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Three very brief reviews

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A trio of books that I don’t have an enormous amount to write about… but more than nothing?

The Powers That Be – Beverley Nichols

When I bought this, I thought it was a novel. When I explored a bit further, I realised it was non-fiction – an account of meeting various people who claim to be able to do supernatural things. ‘What fun,’ thought I. I had assumed it would be Nichols travelling around and meeting Madame Arcati types, being gently witty at their expense, but with good-heartedness behind the barbs.

Well, there are no barbs; there is no wit. Nichols is entirely straight-faced in this book, meeting people who purport to be able to read minds, sense coal or oil by looking at a map, heal by putting a drop of blood in a black box etc. Nichols is agape and unquestioning throughout. The people he meets are portrayed affectionately, and perhaps they all believe that can do their wonders – but the book felt like an article that had got out of hand, and with none of the writing strengths that make Nichols the author he is.

The Electricity of Every Living Thing – Katherine May

Another non-fiction – about a woman coming to terms with her adult diagnosis of autism while walking the south coast of England. It was a really interesting premise, and I did enjoy reading this – May is very open, not only about her diagnosis but about the arguments and tension in her marriage, and her feelings as a mother.

The thing that was missing for me was perhaps more of an attempt to explain what she means by living with a sense of electricity all the time, and perhaps more abstract discussions alongside the angst about the rain and lost pathways. Or perhaps it just that there’s been so much brilliant memoir recently that this one is more ordinary than some of the others? But definitely still worth a read if the premise interest you.

Once Again to Zelda – Marlene Wagman-Geller

My brother got me this ages ago, and it was one of the final Project Names titles I finished last year – so you can see how long it’s been waiting in my to-review pile. The idea is quite clever – she uses the dedications of famous novels to tell the story behind them. Some of them I was very familiar with, like Emma; others were books I hadn’t even heard of. A staggering amount of research has gone into this, and it’s a fun stocking-filler type of book – if you remember this in December. A good one to leaf through, finding interesting facts and stories in, if not one to read through in one go.

More often than not, the story is about the book and the dedication is an incidental way in, rather than particularly bizarre or intriguing dedications – though there are a handful of those too. Probably the book of these three that I enjoyed most, and if you enjoy reading about books and literary history, I can certainly recommend.

All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Elizabeth von Arnim didn’t write a proper autobiography and All the Dogs of My Life (1936) is not – as she repeatedly states – an autobiography. But it’s the nearest she wrote, and I found it an interesting insight into her life. Perhaps most usefully if you already know the outline of her life.

The book is structured exactly as the title would have you imagine – she traces her life through the fourteen dogs she has had during her life, two of which were still with her at the time of publishing. She almost lost me in the first few pages, where she badmouths cats and says they’re not up to much because they won’t come when you call. I’ve always put that in the ‘pro’ column for pets that feel like friends – I don’t expect my friends to obey me. Anyway. Later on she does mention a cat had, but called her/him ‘it’ and doesn’t give his/her name. I guess not everybody can be right about cats.

I am not particularly fussed one way or the other about dogs, but I did enjoy reading the way von Arnim wrote about them. The ones she has loved most are written about with an affection and poignancy that few romances could equal, and I will admit to crying at the death of one particularly special one.

On the other hand, von Arnim does seem to have been a shockingly bad dog owner – by today’s standards, at least. She has one that chases deer and another that kills sheep, and doesn’t seem to have done much to deter them. She has another dog put down, aged three, because he is fat and lazy. She is forever moving country and leaving dogs behind. Maybe all these things were more acceptable a hundred years ago…

But the real reason All the Dogs of My Life is such an interesting books isn’t the dogs – though the photographs of them are a welcome addition. It’s what we learn about von Arnim’s life – particularly her marriages. She doesn’t say much about the husbands, except that ‘perhaps husbands have never agreed with me very much’, and she draws a veil over her miserable second marriage, purportedly because there were no dogs present and thus is doesn’t fit into the schema of the book. But we can see enough in her dry wit throughout to understand what motivated and hurt her.

Don’t expect much information about her life as a writer. Only one of her books gets a brief mention – Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, which is very good – but otherwise she could equally have had any other profession. Only the quality of her writing in All the Dogs of My Life would clue a reader into her successes elsewhere.

It’s a short, intriguing book, filled with the range of emotions from joy to melancholy. As a window on her life, it is the most glazed sort of glass – but if you stand close and peer carefully, you can find whatever von Arnim was willing to let on.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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We’re having some lovely weather in the UK this weekend, and the roses in my garden are in full bloom, so I can temporarily forget about the world out there with a book and a cuppa. I hope your weekend is going well – let me help it along with a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The link – the Hay Festival kicks off in a couple of days! Obviously it’s not happening in real life, but lots of events are happening online – and, even better, the tickets are free. I’ve signed up to see James Shapiro and Jon Sopel. I’m not sure what tickets are left, but check them out!

2.) The book – my friend Matthew recommended The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos – or, rather, heard about it and thought I’d like it. Someone unearths an amazing novel in a library of rejected manuscripts, which starts a publicity hunt for the author. Sounds very up my street – read more.

3.) The blog post – I loved the book recommendations – and the paintings – in the latest round-up over at Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau.

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

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We’re in the last few days of Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, run by Ali, and I am glad I managed to sneak in under the line with The Scapegoat from 1957. I did a poll on Twitter to see whether I should read this, short stories, The Parasites, or I’ll Never Be Young Again, which account for all the unread books I have by her – and I’m glad that this one topped the poll, because it’s rather brilliant. Truth be told, it tied with the short stories – but the people cheering on The Scapegoat were very convincing.

I didn’t know anything at all about it when I started, which was quite an exciting way to read the novel. But I can’t just stop writing then – so read on to have the premise of the novel spoiled. And it really does happen in the first handful of pages.

John is the first-person narrator – he is a university history lecturer from England, visiting France. In Le Mans, he happens upon his doppelgänger. Not just somebody who looks a bit like him, but somebody exactly like him. They even have the same voice, and John’s French is so good that this other man – Jean de Gué – didn’t realise John was English. They start drinking together… and eventually so drunk, or perhaps drugged, that John passes out in Jean’s hotel room.

When John wakes up – Jean has taken all of John’s possessions and gone. He is left with Jean’s clothes, luggage, identity documents – and none of his own. Left with little option, he decides to go to Jean’s house.

If you swallow the far-fetched concept of doppelgängers so identical that nobody at all can tell them apart, then this is a premise rife with possibility. And, look, it isn’t possible. I speak as someone with a literal clone, and very few people would think we were the same person. No matter – let’s go on with the show.

John-as-Jean arrives at his chateau. His earlier attempts to explain what has happened are taken as poor joke, and he takes the path of least resistance. It’s rather an ingenious way to introduce the new cast to us – because John, narrating, is as clueless as the reader as to who they are. There are several women, a child, an older woman, a man. Gradually, he works out how Jean relates to all of them – sussing out the histories and relationships without being able to ask outright. Why does he have bad blood with one of the woman, and apparently secrets with another? Which is his wife??

In their brief encounter, it was clear that Jean was a more ruthless, less pleasant man that John. As he stays there, it becomes increasingly obvious how this had affected things – and how Jean has set John up to be the scapegoat of the title. John is no saint himself – though motivated by much purer morals than his doppelgänger, he is weak and often foolish. And blindingly naive at times. For all that, he is very sympathetic, and du Maurier does a great job of making us feel his frustrations, fear, and dawning attempts to make the best of it.

If Daphne du Maurier had written this twenty years earlier, around the time she was writing Rebecca, this would be a brilliant set-up for something gothic, something in the mould of a thriller. Well, The Scapegoat is not that. It is a much more sophisticated take on the genre, if I can use the word ‘sophisticated’ as a value-free term: I still adore Rebecca; it’s still my favourite of her novels. But The Scapegoat is more of a character piece – after the fantastic premise, everything is believable and even likely. It’s a poignant unfurling of one man’s psyche, while he is similarly on the track of Jean’s. There are dramatic moments, but this isn’t really a dramatic novel. It’s all about personality and relationships and family, and gentle attempts to change things.

It’s also beautifully written. I’ve never seen du Maurier better at the incidental metaphor, descriptions of people and places, and above all subtle and precise descriptions of how John feels and responds.

As I say, Rebecca is still in a league of its own as a complete tour de force – but this is a clever, engaging, and unexpectedly nuance competitor.

Down the Kitchen Sink by Beverley Nichols

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The official author of my quarantine has been Beverley Nichols. Some have been great and others not-so-great – and then there’s Down the Kitchen Sink (1974), which combines high highs and – well, no lows, but definitely things I had less interest in. Its title is an homage to his famous book Down the Garden Path – and it is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but it is really only half that.

The opening is a typically Beverley concoction of nostalgia, dry wit, and whimsy:

It was an evening in early spring and underneath the Eros statue the steps were piled high with the gold of primroses and the purple of violets, which the flower-girls were selling at tuppence a bunch. In and out of the traffic, like figures in a ballet, darted the newspaper boys. selling sheets which have long since fluttered into oblivion – the Westminster Gazette, which printed on green paper and The Globe which was printed on pink; and The Star, whose pages needed no colour, for they sparkled and crackled with the brilliance of its prose. All at a penny a piece.

[…]

I strolled thoughtfully across Piccadilly Circus – (in those days, the early twenties, one could still wander about London like a gentleman, without courting the risk of instant death) – counting my blessings. They were many. I was twenty-five, and almost aggressively healthy. I was wearing a new suit in the latest fashion, with very wide trousers, which were flatteringly reflected in the plate glass windows. I was glowing with the fires of the latest thing in cocktails – the ‘Sidecar’. I had consumed it in the long bar of the Trocadero – an enchanting grotto of delight, all gold mosaics and nouveau art, which should have been painted by Sickert, but never was. And only that morning I had corrected the proofs of my first entry in Who’s Who. Not a very long entry, merely a couple of lines. But something inside me, probably the ‘Sidecar’, which was made of equal quantities of brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice, persuaded me that as the year went by, it would grow considerably longer. Which it did.

Yes, I should have been very happy, but I was not. For at home somebody was waiting for me whom I dreaded to meet.

The person whom Nichols was waiting to meet was Gaskin – the man-servant that Nichols had just installed into his small house in a backstreet of central London, which he almost convinces us was not a sign of affluence at the time. Gaskin was only a few years younger than Nichols, and recently removed from his upbringing in Norfolk to this situation. But he is entirely at ease, in a way that Nichols is not – or professes not to be, at several decades’ distance. Gaskin seems to know what is expected in the master/servant relationship, and gives subtle approval when Nichols gets it right (and censure when he gets it wrong). He is preparing the first meal – having rejected the fish at Fortnum and Mason, he has found a good fish shop down the road. The proprietor came from Norfolk. Nichols quickly learns that, wherever they go, Gaskin will find a network of people who are from Norfolk, and trusts them.

This first half of the book was lovely. Nichols talks about the wonderful meals that Gaskin has produced at different times, and writes about them with a dizzying rapture. I enjoy that when it was about paradise-like desserts, say, but there was rather too much about meat and fish for this vegetarian to enjoy reading it. No, what makes the first half of Down the Kitchen Sink so wonderful is the portrait of Gaskin. As Nichols and Gaskin spent several decades together, their relationship was one of the most long-lasting in Nichols’ life. Gaskin emerges from these pages as a wonder in the kitchen, but also a delightful mixture of competence and wonder. The way in which he inveigles a kitten into the house filled my heart with joy.

The portrait ends, alas, with Gaskin’s death. And the pages where Beverley Nichols describes discovering that Gaskin has long hidden his alcoholism are beautifully, thoughtfully written. It’s wonderfully done, and I have seldom been as moved by the testament to a friendship – which was never an equal friendship but, in Nichols’ eyes at least, no less to be treasured for that.

The second half of Down the Kitchen Sink is less enjoyable, for me. It purports to be Nichols learning to cook for himself – and I thought it might be the sort of funny, self-deprecating narrative that Nichols is so good at. There are moments of that, and understandably, because Nichols is shockingly ignorant about everything in the kitchen. But before long it becomes more of a collection of recipes. Perhaps that is what Nichols had been commissioned to do, and he twisted it away from that commission into something more enjoyable. But by the final sections, it’s just him describing recipes – with a little context, but not much more.

If I wanted to recreate any of these dishes, then it would perhaps be a delight – but the 1970s are not renowned for their culinary excellence in the UK, and Beverley Nichols doesn’t seem to have opted for vegetarian dishes for very long. I wanted humour or poignancy, not instruction.

So, very much a book of two halves. And I shan’t re-read the second half. But I feel like I may well go back to that funny, touching delight of a first half.

Isolarion by James Attlee

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I joined my village book club at exactly the wrong time. I did make it for their annual meal (which was a slightly odd way to meet those I’d not previously met) but the next meeting came after the pandemic hit and we decided not to go ahead. A few days later, we were in lockdown. I still haven’t written about The Citadel by AJ Cronin that we read for that, but I loved it.

This was before libraries shut, so we were able to get our next book: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, published in 2007. As you find out in an epigraph – isolarion is ‘the term for 15th-century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other’. It’s a pretty self-indulgent title, since nobody will know what it means without opening it, but authors often seem to lose their heads when it comes to a title. The ‘specific area in detail’ in question is Cowley Road, Oxford. It’s a long road that goes straight through East Oxford – the less affluent area of Oxford. (It’s an intriguing phenomenon that you will hear people talk about North Oxford and East Oxford, but never about South or West.)

From the events mentioned, Attlee was researching this around 2002-2004. I moved to Oxford in 2004 – to a big, ugly student accommodation block next to the Plain Roundabout, which divides East Oxford from Central Oxford. I could see Cowley Road from the kitchen window. I lived in Oxford for 15 years, and before I finally managed to move out to a little village, I lived in East Oxford again for a few years. I never lived on Cowley Road itself – this country boy could not have coped with living on a busy road – but I lived around it off and on for quite a while. So I definitely had a personal interest in seeing what Attlee would make of it – I don’t know if it would have the same appeal for people who’ve never been there. Who knows.

The beginning of this book starts a trend that was also my favourite element of Isolarion – going into the different shops, pubs, restaurants etc of the street, and learning about them from their owners. Learning what it was like to have a business there, and how the proprietors ended up there. Because East Oxford is easily the most multicultural part of the city, and that’s reflected in the range of shops there: Brazilian art gallery, Chinese medicine, Polish food, Lebanese food, Indian food… there are a lot of food shops there. My favourite to walk past, though I never went in, was a robemakers – because the mannequins in the window wore clerical robes that reminded me of life in a vicarage. Some of the places Attlee mentioned had disappeared before I moved a little while later – some are still in situ, though you’ll also find Sainsbury’s, Costa, and other signs of gentrification there now.

All of this was wonderful – building up the sense of recent history and community, talking to people who’ve been there all of their lives. It certainly isn’t romanticised – he also talks about the churchyard where people get drunk, the levels of homelessness, the mentally unwell people who pace the street (I recognised the people he spoke about). He talks about the porn shop – that, no, I have never been in. It’s called ‘Private Shop’ – when Attlee wrote about it, and when I moved to the area, it was a blue shop with a discreet sign. Now it’s still called ‘Private Shop’ but the ‘A’ is silhouette of a naked woman… some discretion has been lost.

Alongside this, Attlee documents his attempts to guide the local planning committee about how best to celebrate the area – he is very anti having a gateway arch at the beginning of the street. It was a little off-putting how certain he was that he was right and other locals were wrong, but it was an enjoyably immersive sense of living in the community.

So, there were the makings of a book I really loved. I could even forgive his casual dismissing of students as being part of East Oxford life, though I’d point out that they (we) spent a lot more time there each week than people like Attlee, who commute to London. But he rather lost me when he got abstract.

Increasingly, Isolarion turns to philosophical tangents. He gives overviews of various religions, and has some platitudes to share about them. The concrete gives way to his musings about them, and I didn’t find his musings particularly exciting. He quotes Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy a bizarre amount that an editor should have cut down on – it reminded me of another book about Oxford that kept going on about Isaiah Berlin. Stick to the topic on the table, folks, and don’t let your personal obsessions take over!

So, if this was edited down to the concrete – and if Attlee had interviewed more people – it would have been a truly wonderful book. As it was, I still loved reading it – paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than the sum of its parts. But I do wish he’d been stricter with himself about what made Isolarion great and what was interesting just to him.

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison: EUPL Giveaway!

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The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)

I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.

I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.

My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.

This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.

In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. 

Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.

And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.

Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.

And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.

And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.

All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…

* * Giveaway time! * *

EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)

And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s been a while since I did one of these – but also, time no longer has any meaning. April has finished, apparently? What a strange, strange year. I am grateful that my reading abilities came back, though, and I certainly got through a lot of books in April – though I’m not doing so well at writing about them.

I hope you and the people you love are doing well. Stay safe, and enjoy a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The book – Chatteron Square by E.H. Young is now out in the British Library Women Writers series! It’s the first one that I chose myself, and it’s great. I had fun reading about 1930s divorce law while writing the afterword, which hopefully adds a layer of interest to the novel – but obviously it’s a wonderful novel without a word from me alongside it.

2.) The link – if you’re in the UK and looking for vegan and gluten-free cakes during the lockdown, I can recommend my friend Amy’s bakery. I’ve received, given, and bought for myself boxes from them during quarantine – check out Brutally Honest Bakery.

3.) The blog post – I always love when Claire at The Captive Reader reads A.A. Milne, it fills me with such joy – and she has made me want to go back and re-read The Romantic Age soon.

The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington

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I picked up The Vanishing Celebrities (1947) by Adrian Alington in Oxford a couple of years ago, partly because the title sounded fun, partly because I love the look of Albatross paperbacks and partly because I thought it would be a Golden Age detective novel. As it turned out, it was a lot more than that – and a total delight that sadly seems to have become almost completely forgotten. [Sidenote: this is number 5364 in the Albatross paperback series. Who knew they had so many, and how come I so seldom find them?]

The setting is Spindlesby Castle, and the opening chapter has ghostly figures from different periods of the castle’s past congregating – they know something is about to happen, but don’t know what. These ghosts only appear at the beginning and end of the novel and were rather a distraction than anything else – I’d have cut them, though they may have been a satire on something I don’t know about.

Because most of the other characters are clearly satires – either of real people or of types; I don’t know enough of popular culture from 1947 to be certain. But present at the houseparty, organised by the Duchess of the castle and reluctantly permitted by her husband, are…

  • Trackless Butterworth, an explorer
  • Olivia Hitchforth, an actress and Trackless’s wife
  • Aurora Fairground, a tennis player, and her mother
  • Carlotta Trott, a detective novelist who invented Sir Cecil Sweetlip and who is in a bitter rivalry with Fay Peabody, inventor of the detective Aristede Foufoupou
  • Viola Ramshott, MP
  • Virgil D. Schrenkenkraut, an American film magnate
  • The Ambassador of Strubania
  • Len Trooper, a handsome singer
  • Mr Titterways, who is not famous but somehow always turns up where famous people are

You see that Alington has a way with names. Carlotta Trott and Fay Peabody are obviously spins on Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and there’s a later reference to Tenderly Jones, ‘the man who writes whimsically about gardens’, who I think must be Beverley Nichols. Whether the others are types or real people, they are a delight. My favourite to read was perhaps Aurora Fairground, whose reputation her mother is keen to preserve – whenever anybody asks her about her tennis career, she says that she would rather have babies of her own, and is just a girl who loves England and happens to be good at tennis.

An alternative title for The Vanishing Celebrities in some editions was The Room in the West Tower – put those two together, and you’ll work out happens. There are rumours that anybody who slept in a room in the West Tower disappeared by morning. Viola Ramshott, MP, has no time for such nonsense and says she’s will sleep there to no ill effect – and by morning, of course, she is gone.

In the silence which seemed inevitably to follow any observation put forward by Aurora, Carlotta Trott made her first contribution to the discussion. She had been listening to the others with a somewhat cynical smile. Now, thinking that a suitable moment had arrived for the kind of sensational intervention which Sir Cecil enjoyed, she said, adopting her best Sir Cecil drawl, ‘Have you tried draggin’ the lake?’

‘Er – no,’ said the Duke.

Carlotta’s smile became still more cynical.

‘Not a bad idea, what?’

‘A very interesting idea,’ replied the Duke, ‘really a very interesting idea indeed. But as a matter of fact, Miss Trott, there is no lake.

A succession of these celebrities decide to sleep in the room for increasingly unlikely reasons, and they disappear. Various policemen turn up, including people from Scotland Yard with ridiculous nicknames – my favourite was ‘What’s More You’ll Be A Man My Son’ Darby. Fay Peabody pops up to score one over her novelist nemesis.

As a detective novel, it’s not the most impressive. The solution is pretty laughable – but in the good sense as well as the bad. The whole thing is really funny. Alington has a great ear for witty dialogue and, having established the ludicrous characters, frequently made me laugh by dropping in just a few representative words from them. We don’t even have the usual straight man, watching on and being the reader’s perspective on the zany world. Everyone is absurd. It’s a delight.

I suppose the danger in any novel that draws on figures of the period, or even on types of the period, is that they are less relevant when those figures and types have faded. But I loved this even when I wasn’t sure who Alington was drawing on, and the whole thing was a total joy. If you can get your hands on a copy, do – otherwise I hope that it might catch the eye of the British Library Crime Classics series at some point…

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm

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As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

Cases that formally terminate – i.e. end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient – are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.