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Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell

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When I saw that Manderley Press had reprinted Appointment With Venus (1951) by Jerrard Tickell in the beautiful new edition pictured, I decided I had to get my own copy off the shelf. Mine isn’t quite so beautiful (what could be?) but it’s got its own charm – one of those books from the Reprint Society where they covered the dustjacket with quasi-astrological pictures that aren’t very relevant to the plot. You might think it’s to do with the title, but my copy of Guard Your Daughters is the same.

It’s worth noting from the outset that the Venus of the title isn’t the planet, or even the goddess – it’s a cow. Let me explain. The action takes place on Armorel, a fictional addition to the Channel Islands (at one point the others are listed, so it’s not a stand-in). The population is about 300, in a close-knit community with a strong hierarchy. There is a Provost standing in for the Suzerain, the leader of the island who is away at war. Other inhabitants of the island include Lionel Fallaize, an artist who is a conscientious objector, various herdsmen, and others who are excluded from war work for being too young or too old.

(I will get to the cow eventually, promise.)

The island has been occupied by Nazi soldiers – as indeed happened in the Channel Islands. One of the interesting things about Tickell’s novel is how sympathetic it is to the soldiers – not at all to Nazism or to the idea of German victory, but these soldiers are men doing their job and doing what they believe to be right. Things like the Holocaust never come up; this is a question of nationalism alone. (Which is no good thing in my book, but it’s still notable that Tickell could create sympathetic and non-aggressive characters like Captain Weiss as early as 1951.) Even the unnamed German soldiers are not demonised.

The occupation of Armorel was carried out with unusual discretion. The German soldiers arrived without fuss and marched in silence up the hill to the commandeered hotel which was to be their barracks. One detachment went to the lighthouse, another to the telephone exchange. A sentry was posted at the gate of the hotel drive. He was a young man of about twenty, unarmed and smiling. The children gazed at him wide-eyed from behind the hedges, as he leisurely paced up and down in the sunshine. Soon the boldest of them ventured on to the road to stand and stare. The sentry stopped and felt in his pocket, found an apple. He said, still smiling: “You wish an apple?”

The islanders are still resistant to occupation, of course, ‘knowing, with a sense of bewildered resentment, that their beloved island was clasped in a loop of alien steel’. They are polite but clear – they are waiting for Britain to win the war, and will never collaborate with their invaders.

Back on mainland UK, interest turns to a curious quarter – to Venus, the eponymous cow. She is pregnant by Mars, a prize bull who is now deceased, having stepped on a landmine. Both Venus and Mars come from pedigree lineage, and their progeny is widely believed to be the perfect imaginable cow. Captain Weiss was a farmer before he was a soldier and recognises the calf’s worth – and wants to take him back to Germany. And so a plot is launched to sequester Venus and her unborn calf away from Armorel…

I can’t think of a more quintessentially British plot. The pluckiness, the underdog, the eccentricity. It feels like something that might have been an Ealing comedy – and it was indeed made into a film in the same year it was published. I haven’t watched it, but it’s all on YouTube (embedded below).

I absolutely loved Appointment With Venus. Tickell’s clever trick is never making the plot to rescue a cow seem silly. A few characters raise eyebrows, but broadly we are onboard with the priorities of the people doing the rescuing. All the characters are well-drawn and nuanced, and I particularly liked Lionel Fallaize. I’m not sure I needed the romance subplot, but such things are inevitable.

The book is a joyful experience, with enough realism about the experiences of living under Nazi occupation to prevent it feeling saccharine or sentimental. I wholeheartedly recommend that you make acquaintance with Venus and all those who love her.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Yikes, it’s hot. Here in the UK, we are not built to deal with these muggy temperatures (and almost no homes have air-conditioning), so I am spending my time feeling enervated in front of a fan. And reading, of course. And looking suspiciously out of the window, wondering if I should go somewhere or if that would kill me.

ANYWAY, hope you’re having a good weekend, wherever you are! The usual book, blog post, and link…

1.) The link – want to move to the Bennet family house from the 1995 Pride and Prejudice? I should warn you that it has a pretty sort of wilderness. Anyway, it can be yours for offers in excess of £6,000,000. Makes you wonder why Lizzie said “Beggars can’t be choosers”, doesn’t it?

2.) The book – I’m watching the growing list at Manderley Press with a lot of interest. Indeed, I’m currently reading one of their first books – Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell – in an edition I’ve had on my shelf for a few years. The one that has really caught my eye is The Fly on the Wheel by Katherine Cecil Thurston. Click that link to learn more about this 1908 Irish novel – but that stunning cover (by Fatti Burke) and the promise of a spirited heroine are enough to have me looking forward to its October publication.

3.) The blog post – I love a themed list, particularly if it’s about types of houses in books. And so Susan’s list of ‘Five Books I’ve Read Set in Apartment Buildings’ at A Life in Books was a delight – as were all the recommendations in the comments. Go and explore, and maybe add your own?

 

 

 

Kokoschka’s Doll by Afonso Cruz – #EUPL

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Kokoschka's Doll by Afonso Cruz | Hachette UKYou might remember that, last year, I read and reviewed a few of the books that had won the European Union Prize for Literature, also known as the EUPL. Among them was Selja Ahava’s Things That Fall From the Sky, one of my favourite reads of 2021. Well, I’ve been kindly asked to do the same again – and got to choose from a list of all the previous winners. Or at least those that have been translated into English. While the prize isn’t a translation prize, and the books are judged in their original language, I can only read English – so I am grateful Rahul Bery for translating Afonso Cruz’s Kokoschka’s Doll (2010) from Portuguese. What a strange and engaging book. Here are its curious and inviting opening lines:

At the age of forty-two, or, to be precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Initially, he thought it was the mice. Then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us.

The novel is set (at least at first) in Dresden during the Second World War. Rather than a voice living inside Bonifaz Vogel, the voice belongs  to a young Jewish boy called Isaac Dresner – who is living under the floor of Vogel’s bird shop. Yes, ‘Vogel’ means ‘bird’ in Germans. It’s that sort of novel, constantly playful, sometimes in an obvious way and sometimes in a way that cannot possibly be unravelled. Anyway, Isaac is in hiding after a Nazi soldier murdered his friend. Vogel doesn’t particularly question this. Once he realises that the voice is quite wise, he turns to it in every discussion. The voice helps him when people are haggling in the shop. It helps him feel connection.

This alone would be a quirky and interesting novel but, oh boy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way a young female painter called Tsilia joins them but, again, Cruz is only getting started. Somehow they get onto the trail of Mathias Popa – an author who apparently found a lost manuscript by Thomas Mann and passed it off as his own. And it failed horribly. He is working on a new book, though… called Kokoschka’s Doll.

You might be wondering when that title was going to come into play. The middle section of the novel (printed on slightly greyed pages in my edition by MacLehose Press, and possibly in every edition) is the novel Kokoschka’s Doll. It includes the story of a man hired to write a book alluding to all sorts of other books, none of which exist – until the same man is hired to write all of those books too. Keeping up?

And – so, so briefly – we eventually get to the story of Kokoschka’s doll. For a handful of pages, while we’re most of the way through the book. This is the bit that is based on a true story, so you might know it already. Oskar Kokoschka (curiously referred to as Oscar Kokoschka in this translation of Cruz’s novel – deliberate or mistake? Hard to tell in this sort of book) was a painter who commissioned a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler, after the end of a two-year relationship with her. He later destroyed the doll during a party.

After the end of ‘Popa’s’ book, we are introduced to a whole range of characters we haven’t met before, almost as though we should know who they are. And they do eventually link back to the cast we already know, but it is quite disconcerting.

I came to the conclusion that Cruz loves to unsettle the reader. There is so much allusion and confusion in Kokoschka’s Doll, so you can never predict what is happening next, or even be entirely certain about what has happened before. Cleverly, this is contrasted with simplicity in the writing and in the characters. They are simple people – believable, but easily comprehendible. The writing is spare and enjoyable, and often pages only have a short paragraph or two on them. It makes you feel like you are reading something akin to children’s literature – but the loops you are taken in are experimental.

I think the combination worked really well, and I can see why the EUPL judges wanted to reward Cruz. Apparently he is prodigious and prestigious in his native Portugal and Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly the work of an assured author. I don’t fully know or understand what I read, but I really enjoyed reading it.

Do head over to the European Union Prize for Literature website to find out more about this year’s prize, and all previous winners.

Anne of Avonlea… isn’t very good?

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Anne of Avonlea--cover page.jpgHere’s a blog post that might get me in hot water – but I recently listened to the audiobook of Anne of Avonlea and, let me tell you, I felt let DOWN.

Anne of Avonlea (1909) is the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series. Until now, I had only read the original – and loved it. Anne is so spirited and fun, and there is a great deal of heart and humour in Anne of Green Gables. Fast forward to the next book, Anne is in her late teens, still living in Avonlea. All of the books are available for free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so I thought it was worth diving in.

Oh.

So much that made Anne of Green Gables wonderful is missing here. Anne is a schoolteacher, a founding member of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, a sort of grown-up foster sister to a pair of twins who arrive on the scene (more on them later), and generally a noble and good member of society.

The rest of this post is going to be in bullet point form, because that is the best to describe my disappointment. Though I’ll try to throw in some good things along the way.

  • Anne is so Noble and Good in this book. She has become the quintessential heroine of a Victorian children’s novel (albeit this is later than that), thinking good thoughts and doing good deeds.
  • ALL her spirit seems to have gone. I cannot emphasise how dull she is now.
  • Gilbert Blythe gets maybe four lines of dialogue?
  • Even in his most interesting scenes, writing pretend letters to someone, he barely appears.
  • WHY SO LITTLE GILBERT?
  • (I know he comes back in later books, but I cannot fathom why L.M. Montgomery took away one of the two most interesting relationships from Anne of Green Gables. The other was with Matthew, so I can at least see why that isn’t present.)
  • Marilla takes in the twins, Dora and Davy. And lord knows I wish she hadn’t. Davy is forever doing naughty things then saying “Good gosh, Miss Anne, I had no notion this was a naughty thing to do! How will I ever repent of it when it was so fun?” and Dora just cries. How did an author who made a girl character like Anne also make these Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Cry characters? I loathed them.
  • Mrs Lavendar Lewis was great, I will acknowledge. An old lady who is something of a recluse but brings joy and wit to every scene she’s in.
  • Did I mention that there is basically no Gilbert?

I had planned to go on with the rest of the series, but I’m much more reluctant now. Anne has gone from one of the best characters in fiction to one of the most tedious – and, without her spark, the novel really dragged for me.

Others have promised me that the series looks up in later volumes. Does Anne get her spark back? Should I continue?

 

Project 24: Books 12, 13, 14

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When I was in the Lake District recently, I paid a visit to a couple of bookshops. In fact, I made a day trip to visit one – Michael Moon’s Bookshop in Whitehaven. My goodness, what a wonderful place. It sprawls on and on, rooms piling out of rooms, and has a great and affordable stock. If it weren’t for Project 24, I’d have bought a lot more. I’ll have to go back.

The other shop was a secondhand bookshop in Keswick – a smallish stock, with some interesting things. Curiously the bookshop was closed except on Fridays and Saturdays, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for a week of the Keswick Convention with hundreds of people visiting the area, but there we are.

Anyway, here are the three new books I’ve added to my shelves this week, and why I chose them:

The Old Moat House by Eleanora H. Stooke
I was drawn to the lovely dustjacket on this one, and the fact that I love books about houses. From some investigation online, it looks like it was previously published as The Moat House, in the early 1900s. There is very little information about this book online, but Michael Moon’s had two copies. Curious! Stooke seems to have been mostly a writer for children – flicking through this one, it didn’t feel like a children’s book, but that may be what it transpires to be on closer inspection.

The Comfort Tree by Stella Martin Currey
I found One Woman’s Year – a non-fiction journey through a domestic year, reprinted by Persephone – to be totally delightful. So of course I couldn’t resist when I stumbled across one of her novels.

War Isn’t Wonderful by Ursula Bloom
This is a volume of memoirs by Ursula Bloom, aka Mary Essex of Tea Is So Intoxicating fame. I was interested enough to take it off the shelf, whereupon I discovered it was signed by Bloom! A fun addition to the shelves.

I’m 14 books in, and that takes me to the end of July, so I’m on track. I’ve definitely been helped by a handful of interesting review books arriving of late, and finding a tree Michael Innes novel in a box at the side of the road – which, by my not entirely logical rules, I’m allowed to have.

Two books about heatwaves

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During the recent heat wave in the UK (and elsewhere, but I experienced it in the UK) I decided to get two relevant novels off my shelves – Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave and Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. Partly because it amused me, I’ll admit. And partly because it would feel odd to read a novel about a heatwave in any other temperature – though there is a good argument for doing it in midwinter, to warm myself up. It was also interesting to see how the two writers treated heatwaves differently – beyond Lively treating heat wave as two words, and O’Farrell using heatwave as one…

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

Let’s start with Lively’s novel – or perhaps novella, coming in around 180 pages. Published in 1996, she doesn’t give a specific date for the heatwave in question, though it seems contemporary. It opens with Lively’s characteristically detailed, observant writing:

It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World’s End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere.

When I think of Lively, I think of fine writing – though I also think I’d struggle to identify her writing if I saw a group of examples. Perhaps it is that lack of a writerly idiolect that makes her a very good, but not a great, writer? Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s talk about what Heat Wave is about. Pauline is a middle-aged copyeditor (not, she is keen to note, an editor), separated from her husband and living for a summer in a cottage adjoining her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their baby Luke. None of them are permanent residents of this isolated rural pair of houses – but Pauline is living there for the summer, and has invited Teresa and family to take the larger cottage next to hers. Both seem quite small, and there is a claustrophobia to this proximity of family that is both feared and longed for.

The novel is about the experiences of this stifling summer, but also looks back to earlier stages of their life – of Pauline’s motherhood, of her unsuccessful marriage, of the stages of infidelity that led to the separation. The novel is third person, but Pauline’s own recollections do a good job of combining the close-up and the far away. She is both live-r and observer of her life. This is described in one memory, where she tried to burn a manuscript:

Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.

Pauline is an exceptionally good character, and I suspect one with whom Lively has a good deal of empathy. She is intelligent and has moments of being determined and forceful. But these are anomalies in a life that is often passive – passive for fear of alienating her daughter, for fear of saying the wrong thing, for fear that she might indeed be wrong. Lively has built a strikingly complete and layered heroine. The other characters are perhaps not quite so layered, but neither are they flimsy. And this book is much more about people than plot. There are dramatic incidents, but mostly it feels calm and gradual, the long, hazy summer spreading itself wider than the 180 pages.

And the heat? Something I’ve learned from reading these two novels together is that it’s very hard to sustain the feeling that a story takes place in intense heat – because, after all, you can hardly have characters constantly saying “Gosh, I’m hot.” Or, rather, you can, but it would be terribly tedious. So in both novels I didn’t feel the continual oppression of a heatwave, but I liked how Lively threaded it through with occasional paragraphs describing the environment – often the fields behind the cottages, recognising the way the countryside is both romantically beautiful and dispassionately practical.

There is a day of such sledgehammer heat that no one ventures outside. And something curious happens to the wheat. It seems to hiss. Pauline keeps all her windows open, and through them comes this sound, as of some furtively restless surrounding sea.

As I said earlier, I think there is something, for me, that keeps Lively from being a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s that her style is not wholly distinct; perhaps it is simply that the 1990s is far from my favourite period for literature. But I only mention this because Heat Wave is such a good book that it’s surprising I don’t love her more. I wouldn’t be surprised if others called it a masterpiece.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'FarrellInstructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

While Lively’s novel is in an unspecified time, O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) is set firmly during the 1976 heatwave – including using quotes from the Drought Act 1976 as epigraphs for the different sections. The story starts in Highbury, with an Irish Catholic family who are first generation Londoners.

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome, it lies along the corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Gretta is driven by tradition and routine, and she has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life – and won’t let something like a heatwave get in the way of that. Her love of tradition has not been passed down to her three adult children. There is Michael Francis, whose marriage to Claire is falling apart (which he blames on her Open University degree, and the way that studying and her new friends are taking her away from him). There’s Monica, a recent stepmother to two girls who seem to despise her. And there’s Aoife, the one who escaped, living in New York and working as a sort of amanuensis for an artist. The children do not go to mass, to Gretta’s sorrow. Nor are they happy or satisfied. Each is suffering from something or other – which, perhaps a little artificially, comes to a head for each of them during this heatwave.

But the first crisis is that Robert – Gretta’s husband, and the father of these three – goes missing. He says he is going out to the shop, and he doesn’t come back.

If Lively’s contemplative novel is about character, then O’Farrell’s is about plot. That’s not to say the characters aren’t well thought through and interesting, but this is a pacy book about revelations, secrets, and decisions that will make life-long differences. It doesn’t really make sense for all of them to have epiphanies during such a short period, but we roll with it because O’Farrell is such an enjoyable writer.

She is great at making characters who are filled with flaws, and yet we want the best for. It’s not even the sort of flaws that are usually used to make a character realistic but still reassuringly empathetic. Between them, Michael Louis, Claire, and Aoife are selfish, jealous, resentful, deceitful, and thoughtless. Gretta’s failings are considered more with the frustrated affection that one might feel towards a clingy matriarch. I was relieved that her Catholic faith wasn’t treated as something that made her cruel or stupid (as so many novelists would do) – her sadness that her children don’t go to mass is recognised as an understandable human trait, even if not one the novel seems to agree with.

I found Aoife the most interesting character, not least because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. Or at least that’s what I assume it was, from the way she describes letters in words jumping around in different combinations, refusing to stay linear and safe. This is the 1970s, and she was at school in the ’50s and ’60s: her inability to read was just seen as her being wilfully naughty. O’Farrell takes this lifelong difficulty and sees how it might affect relationships, friendships, work – and the tangled web Aoife gets herself into (while still being a bullish, often bombastically unthinking character, rather than a quiet victim of circumstance).

Both novels concern heatwaves, and both have familial relationships at the heart – particularly the fraught relationship between a mother and her adult child(ren), trying to combine closeness and distance. From this starting point, it’s interesting how differently O’Farrell and Lively treat the material. It’s hard to even compare them – they are very different experiences, both rewarding and worthwhile.

Golden States by Michael Cunningham

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You won’t find much mention of Golden States (1984) by Michael Cunningham online – or even in the next novels that were published, which silently erased his debut novel. In an interesting and deep interview Cunningham gave around 2001, he said this about Golden States:

I never felt good about that book, because I wrote it too fast. Because I knew it wasn’t the best book I could write. I’ve always felt that literature and reading have so many enemies—and writers are the very least of the enemies of writing and reading. But I do sometimes find myself looking through the books in a bookstore and galleys people have sent me, thinking, you could have done better than this. You did not put your ass on the line. Here’s just another book taking up space in the universe, and this is part of what is making it hard to keep books alive in the world. They just stack up like cordwood. I’m so much more interested in some kind of grand ambitious failure than I am in someone’s modest little success that achieves its modest little aims. I felt that I had written a book like that, and I wasn’t happy about it. My publisher very generously allowed me to turn down a paperback offer and it has really gone away.

It’s an interesting take on a novel that I think is much better than Cunningham thinks it is. He doesn’t need to be ashamed of it at all.

Golden States is about David, a young boy living with his mother and sister Lizzie in California, and his experiences on the cusp of young adulthood. Parts of him are very childish – he constantly squabbles with his sister, and plays games (and then fall out) with his nearby best friend. Parts of him are beginning to develop more, so he is asking questions about his future, his older half-sister’s (Janet’s) long-term relationship, his place in the world. Recurring antagonisms continue alongside something new. Here is one conversation, but almost any in the first half of the book could be used as an example of the way Cunningham combines the frivolous and the undercurrent.

Janet and Lizzie glanced at one another. “What’s nine times seven?” Lizzie asked.

David put his fingers in his ears. “Don’t do that,” he said, and his voice sounded to him as if he was speaking from a cave. Janet said something, and he unstopped his ears. “What?” he asked her.

“My feet are cold,” Lizzie said.

“Then go inside. What did you say, Janet?”

“Let’s all go in,” Janet said.

“That’s not what you said.”

“Men,” Janet said to Lizzie in a lofty, lecturer’s tone, “always want the facts.”

“That’s not true,” David said.

Janet patted his knee. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the lizard inside before she freezes to death.”

“Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said. She had begun hopping on one foot, and shivering.

“Go on,” David said. “I’m going to sit here a little longer.”

He hoped Janet would send Lizzie in alone, but she got up and slipped her arm around Lizzie’s skinny shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “See you inside.”

“See you,” David said.

Lizzie tucked her hand under Janet’s belt, glanced over her shoulder, smiled knowingly, and said, “Sixty-three.”

As with most Cunningham novels, the book is about interiority – but the sort of interiority that surfaces in conversations with anyone and everyone. People, particularly David, never quite express what it is that they are trying to convey, but keep determinedly trying. Cunningham’s talent is combining this philosophical search with everyday dialogue and the details of the mundane. A thwarted shoplifting or a sibling dispute speak to much larger matters – things that David cannot comprehend, so he feels frustrated and confused. Many of Cunningham’s characters feel frustrated and confused, but the older ones at least expect it. David has yet to learn the limits of understanding.

In the second half of the novel, the dynamic changes. Janet is back in San Francisco – and David decides he has to travel there, for reasons I won’t spoil. And off he goes, with little money and a lot of nervousness about the journey. From here, Golden States becomes something of a travel or quest narrative – the curious people he’ll meet along the way, including one character who I think would be written rather differently now. The blurb says he ‘guides [David] across the threshold of sexuality’, but David is a child and the scene is deeply uncomfortable, even if not at all graphic.

I found the second half of the novel very tense, but preferred the more relaxed dynamics of the first half. I think they play better into Cunningham’s strengths as a writer – which include writing little gems of insightful sentences, like ‘The day would not settle into itself; would not descend from its feeling of suspension, as if the real day was yet to begin.’ There is a poeticism to his writing that is threaded through everything, even when contrasted with quite austere dialogue, and that won’t be to everyone’s tastes. For me, Golden States shows all the promise of the psychologically fascinating novelist Cunningham would become – and, indeed, bears comparison with many of his later novels. If it isn’t his masterpiece, or even the runner up, Golden States is still a very able and intriguing book of which Cunningham should be proud.

The Optimist by E.M. Delafield

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E.M. Delafield is right up there with my favourite authors, but there are still some of her books on my shelves that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. I recently took down The Optimist (1922), one of Delafield’s earlier novels and one I haven’t seen an awful lot of discussion about.

Owen Quintillian is a boy when he first spends time with the Morchard family – led by the calm dictator Canon Morchard, and accompanied by three of his young daughters (Lucilla, Flora, Valeria) and and one young son (Adrian), with another son David away at school. Canon Morchard acts as a tutor for Owen, but really this is a substitute family. Adrian is naughty and wilful, Valeria and Flora are romantic and emotional, and Lucilla is sternly obedient. Owen is perhaps the least categorisable; he is the onlooker, and almost takes the role of the reader.

I was reminded a lot of May Sinclair’s Anne Severn and the Fieldings, both in this section and in the rest of the novel – Owen, like Anne, is the only child who is both insider and outsider in the new community. He is expected to live by the rules of the household and understand its different mores and characters, but there is also a tacit understanding that he is a temporary participant.

Years later, when Owen has spent two years fighting in the war and a period recovering from shell shock in hospital, he returns to the Morchard family. Each child has grown, but the traits that were there before are still recognisable. Lucilla is still obedient, though with a weariness that wasn’t there before. The other sisters have romantic entanglements that include Owen in disastrous ways. Adrian and David are more enigmatic, being away at war – with everything that entails for the waiting family.

But the most dominant character – the ‘optimist’ of the title, mostly relating to patriotism and pro-war sentiment – is the Canon. He is a fascinating portrait of a domineering man slowly squeezing life out of his family, but not in a violent or ogreish way. Rather, as George Simmers wrote in his excellent review on Great War Fiction back in 2007, ‘Morchard is revealed as a monster of selfishness, manipulating his family by a form of moral blackmail – they are terrified of inspiring the pain he expresses when they cross him in the slightest particular.’

In fact, I will quote the same passage George used to illustrate this point:

“Valeria!” The Canon’s voice, subdued but distinct, came to them from without. “My dear, go to your room. This is not right, You are acting in defiance of my known wishes, although, no doubt, thoughtlessly. Bid your sister goodnight and go.”

Val did not even wait to carry out the first half of the Canon’s injunction. She caught up her brush and comb and left the room.

“Are my wishes so little to you, Valeria? Said her father, standing on the stairs. “It costs so small an act of self-sacrifice to be faithful to that which is least.”

“I’m sorry, father. We both forgot the time.”

“Thoughtless Valeria! Are you always to be my madcap daughter?”

His tone was very fond, and he kissed her and blessed her once more.

Valeria went to her own room.

She sat upon the side of her bed and cried a little.

His edicts always come from a firm moral code – one that sees himself as instructor and protector of the household. He is not just hurt but astonished if anybody contradicts or disobeys him, or even has a contrary opinion to him – there is one instance, later in the novel, where Lucilla must use long-learned manipulation to do what she believes is right, and he believes is wrong. In the Canon’s defence, he holds himself to the same high standards as everyone else, and repents and apologises if he contravenes them.

Owen is trying to establish himself as a writer, particularly one in revolt to most standards of Victorian behaviour, belief, and society. There is a clash here, when the Canon reads Owen’s magazine article on ‘The Myth of Self-Sacrifice’. While the narrative is largely on Owen’s side, it seems, there is also the suggestion that Owen’s views can be as self-indulgent and blinkered as the Canon’s, albeit from a different direction.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a family, and Owen is an excellent device for being both inside and outside the circle – it is only as The Optimist develops that we start to see more of Owen’s own character and flaws, and question some of the assumptions he has made about members of the family (and which we may have unquestioningly followed along with).

This is one of Delafield’s more serious novels but, being Delafield, there is a lightness of touch and an ironic sensibility that is never too far away. This sentence is quintessential Delafield, who always seems to return to the topic of self-(un)awareness in everything she writes:

Lucilla, for her consolation, reflected that few people are capable of distinguishing accurately between what they actually say, and what they subsequently wish themselves to have said, when reporting a conversation.

In George Simmer’s review, he concluded that The Optimist is ‘one of the most thought-provoking novels of the 1920s’ and among Delafield’s best. I think it is certainly one that would merit re-reading and thinking more deeply about. It is not among my favourite of Delafield’s, perhaps because that occasional lightness of tone isn’t reflected in the plot or characters and I prefer her in slightly more comic mode, with slightly more heightened characters – but I think there’s a very good argument that The Optimist is one of her most intriguing and complex novels.

Five recent reads

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I’m going to take a little break from blogging, as the next couple of weeks are quite hectic – but before I go, here are five books I’ve read recently (or, in one case, not that recently) to leave you with…

A Map of the Sky: Amazon.co.uk: Wong, Claire: 9781782642695: BooksA Map of the Sky by Claire Wong
Claire and I are friends from church, so I was really excited when her first novel The Runaway was published. It took me a while to read her next, A Map of the Sky (2019) but I finally did back in February, and promptly forgot to write about it. But it’s really good! Kit is an 11-year-old boy who is taken with his family to a remote coastal village in the north of England. It’s not clear if it’s a holiday, a move, or a sort of exile – and why is his dad not with them?

Kit loves adventure stories, and decides to tackle the whole thing as an adventure. The other people living in the guesthouse offer clues, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly – particularly Beth, who is confined to the guesthouse with a chronic illness that Kit doesn’t really understand. But he uses her memories of the area to try and put together a map, which might help unlock the secrets of the summer. I loved the portrait of Beth, sensitive and well-researched (and I know at least one mutual friend of ours helped ensure that there was realism, though Beth is a fictional character rather than a reflection of any one individual). And Kit is a compelling character – excited, unsure, hemmed in by adults making decisions and thinking children don’t need to be informed. It’s interesting that Claire Wong’s first two protagonists are children – I’d be interested to read her with an adult hero or heroine.

The Exquisite Halo by Josephine Tey
A novel Tey wrote under a pseudonym, and not a detective novel – it’s a curious sort of fable (‘a fable without a moral’ is the subtitle) filled with Wildean witticisms and, indeed, Wildean characters. I really enjoyed reading it, but it is featherweight and definitely a minor work. Curiously, the POD edition I read has some very curious and largely irrelevant images along the way. A horrible pie, a German kitchen, some mountains, a bus. It was fun waiting to see what anomaly would come along next.

A Sky Painted Gold - a gloriously sun-drenched coming-of-age story for fans of THE GREAT GATSBY : Wood, Laura: Amazon.co.uk: BooksA Sky Painted Gold by Laura Wood
I loved A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood, which I read towards the end of last year – and immediately went and bought another couple of Wood’s books. A Snowfall of Silver is actually a sequel to A Sky Painted Gold (2018), though it doesn’t really matter which you read first, as the focus is on a different sister. Louise (Lou) lives in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall in 1929, part of a large and artistic family, and is mourning the loss of her sister and best friend. Loss, that is, because Alice has just got married. Lou can’t see what Alice sees in her husband, who appears to be an ordinary, unexciting Cornishman.

She is much more interested in the Cardew House – a mansion on an island, to which she often swims, just to roam the rooms, steal the apples, and read the Agatha Christies. The family aren’t around, so nobody notices. Until… they are. Robert – the handsome, stern 20-something son of the house – discovers her mid-apple-steal. Soon Lou is caught up in a world of rich bohemian people, who are interested in her because she is different. Among them are Robert’s sister, Robert’s fiancée, and Robert’s fiancée’s handsome brother. (But if you think she won’t ultimately end up with Robert, then you’re new to books.)

I didn’t love it as much as A Snowfall of Silver, perhaps because the theatrical stuff in that one really appealed to me, but it was still a frothy delight from beginning to end. And gorgeous cover.

Sidesplitter by Phil Wang
Phil Wang is a comedian I know through his Taskmaster appearance (man, I love Taskmaster), and my friend Malie recommended I try his memoir. Well, he’s keen to say it’s not a memoir, while also acknowledging that it more or less is. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia and has lived since in the UK (where, to add to the tapestry, he was born). His dad is Malaysian; his mum is white British. And the book is about what it’s like to grow up with this mix of identities – never feeling, he says, quite at home in either country. He writes about race, food, romance, media etc etc. And it is also extremely funny, as well as making a lot of interesting and often moving points. I listened to him reading the audiobook, and he’s a hoot.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Malcolm, Janet: 9780300181708: BooksIphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm
What’s the opposite of a frothy delight? This! Malcolm is always searingly brilliant in anything she writes, and Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011) is no different. I was a little stymied by not knowing who Iphigenia was or where Forest Hills are, but doubtless you’re better educated on these matters than I am. Essentially, Malcolm looks at all the ins and outs of a (real) murder trial, where a woman is charged with murdering her estranged husband. Along the way, it becomes much more complex – and a lot has to do with a biased judge in a previous court case about child custody, the fact that lawyers acting on behalf of the child don’t have to take the child’s wishes into account, and another judge who is very clearly dismissing evidence that is central to the case.

Malcolm’s interviews are always piercing, getting people to say far more than they might wish. She doesn’t claim to be writing objective non-fiction, and her voice is clear and present throughout – which is exactly how I like it. If you already love and admire Malcolm’s writing, this is another great example. If you want something kinder, less subjective, more reportage – maybe not for you. For me, she can do no wrong, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be interviewed by her.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Somehow it’s apparently July? 2022 is rushing past as quickly as 2021 was SLOW. Reading continues apace, and I have sailed past my 100th book of the year – helped, as with last year, but the volume of audiobooks I’m getting through.

Indelicacy by Amina Cain | 9781911547587. Buy Now at Daunt BooksI shan’t be helping your reading piles, as here are some weekend miscellany suggestions that might increase the tbr…

1. ) The blog post – I’m going to cheat and give you two, as two particularly stand out this week. Jacqui’s list of boarding house novels is kryptonite to readers like me, and the comments section has lots of great suggestions too. And then Girl With Her Head in a Book wrote a really brilliantly insightful review of David Sedaris’s new collection, Happy-Go-Lucky. One of the best book reviews I’ve read in a while, so had to share.

2.) The link – a lot of readers love the artist Eric Ravilious, and even more so when his paintings appeared on Furrowed Middlebrow books. Enjoy this interesting new article about his life.

3.) The book – I was watching a book vlogger the other day and she mentioned Indelicacy by Amina Cain. She sold it as a spin on A Room of One’s Own, so naturally I was intrigued. Here’s the description, which does sound winning. Has anybody read the book? (And what a shame that design is ruined by the puff quote in the middle.)

In an undefined era and place, a cleaning woman at a museum of art aspires to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the security and time to use her mind, and the liberty to be a writer.

She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labour social and erotic but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps a more drastic solution is necessary?

Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral and an exploration of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature.