A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig is rather brilliant, isn’t he? A Chess Story [also published as Chess and A Royal Game], from 1941, is the third Zweig novella I’ve read and the best so far – a really astonishing achievement in so few pages. Translated by Alexander Starritt, I should say – someone at my book group had a very different translation, based on our comparison of the first few lines, but it hurts my head to think too much about the variations that are possible with different translators at work.

I didn’t know anything about A Chess Story when I started it, and I was very glad about that. It made the whole experience so much more surprising and revelatory – so part of me wants to tell you to stop reading this review and just get a copy. Preferably the gorgeous Pushkin Press edition I have. But I’ll keep going anyway.

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us – it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure.

The narrator is an interested and friendly man, but we don’t learn all that much more about him. Rather, he is there to introduce us to other people – to be the intrigued onlooker, always ready to give backstory when necessary. Zweig breaks all sorts of narrative ‘best practice’ rules, or what we would now consider rules, and somehow gets away with it. For example, he jumps from this present moment into a full history of the celebrity in question: Mirko Czentovic, chess prodigy.

We learn that Czentovic came from poverty and was considered unusually stupid. He barely communicates, and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. Except one day he reveals himself to have a preternatural ability for chess. One thing leads to another – Zweig tells it very well – and Czentovic is now a big deal. He’s also a mercenary, and will only play chess if it’s monetarily worth his while.

A competitive man on board the ship, and the narrator, manage to get together a group who are willing to put together the price. And it looks like the hubris of the amateur and the arrogance of the professional will be the story here. It would have been a good story. But, in the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. And, diffidently, he calls through an instruction. It quickly becomes clear that he is brilliant at chess himself – but once the match is over, he doesn’t want to play again.

Dr B is his name – and the second half of the novella becomes about something completely different. I won’t say what, though it’s easy enough to discover online if you want to. It’s about how he became so talented at chess – and why he doesn’t want to play again. Frankly, it’s astonishing.

All the more astonishing is how vividly Zweig creates two worlds – the ship and this other world that I won’t say too much about – in only a hundred or so pages. He could have made it a novel of three times the length, but there is a great power in his brevity. It says more about its time than novels ten times as long; I suspect it will stay in my mind for a long time. I’ve seldom read a better portrayal of mental illness, and the final chess match in A Chess Story is one of only two times that a sport has held any interest for me – the other being the cricket match in The Go Between.

If you’ve never read Zweig before, this is a great place to start. And I’m keen to get as many more as I can.

Patience by John Coates

A couple of weeks ago, Jessie at Dwell in Possibility organised a mini Persephone readathon. Basically, an excuse to get a Persephone book off the shelf and dig in – and I had a quick mosey through the ones I have unread on my shelves, and opted for Patience by John Coates, originally published in 1953.

Coates is one of those rare[ish] creatures – a male Persephone author – but his main character is a woman. ‘Patience’ is there as a theme throughout the novel, but it is also the name of the main character. She is a devoted mother to her children, and thinks she might be on the way to another. Here’s the rather wonderful opening line:

It was odd, thought Patience, that surprises never came singly, and that the day she asked herself whether she was going to have another baby, poor Lionel should have asked himself to tea.

Lionel is Patience’s brother and something of a hassle. His wife has recently left him to join a retreat, permanently, and he is busying himself with interfering in Patience’s life and her marriage. He’s always quite interfering, but he has particular reason this time: because he’s discovered that Patience’s husband, Edward, is having an affair.

That might be rather a devastating discovery for many wives, but Patience isn’t unduly perturbed. Her relationship with Edward is one of thoughtless acceptance. She has been taught to be submissive and so she lets him sleep with her, and she is proud of the offspring of that marriage, but it seems never to have crossed her mind that one might love one’s husband, or want to spend time with them.

An awful lot of things have never crossed Patience’s mind. Coates has created something rather extraordinary in her – because she is clueless and naive, taking things on surface level, kind to everyone and absolutely predisposed to like them. But she is never, never the butt of the joke in the narrative. Patience would be a slightly absurd comic character in the background of most novels. Here she is a heroine, and I loved her. She is fundamentally good, even if the way she understands the world and its morals is a mixture of pragmatic, idiosyncratic, and Catholic.

I’ve buried the lede, but Catholicism is one of the big themes of this very funny novel. Importantly, Coates isn’t mocking Catholicism – I have zero time for novels that mock people’s faith – but he is funny about people who twist scripture and the tenets of the church for their own ends, or who are half-hearted in it. This early sentence amused me, and gives a good sense of Coates’ tone – it’s about why Patience is married to a non-Catholic:

For darling Mummy had been unable to find any eligible Catholics for her daughters, what with the war being on and perhaps not trying very hard.

Because of her firmly-held faith, Patience can’t get a divorce. Even when things get more complicated, as she falls instantly in love with a man called Philip… and that’s just the beginning of the complications that follow.

I have only two qualms about this novel. One is the love-at-first-sight thing. Maybe it does happen sometimes, but it just feels a bit silly in a novel. The other is that Patience thinks a lot more about the church than about God, which is a little at odds with the genuine nature of her faith.

Besides those details, I loved Patience. Coates is really good at putting together this bizarre twist on a moral dilemma, in a novel that could easily have been a miserable tale about unhappy marriage in a different author’s hands. Instead, Coates sustains the humour and lightness of the novel, and keeps the reader – well, this reader at least – fully empathetic with Patience, and really liking her. But then again I never find unworldliness offputting in someone, real or fictional, unless it means that other people have to deal with the mess they leave behind them. And that’s never the case with Patience.

Such an unusual topic for a novel, handled perfectly, and a delight from start to finish.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The tone of the novel is a deceptively simple one; Patience’s voice is perfectly delightful, childlike whimsy. Despite its few flaws I really thoroughly enjoyed this surprising little novel” – HeavenAli

“While it is, in many ways, quintessentially ‘Persephone’, it is also quite strikingly different, and fills a gap in the Persephone canon that I hadn’t realised was there before.” – Book Snob

“It’s a rare occurrence but sometimes a Perephone title just doesn’t suit me and this was one of those times which was mildly disappointing as it’s the one I’d had the highest expectations for.” – Desperate Reader

Told in Winter by Jon Godden

Each Christmas, the Thomas family take it in turn to open the parcels under the tree – most of which have come from each other, or family and friends that we all know. And every year there’s a little pile of parcels to me from somebody none of the others know. And that person changes each year. It’s the LibraryThing Virago Modern Classics Secret Santa! [The group is devoted to VMCs – the Secret Santa books don’t have to be VMCs.]

This year, I was lucky enough to get Dee as my Santa, and chose a lovely selection of books. Among them was Told In Winter (1961) by Jon Godden – Rumer Godden’s sister. Since I wanted to read it in winter, and because that gorgeous cover was calling to me, I polished it off in January. I didn’t quite have the snow depicted on the cover and in the book, but it definitely felt suitably wintery.

Snow had fallen all night and the house in the woods was already cut off from the road and the village by a four-foot drift at the bottom of the lane. Snow lay along the branches of the firs that made a dark ring round the house, and the lawn was a smooth white lake.

As the sun came up behind the hills, the back door opened and closed again. One of the house’s three inhabitants was now abroad in the morning; the cold air filled her lungs and cleared the last mists of sleep from her eyes. She shook her head, as if in amazement at the white world which confronted her, and moved cautiously round the side of the house keeping close to the walls. Every few steps she paused to look suspiciously across the untouched expanse of snow into the recesses between the trees. Nothing moved. Nothing threatened.

This is the opening to the novel – and I don’t know about you, but I already felt a really strong sense of place. Not just the snow, but the stillness, the isolation, the vastness. I love a novel that can make me feel like I dived into it – and because descriptions of landscapes etc usually don’t work for me, I want the bare bones of the physical environment to be filled with how it makes the observer feel. Not many authors can do it in a way that works for me, but I felt cold and isolated as I read the opening of Told In Winter – isolated in a positive sense. With a secure centre.

And have you worked out what’s unusual about the first character we meet? We learn, after a few more paragraphs, that this is Sylvie – and she is a dog.

In this isolated house are only three characters: Jerome, a writer who has had success with plays and less success with the novels he considers his true art. Peter, who was Jerome’s batman in the war and is now a sort of housekeeper. And Sylvie, the Alsatian who lives with Peter when Jerome isn’t there, but worships Jerome.

Godden builds this house so perfectly. Focalising through a dog might sound twee or annoying, but it is not that. She never treats Sylvie like a pet or a piece of whimsy – she gives us Sylvie’s viewpoint, with honesty and accuracy, and without ever slipping into the first person. That would have made it too fey.

If their little world seems almost idyllic, then the moods in it aren’t. Peter is recalcitrant and so loyal that he can’t help pointing out his master’s errors. Jerome is frustrated and cross, and grudgingly fond of Peter. Only Sylvie is content, and she is content only when Jerome is around.

Into this world, though, stumbles Una. She has lost her car in the snow and turns up, bedraggled and desperate. Peter is sickened by the thought of her. Jerome is shocked and tries to send her away – but lets her in. They have had a relationship of sorts, and she believes herself to be in love with him. She has come to this distant place to convince him to reciprocate that love.

Into a settled household comes a great disturbance. I don’t love a big age gap in a novel, particularly of the kind where the man is always saying things like ”You silly little thing”, and the girl is weeping and flinging herself on him. It would read like a middle-aged man’s fantasy if it weren’t written by a woman. Well, it might anyway.

But if we put that aside, there is something very interesting at the heart of Told in Winter. It’s the most intriguing take on a love triangle that I’ve read. A love triangle between a man, a woman… and a dog. Sylvie is deeply, openly jealous. And Peter is constantly trying to get her to behave with dignity and restraint, as he feels too pained at watching her undisguised jealousy.

In terms of plot, this is it. Godden’s writing is so beautiful that it doesn’t need more. We see Jerome use his control over the girl and the dog, ebbing too and fro between them. We share Peter’s growing rage and unhappiness. And we know there can’t be a happy ending for this disturbed trio.

I don’t know much about dogs, so I’m guessing about how accurate Godden is – but it certainly chimed with everything I do know. It reminded me of May Sarton’s excellent The Fur Person, about a cat, in the depth of its attempt to explore the psyche of the animal – putting aside any of the romanticised versions that humans might put on top of that. Are dogs really this possessive of humans? I’m going to assume so.

Told in Winter will stay with me a long time, and makes me wonder how a writer of Godden’s calibre ever faded away.

Exciting news! British Library Women Writers

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I had a secret project I was waiting to share – and I can finally share it. I shan’t bury the lede: I am the Series Consultant for a new British Library Women Writers reprint series!! Here’s what the first four look like… [they’re out in March and April]

And now for a bit more detail.

It must be about two years ago that I first got an email from Liz at the British Library, asking if I’d be interested in helping find books for a tentative, might-not-happen series reprinting women writers from the first half of the century. I’ll be honest, I thought it could be a hoax. Because surely it was too good to be true? It was basically my dream come true, and of course I leapt at the opportunity – and had some lovely phone conversations with Liz. She sadly left the British Library before the series came to full fruition, but I know she is cheering on from the sidelines.

The idea was, and is, to reprint about four every six months – I suppose for as long as it does well. Liz had already put together suggestions for three of the first titles – The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair, Bad Girl by Vina Delmar, and My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes. I’d read and enjoyed My Husband Simon; I really liked May Sinclair but hadn’t read that particular one, and I’d never heard of Delmar. Luckily all the books are great – and, when I was asked to suggest something for the 1940s, it wasn’t long before I landed upon E.H. Young’s Chatterton Square. I definitely thought that needed to be back in print.

To be a candidate for inclusion in the series, the book has to be by a woman, completely out of print, and have something interesting to say about women’s lives in the period. And – eek – I got to write afterwords to each of them! They were going to be introductions, but we decided they’d fit better at the end because then I could write about the plot – and we all hate introductions that give away the ending.

For each afterword, I linked themes from the novel with something affecting women’s social, political, or private life in the decade that the novel was written – exploring it through a reading of the book. For instance, I wrote about how the books people read linked with their class in my afterword to My Husband Simon.

I’ve already suggested the four books I’d like to see in the autumn batch of the British Library Women Writers series, and am waiting to hear what the editorial team think. Obviously I have MANY books I’d like to see back in print – but if you have any suggestions that match the criteria, let me know and I’ll see what I can do :D

I do hope you enjoy this series – and can you believe how lucky I am??

Conversation With Max by S.N. Behrman

Yes, I’m still working my way through #ProjectNames reviews, and am likely to do so for a while longer! Conversation With Max is a 1960 book by S.N. Behrman, and if that name sounds familiar then you might have come across Duveen, which was reprinted a few years ago and which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. That was a biography of a bizarre art dealer, and this is a memoir of a friendship with Max Beerbohm – so Behrman is nothing if not eclectic.

Beerbohm is chiefly remembered today for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson, about a woman so beautiful that all the undergraduates in Oxford drown themselves. I’ve read a couple volumes of his essays and have many more, but I don’t think I really understood what a cultural figure Beerbohm was in the early twentieth century – or at least according to Behrman.

The structure of Conversation With Max belies the singular ‘conversation’, in that Behrman returns several times to Beerbohm’s house – to hear stories of his long writing career and his life. The former apparently started when he wrote an impassioned piece about make-up in an Oxford undergraduate magazine, which seems as unlikely a start to a writing career as any.

I have a soft spot for memoirs of writers that come from a specific and subjective angle – whether that be H.G. Wells from the perspective of his children’s governness, Walter de la Mare from someone who went to tea, or Ivy Compton-Burnett through the lens of her secretary. (Yes, those are all real examples of books I have actually read.) Behrman perhaps forges his own connection, as a fan and journalist, but there is a definite sense of sitting in Beerbohm’s home, hearing his stories, and being in the presence of a biographer who is happily overstating the importance of a single cultural figure. He is not pretending to be objective. Here’s the opening:

The hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max Beerbohm. I first made Max’s acquaintance, one might say, in the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian. When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign “RAPALLO” (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there. I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer of 1952, it came about.

(The book also seems to have appeared as a series of articles – the first is available online, if this opening has caught your attention.)

At the time, Beerbohm was known as much for his drawn caricatures as his writing. It’s hard to recognise the impact that individual caricatures could have, in this era where every public figure is open to ridicule or affectionate mockery at any moment of any day. I suppose, also, that the sphere of intellectual life was smaller and more insular. Whether or not you are interested in Beerbohm’s output in art and literature, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Conversation With Max presents one artist/writer’s life through nostalgia and anecdote.

And that’s what made this book special to me. Not so much the individual examples chosen, but that a book of this sort exists – affectionate, leisurely, and somehow revealing the life of a writer more intimately than the most tell-all biography. Because, by the end, we also feel like we have been invited into Beerbohm’s home, and have become his friend.

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott at the excellent Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Every time I want all of them, and every time I only manage to read a handful – but thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a review copy of My Caravaggio Style (1959) by Doris Langley Moore. Don’t worry too much about the title – I’ll come onto that in a bit.

Quentin Williams is the narrator. He works in an antiquarian bookshop and is the writer of fairly unsuccessful biographies of people nobody much cares about. In a chance conversation with a passing American, he somehow manages to suggest that he has access to the memoirs of Lord Byron, believed to have been destroyed. One thing leads to another, and Quentin decides that he’ll give forgery a go.

Moore was a Byron expert and there is plenty of background detail about Byron here – or, rather, enough so that those of us who’ve never read a word of Byron don’t feel entirely adrift. She even does a good job of making you feel the significance these memoirs would be, though mostly because they’d be worth a lot of money. The cleverest thing is that we are always reluctantly on Quentin’s side when it comes to the forgery – because he is such an intensely dislikeable person.

I hope this was deliberate. He is arrogant, careless of the feelings of others, and particularly unpleasant to his girlfriend Jocasta. Every time he describes her, he talks endlessly about her beauty and stupidity. It’s the sort of viewpoint that is at the very worst edges of men-writing-about-women, so either Moore was impersonating a terrible man, or needed a quiet talking to. Let’s assume the former. This is the sort of thing Quentin says about Jocasta…

Such a vapid and unworthy comment quite irritated me. I had never regarded my beautiful Jocasta as an intellectual girl but she had been brought up by highly cultured grandparents, and I saw no reason why she should appear – no, I won’t say vulgar, for she had too little pretension ever to be that, but – I can only repeat – childish.

While we cannot forget the chief reason that he is dating her – she is so beautiful, y’all – it’s never clear what she sees in him. And, indeed, she’s very keen that they get married, despite him having no redeeming qualities at all. Quentin is rather easier to cheer for when he visits his great-aunt – by some convoluted reasoning, he needs some manuscript books from her attic and also needs her to witness him receiving them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Moore can be very witty – particularly in these sections. For example…

It was curious that so much good will towards the human race should be combined in my great-aunt with an inveterate reluctance to allow any member of it whom she saw at close quarters to be comfortable.

To distract Jocasta from finding out about the forgery, Quentin sets her off doing a research project on Byron and animals. She gets really into it and starts to love reading Byron – rather ludicrously, Quentin gets terribly jealous that she should love Byron. His reasoning is fairly unhinged: Byron was a notorious womaniser and thus he doesn’t want his girlfriend falling in love with him. Despite, of course, Byron being long dead. And so he tries to write things in the forged memoir that will alienate Jocasta…

It’s all bonkers, but Moore manages to make the logic of the novel work well. I found that I wanted Quentin to succeed in his efforts, even as I wanted Jocasta to get as far away from him as possible. It’s always fun to read about literary obsessions taken to great lengths, and once different Byron scholars get involved (including ‘Doris Langley Moore’ as a character!) it’s all very amusing and dramatic.

And the title is apparently a reference to something Byron said about his own writing, though that does make it one of those slightly silly titles that only makes sense to the in-crowd. That aside, Moore did a great job of making this interesting to someone who doesn’t care at all whether or Byron’s memoirs are discovered.

Another success for Furrowed Middlebrow. Just as long as Moore knew she was creating an idiot and not a hero.

 

Some books I’ve bought in 2020

The new decade is still very young, but I’ve been busying myself with buying books…  These aren’t all from the same shop, but represent trips to a couple of old reliable shops and a couple of books I bought online. The reliables are the bookshop in Wantage and Notting Hill Book Exchange. They’re both shops I’ve been to time and again, and they always turn up affordable gems. But the first two came from the great wide internet…

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
When I wrote about the wonderful O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Sarah said that she’d read and loved Proud Citadel. And so I had to have it, didn’t I? Watch this space.

Another Year by R.C. Sherriff
Every Sherriff novel I’ve read has been amazing, and so obviously I need to track down as many as I can. Watch this space AGAIN. Just keep watching spaces.

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden
I’ve already read and reviewed this one, so you know what I think about it and why I bought it!

Sing For Your Supper by Pamela Frankau
I loved A Wreath For The Enemy so much, and have been stockpiling Frankau ever since – but have yet to read any of the others on my shelves (though did read one in the Bodleian). Let’s throw another on the pile. Anybody read this one?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way by Nancy Spain
I’ve been keeping eyes out for this autobiography for a while because apparently it includes an account of meeting A.A. Milne. She was also a fascinating person for many reasons, so it’ll be fun to find out more about her from her own mouth.

Authenticity by Deirdre Madden
You know how much I loved Molly Fox’s Birthday, and I’ve now bought a couple of Madden novels to try next – the title is intriguing in a Milan Kundera sort of way.

Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
I definitely said I wouldn’t be buying any more Mackenzie novels until I’d read some of the ones I own. When I saw this, I thought ”I won’t buy this unless it was published in the 1920s”. And I picked it off the shelf and saw it was from 1927. The decision was OUT OF MY HANDS.

The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley
I have so many unread Hartleys and I don’t know anything about this Hartley novel, but it was only a quid so why not.

Present Indicative by Noel Coward
I’ve seen this one around a few times, and finally succumbed. Will Coward be as funny in his autobiography as he is in his plays?

Embers by Sandor Marai
I don’t know anything about this but I’m trying to read more translated fiction, after my all-time record of eleven last year. And this one looked interesting.

The Shadow of a Sorcerer by Stella Gibbons
Continuing the theme of this post, I have so many Gibbons novels I haven’t read – but it felt like quite a coup to stumble across one I haven’t even heard of. And there’s surprisingly little info about it online…

Have you read any of these? Any that should race up my tbr pile?

 

Three super speedy reviews

The pile of books to review has been getting very high and threatening to topple into my fireplace. Which has an electric heater in it, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world – but, nevertheless, here are my quick thoughts about three books I read last year. All non-fiction, in fact. [Pun intended]

Shakespeare’s Library (2018) by Stuart Kells

Image result for shakespeare's library stuart kellsI got this as a review copy, for which many thanks to Text Publishing. As witnessed by Paul Collins’ The Book of William being my favourite read of last year, I love reading about William Shakespeare. More particularly, I love reading about his cultural reception. And so I did enjoy reading Kells’ book, however flawed it might be.

The main issue about a book called Shakespeare’s Library is that this isn’t really about Shakespeare’s library. Supposedly it’s about the hunt for any books Shakespeare used to own, and this comes up every now and then, but it gets rather muddled with more metaphorical interpretations of the word ‘library’ and a baffling amount of anti-Stratfordian theories. I.e. the idea that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This seems to be given more credence than necessary here, and Kells quotes books like James Shapiro’s Contested Will without addressing all the pro-Stratfordian arguments that Shapiro neatly condenses.

There is a fair amount of overview of the reception of Shakespeare, and the authorial question, over the years – but, to be honest, nothing you can’t find done better elsewhere. It was a nice idea for a book but I don’t think it really worked.

Book Girl (2018) by Sarah Clarkson

Image result for book girl sarah clarksonClarkson is one of the few authors I’ve mentioned whom I’ve seen – and seen quite often, as she used to walk her pram near my office quite often. I would have said I was enjoying her book, but once I started reading it I never saw her again, and now I work somewhere else.

Anyway, Book Girl is one of those books about the joys of reading that I can never resist. A couple of people had recommended it – Elizabeth was one of them, I think, so thanks – and my parents got it for me last Christmas. It’s aimed at girls and women, as the title suggests, but I’ve never been one for respecting gender divides when it comes to reading – and I’m glad I read this, as it’s a lot of fun.

Clarkson is a Christian, so a lot of what she writes includes that perspective. And, indeed, a lot of Book Girl consists of lists of books and why you should read them – which I’m certainly not going to complain about. So there’s ‘Books about Imagination: why you’re never too old for Narnia’, ‘Novels that kindled my delight in existence’, ‘Novels that helped me cope with a broken world’, etc. etc. There’s a lot of faith-based suggestions and a lot that aren’t, and I certainly made a little list – even if Clarkson’s taste runs more to fantasy than mine does.

My only issue with Book Girl is that Clarkson is obviously a much nicer person than I am. I often feel similarly when podcasting with Rachel. Clarkson, like Rachel, talks a lot about how reading can enrich you, can teach you, can help you appreciate the world. There’s not any space in Book Girl for reading that is snarky or savage or dry. The sort of book that lets you laugh at how absurd and sometimes unpleasant the people around you might be. I sense that she’d read Austen and see the benefits of self-growth rather than the take-down of pomposity. Both are there, of course, but I think I lean towards the latter.

Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners (2009) by Andy Merriman

Image result for merriman margaret rutherford coverWho doesn’t love Margaret Rutherford? What a wonderful performer she was, and how amazing it would have been to get to see her on stage. Thank goodness she put a fair few performances on screen.

Wanting to find out more about her life, I tracked down Merriman’s biography. I’m usually a bit bored by the childhood stories of famous authors and actors, and just want to get to the bit they’re best known for – but even I was a bit dazed when Rutherford was 40 by page 40. We see some tragic childhood experiences – or tragic experiences that impacted her childhood, because she didn’t learn the truth of her father for some time – and the we rush into her career.

This is a great book for giving a thorough overview of all of Rutherford’s plays and films, though it’s pretty apparent which films Merriman has seen and which he hasn’t. I’ve come away with a long list of films to track down, and can recommend ‘Castle in the Air’ [which you can find on YouTube]. And naturally I loved reading about Rutherford’s THREE portrayals of Miss Hargreaves – on radio, TV, and stage. How I wish I could see/hear any of those.

But somehow the whole thing felt a bit like an extended magazine article. I’m not sure quite what was missing, I just know that someone like Claire Tomalin or Ann Thwaite would have written something deeper, somehow. An invaluable resource, but perhaps in the way that a Wikipedia article is, rather than a work of art.

 

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden

I love taking a trip to the secondhand bookshop in Wantage, which is less than half an hour from my house. It’s a real treasure trove, and I never come away empty-handed or anything like it. Among my recent haul was Return Journey (1954) by Barbara Goolden, and I was so taken by the premise that I started it immediately. But before I looked to see what it was about, I was drawn in by those stunning cover. Isn’t it a beauty?

It reminds me a lot of a village called Lower Slaughter that isn’t a million miles from me, and where I once accidentally gatecrashed a fete.

“You do not feel,” said the Assessor gently, “that you are altogether satisfied with your Record?”

“Most dissatisfied,” confessed the New Arrival. “I have the feeling, you see, that I am a complete failure.”

The Assessor take up a file. “You were, I think, an English spinster of the upper middle-class, living in the country?”

“Hampshire,” prompted the New Arrival, “the Surrey side, very convenient for London. Not that I myself liked town life, the traffic always confused me. I was killed, you recollect, by a tram. So bewildering. I thought it was going, when, in fact, it was coming.”

The ‘New Arrival’ is Veryan Meadows, and the place she has newly arrived is the Pearly Gates. Before her record is read, though, she is given the option of returning to Earth for any year of her life. And she can choose whether to have a change of heart, a change of mind, or a change of physical appearance. She chooses to go back to her youth, and to be beautiful.

Isn’t that a brilliant premise? Well, it swept me away, certainly.

As it happens, it was the most brilliant thing about Return Journey. I enjoyed reading the novel, but I feel that Goolden could have made more of the idea.

When she is sent back on her terrestrial way, the celestial powers that be decide to give her an added attribute, along with her beauty – the ability to express her opinions. She has always been rather shy and unsure of herself – which, coupled with plainness, led to an unhappy life as ‘an English spinster of the upper middle-class’. So here she finds herself again, the daughter of a minister in a small village. She is unused to having any male attention, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the sudden attentions of, among others, the curate. Any young gentleman is bewitched by her looks; any older man or woman seems to think she is unnecessarily odd. And you can sort of see their point. While the Assessor gave the ability to express her opinions, she does seem to be [a] pretty stupid and [b] bizarrely literal. Any turn of phrase is taken at face value, and her repeated questions madden quite a few people.

It’s unclear whether she remembers her heavenly adventure, or realises that she’s having a second lease of life. And that’s the major drawback of the novel for me. If we had Veryan reflecting on the differences this time around, or cynically thinking about how beauty has altered perceptions of her, it would be rather intriguing. What a lot to explain. Instead, it’s an enjoyable small-town novel where the heroine is unusually pretty and unusually dim. It’s good fun, but it rather wastes the initial premise.

Goolden is neither dim not literal, and she is rather good at one of my favourite authorial tricks – showing when characters are inadvertently revealing their true nature, or using quick narrative asides to send up the characters. Return Journey ended up being one of those novels that slightly frustrated me, because it could obviously have been better than it was – if Veryan had had an ounce of the wit and intelligence that Goolden has, it would have been much improved. More fun than seeing a virtuous innocent be virtuously innocent.

So, this has ended up one of those confusing reviews where I might sound more negative than I feel. Return Journey is fun and diverting. It’s only that I think it could have been truly brilliant. Maybe next time around?

Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

The first book I started this year was one I bought for a treat in Woodstock’s independent bookshop – Ghosting (2004) by Jennie Erdal. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few review copies from Slightly Foxed, but hadn’t had this one – so it was a nice one to reward myself for… well, something last July. Who knows what.

All I knew about the memoir was that it was about ghostwriting, and that Slightly Foxed Editions pretty much never put a foot wrong. And Ghosting turns out to be no exception – what an extraordinary book.

Erdal was the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’, a man who is not named in the book but who was apparently Naim Attallah. That name means nothing to me, but he is certainly a character and not in a particularly positive way. More on that later. And when I say that Erdal was a ghostwriter, it seems that she wrote more or less anything that Tiger needed to claim as his own – whether letters, newspaper columns, or full-length novels.

She got the job by having done some Russian translation – Tiger asked her to come on board at his publishing house, in charge of the Russian list. She doesn’t go into his backstory, so I don’t know how somebody as supremely unqualified as Tiger came to own a publishing house – but, dizzied, she does accept this role. She’s allowed to work from her home in Scotland, only occasionally coming down to London for meetings. When her role expands into writing up and editing interviews Tiger does with hundreds of women for a ‘book about women’, she finds that she has morphed into a ghostwriter.

I was ready to be fascinated by her account of ghostwriting and was a bit annoyed when she started talking about her upbringing. But, my goodness, she’s very good at it. Hers was a family where appearances mattered more than anything, and the abiding horrors of her parents were (a) shaming themselves before their neighbours and (b) Catholicism.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances – the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

Erdal doesn’t treat the memoir chronologically, covering childhood before moving onto adulthood, but rather draws links between her background and what’s going on with Tiger. It’s all done very elegantly and impressively – though in the second half of the memoir, it’s just about Tiger and working for him.

Tiger. Good grief. What an appalling man. Erdal is never vituperative, and seems to have been under the spell of his apparent charm – but beneath this, the reader can see what a monstrous man he is. Tiger is completely selfish, expecting everyone to bend to his will. He is devoted to ‘beautiful women’, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered about their minds or personalities, or even what they think of him in return. The portrait of Erdal working with him isn’t far off an abusive relationship, particularly when she starts to want to change the arrangement.

And yet she treats it lightly, and Ghosting is often funny. Tiger is as ridiculous as he is awful. And Erdal focuses on the ridiculous when she starts writing a novel ‘with’ him. He seems to believe he has come up with the idea of it – because he says it should involve a passionate affair. That’s it; that’s the plot. It’s left to Erdal to craft something from that premise – and her description of the editing process is funny, frustrating, and bizarre. What’s so impressive is that she doesn’t give up trying to do well, and she writes brilliantly in Ghosting about the process of trying to satisfy Tiger’s whims while also satisfying her artistic nature.

The fact that I was writing as someone else – with a mask on, as it were – inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

Erdal writes so well about her inner philosophy – and, in the same volume, writing movingly about her childhood and her divorce, as well as drawing a portrait of the outlandish, absurd, and appalling Tiger. And she even finds pity for him.

Ghosting holds together many disparate elements brilliantly and it’s another success for the Slightly Foxed Editions series. A great start to the reading year.