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The Colour of Evening by Robert Nathan (Novella a Day in May #27)

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I love Robert Nathan novel(la)s for when I need something simple and lovely. He is best remembered now for the film adaptations of his works – The Bishop’s Wife, The Preacher’s Wife, and Portrait of Jennie – and far easier to find in the US than the UK, but I snap up any I come across. They are never at all demanding, and have no claims to being great literature. But there is something refreshing about spending time in one.

The Colour of Evening (1960) came towards the end of his long and prolific career. (Incidentally, it was also filmed in 1990.) It concerns an old painter called Max Loeb who lives south of Santa Monica, painting portraits and getting enough interest from the public to get by, just barely. He is filled with disdain about modern art – which seems to encompass artists who were well past being ‘modern’ by the time this book came out – and Nathan seems to assume his readership will have the same outlook. This disdain stretches out to include the idea of realism in art and literature, as opposed to anything idealised or beautiful.

“Realism,” grumbled Max, sketching away. “You call it realism what we get? Is a bone with gristle on it realism? Maybe – for a cemetery. Do you know what true realism is? It is the bone inside the flesh, under the living tissue: paint that, or write about it! Even in the newspapers you can find out what is going on with our artists, or sometimes in a magazine at the barber shop. Do you know what I think about these books you read? They are not like life, because in life everybody is not such a good-for-nothing.”

Alongside Max is his landlady, Mrs Hermione Bloemendal, and Jon Kuzik. Or sometimes ‘John’, which I think was a failing in the copyeditor, rather than a deliberate trick. Mrs Bloemendal sometimes poses for portraits; Jon is Max’s pupil, and pays him in money or, more often, in kind. They have a quiet, contented dynamic between the three of them. They care for each other, but in a calm way.

Into this world comes Halys – a young woman in a dirty dress, desperate for any work or way to keep going. Well, desperate in the sort of picturesque way of a Robert Nathan novel, which will never get too unpleasant. She moves into this delicate ecosystem, earning her keep by cleaning and posing for portraits. Only things start to go awry when Max wonders if he is in love with her, and the careful balance of the existing friendships get challenged…

This sort of plot could make for a very dramatic novel, but The Colour of Evening remains quiet and contemplative even when Nathan is infusing it with event. I think that’s largely because characters are often given to philosophising, or exchanging moral conclusions that are a little bit saccharine. The sort of tropes that might belong in a chatty magazine.

It’s all perfectly enjoyable, though I think Nathan is better when these maxims and pronouncements about life and love are offset by his quirky plots. In other books of his I’ve read, there is often a fantastic streak – a girl whose ageing is off-kilter, a character who comes to life, a boat that sails through roads to the sea. Without that whimsy or fantasia, it feels a bit fey. He needs to add in the strange and unworldly to balance out his sentimental tone.

But I still always enjoy my time with Nathan. I wouldn’t recommend this one to start, but it was what I needed today.

The Home by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #26)

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THE HOME | Penelope MortimerLook, yes, I’m cheating again – The Home (1971) isn’t a novella, since it’s 230 pages, but I had a bit more time to read today, and I thought I’d spend it here. And I’m so glad I did – The Home is brilliant (and, indeed, rather better IMO than the other Mortimer I read earlier in May, My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof).

The home of the title is the one that Eleanor Strathearn moves to after leaving her husband Graham – because of his affair with a younger woman, also called Eleanor though known as Nell. He has bought her the house, under some sufferance, and she has taken almost all the furniture. She goes with their youngest son, Philip (15) – they have four other children, adults living lives of careful detachment from their parents.

The course of the novel follows the aftermath of this split, and brings in their respective mothers too. Mortimer is brilliant at combining different permutations of the family and showing the dynamics that emerge – sometimes confiding, sometimes awkward, usually fraught in some way.

What I loved most about The Home is the tone of voice. Mortimer is drily funny and quite odd, and fans of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge will find a lot to enjoy. Her descriptions of people are always slightly off-kilter and wonderful. Here is Eleanor’s mother, Mrs Bennet:

While not exactly believing in God – the prospect was a little ridiculous – she was devoted to death, regarding it as the cure for all evils, by which she meant life. However, she remained indomitably alive. Other elderly ladies – at the time of the break-up she was eighty-two – suffered from fluttering hearts, poor eyesight, deafness, arthritis. Mrs Bennet was healthier than she had been at eighteen, and as much in command of her faculties. She also grew more knowledgeable every year, and was now far better informed about politics, the arts, drug addiction, space travel, sexual permissiveness and other topics of absolutely no use to her than her husband, a gentleman farmer and Justice of the Peace, had ever been.

There is a cynicism about romance and relationships throughout The Home – one character says, “Whoever heard of a happily married couple in 1971?” – but there is also a sort of hope that is as indomitably alive as Mrs Bennet. Or at least a triumph of hope over experience. Everybody wants slightly different things, and knowingly damages and disregards the people around them in pursuit of these things – but doing so, at the same time, with genuine love and care. It is all excellently observed.

I don’t know The Home is less well-known than some of Mortimer’s other books. It probably isn’t quite the exhilarating tour de force of The Pumpkin Eater, but it is certainly recognisable as the same brilliant authorial mind. I loved it.

Maigret’s Revolver by Georges Simenon (Novella a Day in May #25)

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Whenever Karen and I run a club year, there is a Georges Simenon – and every time I comment that I must read something by him. And as I was glancing around my shelves, I spotted that Maigret’s Revolver (1952, translated by Nigel Ryan) is really short – and why not? So I have now read my first Simenon, and finally met Inspector Maigret.

He is straight-forward man, more compassionate than he needs to be but also unlikely to fly into any sort of passion. He drinks an extraordinary amount, and finds the fact that he can’t get whisky in an English hotel before 11.30am absurd. He is determined to solve a mystery, but seem content to achieve that aim with measured and thoughtful steps.

The mystery, in this case, starts with the revolver of the title – a young man is waiting in Maigret’s study, but has gone before Maigret gets home. He discovers that his revolver is missing. The revolver itself was a gift that he has never used, but it is still fully functioning. He quickly learns that a young man matching the description of this mysterious figure (for Maigret’s wife met him, and could describe him a little) has been buying gun cartridges.

Along the way, after some fortunate policework, Maigret is led to the discovery of a body…

I really enjoyed reading this. It has a dry humour that I didn’t know would be there, and Maigret is a more interesting and likeable character than I’d realised. He is not hard-boiled or maverick – he is human and sensible, and engages with fellow professionals. Something I particularly liked in the writing was the treatment of women, who are frequently intelligent and not thrown by the strange circumstances they find themselves in. A lovely contrast to the common figure of detective novels from this era, where women fall apart in hysterics when questioned or when faced with difficult circumstances.

Here, for instance, is part of a questioning with one female character. I think it shows what I liked of Maigret’s dogged patience, and the quick-witted assuredness that Simenon gives women. In this novella, at least. I don’t know how much of an anomaly that is.

“You know your father’s ill?”

“He always has been.”

There was no pity, no emotion in her voice.

“He’s in bed.”

“Very likely.”

“Your brother’s disappeared.”

He saw that she was startled, that this piece of news took her aback more than she was willing to admit.

“That doesn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me.”

“Because I’ve seen too much. What exactly do you want from me?”

It was difficult to reply point blank to such a straight question, and she calmly took a cigarette from a case and asked:

“Have you a light?”

He lit a match for her.

“I’m waiting.”

“How old are you?”

“I presume it wasn’t just to find out my age that you took all this trouble. According to your badge, you aren’t a plain sergeant, but a Chief-Inspector. In other words, someone important.”

As for the plot itself – it’s a little flimsy as a mystery, but works well as a story. If Maigret’s Revolver is anything to go by, Simenon is more interesting as a novelist of characters than of puzzles. I’m glad I’ve finally read some Simenon, and it certainly won’t be my last. And do let me know if my conclusions based on this single book are wide of the mark or not!

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen (Novella a Day in May #24)

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I was inspired by the latest Backlisted episode to pick up a Bowen – specifically the one they covered, Death of the Heart, but it turns out that I don’t own it – so I substituted a novella of 151 pages, Friends and Relations (1931). It’s not one I see people talk about all that much, but I thought it on par with her others – the usual hallmarks of exceptionally beautiful and perceptive writing, and a plot that is never quite obvious.

The story opens at the wedding of Laurel Studdart and James Tilney. It is a very proper, slightly passionless affair. I loved this exchange, showing Bowen’s talent for dialogue that does a lot more than is evident on the surface.

‘You might hold your lilies,’ said Mrs Studdart, who had discovered the sheaf on a hall table specially cleared for the top-hats.

‘Oh, Mother, I can’t; they’re heavy.’

‘But don’t you think it would be nice, Edward, if she were to hold her lilies?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Edward. ‘Do people generally?’

‘They’d be such a strain on one arm all the time. You see I can’t change them; I must keep my right arm for shaking hands.’

‘And shake hands lightly,’ said Mrs Studdart, ‘don’t grip.’

‘Did I look …?’

‘Lovely, lovely,’ said Mrs Studdart. She was looking round distractedly for a vase and soon found one, a kind of Italian urn in which she arranged the lilies beside the bride.

It’s not long before Laurel’s sister Janet gets married – though this is rather more of a surprise to the family, as Janet was not expected to do anything so fortunate and conventional. What’s a little less conventional is that she is marrying the nephew of the man who had an adulterous affair with Edward’s mother. If that sentence is a little confusing, fear not, it’s clear in the book – essentially the dark horses in the family tree of both sisters’ new husbands are tangled together.

I found Laurel and Janet both rather unknowable. I’d be hard pressed to describe their personalities, and perhaps that reflects the rather controlled conversations they have with each other – appropriately sisterly to appearances, but without giving too much away.

On the other hand there is Theodora, easily my favourite character in Friends and Relations, and the most vivid. We see her first as a 15 year old at the wedding, pressing ice creams on unwilling guests and believing herself to be doing a great kindness, loudly berating her parents for huddling together, and evading speaking to the bride by walking outside and round the building to get to the food. She dominates her parents, finding them deeply embarrassing and forever correcting things that only a child would notice. It is a pitch perfect portrait, and funny too.

We move forward ten years into the past – both marriages have children, Theodora is still around, and the dark horses of the past are still having their effect on the future. There is a turning point in this section, but also the sense that the past lingers long over future generations.

I found I didn’t always know exactly what was going on, partly because Bowen’s writing is too complex to rush-read in a novella-a-day challenge, and partly because everybody prevaricates. The dialogue is never there for exposition; it is more realistic, and gives a rich sense of the relationships between people, rather than the details of the plot. I had to go back and re-read bits to try and piece things together. But it didn’t stop me enjoying Bowen’s striking writing. So many lovely sentences – I noted down one about a cat, of course: “The Siamese, reappearing like a malign sun over the cushions, looked at his mistress with penetration, without sympathy.”

Ultimately, I might land more on admiring Bowen than loving her – but there is so much to admire that that is no weak praise.

Novella a Day in May: Days 22 and 23

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Day 22: Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita Sackville-West

I re-read Vita Sackville-West’s novella set in an alternative 1942 where Nazi Germany has successfully taken over Europe, and refugees have fled to America. This book focuses on the occupants of a hotel on the edge of the Grand Canyon – and what happens when bombs come to the hotel. I won’t say anymore because Rachel and I will be discussing it on an upcoming episode of ‘Tea or Books?’.

Day 23: The Empty Room (1941) by Charles Morgan

In about 2003, a lady in the village called Marion lent me three books that she thought might set me off on paths of discovery. She knew I liked older books and, being 17, hadn’t formed my taste as an adult yet. The three books were Bulldog Drummond by Sapper, Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers, and A Breeze of Morning by Charles Morgan. I liked the Sayers, disliked the Sapper, and really liked the Morgan. Over the years since, I have owned and given away a few Morgan novels, but it’s taken me almost two decades to finally read my second book by him. Which I have in a proof copy – this is what proofs looked like in the 1940s!

Like Sackville-West’s novella, this was written in the midst of war – though Morgan’s is set in the contemporary world, rather than an alterative version of it. Richard is working on the development of a bomb-sight – I had to look up what that was, but essentially something that helps bombs be dropped more accurately. The novella starts with him working alongside other men who are in kept professions, most of whom fought in the previous war.

“I assure you, Flower,” Cannock answered, “this is paradise compared with the last war. And yet, you know, it’s extraordinarily like; that’s the devil of it. People wasting the same time and talking much the same nonsense. The same jokes, the same optimism – it’s like going to a play by a dramatist who may produce an exciting plot but whose style bores you to death. As yet we aren’t half-way through Scene One…”

Morgan is very, very good at describing the experience of finding oneself in the midst of war, and how it affects different people. All the quotes I noted down were about that, I now realise, and it’s particularly impressive to write so vividly about something that, even in 1941, had been described endlessly. Though The Empty Room turns out not really to be about the war – instead, it is about a family Richard meets because of it. There is a fellow worker whom Richard recognises from an earlier acquaintance, who invites him to move in rather than find impersonal barracks. Henry is a widower with a daughter who has not long become an adult. She, Carey, never knew her mother, but there is a portrait of her on the wall showing how similar her daughter looks. Besides this image, little is said of her – though the empty room of the title is Carey’s mothers bedroom, left as a sort of silent shrine to her.

Richard and Carey are about 20 years apart in age, but become close. It’s less icky than it sounds, though perhaps not ick-less. Anyway, it’s another opportunity for Morgan to write so perceptively about the war:

His was a generation different from hers in more than the years that divided them. This was his second war; after it, there would be for him no starting again, only a continuance to the end of a life already doubly broken; but for her it would become an incident of her youth, a point of departure from which her life would stretch ahead, still limitless, still expectant of an ordered fulfilment.

And here’s another example, about the end of the phoney war:

Every good thing became more precious; even things that were, in themselves, neither good not bad – an account-book lying on the table, a packet of old letters in a drawer – became extraordinary because they were inanimate, because they had existed before the break and lay in their places, still unconscious of it. There was a stab of wonder in every carefree movement of a bird, in the stream’s unbroken continuity, in the aloof and unswerving process of Nature.

What starts as a novella about wartime activity turns into a domestic psychological tale – the sort of thing Henry James would write if he could have composed a readable sentence. I did find it weird that such a short book would have the lengthy framing – I think it would have worked equally well, or perhaps better, if Richard had been more quickly introduced to this household. From here, it is a tense and well-written story – what really happened to Carey’s mother, and what is the mystery of the empty room?

Novella a Day in May: Days 20 and 21

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There’s a bit of a theme to the two novellas I’ve read in the past two days… or at least their titles.

Year of the Hare, The: Amazon.co.uk: Paasilinna, Arto: 9780720612776: BooksDay 20: The Year of the Hare (1995) by Arto Paasilinna

This novella, translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas, starts with a journalist and a photographer hitting a hare in their care. The journalist (who is called Vatanen, we later learn) gets out to see if it’s ok.

The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Tired of waiting, the photographer leaves the journalist in the forest – assuming that he’ll catch up to their hotel. But he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to abscond. He doesn’t like his wife anymore, he doesn’t much like his life, and he sees the opportunity to go off wandering through Finland – with the hare.

From here is a quite episodic novella, featuring all kinds of over the top acts – from bear hunting to dangerous fires, threats of pagan sacrifice and more. I’m going to be honest… it all left me a bit cold. The blurb and puff quotes all talk about how funny it is, but I didn’t really understand the wit. I found it all a little drab – big events but very little to make the reader invest in them. Even the hare is curiously characterless. I suppose it’s a sort of deadpan humour that I have enjoyed in other contexts, but for some reason this one didn’t move me.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's “Down the Rabbit Hole” - Words Without Borders

Day 21: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010) by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Down the Rabbit Hole comes in around 70 pages – all about a drug gang in Mexico. If I’d known that, I might never have bought it, because I really hate reading about gangs or the Mafia or anything like that. And I’d have missed out on a really brilliant little novella.

It’s told from the perspective of Tochtli, the eight-year-old son of a druglord. This is how it opens…

Some people say say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious.

He is indeed pretty precocious, and he does return to those words a lot – particularly sordid and pathetic, which he uses to dismiss a lot of people. (He also uses the f-word a lot, which I rather wish hadn’t been included in this translation.)

Tochtli isn’t shielded from the things happening around them, but he sees them with a child’s incomplete understanding and lack of empathy. He knows that people become corpses at their compound, but is more interested in how many bullets are needed for different parts of the body than thinking about any morality. He is amoral; the people around him are immoral. He is more interested in his various obsessions – Japanese samurai films, a collection of hats, and getting a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

Tochtli’s voice is brilliantly realised in this novella, and Villalobos has created a wholly convincing viewpoint on this horrible world.

Novella a Day in May: Days 18 and 19

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Day 18: The Nymph and the Nobleman (1932) by Margery Sharp

When I was in Hay-on-Wye last year, I stumbled across The Nymph and the Nobleman, one of Margery Sharp’s first books. And – gasp – signed by Margery Sharp! And all for £5. Of course, I snapped it up straight away.

It’s a very slight work, only 75 pages – and quite a few of those are full-page illustrations by Anna Zinkeisen. The story is of a bashful member of the English aristocracy, Sir George Blount, who falls in love at first sight with a beautiful dancer he encounters in Paris. He speaks little French and she speaks little English – but she is ready enough to assent to an assignation that will take place over several days. It’s quite a coup to rush off to England with a gentleman, and she will have stories to tell when she returns to her fellow dancers. What she doesn’t realise is that Sir George is extremely honourable, and he has asked her to be his wife…

She was not used to it. She was used to the scramble of dressing, the bustle of rehearsal, the crowning excitement of the evening’s performance. She was used to fifteen companions of her own age, each with a lover or two, and a maitre-de-ballet who never stopped swearing. It saddened her, on rising, to find that no one had got up earlier and borrowed her stockings. Even a shoe out of place would be something to look for, but the new maid shut them all into a wooden press: her character had been approved by the dowager, and she never saw anything on the floor without immediately picking it up.

As you can see, if you know and love Sharp like I do, the slightly dry writing is certainly recognisable. This is a fable, of sorts, and the tone softens what might otherwise be a slightly saccharine story. But Sharp can’t put a foot wrong. This is a minor work, but an enjoyable one to spend an hour so with.

Day 19: The House (1938) by William McElwee

I love any story where a house is prominent, and the cover of this is a pretty accurate representation of the sort of house at the centre of the book.

The first impression made by the house on a sensitive visitor was one of happiness. It had charm and, in certain aspects, even beauty. But the charm and the beauty were of the kind which grows with more intimate knowledge. They did not assault the senses with an insistent demand for admiration, but waited quietly to be discovered. Everything about it was essentially unpretentious. Nobody had lavished on external appearances that constant attention which can make a house as tiresome and boring to live with as a society beauty. The gardens were care for, but not too well; they suggested the haphazard efforts of generations rather than the carefully laid design of one landscape gardener. Certain flowers grew in particular beds not because they could be the most effective where they were, but because they always had been planted there; and most of the trees stood where they did because, at some time or other, they had contrived to grow unnoticed to such a size that it had seemed a shame to cut them down.

That’s the opening paragraph, and exactly the sort of opening I want from a novel(la). Domestic, the slightest amount of whimsy, and plenty of down-to-earthness alongside. There are a few more pages setting up this lovely home. And into this scene comes the unnamed protagonist – a tramp, looking for any opportunity for food or some paid work. He is nearing 50, and came from a middle-class background but has steadily had bad luck for so long that he has hit rock bottom. But is firmly moral, and is determined never to end up at a police station, or do anything that could warrant police attention.

But he does end up going through a window into the house – because, gloriously, a cat turns up and expects to be let in and fed. I’m biased, but I always want plots to be propelled by a cat. He/she was great, and I’m sad that we didn’t see that much of him/her.

Having once got in, the man goes through a series of decisions that end up with him staying in the house and eating food from the larder. As he spends more time there, he learns about the family from their portraits and belongings. He becomes to want to know more and more about them.

I thought this was all brilliant. The second half of the novella worked a little less well for me – when he becomes obsessed with the son of the family, a man who looks (from pictures) to be in his early 20s, and a poet. McElwee creates many sonnets for this young man, and the tramp learns about his emotional trajectory through them. The poetry is mercifully good, and I certainly didn’t mind reading this, but I’m not sure it’s the direction I’d have taken the story – it felt less compelling then just seeing the tramp gradually change as he lived in the house. As it is, I was really impressed by how vital McElwee could make a book which, for almost all of it’s 191 pages, the tramp is the only human in the story.

Novella a Day in May: Days 16 and 17

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Day 16: Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) by Per Petterson

TAshes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Amazon.co.uk: Petterson, Per, Bartlett, Don: 9781846553707: Bookshis 1987 book was translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett in 2013, which is when I think I got it as a review copy. Well, here I am, almost a decade later I’ve read all 118 pages of it. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is a novella or a series of short stories – it’s kind of both, in the way that Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is. Arvid Jansen is an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s, living with his family on the outskirts of Oslo, with a scathing older sister, a worrying mother, and a father who never stops speaking about ‘before the war’. There is also a grandfather, who dies in one of the first chapters/stories – a brilliant portrait of a young child’s mingled grief and indifference, scared of things changing but not really in mourning, and trying with inadequate words to convey all he is experiencing but not really comprehending.

Petterson is very good at giving the child’s point of view – it has that matter-of-factness, and at the same time building an understanding of the world. Here is Arvid thinking about his mother, and about ageing:

She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

Some of the dangers in Jansen’s world are philosophical and abstract, like this. But there is also malice in his world. There are bullies, there is the animosity between his father and his uncle, and his father’s drunken sadness. Petterson combines the contemplative with the unsettling.

Apparently Arvid Jansen appears in quite a few Petterson works, usually rather older than this boy. I haven’t read any of those, but now I’ve met Arvid as a child, I’d be intrigued to encounter him as an adult.

Day 17: The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath (1978) by Dodie Smith

the girl from the candle-lit bath dodie smith 1978 001This was Dodie Smith’s last novel, written when she was in her 80s, and it is quite a departure from her earlier work. While I Capture the Castle might feature the heroine in a bath when she first encounters the hero, nobody would describe Smith’s most famous work as a thriller. And that is what The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath is at least trying to be.

Nan is fairly recently married to an MP, and is worried that he is having an affair – she has spotted him handing a parcel to a shadowy stranger, and he is being coy about where he’s been. We never really get to know him, and even Nan doesn’t seem to particularly like him, but such is the start of the plot. In the first few pages she meets a taxi driver, after twisting her ankle and needing a lift, and he begins to talk to her about the possibility that her husband is hiding something even more significant.

The novella is told through a series of ‘tapes’, as Nan decides to record herself speaking, as a way to think things through. It’s an interesting device that felt a bit like a 1970s update of the 18th- or 19th-century heroine who had to commit all her thoughts to letters, no matter how precarious the situation.

And the title? Nan is famed from a TV advert, before she later made a success in television.

It began with something quite idiotic. I did a very well-paid commercial, advertising a soap first made back in the eighteen-nineties. They copied a wonderful bathroom in some old country house, with a marble bath, gleaming silver plumbing and all sorts of elaborate details, and they lit it only by candle-light. I came on in an exquisite negligée, took it off and stepped into the bath, but owing to the dim lighting, clever cutting and various tricks, I was never seen quite nude, even though the bath water was clear and not a bubble bath. Again and again I was almost seen but always something – usually the soap, in a silver soap dish – got in the way. The commercial was a great success and I became known as ‘The Girl in the Candle-lit Bath’ and got quite a large fan mail.

Her husband allows (!) her to start acting again, and the part of this novella I most enjoyed were her experiences re-entering the theatre as an understudy. At the same time this novella was published, Smith published the second volume of her memoirs – which, if memory serves, looked at the period of her own life when she was trying to make it as an actress. Smith is clearly at home in this world.

Where she is less at home is the thriller – the story suddenly takes a leap for the more dramatic, after a relatively promising start, and we are lost in a sea of chases and espionage and peril. It’s not at all convincing, and mostly feels very silly. I’d read Barb’s and Jane’s very unflattering reviews, and at least forewarned is forearmed. I quite enjoyed the first half, which have elements of Smith’s delicious humour (“Anyway, they hated the idea of the public tramping over beautiful old houses, which should be private, part of their owners’ private lives. If the Slepes ever acquire a private life they’ll be bitterly disappointed”) but the second half is too absurd and unsuccessful to make this a book worth seeking out.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (Novella a Day in May #15)

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Wow. A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence is absolutely brilliant. I bought it in 2007, and 15 years later it has come off my shelf and been devoured in a couple of sittings. It might not quite be a novella, at 202 pages, but its scope is compact in time and space – and a spectacular success.

This is the second in Laurence’s Manawaka series of novels – I’ve now read the first, fifth, and second (in that order) – set in a fictional town in Manitoba, Canada, though with a different set of characters each time. Having read the lengthy, spacious The Diviners for ‘Tea or Books?’ and finding it astonishingly good, I wanted to see which other Laurence treasures I’d been neglecting.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing then.

Rachel Cameron isn’t just living in the same small town where she grew up – she is living in the same house, and working as a second grade teacher at the same school she attended as a child. Her life has not progressed in any of the ways she’d imagined. Her days are spent at work with children who know her deeply for a year and then move on – still in the same school, the same town, but no longer part of her life. Her evenings are spent with her widowed mother, living above the funeral parlour that Rachel’s father used to run. Like some of the other books I’ve read this month, the mother/daughter relationship is too dependent, too stultifying, too thoroughly tangled with guilt and resentment, as well as love. Rachel seems to have few friends and no intimates – and she tries to avoid the closeness sought by her colleagues, such as the teacher who wants her to come along to her charismatic church.

Into this unchanging world comes Nick Kazlik. Or, rather, into it he returns.

“Hello, Rachel.”

Has someone spoken to me? A man’s voice, familiar. Who is it?

“It is Rachel, isn’t it?” he says, stopping, smiling enquiringly.

He is about the same height as myself. Not thickly built, really, but with the solidity of heavy bones. Straight hair, black. Eyes rather Slavic, slightly slanted, seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery in them from years ago.

Nick was the milkman’s son, returned to stay with his elderly parents – he left; he went to teach high school in the city. He and Rachel weren’t particularly close, but now they are drawn to each other. Soon, they are spending most evenings together – clandestinely, for both know their parents wouldn’t approve of anything so sudden.

In another genre, this would be a romantic release from drudgery. But in A Jest of God, Rachel cannot get release from herself. Though there is happiness in this new fling, Rachel has the self-consciousness of an adolescent. She second guesses everything she does or says, constantly imagining how it might be interpreted, what sort of impression she is making, whether she will be accepted or rejected.

Laurence writes with astonishing psychological acuity. The Diviners was sprawling in time and space – A Jest of God takes place over just a few weeks in a town so insular that it’s hard to conceive the rest of the world exists in any meaningful way. Rachel is so detailed and complete a character that the reader loves her, wants the best for her, and knows how unlikely it is that she will get it – because of flaws in herself and her upbringing, as much as the environment in which she lives. The tension between the possibility of Rachel’s future and her own hubris is what keeps this novel pacy and compelling, even when very little is happening on the surface.

It is a fantastic success of a novel, showing how adept Laurence is at whichever scope she sets herself.

Novella a Day in May: Days 13 and 14

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I’m watching Eurovision; I’m typing up thoughts about novellas. What a day.

Day 13: Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes

Ooof. I’ve read a couple of Barnes novels before this one, and never really seen what the fuss was about. But I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad Elizabeth Finch would be.

The narrator is remembering a teacher – Elizabeth Finch, referred to often as EF – who has had a lasting effect on his life. Think someone with the unusual pith and dignity of Jean Brodie, dispensing philosophical insights that have her pupils thinking for decades. Except that everything she says is only a couple of notches above a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign in terms of profundity.

One of the things she introduces the class to is Julian the Apostate, who hated Christians sometime many centuries ago. Don’t know much about him? Don’t worry, Barnes then includes an ‘essay’ by the narrator where he dumps all the knowledge he has about Julian. It reads like a Wikipedia article, only it’s 50 pages long. We get the facts and theories about Julian the Apostate, It’s astonishingly inelegant, in terms of novel writing.

Elsewhere, in the first and final sections, his writing is serviceable and only occasionally embarrassing (some of the dialogue he gives Elizabeth Finch is really awkward, and clearly she is a mouthpiece for a middle-aged man). But the best this novella gets to is mediocre, and at worst it is bafflingly poorly done.

 

Day 14: Sing Me Who You Are (1967) by Elizabeth Berridge

I bought this back in 2009 because I knew her name from the Persephone collection of her short stories, but I might equally have bought it for this glorious cover. The illustrator – Reg Cartwright – did three or four Berridge reprints in the 1980s and they are so characterful and wonderful.

What’s more, it is accurate to the premise of the novel. Harriet Cooper and her two Siamese cats arrive at the farm which belonged to her recently dead aunt, and where her cousin Magda and her husband Gregg live. Her aunt hasn’t left her the farm, or the land, or anything – except, pictured there on the cover, the bus.

Wading through the still-dewy grass – for the bus lived in shadow half the year, and this was autumn – Harriet went through the wooden gate set in a gap in the hedge and up on to the step. She unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door, which folded inwards down the middle. Stepping inside she became aware of the musty smell of disuse. How long, a month, six weeks? Enough for damp to invade this thin shell. She would open windows, light a fire, banish it.

She has stayed there on and off over the years, and now she has brought her few possessions to live there indefinitely.

The story then looks at how her life alongside Magda and Gregg brings up past and present tensions, as well as affinities. Central to them is the memory of a man known as Scrubbs – who deeply affected each of the three. He has been dead for a long time, but he is still impacting all of their lives, and the way they interact with each other. Along the way, secrets come out…

I’ve read three other Berridge books, and have yet to find one that I really love. This is a good novel, and Harriet is an interesting, layered character – but I think I’m really hoping for a book that will live up to those wonderful covers. If Berridge were a little weirder, or a little more stylised in her prose – a dash of Beryl Bainbridge, say – then I think I’d love her. As it is, her realism lacks a little something. And yet I’ll keep reading them, because I feel like there might be something even better in her oeuvre – and something that lives up to those covers.