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Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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The season has definitely changed here in the UK. The clocks have gone back, the evenings are getting darker, and the leaves are changing. It’s all very pretty but a little miserable to be dark and cold – especially as covid restrictions are likely to get stricter. Where I live, we’re still in tier one – but I suspect it won’t be long before that changes. Just in time for my birthday…!

For the bleaker weather – and to help deal with the anxiety the world is feeling around the upcoming US election – have a book, a link, and a blog post.

1.) The book – somehow I missed the announcement until now, but on 3 November there will be a new Edward Carey novel! I’ve been following his writing output for well over a decade, and love that Little put him more on the map. The Swallowed Man seems as eccentric and interesting as vintage Carey. Find out more.

2.) The link – I have no idea how catching up with TV works in the US, but if you can watch Superstore at this link, then I heartily encourage you to. It’s on hulu as well, and maybe there are other ways. Just for US folk, I’m afraid, but Superstore is one of my favourite sitcoms and their handling of the pandemic is genuinely moving, as well as very funny.

3.) The blog post – Books and Wine Gums has been enjoying a lot of the British Library Women Writers series – do check out her thoughts on Mary Essex’s Tea Is So Intoxicating.

Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward

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It seems odd to me that Noel Coward wrote something in 1960. To me, he seems hermetically sealed within the 1930s. As it happens, he lived until 1973. but it’s still quite bizarre to read a novel by Coward – I think perhaps his only novel, though the internet is proving cagey on that – in which Elizabeth II is on the throne.

Pomp and Circumstance is set in the fictional British island colony of Samolo, somewhere in the South Pacific, and the ex-part dignitaries are preparing for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Perhaps it isn’t too big a spoiler to say that the novel ends before they turn up – this is all about the preparation, which must take place in the midst of the island’s other events, secrets, and gossip.

The narrator is the bizarrely named Grizel Craigie, an official’s wife who is used to the ex-pat community of upper-class Brits who’ve grown used to living a fairly luxurious life in a fairly insignificant place. The dinner parties, social niceties, and hierarchies of England have all been exported to this island – which does, indeed, feel rather like it is living in an era two or more decades earlier. Whether this is because Coward is holding the pen or because it is an accurate portrait of this sort of community in 1960, I have no idea.

Their lives revolve around Government House, which is described in the opening lines of the novel:

There’s no use pretending that, architecturally, Government House has anything to recommend it at all because it hasn’t; it is quite agreeable inside with nice airy rooms and deep-set verandas, but outside it is unequivocally hideous. Viewed from any aspect it looks like a gargantuan mauve blanc-mange. It was built in the early nineteen hundreds after the old one had burned down and nobody knows why it should have been painted mauve in the first place or why it should always have been repainted mauve since.

Again, it might be 1960, but any Edwardian comic writer could have written that paragraph.

The novel starts with a neighbourly dispute about children, and there is something of the Provincial Lady in the way that Grizel attempts to manage her husband, her neighbours, their respective children, and somewhere in the middle of it all lies the truth of what happened. But this is just scene setting before she hears the news that Her Majesty is on her way – and news spreads like wildfire across the island. Well, again, the ex-pat community. We here surprisingly little from or about native Somoloans, and it’s about as racially insensitive as you might imagine whenever they are mentioned. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as the worst you can imagine, but certainly any 21st-century editor would put a red pen through a lot of it.

But Grizel can’t dwell on this for too long – because a different visitor is coming before the royals arrive: Eloise, the Duchess of Fowey. She has a longstanding affair with a man called Bunny, and Grizel is called upon to try and keep their affair secret by officially housing Eloise. Reluctantly, Grizel agrees.

When Eloise does come, there is all manner of fun with clandestine meetings and ‘sleepovers’, the spread of scarlet fever that puts paid to these plans, and a diabetic nurse who cheerfully tells people to force sugar into mouth, however much she protests, if she has an episode.

There are a lot of typically Cowardian elements in Pomp and Circumstance, from elaborate set pieces to immoral people being wittily frank about their immorality. Grizel is an entertaining narrator, caught between callousness and social decency, and endlessly frustrated with the admittedly frustrating people around her. But mostly Pomp and Circumstance shows how good Coward was at plays…

While there are some funny lines and situations, and the prospect of a royal arrival is a fun idea to throw the island into a frenzy, there is an awful lot of padding in the novel. It moves with glacial slowness, and often dozens of pages would pass without anything of note happening, or the same conversations happening again and again in slightly different ways. There must be some reason that this became a novel rather than a play, but it feels as though there is only a play’s worth of words at the centre of this much-longer book. The rest is rather surplus to requirements.

So, I enjoyed reading certain sections, and the opening paragraph gave me hope that it would be a silly delight. In the end, it was more of a slog to get between amusing moments. I will say that the end is a delight, with the sort of momentum I’d hoped for throughout, but it’s a long way to go for that pay-off. On the whole, I don’t think it much matters if you stick to seeing Coward on stage.

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

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One of the most important things about a holiday, I’m sure we can all agree, is choosing which books to bring. If I’m going on holiday by car, I bring wildly too many – because then I can have some choices while I’m away. I took eleven books for my recent week away, and the eleventh of those, thrown into the suitcase at the last minute, was The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham. And thank goodness I did, because it ended up being exactly what I wanted to read first – and it’s absolutely brilliant.

We start just before the 2004 US General Election, where various characters are sure that George W. Bush won’t get re-elected because he is ‘the worst President in US history’. Wry laugh. Barrett Meeks has just broken up with his rather-younger boyfriend, who told him by text that they had both seen this coming – Barrett had not – when he sees something extraordinary in the New York sky:

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its centre, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood – a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice – as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news – as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration – there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn…

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing solid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed – he knew – that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him…

This moment of inexplicable encounter happens early in the novel, but it is quite possible to imagine the novel existing without it. Its principle impact is to make Barrett look more closely at life, and try to work out how he was the only person to see this light – and what it could mean, and why he was chosen to see it. But, around him, the novel’s other characters continue their complex, anxious, vibrant, and ordinary lives. Few authors show the complexity of the ordinary, and the banality of the extraordinary, as well as Cunningham does.

For instance, Barrett;s sister-in-law Beth is seriously ill with cancer. Her possible death laces every word spoken in the house, where Barrett moves ‘temporarily’ to recover from his break-up. But, in the midst of this, Barrett’s brother Tyler is preoccupied with trying to write a song for his upcoming wedding to Beth. He is a singer-songwriter who has always been the talented one – but possibly not talented enough to ‘make it’, after years of trying, or to avoid falling into cliche when he tries to express himself in song to Beth.

Various other friends form part of the core cast, and we go between the minds of all of them – mostly Barrett and Tyler, but Cunningham elegantly takes the third-person narrative into different people’s perspectives, often for fleeting moments, while maintaining a cohesion and fluidity to the novel. He is so good at the moments that synecdochically represent whole lives. And he is equally good at showing, through narrative and dialogue, the precise degree of love and trust between two characters. Barrett and Tyler are closer than any two brothers I’ve seen in fiction, and Cunningham enables the reader to feel this almost viscerally.

I was a bit worried when I saw, in the blurb, that Barrett would start going to church. Christianity is seldom written about well by people who aren’t Christians. But Cunningham resists a dramatic conversion or a fall from faith – rather, it is one of the ways that Barrett’s life opens up, without ever developing beyond a sense of cautious wonder. The mysterious light sends him on a new path, even if it doesn’t reveal a new destination.

Mostly, I just love reading Cunningham’s prose. There is something about the way he forms communities of characters, and something in the elegant simplicity of his writing, that makes reading one of his novels feel like having  cold, refreshing water pouring through your hands on a hot day. The Hours remains my favourite of the four or five I’ve read, but this is a close competitor. I think there’s a danger that his novels are underrated because they give such an effect of simplicity – of things happening to ordinary people, and then the novel concluding. But to do that well, and even with a sense almost of transcendence, is surely one of the highest possible achievements of the novel.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

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The publication of a new novel by Marilynne Robinson is always an event. She is one of the few authors whose output I eagerly await, and I had Jack preordered – it arrived a couple of weeks before the official publication date, and I couldn’t resist jumping right in. It’s the fourth of the Gilead series, though technically you can read them in any order. Chronologically, it comes before Home.

Jack is the first of the series not to take place at all in the town of Gilead, though it certainly haunts the entire novel. Jack is the wayward son of Reverend Robert Boughton, one of several sons and daughters but the only one who turned away from the family completely. As this novel opens, we see him living in a small town far away, occasionally visited by his kindly brother Teddy, but more often collecting the money that Teddy leaves for him at a previous address. He is too proud and damaged to return home, even for his mother’s funeral. But he is also hopeful of improvement – of his fortunes improving, of improving himself, of finding someone who believes he is worth the effort. But he also reviles those opportunities. Jack is in a constant war with himself. We see him in Gilead as the casually cruel neighbour’s son of John Ames’s memory; in Home as the prodigal son who has been quietened by life, but cannot help resisting a reunion. In Jack, we see the man between those stages.

After a few pages, showing Jack and a young African-American woman called Della, whom he has offended in a manner that isn’t immediately clear, the scene shifts to a cemetery – and then we enter an extraordinary section of the novel. Jack and Della are both spending the night locked in there. This is habitual for Jack, and an accident for Della. For dozens of pages, Robinson shows us their conversation in real time. It reminded me a lot of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which are among my favourite films. They talk about nothing and everything, revealing as much in their silences as their replies. Neither opens their hearts – both have difficulties with trust.

She took a deep breath. ”I’m not going to get into this with you, Mr Boughton.”

Why did he persist? She was reconsidering, taking her purse and her bouquet into her lap. Could that be what he wanted her to do? It wouldn’t be self-defeat, precisely, because at best there would be only these few hours, tense and probationary, and then whatever he might want to rescue from them afterward for the purposes of memory. That other time, when the old offense was fresh, she had seemed to regret it for his sake as much as her own. He had seen kindness weary before. It could still surprise him a little.

He nodded and stood up. ”You’d rather I left you alone. I’ll do that. I’ll be in shouting distance. In case you need me.”

”No,” she said. ”If we could just talk a little.”

”Like two polite strangers who happen to be spending a night in a cemetery.”

”Yes, that’s right.”

”Okay.” So he sat down again. ”Well,” he said, ”what brings you here this evening, Miss Miles?”

”Pure foolishness, That’s all it was.” And she shook her head.

[…]

She said, ”I owe you an apology. I haven’t been polite.”

”True enough,” he said. ”So.”

”So?”

”So, pay up.”

She laughed. ”Please accept my apology.”

”Consider it done. Now,” he said, ”you accept mine.”

She shrugged. ”I don’t really want to do that.”

”Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

”No, it isn’t, not all the time. Besides, I promised myself I wouldn’t.”

There’s a danger, when one starts quoting Robinson, that one will never stop. In that ‘[…]’, I cut out quite a bit, but I wanted to show how she uses dialogue – that sounds so inconsequential, but builds up the relationship of characters so well. In all her novels, I think she might be best at people disagreeing but never quite coming to the point. Every argument – and Jack and Home are full of conversations that are almost arguments – has two people afraid to speak all they are thinking, awkwardly hovering around truths, trying to work out exactly how much of themselves they can reveal. It’s all so masterly.

Jack is a romance, of sorts – the most cautious and often melancholy romance you can imagine. Because, of course, the barriers here are not just the hurts and mistrusts of Della and Jack, but the fact that they are from different races at a time where a marriage between them would be illegal in many US states and make them likely victims of discrimination in all of them. Interestingly, back home in Iowa there would have been no law against their union. Where Jack and Della now are, their fledgling relationship is illegal. And Della’s family are keen that she is not hurt – as well as believing ideologically that African-Americans should marry African-Americans. Della’s hard life becomes still harder, and Robinson is excellent at showing her gradual, reluctant, and often poorly rewarded affection for Jack – even while Jack and his emotions remain centre stage.

It’s hard to think of many things that Robinson doesn’t do excellently. Perhaps structure is one – or the signposting of structure, at least. The narrative leaps back and forth a bit, particularly around their first date, and it was sometimes a little confusing to remember where we were. But, without the achronology, that scene in the cemetery would have lost its power.

The real star of the book is Robinson’s writing. It’s the sort of novel to read slowly, savouring her impossibly good writing. So often, I would have to pause, having read an observation so perfect, or a trait so strikingly described, that it deserved a moment or two of reflection. Here’s one bit I highlighted:

There were times in his youth when his imagination of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial.

Jack has been described as a novel about grace – and ‘grace’ is, indeed, the final word of the book. Robinson is a wise theologian, and certainly the idea of grace is threaded throughout. Jack is a man who cannot believe he deserves anything – and, indeed, the doctrine of grace shows us that good things can be given irrespective of deserving. The gift of Della’s love, the prospective reunion with his family, even the idea of a job and home – these are undeserved gifts of grace that Jack finds difficult to receive. But it is true that to understand all is to forgive all. The Jack we see in earlier Gilead novels becomes, in Jack, so rich and full and deep a portrait that one cannot help but empathise with him, failings and all.

To put it simply, this is an extraordinary and wonderful novel. Even more extraordinary is the fact that Robinson doesn’t revise – she just writes out the novel, first time. What a gift. I hope she never stops adding to the Gilead world. Jack is a strong contender for my favourite of the series – and if she can give this much depth to each character, I can’t see why the small canvas need ever be completely filled.

Announcing the 1936 Club!

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Thank you for all your suggestions for the next club year! Karen and I looked through them all and had a discussion, and decided to go with Marina’s suggestion of 1936, which has a good range of well-known novels as well as many lesser-known works, of course.

We did think about evening up the decades by doing another 1970s year, but neither of us were that excited by the prospect… what I can say, the 1930s turned our heads. And it’s a great excuse to use this lovely image that I found on Flickr (with rights for re-use). Wouldn’t this be wonderful on a book cover? I might put it on The Provincial Lady Goes Further, actually, though that’s four years too early for this club.

Obviously six months is a lot of notice, but we’ll make sure to remind you in good time before next April. Already looking forward to it!

The Overhaul #7

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Let’s do another Overhaul! It’s where I look at some books that I bought, and see how many of them I’ve read, how many I’ve not kept, and how many are still to read. I basically shame myself for all of our entertainment. FUN!

 

The Overhaul #7

The original haul is here.

Date of haul: November 2012

Location: London

Number of books bought: 11

This is one of my more restrained hauls, and it even represents a whole range of bookshops – and some books I got at the annual book swap of my online reading group, but we’ll count it all to the haul. Here goes…

Mariana by Monica Dickens
I read this during Project Names last year – one of the very first Persephones, which I’d been intending to read for years. I enjoyed it but also remember nothing at all about it, and felt that I’d forgotten it as soon as I finished the last page. Do you ever get that?

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
I think I must have started this almost as soon as I bought it. It’s my favourite of Sacks’ books, all about different types of hallucinations, as you might have guessed. Shows his wonderful humanity, and it’s fascinating. I have lent my copy to someone…

The Crafty Art of Playmaking by Alan Aychbourn
Guys, I’m on such a roll, because I’ve read this too! Annoyingly, just before I went to see his wonderful play Relatively Speaking, and I didn’t realise this book would give away the plot.

At the Pines by Mollie Panter-Downes
Ah, here we go. Not read this, though I have read lots of MPD before and after this haul.

Adele and Co. by Dornford Yates
I even singled this out among the ten books with names in the title that I’d read during Project Names. Reader, I did not read it.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
I’d already read this when I bought it – counting it though.

Money For Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
I don’t think I’ve read this, but I’ve read a lot of Wodehouse and don’t particularly remember which…

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
I read this for a book group, and I enjoyed it, but I think I sent it off to a charity shop at some point when I realised I probably wouldn’t re-read it.

Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett
This was my final ICB book to buy – except for early novel Dolores, which is very tricky to find – and I have read it! It was worth tracking down – it’s a really good one.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic
I love Oliver Sacks and it made me think that I wanted to read more popular neurology – I find synaesthesia fascinating, but started this book and didn’t get very far. Turns out not all neurologists write as engagingly as Sacks. But it’s still on the shelf with the intention of trying again one day.

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
This one has hovered vaguely on the edge of my reading life for so long, but never quite to the top of the tbr. One day!

Total bought: 11

Total still unread on my shelves: 5

Total no longer owned: 1

The club is dead – long live the club!

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(Firstly, sorry to people who get emailed all my posts – you’ll just have received my ‘about me’, because I realised I didn’t have one and wanted to link to it in the sidebar. But nice to meet you all, even if you’ve been reading for 13 years!)

And what a great 1956 Club it’s been! Even if I kept writing 1965 by mistake – hopefully none of those slipped through.

You can see links to all the reviews here (let me know if I’ve missed any). An amazing variety, and SO many authors I haven’t heard of. We’ve checked our usual club regulars of Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie, but the usually-reliable Georges Simenon didn’t make an appearance!

From my own reading, I’m so glad it motivated me to pick up Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill, which is likely to be one of my best reads of the year.

Thanks so much for joining in! Karen and I are always so thrilled at the turnout.

Over to you!

We’ll be holding another club next April – and we’re asking for suggestions. As long as we haven’t done it before, and it’s between 1920 and 1980, then it’s up for grabs.

As a reminder, we’ve previously done: 1920, 1924, 1930, 1938, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1956, 1965, 1968, 1977

Pop your suggestion in the comments, and why you’re suggesting it, and Karen and I will chat and make a choice!

 

Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie – #1956Club

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Thank you for some additional 1956 Club reviews since I updated the page recently – I will make sure the list is fully updated at the end of the week. And will read all the reviews too! This week has rather got away with me, but I always manage to read them in the end – and what a variety of books people have been reading.

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else reading Thin Ice, though. It’s my third Compton Mackenzie novel, and the other two (Poor Relations and Buttercups and Daisies) both of which ended up being among the favourite books I read in those respective years. Since then, I’ve been buying a lot of his novels, and I was aware that he wrote in various different styles. The first two I read were very funny, bordering on farce. Thin Ice is… not.

It’s narrated by a man called George and is about the life of his close, long-term friend Henry Fortescue, from 1896 to 1941 – when, as we learn on the first page, Fortescue dies. They were friends as youths and continued to be as Henry became an MP, with an eye on potentially becoming prime minister. The only thing that might stand in his way is if he ‘indulges in his indulgence’ – which is being gay. This is a secret for only a few dozen pages, and even during that time it is a secret only from George – the reader has worked it out almost instantly. Henry states early on that he will never marry any woman, and that he intends to either be celibate or throw caution to the wind completely – and this is where the title of the novel comes from:

”You’re pacing this orchard with me, Geegee, trying to look sympathetic, and only occasionally peering nervously round over your shoulder to see that nobody is within earshot, but how can you be sympathetic? You can’t possibly understand my emotions. I can assure you that I shouldn’t be inflicting them on you now if I were not determined to suppress them henchforth. That’s why I’m telling you. Edward Carstairs would jeer at that. All he would ask is that I should be discreet. And that’s what I was intending to be until I realised that for me discretion was impossible. It had to be complete self-denial, or complete surrender. And walking about for ever on thin ice does not appeal to me.”

It’s certainly an interesting theme for the 1956 Club, being published more than a decade before homosexuality would become legal in the UK. Sadly, it’s not a very interesting novel in any other way.

Because it covers such a long period, and gives weight to each year, the chapters hare through a lot of time at breakneck speed. Details of the day are thrown in, often political, many of which didn’t mean much to me but do give a good sense of historical accuracy. Doubtless the 1956 reader enjoyed the references that took them back to their own younger days. But this speeding through years gives Thin Ice a feeling of being constantly in flux, and never letting us bed in to any details of the characters. The narrator is largely there to relay events, but we expect a bit more of a personality from the main character’s best friend. And Henry himself is drawn with a bit more complexity, but we don’t get enough time to dwell on any of it.

Mackenzie isn’t writing in humorous mode here, and I certainly missed that. It all felt a bit colourless and repetitive. Bland. Perhaps it wouldn’t have done if he’d picked a few years and focused more on characters and relationship between them. The scope of the novel left it without any depth.

A shame to end 1956 Club with a bit of a dud, and perhaps it wouldn’t feel quite so much a dud if I didn’t love Mackenzie’s comic fiction as much as I do.

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson – #1956Club

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It is well documented that I want to own every single one of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal. I bought Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson last year, having coveted it when Scott first blogged about it. It’s a war memoir – and it’s always interesting to see the tone these have in the post-1945 club years. I get the impression that things went a bit quiet on the war memoir front immediately after the war, but 10+ years later people were ready to look back on that bizarre time.

First off, yes her name was Verily. And here’s why:

One of my father’s interests is words. He devised a system for naming his five children. Each name had to have six letters; and, because his and my mother’s names contain an R and an L, each of ours had to too – plus some peculiarity not shared by others. Merlin (n), Rhalou (h), Erroll (doubles), Verily, (v) – not so much a name as an adverb – and finally, to fall in with the system, he had to invent Lorema.

Spam Tomorrow starts off with Verily going briefly AWOL as a F.A.N.Y. (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) so that she can marry Donald, which they do hastily and illicitly – illicit because she didn’t have leave, rather than because they couldn’t be married.

She then jumps back a bit to joining the F.A.N.Y. – before which she had found a job that used her artistic talents to some extent, in that she designed the wrappers for toffees. It is an example of the slightly eccentric and bohemian spirit that is key to understanding Anderson’s character and writing – a detail that might seem too niche and absurd in a novel, but just happens to be true.

Anderson doesn’t work for the nursing yeomanry for a very long time, and is quite open about how poorly suited she was to such a regimented life. There is a very funny and odd scene early on where she is arrested and threatened with court-martialling for crashing a government vehicle into a gatepost.

A few minutes later, while I was getting ready for lunch, two F.A.N.Y.s of the quiet, useful, obedient type came into the bedroom which I shared with four others (including one whose claim to fame was that her husband had been fallen on by Queen Mary in her recent motor accident). The two F.A.N.Y.s stood in a waiting attitude, one each side of me.

“Want to borrow a comb?” I asked affably.

“You’re under arrest,” said one.

“I’m what?” I asked.

“Under arrest. We’ve had orders to close in on you and march you to the orderly room without your cap or belt.”

She never quite works out what is going on, but ultimately receives a reprieve. It’s an insight into the daftness that always comes with a militaristic attitude to life.

The bulk of Spam Tomorrow is taken up with her married life and particularly her domestic life. Some of the most dramatic pages, unsurprisingly, are when she goes into labour during an air raid. Apparently this left her quite ill for a long time, and the only cure was to have another child – which rather baffled me, but it seemed to work.

I loved everything about her looking for housing, and it was fascinating to read about the precarious nature of homes in London in a period when they could easily be bombed at any moment. And then there is the section where she starts taking house guests in a larger place in the countryside, and discovering how inept she is at it. Which gives plenty of opportunity for being scathing about some of the worst paying guests – particularly those who come from an artists’ colony and have extremely demanding tastes. It reminded me quite a lot of the latter stages in another Furrowed Middlebrow title, Ruth Adam’s wonderful A House in the Country.

Basically, the whole book was very funny and enjoyable, without ever shying away from the perils and privations of the home front. I’ve read far more home front memoirs than those of active soldiers, and I can’t imagine that trend will change, and Anderson’s is a worthy addition to the genre – because of her experiences, but mostly because of her frank, eccentric, and indomitable character.

Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith – #1956club

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I’ve been buying up Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s novels, because I’m worried that when O, The Brave Music is published by the British Library later in the year, there will suddenly be none of them on the secondhand books market. Of course, Miss Plum and Miss Penny from Dean Street Press might already be having the same effect. Well, I bought Beyond the Gates earlier in the year and was delighted when I saw that it qualified for the 1956 Club.

This novel came somewhere in the middle-to-late period of Smith’s all-too-short writing career – she was 50 when her first novel was published. It concerns a 15-year-old called Lydia and the gates she is going beyond are those of Mary Clitheroe Orphanage. She has been chosen to go and be a servant for Marion Howard and her small household – though she is so diminutive that Marion initially mistakes her for someone much younger than 15. Rather a lot of emphasis is placed on how small and ugly Lydia is, though they’re not particularly significant characteristics for the rest of the novel – except for contributing to the low self-esteem she has.

Marion is unsure if Lydia will be able to manage the work on her own, but takes her back to the house and agrees to a trial. Marion is a single woman who lives with her niece Midge – various other siblings and nephews/nieces come to visit at different times, though most members of the sprawling family were killed in an accident. I drew out a family tree in the pack of my copy, and then most of them died and it became less relevant!

When she was a very old woman, whatever else Lydia might forget, she would never forget one thing – her first sight of the room which Miss Howard told her was to be her very own. 

She advanced across the threshold slowly, warily, as an animal enters strange territory, fearful of the hidden enemy, the biting trap. She stared about her furtively. Her flat, sallow face showed nothing of the leaping, incredulous pleasure that swept her in a great wave.

“Put down your box, Lydia.”

Lydia set the trunk down carefully against the wall.

This is all in 1920. The novel is in three parts, and the others are in 1930 and 1940. There is some plot along the way, not least when Lydia’s past life catches up with her in the middle section, but for the most part Beyond the Gates is about relationships. It’s about how Lydia discovers being part of a family for the first time, gradually thawing until she can believe that she is loved.

Which makes it sound extremely mawkish. And it does lean a tiny bit that way occasionally – I would have preferred Lydia and Marion to have a few more negative character traits, to offset the loyalty and kindness that they have in common. But mostly Smith is too good, too delicious a writer to be disliked. I’ve read four of her novels now (though don’t remember much about the one I read years and years ago), and what really makes her stand out is the way she brings the reader into the world of the story. I never visualise the books I read, but I feel like I’ve spent time in each of her communities. I don’t know quite how to explain that, because I haven’t imagined myself in those surroundings (my brain doesn’t work like that), but I belong to these worlds. There is something in the warmth of them, the timbre of them, the atmosphere of them, that has enveloped me and kept a bit of me behind.

It’s a rare quality, and it’s precious. O, The Brave Music remains my favourite of her books, and the one that enveloped me most completely, but I loved reading Beyond the Gates too. I’m so glad this special writer is finally being rediscovered.