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StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I have read a novella today, but I’ll write about it tomorrow alongside whatever I pick up for Day 13. I hope you have good plans for the weekend? I’ll be heading to my godson’s first birthday party and then, of course, watching Eurovision. I’ll be cheering on Estonia, because I got them in a sweepstake.

Speaking of all things musical, last week I was in London and saw &Juliet – if you get the chance, race to it. It’s the most fun I’ve had a show ever. It might have been custom made for me – it’s a wonderful combination of Shakespeare and 90s/00s pop. The premise is that Anne Hathaway persuades Shakespeare to let Juliet live at the end of Romeo & Juliet – and then what happens next. Set to the music of songwriter Max Martin, who penned hits for people like Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Pink etc. Basically a total nostalgia dream for an older millennial like me, and enough Shakespeare to feel vaguely intellectual. I’m already planning when I’ll go again…

Anyway, let’s do the usual think for the weekend miscellany.

1.) The link – Emily got in touch to ask if I’d like to join one of her Emily’s Walking Book Club, which meets on Hampstead Heath. If I’m ever in London at the right time then I’d love to go – but if you’re London-based, do check it out. Particularly the next one, discussing Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov on 22 May, which is a fundraiser for Ukraine. More details.

2.) The blog post – it’s not too late to join in with Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, or catch up on the participants’ reviews!

3.) The book – a new Ned Beauman is always of interest. This one, with the fairly horrible title Venomous Lumpsucker, is ‘a hilarious, terrifying novel in which Ned Beauman captures brilliantly the contradictory blend of urgency, paralysis, panic and resignation the climate emergency and its attendant mass extinctions inspire’, according to Chris Power, and it’s out in July.

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (Novella a Day in May #12)

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Gentleman Overboard eBook : Lewis, Herbert Clyde, Bigelow, Brad, Szirtes, George: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen Brad of Neglected Books started recommending titles for a new series of reprints, from Boiler House Press, I knew we would be in for something special. Few people know more about overlooked literature than Brad, and he has a wide and varying taste. So I knew I’d have to read whatever output came – and first was a slim book from 1937, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. I ordered a copy in December and it came last month, so… be careful where you order it!

Henry Standish is onboard the Arabella, sailing home from a period spent away from home. He has left his wife and young children behind in something that isn’t called a nervous breakdown, and perhaps isn’t that extreme, but certainly some mental instability has led to him wanting to get away from everything for a while. He is a successful businessman, sensible except when it comes to worrying about appearances, kind and private. (The ‘kindness’ we are told more than we see, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

As you may have guessed from the title – early one morning, walking the deck, he slips and falls overboard.

Standish’s thoughts during these seconds were strangely enough more concerned with shame than with fear. Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it was just not done, that was all. It was a stupid, childish, unmannerly thing to do, and if there had been anybody’s pardon to beg, Standish would have begged it.

The rest of the novella concerns the hours afterwards. Much of it is spent with Standish and his thoughts as he floats in the ocean – but we also go back to the Arabella and see the actions and responses of crew and passengers (curiously few passengers, helpfully for narrative purposes).

It is an unusual and very good book. I think the thing that makes Gentleman Overboard still feel vital is how timeless the idea is. Or, rather, being stuck alone in the ocean can have very few contemporary trappings. Back on board, there are some elements that remind us we are in the 1930s – but Standish, in the expanse of water, thinks thoughts that anybody in any decade or century might have thought there.

Lewis sustains the idea the perfect length – it is a short novella, and would have felt stretched if it were any longer. His writing is good – unshowy, with neat turns of phrase – but it is his psychological acumen that makes the novella work. And the subtlety with which he delivers it.

Certainly a premise unlike anything I’ve ever read, and a worthy start to a promising series.

The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek (Novella a Day in May #11)

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The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories by Du Maurier, Daphne [1907-1989]: (1981) | Little Stour Books PBFA MemberWhen I was looking at how to double up Novella a Day in May with Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, there weren’t a lot of options my shelves. If du Maurier wrote any novellas, then I don’t have them. But The Rebecca Notebook and other memories does come in at novella length, and has been waiting on my shelves since 2009.

I’m sure every one of you has read Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier’s runaway bestseller of 1938, and also (I would argue) her best novel. It’s been adapted for stage and screen many times, and has certainly reached classic status. That was also true in 1983, when du Maurier was in her mid-70s and The Rebecca Notebook was published. “Why, I have never understood!” claims du Maurier in the introduction – not so much that she can’t believe it has been popular, one suspects, than that she thinks it no better and no worse than all the rest of her output.

Anyway, its popularity is sufficient to sell this collection of non-fiction pieces – though the notebook itself accounts for only about 20 pages. It is an outline of the novel, though as she details later chapter it becomes rather more fleshed out with scenes and dialogue that she wanted to note. The survival of the notebook is owed to a plagiarism legal case, brought by Edwina MacDonald for a novel called Blind Windows, which du Maurier had never heard of. Du Maurier’s notes were thus used in her defence.

My only memory of the plagiarism suit was that the notebook was produced in court, and after cross-questioning the judge dismissed the case. I gave the notebook to dear Ellen Doubleday as a memento, and all I can recollect, after that first visit to the States, was being seasick all the way home in the Queen Mary.

When, after many more visits to the Doubledays, dearest Ellen died, she left the notebook to her daughter Puckie. Puckie returned it to me. And I reread it, for the first time in thirty years, when I received it.

It is a curio, and I did find it interesting to see how much du Maurier kept the same and how much she changed from this 20-page outline. The ending changes, and Mrs Danvers becomes creepier. That famous opening section is introduced – or, rather, moulded from the original epilogue (which is also included, after the notebook). All of this is only interesting if you love Rebecca – which I do, so it was.

The rest of the book is essays written at various times across du Maurier’s long career. The first concerns her famous writer grandfather, the next her famous actor/director father. The ones I found most interesting related to Menabilly (the model for Manderley in Rebecca) – I hadn’t realised that du Maurier wrote Rebecca simply on the strength of trespassing in the grounds of the abandoned house, and it wasn’t until years later that she managed to negotiate a lease and live there for a couple of decades.

Other essays are less convincing – I can’t imagine anybody is interested in du Maurier’s idiosyncratic and somewhat naïve takes on religion, and certainly you won’t be by the time you come across them for the third time – but there is enough of interest in parts of this collection to make it very much worth tracking down.

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

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I will try to keep doing these daily, and I am reading novellas daily, but I had so little to say about Day 9 that I thought I’d better roll these into one…

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

One of the shortest Persephone books, I’d somehow started and quit this one before. And I thought I’d go back and… well, I can see why I didn’t much bother about it before. It’s about Hatty going away away on honeymoon with a much younger husband, Stephen. That’s the present day plot, but much of it looks back at previous journeys, previous relationships, and particularly her aunt Cynthia and Hatty’s ill-fated relationship with a man called Jasper.

Some people really love this book, but I found the whole thing both confusing and negligible. I often didn’t know which timeline we were in, as it flitted back and half between paragraphs, and there was nothing in it to capture my attention. The writing, in isolation, is precise and rather lovely – but in such a way that I never felt particularly keen to look at sentences out of isolation. As a whole, it felt like a stagnant 119 pages to me.

A Change for the Better - WikipediaDay 10: A Change for the Better (1969) by Susan Hill

I had much more success with today’s novella, which I loved. Hill was still only her mid-20s when she wrote this story of people in a seaside community – and if you are immediately reminded of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, then keep that comparison in mind. If Hill’s writing is not quite like Taylor’s, being here a little less piercing and a little more comforting, these characters and stories could easily have been lifted from a Taylor novel.

The canvas is a little less wide, and I think that is to the novel’s advantage – many books that take a small society as their scene end up cramming in too many characters. Here, it is really two households that are focal. One is Deirdre Fount and her mother Mrs Oddicott, who run the draper’s, and Deirdre Fount’s 11-year-old son from her brief marriage. The marriage had been impetuous and ended in a wise divorce, with the absent Fount mentioned as seldom as possible.

Deirdre Fount had never questioned her mother’s view of the whole affair, had been entirely influenced in her behaviour and beliefs by Mrs Oddicott. She found it hard now to separate what actually had happened from what her mother had always predicted would happen, and she could remember no conversations with Aubrey, no relationship, no intimacy, that was not intruded upon by her mother. It was as though, having used men to provide them with a status and offspring, to ward off the shames of spinsterhood, they were ready to discard them and sink back into their closed, female society.

As you can see, they don’t have the healthiest relationship – but Hill gives subtlety to the usual portrait of a domineering mother, because the power shifts back and forth between them. It even passes to the 11 year old. Each needs the others, but also needs freedom, and the uneasy dynamic never stays still.

The other household is an older couple living in a hotel – Major Carpenter and his wife Flora. He is one of the most realistically infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His life is spent in selfish complaining, but each complaint is phrased in a way that makes Flora seem selfish, thoughtless or hectoring. Throughout the book, but particularly in scenes with these characters, Hill is brilliant at dialogue. It’s impossible to refute what Major Carpenter says, because he uses logic like a weapon. But, oh, he is appalling. But even he is treated with some sympathy – part of his unkind and self-centred nature comes from a terrible fear of illness and death.

Alongside nuanced character portraits, there is plenty that happens in A Change for the Better. Nothing is static, even in lives that don’t feel like they are developing. It all reminded me a little of the ‘well-made play’ – characters neatly doing enough to make a good, solid plot. And I found it absolutely enthralling and wonderful, a perfect balance between event and observation.

The only thing I would add, which could be either criticism or praise depending on your point of view, is that A Change for the Better feels very like a novel by someone who has learned more from reading than from life. I suppose most of us end up learning more from reading, since it encompasses much wider experience – but this feels especially like a novel built from reading many other novels. A few details suggest that it’s set contemporaneously, in the 1960s, but without those I could easily have believed it 1930s or even earlier. All this means that it doesn’t quite have the vividness of lived experience, but that is a quality that I am willing to sacrifice for something as satisfying as A Change for the Better.

Novella a Day in May: Days 7 and 8

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I did read my novellas (…sort of) on days 7 and 8, but I didn’t write yesterday because I was in London overnight. (I saw the musical &Juliet, and if you get a chance then please do so – it’s such a marvellous combination of 90s/00s pop and a clever spin on Shakespeare. It could have been purpose-made for me.)

Day 7: What the Neighbours Did (1972) by Philippa Pearce

On the train on the way there, I read What the Neighbours Did and other stories by Philippa Pearce – as you can tell by that title, it is a collection of stories rather than a novella. It’s one of those I bought on impulse online a decade or so ago, probably after (re)reading her masterpiece Tom’s Midnight Garden, but somehow didn’t get around to it. 

I thought that it was a collection for adults, and I suppose you could argue it is, but every story features children. The events are quite mundane – a tree being felled, a midnight feast, going blackberry-picking – but Pearce fills them with expansive wonder. Everyone and everything feels so free in this collection. The children head out for adventures in the countryside on their own, as every generation believes they were the last to do, and somehow Pearce gives these stories the feel that they will be treasured memories – like we are seeing the creation of nostalgia in the moment.

This edition also has the bonus of characterful illustrations by Faith Jaques. They give added beauty to a collection that is quietly joyful.

Day 8: Heartburn (1983) by Nora Ephron

Last year, in a work ‘secret’ Santa, I was given Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I put ‘secret’ in inverted commas because I know it was my good friend Katherine, and she chose very well. A bit of a gamble to get such a well-known book, but I hadn’t read it and had long intended to.

Heartburn is a fairly (but not completely) autobiographical novella about a cookbook writer called Rachel discovering that her husband Mark is having an affair while she is seven months pregnant with their second child. It covers the next couple of months, but also fills in the gaps about Rachel’s first unsuccessful marriage, as well as how she and Mark met and fell in love. 

Ephron writes just brilliantly, and I’m going to spend most of this short review sharing quotes… like this one, which was the first bit I noted down:

It is of course hideously ironic that the occasion for my total conversion to fidelity was my marriage to Mark, but timing has never been my strong point; and in any case, the alternative, infidelity, doesn’t work. You have only a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can’t remember which one you’ve told which story to, and the next thing you know, you’re moaning, “Oh, Morty, Morty, Morty,” when what you mean is “Oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with both of them simply because you’ve been raised to believe that the only polite response to the words “I love you” is “I love you too,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with only one of them, because you’re too guilty to handle loving them both.

She is very funny, and often takes sentences in a different direction than expected – both in terms of what they are saying, and the emotion she is conveying. For example…

My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from an obscure Dan Dailey movie he’s played a pediatrician in, and partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

Along the way, food is an important factor. Several actual recipes are included, and my edition even has an index of the different recipes as people clearly try them out. I might give the bread and butter pudding a go, and need to find out if her vinaigrette is really as marvellous as she suggests. The food isn’t incidental either; it connects with various stages of her life and her journey. And it gives way to this glorious quote about the association we have between specific cooking techniques and people we’ve known:

The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him. There was another man in my life when I was younger who taught me to put sour cream into scrambled eggs, and since I never ever put sour cream into scrambled eggs I never really think of him at all.

The author I kept thinking about, as I read Heartburn, was Anita Loos and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I don’t know if that’s a common comparison or not, but it has the same feeling of words tumbling out uncontrollably. The same endless self-reflection, but never pausing to get any of the benefit of it. Everything is told quite matter-of-factly, so even when Rachel is telling us how heartbroken she is, it comes in a stream of other stories and events and thoughts, so somehow the book maintains an even emotional keel in the telling.

Though I saw comparisons to Loos, Ephron has a really distinct voice here – and one that is kept up successfully throughout. I thought it was marvellous, and wonderful that somebody capable of writing such a cynical comedy of a novel could also write quintessential romantic comedies.

In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp (Novella a Day in May #6)

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When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.

Screens Against the Sky by Elleke Boehmer (Novella a Day in May #5)

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I bought Screens Against the Sky (1990) by Elleke Boehmer in 2008 – just weeks before I started my Masters, because Elleke was running the course and I thought it would be fun to read her book before I met her. And here we are, a short 14 years later, and I’ve finally read it! I haven’t seen Elleke for almost a decade, but it was fun to think of her as I read her debut novel.

I’m not sure how autobiographical Screens Against the Sky is, but it would certainly fit – like Boehmer, Annemarie is a teenager in 1970s South Africa. She lives with her mother, Sylvie, and towards the beginning of the novel they mourn the death of Sylvie’s husband, Annemarie’s father. And begin the next stage of their relationship – as the only two people in the household, in a mother/daughter relationship that sometimes seems unhealthily close, sometimes is threatened by Annemarie’s leaps towards independence, sometimes in the sanctuary they need in grief. The title is literally about some hail-screens that are attached to the windows, but is also about Sylvie’s wish to keep the scary, vast outside world out.

The long slope of the veld leading up towards the hills drew her [Sylvie’s] own eyes towards the sky and the bleak white sun. There was too much space about. She preferred not to see it. With the chicken wire netted across the windows, she could focus on something close at hand. The screens made a web to which her skittering eye might cling.

They are not quite the only people in the household, in fact. There is also Simon – the garden boy, not far off Annemarie’s age. He is Black, and he introduces Annemarie to a world she had known nothing about. Her father taught her only to read world news, not local – and so she was almost entirely ignorant about apartheid, and how things were beginning to change. The most significant moment is the murder of Steve Biko, a victim of police brutality. Shamefully, I didn’t know anything about this real event – if you’re the same as me, then I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. It is a discovery that changes Annemarie’s outlook, and one of many contemporary events that leads Simon to leaving their employment. I wouldn’t say that Screens Against the Sky is a novel about apartheid, but it is unavoidably the background against which the novel is set.

But front and centre is that tortured relationship of mother and daughter – with some ups and rather more downs. The novel alternates between third and first person, the latter being Annemarie remembering this period from an undefined future. As a teenager, she rigorously recorded journals – though she no longer has them, her recollections often involve the journaling, and an approximation of what she thought she’d written. The differing perspectives come together well, often changing in a few paragraphs. It works as a patchwork.

I was a bit worried when I started Screens Against the Sky that it would be very overwritten. The style of the first few pages is certainly leaning that way, with sentences like ‘On the bedside table, painted buff eggshell off-white, lies a New English Bible, abutting on a colonnade of pill phials.’ More of this does appear later, occasionally, but the style calms down for the most part. And quite a lot of it is told in spare, effective sentences – like this:

The Reverend Guthrie brought relief. Within an hour of his eventual coming, he and Mother retired to the seclusion of her bedroom to pray. I heard her voice rising, falling and rising. I heard them pray together, prayer after prayer. I feared they might at some stage call me in to join them, so I went walking. There was an errand I had to run for which I had not yet had the time. I walked to the edge of town, a place not far from the bus depot, the site of the municipal dumping grounds. It was a wide piece of land, covered with slowly smoking ash and hidden from the road by dense bramble bushes. It smelt distinctively of rust and pus. I did not spend very long. As soon as I arrived, I felt I had to hurry home. I was right in doing so. At the gate Mother was waiting: she wanted me to be with her during the Reverend’s closing prayer She said it would help her. I walked with her to the bedroom, she behind me. She asked where I’d been. I said to town and back – for air. That was, I think, the first lie I consciously told my mother.

Screens Against the Sky is a novel written in a place and a decade that I know little about in literature, and it was rewarding to spend time there. I’d certainly be intrigued to read more by Boehmer, and found the different elements of this book very rich – I think it would merit rereading, exploring all the depths.

Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Novella a Day in May #4)

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Journey Through a Small PlanetOops, I keep cheating on this novella challenge – though today’s cheating was accidental, since I was about 30 pages into Journey Through A Small Planet (1972) by Emanuel Litvinoff when I realised it was an autobiography. Simply from seeing it on the shelf, I had assumed it was a sci-fi novella – though that in itself would have been a surprise, being worlds away from The Lost Europeans, my (brilliant) previous experience with this writer.

Instead, we are taken to the East End of London in the years after the First World War. Emanuel is the son of working-class Jewish immigrants from Russia, living in a community that shares his poverty and his ethnicity. I won’t say faith, because Emanuel determines relatively early in childhood that he doesn’t want to follow the Jewish religion, though of course he remains Jewish. And in the eyes of many people at his school and, later, his first places of employment, he is still Russian. Even though he has never been there. Sadly, recent political decisions in this country show that British-born children of immigrants don’t today have much more certainty that their nationality will be respected…

I found the writing in The Lost Europeans captivatingly beautiful. In Journey Through A Small Planet, the prose is much more understated – Litvinoff is more interested in translating the perceptions of his childhood than in framing it elegantly. We see how he is bullied and ostracised at school, both by pupils and teachers – on the first day, his form teacher makes much of his ‘foreign’ surname, and sets the trend for the way Emanuel will be treated by everyone who encounters him. Despite there being a significant Jewish population in his area of London, none of his contemporaries at school seem to be Jewish – and Emanuel feels all the more alienated because he doesn’t see himself in his community either. Judaism pales in comparison to Communism in his mind. He is captivated by faintly understood tenets, and Litvinoff takes us inside the passion and in-fighting of those on the left of the spectrum in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Of course, Emanuel is also occupied with less abstract issues. There is hunger, there is lust, there is envy – all the human emotions, conveyed with all the sense of newness that everyone feels in experiencing them for the first time. Eventually he disappears from home in a way that seems very far-fetched, but presumably happens. And the autobiography – or perhaps memoir – ends almost in the middle of a scene.

Along the way, the infant Emanuel and the adult Litvinoff coalesce. The emotions are the child’s, but he blends it well with the observational power of the reflecting adult. It combines to give the memoir an authenticity that is amplified by perceptiveness. Here’s a rather lovely bit I noted about a child (otherwise a background character in the book) whose father returns from long exile:

Acquiring a father unexpectedly like that could be either horrible or marvellous for a boy. In Mendel’s case it was marvellous. You’d see the two of them walking hand in hand through the raucous streets, talking to one another as if no one else in the world existed. They went to museums, parks, art galleries, visited the Tower, climbed the Monument, inspected the Palace Guard, all things that Mr Shaffer must have dreamed of doing with his son during those long years of waste and deprivation in Russia. If the boy was happy, the man was ecstatic. I saw him one Sunday standing in the marketplace utterly dazed by the mounds of ripe fruit, barrels of shmlaz herring and pungent strings of sausages, gazing at these and the stalls flowing with coloured silks and heaped with new-smelling leather, as if the wonder of the world was spread before his feasting eyes. And the way Mendel smiled up at the tall man you’d think he was the father, not the child.

If Journey Through A Small Planet didn’t bowl me over quite as much as Litvinoff’s fiction, it impressed me in a different way. Definitely recommended – and now I’ll re-shelve it in the correct section of my library.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #3)

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I’m playing cold-or-Covid roulette at the moment – it would be unlucky to get Covid again so soon, but you never know – and Penelope Mortimer accompanied me while I wasn’t working or napping today. My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is the curious title of this 1967 novel(la), somewhere in the middle of her writing career. A few of her books have come back into print through various houses, but I am still surprised that she has not survived as unstoppably as other contemporaries. Her style is assured, odd, and captivating.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is about Muriel Rowbridge – the only women in a group of journalists who have been flown to Canada. They aren’t there for a particular event so much as to soak in the culture of the area, and report back on it in their various ways. Muriel’s writerly output is a column in a woman’s magazine (though they avoid the term). She has some aspirations of writing novels, though lies about this, and doesn’t seem particularly fulfilled by her job. Though nor is she ashamed of it as some people expect her to be.

Muriel is in something of a turbulent period of her life. Only a few months before the novel starts, she has had a mastectomy. She has a brassiere with a fake breast, and is far from getting used to the change in her body, and in the way she believes that people see her. After the mastectomy, she ended her relationship – a long-term affair with a married man called Ramsey.

Then they told her she was not going to die and her concern changed to a sense of outrage; she became convinced that no one could ever feel anything for her, sexually, but pity and disgust. She sent Ramsey away, his mirror after him. They said she would get over this too, and suggested therapy. But she did not want to get over it, the cheat she was perpetrating on the world by pretending to be a normal woman gave her a kind of terrible liveliness; without that liveliness, that feeling of perpetual shock, she believed that she would drift into an apathy which would be worse than death. she went back to work in new clothes, everything hidden. They called her brave behind her back, but treated her, according to the General’s directions, with affectionate indifference. Very few people telephoned her at home, or asked her out, in case she should feel pitied or find it difficult to refuse. The men who had previously patted or stroked her. out of friendliness, avoided her; the women, in her presence, avoided the men, obscurely ashamed of themselves.

Mortimer writes about this experience with a sort of brutal sensitivity, if that isn’t an oxymoron. Muriel’s feelings are not given anywhere to hide, but there is somehow a kindness in the unflinching way her new life is examined.

She certainly needn’t have worried about men finding her attractive, though. While there is a complexity to each of them, the crux of the novel is Muriel forming a relationship with every man on the trip. More than one are sexual. Some are based on shared disappointment, some on a meeting of minds and questions, and some simply on unstoppable interest in one another. I’ll be honest, I did struggle to separate the men – they did have distinctive traits, but I couldn’t remember which traits went together, or with which name. She shuttles between them all, one by one and back again, often in the form of sparse back-and-forth conversations. There is definitely something Spark-like in the way Mortimer presents conversations – a sort of emotional openness that never quite answers the questions the reader is probably asking.

I thought My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof was very good, and the writing is exactly the sort of curious, spare prose I love from this period. Mortimer is expert at conveying the damage that Muriel feels. I think the only thing that stopped me really loving this book is that I was a bit too confused by it. But maybe that was part of the point.

William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (Novella a Day in May #2)

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William - an Englishman – Persephone Books

William – an Englishman (1919) by Cicely Hamilton isn’t really a novella, coming in at 226 pages, but I needed to reread it for Tea or Books? so I thought a Bank Holiday Monday was a great opportunity to read something a bit longer. Never too early to break the rules!

I can’t remember when I originally read this book, but not that much of it had stayed in my mind – except some searing scenes. And this is a decidedly searing book. It was the first novel published by Persephone Books, and it certainly dispels from the off the idea that they only publish cosy books. It’s hard to imagine anything less cosy – William – an Englishman is almost a work of horror at times.

It is titled after William but it is also about his wife, with the rather absurd name Griselda. As the novel opens, they have not met – but both have been swept up in the contemporary tide of socialism and suffragism. It is 1913 at this point, I think, and both movements are in full sway. William and Griselda are not paddling in the shallow waters of these movements either. They have dedicated their whole lives, their whole beings, to the cause.

From that day forwards he devoted himself to what he termed public life – a ferment of protestation and grievance; sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured or, at least, artificially heightened. He was an extremist, passionately well-intentioned and with all the extremist’s contempt for those who balance, see difficulties and strive to give the other side its due.

Hamilton writes quite satirically about them. She doesn’t doubt their convictions, nor does she particularly undermine the causes for which they fight – she just portrays their extremism in the light of an authorial voice for whom calmness is the hallmark of good sense. The reader feels safe. There is a definite safety in seeing such passion from a distance, where we can turn it around in our mind, chuckling at its excesses.

But Hamilton has lured us into a false sense of security. The novel is about to become much less safe.

William and Griselda get married and set off to spend their honeymoon in Belgium, at the holiday home of a friend. They are three weeks into their time there, away from newspapers and letters and any contact with the outside world, when they spot some soldiers on the horizon. With their pacifist stances, they just mock the men out ‘playing at murder’. They do not realise that, since they last heard the news, a war has been declared – and Belgium has been invaded by German soldiers.

From here, William – an Englishman becomes much darker – even brutal. It is fast-paced, as the couple find themselves caught up with swift intensity in a situation they couldn’t have imagined. Hamilton switches tone expertly, and we can no longer smile at the naivety of this young pair. None of it feels melodramatic or gratuitous, simply because the horrors they are suddenly exposed to are horrors that genuinely happened to enormous numbers of people.

Later in the novel, I found the intensity flagged a little, and Hamilton loses a bit of her subtlety for a period – but the ending recaptures the pathos of the early novel. It’s extraordinary that this novel is more than a century old – it still feels fresh and vital, and one can’t help thinking about other invasions and violence happening in the world today.

Rachel and I will soon be recording an episode of Tea or Books? comparing this with a novel about a couple at the beginning of World War Two – Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune. Look out for that!