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Bear by Marian Engel – #1976Club

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Some bloggers and books are inextricably linked. Someone talks about a book with such passion, and perhaps often, that they and the book become united. I think that’s probably true of me and Miss Hargreaves. It’s definitely true of Dorian and Bear by Marian Engel.

You probably know Dorian’s brilliant blog, or have encountered him on Twitter – and he has written a wonderful article about this novella. Because of him, Bear has been on my horizons for a while. When it was reprinted by Daunt Books this year, I got a copy (and it was another recommendation, really, because Daunt are so flawless in their choice of reprints). When it turned out to match the club year, it was a no-brainer to pick up.

Lou is a librarian in Toronto, though her role seems to encompass archivist as well. Describing her job is one of the first moments I stopped to note down the beautiful precision of Engel’s writing:

Lou dug and devilled in library and files, praying as she worked that research would reveal enough to provide her subject with a character. The Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel. Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed.

Her role might sound wonderful to the likes of you and me, but she has grown weary of it and wishes to escape her lonely urban life. When the Institute for which she works needs someone to go to Cary’s Island, part of a legacy left by Colonel Jocelyn Cary, she is the person for the job. The idea is that she is to catalogue the library, find out what she can about Cary, and report back about whether or not the estate would make a good place to develop a research facility.

I love novels about outsiders going to small, isolated communities. Those narratives can take so many directions – perhaps it will be a new lease of life, perhaps unsettling, perhaps a panacea, perhaps antagonistic. Bear takes parts of all of these. Lou finds a sort of freedom in being unleashed from her life – and the locals are hesitantly welcoming. But there is much more to discover. Here she is, after talking to one of the locals who is sometimes kind and sometimes not:

She made as if to go inside the house again, for it was dark and she was tired and cold, but Homer stood looking at her uneasily, shifting from foot to foot. She wondered if he was going to touch her or to denounce her. She wanted to get in and get settled. There had been so much day; she had a lot to think about. She was impatient.

‘Did anyone tell you,’ he asked, ‘about the bear?’

Nobody has. It says something about the beguiling way that Engel writes that it somehow doesn’t leap out as ridiculous that her role on the island includes caring for a bear, and that nobody has mentioned it. But apparently the Careys have always had a bear – and there is one, enormous and noisome, chained to the ground. Apparently docile, but who knows what would happen if he were given his freedom.

Gradually, Lou starts to be curious about the bear. There is something about sharing this isolation with one other living creature that starts to give a sense of companionship. But she never forgets the essential danger of the bear – that he could end her life on a whim. She seems almost intoxicated by this potential for danger – as she is intoxicated by the sense of escape she has from her ordinary life.

And, yes. Moment by moment, the narrative edges closer and closer to a sexual relationship between Lou and the bear – so that, when it happens, it is shocking but it somehow coheres with everything that has gone before.

I think the reason Bear can cope with its bizarre, extraordinary plot is the fineness of Engel’s writing. She uses all the senses, as well as exploring Lou’s mind in sentences that are sparse but beautiful. Here’s an example of her writing treading that line between poetic and straightforward, finding the perfect place in between:

He smelled better than he had before he started swimming, but his essential smell was still there, a scent of musk as shrill as the high sweet note of a shepherd’s flute.

It is a short novel, perhaps a novella, and I read it in a few hours. There is something dizzying about it. While Lou dices with danger, the tension I found in the novel was really about Lou’s discovery of herself – of the limits of new frontiers, and how gently she can travel beyond those limits.

When I mentioned I was reading Bear, I got the impression that a few people wondered how I’d cope with the theme. Gasping emojis and the word ‘No’ were among the comments I got on Instagram. But it is far from my first moment of fictional bestiality! I wrote a chapter of my DPhil thesis on animal metamorphosis, and it also encompassed animal marriage and, yes, sex with animals. It crops up in Lady Into Fox by David Garnett and His Monkey Wife by John Collier – there is nothing new under the sun etc. etc. So the relationship that emerges between Lou and the bear might be the shocking detail that people remember most – but, at its heart, Bear is much more sophisticated than a can-you-believe-it moment.

Almost any story can be beautiful if told beautifully, and Engel’s writing is a sensuous, careful delight. I’d suggest going into the novella without worrying about where the plot will lead. Go for the journey.

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore – #1976Club

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brian moore - the doctor s wife - AbeBooksSheila Redden has come to France to celebrate her anniversary with Kevin, the doctor of the title. She has come ahead of him, as he has been caught up with work – and they’ve returned to the place where they had their honeymoon fifteen years earlier. Before heading to the very same hotel in Villefranche, she is spending a short time in Paris, visiting an old friend and her current boyfriend. Her life is painfully ordinary. She loves her teenage son Danny, though not all-encompassingly. She supposes herself to love her husband and her life, because that is what one does. Sheila is an introspective woman who manages to avoid looking too close.

Coming back to France isn’t just stepping back into a past of their early romance, it is escaping the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That term has been used in our earliest ‘club’ years and in our latest, though here it is different than in the ’20s, of course. Sheila is a ‘Catholic’, very much inverted commas in place, and has no strong political leanings – just a horror of the death and destruction that is happening in her homeland.

In Paris, Sheila gets talking to a young American called Tom. He is charming, funny, and – most unusually of all for Sheila – interested in her. They share an evening of conversation, walking around the sights of Paris, discussing their pasts, presents, futures. It is a perfect evening, and Tom tries to persuade Sheila to stay longer – particularly as her husband is further delayed. But she insists she has to go to the hotel in Villefranche.

Moore is very good at moments that illuminate a life: that tell you enough in a microcosm that you can understand the broader dynamic of a relationship or state of mind. Even rarer, he is good at doing it unshowily, letting the moment be an ordinary part of a day and letting the reader recognise its significance.

Ninety minutes later, the plane began its approach to Nice, flying along the coastline over Saint-Raphael and Cannes. Through the window she saw villas on cliffsides, emerald swimming pools, white feathers of yacht sales scattered in the bays. When she had first looked down on this coast long ago on her honeymoon, she had turned in excitement, saying: ‘Oh, Kevin, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to live here all the time?’ only to have him take her literally and answer, ‘I suppose it would, if all I wanted to do was water-ski the rest of my life.’ She remembered that now, as the plane wheeled, pointing down toward land. Below her, cars moved, slow as treacle on the ribbon of seafront road. The plane skimmed the tops of a row of palm trees, came in over a cluster of white rectangular hangars to land with a jolt of its undercarriage and a sickening rear jet thrust.

She hasn’t been at the hotel for very long when the reception call and say there is a gentleman waiting for her in the lobby.

When the lift reach the ground floor and paused for that little airbrake moment before it finally settled, all at once she knew. The lift door opened, showing the lobby, him standing there, throwing his head up at sight of her, very excited, smiling, awaiting her reaction. ‘Hello, Sheila. Mind if I join you?’

It was then she saw how nervous he was.

‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I hate to be left behind at airports.’

It sounds a bit manipulative out of context, but Moore goes out of his way to make Tom kind, selfless and respectful of Sheila. She is so unused to being put first, and to be found vital as a woman – and she quickly falls in love with this younger man. It is mutual, and they quickly find themselves in bed together. As we had known they would from a prologue at the beginning of the book.

The Doctor’s Wife then treads three lines, I think. One is Sheila finding a new world before her, and her new relationship with Tom. One is Kevin trying to resurrect his marriage from Northern Ireland – enrolling Sheila’s brother, who is also a doctor, to try and help plan how best to overcome what he sees as a temporary insanity. And one is Sheila dealing with the collapse of her marriage through a series of phone calls and a lot of personal reflection. Each is captivating, and the reader feels a constant whirl of pity, hope, and compassion.

Moore is such a sensitive and subtle novelist. It’s one of those plots that could come across quite tawdry, but there is a beauty to this novel – because it is concerned most deeply with people, not with their actions. While the plot is about adultery and its aftermath, it’s really ‘about’ Sheila and her being shaken into a fresh development as a person.

As in his best-known work, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore gets deep under the skin of an unhappy and unfulfilled middle-aged[ish] woman, and does it brilliantly. If that is his masterpiece, then The Doctor’s Wife isn’t too many paces behind it.

1976 Club: Post your reviews here! #1976Club

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The 1976 Club is here! It’s time for the bi-annual event where Karen and I ask readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of a particular year in books. This week, we’re asking you to read and review a book – or more – published in 1976. Any book published in 1976 counts – in whatever format, language, place.

Just put a link to your review in the comments here – on your blog, GoodReads, Instagram, wherever. If you don’t have any platform to leave a review, you can write your review in the comments.

I also wanted to start the week by sharing this apt quote from Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017), translated by Sasha Dugdale – an eclectic and poetic work of non-fiction that starts from the idea of looking at old family photographs and ranges far and wide. How perfect for the club projects is this? It really captures something of what I hoped we could achieve when I first came up with the club idea.

There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross-section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces it owns particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the ‘typical’ suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.

British Library Women Writers #10: Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

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It’s less than a year since I first blogged about Sally on the Rocks here (though I read it earlier in 2020, and only blogged after my re-read) – and here we are, it’s the tenth book published in the British Library Women Writers series. I am so excited for people to meet her!

I’m writing about each of the series in turn, and a lot of this post is copied from my original review. Before I repost that, though, a bit of background into its appearance on the list. I think it’s the first BLWW title that I discovered while deliberately hunting out little-known and out of print books – I have actually been going through Scott’s incredible list of British and Irish women writers 1910-1960, hunting out the ones who sound particularly interesting. You have to get through a lot of books to find a real gem, of course, and Sally on the Rocks wasn’t even the Boggs title I intended to read.

The title that made me want to explore Boggs was The Indignant Spinsters, since it sounds so up my street. I did get a copy, but I bought Sally on the Rocks too because there were a few more copies available and rather cheaper. Why not, thought I. Well, now I’ve read both books – and Sally on the Rocks is much, much better. I suggested it to the British Library with a fervent urgency, and they agreed that it should be back in print.

My afterwords for the series are supposed to identify particular issues of the period affecting women, which are brought out in the novel. There wasn’t one clear issue in Sally – except for the different morals facing men and women, which is spelled out so clearly in the novel that all I could really do was echo them. So, alongside, I wrote about money and dug up some really interesting contemporary reviews. As always, I start wondering if I’ll have enough to say, and find that I have to start cutting back.

What was much harder was the bio – it’s impossible to find anything beyond the most rudimentary info. Because she died more than 70 years ago, it’s out of copyright and there weren’t any family members who could clue us in a bit (which proved so useful when writing about Dorothy Evelyn Smith). I’m hoping the book being back in print might bring some info out of the woodwork.

And the book itself – here we go: Winifred Boggs starts us with the sort of village community that has been the basis for many of the great works of literature. Little Crampton is an insular world, assured of its own superiority, and not necessarily very welcoming to outsiders. But how few outsiders would be interested in it, because any village would be equally convinced that it is the first and best village in its region. Little Crampton is ruled over by Miss Maggie Hopkins – an unofficial position, but her gossiping, her rigid adherence to morality when it can shame others, and her determination to root out the truth in any situation mean that she is feared and also a vital source of information.

As the novel opens, she writes to Sally, hinting that the bank manager and sort-of-curate, Mr Bingley, is looking for a wife. ”He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks’, as well as the fifteen hundred,” she writes, none too subtly. It is enough to bring Sally back to the village where she grew up, adopted by the vicar Mr Lovelady, who is still in residence but hears little from his ward. She is in France, wary of the probable coming invasion – for the war is underway – and she has is licking the wounds of an unsuccessful love affair. She comes back to Little Crampton.

As she says, ”You’re not out for romance at thirty-one; it’s a business.” She is truly fond of Mr Lovelady, but she does not want to end up dependent on him – rather, she sets her cap at Mr Bingley and is willing to do whatever it takes to become his wife. All is fair in love and war, perhaps – but there is neither love nor war here. It is a woman who has been broken by the world seeking to play the world’s rules against themselves. She is like a much more likeable Becky Sharp. She doesn’t seek power or position – just stability.

Sally on the Rocks is wonderfully feminist at many junctures. I shan’t spoil all the plot, but Sally’s lover from France comes back. When Sally is asked, by her ex-inamorato, if she can forgive him, she replies:

”There is no question of that, only you are a little illogical, aren’t you? You are to be permitted to forget, but never I. Yet you have paid no price. Your wife forgave you and married you just the same, as women, wise or foolish, do the whole world over. You look at the matter one way and I the other – the man’s and the woman’s way. You ran no real risk of losing your wife by confessing. I lose everything in this world; some think everything in the next. No, such things are not on the same footing, after all.”

Most wonderful is Boggs’ take on a love triangle. Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter, is also keen to persuade Mr Bingley to marry her. We have seen, hundreds of times, the two women pitted against each other for the ‘prize’ of the man. Here, the women candidly agree that Mr Bingley is a repellent prospect but the financially savvy one, acknowledge that they will both fight hard to win his hand, but that they will play fair. There is a sense of comrades-in-arms between them that I haven’t seen in a novel before.

I should say, Sally on the Rocks is very funny, as well as having a lot to say about the status of women at the time. Sometimes simultaneously. My favourite, extended scene was when Sally takes Mr Bingley off on a walk in the woods, deliberately letting them get lost – her plan being that, lost alone with her in the woods, under a full moon, he will feel duty-bound AND romantically inclined to propose.

But much of the humour, as well as the enjoyment in the book, comes from Sally. She is determined, witty, bloody but unbowed. She is even rather ruthless, but there is plenty of humanity in her too – and, of course, there is another man who catches her eye. He is not at all the savvy choice. I shall leave it to your imagination to decide which path she ultimately takes…

I’m so delighted that more people will meet Sally, and am very impatient to hear people’s thoughts. Luckily, the four new British Library Women Writers titles will all be part of a blog tour throughout October and November – I can’t wait!

The Warning Bell by Lynne Reid Banks

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The L-Shaped Room is one of my favourite novels, and I’ve read it and its sequels quite often over the years – but have read oddly little of Lynne Reid Banks’ other novels since a brief spate about twenty years ago. And I’ve owned The Warning Bell (1984) since probably about 2003, so it seems about time I read it.

Maggie is a teenager when the novel begins – with two brothers, the censorious Ian and the more laissez-faire Stip, and parents who seem ordinary and conservative to her. She longs to escape the community in Scotland that she sees as backward and repressive, and dreams of finding success as an actress. Her best friend Tanya longs for the same thing and, as the novel opens, they have both been caught in a series of lies to go and see a production of Oklahoma.

The same deceit comes into play a little later when Maggie goes to drama school – throughout which she is deceiving her father into paying, as he thinks she is doing a different course at a different university. She is aided and abetted by her secondary school drama teacher – indeed, it is this teacher’s idea – and Banks is great at the feelings of guilt and freedom that intertwine, even if she is a little more haphazard on the actual details of how this deception would take place. When it comes out, the proverbial inevitably hits the fan.

Maggie seems a little similar to The L-Shaped Room’s Jane in the opening chapters of the novel. Like Jane, she is at odds with her father and has to start a life estranged from her family – albeit for different reasons. But where Jane enters a new community in her block of flats, gradually getting to know and love the people around her, Maggie’s immediate future is rather darker. She is sexually assaulted by a man she is dating, discovers she is pregnant, and decides to marry him.

The title of the novel is explained in the early pages of the novel, and this is one of many moments where the bell is clanging loudly…

Maggie’s mother once said, ‘You know, Maggie, the vainest and most futile mental exercise in the world is tracing back some accident or blunder to its origins, and letting one’s heart gnaw itself in regret that one didn’t know what was going to result. You know: ”If I hadn’t gone there, met so-and-so, done this or not done that…” One’s whole life can turn on some tiny thing. It’s not fair. There ought to be a bell, a warning bell, sounding at dangerous corners. But there never, never is.’

But Maggie, on reflection, decided that there very often is a warning bell. It may not go clang-clang with great noisy obviousness. But it rings in other ways. She could remember many turning-points in her own life which were marked by bells of a sort. Her innumerable blunders had not resulted from an absence of bells, but her wilfulness in ignoring them.

In justice to Banks, the rape is recognised as being horrific, and Maggie’s decision to marry Bruce is not presented as something wise or justified. I’m racing through the plot a little here, because the novel is packed with incident, but Banks is very good at conveying the feel of living another person’s life, and I certainly felt plunged into Maggie’s – including all the mistakes, horrors, rejections, pressures and so on. Considering dark things happen, The Warning Bell is not a bleak novel at all. Banks recognises the confusing way that life can be a tapestry of bad and good simultaneously, without one blocking out the other.

I was really loving the novel, in fact. Banks writes brilliantly, and I was getting the same sense of full immersion that I always get when I re-read The L-Shaped Room. But then… Maggie and Bruce move to Nigeria. And… yikes.

There are definitely racist elements in The L-Shaped Room, but I always felt that they were on the part of the character – and that she grows to realise she is terribly wrong. In The Warning Bell, the way Nigerians are portrayed is just as racist in the narrative voice as in the different characters’. They are all depicted as unintelligent, primitive, and desperate to be servile to the white characters – who consider themselves set apart and far better in every way, and the narrative seems to agree with them. It was really unpleasant to read, and the sort of casually racist set up that I was surprised to see so openly in a novel published so recently.

Things improve when Maggie returns to the UK, and she deals with the conflicting impulses of motherhood, career, romance and friendship. These are all more or less eternal themes of women’s lives, and Banks brings them together convincingly and compellingly. Well, convincing insofar as becoming a national TV newsreader is considered a fall-back option for a wannabe actress.

My only criticism in this second half of the book is that the pacing is sometimes a bit awry. It does seem to enter rather a gallop in the final section of the novel, jumping ahead both in terms of time and the emotional curve of the narrative. So, overall, your stomach for this novel will depend on how much you can cope with the horrendous racism that’s prevalent for about fifty pages. I loved diving back into the incredible storytelling that Banks is so good at – but with a nasty taste in my mouth at the same time.

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

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If you click that ‘Cunningham’ tag above, you’ll see how much I love his writing. He is one of my favourite living writers, and I am getting unsettlingly close to having read everything he has published so far – one of the ones I hadn’t raced towards is 2005’s Specimen Days, and the reason is that it takes me very out of my comfort zones.

It’s a novel of three periods – much like Cunningham’s best-known book, The Hours, though in Specimen Days the periods do not interweave. Rather, there are about a hundred pages devoted to each – New York in the nineteenth-century, in a contemporary world still rocked by 9/11, and in a sci-fi future that I don’t remember the exact dates of. In each period are Simon, Catherine, and Lucas (or close variations on those names). They have different relationships in each section and, indeed, only two of them are alive in the first and second sections. It’s an intriguing and inventive premise – but did it work?

In the first period, Lucas is a young teenager starting work at a metalworks – taking over from his brother, Simon, who was killed in an accident with one of the machines. He has to go to earn money for his parents, but also wants to give some of it to Catherine – the woman who was going to marry Simon, and with whom Lucas has an uncertain relationship. Lucas is devoted; Catherine is a little unnerved, affectionate, troubled. It doesn’t help that Lucas can only communicate in Walt Whitman quotes, most of the time.

Walt Whitman is one of the most prominent connections between the sections. He actually appears as a character, briefly, in the first section – but, in each, there is a character who speaks chiefly in quotes from his poetry. In the first it is Lucas; in the second it is a child phoning in warnings about bombings (more on that soon); in the third it’s a robot. I was expecting more links and overlaps between the sections, but Cunningham doesn’t play overly with this conceit – so it’s Whitman’s words that form the threads between the worlds. Which would probably mean more to someone who had read some Whitman, which I have never done… I believe Leaves of Grass is still a text most high schoolers study in America, but Whitman is much less read here in the UK and I suspect I lost some of the significance that was intended.

Anyway, back to the 19th century. Historical fiction is a tricky genre for me, but I loved how Cunningham took us into Lucas’s world – with an accurate range of expression from an uneducated teenager in the midst of shocking grief. His job in the factory is simply putting metal plates into a machine to be stamped, and Cunningham manages to convey the almost dehumanising monotony of this in, paradoxically, a way that is captivating to read.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

Man, Cunningham is good.

My favourite of the three sections, unsurprisingly, was the central, contemporary section. Catherine is now Cat, who works as the receiver of calls to the police that might pose plausible threats. Most of the calls she gets are from mentally unwell people who pose no real threat – who think their TV is spying on them, or that they are psychic, and so forth.

If the caller suggests that somebody is making them do something, then she has to ‘red tag’ the call, and elevate it to a different team – because if somebody else is instructing them, whether that person is real or not, then the threat becomes much more credible. In the call she receives from a young boy, she doesn’t red-tag when he says ‘I wasn’t supposed to call’.

It may or may not have made a difference – but not long afterwards, a politician is murdered when a boy hugs him and detonates a bomb. They spend some time trying to work out a connection, but it may be more unsettling: random attacks. Then Cat begins to get mysterious phonecalls from another boy who claims to be ‘in the family’ with the first caller.

In this period, Simon is Cat’s rich, obnoxious boyfriend. I shan’t spoil who Lucas is, but it’s a great twist. Cunningham is so good at the dynamics among a group of people, and I was totally absorbed in this contemporary world. He doesn’t need high stakes to make a narrative compelling, but they added something a little unusual here – and the final words of this section will stay with me for a long time.

And then the third section… Reader, I tried. I really did. But I simply have a brain block when it comes to a world of robots and invading aliens and whatnot. I never really knew what was going on, who was human and who was programmed or what the aliens were up to, and I ended up skim-reading it. I don’t really have anything to say, except I’m sure the problem was with me rather than Cunningham.

So it was definitely a curate’s egg for me. I will try anything Cunningham writes, but even a prose stylist as beguilingly good as him couldn’t get me past my own prejudices – or, rather, my own stumbling blocks. If you share mine, then I still recommend you read the first two thirds of this novel. And if you don’t share mine, then you’ll doubtless find a lot to love right to the final page.

Cunningham hasn’t published a novel for seven years, so I feel like one MUST be around the corner somewhere. His most recent is the brilliant The Snow Queen, and I would love him to do another like that, using a smaller conceit and keeping things in the real, contemporary world. And hopefully soon?

British Library Women Writers #9: Mamma by Diana Tutton

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Two new British Library Women Writers titles are out YESTERDAY in the UK – Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs and The Love Child by Edith Olivier, which are both up there among my favourites in the series so far. I was going to do one of my posts about them, but realised that I’d never actually done BLWW number 9, Mamma (1956) by Diana Tutton. (You can see my posts on all the series at the blww tag.)

I first read Mamma in the Bodleian, after loving the extraordinary Guard Your Daughters but not being able to track down her other books. Older copies of Mamma do turn up now and then, but obviously this new edition is available to everyone easily!

When I read Mamma, I was a bit taken aback at first. Guard Your Daughters had been an instant favourite – almost from the first page. It was lively and funny and chaotic. Mamma is a much quieter book – it’s about Joanna, whose daughter Libby moves in with her to save money. She brings along her new husband Stephen, whom Joanna doesn’t know. He is much older than Libby – indeed, he is only a few years younger than Joanna. And gradually Steven and Joanna develop feelings for one another…

It sounds very sensational, whenever you try to describe it, but it really isn’t. It is such a gentle, thoughtful, and unsensational book – just looking at what might happen in this situation, between three decent people who don’t want to hurt each other.

When it came to writing my afterword, I ended up writing about sex – I always seem to veer into this for the series, and I’m worried that people will be alarmed. But the levels of discretion writers did or didn’t have about sex does seem to shift so much in the period – in fact, there’s a novel I’m hoping we’ll do next year that is very interesting on the topic, writing much less discreetly than you’d imagine for the era…

In Mamma, it’s all tied up with psychology and changing norms – particularly around celibacy before marriage.

“I don’t see,” said Elizabeth, smiling, “how anyone at all young can live without sex and not get warped.”

Steven’s feelings changed abruptly. Of all the tactless remarks! But Joanna answered peacefully: “Quite a lot do.”

“Well, they all get a bit peculiar.”

“I don’t think that’s altogether true.”

“Janet says it comes out in all sorts of funny little ways.”

“Well, good Lord, we’ve all heard that one,” said Steven impatiently. “But it’s by no means universal.”

“Even if it’s not visible,” calmly continued Elizabeth, “it’s still there. In fact if you can’t see if it’s probably worse.”

“Darling,” said Joanna, looking, as Steven gratefully noticed, not hurt, but amused, “we’ve all heard that, too.”

“Often,” added Steven.

“Oh, all right!” said Elizabeth, not at all offended. “But all the same, Janet says – ”

“A course in so-called psychology,” said Steven nastily, “doesn’t guarantee a profound knowledge of human nature.”

I’ve been interested to see some people preferring this novel to Guard Your Daughters – I still think that’s Tutton’s masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite novels, but Mamma is such a different type of novel that they don’t really compare. Now we just need to decide if there is an appetite for her third and final novel, about brother/sister incest…

White Spines by Nicholas Royle

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About a minute after reading Susan’s review of White Spines by Nicholas Royle, I had ordered my copy – directly from the publisher Salt, which perhaps explains why it came with a surprise author signature on the title page.

It is exactly the sort of book I like: a book about reading, about buying books, and a love for literature that is more idiosyncratic than a slavish devotion to Lists of Great Works. The ‘white spines’ of the title are those that Picador used from the 1970s to the 1990s. If I’m honest, they’re exactly the sort of books my eye flashes past in a charity shop. It’s an era of literature that I know very little about and, except for a few stand-out names, I am pretty poorly read for those decades.

Royle does love some of the writers he buys from this period, but he buys books without necessarily ever anticipating reading them. He is a completist: he wants all of the titles. He wants the anomalies, from when some of the books had black or patterned spines. He wants a ‘shadow collection’, where he duplicates books already on his shelves of white spines. And his buying goes in tangents – an admiration for a cover artist will lead to him buying everything he can with the same artist on the cover, for instance. Almost anything can form the basis of a collection, and you get the sense of Royle’s – surely enormous? – house being a melting pot of different fascinations, grouped in overlapping collections.

Despite not sharing Royle’s particular tastes, and seldom buying books unless I have at least vague intentions of reading them, I loved reading about his bookish adventures. Next to going on a book buying spree, I enjoy experiencing them vicariously – and a lot of White Spines is about his book shopping. Sometimes far afield, sometimes in bookshops or charity shops that are regular haunts. He seldom comes away empty handed, and manages to convey both the excitement and the curiosity of the perennial haunted of bookshops. Here’s a trip to The Bookshop Experience in Southend… which I just kept writing out, because I enjoyed the journey we go on as he scans across the shelves.

As soon as I enter the Bookshop Experience, I know I’m in luck. I’m immediately taking the books off shelves. Paul Bowles – two Abacus collections, A Thousand Days for Mokhtar and Call at Corazon, in the same series, with excellent photographic covers, as two titles I already have. Calvino’s The Literature Machine, in the Brothers Quai (sic) series of covers from Picador (a separate series is credited to the Brothers Quay). And then – increasing heartbeat – I spot an early Sceptre paperback of Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

I love The Blindfold. My edition is later and features a woman’s midriff in a crop top that has always felt wrong to me. I like this earlier, uncredited cover with its blindfold, its disembodied eyes, Chrysler Building and 109th Street sign. Next, a King Penguin edition of BS Johnson’s best-known novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, that, as with The Blindfold, I hadn’t even known existed. Finally, I can’t quite believe it, but, yes, there, under K, a copy of the white-spined Picador edition of Kafka’s The Trial, which I have only seen once before, in the home of writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.

When I saw it at the Gaffney-Conlon residence, I was tempted to become a book thief. The Trial exists in many editions, from different publishers, with different covers. This Picador cover, by Steven Singer, has the distinction of having previously been, to me at least, invisible. Normally, if there’s a Picador I know I want, I don’t order it, as previously discussed. In the case of The Trial, however, I weakened. Having seen it in the wild, having even handled it, I couldn’t resist and did go online and did order, off eBay, what appeared to be the same edition. When it arrived it was a Picador Classics edition. The same translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, but in the black spine of Picador Classics, with a cover illustration by Peter Till. The search for the white-spined edition would continue, but my lesson learnt, only in the real world.

If this sort of thing is your jam, then this is the book for you.

There is a lot else of interest here, including Royle’s own writing career and his experience of sending stories to small magazines, his interviews with people connected to Picador and other publishing ventures, and an entertaining tangent into authors with the same names. He has reason to find this interesting: there is another Nicholas Royle, and they even both appeared in a collection I read about writing. The other Royle wrote a novel called Quilt that I found impenetrable and a book called The Uncanny that was rather too self-indulgent to be useful as the critical text I was hoping it would be for my DPhil. Safe to say, I prefer this Nicholas Royle.

Personally, I seldom care what edition a book is, and the only books I’ll get simply for the series they’re in are Persephone Books and Slightly Foxed Editions. But Royle still conveys much of what most of us will recognise in ourselves: someone who is not simply an occasional reader, but someone for whom books mean an enormous amount. We love reading them, but we also love being around them, choosing them, collecting them, and hunting them down. Royle is a witty, friendly writer, and it was a delight to go on this voyage with him.

1976 Club: one month to go!

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For those who like reminders – here is your reminder that the 1976 Club is only a month away! Karen and I will be asking everyone to read and review books published across the world in 1976.

I’ve been looking through my possibles – not all that many, and fewer when I checked them and realised a couple were mis-dated in my LibraryThing catalogue. But I have two or three books up my sleeve, and I look forward to seeing what everyone else picks.

Have you chosen yours yet? If you need inspiration, having a look on Wikipedia and GoodReads might help.

The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman

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As I probably said when I wrote about The Remarkable Life of the Skin, I would probably never read popular science if it weren’t written by Oliver Sacks – or by one of my friends. And it would be my loss, because if I didn’t read my friend Monty’s books then I’d have missed out on a lot – and I found The Painful Truth even more fascinating and engaging than his previous book.

As the subtitle says, this is about ‘the new science of why we hurt and how we can heal’ – but it’s also how everything we think we know about pain is wrong. Or, rather, everything I thought I knew; I shan’t tar all of you with the same brush of my colossal ignorance when it comes to science. I’d also blithely assumed pain was largely connected with nerve and tissue damage. Of course, I knew other factors could be at play – pain always hurts more when you don’t know what’s wrong and you’re really anxious – but I hadn’t realised quite how big a role expectation and comprehension play in how much pain we feel. (While being ‘all in your mind’ doesn’t, of course, make pain any less real.)

Vision is not a measure of light and colour: it is designed to make meaningful sense of objects in the outside world. Pain is very similar: it is not a measure of damage or danger but is instead the brain’s unconscious opinion on whether our body is damaged or at risk.

Lyman (it’s easier for me to write objectively about this book if I imagine the author as Lyman rather than Monty!) doesn’t stop at this rather profound re-education on what pain is, of course. The Painful Truth often returns to this fact, and to the idea that pain is there to help not hinder us, and spreads outwards from this starting point. It is so chockful of extremely interesting experiments and facts (for instance – an experiment where strong opioid pain relief was given, but only had significant effect when the patients were aware it was being given; when they were told it hadn’t yet started or had stopped, the pain relief didn’t work). Lyman must have done an astonishing amount of research, and this is the anecdote I keep telling people, about hypnosis:

Highly hypnotisable people are able to respond to questions by ‘automatic writing’, where one hand writes answers to questions without the subject’s awareness. In 1973, the renowned Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard tested this out on a young woman – le5t’s call her Lisa – by first asking her to rest her hand in ice-cold water. Unsurprisingly, she found this intensely painful. Lisa was then induced into a hypnotic state, and again her hand was placed into the ice water. This time she reported feeling no pain whatsoever, but while she was verbally describing how relaxed she felt, her own hand continued to automatically write, reporting that she was feeling agonising pain – the same pain she felt when she was not hypnotised.

Yes, I find this rather creepy. But also completely enthralling, and helping shift everything I thought I knew about pain. Elsewhere, Lyman is really interesting on the placebo effect. I think, colloquially, this perhaps dismisses things that are ‘only the placebo effect’ – whereas when it comes to pain, this could be a very powerful solution. And how does it work? I shan’t summarise a whole chapter into a paragraph, but I did find this quote really interesting:

This isn’t the placebo – an inert substance – doing the work; let’s give our brains the credit. It is our belief in the treatment that opens up the brain’s drug cabinet. The active ingredient is expectation. This is neatly seen in the hierarchy of fakery; not all placebos are created equal. Saline injections tend to have a greater pain-relieving effect than sugar pills, and it wouldn’t be surprising if fake surgery is significantly better than both of these. An expensive placebo is more effective than a cheap none. The more dramatic the intervention, the more meaning the patient attributes to the treatment.

It reminded me of a book I read about why people believe conspiracy theories – and it is partly because we can’t cope with the disparity between enormous effect and trivial cause. Nobody has conspiracy theories about assassinations that just missed, but people find it hard to think that an invent that changed the world could be caused by one person with a gun. In sort of the same way, if I’m understanding it properly, our brain expects big results from big actions. And since the brain is the one determining our level of pain, it can answer its own expectations.

This is only a taste of the wide variety of topics covered, each covering a range of Lyman’s own experiences, notable experiments, and a little bit of technical info (which I didn’t always fully understand, but it is far from overwhelming in the book). Among other things, Lyman writes about people who don’t experience pain at all, pain and PTSD, pain after amputation, and the ordeal faced by patients with chronic pain – particularly chronic pain where there doesn’t seem to be any diagnosable cause. What makes Lyman’s writing appeal to me so much is the same thing I love about Oliver Sacks’ books: the compassion. It does help that I know him and know what a lovely guy he is, but I think it would come across anyway. The people he writes about aren’t simply scientific curios, or even patients. They are people with complex lives who are often suffering deeply, or bewildered by the tests they have undergo, or frustrated by no solution being in sight. The only times Lyman is clearly frustrated himself is when writing about medical professionals who don’t have compassion, won’t try to find solutions, or underestimate the consequences of pain.

I was initially wary of telling friends with chronic pain that I was reading a book about pain. I am sure people who suffer in this way are sick of being recommended remedies, usually from people with far less expertise than them. But I think this book would be helpful. While Lyman is very keen to emphasise that The Painful Truth is not a self-help book, it does include some really useful things people who experience persistent pain can do – recognising that, though the responses he lists have a weight of research behind them, the medical profession is often very behind in treatment recommendations. I’ve experienced difficult-to-treat pain over two periods – intense and constant tension headaches one year, and severe RSI over several extended iterations – and I know how exhausting it is to keep going back for diagnosis or treatment when neither seem forthcoming – and that was only over short-term periods. I really hope a book like The Painful Truth can offer some help, even if it isn’t a self-help book. At the very least, Lyman recognises the severity of persistent pain and the impact it has on millions of people.

But whatever your experience with pain is or isn’t, The Painful Truth is an engrossing, well-written, and wide-ranging book. Even if you’d never normally pick up popular science, I think almost anybody would get a lot out of this. It’s always a relief when a friend’s book is genuinely excellent, but even better when they’re as brilliant as this book is. And Monty has my rapturous Instagram messages to prove that I’m saying the same thing in public and private!