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Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe #ABookADayInMay No.2

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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty: Amazon.co.uk: Keefe, Patrick Radden: 9781529062489: Books

Day two of this project will reveal two things that I had previously left unstated. My aim is to finish a book each day in May, but that doesn’t mean that I have also started that book. I did not read all 560 pages of Empire of Pain (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe in one day. In fact, I didn’t actually read any pages at all – I listen to the audiobook, and finished the final hour of it today.

When I downloaded the book, I thought it was about the opioid crisis in America and the court cases surrounding it. And it sort of is about that, but opioids don’t even exist until we’re a considerable way through the book. While a large chunk of the end of the book is about attempts to address the terrible cost of opioid addiction through the courts, Keefe takes us decades and generations back in the first half of the book. He is documenting the Sackler family’s rise from nobodies to billionaires right from the beginning.

As I’m writing this quite late in the day, and it’s an enormous book, I’m not going to detail all that much of it. But Empire of Pain is certainly a book of two halves. The first is about Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their humble origins – and how Arthur Sackler’s genius for advertising led to him being the first to advertise medication directly to doctors. He was, indeed, the first in many fields of advertising – he basically appears to have invented the idea of medical advertising, which still has such a stranglehold on the American healthcare system.

This half of the book documents every rung of the brothers’ steps to success, as well as all their feuding and pride. Their various marriages, dalliances, children and personal tragedies. Arthur’s obsession with art collections is dealt with in astonishing detail. Everything is dealt with in astonishing detail.

In the second half of the book, the Sackler family and their in-fighting gets a little sidelined as Purdue takes centre stage. This company developed research into opioids which would then turn into Oxycodone – and Keefe shows us, again in rigorous detail, how the marketing of the drug in a completely ruthless way led, incrementally (Keefe argues), to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – and how the company sought to tarnish those who were lost as wilful addicts rather than victims of their determination to prescribe higher doses for longer to as many people as possible. The end of the book looks at how the untouchable family start to become hate figures, as the truth about their tactics and deceit becomes wider known. It also shows how they’ll probably get away with everything.

I’ve skimmed the surface of this book. It really is researched to an astonishing degree. It will leave you furious about the total lack of ethics behind this company, and the granular way in which Keefe unpacks their lies and manipulations, and the way that good lawyers will let you get away with everything, will certainly infuriate most listeners. Even if, like me, you thankfully don’t have any connection to the opioid crisis. (It is worth noting, though this comes late in the book, that Purdue weren’t the only company to market opioids aggressively – apparently they never had more than about a third of the market – so Purdue and the Sackler family are certainly huge in this arena, but not lone wolves.)

Is all the detail necessary? I will say that, like almost any book over 500 pages, it would have been better if it were shorter. In the first half, where the level of granular detail has no bearing on showing injustices, I’d say that two out of every three sentences is extraneous. We hear about the lighting that someone chose to hang above their artwork. We hear about the graffiti on an archaeological item that Sackler paid to ship to the US. There is seemingly nothing that Keefe learns that he doesn’t include.

In the second half these details feel more like they are building a court case – and, in this half, Keefe leans a little towards repetition. We hear the same lines repeated over and over again – for instance, that Purdue marketed Oxycodone as giving pain relief for 12 hours even though their own studies had shown it wore off after eight. That fact must have been in the book at least six times.

It’s hard to fault somebody who has done years and years of research, and risked the notoriously litigious Sackler family, so I will say that this overlongness doesn’t lessen from Empire of Pain being a masterful and extraordinary work. It doesn’t make for fun reading – but, since opioid addiction is now the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US, it fees like essential reading.

The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner #ABookADayInMay No.1

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I was really hoping that Madame Bibi Lophile would do her A Novella a Day in May challenge again, and lo and behold the first post has gone live. I’ve joined in the past couple of years – I’m going to start this year too, though won’t make promises of completing. (My eyes are so, so, so much better than they were in December/January, when the thought of being able to read a book a day would have been completely impossible.) I’ve decided to call mine A Book a Day in May because they won’t all be novellas – for instance, the first book I’ve chosen is non-fiction.

I hadn’t heard of Joan Givner when I picked up The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer (1993) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago. I haven’t even read anything by either of the authors that Givner wrote biographies of – Katherine Anne Porter and Mazo de la Roche. But I’m so glad I read this memoir, because it is brilliant.

It’s very unconventional, in a way that intrigued me enough to buy it in Richard Booths’ bookshop. The portrait is told through 381 numbered short sections – rather like 381 different note cards. Indeed, it sounds like that’s exactly what they are. Often there is a short series of sections which connect and tell more or less the same story, but equally the next one might splinter off to a different theme, different country, different time. They aren’t in chronological order by any means, and we follow Givner at various times through a childhood in northern England, through an unsuccessful first marriage in America, through the research and publication of her biographies, and through their reception.

Though the title tells us this is a self-portrait of a literary biographer, Givner’s work isn’t given priority over her experiences as a wife, a mother, a teacher, a colleague – and perhaps most of all, a daughter. With unflinching honesty – and it does seem honest, even while it is deeply subjective – Givner portrays her parents’ keenness for respectability, their pride in her getting into grammar school, their bewilderment at many of her life choices (including her divorce). And most vivid of all is the portrait of her mother in the present – given to slightly foolish sweeping statements, or contradicting her past self. It is a fascinating depiction of a mother/daughter relationship throughout the decades that is neither close nor estranged, but inescapable even with an ocean between them. Givner looks at family, and her place in it, with the same remorseless quest for precision that she apparently had as a biographer:

When I went to the U.S. I spent the summer with my first husband’s family. It was my first experience of a peaceable, harmonious family in which members went their own ways uninterfering, and uninterfered with, treating each other with a kind of friendly respect.

In my own home, relations were combative, adversarial. Every act – even the simplest one of eating a meal, choosing a helping of this over that – was subjected to criticism, moral disapproval, and ultimately, strident quarreling. Granted, this sometimes – not by any means frequently – dissolved into laughter.

I think I had always suspected that my family life was more unpleasant than most and something to escape from. I did escape and yet was crippled by it, still.

But the title of the book isn’t lying. As it progresses, we see more and more about her experiences as a biographer. If I had read one of her biographies, or even knew a bit more about Katherine Anne Porter (who figures much larger than Mazo de la Roche) then maybe this would have been even richer, but I still loved it. There isn’t much about how she went about writing the biography, or what to include or exclude, but there is a lot about the research – about the people she meets and interviews, and often leaves feeling embittered or affronted. No less a figure than Eudora Welty writes to say that she is concerned that Givner’s motives are malice and busybodiness.

Givner does not spare herself in Self-Portrait. Though she may defend herself at times, she also includes negative reviews of her writing without comment. We get fascinating glimpses of a Katherine Anne Porter conference where she is berated from the stage by more than one speaker. Evidently she is a controversial figure in this world, and records the controversy.

Somehow, even with a format of those 381 different sections, Self-Portrait never feels disjointed. Givner expertly always gives us enough information to know where we are at all times, or at least to manage without knowing all the context. I suspected that I would find the book maddening or sublime, and it was the latter. More than that, it was a compelling page-turner. I was reminded of Kate Briggs’ excellent This Little Art about translation, which is written in a similar way, with vignettes following one another. In fact, I could see Self-Portrait fitting in well as a Fitzcarraldo reprint.

What an experience, and what a great start to A Book a Day in May!

Unnecessary Rankings! Elizabeth von Arnim

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I’m continuing my series on ranking all the books I’ve read by authors I like – I kicked off with Michael Cunningham, and now I’m onto the much more prolific Elizabeth von Arnim. With Cunningham, I’d read everything he wrote – with von Arnim, there is still quite a handful of her novels still sitting unread on my shelves. So if your favourite isn’t in the list, that’s why!

Ok, let’s go – from my least favourite to my most favourite.

14. Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898)

Sacrilege! I actually like all fourteen of the Elizabeth von Arnim books I’ve read, but this one is in last place perhaps because I had such high expectations. It was such a big deal during her life, since she always appeared as ‘by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden’ or ‘Elizabeth’, but I found it didn’t have the spark of her best work.

13. Christine (1917)

Published under the pseudonym Alice Cholmondeley, it was initially marketed as genuine letters from a young English girl studying in Germany during 1914. It is fascinating, but one of her bleakest books.

12. Expiation (1929)

Opinions differ on this one, but I found this novel about adultery to lack the humour that is usually so characteristic of Elizabeth von Arnim. I found it a little wearingly earnest. But Persephone reprinted it and called it ‘laugh-out-loud hilarious’, so you may find that too!

11. Mr Skeffington (1940)

Elizabeth von Arnim’s final novel is about the once-beautiful Lady Skeffington trying to cling onto her appearance – and relive her youth by going to see the many men who have thrown themselves at her feet. I wrote in my review that I’d probably appreciate the book more in fifty years’ time. (Well, forty years now!)

10. In the Mountains (1920)

This is very much a novel of different parts – she starts with a nature-as-idyll description, but I much preferred the second, funnier half where two forceful English widows arrive at the narrator’s Swiss mountain home. In my review, I said: “It was a lovely, slim introduction to many of the things that make von Arnim charming, witty, and with an undercurrent of topical commentary that prevents the mixture being too sweet.”

9. The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen (1904)

There are quite a few sequels to Elizabeth and Her German Garden – this is the only one I’ve read, but I definitely preferred it to the original. It’s much funnier, particularly when Elizabeth is trying to avoid her burdensome Cousin Charlotte.

8. The Benefactress (1901)

The Benefactress might be higher if its story – a woman setting up home in Europe with three discontented women, and their gradual changes – hadn’t been done better by a novel we’ll find further up the list.

7. All the Dogs of My Life (1936)

Elizabeth von Arnim’s only autobiographical work is pretty cagey about the bigger upsets in her life, but I still enjoyed it a lot. She writes it through the lens of the different dogs she’s owned, and does rather expose herself as an appalling dog-owner.

6. Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907)

Told in letters from Fraulein Schmidt (and we have to imagine the replies from Mr Anstruther) von Arnim expertly shows how infatuation can turn to hurt pride and the whole rollercoaster along the way. We really can picture the absent Mr Anstruther and the sorts of letters he probably writes.

5. Introduction to Sally (1926)

An impossibly beautiful young working-class woman is married off to the first man who asks, in a desperate attempt by her anxious shopkeeper father to ‘protect her morals’ – but it turns out that he doesn’t like much else about her. A sort of Pygmalion story, it’s delightfully funny with (as so often with E von A) a searing undercurrent of deeper emotions. Coming from the British Library Women Writers series later in the year!

4. The Caravaners (1909)

Elizabeth von Arnim’s most satirical work is gloriously funny. It’s from the point of view of a German man who can’t see how cantankerous, selfish and unreasonable he is. A few years ahead of the First World War, von Arnim spears German/Anglo relations – it’s the comic sister of Christine.

3. The Enchanted April (1922)

Her best-known work is deservedly loved. Four women head to picturesque Italy, described so enticingly, and go from selfish disunity into something rather idyllic. Saved from the saccharine by von Arnim’s dry wit as a narrator.

2. Father (1931)

Jen is perhaps my favourite creation of von Arnim’s. She leaves her father’s home upon his second marriage, keen to avoid a life of service to him. The novel has a lot to say about the role of women in the 1930s, but Jen is so spirited and naive a character that the whole thing feels joyful even when confronting real issues. So glad we got to do this one as a British Library Women Writers edition.

1. Christopher and Columbus (1919)

Nineteen-year-old twins Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas von Twinkler are half-German/half-English are packed off to America by their horrid Uncle Arthur when war breaks out. On the boat, they enchant Mr Twist, inventor of Twist’s Non-Trickling Teapot. Once arrived in America, after a series of events, they open a tea room. I LOVE a tea room plot. The twins’ dialogue is so fun, always sparkling and strange, and von A’s ironic turns of phrase are at their best in Christopher and Columbus. I think it’s still just about in print from Virago, otherwise I’d have tried to snap it up for the British Library, and I’d love to see more people meeting this wonderful cast of characters.

That was fun! Which Elizabeth von Arnims would you put at the top of your list?

Some books from Suffolk (and elsewhere)

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When I was on holiday recently I took a trip to Treasure Chest Books in Felixstowe, Suffolk – one of my all-time favourite bookshops, though I’ve only been there three times, each time about ten years apart. It initially looks like one little room, and then it just goes on and on in a warren of increasingly exciting rooms. There’s a great range of stock, very reasonably priced – and even two shelves of Persephone Books! I had almost all of them already, of course, but came away with a couple. The first photo is the pile I bought there – the second photo is a smaller pile that came from various places.

Defy the Wilderness by Lynne Reid Banks
I do have a couple of unread books by Lynne Reid Banks on my shelves, but my abiding love for The L-Shaped Room trilogy means I will always pick up more by her. The books she set abroad haven’t dated brilliantly, but I’m happy to keep trying.

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi
I should have mentioned this one during the recent Tea or Books? discussion of novels set in bookshops – because I bought this one entirely on the strength of the word ‘bookshop’ in the title.

The Fell by Sarah Moss
Summerwater by Sarah Moss
So many podcasters and bloggers and others have mentioned Sarah Moss as someone I should be reading. It was great to find these two cheaply, and maybe I can finally start disentangling the various literary Sarahs in my head.

Dance and Skylark by John Moore
I’ve read one or two of Moore’s autobiographies set around Bredon Hill (where I grew up), but haven’t read any of his fiction yet. I did mostly buy this one because of its beautiful dustjacket, but I’m also intrigued by the contents.

Paper Lives by Compton Mackenzie
I keep telling myself that I have to read more of the unread Mackenzies on my shelves before I buy more, and thus I keep lying to myself.

Moonraker by F. Tennyson Jesse
Unrelated to the Bond movie, this is a little story of pirates? I’m not sure if it’s for children or not, but always happy to stumble across more by the brilliant FTJ. I believe it was a Virago Modern Classic at some point, but not one I’ve ever seen in the wild.

A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves
Emmeline by Judith Rossner
The two Persephones I didn’t have are both quite recently published ones, I think, though published initially about a hundred years apart. They’re also not Persephones that I’ve seen many people mention… anybody read these?

Next To Nature, Art by Penelope Lively
I probably don’t need more Livelys since I have several unread, but I couldn’t leave this one behind because it is signed by the author. When I got home, I also spotted that it is from the library of Jill Paton-Walsh, so maybe given to her by Lively?

And these books came online, from a charity shop, and from a remainder shop.

The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge
After loving The Bird in the Tree, I’m keen to read more Goudge. She turns up in charity shops a lot, and that’s where I found this delightful edition. I’m told it’s a bit more grim than some of her other works…

Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum
Found and Lost by Alison Leslie Gold
A remainder shop in Bristol had quite a few Notting Hill Editions, and these were the two that really drew me in.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
I’m very excited by this reprint – the first McNally Editions book that I’ve bought from their eclectic list. Ursula Parrott is someone I’ve wanted to try for a long time but she’s not been easy to find – so thank goodness this one is now available. I’ll let their description tell you more.

When in French by Lauren Collins
As soon as I read Beth’s Instagram post about When in French, I had to have a copy – it sounds so very up my street. Click the link and you’ll see why!

I haven’t started any of these books yet, though would happily dive into any of them. Have you read any, and where would you start?

The next club… (and a minor podcast announcement)

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I’m realising that I haven’t mentioned the successor to the 1940 Club on here yet! Ooops. You might have seen it on Karen’s blog, or on my social media – in October we will be doing *drum roll* the 1962 Club!

And the minor podcast announcement truly is minor – just in case anybody is reading along, we have changed the John Dickson Carr novel we’re doing in the next episode. It’ll now be It Walks By Night (because that’s the one Rachel could find in a bookshop!), still vs Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain.

Eggs, Beans and Crumpets by P.G. Wodehouse – #1940Club

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There are so many P.G. Wodehouse books in the world, and so many of them are sitting unread on my bookshelves, that I try not to buy more. But I think I must have been tempted by the intriguing title of Wodehouse’s Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, and I’m glad I did because it meant I could add it to the 1940 Club. It’s also one of his books that I’ve never seen anyone else mention, and that’s enough to make me wonder if I’ve stumbled across an overlooked gem among his vast canon.

Well, the title is fun, but completely irrelevant – it’s a collection of stories from a few different gentleman’s clubs, and Wodehouse has decided to delineate different anonymous members of the clubs by types of breakfast food. Is this a joke he did elsewhere? It’s never explained, and the different foods don’t seem to have any associated traits. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the first story:

A Bean and a Crumpet were in the smoking-room of the Drones Club having a quick one before lunch, when an Egg who had been seated at the writing-table in the corner rose and approached them.

Perhaps he thought of the title first? Anyway, while these various figures are unnamed, most of the stories feature names that P.G. Wodehouse fans will recognise. The Drones Club, of course, appears in many collections of Wodehouse stories – and the first few stories in Eggs, Beans and Crumpets star one of their most prominent members, Bingo Little.

Bingo Little will also be familiar to readers of the Jeeves books. In those, he is perpetually falling in love with different women. By the time of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets he is happily married to a rich novelist. There is something sweet and unusual in Wodehouse about their genuinely affectionate love for one another – but the difficulty that inspires each of his stories is Rosie M. Banks’ (his wife) reluctance to give him any money. Bingo Little also needs money to pay debts, and his sure-fire way to earn it is to gamble on a horse so certain to win that it’s basically just collecting money. Except, of course, the horse always loses and Bingo Little gets himself into increasing difficulties – without, in these stories, Jeeves to save him.

Apparently other stories in Eggs, Beans and Crumpets will differ depending on whether you have the US or UK editions. In my UK edition, other familiar characters who appear in later stories are Ukridge and Mr Mulliner, and quite a few minor characters who recur in Ukridge stories. In some ways it doesn’t particularly matter who the story is about. These gentlemen do have different personalities, but the structure of each story is the same: they get themselves into some sort of fix, and then surprising coincidences help extricate them from it.

While I really enjoyed reading this for the 1940 Club, I think that is the reason I prefer Wodehouse at novel-length. Because there will only be one big denouement where all the pieces brilliantly fit into place, and the hero gets away with whatever risks and blunders they have found themselves in. In Eggs, Beans and Crumpets it was all very fun, but rather repetitive. The same patterns took place in every chapter, without long enough space for the plot to have got as brilliantly convoluted as Wodehouse does at his best.

But, while the plots felt hurried, the writing was as deliciously Wodehousian as ever. There is no equal for his mix of understatement, overstatement, and comic twists and turns of sentences. Even something like this is deliciously funny to me:

The Bean asked what the Bella Mae Jobson affair was, and the Crumpet, expressing surprise that he had not heard of it, said that it was the affair of Bella Mae Jobson.

I could type out the whole book, but here is just one more example – on the snobbery of ailments at a health spa:

The ancient Spartans, one gathers, were far from cordial towards their Helots, and the French aristocrat of pre-Revolution days tended to be a little stand-offish with his tenantry, but their attitude was almost back-slapping compared with that of – let us say – the man who has been out in Switzerland taking insulin for his diabetes towards one who is simply undergoing treatment from the village doc負or for an ingrowing toe-nail. And this was particularly so, of course, in those places where invalids collect in gangs – Baden-Baden, for example, or Hot Springs, Virginia, or, as in Sir Aylmer’s case, Droitgate Spa.

Wodehouse has never been equalled – he hasn’t even been imitated as much as you’d expect – and any time spent with him is reliably delightful. I doubt I’ll remember the details of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and it isn’t a standout from his library of work – it certainly wouldn’t be one of the ones I’d recommend to a newcomer. But a mid-ranking Wodehouse is still a more entertaining experience than almost any other writer, and I enjoyed every moment.

A London Family Between the Wars by M.V. Hughes – #1940Club

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The title to M.V. Hughes’s A London Family Between the Wars is only half accurate, and belies the fact that it is part of a series. You might be familiar with A London Child of the 1870s, which was published by Persephone and is the only other one I’ve read. Along the way she also covers the 1880s and 1890s – before jumping through to the interwar years. In 1940 this was, of course, very recent history.

So, yes, it is about a family between the wars – but by no stretch of the imagination are they in London. The village they live in, Cuffley, is probably firmly within the London commuter belt now – but it is a village, and when the Hughes family lived there it clearly feels very much like a village isolated from the world around it.

Perhaps one of the reasons that M.V. Hughes skipped from the 1890s to the interwar years is because her husband has died. Her only allusion to this is on the first page, ‘I was suddenly left a widow’ – I’m not sure what he died of, though Wikipedia says it was in 1918 so may well have been at war. She doesn’t dwell on the sadness, but she does talk about her sons – with the extraordinary names Vivian and Barnholt, and the rather more common-or-garden Arthur. At the start of the memoir they range from new-adult to early-teenager, and she writes with love and respect of them all. In-jokes are hard to convey in a way that means anything to the reader, but she does manage to give the sense of the best sort of family – the security and affection, and the safety they feel in teasing each other without endangering the relationships between them.

The anecdotes she tells them, and the lives they lead that gradually grow into greater maturity away from the family home, were all very pleasing. But somehow I now don’t remember any of them – Hughes successfully portrays an atmosphere rather than uniquely interesting quotes and incidents.

You might know that one of my favourite things – in fiction or non-fiction – is when people go house-hunting or move house. In A London Family Between the Wars they move across the village once they’ve outgrown their little house – to a new build. But for some reason haven’t quite checked that it is finished before they move in…

The best of a big worry is that it drives out all the little ones. My annoyance at being overcharged for the removal soon gave way to my dismay at the state of our new home.  Of course I had reckoned on our removing-workmen to put most of the furniture in position. But the parquet-flooring of the big room had not been begun. The wooden bricks were occupying the floor in piles. Not a single thing could be placed there. So our piano and Chesterfield-couch, our Welsh cupboard and dresser, oak chest and chairs, all had to be dumped in the garden.

The next revelation was that there were no stairs. A nice big ‘well’ was there, but the ghost of a stair. A ladder was propped up for our use in the manner of Jacob’s dream, and the beds were hoisted up the well by means of ropes. So, at all events, thought I, there will be somewhere to sleep.

That certainly puts any of my house anxieties in the shade! The stairs don’t turn up for quite a while, and they manage to make do. ‘Making do’ is quite a theme of her life, indeed, and relatable to people reading the book in 1940.

Hughes wasn’t making most of her money from writing – she also worked in the education profession. Not much as a teacher herself any longer, but in assessing other teachers’ lessons – and the exam papers that they wrote. Much of the book is taken up with tales from these worlds, and (though I have no personal interest in teaching) I found her discussions of how best to teach really interesting. In a suitably anonymised way, she shares fascinating examples of the best and worst teaching she has witnessed – and some sentences could equally well have been written 83 years later: “Our noble Ministers of Education have probably never in their lives entered the portals of an elementary school. I should like to rub their noses in a few of them.”

Overall, it’s an interesting and engaging memoir, and Hughes’ personality is what holds it together. She is charmed by nature and by people’s foibles, but is also quite no-nonsense herself. She has a few nearby friends but otherwise largely wants to be left alone, cherishing connection with her sons above all. Of course, most of the book is about a time before 1940, so it’s not all revealing about life in the period of the 1940 Club – but modernity is looming towards the end, and there is a sense that the countryside is changing. Every generation believes this, of course, and it is instructive to see something like this written so long ago:

For years after our settling here a great feature of our pleasure was the unusual beauty of our walks. There were two specially shown to visitors with pride: our star turn was a long grassy glade through the woods, with its varying colours; especially when the season was right for striking a secret route across a field into a copse thick with wild hyacinth. A walk in another direction was almost as good, for it was across fields and over stiles, up and down hill, past a real farm, and producing in spring at one stage in the walk a generous show of daffodils.

And in the autumn we could roam the fields close at hand for mushrooms – more than we could consume; while for blackberries we hardly needed to do more than push out our hand.

But now we are met with barbed wire, notices to keep to the pathway, to beware of the dogs, ‘You have been warned’, and other such chilling deterrents.

Plus ça change…

Revisiting Miss Hargreaves – #1940Club

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I think it shows extraordinary restraint that we are five or so years into these ‘reading the club’ years before we chose the year that Miss Hargreaves was published. You might think I inaugurated these club years simply as the start of a lengthy campaign to get more people to read Miss H. At the time of writing, nobody has contributed her to the club – but by the time I publish this, that might have changed. And, let’s face it, it’s quite likely that I’ve already strong-armed everybody into reading it.

(If you don’t know anything about it yet, fear not – I’ll explain soon.)

I knew I wanted to re-read Miss Hargreaves for the 1940 Club, because it would seem absurd not to, given how much I talk about it. And I realised it’s actually been quite a long time since I last read. At one point, I was rereading Miss Hargreaves every year or two, ever since it was first recommended to me by my piano teacher in 2003. But it must be about ten years since I last gave myself the pleasure of spending time with Constance Hargreaves.

For newbies, Miss Hargreaves is a novel about a woman who is made up on the spur of the moment. Norman Huntley and his friend Henry are in an ugly church in Lusk, Ireland, being given a tour by an overly attentive verger. Without much thinking about it, Norman claims to have a friend in common with the beloved old minister of the church – that friend being Miss Hargreaves. To entertain themselves, Norman and Henry make up all sorts of silly details about her. She never goes anywhere without her dog, cockatoo, harp and hip bath. She writes poetry and is related to the Duke of Grosvenor. She is nearly 90 years old, but still travelling to enjoy choral music across the country.

As a final joke, they send a letter to a hotel where she is supposedly staying, inviting her to come and visit them in the cathedral town of Cornford. And think no more of it. Until they get a reply…

And then she arrives. Miss Hargreaves is exactly as they have described her – and exactly as lovable and eccentric and slightly intimidating. The novel is a jeu d’esprit about when creative thought gets out of control. And, as time goes on, Miss Hargreaves becomes something of a Frankenstein’s monster – beginning to exert control and challenge her creator. “I hate her and I love her and – I’m half afraid of her,” as Norman says.

When I first read Miss Hargreaves in 2003, it set me off in a direction I’ve never looked back from. I discovered my love of fantastic novels – not set in a fantasy world, but where the fantastic intrudes into the real world. Since then, I’ve read and loved Lady Into Fox by David Garnett, The Love Child by Edith Olivier, Miss Carter and the Ifrit by Susan Alice Kerby, Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson and many others that fit this subgenre. I’ve written a DPhil on the topic. And I always come back to my love for Miss H. So much that I named my (male) cat after her.

This time, for the first time, I decided to listen to the audiobook. Read by Julian Elfer, it was a delightful experience. I’ve listened to a dramatisation of the novel many times, but never the unabridged version – and yet I’ve read Miss Hargreaves so many times that it felt delightfully familiar. I’ve come out the other side of repetition and into it being like spending time with beloved family. I didn’t see anything new or different in it this time; I just loved being back in the company of an old friend.

I don’t reread very much, and when I do it tends to be with a specific purpose – the podcast or book group – and so there are very few books which I return to with this feeling. I won’t leave it ten years ago. At this point, it’s barely even reading – it’s just wallowing, and remembering what it is that I love about reading and books.

Over the years since 2003 I’ve read quite a few other novels by Frank Baker, and none of them hold a candle to Miss Hargreaves. Quite a lot of them aren’t even good. But I am always grateful for this touchstone that does everything that I want a novel to do. Did it form my taste, or does it just answer all the requirements I would have had for a novel even if I hadn’t read it at a formative time? Who knows – either way, thank you to the 1940 Club for giving me an excuse to go back to Cornford.

Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck – #1940Club

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Goodness knows when I bought Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck, but it was probably the best part of 15 years ago. Thank goodness for these reading clubs for making me pay attention to the books waiting on my shelves, as I really enjoyed this novel – subtitled ‘a week in the life of a clergyman’s wife’.

Parts of it were published ‘in rather a different form’ (whatever that means) in the Guardian before being collected into a book – which must have happened rather quickly, as it is set in the spring of 1940 and published before the end of that year. Of course, the Second World War moves quickly – and the period it is set in is before Blitzkrieg. It was while war might still feel far off, though still affecting everyday lives in numerous ways, of course. As Peck writes in a little author’s note at the beginning, ‘perhaps the thinks she [the diarist] cares for are coming to seem more, and not less, precious’.

The things she cares for are the lives and squabbles of a community of churchgoers. It all feels very like provincial village life, and indeed Provincial Lady-esque, except she mentions in passing that the population of Stampfield is about 60,000 – more than 200 times the number of people living in my village. But somehow, even in a fairly significantly sized town, everybody seems to know one another and be keenly involved in the details of each other’s lives.

Camilla is the vicar’s wife keeping the diary over the course of the week. It’s not really in diary form, except for aping the popularity of the Provincial Lady technique – and we have a similar range of characters. She has done better than the PL in the husband department – Arthur is kind, gentle, and a little incapable. Much of Camilla’s life seems to be spent in stopping him giving away all their money or shielding him from the criticism of locals. They have an adult son, Dick, who is a soldier but not yet deployed. Their maid is Not What Maids Were Before The War, and Camilla seems to do much of the housework themselves, but they consider her part of the family and tolerate her constantly going to see her boyfriend (who dangles the threat that he might be sent to the front at any moment).

One of the chief interests in reading books from 1940 is seeing a particular moment in wartime. There are little details, like ‘”the pink form” (which has, Dick tells me, a far less polite adjective in the Army)’ – which Peck’s original audience would have understood, I suppose, and seems to have been something connected with income replacement for the wives of soldiers? (I’ve only been able to find this post which mentions the pink form in WW1, which is something rather different.) As Camilla writes:

Like everyone else in Europe, we have lived for these last two years as people who know a thunderstorm is coming, and now the storm is raging all the time, though the lightning has not struck Dick nor ruined our cities yet, and the only thing to do is to turn away from the windows at odd moments and try to forget, as best you may, if you wish to keep your reason.

Despite war being a constant, Camilla notes that people aren’t truly interested in each other’s experiences of it: ‘”What news have you of Dick?” (Everyone asks this, and no-one ever waits for an answer, I notice. Soldiers aren’t news in this war.)’ They are rather more preoccupied with their own local issues – and one of the chief of these in Bewildering Cares is the curate Mr Strang, and a sermon he has recently given in favour of pacifism. People are furious, and Arthur and Camilla find themselves called upon to disown the curate or remonstrate with him in some way. Camilla, in particular, has no wish to do anything so drastic, and spends a lot of the book ingeniously disengaging from conversations with irate parishioners.

It is very quaint to imagine a time when a sermon could become the talk of a town. I certainly enjoyed the theme of faith in Bewildering Cares, and the ways that Camilla writes genuinely and undramatically about her prayer life and relationship with God, as well as the behaviour of other people in the church community. It’s so rare to find Christian faith written about sensitively or sincerely – or even unsneeringly – in recent fiction that I really appreciated how Peck incorporates it into the novel as a fundamental and stable part of Camilla’s life. Peck also writes so well about the mixed feuding and kindness of church communities that I have to assume she was part of one. I even expected that her husband had been a vicar, but apparently he was a schools inspector and later Education Minister in Scotland.

Another lovely feature of Bewildering Cares is seeing mention of other middlebrow authors. Camilla, like so many literary heroines whom we are expected to have some affinity with, is a keen reader and mentions Angela Thirkell, Dorothy Whipple, and Charlotte M. Yonge among others. These sorts of things might feel a bit forced in a historical novel, but much more natural from someone at the time.

Overall, Peck doesn’t have quite the charm and humour of the Provincial Lady, but then who does. I still loved reading Bewildering Cares, learning a bit more about the home front in 1940, and spending time in the company of a heroine whom it was easy to consider a friend.

The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge #1940Club

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The Bird in the Tree (1940) is the third Elizabeth Goudge novel I’ve read, after The Middle Window and The Scent of Water, but it was the first one I ever owned. Embarrassingly, I was given it back in 2008 – by Jenny, who used to blog with Teresa at Shelf Love. There was something called ‘buy a friend a book’ and lots of bloggers sent books around the world. I don’t remember who I bought for or where I sent it, but I’m delighted I took part because – 15 years later – I really loved this novel.

The Bird in the Tree is apparently the first of a trilogy of novels about the Eliot family – some of whom are living in Damerosehay, a beautiful home that is not an ancestral pile, but has been acquired relatively recently in a somewhat romantic and characteristically determined move by Lucilla. She is the matriarch of the family, loved and underestimated by all. They respect her steely core, but focus more on the sweet wrappings of it.

She did not know why they found her so deliciously funny, but she was glad that they did, for she knew that the people who can be loved and laughed at together are the most adored.

With her is her unmarried daughter, Margaret, a clergyman son and several visiting grandchildren. Two of her sons have died in the war, including her favourite child, Maurice. This favour has continued to the second generation – his son, David, is also beloved by all. As the novel opens, he is returning and his nephews are delighted to greet him.

From this varied cast of characters, alive and dead, Goudge manages to give us distinct understandings of them all – and the relationships between them, whether close, precarious, or faded. Here, for instance, is David’s relationship with his unmarried aunt – and the final word of the paragraphs takes it in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, but which has such truth to it.

But David, standing where all the Eliot men always stood, in front of the fire so that none of the warmth could reach their female relatives (though to do them justice they did not think of this, Lucilla not having the heart to point it out) threw the evening paper quickly aside and went instantly to meet Margaret. He never forgot for how many years she had done for him all the things that it would have bored Lucilla to do; darned his socks, packed his box for school, ministered to him when as a small boy he was sick in the night; he did not forget, and he never failed to show her a punctilious affection that hurt her intolerably.

David has inherited much of his grandmother’s determination and charm, and he finds it easy to make people love him – but he has far greater stores of selfishness than she does. Luckily things that please him tend to please others too, but there is secret he is holding that threatens to hurt many people and damage many relationships. When Lucilla comes to hear of it, her purpose is to try and dissuade him.

Most of what I loved about The Bird of the Tree was the feeling of being swept away to this family estate. I’m not good with visual descriptions and wouldn’t be able to tell what Damerosehay looked like, but I truly felt like I was there. Goudge conveys its gentleness, its familiarity, its cosiness and security and history – and its resistance to change. I felt at home.

I also loved Goudge’s unashamed story of sacrifice for others. Few modern novelists would expect a character to sacrifice something seemingly vital to him for the sake of other people. The narrative of ‘you have to be true to yourself’ is overwhelmingly dominant now, and Lucilla’s advice may seem old-fashioned to many. But I appreciated the morality of The Bird in the Tree, and the uncloaked way it was shown. While I’m not sure I agreed with all of Lucilla’s beliefs, I really liked the sincerity and faith behind them – the unselfish way she lives them out, and hopes others will also live them out.

What prevents The Bird in the Tree feeling saccharine or simplistically moralistic is Goudge’s excellent observational writing. Here, for instance, David is remembering a time of deep upset in his youth, scared of his father’s increasing illness:

Terrified by it he had fled one evening to the dark attic, slammed the door and flung himself down sobbing upon the floor. He had sobbed for an hour, sobbed himself sick and exhausted until at least, childlike, he had forgotten what it was he was crying about and had become instead absorbed in the moonlight on the floor. It had been like a pool of silver, enclosed and divided up into neat squares by the bars of the window. He had counted the squares and the lines, dark and light, and had been delighted with them. He had touched each with his finger, this way and that, and had been utterly comforted.

It’s a tricky balance, but Goudge treads it expertly. I loved the time I spent at Damerosehay and the spread of characters I met – mostly Lucilla, who charmed me as much as she does everyone else. I hope I manage to read the sequels rather more quickly than I read the first.