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Dusty Answer – Rosamond Lehmann

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Despite packing and moving and all sorts, I have managed (just in time) to finish Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, and thus I am participating in Florence’s Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week!  I also realise I’ve been spelling it ‘Rosamund’ up until now.  Sorry, Ros.

I bought Dusty Answer (1927) eight years ago, and it’s been on holiday with me a couple of times, and yet I hadn’t read it (or any Rosamond Lehmann novels) until this week.  I had intended to read a different Lehmann novel, but then decided to start at the beginning, with the novel Lehmann had published when she was 26, the same age I am.  I’m glad I did.  Dusty Answer is brilliant, and fulfilled all the expectations I’ve been building up in my head over the past eight years.

The papier-mache dog (Pastey) was made by my friend Mel’s boyfriend…
Mel insisted that he make an appearance.

The novel concerns Judith Earle, an only-child who is mostly solitary, but who becomes friendly with the children who visit next door – and who end up figuring hugely in her life.  They are Mariella, Roddy, Julian, Charlie, and Martin – mostly cousins, but Julian and Charlie are brothers – and have a busy, high-spirited life which Judith joins in nervously but so very whole-heartedly.  They are her life, for a summer or two – and ice-skating a while later – and have a huge significance in her otherwise lonely upbringing.   It takes a talented writer to write about childhood without the novel feeling like a children’s book, and Lehmann achieves this wonderfully.  The cast is well-drawn – foolish but amiable Martin, above-it-all Julian, unusual Roddy, beautiful Charlie, and self-conscious Mariella.  Lehmann captures childhood, and the fleeting but all-absorbing interaction with other children, even when it lasts only a little while.  Although nothing exceptional happens in these chapters, the atmosphere is consumingly beautiful.  Part of me wishes the whole of Dusty Answer dealt with their childhood, from the subjective but astute gaze of Judith.  It would have been enough.

But, we learn in the first page or two, Charlie is killed.  The children grow up and don’t see each other.  Judith must start to make a life for her own – which she does, as a student at Cambridge.  This was the section I liked least.  The character who looms largest in Judith’s life at this point is Jennifer – they bond over insulting a chubby, ugly girl behind her back; they are essentially horrified by a lack of beauty.  This was where I lost a bit of sympathy for Judith.  But a novel – even one which looks through the eyes of one character – doesn’t fail or succeed on the sympathetic qualities of its protagonist.  Lehmann still writes engagingly and Cambridge life, but I missed the cousins.  I wanted them back.  That group was what gave the novel vitality for me.  And, luckily… they came back!  I shan’t spoil any more, but things get increasingly complex…

Dusty Answer spans Judith’s life from childhood to her early twenties (I think) and Lehmann is convincing at the subtle ways she changes as she ages – and the same for all the children as they become adults (except poor Charlie, of course.)  Only Julian and Roddy got rather confused in my mind, and we might be able to lay the blame at the door of the hot weather this week.  As a central character, Judith is convincing in her thoughts and responses, irksome in her self-consciousness and occasional hysteria, and an odd (but believable) mix of concern for the lives of others and intense introspection.  Perhaps common traits of the only-child with distant parents.  One character sums up her approach to life rather well:

Have you ever been happy?  No.  Whenever you come near to being, you start thinking: “Now I am happy.  How interesting… Am I really happy?”
Yet, although she has a few off-putting qualities, these only serve to make her more interesting and rounded as a focal pair of eyes for the novel.  She seems to have been based on Lehmann herself.  None of the characters are saints or sinners; the good do not end happily and the bad unhappily – Lehmann’s novel reflects the highs and lows, obsessions and irritations of life itself – albeit rather heightened at times.

But the reason I loved Dusty Answer was Lehmann’s writing, especially in the first section.  It’s another of those novels which starts with a little bit of prolepsis (starting with some information, then skipping back into the past) but it worked well here, because we are going back to Judith’s childhood.  The effect lends an air of added nostalgia to the early chapters.  It actually reminded me of a couplet written by Miss Hargreaves (!) – her poetry is usually nonsensical, but there was a definite sense at the beginning of Dusty Answer of ‘Halcyon, halcyon, halcyon days / Wrapped in high summer’s indigenous haze.’    And Lehmann writes so, so beautifully.  As with Sybille Bedford, it’s difficult to pinpoint sections which are especially brilliant, because all of it flows exquisitely.  Karen (whose review is here) wrote on the LibraryThing discussion of Rosamond Lehmann: ‘What beautiful, dreamy, atmospheric prose she writes!’  And she’s spot on.  As I say, picking out an excerpt is tricky – indeed, it somehow seems rather like purple prose in isolation, which it never does in context, but I thought I’d better not write a whole review without any quotations…

Into the deep blue translucent shell of night.  The air parted lightly as the car plunged through it, washing away in waves that smelt of roses and syringa and all green leaves.  The moon struggled with clouds.  She wore a faint and gentle face.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if there was rain before daybreak,” said Martin; and, reaching at length the wan straight high road, accelerated with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Faster, Martin, faster.”

Faster and faster he went.  She settled herself close against him, and through half-shut eyes saw the hawthorn and wild-rose hedges stream backward on either hand.  The night air was a drug from whose sweet insinuating caress she prayed never to wake.  Soon, through one leafy roadway after another, the headlights pierced a tunnel of green gloom.  The lanes were full of white scuts and little paws, paralysed; and then, as Martin painstakingly slowed down, dipping and twinkling into the banks.  Moths flickered bright-winged an instant in the lamplight before being dashed to their fried and ashy death.  Once or twice came human beings, objects of mean and foolish design, incongruous in the night’s cast grandeur; and here and there, under the trees, upon the stiles, in the grass, a couple of them, locked face to face, disquietingly still, gleamed and vanished.  She observed them with distaste: passion was all ugliness and vulgar imbecility.
But I think the only way to see whether or not you’d like Dusty Answer is to pick up a copy and start reading.  Since it was on my shelf for eight years, you’ll have gathered that a synopsis alone doesn’t sell it as a must-read.  But if, like me, you’ve somehow gone through your life without reading any of Rosamond Lehmann’s output, then – hie thee to a library!

Thanks so much, Florence, for running Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week and for making me finally read this novel.  It’s so, so good!

A Favourite of the Gods – Sybille Bedford

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Let’s take a moment, before I begin, to praise how beautiful this book is – the book-as-object, I mean.  Well, you can only see the picture – sadly, you can’t feel it.  It is beautiful to read.  The cover flips closed with a beautiful soft clunk; the pages slip beautifully together.  It is a little soft to the touch.  It’s delightful.  This is why I love books, not just reading.  This is why I won’t get an e-reader.

But, thankfully, it didn’t end there.  A Favourite of the Gods (1963) is also a really good novel, which Daunt Books kindly sent me a few weeks ago, along with the sequel A Compass Error, which I’ve yet to read.  You might already have spotted Rachel’s enthusiastic review of the books – and I’m jumping on the same bandwagon, because I think Sybille Bedford might be something rather special.

A Favourite of the Gods concerns three generations of women – Anna, Constanza, and Flavia – over several decades, dealing with Italian and English society, living lives governed by different moral systems, yet somehow inextricably bound together, even when understanding each other least.

The novel opens with Constanza and her daughter Flavia on a train to Paris, intending to meet Constanza’s fiancée.  Everything goes rather awry when the train stops and Constanza realises she has lost her ruby ring… they get off the train and stay locally for a while.  And then we leap back to the beginning of the story… as with Wise Children, this technique irked me a bit, but I’ll let them get on with the show…

Since the plot is the least important part of the novel, I’m going to whizz through part of it… Backtrack to 1870s American Anna – who heads off to Rome and falls in love with an Italian Prince, as you do.  Marriage and a baby girl, Constanza, swiftly follow.  Some years later, Anna discovers something that makes her whisk Constanza away to England, forbidding to let her ever see her father again.  When Constanza becomes of age, she resolves to see him anyway, now she is no longer under her mother’s well-meaning but possessive control – only, war is declared.

Right, that’s as far as I’ll go – but, obviously, somewhere along the way Constanza’s daughter Flavia appears…

Thinking back over the novel, there are a few significant moments, but for the most part the events don’t particularly matter.  Bedford writes, instead, about relationships between mother and daughter; how people come to understand the world around them, while relating their new-found understanding to their upbringing; how children grow to see their parents as people, and not simply parents; how events affecting the whole of Europe can equally affect tiny family units.  And, throughout all this, Bedford has an astonishingly subtlety.  Nothing is overstated; a lot is barely stated.  Bedford depends upon her fine character drawings, rather than exclamatory narrative interjections.  Anna is dignified and calm, but very proud; Constanza is more rebellious, but ultimately loyal.  Their mother/daughter has a thousand shades in it, and is wholly believable.  I loved how Bedford managed to convey this with tiny linguistic decisions.  For example…

Constanza said: “There hasn’t been one word of marriage; and there won’t be.”

“But dearest girl, why?”

“One doesn’t marry like that,” said Constanza, “just like that.  For a bit of love.”

Anna chose to laugh.  “You don’t know yet, my dear, what one marries for.”
I think the ‘chose’ is really clever there.  A lesser novelist would elaborate about Anna’s shock and discouragement, and her decision to put a brave face on matters – but Bedford captures it all in a word.

It must be so difficult not simply to show how these characters are and interact, but how they change over the years.  We see Constanza growing from a baby to a mother, and Bedford writes her life without a false step or unbelievable move.  Often characters seem the same from cradle to grave, but Bedford is cleverer than that.  Here is Constanza as an adult, and a passage about change:

She had learnt to travel light.  In her youth she had looked at fate as the bolt from the clear sky, now she recognized it in the iron rule of time on all human affairs.  Today is not like yesterday; the second chance is not the first.  Whatever turning-points are taken or are missed, it is the length of the passage, the length of the road that counts.  She realized that she would never again entirely belong, but also that a large part of her belonged nowhere else.  Once more she basked, volatile and melancholy: the sun, the fruit, the colour of the stones were her inheritance as well as the sad pagan creed of carpe diem and stoicism for the rest.
In terms of her writing, Bedford belongs (to my mind) with the small and disparate group – as diverse as George Orwell and Elizabeth Taylor – whose style does not clamour and shout, but has a rich beauty in its consistent balance and measure.  It is difficult to point out a phrase which is exceptionally brilliant, or a piece of wit which ought to be repeated – but she is a subtle prose stylist par excellence all the same.

The best novels are the most difficult to write about, I find, especially where the novelist is not highly stylised – there are no grotesques or eccentrics in Bedford’s writing, however welcome these features may be in the hands of other novelists – so I don’t think any review could quite convey the feeling of reading A Favourite of the Gods any more than I can make you understand how it feels to hold the book.  But I hope I’ve encouraged you to seek out this book.  We’ve heard a lot this year about how Elizabeth Taylor is a Well Kept Secret and a dazzling writer.  Well, I think it’s time that Sybille Bedford stepped out onto the stage.

A Card From Angela Carter – Susannah Clapp

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When I was given A Card From Angela Carter at a Bloomsbury party a while ago, I was excited to read it – but, at the same time, I worried that it might be a bit barrel-scrapey.  The barrel that, as far as I know, has in fact scarcely been investigated.  The publication of some of Carter’s postcards seems as though it would be the afterthought to a long series of edited diaries and letters – none of which have been published (or have they?)

But I needn’t have worried.  The selection of postcards Angela Carter had sent to Susannah Clapp was really just an ingenious way for Clapp to organise her thoughts about a dear friend, and a refreshingly original take on the memoir genre.

I love biographies where the writer knew and loved the subject.  Indeed, I’m reading one at the moment that is a strong contender for my favourite book of the year.  So it is lovely to see Angela Carter as Susannah Clapp saw her – witty, a little rude, loyal, colourful, more political than I expected, and a lover of literature.  It is the last quality which I noted down most (perhaps unsurprisingly).  I was surprised, though, to learn that she didn’t like Dickens – that she didn’t find him funny.  I know some people do not, but having read Wise Children (which, thankfully, is the novel Clapp talks about most in A Card) I assumed Carter had been influenced by Dickens’ own extravagant joie de vivre.  But there are plenty of writers Carter did admire:

Yet for her deepest admiration she went further back.  Chaucer – who was “so nice about women” and who, in the Wife of Bath, created a character she loved – was to her the “sanest, the sweetest and most decent of English poets”.  She liked the idea that he wrote “before English became a language of imperialism”.  She liked the notion that The Canterbury Tales, coming from an oral tradition, had to be direct and forceful enough to transmit when read aloud to a room full of people who were busy “sewing or shelling peas”.  She liked the aspects of Chaucer’s work that pre-dated the novel, and half-disapproved of the genre in which she made her name.  “I’m sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class.  Actually.”  That ‘actually’ dangling from the end of a sentence was habitual when she spoke.  Dainty but adamant, it was like the flick of a heel or the toss of her head.  It warded off objections but also slightly invited contradiction.  It both emphasised and slightly undermined what she had just said.  Actually.
And then, of course – of course – there is Shakespeare.  Wise Children is a love letter to Shakespeare – and Clapp’s first-hand knowledge of Carter offers an interesting perspective:

She favoured the bland lines that moved the plot on: “a ship has come from France”.  She was dismissive of the routine idea that had he been alive now he would have been writing for television: he would more likely have been a used-car salesman.
As for the cards themselves – they’re reproduced in b/w in the book, and are mostly a little silly.  There’s the car which looks like a chicken; the myth of mountains in love; the Charles/Diana divorce card… the Statue of Liberty in a lake; Betty Boop as a geisha, and (but of course) Shakespeare.  Clapp uses these cleverly to organise her thoughts about Carter, only occasionally seeming to read more into the choice of card than was probably intended.

It could have all been the scraping of a barrel, but it actually turned out to be very innovative, and rather moving.  For a writer as unusual as Angela Carter, only an unusual form of memoir would do, wouldn’t it?

Wise Children – Angela Carter

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Twins. Theatre. Shakespeare. Eccentrics.  There was never really any chance that I wouldn’t like Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter, was there?

Everything kicks off with 75 year old twins Dora and Nora Chance (with Dora as our narrator) getting an invitation to their father’s 100th birthday party.  Only he (Melchior) has always denied his parentage, instead claiming that his twin brother Peregrine is their father.  They’re understandably a bit miffed by this, but nothing keeps them down for long.  They really are eternal optimists – and delightfully over the top.  They prepare for going out…

Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge.  Revlon, Fire and Ice.  The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven’t had a man for yonks but still we slap it on.  Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night.
That’s a pretty good example of the tone of the novel, actually.  It’s the heightened, slangy voice of Dora, a little coarse but endlessly cheery heroine, along with a good dose of literary references (but the sort that even someone with my rather fleeting familiarity with poetry will get.)  (Yes, I have studied English literature for eight years now – argh! – but I’ve always avoided poetry wherever possible.)

It took me about half the novel before I realised the significance of the title, but I’ll save you some time – it is a wise child that knows his own father, as the proverb goes.  Oh, and if you’ve got the edition pictured (and probably others) then there’s a Dramatis Personae at the back – I didn’t find that until the end, but it would have been VERY useful, as the family is complicated beyond measure.  Heaps of twins, heaps of multiple marriages, and all manner of possible and probable illicit parentages.  All very Shakespearean – which, of course, is precisely the point.  I learnt, in Susannah Clapp’s A Postcard From Angela Carter (which I’ll be writing about soon – maybe tomorrow?) that she intended to get in references to every one of Shakespeare’s plays, but missed out Titus Andronicus.  I wish I’d known that before I started – I’d have had my checklist!  Some are more obvious than others (they film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance) but some are fun to try and spot (is the mysterious resurrection of a character presumed dead a reference to A Winter’s Tale?)

A little while ago I mentioned my literary bête noire, of novels starting in ‘present day’ and then going back to the beginning.  I would probably have loved Wise Children more if Carter had chosen a different narrative structure, but that is what happens here.  We reverse back to Dora and Nora’s youth, their early activities in theatre and film, and their various beaus.  Not to mention the increasingly complex family.  Melchior’s various wives make for fun reading.  Then there is Nora’s boyfriend whom Dora rather likes, so they swap perfumes (the only way they can be told apart, apparently) and Dora has her wicked way with him… and there is a fire.  Everything is gloriously over the top.  So much happens, to so many people, that it is a little dizzying in a short novel, and impossible to recount in detail.  But that is what I loved most about Wise Children – it is mad.  Dora Chance is wonderful – particularly in old age (which is why I wished we’d spent more time there, and less on the past) and the whole novel is wonderfully exuberant – mostly because of the inexhaustibly optimistic voice of Dora, and her turns of phrase, her cheekiness, and her ability to laugh at everything life throws at her.  And Carter is obviously having a whale of a time – it must be an author’s dream to be able to use the most excessive and absurd images all the time – par example:

Flash! A passing paparazzo took a picture of an old lady who looked like St Pancras Station, monumental, grimy, full of Gothic detail
– and to concoct the most extraordinary plots and interrelations, while still able to point over her shoulder and say “Well, it’s no more zany than Shakespeare.”

It’s such a fun book, and a good introduction to Angela Carter for me.  It was her last novel, and I have plenty more to explore now – maybe I’ll even work my way backwards?  But my second dip into Carter territory was, as mentioned, the book Susannah Clapp wrote about her postcards – more on that coming up shortly!

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“Angela Carter’s last novel is an over-exuberant bear hug of a book; it’s the literary equivalent of being dragged into a conga line at a party, and it does this with such big-hearted, good-natured cheeriness that it is quite impossible to resist.” – Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room

“I think that Angela Carter is like what I imagine marzipan to be like, or maybe this particular sort of chocolate mint cake my father has: delicious and rich but you maybe wouldn’t want a massive lot of it at once.” – Jenny, Jenny’s Books

“The novel succeeds on multiple levels, and on a uncomplicated plane it sincerely argues for the recognition of simple joy under the long and often theatrical masks of seriousness and complexity.” – Leif, Leif and the Pages

Song for a Sunday

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A lovely lady called Diana got in touch with me a while ago to recommend Christian artist Sara Groves as a Sunday Song singer.  Well, I know and love Groves’ album The Other Side of Something, but Diana sent a few links to more recent songs, and I liked them.  I picked ‘Childhood Summer’ more or less at random, because it seemed appropriate for the last-ditch effort at summer we’ve been having this weekend.  Thanks, Diana!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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My weekend is looking pretty busy – a wedding later today, and then packing, packing, packing.  For I am moving house – to Headington, just east of Oxford.  If anyone would like to update their address books, email me and I’ll let you know my new address…  My actual move date is next Wednesday, so I may go a bit quiet, depending on how internet goes in the new place, and whether or not I manage to prepare some blog posts in advance.

1.) The book – nearly two years ago, I was surprised by how much I liked Ned Beauman’s Boxer, Beetle, and now his next novel has been published by Sceptre.  It’s called The Teleportation Accident (great title; great cover) and you can read more about it here.

2.) The link – is hilarious.  Fancy eavesdropping on a sleep talking man?  His wife records his alter ego (he does know about this!) and then transcribes.  It’s so funny!  Have a listen here.

3.) The blog post – it’s that time already!  Rosamund Lehmann Reading Week starts on Monday.  When I first heard about it, I didn’t know I’d be moving house… I’m still very, very keen to join in, but… well, I’ll try really hard.  If you’re not in the process of packing up all your belongings, you should definitely join in. Let Florence tell you more here.

Have a great weekend!

His Monkey Wife – John Collier

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Some titles are metaphors.  Some titles seem to suggest one thing, only for the book to be about something completely different – from The Silence of the Lambs to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.  And His Monkey Wife (1930) is also a bit false… but only because he isn’t married to the monkey.  There is some question of it later.  But, as the novel kicks off, it’s simply that a monkey is in love with him.  That’s all.

Mr. Fatigay is an English schoolmaster in the Congo whose charms (mostly of a scholarly nature) win him the love and affection of Emily, a chimpanzee.  (I’m afraid I don’t know the difference between monkey, ape, and chimp, or where these things might overlap – for the sake of argument, I’ll refer to Emily as a chimp [which she definitely is] rather than the title’s monkey [which she might or might not be.])  Emily is rather a dear.  She is incredibly intelligent, and with an eavesdropping sort of learning, manages to become an expert reader – although she cannot talk.  You might remember that last October I wrote about G.E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia, where a woman tries – with a limited sort of success – to educate an ape as her son.  Well, Mr. Fatigay is a fairly oblivious man, and has much greater success without even meaning to.

Is it so hard to understand how she came to a comprehension of the function of books, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter functions of language?  Our scientists may think so, who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana.  They suspend the delicacy from the ceiling of a cage and assess the subject’s mentality in terms of the number of boxes he or she will pile one upon another in order to secure it, failing to see that nothing is revealed except the value which that particular chimp chooses to set upon the fruit.  And, beyond a certain low limit, this surely is in inverse ratio to intelligence.  What boy of ten would not pile up a dozen boxes in an attempt to climb within reach of it?  How many would Einstein clamber upon?  And how many less would Shakespeare?  Emily, though a fruitarian by instinct, would have disdained an eagerness capable of more than two and a jump.
For Emily is quite concerned with etiquette, and wants to do things properly.  And thus it pains her to break into Mr. Fatigay’s desk and read the letters from his fiancée in England – but she is not perfect, and not unafflicted by jealousy.  She is all ready to sacrifice her love at the altar of Mr. F’s happiness, but when she has read the letters, she (and the reader) realise how callous his fiancée, Amy, really is.  She is stringing out the engagement, clearly not eager for Mr. Fatigay to return from Congo.

But they do go back to England.  Emily is thrilled to be accompanying Mr. Fatigay… but less thrilled when she realises why.  He is giving her to Amy as a present, to be Amy’s maid!  Emily is not averse to a little hard work, but it is hardly dignifying to be the maid of your rival in love… especially one who shrinks from Mr. Fatigay’s touch, and treats him appallingly.  What can Emily do?….

Celebrity librarian (!) Nancy Pearl apparently called Emily one of the best characters in modern fiction, which is quite the claim –  but I can see where she’s coming from.  Emily is so charming.  Besides being besotted with Mr. Fatigay, she is wholly enamoured with books.  She manages to sneak out of Amy’s apartment to visit the British Museum – and becomes quite a cult figure there.  Apparently the simple expedient of wearing clothes renders her more or less indistinguishable from a human (and there is, sad to say, a bit of 1930s racism in this section, when various gents try to guess her country of origin.  For the most part, they settle on Spain – but because of her spirit, rather than her appearance.)

“Well, I like her,” said a simple fellow, “because she’s a little woman.  A bouncing little woman.  I like them like that.  My first wife was not.  I was deliriously happy with my first wife.  With my second – not altogether so.  I like a bouncing little woman.” 

“Well, gentlemen” said the senior member of the company, who ignored the last remark as being the probably carnal utterance of one whose work was merely the compiling of a cyclist’s encyclopaedia.  “Well, gentlemen, we had better make a move if we’re to catch a last glimpse of her, for like all that’s best in life, she comes late and departs early, Heaven knows where.”
I always find it impossible not to love a bibliophile in a novel – and Emily’s love of the written word is a joy.  Indeed, she is a joy altogether.  As Osbert Sitwell writes somewhere, she is in many ways the least animalistic of all the characters.  She is certainly more sophisticated, responsible, moral, and caring than Amy – although things do take rather a twist later in the book… and the ending came as quite a surprise…

Collier has picked an eccentric theme for his novel, and sometimes that might have hindered rather than boosted my interest in his writing.  Sure, I wouldn’t have read this novel if it weren’t relevant for my thesis – but I can’t help wondering how his talent for characterisation and writing would fare in a more quotidian novel.   The only other thing I’ve read by him (and this will serve as my post to link to from A Century of Books, as I don’t think I’m going to blog about it fully) is Green Thoughts (1932), a short book (c.50pp.) where people metamorph into plants – also well-written, but absorbed by the strange.

What I liked most about his writing were the incidental similes he used, and they crop up a lot.  Here’s one:

Fate, whose initial gifts to lovers are supplied as generously as those free meals an angler offers to the fish[…]
And there are plenty more to look out for!  He’s also pretty witty, adept at turning a sentence in a semi-Wildean way:

The men were the sort who have given up art for marriage, but, as if nature was scheming to restore the balance, many of their women appeared likely to give up marriage for art.
Collier really is quite an impressive prose stylist, finding that middle ground between modernist experimental and simple storytelling.  There are loads of literary references throughout, from Virginia Woolf to George Moore: Collier clearly respects his audience’s intelligence.  I don’t really know what else he wrote, but I think this might be a case where the novelty of his topic overshadows the talent Collier simply has as a novelist.  I admired His Monkey Wife, and I’d be intrigued to read something else… does anybody know anything else about John Collier and his work?

Manguel on… the Destruction of Books

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For a while I’ve been reading Alberto Manguel’s wonderful The Library at Night, given to me by my brother last year.  It’s the perfect book to have next to my laptop while I’m writing my thesis – when I need a quite break, rather than browsing Facebook I read a few delightful pages of Manguel.  And, like I did with Stop What You’re Doing And Read This, I’m going to be posting quite a few funny, recognisable, thought-provoking, or simply good, excerpts from The Library At Night, along with some paintings I like, preferably of readers (following Harriet‘s great ongoing series – I may accidentally use pictures which have already featured over there!)  First off is ‘Reading Room at Buxton Library’ by Robert McLellan-Sim, from the 1930s..

“As repositories of history or sources for the future, as guides or manuals for difficult times, as symbols of authority past or present, the books in a library stand for more than their collective contents, and have, since the beginning of writing, been considered a threat.  It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.  Those books may no longer be available for consultation, that may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality.”

— Alberto Manguel, ‘The Library at Night’ (p.123)

Five From the Archive (no.5)

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I hope the Canadian bloggers among you don’t mind my affectionate teasing in the sketch(!)  Although I’ve never been to Canada, I feel a certain affinity with that nation – we Brits (when we’re not binge-drinking football fans) also radiate politeness (even when seething), and apologise when someone bumps into us.  Kate Fox’s Watching the English is a brilliant read for this sort of thing, and will probably appear in a Five from the Archive at some point – but, for today…

Five… Books By Canadians.

1.) Too Much Happiness (2009) by Alice Munro

In short: A collection by one of the world’s most acclaimed short story writers.  Munro examines many themes, but particularly death and intrusion.

From the review: “In playing with the short story genre, Munro invents a formless form appropriate to her superlative talent as an observer of human nature and human interaction.”

2.) Literary Lapses (1910) by Stephen Leacock

In short: Very amusing sketches by an exceptionally gifted comic writer, not well known outside his native land.

From the review: “Stephen Leacock is a humorist par excellence. If I utter his name in the same breath as PG Wodehouse, it is not because their styles are all that similar (though both make fantastic use of stylistic exaggeration) but because Leacock is the only writer I would dare hold up to Wodehouse.”

3.) Crow Lake (2002) by Mary Lawson

In short: A sister returns to visit her family, feeling guilty that she has studied for a PhD while her siblings have had to sacrifice their education… but things become more complex than that…

From the review: “Lawson writes with so many character nuances, and is concerned with subtle issues of empathy, sympathy, unity, hope, hopelessness, courage, foolishness, pride, misunderstanding – it’s all there.”

4.) The Penelopiad (2005) by Margaret Atwood

In short: A re-telling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective.

From the review: “The ‘hook’ of Atwood’s narrative, though – a more original feminist viewpoint – is the death of Penelope’s twelve maids. Odysseus apparently had them hanged upon his return from his voyage. I suspect this is a footnote in Homer’s original, but Atwood plays it to its full potential, and it really is an ingenious angle: why were they killed, when they had aided Penelope?”

5.) Let’s Kill Uncle (1963) by Rohan O’Grady

In short: A troubled orphan, Barnaby, is sent to a Canadian island and befriends a local girl, Christie.  Nobody would believe that Barnaby’s kindly uncle is, in fact, a manipulative, evil man, intent on killing him.  Barnaby and Christie hatch a plan to kill the uncle first…

From the review: “When I read in the blurb that Donna Tartt had called Let’s Kill Uncle a ‘dark, whimsical, startling book’, I was a little confused. Surely those words clash a bit when placed together? And I’m still not sure that there is much whimsy in the novel, unless you describe any scene without blood as whimsical – but it’s certainly the lightest dark book I’ve ever read. Or possibly the darkest light book.”

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Over to you!  Which would you suggest?  (I chosen this ‘five’ theme because I’ve read so few Canadians – I imagine many of you would be able to suggest dozens.)

I should add that I loved The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, but apparently never blogged about it.  And, before you suggest it, I really did not like The Handmaid’s Tale…