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Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

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Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?

The Overhaul #4

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It’s time for another Overhaul! For those who missed the first three in the series – it’s where I look back at haul posts from the past on my blog, and see if I actually read the books.

And this time we’re going with maybe my biggest haul ever.

The Overhaul #4

The original haul post is here.

Date of haul: April 2011

Location: Bookbarn, Somerset

Number of books bought: 29

TWENTY-NINE BOOKS. Buckle up, and let’s see how well I’ve done with them… [and click through to the original post if you want to know more about the books and why I bought them – for some reason I thought it was thirty-one then.]

  • Confessions of a Story-Teller: short stories by Paul Gallico
  • The Small Miracle by Paul Gallico
  • Ludmilla, and The Lonely by Paul Gallico
  • The Adventures of Hiram Holliday by Paul Gallico

I have read plenty of Paul Gallico since 2011, but I think the only one of these I’ve read is the shortest – The Small Miracle.

  • A Village in a Valley by Beverley Nichols

When I bought this, I wrote “I keep stockpiling Nichols books, and have still read none…” – well, readers of StuckinaBook probably know that the dam burst and I’ve read a lot of Nichols since then – including this one.

  • Four Years at the Old Vic 1929-1933 by Harcourt Williams

I’ll be honest, I forgot I had this. It sounds great! I wonder where it is…

  • The Theatre Since 1900 by J.C. Trewin

I have a better idea where this is, but I defo haven’t read a word of it since I bought it.

  • Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock

I think I read this before I bought it? COUNTING IT.

  • Countries of the Mind: Essays in Literary Criticism by J. Middleton Murry

I have no recollection of ever seeing this book before in my life. But I guess it’s here somewhere? This isn’t going well.

  • Dreams in War Time: A Faithful Record by E.M. Martin

Nope.

  • Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

I still haven’t this, but – fun fact – I did accidentally buy another copy later, because I liked the way it sounded when it closed. A very satisfying thud.

  • Letters to a Sister by Rose Macaulay

I’m not sure, but I’m going to say that I have read this. I’ve certainly read a lot of Macaulay letters, so why not this?

  • After the Stroke: a journal by May Sarton

I’ve read a couple Sarton novels since I bought this one, but… not this memoir. Yet.

  • Summer in February by Jonathan Smith

I did read this one! Though I have to say I didn’t love it. If you’re into that famous Cornish painting community that I can’t remember the name of, though, then you may well enjoy it.

  • The Dud Avacado by Elaine Dundy

This is one of those novels I’ve been meaning to read for my entire adult life. Have I? You already know the answer. And apparently I got rid of it at some point, as it’s no longer on my shelves…

  • Star Quality by Noel Coward

I can see this from my bed, and I often think ‘Hmm, should read that’. Does THAT count??

  • The New Immortality by J.W. Dunne

I really should have read this for my DPhil but, y’all, I did not.

  • Conversations in Ebury Street by George Moore

I read this for the very first ‘club’ year, the 1920 Club!

  • My American by Stella Gibbons

When I bought this, I’d only read one novel by Gibbons. I’ve now read three or four more, but this is not among them.

  • Her Book by Daisy Ashford

This is so short that I could have whipped through it, just to up my numbers here. But it’s a no.

  • The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson

I read this earlier in the year, as one of my 25 Books in 25 Days, and it was a really enjoyable character piece.

  • The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield
  • Mrs. Parkington by Louis Bromfield

And I read The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg this year too! Imagine how badly I’d have done on this list last year. But haven’t read Mrs Parkington yet.

  • The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Another one I’d read before I bought it – as a library copy – and another sneak tick from this haul.

  • The Ginger Griffin by Ann Bridge

Why have I only read one Bridge novel? And it ain’t this one.

  • Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

As I wrote at the time, “You can never have too much Wodehouse: FACT.” But I haven’t read it.

  • Wonderful Clouds by Francoise Sagan

I thought Sunlight on Cold Water was so annoying that I got rid of almost all my other Sagan novels, including this one.

  • A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

I have read The Garrick Year and The Millstone since buying this, but not actually this.

  • The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

At least we finish on a success! This take on the Watergate scandal, transposed to a nunnery, is the sort of wonderful, odd novel that only Spark could have written.

Total bought: 29

Total still unread: 17

Total no longer owned: 2

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

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My book group doesn’t really have any rules, but there are a couple that people have voiced support for. I would love if we implemented a 350-page-maximum rule, and there are others who think we should only recommend books we’ve already read. I am vehemently anti this rule, because my choices for book group are broadly made for one reason: because I own them and want to read them, but not quite enough to do so off my own bat.

Step forward To The Bright Edge of the World (2016) by Eowyn Ivey, which I got as a review copy a few years ago. I’d read and loved The Snow Child – I say ‘loved’, but in fact I found it so emotionally vivid and painful that I had to stop for about six months in the middle. But Ivey was a brilliant storyteller and I wanted to try her again.

And then the book arrived. And it was enormous. And historical. And about icy exploration. That is not a list of ingredients that warms my heart, even despite Claire’s very enthusiastic review. So – book group it was!

There are two main characters who narrate To The Bright Edge of the World, and they don’t spend a lot of time together on the page despite being married. Colonel Allen Forrester has been sent off to the uncharted territories of Alaska with a band of men in 1885, tasked with reporting back. For a while it looks like his wife Sophie might join him, and I was quite excited about seeing a woman doing something adventurous. As it turns out, though, she’s pregnant and she stays behind – so the novel is told through their diaries and occasional letters.

Look, I’m not that interested in icy exploration. I keep calling it that because I don’t know what we call non-polar exploration in the ice… frontier exploration? And Ivey writes very vividly about this trip, taking us inch by frustrating inch along their journey. I did find Forrester a very warm, lovable character, unafraid to express how deeply he loves and admires his new wife – as well as his affections and frustrations with the various other men on his trip. But I suppose I’d have found him a more enjoyable character in a drawing room than in a makeshift camp. I will confess that I ended up reading some of these sections very quickly, not necessarily picking up every single detail…

And when I say ‘exploration’, I should add that they weren’t the first people there. Along the way they encounter several native Alaskans, and it’s interesting to read the meeting of cultures – particularly when Alaskan myth and miracle is woven into the novel. And one of the men strikes up a very close relationship with a native Alaskan. Like many historical novels, twenty-first-century morality guides which characters are admirable. I suspect we wouldn’t find many explorers of the time who were quite so considerate to native Alaskans, nor who had such feminist sensibilities.

Speaking of, mine were rather more invested in Sophia back home. She is a brilliant mixture of intelligent determination and uncertainty – keen to face life bravely, but also young and naive. She has a lot to contend with in the pregnancy (and there are some heartbreaking sections where he writes joyfully about her pregnancy while she is finding it terrifying and difficult), and she has plenty to content with in the patriarchal society. And then her interest in photography blooms. That’s much more up my street than exploration! I loved reading about her processes, and her intent attempts to capture stunning wildlife photography.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly for me, I found the novel wildly too long. It would have been a better novel with at least a hundred pages shaved off it. Unless sections of it were meant to reflect the wearying, slow process of getting through inhospitable Alaska?

But I enjoyed it nevertheless. The strength of it is the characters. And for those who like exploration, that will be an addition rather than an obstacle. In fact, just go over and read Claire’s review? I didn’t have quite her experience with it, but I got plenty vicarious enjoyment from her enjoyment of it. And if I were a rating man, I’d give it a solid 7/10 myself.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

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I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

Ann and Her Mother by O. Douglas

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Image result for ann and her mother o douglasAlongside a few others, I picked up an O. Douglas novel in homage to a friend called Sarah – I’ve written a little bit about her, and why, at the bottom of this post. Like the other Douglas novel I read this year, this one was kindly given to me by my friend Emily’s mum, and it came from her mother’s library.

I chose Ann and Her Mother (1922) because it fit Project Names, and it turns out to be a little different from the other two I’ve read – Pink Sugar and The Proper Place. Both of those novels have quite a lot of plot and movement – whereas Ann and Her Mother takes place entirely across a handful of days, in conversation between Ann and – you guessed it – her mother. Ann is in her late 20s and her mother is what the 1920s considered old. Certainly she is old enough that Ann thinks it’s appropriate to write down an account of her life. The novel does acknowledge that there wouldn’t be a wide public for the ghostwritten memoir of a minister’s widow, and does so with a nod and a wink – because this is exactly what is written.

Another review I’ve read points out that it’s very autobiographical, but I don’t know enough about O. Douglas’s life to notice the similarities – other than that she was really called Anna Buchan, sister of the famous novelist John. In the novel, at least, the mother’s life has been dominated by the death of four people – recently, her husband; longer ago, two sons in war and a daughter in infancy. Douglas manages to write about the death of this young innocent in a way that sidesteps the mawkish because it is so heartfelt and genuine.

The loss of these four aside, there is much to amuse in their reminiscences of being respectively a minister’s wife and a minister’s daughter. Ann is a little quicker to see the ridiculous than her mother, and is occasionally reprimanded for not depicting the locals kindly. And she writes very well about growing up in the manse – having grown up in a vicarage myself, this rang SO true:

“I do so agree,” said Ann; “‘a bright, interested expression’ is far too often demanded of ministers’ wives and families. What a joy to scowl and look listless at a time. You know, Mums, a manse is a regular school for diplomatists. It is a splendid training. One learns to talk to and understand all sorts of people—just think what an advantage that gives one over people who have only known intimately their own class! And you haven’t time to think about yourself; you are so on the alert to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. You have to try and remember the affairs of each different member, how many children they possess, and all about them, and be careful to ask at the right moment for the welfare of each.”

I have seldom read a less urgent novel. It is not one to keep you up late reading to find out what happens. There is almost no pace. But that is deliberate, and it perfectly suits a certain reading mood. I enjoyed easing myself into it in an evening, letting the gentleness wash over me. However painful the topics covered, this is not a painful book to read. The affection the two have for each other, and their optimism and faith, makes it an ideal novel to soak in.

Douglas does anticipate the inevitable criticism of the novel, as not being edgy enough, by having Ann send the unfinished manuscript of her mother’s Life to a friend…

“Here’s a nice state of things,” said Ann.

“Is anything wrong?” asked her mother.

“Well, I don’t know whether you would call it wrong or right. Mr. Philip Scott sends me back my MS., with his criticism of it. I agree with most of the things he says: my language is too incorrigibly noble, my quotations are very frequent——”

“But if they’re good quotations,” Mrs. Douglas interrupted.

“Oh, they’re good quotations. ‘It was the best butter,’ as the poor March Hare said. But what he objects to most is the sweetness of it. He says, ‘Put more acid into it.'”

Reader, she does not put more acid into it. This novel is entirely absent of acid. Perhaps it would feel too saccharine in some moods, and I did tend to pick it up only when it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read – but, at those times, it could scarcely be bettered. And is mercifully light on the Scottish dialect, impenetrable to non-Scots like myself!

And here’s a bit about Sarah, and how I came to pick up the novel.

It’s odd to mourn a friend that you’ve never met. I’ve been in an online book group since 2005, and it has settled into the same handful of like-minded readers for about the past ten years. We don’t all read the same books, but we have similar taste – and it is a lovely place to share reading tastes and recommendations. And, of course, other aspects of life come alongside. We’ve all become friends – and those of us in the UK meet up once a year. I’ve met a couple of the readers from the US. But I never met Sarah.

She was a very active member of the group, often starting and continuing conversations. She was encouraging, kind, and funny, and the group relished having her. Earlier this year she died, and I miss her contributions deeply – despite not even really knowing what she looked like. But I knew more important things, like her love for her husband and family, her infectious love of reading, and her favourite authors. Among them was O. Douglas, and several of us in the group used reading an O. Douglas novel as a way of saying thank you and farewell to Sarah.

The Wells of St Mary’s by R.C. Sherriff

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I was a little late in the day to R.C. Sherriff, but have now read and loved all three of his novels that Persephone publish – with Greengates being my favourite, I think. And naturally it made me want to read more of his. Bello have republished a few as ebooks and POD, but I got this quirky little paperback online relatively cheaply – and, while on holiday, read The Wells of St Mary’s (1962). It’s a few decades later than the Persephone novels, but every bit as good.

Our narrator is Peter Joyce, who lives in a large house on the outskirts of a village called St Mary’s. He is a magistrate and retired colonel. The Joyces have lived there for many years, but being landed gentry doesn’t bring the same riches it once did. Joyce is rather down on his luck financially, at least compared to his family’s former wealth – he does still have a butler – and its made him a bit cautious to invite old friends to stay. But one old friend does come – Lord Colindale (whom he also calls Colin – is his name Colin Colindale??) They haven’t been in touch for a while, and when Lord Colindale arrives, Joyce sees why – Colindale was renowned for being a powerful man of politics, journalism, and public life, and now he can’t move more than a few feet without the use of crutches. His vitality has been taken by rheumatism.

Don’t stop reading, if you think a novel about rheumatism doesn’t sound very gripping! I should also mention that, very early on, Joyce says that the account he is writing is connected with a murder. We don’t know who will be murdered, and we are constantly watching out for developments in the novel, to see who the victim and perpetrator will be, and why.

While taking his friend on a short tour of the village, they come across St Mary’s Well. It is on Joyce’s land, and still manned by an old man who has worked for the family since Joyce’s grandfather’s time – if ‘worked’ is the word, since he is often drunk and very few people come to the wells. It has been used since Roman times, and there is a building around the well, but the locals wouldn’t dream of going – and the number of tourists fighting their way down the overgrown path to the well is dwindling. But it has supposedly miraculous health-restoring qualities, and Colindale decides to take a drink.

And – yes! He finds the next morning that he doesn’t need his crutches. He is miraculously cured by the water of the well!

From here, things in the village start to change. Colindale uses his public position to tell the world about the well – and the next day the roads are jammed with cars getting there. The village puts together a committee to decide how they will make the most of this potential windfall, and most of the villagers sink their savings into shares. After all these highs, obviously not all will go well… but that’s all I’m going to say. And it’s obvious from early on, because Sherriff ends an awful lot of chapters with things like ‘but that was before the worst day of our lives’ etc.

I love fantastic fiction, and the premise of this novel puts it in that category. But more than that, I love Sherriff’s writing. In all of his novels, he is so, so good at unshowy writing that just drags you in and keeps you captivated, while being constantly gentle and character-led. It’s a real gift, and the sort of talent that doesn’t come around all that often. Whatever his genre or his idea, he gets us right in the midst of the community – he can sell any premise without the reader blinking an eye, and there is as much nuanced humanity in his sci-fi post-apocalypse as in the tale of a retired couple buying a house as there is in this novel about a miraculous well.

I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be enough fiction on my end-of-year list, but this would be a worthy addition. And now I need to track down the rest of his novels, evidently…

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend! Even happier for me, because I’m off work for a week – and off on holiday with my brother. We tend to go away this time of year, because it’s coming up to our birthday, so we always get to enjoy places that are cold and wet. Hurrah! A couple years ago we went to Canada, last year was Northern Ireland, and this year it’s Yorkshire. If there are any bookshops near Harrogate that I mustn’t miss, let me know.

Luckily Hargreaves isn’t being abandoned – Mum is coming up to look after him, with Dad popping in occasionally. They were known as Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife here for many years – and those of you who’ve just read The Diary of a Provincial Lady for the 1930 Club will now know why – but since they’re retired now, what should their nicknames be??

I’m going to be taking a blogging break while I’m away, but I’ll leave you with a book, a link (or two), and a blog post.

1.) The link – I read an interesting take on that Booker prize and its rule-breaking double win, from one of the judges – and then I read an even more interesting take from one of the not-super-pleased publishers with a novel on the shortlist. I have to say, I ended up #TeamPublisher.

2.) The book – Of the making of books about books there is no end, and thank goodness say I. The Secret Life of Books by Tom Mole came through my letterbox recently, and you can colour me intrigued.

3.) The blog post – Scott is running a ‘Possibly Furrowed Middlebrow?‘ event – a virtual one, anyone. Are there books that you’d long to see back in print? There are a few other criteria but that’s the main one.

 

 

The next club is announced!

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Thanks to everyone who put forward suggestions for the next club year, following #1930Club! Karen and I looked through everyone’s ideas, and two decades were definitely standing out – the 1920s and the 1950s.

In the end, we decided upon the #1920Club – first suggested by Paula. It’s right at the beginning of the period we do club years in, and it’ll be the centenary next year – which feels very appropriate. Maybe we’ll turn to the 1950s next time?

Here’s the badge, and as you can see it’ll be next April. Plenty of warning so get hunting for what you might read!

By the way, for those asking why we don’t do earlier or later years, and who haven’t seen the explanation before – the reason we decided to stop at 1980 was basically personal taste! The reason we don’t go earlier than 1920 is because cheap printing and a wider reading public around that time led to a great deal more books being published – and, in practice, it would be harder to get the same diverse range of books (particularly if we want them widely accessible) if we went earlier. Hope that clears that up!