review, ‘She manages the household beautifully. Everybody thinks her sweet and ineffectual, whereas she is sweet and effectual.’

There we have it! I’d love to know your rankings. And, for the avoidance of doubt – if I haven’t mentioned it, I haven’t read it.

Two Japanese books about cats #ReadingTheMeow

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Japan truly seems to love a book about a cat, and I am here for it. Two of the other books I’ve read for the #ReadingTheMeow themed week are short Japanese novels with ‘cat’ in the title – though arguably the cats are not the main characters in either of them. (Except in the way that any mention of a cat automatically makes it the main character.)

If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

I was sent this as a review copy when it was translated into English in 2018, by Eric Selland – having originally been published in Japanese in 2012. And what an intriguing title! The concept is equally interesting. The unnamed (I think) narrator has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life is quite narrow – his mother has died, he is estranged from his father and recently broken up from a woman he loves. The only creature in his life is a little cat called Cabbage. Reeling from this news, the narrator is visited by the Devil, who appears as his doppelgänger and informs him that he only has one day to live. But…

“There is something we could do…”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“Well, you could call it a kind of magic. But it might increase your life span.”

“Really?”

“On one condition: you’ll have to accept this one fundamental law of the universe.”

“And what is?”

“In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

“So what do I have to do exactly?”

“It’s easy… I’ll just ask you to perform a simple exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Sure… All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you get one more day of life.”

At first, he thinks he can simply get rid of things that don’t matter – the dust from the top of his bookcase, for instance. But he quickly learns that the devil is the one who makes suggestions, and he simply has to agree whether or not to take the bargain offered.

The first one, which he accepts, is phones.

I was a bit disappointed by this book, if I’m honest. My favourite bits were when (rather inexplicably) the cat starts speaking – there’s a lot of humour in the fact that he picked up language from period dramas and speaks very formally. But I don’t think Kawamura makes much of his premise. All the phones in the world disappear overnight, and the only problem highlighted is that the narrator finds it tricky to meet up with someone. Surely if phones stopped existing, businesses around the world would collapse, the economy would nosedive, all sorts of extraordinary things would happen. In Kawamura’s hands, it’s just as though the narrator is the only one to suffer an inconvenience – even though it is spelled out that it’s universal.

Towards the end, If Cats Disappeared From the World does take on the Alchemist-school of being basically a novelised fridge magnet. At one point, someone even says ‘Being alive doesn’t matter all that much on its own. How you live is more important.’

This could have been a really quirky, dark, strange little book – but it sort of ended up more like a Facebook inspirational quote. A shame.

 

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

The other one is The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), translated by Louise Heal Kawai in 2021 and given to me by my friend Lorna last year. Cats! Books! What a combo. And it’s set in a delightful old bookshop, run by a boy called Rintaro since his grandfather’s death. One day a talking cat gets him to go on various quests that mysteriously appear in the back of the shop, which expands out into unknown worlds…

There are various semi-nemeses to defeat, including this guy whose views on rereading hit a bit too close to home for me:

“The world is full of books, you agree? It’s impossible to count the number of books that have been, and are still being, written. To find the time to read the same books over again – well, it’s just inconceivable.”

And his views on book hoarding enrage Rintaro…

“But that’s how I’ve elevated my status – by collecting all these books. The more books you have, the more powerful you are. That’s how I got to where I am.”

“And is that why you’ve imprisoned them? To show them off as if their power belongs entirely to you?” Rintaro asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re so impressive – you built this ridiculous, pretentious showroom just so that everyone can see how many books you’ve read.”

I don’t think I have masses to say about this book. It’s basically a fun little quest-narrative which some enjoyable observations about readers and reading along the way, but felt very like a young adult book. It rattled along but didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me, if I’m honest.

Fingers crossed I can manage one more book for Reading the Meow before the week ends on Sunday…

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit #ReadingTheMeow2023

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When I saw that Mallika was inaugurating a week devoted to books about cats, you know I had to join in. Books! Cats! Basically my two favourite things, as anyone who follows my Instagram will attest. Then I had to read Barbara Trapido for book club, but now I’m getting onto the cat books.

I had a few on my shelves, and the first one I finished is this little memoir, Seven Cats I Have Loved (2022) translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan. It turns out all three of the books I was eyeing up for this week are in translation – do people write more about cats in other languages, or is there sufficient faith in a market for them that cat books are disproportionately translated?

Levit is an Israeli poet and author who has won various prizes, though I note she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (in English, at least). So this isn’t a book by an unknown person who happens to love cats – rather it’s a look into a fascination of an author people already love. And it does what it says. The book is about seven cats that Levit has lived with and loved devotedly.

Five of these cats come quite quickly. After not really intending to ever get a cat, she is persuaded to do so by her two young daughters when her life faces a bit of a crisis. She falls so fast and so hard for Shelly that she almost immediately goes and adopts four more kittens. Each is a purebreed who is kept indoors and treated like royalty. All cats should be treated like royalty, of course, but I will have to prevent Hargreaves from reading Seven Cats I Have Loved because he will consider himself terribly hard-done-by in comparison. They get an elaborate ‘buffet’ of different types of expensive cat food, with much of it being thrown away uneaten. As a result, one of them is unhealthily overweight.

I always knew it was impossible to deny my cats food. The buffet served all the cats, and there was no way of preventing access to one of them without making his or her life miserable, which I was incapable of doing. Closing the buffet, and diminishing the lifestyle the cats had grown accustomed to, was also not an option.

I’m certainly not going to judge another cat owner for how they look after their cats – let’s just say that many things in Seven Cats I Have Loved show that Levit does things differently to the way I would/do. But she also loves them very, very much. In philosophical interludes, she talks about the love between cat and human (sometimes wandering into over-optimism, to my mind, in relation to the love she gets back from them); she even compares the love she has for cats and for her daughters, and the ways in which the former is greater – or at least simpler.

The final two cats to come are Cleo, a male Siamese whom she impetuously buys from a neighbour – and perhaps my favourite, Mishely, because she is a stray. She seems to live in a box at the bottom of the stairs, and only occasionally creep into the house for rare treats. But I’m not a purebreed-cat kinda guy, so the stray moggy has my heart. All of them have my heart.

I had read (and commented on) Rebecca’s review of this book not long before my friend Lorna gave me my copy, but I had forgotten her warning that ‘Unfortunately, I felt the most attention is paid to the cats’ various illnesses and vet visits, and especially the periods of decline leading to each one’s death.’ And this is certainly true. Each decline is detailed laboriously, and movingly. Levit seems to choose never to euthanise her cats, so they live out every last minute before finally dying. She has very strong opinions on some health issues (she won’t take them to the vet hospital when they are dying) and curiously lax on others (they all get matted fur, and she believes clipping this away is torture to them).

So, this was hard to read. Like Levit, I find I can’t help being very alert to any sign of cat illness – particularly since I don’t know how old Hargreaves is. She tends to rush them to a vet; I tend to fret to myself while Hargreaves continues cheerily along. (And never mention anything online, because people love to try and make cat owners anxious with their own horror stories and warnings.) So I found I Levit a very empathetic memoirist, and even if we don’t treat our cats the same, we certainly both love them deeply. I would have liked more little reflections on the nature of cats, like this one of discovering missing Jesse:

Finally, I found the cat stuck behind the fridge. He’d made it in but couldn’t make it out. I quickly pushed the fridge away from the wall, picked up Jesse in my arms, and kissed him, trying to reassure both of us. I had no idea if he’d only slipped behind the fridge that morning or if, God forbid, he’d spent the entire night back there. I knew I would never be able to answer that questions, and took solace in the notion that perhaps cats knew how to skip from one event to the next without carrying the burden of human memory, which accumulated unhappy experiences.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Jesse returned to prowling the apartment with his usual ease, as if no serious trauma had befallen him.

On the whole, I loved this little memoir when it was talking about the foibles, behaviours, and eccentric demands of the cats. I wish there had been a lot more about their lives than their deaths, and that it would have felt a more joyful book. It’s not as good or as sharply observant as a similar book I’ve read, Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and will happily keep it on my cat shelf.

Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido

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We all say it often, but it really is true that our bookshelves can hold hidden gems just waiting to be discovered. Back in 2009, Bloomsbury kindly sent me all six of Barbara Trapido novels that had recently reprinted (a seventh novel would be published the next year). I read Brother of the More Famous Jack and liked it a lot – then in 2019 I read Noah’s Ark and didn’t like it much. At this rate I could be reading Trapido for the rest of my life – but I have now read my third, Temples of Delight (1990) and it is my favourite so far. It’s really something special.

Temples of Delight is a coming-of-age novel of sorts, following Alice Pilling from her childhood into early adulthood. She is a shy, clever girl, made nervous by her stutter and by not being widely loved by her classmates. There is a stubborn, determined streak in her – she certainly won’t conform to the mould of the girls around her, though that would perhaps make her life easier. And this only develops when she meets Jem, a nice girl in her class who is a whirlwind of a personality. Her stories of her life, her parents, her relatives are all extraordinary, eccentric and vivid – her parents meeting over a wall after a snowball fight, for example, or her sister Patch meeting Modigliani while shading in her sketch of Michelangelo’s David‘s unmentionable parts. Even her name is a curio – she is called Veronica Bernadette, but nicknamed Jem after P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘jem-sengwiches’.

The opening line says ‘Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice’. She is a joyful mystery to the reader too. It’s very hard to pull off the idiosyncratic, ebullient character, but Jem is a complete success. We observe her with the same fascination that Alice does. For a girl who has lived an ordinary life, with ordinary, kindly parents, Jem is a revelation. It is thrilling to Alice that Jem should even pay her attention.

Alice loved the way Jem talked, even when she couldn’t understand half of what Jem said. It was infectious the way Jem grooved on words.

The opening section of the novel is a wonderful ode to the power of female friendships, even when they are founded on an enigma. I was reminded of Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore and, to a lesser extent, Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

Jem is such a vivid, captivating, brilliant creation that we miss her as much as Alice when, one day, she disappears from Alice’s life. She announces that she must leave immediately, on the next train.

“I’ll write to you,” Jem said again. “Alice, you will always be my dearest friend.”

“What?” Alice called, because she couldn’t catch the words and Jem was getting further away.

“I’ll never forget you,” Jem called out, but the sound of her voice was drowned in a roar of gathering speed.

With Jem gone, Alice has to concentrate on her studies – and she exceeds expectations by getting a place at Oxford University. As a long-term resident of Oxford (now Oxfordshire), I enjoyed the section of the novel set there – which focuses little on Alice’s studying of Classics and more on the strange family household where she rents a room, and the confident Roland who becomes her boyfriend.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot – unlike, it must be said, the blurb on the back of my edition. But it continues with different people and places intervening into Alice’s life, and throughout it all she thinks often and deeply about Jem. She still has with her the dramatic, oddly capable childhood novel that Jem wrote in school exercise books. She refers often to what Jem might think or do in any given situation – there is a feeling that Alice is simply biding time until she meets Jem again. Despite the brevity of their friendship, there is a sense that she is a light guiding the rest of Alice’s life. It is testament to the power of Trapido’s writing that Jem’s light shines bright enough to illumine many pages and chapters after her mysterious exit.

Generally, I am most impressed by novels that are short and spare – that make a big impression in a low number of pages. Every now and then, I am bowled over by a book that does the opposite. Trapido is never in a rush. There are chapters devoted to characters who, in the scheme of things, don’t matter hugely. We delve particularly deeply into the life of schoolmate Flora and her miserly, unkind father and loyally downtrodden mother – indeed, some of the scenes with them are the most memorable and dramatic. Does Flora need to be in Temples of Delight? Not really, but it is all part of Trapido’s leisurely, expansive way of writing this novel. A review on the front says ‘fizzes along at a cracking pace’, but I think the opposite is true. Trapido envelopes us in a world and makes it whole. We move steadily through it, never wanting to increase the pace, taking it all in eagerly.

Alongside this world-building, and her perfectly drawn characters, Trapido is very funny. Her prose is often dry – I noted down ‘The school was not one which attracted bookish girls on the whole, and there was no one in the third form who appeared athirst for a greater understanding of the English Revolution.’ She is witty, often unsparing of her characters, in that mould of delightfully eccentric prose writers like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles. But she is a little more grounded than they are, a little more accepting of hope and optimism.

I will say that the final third of the novel was not quite as good, in my eyes. I wrote in my review of Noah’s Ark that ‘Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness’ – that isn’t quite so true, or quite so jarring, in Temples of Delight, but I did find that, tonally, the final sections weren’t quite as successful as the rest. But it doesn’t diminish my love for this book, or the likelihood of finding it on my best books of 2023. I’ve found it hard to do the novel justice. I loved it so much.

It turns out I’ve been reading Trapido’s novels in order, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, and it also turns out that her next book, Juggling, is a sequel. And then her next, The Travelling Hornplayer, combines characters from these books with those from Brother of the More Famous Jack. Will I read them while I remember enough about the characters to recognise the connections? Possibly not, at this rate, but I know that one character I won’t forget is Jem.

Rumour has it that he’s been buying books

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I’ve been buying some books online and in-person over the past few weeks – quelle surprise – and I thought I’d talk you through the recent arrivals Chez StuckinaBook. Here we go, from the top of the pile…

Things I Didn’t Throw Out by Marcin Wicha
I saw someone mention Things I Didn’t Throw Out on social media, I now forget who, and ordered a copy – it sounds so up my street. It’s non-fiction, about the books and other things that are left over after Marcin grieves his mother, and uses objects as a way of looking through the past. And it’s published by Daunt Books, which is a guarantee of something good.

Virginia Fly is Drowning by Angela Huth
The first of a couple books I bought on a trip to beautiful Canons Ashby National Trust – I haven’t been before, at least not since I was a child, and I absolutely loved it. I don’t know this author, but the title caught my eye.

Choose by M. de Momet
This novel was advertised on the back of a 1940s novel I was reading the other day, and it looked very intriguing – about a woman whose husband is missing presumed dead. She marries again, and then the first husband turns up. I can’t find any information about the author, so I don’t know if it’s short for Monsieur or a name beginning with M.

A Deputy Was King by G.B. Stern
We popped into a lovely bookshop in Brackley – new and secondhand books – and I bought a couple of G.B. Sterns, including this novel which is a sequel to The Matriarch. Which I’ve owned for many years but haven’t read, but now I can read both in a row.

The Judge’s Story by Charles Morgan
I’ve read a few Morgans over the years, and I’ve bought and given away others over the years, but here’s another. Does anyone else read Charles Morgan nowadays?

Trumpet Major by G.B. Stern
And here’s the other Stern – one of the 10 autobiographical/essay/pondering/meandering books she wrote – I’ve read Benefits Forgot and A Name To Conjure With, and have a few others. They’re odd and really enjoyable.

Elephant by Raymond Carver
I’ve never read any Raymond Carver, and this slim little volume seems a good place to start – another one from The Old Hall Bookshop in Brackley.

Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar
This Marathi novel was turned into a film that I enjoyed, so doing things the wrong way round, I thought it would be good to read the book too.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
Like a lot of us, I loved Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, one of the first books-about-books that did really well. This is something quite different – a non-fiction book about a Hmong refugee family in California, and their interactions with the health care system when their son is diagnosed with epilepsy.

A Slanting Light by Gerda Charles
The winners of the James Tait Black Memorial prize are always worth a shot – I bought this one partly because of that, but also because there are so few mentions of its content online, and the three reviews of it I found are all completely contradictory about the plot. Like, they talk about different casts of characters. Very confusing, so I guess I’ll find out.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton
I’ve loved a few May Sarton journals this year, and a few people recommended this one as being one of the best – so naturally I had to have it.

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau by Sheena Wilkinson
And, finally, one I haven’t bought – this is a copy from the author. I tend to say no to review books most of the time, but this is the description that sold it to me:

Sheena Wilkinson’s Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is a riotously funny novel with hints of Noel Coward and PG Wodehouse. It’s 1934 and Northern Irish April McVey is the new manager in the marriage bureau of the title. She’s intent on updating this failing business, much to the initial consternation of its owner. But Mrs Hart takes to April, just as April takes to Yorkshire and her newfound freedom. April’s landlady has a widowed brother, Fabian, a solicitor with a nightmare teenage daughter. Fabian lives in the shadow of his wife, now dead three years; April, for all her no-nonsense disposition and persistent sunshine, has a ghost or two of her own.

Have you read any of these books? Which would you start with?