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The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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Believe it or not, I’m reading a proof copy here… oops.  I started The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey more or less as soon as the proof copy arrived from Headline, back in 1884 or whenever it was that it was sent (erm, 2011?) but wasn’t in the right head space to be reading it, and popped it back on the shelf, knowing I’d go back to it.

Well, with a repeat of A Century of Books lined up for 2014, I’m enjoying delving into 21st-century literature in my post-thesis binge.  Indeed, I finished reading this shortly after I submitted my thesis, and before I flew to America, so it’s taken a little while to review.  And it’s every bit as good as everyone was saying it was, back when it first came out.

 It’s your standard fantastic creation story… a lonely woman who longs for a child accidentally creates one, and then begins to lose control over her creation.  The story is remarkably similar to Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child – and even more similar, overtly so, to the Russian fairytale ‘The Snow Maiden’.  With my interest in novels of this ilk, it’s as though it were written for me.  But, as with any updating of fairytale, what is important is the way in which the tale is told.  Ivey does it beautifully.

Mabel and Jack have moved to the middle of snowy nowhere in Alaska, 1920, and live quietly, working hard to keep their farm going.  Both characters are quite shy and keep their emotions to themselves, but it’s clear at the same time that these silent emotions run deep – so deep that any hint of them is unbearably painful.  And yet, shy as they are, they somehow make friends with their jolly neighbours Esther and George.

“I suppose I’m the black sheep.  No one else in my family would think of living on a farm, or moving to Alaska.  My father was a literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” 

“And you left all that to come here?  What in God’s name were you thinking?”  Esther shoved Mabel playfully on the arm.  “He talked you into it, didn’t he?  That’s how it often is.  These men drag their poor women along, taking them to the Far North for adventure, when all they want is a hot bath and a housekeeper.”

“No.  No.  It’s not like that.”  All eyes were on her, even Jack’s.  She hesitated, but then went on.  “I wanted to come here.  Jack did, too, but when we did, it was at my urging.  I don’t know why, precisely.  I believe we were in need of a change.  We needed to do things for ourselves.  Does that make any sense?  To break your own ground and know it’s yours free and clear.  Nothing taken for granted.  Alaska seemed like the place for a fresh start.” 

Esther grinned.  “You didn’t fare too badly with this one, did you, Jack?  Don’t let word get out.  There aren’t many like her.”

Though she didn’t look up, Mabel knew Jack was watching her and that her cheeks were flushed.  She so rarely spoke so much in mixed company.  Maybe she had said too much.
These sections actually reminded me a bit of Betty Macdonald’s The Egg and I, although that is a comedy; the same hardships and marital tensions come about because of giving everything to a working farm.

It swiftly becomes clear that the thing missing the in the lives of Mabel and Jack is not simply money or an assistant, but a child – and, of course, one materialises.  A child made out of snow turns – it seems – into a real child, called Faina.  She is quiet and undemonstrative; Ivey cleverly changes the way dialogue is spoken in any scene in which Faina appears, so that it isn’t announced by speech marks but blended into the narrative.  In the same way, Faina seems to blend into the natural world, never quite leaving it to be their child, always disappearing into the snow.  She willingly wears the beautiful coat Mabel makes, but she is still wild – like Clarissa in The Love-Child, she cannot really be contained.

And then there is the question, unearthed by Jack, as to who Faina really is.  Is she a miracle, crafted from snow?  Or is she all too human, abandoned and homeless on the snowy mountainside?  Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you.  Nor am I going to tell you about the other complication that arrives, which again mirrors the plot of The Love-Child (and which, I realise, probably means that Edith Olivier probably read ‘The Snow Maiden’.)

Eowyn Ivey has met with a lot of success with this novel, and deservedly so.  The Snow Child is written with a beautiful simplicity – or a simple beauty, if you like – with emotions always playing out near the surface; there isn’t much introspection, or a web or words trying to weave a complex portrait of an emotional state, but rather Mabel and Jack’s urgent feelings are clear to the reader (even while they are hidden from others.)  What I mean to say is, sometimes the deepest and most complicated situations require only simple words; sometimes the simplest words can convey the deepest sorrow and be more moving than any over-wrought passage.  I know I’m not alone in being very affected by The Snow Child – my friend from OUP admitted that it made him cry, and I’ve got to say I liked him even more after that confession – and it is a novel which requires some sort of emotional stability in its reader, or it would be too heartbreaking from the outset.  But, oh, it’s worth it.

As I wrote earlier, this novel could have been crafted for me and my interests – and it got a mention in my thesis – and I was surprised, but pleased, to see how widely it was admired and loved.  Rightly so.  Eowyn Ivey is a significant new talent, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from her.

Off to t’ North…

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Thank you for your lovely comments on my story!  I have to admit, I was pretty excited by the idea, and pleased how it panned out.

A quick blog break, as I’m off to give that there talk in the Lake District, and spending a couple of days enjoying the most beautiful part of the UK.  Here’s a pic I took the last time I was there:
See you on Tuesday or Wednesday or thereabouts…

Jane Austen wrote the works of William Shakespeare (short fiction)

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Another piece of short(ish) fiction; a little bit different this time!  I hope you enjoy it…

“Thank you very much, Dr Welling, that was a fascinating – a fascinating and original – talk on the way in which Jane Austen uses middle-child syndrome in her novels, letters, and, of course, her juvenilia. I’m sure that there will be lots of questions, but we’ll wait until all three panellists have spoken.” The chair glanced quickly at her watch, but needn’t have been so surreptitious; every member of the audience was performing the same action. “Now please join me in welcoming Dr Tove Sivertsen, from the University of Oslo, who will be speaking to us on Jane Austen and William Shakespeare.”

Applause was desultory, and ceased before Dr Sivertsen had made her way to the podium. She was a short woman with tiny glasses and messy white hair. Her head and neck were visible to the audience of tired academics, but no more; she reached a diminutive hand to pull the microphone down an inch, and neatened the edges of the papers in front of her.

“I take as my first premise,” she said, in a heavily-accented voice, “that Jane Austen wrote the works of William Shakespeare. If we –”

“I beg your pardon,” said the chair, aware of the sudden attentiveness in the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Dr Sivertsen, but could you repeat your opening sentence?”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Dr Sivertsen nervously. “I said, ‘Jane Austen wrote the works of William Shakespeare.’”

There was a fraught pause.

“I’m sorry,” said the chair again, “are you really suggesting that Jane Austen wrote the plays which are commonly attributed to William Shakespeare?”

Dr Sivertsen’s tiny eyes grew anxious, and it was in a whisper that she replied that yes, indeed she was.

A German gentleman in the front row stood up. “That is ridiculous!” he cried, and, after a moment, added: “Ridiculous!”

“If we look at the evidence – ” began Dr Sivertsen.

“There is none! There couldn’t be! The idea is preposterous!”

“Perhaps we could – ”

“Ridiculous!”

There was an awkward silence. The chair felt that order ought somehow to be restored, but before she could interject, Annette Steinberg had risen to her feet. This was enough to make other attendees roll their eyes at the best of times; Annette was renowned for her love of conspiracy theories, and belief that neither Austen nor her works were quite all they seemed. Her belief was constant, though its manifestations were subject to much variation.

“My colleague raises an interesting angle,” she began, “And one I am inclined to take seriously – ”

“Oh, shut up Annette!” cried somebody from the back of the room, which was met with rather more applause than Dr Sivertsen had been given.

“A cursory glance at the dates in question – ” one man was asserting, while another loudly and determinedly listed all the arguments in favour of an anti-Stratfordian perspective. Annette, accustomed to being interrupted, boldly continued to support (the now silent) Dr Sivertsen:

“ – and, if we recognise the possibility of the falsification or disposal of documents – which, given Cassandra Austen’s acts in the 1840s, ought to – ”

Suddenly everybody in the room seemed to be speaking at once, except Dr Siversten, and many were shouting as loudly as they could. Though nobody in the room had initially taken the suggestion seriously, the question of the Austenian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (“the Bard of Chawton!” cried one particularly enthusiastic junior research fellow) drove the room into a frenzy. Unwillingness to consider the theory was seen by some as symptomatic of the arrogantly conservative old school of Austen critics, while a willingness to consider it was seen by others as symptomatic simply of insanity – or, worse, poor scholarship.

It wasn’t clear who threw the first chair; in any case, it missed its target. As did the second. Whoever threw the third – witnesses have suggested it was, ironically, the chair of the panel herself – had a truer aim, and broke the nose of Adrian Bridgeton, a second-year PhD student who had only attended the conference to avoid embarking on his next chapter. After that, more chairs seemed to be in the air than on the ground. Papers flew in every direction, and several people are believed to have hurled copies of Mansfield Park at the professor who had, the day before, given a talk about slavery in that novel that had exceeded the twenty minute time allowance by over quarter of an hour. Those who loved Persuasion attacked those who preferred Northanger Abbey; two academics who had edited Pride and Prejudice for rival publishing houses dropped the silence of a decade, and replaced it with voluble insults. A gentleman who had travelled from New Zealand to present a paper on the influence of Frances Burney found himself being pushed through an open window, though thankfully the panel had been held on the ground floor.

At some point in the furore, security guards guided Dr Tove Sivertsen out of the room and through a fire exit. In one hand she clutched her lecture papers; in the other, her briefcase. Few people noticed her bewildered face as she left the building.

Although the first to be escorted from the room, she was not the last. Paramedics arrived at 2pm to remove a man who had been knocked unconscious when asserting that the dedication in Emma was a forgery, while police, uncertain whom to arrest, started with the tall Parisian academic who had greeted their arrival by toppling the podium onto a colleague from Nice. Shortly after 2.30pm, somebody in maintenance had the idea of turning on the sprinkler system. By 3pm, every speaker and delegate – sopping wet – had been taken either to the hospital or the police station, and all conferences had been cancelled for the foreseeable future.

Quietly, on a bench some distance from the conference centre, Dr Tove Sivertsen was examining her Norwegian/English dictionary, and tutting gently to herself. How frustrating, and how careless. Once again, she realised, shaking her head, she had confused the English words ‘wrote’ and ‘read’.

Beowulf on the Beach – Jack Murnighan

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I’m not great at reading on ‘planes, and I thought (on my recent trip to the US) that it would be best to take a book I could read in short segments, rather than attempting to sustain a narrative.  While rooting through my books-about-books shelf, I stumbled across Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (2009) by Jack Murnighan.  It was first suggested to me by an online friend, Sheila, and I put it on my Amazon wishlist – from where it was bought by my brother a few years ago.  Thank you Colin, and thank you Sheila if you’re still reading SiaB!

I think there are two things most bloggers and bibliophiles think when they see a list of books: (1) yay! a list! (2) wait, how could they have missed out/included this/that…  Well, Beowulf on the Beach is an extended exercise in both (1) and (2), tied together with Jack Murnighan’s very amusing style – so, of course, I loved it.

Let’s start with the gimmicks – and, no mistake, this is a very gimmicky book.  It would have to be, really.  Murnighan has selected the 50 ‘greatest hits’ of literature, and tells us what they’re about, what the ‘buzz’ is, the best line, fun facts, what’s sexy (!), and what to skip.

When I read, I hope the book will reach me in at least one of three places: where I zip, where I button a shirt, and where I put on a hat.
A neat sentence, and once which tells you the sort of literary scholar Murnighan is – one who isn’t afraid to talk about what is ‘sexy’.  Yup, he’s not using the word to mean ‘the best bits’, he literally means ‘is there sex in this book?’  Which is obviously a bit silly, and very awkward when we get to Lolita, but… well, it’s a gimmick, as I said.  Equally untenable is the ‘what to skip’ bit – perhaps it works when he’s talking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s Odyssey, but it’s pretty ridiculous to advise skipping huge chunks of a modern novel, which probably wouldn’t make sense.

But none of that really matters, because I don’t think Murnighan intends us to take those sections particularly seriously.  What I really enjoyed is how Murnighan refuses to put on a scholarly voice, and instead brings out how enjoyable reading great works of literature can be.

Anna Karenina is like a sundae with a dollop of Madame Bovary as its base and a squeeze of melted Middlemarch poured over the top.
Since I’ve not read any of those three novels (well, the first hundred pages of the third), I can’t comment on the accuracy of Murnighan’s simile, but I love the idea of it nonetheless, and it is a good example of his lack of holy cows.  Charles Dickens becomes Chuck, Murnighan refers to ‘zingers’, etc. etc.  It’s all very informal, and great fun – but also very informative.  Murnighan is nothing if not passionate about literature.  Here’s part of what he has to say about One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Forget magic realism.  Right now.  If I hear you say the words, I’ll sneak up behind you with a piano-wire; I’m not kidding.  Yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is associated with that dimwit’s category (lumping him with the epigone Isabel Allende and other charlatans), but his imaginative leaps are the least important about this book.  To reduce Garcia Marquez’s narrative genius to such an infantilizing pseudoconcept as magic realism is high treason in itself, but to allow that academic manure to be what people talk about regarding this novel, as if humanity doesn’t need to be sat down, as a whole, at grandpa Gabo’s knee and told what’s really important, that is utterly inexcusable.  Literature classes have a sacred book on their hands and they make it sound like the trip journals of a peyote fiend.  For shame.
Eeks.  Truth be told, Murnighan’s tastes could scarcely be more different from mine.  He says Paradise Lost is the best work ever written (I don’t even think it’s the best work Milton wrote beginning with the word ‘Paradise’), Moby Dick the best novel (snore), and Faulkner the best novelist (haven’t read any, but…).  While he covers more of the globe than I do with my reading, there is a rather shameful paucity of female writers responsible for these 50 books – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.  Of course, he is not to blame for the sidelining of women throughout literature’s history, but the inclusion of authors like Robert Musil, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy rather than (say) Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Muriel Spark – all of whom have at least equal claim to canonicity – does speak some prejudice.  Make no mistake, Murnighan is a big fan of overtly masculine, guns-and-big-themes literature, and proudly states it; we were never going to coincide in our literary tastes.  (His chapter on Pride and Prejudice is, by the way, pretty poor… I don’t think he got the point, since he thinks it’s all about ‘romantic fantasies’, instead – as I would suggest – of being chiefly about self-knowledge.)

I was also left wondering whether Murnighan ever read anything that wasn’t canonical, since he seems to have read all fifty of these books dozens of times.  Does he ever pick up something he’s never heard of, and discover an unexpected gem?  That (as I’m sure you’ll be aware) is one of the greatest joys of the reader’s life.

But these are small criticisms for a book which, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, could only be found perfect by a bibliophile were that bibliophile to compile the list themselves.  Whether or not you’ll use Beowulf on the Beach as a manual for the reading life, skipping the bits Murnighan advises against and bookmarking the sexy bits… well, I doubt you will – but any lover of literature will delight in a very witty, very intelligent, entirely biased and totally enthusiastic reader sharing those enthusiasms.  A perfect Christmas present for the bibliophile in your life – and a perfect birthday present to me from Colin back in 2010.

Symposium – Muriel Spark

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I really thought I had written about Symposium (1990) by Muriel Spark months ago, when I read it, but a quick search suggests that I, in fact, did not.  And that was foolish on three levels – (a) I’ve forgotten quite a lot about it, (b) it was a lovely gift from Karen/Kaggsy and thus part of Reading Presently, and (c) it’s one of the best Muriel Spark books I’ve read.

In some ways, it is not simply a collection of people around a table, or a series of events, but a symposium of Sparkian traits and tricks – a pantheon of Sparkisms, characteristically condensed into only 140 pages.  There are (of course) the flashbacks and flashforwards which subvert the typical ways in which authors dispense information, and moments which would be big ‘reveals’ in most novels are slipped in incidentally.  There are self-important characters who dramatise their lives when nobody is really listening.  The narrative – as always with Spark – is darkly dispassionate, showing things happening without permitting emotion to enter the tone of the narrative, even for a moment.  Selfishness, cruelty, greed, avarice, and foolishness are all present in spades.  And, oh, I loved it.

The first words are definitely dramatic:

“This is rape!” His voice was reaching a pitch it had never reached before and went higher still as he surveyed the wreckage. “This is violation!”It was not rape, it was a robbery.
This is one of the pivotal moments of the narrative, despite appearing on the first page – the narrative weaves back and forth, with Spark’s usual disregard for linear structure, with this burglary appearing repeatedly in the timelines of the various characters.  It is Lord and Lady Suzy who have been robbed, but this is not the only robbery which takes place; while the guests assemble at Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan’s dinner party, another burglary is taking place…

The dinner party (or, indeed, symposium) is depicted in the present tense, and the conversations swirl snippily in Spark’s inimitable style, conversationalists never quite on the same plane as each other, and logic never quite being followed.  And then Spark takes the reader back into the recent history of everyone at the table – and further back still, so that this slim novel encompasses Marxist nuns, a complicated case of possible insanity, and family tensions between a newlywed and his mother.

“I don’t give it a year,” said Hurley Reed.  He was referring to William Damien’s marriage.”
You might be able to tell that many of the specifics have now gone from my mind, as I read Symposium months ago, but quotations like the one above reveal why I love Spark so much.  That quirky way of expressing herself, so the reader is constantly being jolted in their expectations, and conventions of narrative being consistently disturbed.  And of all the Spark novels I’ve read (which is about a dozen, I think) this is probably my second favourite after Loitering With Intent.

Since it is an amalgam of everything that I love about Spark, and representative of so many of her characters and writing quirks, I can’t decide whether it would make a brilliant entry-point for sampling Spark, or if it can only truly be appreciated by somebody who has already developed a love for Dame Muriel… maybe the latter; for us Spark appreciators, it is a delightful treat, of her best qualities neatly parcelled up.  Karen – thank you so much!

Others who got Stuck into it:


“What I read this time was a murder mystery but the really brilliant thing about this book is that next time I read it when doubtless […] I’ll find myself reading a book about love, or obsession, or family, or friendship…” – Hayley, Desperate Reader


“Spark doesn’t play to the emotions – I was watching them all from a distance, detached.” – An Adventure in Reading


“A perfect little morsel of the macabre set against the backdrop of everyday life.” – Polly, Novel Insights

Come and hear me talk in the Lake District!

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Aeons ago I agreed to give a talk – entitled Ladies, Gentlemen and Foxes: The Fantasy Fringe of the Bloomsbury Group – in the Lake District, and the time is rolling around when it will actually be happening.  Indeed, it is Saturday 23rd November at 3pm, and I would love any Cumbrian blog readers to come along and say hello.  If anybody in the area can make it, info and booking is here.  You’ll learn all about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox and more!

As usual when I sign up for these things, I am getting a bit nervous and terrified lest nobody turns up, so if I know at least one of you is attending, it will ease my nerves a lot…

Tell your friends! ;)

Cullum – E. Arnot Robertson

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I’ve been meaning to read something by E. Arnot Robertson for years, and as part of Reading Presently I picked up Cullum (1928), which my lovely friend Clare gave to me, it being one of her favourite books.  Being a tale of a young woman’s first doomed love affair (we are told in the first line that it is doomed) and featuring my bête noire, fox-hunting, I was a little nervous… but needn’t have been.  Cullum is really good – moving, engaging, and – most importantly – witty.  A novel about love and hunting without humour would have been unbearable.

The girl in question – possibly the one looking poignantly to her left on the cover of my Virago Modern Classic – is 19 year old Esther Sieveking, half-English, half-French, and entirely ready for a sexual awakening which will take her beyond her circle in Surrey.

Which of us could fail to empathise with this statement – one which probably brought most of us to the blogosphere in the first place?

I was desperately eager to find a companion who could enter into the intangible world of books and ideas, where I spent half my time.
Esther thinks she might have found a way out when she learns that a poet, one Mrs. Cole, is living nearby… My mean side emerges in my love of fictive character assassinations, particularly those given in measured, well-paced prose.  If it helps, I share four out of five of Mrs. Cole’s listed traits:

I learnt in ten minutes that she was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker and an anti-vivisectionist, and that she had innumerable other fads.  She was of the type that should have had many children, instead of only one son and many affectations.
She is a poet.  Nobody likes mocking writers like writers, and here is a demolition of Mrs. Cole’s poetry:

I was shown a collection of worn cuttings that had become illegible at the folds through constant handling. They contained sad little pieces of verse which always referred vaguely to ‘you’ in the last line.  ‘You’ had either jilted her of passed away; it was impossible to tell which, but they were all melancholy and had the most comprehensive titles; ‘Life,’ dealt with in eight of ten lines; ‘Love,’ inaptly, being a little longer.
Mrs. Cole isn’t herself a very important character, but she does provide the means by which Esther meets Cullum Hayes.  I don’t seem to have bookmarked any paragraphs which describe him, but essentially he is perfect for Esther.  Handsome, amusing, and persistent, he speaks romantically when needed and flippantly when needed.  Considering the other potential suitors in her life have, to this point, been of the damp, somewhat pathetic variety, the arrival of Cullum is easily enough to sweep her off her feet, and (seemingly) she him his.  (That ending of that sentence almost makes sense, and was too fun to write to ignore.) (So was the ending of that one.)  And, boy, does it get passionate – particularly for 1928.

Did I want him!  Many times, when I was with him and when I was alone, at nights, I had longed for him, almost faint for a second with the desire for his kisses, which I could only imagine.  Love, feeding on itself, had grown greatly.  Cullum obsessed me; all of me, mind and body.
So why did this not aggravate me, as pontifications on love are apt to do?  It was the humour which surrounded them.  Robertson is very amusing on the travails of working for a rubbish women’s magazine if one has any literary pretensions, and also quite biting of the huntin’ fraternity (Esther does hunt, but hates the idea of it at the same time.)  Here’s a sample which made me smile…

I saw a great deal of him.  He formed a habit of dropping in two or three evenings a week at my boarding-house.  Sometimes we talked, or if I had brought back some work to finish from the office, he read or smoked in the arm-chair in my bedsitting-room, to the thrilled horror of several elderly boarders of both sexes, who were convinced that he was my lover, since he had been allowed into a room which undeniably held my bed, even though it might be disguised as a sofa during the day.  That was conclusive.  The old ladies believed the worst because they secretly hoped it was true; the dear old gentleman because, in the virile period of his youth, it would have been so.
And, of course, Cullum turns out to be a bad’un – a liar and delusional fraud, and repeat offender at that.  I don’t know why Robertson chose to reveal that in the opening line – perhaps to avoid the trap of the novel being structured like a romantic penny dreadful? – but it gives Cullum a structure oddly akin to The End of the Affair – except we see the beginning, middle, and end, all the while knowing how it will end.

Having compared Cullum to The End of the Affair, I should point out the difference that tone makes.  The structure and the emotions may have significant overlap, but Cullum – for all its passion and anguish – still felt like a fun, light book with dark moments.  The End of the Affair, on the other hand – even with the comic detective – was a dark book with light moments.  And here ends a spontaneous comparison of two books I doubt anybody has compared before!

Thanks, Clare, for another gem.  I really should immediately read all the books you give me, shouldn’t I?

The End of the Affair – #GreeneForGran

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Remember in the dim and distant past when Simon S organised a #GreeneForGran reading week, in commemoration of Granny Savidge who prized Graham Greene so highly?  It was keenly taken up by bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers etc., and I was one of the number who joined in, picking up The End of the Affair (1951).  And then my blog break happened, and now it’s months late… oops.  But I thought the novel was amazing, so I’m going to write about it now.

And, first, can we talk about how great this Penguin cover is?  It’s a 1962 edition, and it is those 1960s Penguin covers, with layering and elements of the surreal, that I love the most.

The End of the Affair is the third Greene novel I’ve read – you can read my review of Travels With My Aunt, should you so wish, but apparently I never got around to writing about Brighton Rock.  In broad brushstrokes, they were funny and violent respectively.  I loved the former, and didn’t enjoy the latter.  Well, The End of the Affair is neither funny nor violent, but I am ready to state (even without having read almost everything Greene wrote) that it is his masterpiece.  I don’t see how he could have done better – at least not in the line which the novel takes, which is melancholia. Except it’s altogether too British for that word, which conjures up images of dreary French novels like Sagan’s Sunlight on Cold Water; despondence is perhaps a better description.

The novel concerns, as you might have guessed, a love affair.  Maurice Bendrix is the narrator, and his affair was with the wife of a friend, Sarah Miles (based, apparently, on the woman Greene himself had an affair with.)  The title suggests that the novel documents the end of this affair, but, as Bendrix says towards the end:

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end.
I usually hate it when novels include the ‘If I were writing a novel’ gimmick, but I’ll forgive Greene this instance because it raises a useful point – The End of the Affair does not document the end of an affair, but rather the aftermath of an affair – and, in flashbacks, the affair itself.  There is no clean break; there is uncertainty and longing and Sarah continues to dominate Maurice’s mind throughout.  Sarah’s husband Henry asks Maurice whether he thinks Sarah is having an affair (at this point Maurice’s affair is over); in response, Maurice hires a private detective to follow her, and report back.  He is driven, of course, by possessive jealousy – but there is little rage and bluster in him; he is no Othello.  Instead, he is simply unhappy.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.  In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other.  But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Books about lovers usually bore me to tears, as do books about unhappiness, perhaps because both have been written about so very often that it is difficult to write anything original, but Greene’s prose is quite astoundingly good.  Par example…

She had often disconcerted me by the truth.  In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth – that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry.  I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself.  But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude… I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, “I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.”  Well, she hadn’t known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.
Every page of The End of the Affair was written exquisitely, which meant it couldn’t be a quick read – and, similarly, its depiction of despondence was too well done to make for easy reading.  Somehow unhappiness is woven into every word, and the tone is heavy-laden but realistic.  No histrionics or wailing, simply stating, recording, responding.

And yet, in the midst of this, is a fantastic comic character – in the shape of the hired private detective, Alfred Parkis.  The End of the Affair contains one of the most wonderful detectives I’ve encountered in fiction, and had Greene chosen to take that route, I could envisage a fantastic series of novels featuring Parkis (note to self: craft a spin-off series).  He is delightfully dim, and a curious mixture of eager, officious, and melancholic.  It is a dark comedy, because he is continually afraid of looking foolish in front of ‘his boy’, who trails around silently after him at all times – and invariably he does look foolish.  But he is also a very sympathetic character, and I would have loved more of him in the novel.

I am aware that I am one of the last to the party on this one, and that I’m hardly uncovering a forgotten classic, but I was bowled over by how tautly good The End of the Affair was.  The blurb to my copy says that it is ‘distinct from any other major novel by Graham Greene’, which is a curious way of phrasing things and gives me hope that perhaps some of his minor novels (whichever they might be) run along similar lines?  I’ll certainly try more Greene, waiting to see what else he can do – and will metaphorically raise a glass, or literally raise a book, to Granny Savidge when I do so.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“[It] is a dark, intense little gem of a novel, as wintry and stark as the post-war January landscape in which it takes place” – Victoria, Tales From the Reading Room


“This is an incredibly moving story that brims with pathos and anger throughout.” – Kim, Reading Matters


“Greene is often bleak but not often this bleak.” – Catherine, Juxtabook

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Gosh, it’s been a while since I did one of these, so I have quite a few things to catch you up on!  Here are just ten of them…

1.) Angela Young’s brilliant novel Speaking of Love is now available as an e-book for Kindle (etc.? I don’t know how these things work.)  You can see/buy it here, and it’s only £1.99, which is crazy cheap for such a good book.  Go give it a try!

2.) National flags created by the foods the countries are associated with!

3.) Daunt Books recently sent me a beautiful new edition of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene.  I reviewed this collection of stories back in 2007, and highly recommend this really lovely edition – maybe as a Christmas present?

4.) Jura Whisky are running some flash fiction competitions #WinningWords – more info here.

5.)  If you haven’t see Blue Jasmine and get the chance, do.  It’s the best film I’ve seen this year, and Cate Blanchett is astonishingly good.

6.) Jennifer Walker has written a biography of bloggers’-favourite Elizabeth von Arnim (called Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey) – I’ve not started it yet, but I’m excited about reading it.

7.) An interesting book bloggers’ survey (to which I contributed) has results here (four results posts linked from that link).  I was mostly surprised by what a high percentage of bloggers are paid to write reviews for publications or other sites.

8.) I loved Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (review here) and thought that you might like to know that she has a new book out – Given The Choice – published by Cillian Press.

9.) I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of Elie Wiesel, whom the good people of Souvenir Press assure me is one of the best-known European writers, but I shall find out more with The Testament (trans. Marion Wiesel) which they’ve sent me.

10.) Someone sent me Amazon.com’s 100 Best Books of 2013.  I have heard of 4 of them, and read none.  I do quite want to read three of those four – the Tartt, Rowling, and Humans of New York.