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Six Degrees of Separation: from The Snow Child to

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I keep an eye on the 6 Degrees of Separation meme from Books Are My Favourite And Best, and was pleased to see it kicked off this month with a book I’ve read and loved – The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. As Kate says – ‘Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.’

The Snow Child.jpg

Starting book: As I said, the first book is Eowyn Ivey’s take on a fairy tale, The Snow Child, where a childless couple in 1920s Alaska discover a child living alone in the snowy wilderness. They want to take her in and she wants to remain wild, and a love story of sorts begins between these kind, hurt trio. I found it a deeply moving book – I had to put it down for a few months at first, because it is so piercingly poignant.

British Library Women Writers 11: The Love Child by Edith Olivier – Stuck in a Book

1st degree of separation: A very clear link with Edith Olivier’s 1927 novel The Love-Child, in which a childless woman so keenly yearns for a child – well, for friendship really – that she inadvertently brings her old childhood imaginary friend Clarissa to life. All goes well, but a power struggle evolves. It is a novella, but so perfectly and movingly done.

A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing: Amazon.co.uk: Anna Thomasson: 9781447245537: Books

2nd degree of separation: I never tire of recommending Anna Thomasson’s wonderful biography of the friendship between the author of The Love-Child, Edith Olivier, and the artist Rex Whistler. Though from different generations, they had a beautiful meeting of minds in the 1920s – and Thomasson tracks how Olivier had a new lease of life in her middle-age, surrounded by these bright young things. It’s an absorbing, brilliant, and unusual biography.

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

3rd degree of separation: Let’s go for a book about an artist – one, like Rex Whistler, who was taken seriously for illustration when she would rather have been known for other artwork. I’m talking about Anna in Tove Jansson’s darkly brilliant The True Deceiver (trans. Thomas Teal). You can listen to Rachel and me talk about it on a recent ‘Tea or Books?’ episode.

Things that Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava, Emily Jeremiah | Waterstones

4th degree of separation: Another brilliant book by a Finnish write – Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From The Sky (trans. Emily and Fleur Jeremiah). It’s about people to whom very unusual things have happened – whether winning the lottery twice, being killed by a falling block of ice, or being struck by lightning repeatedly. Though really it’s about how people respond, and it’s told in a tone that seems to mix dream and reality.

Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press): Amazon.co.uk: Jenn Ashworth: 9781912685196: Books

5th degree of separation: I really wanted to pick a novel about something unusual that falls from the sky. Wouldn’t that be a good link? I couldn’t manage that, so let’s go with the falling connection – Jenn Ashworth’s memoir Notes Made While Falling. I say memoir, but it fuses so many genres and ideas that it is hard to categorise. It starts with an extremely traumatic birth that Ashworth experienced – the sound of her blood falling on the floor returns and echoes through the book. From there it covers an extraordinary amount of ground. It is such a special, ambitious book.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: Amazon.co.uk: Shapiro, James: 9780571338887: Books

6th degree of separation: There is a chapter of Ashworth’s book that is ostensibly about why she doesn’t like King Lear, but is really about fathers and memories. I love the technique of using Shakespeare in interesting ways to discuss other cultural, historical or personal moments – and that’s what a book I’ve recently read is about: James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America. A fascinating look at the unexpected significance of Shakespeare’s writings in many important moments/periods of America’s history – from Lincoln’s assassination to the anti-slavery movement to the affair of Bill Clinton.

There we go, what a journey – but starting and ending in America.

Project 24: 19, 20, 21, 22

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I went for quite a while without buying any of my allotted 24 books under Project 24. And then, dear reader, the dam burst. I couldn’t stop buying. Three of these four were online, and one was from a local bookshop – and, unusually for me, three of these are new books. (There’s also another new book, I guess my 23rd for the year, on its way to me from America – because the US cover is so much nicer than the 24th.)

Here are the four books I bought, and why…

Spring Always Comes by Elizabeth Cambridge

As I said, most of these really came because I was missing book buying. They wouldn’t necessarily have found their way to my shelves with any urgency if it weren’t for me jonesing for buying some books. But Spring Always Comes is the exception. I loved Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge – the one Persephone reprinted – and have read it a few times since 2004, when I first delved in. It’s a domestic novel par excellence – but other Cambridge novels are quite tricky to find. And ever since I read Barb’s 10/10 review of Spring Always Comes, I’ve wanted to get hold of this. And finally a copy turned up online! And now it is MINE.

The Crime of Sheila McGough by Janet Malcolm

Whenever my Malcolm pile gets low, I panic and buy another. And I’m running out. She is just so brilliant. This is her, presumably unusual, take on a investigation into a lawyer who has imprisoned for a crime she says she hasn’t committed.

The First To Die At The End by Adam Silvera

I’m at least two decades older than this book’s audience, but I thought his teen novel They Both Die At The End was really good – the conceit is that, on the day you will die, you get a phone call telling you it will happen. And what a brilliant title! This is a prequel, but I think it’s about two entirely different people.

Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks seems to be getting a lot of rave reviews, and I’ve downloaded the One Bright Book episode on it to listen to when I’ve read it. It was on my radar because I follow the author on Twitter, and loved her Hark, A Vagrant cartoon blog for years. She has such an incisive, fun look at literary and historical culture. Ducks is something completely different – a graphic memoir on working in oil sands. I bought a copy for my friend’s birthday and then went back to the bookshop and bought a copy for myself, because it sounded so up my street.

I’ll let you know what the other book is when it arrives – partly because it was my most impulsey of impulse buys and I don’t actually recall the author or the title. What will my final book of the year be?? I was doing really well and now I only have one precious purchase to last me for almost a month…

Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Two Thousand Million Man-Power eBook by Gertrude Trevelyan - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

One of the questions asked about Gertrude Trevelyan (the artist formerly known as G.E. Trevelyan) is why she has disappeared, when her writing is so good and her early reviews were glowing. One answer, of course, is that any number of brilliant writers disappear – and that’s why we should be grateful for reprint series like Recovered Books (edited by Brad Bigelow aka Neglected Books). Another reason, with this book at least, is that Trevelyan chose one of the worst titles imaginable. Please don’t let it put you off. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) is so much better than the title suggests.

It comes from a quote about machine power in the US, and essentially how it will put an awful lot of people out of work. One of the men in danger of losing work is Richard Thomas – a research chemist whose work has largely been concerned with cosmetics, face creams etc. He is definitely at the commercial end of the research scientist world, which might be thought to help him in an era of increasing capitalism. And you’d be wrong.

The other main character in Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a schoolteacher called Katherine. The early sections of the novel chart their coming together and falling for each other, against a backdrop of youthful idealism and radicalism. While both have jobs, and are thus perhaps part of the machine of capitalism, they rail against it. They have hope for changes in the future, while also still enjoying any trappings of middle-class life that do come their way. Impressively, Trevelyan makes both Robert and Katherine deeply empathetic. They may have aspects of hypocrisy from the beginning, and they may be more earnest than is usual for a lovable fictional character, but we are invited into their lives in such detailed ways that it’s impossible not to care about them.

Throughout the novel, Trevelyan uses a conceit that must have been difficult to pull off, but is rather brilliant. After some pages of scenes of daily life for Katherine and Robert, she will give a list of significant world events happening – often hinting towards a war that was still a prediction rather than a reality when the novel was published in 1937. And she will then swoop from the broad to the specific, narrowing in on a simple action of Katherine’s or Robert’s. It’s like a camera panning in suddenly. Here’s an example from early in the novel:

The Protocol is coming. France rejects the notion that there is no such thing as a German air-force: air-ports springing up: Dutch, Danish, Italian and Russian establishments produce aeroplanes for the Reich. Powder and munition factories in Russia work full time under German engineers: ten thousand aeroplane programme. In Rome a great demonstration celebrates the sixth anniversary of the birth of Fascismo. Naval manoeuvres off Magdalena Bay – “greatest concentration of naval power ever assembled in the Pacific” – show America powerless to protect the Pacific coast against an attack of enemy air-force. The Government of Great Britain is unable to accept the Protocol. Katherine, with her paper spread out on the stuffy green cloth of the parlour table behind the ferns of 26 Verbena Road, feels terribly flat and wear, and all at once she knows that the one thing in the world she wants is to tell Robert Thomas all about it.

As the book spans from 1919 to 1936, these sections must have required a lot of research – or a lot of faith in her memory. I found them very effective, written with a Woolf-like rhythm and making the emotions of the two protagonists feel equally significant with huge world events. Because, of course, they are – in the eyes of Katherine and Robert. All of us still feel our everyday lives very deeply, whatever else is going on in the world. (The introduction and the afterword to this edition, which are remarkably similar in content, both mention that John Dos Passos had recently done something similar in his USA Trilogy – I haven’t read it, so can’t comment on how original Trevelyan was being – but, to my mind, it really sets the novel apart.) (Incidentally, the afterword also mentions a ‘near-complete absence of any mention of Trevelyan’s work in any sources I could locate online’, and I’m proud to say that I was one of the few exceptions – both on this blog and in my DPhil thesis, where I wrote about her novel Appius and Virginia.)

As the novel continues, and time passes, Katherine and Robert lose some of their idealism in the face of financial realities. Or, rather, everyday practicalities have replaced any fervour they had for effecting change. Their anxieties have moved from whether they’ll be seen together, unmarried, to whether or not they’ll be able to find work. There are sections of both going looking for jobs, and the reasons they are turned down. Their household objects are ranked by what can be sold. On the other hand, when anything looks up these objects are re-bought, and Katherine starts looking for nicer homes to move to. Their whole life seems to be guided by what they can or can’t afford, and the exact slot this puts them into.

They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it. That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want. And now it had caught up Kath again and tired her out, so that she couldn’t think of anything but food and rent. It didn’t make much difference whether the machine caught you up or threw you out; it came to the same in the end.

Trevelyan is brilliant at taking the reader through these all-encompassing scenarios, so we feel the stakes as keenly as Robert and Katherine. Even the ‘newspaper headline’ style reminders that much else was going on in the world can’t compete. These two lives are the most significant things on the page. And while Two Thousand Million Man-Power certainly isn’t a happy book, it also didn’t feel too miserable. It helps that the writing is beautiful and the authorly control of the narrative is absolute, but ultimately the feeling I got from the book was that happiness and unhappiness aren’t the point. The novel ends up being about survival, and what the constant drive to keep head above water can do to a couple. And yet we get to know them too intimately to feel that this novel is about some abstract point. It’s about Katherine and Robert, and how they lost their identities.

Fifty Forgotten Books by R.B. Russell

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Fifty Forgotten Books | And Other Stories

One of the books I took on holiday to read was also one of the books I’ve bought under Project 24 – Fifty Forgotten Books (2022) by R.B. Russell. It’s exactly the sort of book I can’t resist, and it was every bit as enjoyable as I’d hoped. I absolutely loved reading it.

Of course, bibliophiles who tend to read slightly more obscure books will ask, ‘Are these really forgotten?’ And of course they are not all completely obscure books, but I have only read five of the 50. Four of those were actually books I discussed in my DPhil thesis (The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay, Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser and – hurrah! – Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker). The fifth is The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson, perhaps one of the best-remembered names in the book. But, yes, there were an awful lot of titles and authors I’d never heard of, and I very much enjoyed reading why Russell had chosen them for inclusion.

There certainly isn’t any attempt to make this an objective collection of titles. They are certainly books that reveal one man’s personal taste, and in some ways Fifty Forgotten Books is a memoir, a little like The Books of My Life by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Compared to something like Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors (which I enjoyed, and which also includes Miss Hargreaves), Russell’s book is much more personal and he doesn’t devote each short chapter exclusively to the book being mentioned. Rather, he will use the book in question as a prompt for writing about something going on in his life. Or, I should say, his bookish life. That means we get truly delightful looks behind the scenes at the development of his literary taste, his bookshopping habits, or the origin and history of Tartarus Press – a small-edition publishing house that Russell co-runs, and which came to my attention when they reprinted Miss Hargreaves in the mid-2000s.

Tartarus Press specialises in the literary supernatural/strange/horror, and that is certainly reflected in his selection here. It overlaps with my love of the fantastic (hence the four books that were in my thesis on the Middlebrow Fantastic) and, while I’m unlikely to leap towards some of the horror or fantasy books he recommends, I still loved reading about them. I was already feeling confident that Russell was something of a kindred spirit when I got to the Miss Hargreaves section. This opening line makes me wonder if I am secretly the same person as Russell:

With limited house room, there is little excuse for owning multiple copies of the same book. I do, though, feel I can justify my five different copies of Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker.

Why, yes, I do also have five copies of Miss Hargreaves, and would readily buy any future ones I find, so long as they’re not editions I already have. One of the differences between Russell’s bibliophilia and mine is that he cares about first editions. He often talks about replacing copies of much-loved books with first editions, perhaps then moving on to a first edition with a dustjacket, and so forth. It’s an angle of literary life that I’ve never understood. I’d definitely opt for a book with a lovely dustjacket, for aesthetic reasons, but I can never see why anybody cares if a book is a first edition or a 50th edition, so long as the text is the same. Well, it saves me money!

Threaded through a lot of sections is the memoir-esque bit that I found the most intriguing – Russell’s experiences with the Arthur Machen Society. We learn about the machinations (ho-ho) of this society along the way, including misunderstandings, draconian leaders, unsettling periods in leadership, and the start of a rival organisation.

There are times when you can find yourself embroiled in unexpected battles, even in literary societies where so little might appear to be at stake. […] Matters came to a head in September 1966 when a member from Tunbridge Wells phoned to ask why he’d had a subscription reminder when he had received no journals or newsletters in the previous year. When I passed this complaint on to Mrs X, her reaction was such that I could only share Mr Talbot’s concerns. She could not explain how the subscriptions had been spent, and when I suggested that this was an unsatisfactory situation, she launched an unpleasant personal attack upon me. I was confused and hurt, and I could see no option but to resign.

Any of us with experience of big fish in small ponds may well recognise the type of Mrs X. What I found impressive is that, even when Russell is writing about disputes and fallings-out, he comes across very well. He always seems kind, thoughtful, and eager to share passions about literature with like-minded people. He is refreshingly free from any book snobbery, taking in all genres and all types of literature equally. In short, it was a pleasure to spent these 254 pages with him – and, for that reason, I think Fifty Forgotten Books would be very enjoyable and engaging even if you’ve never heard of any of the 50 authors.

I’ve come away with a little list of books to look out for, happy reminders of some titles I’ve enjoyed and, above all, the happy experience of spending time in the company of somebody who unabashedly loves books and knows the power they can have to grow as a person, form communities, and connect with authors who are long gone.

The books I got for my birthday

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I’m back from my holiday – staying on the Menabilly estate, which is where Manderley from Rebecca is based on! We weren’t in the old house, so no need to worry about unhinged housekeepers – we were in the rather lovely gardener’s cottage. It was a relaxed, fun week. And then I stayed with some friends while my bathroom were redone, so it’s like coming home to a different home. Well, one different room in the same home.

It was my birthday while I was away and, unsurprisingly, I got quite a few books. Hurrah! Some of these were from my wishlist, while others are lovely surprises. From left to right…

Remainders of the Day by Shaun Bythell
If it weren’t for Project 24, I’d have bought this as soon as it was published – as it was, I was delighted to get a copy of it from my parents. And, indeed, I’ve already read it. More soon! It’s the third of Shaun Bythell’s hilarious diaries about running a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. It’s just as brilliant as the others, and I hope he keeps writing them forever.

You Don’t Look Like Anybody I Know by Heather Sellers
The first of two books my friend Malie selected from my wishlist – I don’t remember where I originally heard about this memoir of prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, but it’s a topic I find fascinating.

The English Library Journey by John Bevis
I hadn’t heard of this memoir – of a man trying to get a library card for every library in the UK. But gosh it sounds exactly up my street. A bookish, quirky tour of the country? Yes please. Thank you to my friend Lorna for spotting this and knowing it would be perfect for me.

How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis
The other one from Malie – a delightful-looking book about learning from literary heroines that has been on my wishlist for such a long time. Really pleased to have the opportunity now to read this one.

A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke
I added this to my wishlist after Rachel mentioned she was reading it on an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ – it sounded so weird and interesting. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am very intrigued by the history of people believing in ghosts, and the lengths they’ll go to to find out more. My friend Clare bought it, having also read and loved it, and I think it’s next on my non-fiction reading list.

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret
This is the other book from Clare – I added it to my wishlist earlier this year after reading Keret’s brilliant collection of short stories Suddenly, A Knock on the Door.

The Trouble With Sunbathers by Magnus Mills
Sunbathers in a Bottle by Magnus Mills
These were from Colin – I love Magnus Mills, as long-time readers of Stuck in a Book will know, and he got quite prolific in the past few years. I’m going to line these up for Novella A Day In May next year, I think,

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills
And another Mills! Fittingly, this one was from my friend Mel, who introduced me to Mills in the first place. I actually gave this one as a birthday present to another friend a couple of years ago and had to resist reading it myself first, so now I have the chance.

What Writers Read edited by Pandora Sykes
A lovely book about books from my friend Phoebe (aka Esther Rutter, author of This Golden Fleece). Everyone knows how much I love these!

The final ‘book’ on the pile is actually a book of postcards – Tom Gauld’s wonderful bookish cartoons, collected as The Snooty Bookshop, which were a gift from my friend Emily.

Very pleased with my birthday haul – anything you’d enjoy or recommend?

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Too Much: Amazon.co.uk: Allen, Tom: 9781529397437: BooksHappy weekend! I’m off on holiday so won’t be blogging for a bit. But, dear burglars, there will be someone in my house while I’m away. No burgling please! Or burglarising, for my American friends. Or burglarizing, I suppose. The word ‘burgle’ has lost all meaning for me.

An episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ will be coming out while I’m away, but otherwise I’ll leave you with a book, a blog post, a link.

1.) The blog post – Susan at A Life in Books always comes up with interesting topics for blog posts, and ‘Five Novels I’ve Read With Unusual Structures‘ is no exception.

2.) The book – I loved comedian Tom Allen’s book No Shame, and I’m looking forward to Too Much coming out on 10 November. I recommend listening to him reading his own audiobooks. This memoir will cover his father’s recent death and, if it’s anything like the previous book, it will be sensitive, observant, and hilarious.

3.) The link – I love the ‘Never Too Small’ YouTube channel – looking at how architects have designed stylish, functional homes in small spaces. Here’s one to get you started, but you might end up getting addicted and binge-watching…

Announcing the next club

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It’s been another really great club year! Thank you to Karen for co-hosting and for all the people who submitted reviews. I think we got to about 85 reviews between us, which is brilliant – covering everything from detective novels to Modernists and everything in between. Here’s everything we read.

As usual, we’re announcing the next club as soon as one ends – so, next April, get ready to join us for the 1940 Club! It’s a miracle that it’s taken this long to do the year that Miss Hargreaves was published, but here we are.

Plenty of time to get thinking about what to pick up off the shelf…

Three more #1929Club books

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It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Giono, Jean, Abram, David, Eprile, Paul: 9781590179185: Books

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman by Stephen Leacock – #1929Club

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Stephen Leacock is one of the authors I first got really into, and I’ve put together quite a collection. Like a lot of the authors I loved around 2002-2005, I binge-read a lot at the time and now only read one every few years. When I spotted that The Iron Man and the Tin Woman was a 1929 title, it was a great opportunity to make this one my next Leacock.

It’s not one of his best known or easiest to find, in this country at least, and I think it’s a really interesting addition to the 1929 Club because it’s about the future. While in Leacock’s characteristic style of humour – dry exaggeration – it shows what was considered to be the frontiers of modernity in 1929. Some of the sections are what might happen in a couple of decades’ time, while other sections highlight things that seem alarmingly modern in everyday life. For example, there is the idea that life is far more regulated by rules and bureaucracy:

“Dear me!” sighed Angelina, “I suppose it’s wicked to say it, but sometimes it seems terrible to live in this age when everything is so regulated. Did you read that awfully clever novel that came out last week called ‘Wicked Days’ that told all about our great-grandfathers’ time when people used to just do almost as they liked?”

“No, the book was suppressed, you know, immediately. But I heard something of it.”

“It must have been awfully queer. Anybody could go round anywhere and visit any house they liked and actually, just think of it!—go and eat meals in other people’s houses and even in public restaurants without a Sanitary Inspector’s Certificate or anything!”

Edward shook his head. “Sounds a bit dangerous,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’d like it. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had a cold in the head, you might catch it. Or suppose you found yourself eating in a restaurant perhaps only six feet away from a person infected with an inferiority complex, it might get communicated to you.” He shivered.

“Let’s sit down,” said Angelina suddenly. “I want to go on talking, but I don’t feel like walking up and down all the time. Here’s a bench. I wonder if we are allowed to sit on it.”

“I’ve got a Sitting License for two in my pocket,” said Edward, “but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s been stamped.”

I also love any time when Leacock apes popular styles of writing, and applies them to mundanities to highlight their absurdities. It’s something he often returns to and I can’t quite describe what he’s doing and why I enjoy it so much. Anyway, here’s an example – where he is satirising the tell-all memoir:

I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.

First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.

And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.

My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.

I found The Iron Man and the Tin Woman a mixed bag – and enjoyable, but with limits. Leacock is always diverting, and he has a real eye for human foibles and a gentleness, even a kindness, in the way that he teases them. But the premise of this book has its limits. When his vision of the dizzying future is 1950, it’s understandable that some of the impact is lost by 1950. For instance, he suggests people will be taking round-the-world tourist trips within a day by 1950 – and, the brilliantly observant bit, will be rather bored by them and glad to get home. Now, the humour relies a little on the possibility of this happening. 70+ years later, we know it hasn’t. It’s still fun, but without the frisson of possibility that a 1929 audience would have seen in the background.

The other thing that stands out, reading this almost a century after it was published, was how eternal the complaints about modernity are. Among the ideas that are highlighted in this book are:

  • too many cars on the road
  • marriage not being taken seriously
  • everything being too commercialised
  • young people not respecting their elders or being willing to work hard
  • advertising being devious

It just goes to show that every generation complains about more or less the same things. And, of course, every generation sees themselves as the pinnacle of modernity – for good and bad – as every generation is the pinnacle of modernity, until they are replaced. If The Iron Man and the Tin Woman is probably best read in 1929, it was still fun to read today. Definitely not where I’d recommend somebody start with Stephen Leacock, but plenty to enjoy for the existing fan.

Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1929Club

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For years, the only novel by Mollie Panter-Downes that was available was her last – One Fine Day – which is also her masterpiece. By comparison, her earlier novels were extremely scarce. The British Library Women Writers series has reprinted My Husband Simon, and there must be question marks out there about her others. Are they worth reprinting? Well, I am in the fortunate position of owning all her novels, and Storm Bird happens to be a perfect candidate for the 1929 Club.

I was quite surprised when the main character of Storm Bird turned out to be a man who has recently been widowed. Martin Thorpe is old for 1929, though wouldn’t be considered so now – in his sixties. Florence is the wife who has recently died, and she immediately fades into the background. We don’t learn a lot about her along the way, and it seems that Martin began forgetting her long before she died. For the most part, the narrative isn’t particularly interested in her either, but I did think this passage was beautifully done:

It was a little cruel that when Martin Thorpe thought of his dead wife it was only as a woman who had made the last twenty-five years extraordinarily comfortable, for she had been a creature of quite a few memorable moments and much talent for a sturdy kind of companionship. Although she had never understood him, he had loved her deeply, yet when he tried to conjure up her fine dusky looks he found only a blurred impression of good food and a quiet skill in handling servants. Her ringing laugh was becoming increasingly difficult to remember, though the culinary triumphs of her dinners were as vivid in his mind as ever. He could even recall the clothes she wore better than the body which had once turned his feet from Mexico to Broad Street. Plunging into the chilly waters of death, she had left surprisingly few and trivial garments on the bank.

Florence’s real purpose is to have provided Martin with a daughter, Leslie, now an adult and rather dependent on her father financially and socially. We are not far into the novel when Martin spots Sara across the room at a party that is too bohemian and self-congratulatory for his liking. She is young and striking, and Martin is struck.

He stopped in the middle of his talk to ask her with startling suddenness how old she was. She told him ‘twenty-four’. He stared at the years separating them, and thought how hot, dusty, and jaded he must seem to her, glowing with that magic which he envied with an envy almost like hate.

The reader can see what is coming from the outset, though I have to admit I was rather hoping it wouldn’t. Perhaps there are good relationships in real life with around a 40-year age gap, but they just seem icky on the page. To me, at least. There is something so uncomfortable about an old man romancing a young woman, particularly with this wealth imbalance. Sara has been an artists’ model to make money, and her nude form can be found in paintings in exhibitions and homes. Martin is wealthy in a way that means non-wealth has barely appeared on his radar.

The marriage of Martin and Sara is dealt with cleverly by Panter-Downes. We don’t see much of the development of the relationship. It is sprung on us with suddenness – in the same way that it is sprung on Martin’s daughter Leslie. Unsurprisingly, she is not particular won over by the idea. If the reader is reacting the same, then one line of dialogue might be intended to chastise us:

“If only she wasn’t so young! That’s what makes it -“

“If only,” said her father softly, “your objections weren’t so distressingly conventional.”

After this, it’s a novel about what happens when two people from different worlds marry, with clearly few people on their side. One of the things I found interesting about it, as so often in club years, is how certain societal trends are considered to be at an extreme – when we know, from our 21st-century vantage, that it was simply the tip of the ice-berg. In this instance, I’m thinking about this line:

Divorce was so easy in these days; all her friends slipped in and out of marriage as though it were a shoe which pinched here or was too loose there.

As you’ll have seen from some of these lines, I think Panter-Downes’ writing is often very good in Storm Bird. You can certainly see signs of the observational, detailed prose writer she’d become. I think where the novel falls down a little is in character and plot. It often feels quite cartoonish, or derived from melodramas and penny romances. That is to say, people behave like characters in a book, rather than people.

I looked up how old Panter-Downes was when she wrote this – 22. About the age of Sara, but choosing to focalise the novel through Martin. And what does a 22-year-old know about being widowed after a long marriage? It’s clear that, at this stage of her writing career, Panter-Downes was learning from books rather than from life. And it shows. There is no psychological depth to Storm Bird; it is more histrionic than moving.

It’s interesting as a way of seeing what Panter-Downes would become – and only two years later she would write a rather better book in My Husband Simon, perhaps because it is so clearly autobiographical. In Storm Bird, she was trying to put herself into another life – as great writers always have – but simply wasn’t good enough to that yet.