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Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm by Gil North (25 Books in 25 Days: #18)

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I tend to buy British Library Crime Classics whenever I come across them, and have been lucky enough to have quite a few as review copies – but it seems like I don’t get around to actually reading them as much as I’d like. So I went for the shortest one I own with a name in the title, for a meeting of projects – step forward Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm (1960) by Gil North. It was the first in a long series of crime novels with Sergeant Cluff at the helm.

I will say ‘crime’ rather than ‘detective fiction’, because North seems to be more interested in the psychology of the investigating sergeant, the victim, and the probable murder than with a twisty, turny novel. I prefer the twists, but I was willing to get on board – and I liked that Sergeant Cluff is a mainstay of his little village. When he begins to explore the death of Amy Snowden, we’re quickly aware that Cluff knew her, her recent (much younger) husband, her neighbour. He knows everyone, and they all know him – and his father before him – because this is rural England in the 1960s. It’s something that other members of the force can’t quite appreciate properly.

I did like Cluff and his humanness – his pity for the ill-treated, and his quiet thirst for justice. What I liked rather less is how misogynistic this novel is. At first I thought maybe it was just some characters who were misogynistic (why, for instance, is everyone transfixed with the idea of a woman marrying a younger man?) – but it saturated the novel. I am not exaggerating when I say that no woman is ever introduced without her breasts being described. This includes the dead woman. Seriously, there was one character whose breasts were mentioned every time she was mentioned. It felt like satire.

So, this wasn’t a massive success for me. If it had had a brilliant detective plot, I might have been able to latch onto that and set aside other elements of the novel – but since North was going for the higher ground, as it were, that option isn’t left to me. So… I guess I enjoyed some elements of it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth? I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.

Mrs Tim Carries On by D.E. Stevenson (25 Books in 25 Days: #17)

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Like a lot of people who read Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson when Bloomsbury republished it about ten years ago, I was keen to read the rest of the series. And, like a lot of those people, I came up against the extortionate secondhand prices one had to pay. So hurrah and hurray for Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press for bringing them back into print! And an extra hurrah for sending me review copies – I wolfed down Mrs Tim Carries On (1941) today.

I should probably be avoiding 243pp books during 25 Books in 25 Days, but I couldn’t resist. And Mrs Tim is just as lovable as I remembered her – dependable, wise, but not with rose-tinted glasses. Her diaries give her exasperated opinions of locals, but also affectionate ones. They show her anxieties and pride as a parent, while also finding humour in everyday life. Only this time, of course, it is wartime.

It’s interesting to see how Stevenson adapts the character to the difficulties of war. Like the Provincial Lady books (which remain a very evident influence on Stevenson), she has taken a humorous character from the 30s and brought her into the war-torn 1940s. While the Provincial Lady looks at the most farcical elements of war, and the hypocrisies of those caught up in the civilian effort, Mrs Tim is a bit more restrained.

I proceed to explain my own particular method of “carrying on”. None of us could bear the war if we allowed ourselves to brood upon the wickedness of it and the misery it has entailed, so the only thing to do is not to allow oneself to think about it seriously, but just to skitter about on the surface of life like a water beetle. In this way one can carry on and do one’s bit and remain moderately cheerful.

This isn’t quite true, though. Mr Tim is an active soldier, and there is more anxiety tied in than this statement suggests. Not only for his fate, but around the possibility of invasion, and the threat of bombs. It is less all-out funny than the Provincial Lady (and, if we’re being honest, not quite as good) – but a more poignant portrait. And, to be honest, almost nothing is as good as the Provincial Lady. If this isn’t quite, then it’s still rather wonderful – and all the more wonderful for being readily available again.

Frank by Jon Ronson (25 Books in 25 Days: #16)

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I haven’t had that much reading time today, and so today’s book is the shortest so far – under 70 pages. Which is unusual for Jon Ronson, who tends to write quite chunky things – filled with the surreal and extraordinary things he has witnessed or investigated. I’ve enjoyed several of his other books, and was particularly impressed by one that wasn’t particularly about the surreal so much as the unpleasantly common, in So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

I’m not sure of the genesis of Frank (2014), though I suspect it might have been put out quickly to support the film. It tells of Ronson’s time as an almost accidental member of Frank Sidebottom’s band – Frank Sidebottom being the pseudonym of a musician called Craig who performed wearing an enormous cartoon head. In this slight volume, Ronson talks about the band’s meandering creation and lack of success – as well as all the people they bumped into who went onto bigger and better things. There is enough insight into Craig’s psychology to make me wish Ronson had written a rather longer book. And I still haven’t quite worked out how Frank ever became famous or notable – his legacy seems to come from nowhere.

But Ronson is always a fascinating and empathetic writer, managing to make the reader marvel alongside him, and become interested in whatever he is interested in. This was a fun one to pick up on a day I needed a short book.

What Hetty Did by J.L. Carr (25 Books in 25 Days: #15)

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What Hetty Did (1988) is the fourth novel I’ve read by J.L. Carr, and each time I feel like I understand him as a writer a little less. He’s so varied! The one he is probably best known for is the elegiac, lovely A Month in the Country. Well, What Hetty Did is not much like that – though it does include one of the same characters. Indeed, characters from at least four of his other novels pop up in this one.

Hetty (actually Ethel) is a bright A Level student who is not much liked by her mother and openly disliked by her father. She decides to up and leave – at least until such time as she might get a place at Cambridge. A chance encounter on a train gets her recommended for a guest house. While staying there she decides to try and find the biological mother who gave her up for adoption. Various other eccentric characters mill around the outskirts.

Eccentric is definitely the key term for this novel. Carr seems to have got odder and odder, as a writer, as he got older – and was in his mid-70s when What Hetty Did was published by an imprint that Carr had set up. Hetty is a whirlwind of a character, and not a very likeable one – more determined than pleasant. And the strange way in which things are described is due to some sort of disconcerting energy in the narrative. It’s like Angela Carter but the events are mundane, even if the prose is not.

Did I like it? I honestly don’t know. It’s an impressive feat, and quite distinctive – but such an odd way of telling a relatively simple plot that I never quite felt I could find myself on stable ground. But if nothing else, it’s nice to read a novel set in my homeland of Worcestershire – that doesn’t happen too often. And Bredon Hill even gets a mention, which was the hill abutting my village!

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (25 Books in 25 Days #14)

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I still haven’t read any Proust, but I have read three books about reading Proust, or about Proust more generally. One was a few days ago (Proust’s Overcoat), and Phyllis Rose’s wonderful The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t that long ago. I’ve now made it a trio with 1997’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, published when Alain de Botton was only 28.

It’s an intriguing book that combines many different genres. It’s styled as some sort of self help guide – or rather a Proust help guide, where a reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can help give life lessons. This covers all manner of things, from friendship to romance to how to read a book. But there are layers – and de Botton incorporates biographical details of Proust and a literary analysis of his writing. Indeed, it often seems like he is making no distinction between Proust’s letters, his fiction, and his actual life events – all are mixed together to draw out potential advice, filtered through a philosophical lens. Each section ends with a ‘the moral?’ conclusion.

The moral? To recognise that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the gratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

What holds it all together is de Botton’s engaging prose and his wit. And it’s often a very amusing book, being light with Proust’s life as well as the various friends, relatives, and critics who popped up in it. It’s all an odd concoction, and perhaps on that would make more sense reading after I’d read some Proust – but with enough verve and confidence to keep me enjoying it throughout.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (25 Books in 25 Days #13)

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You know what #13 means? It means that 25 Books in 25 Days is officially half over already! It feels like it’s been doing super fast – and has, indeed, so far been pretty doable. And almost all of them have also qualified for Project Names – including today’s, An Abundance of Katherines (2006) by John Green.

I started watching John Green’s YouTube channel around 2008, and still watch it now and then – it’s called vlogbrothers, and he alternates videos with his brother Hank. This was my entry to Green, and then I read The Fault in Our Stars a couple of years after everybody else read it. Since then, I’ve bought a few of his books, but had yet to read any others. I decided to pick up An Abundance of Katherines because Rachel and I will be talking about YA fiction on the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ and I haven’t read a huge amount.

The main character of An Abundance of Katherines is Colin Singleton (not many Colins in fiction, so that was a plus!) who has dated 19 girls called Katherine. Not Kate, not Katie, but Katherine. And he’s only just leaving high school. As we subsequently learn, some of these ‘datings’ lasted rather less an hour, and started when his age was in single digits – but, to his mathematical mind, there must be some meaning to his having only dated Katherines. And to his heart, there has to be a reason that he is always the one who is dumped. He decides to put together a theorem to explain his relationships – and which will predict who will be dumper and who will be dumpee.

Meanwhile, he and his best friend Hassan head off on a road trip – deciding to stop in a small town which claims to have the burial place of Franz Ferdinand, and where he and Hassan can get jobs at a factory making the strings for tampons. Naturally there is also a gang of people their age that they can get involved with – including Lindsey, who captivates Colin.

There are quite a few boxes ticked along the way, and the novel is quite self-consciously quirky, but in an entirely enjoyable way. I rolled my eyes a bit at Colin’s thought process about how women don’t NEED to wear make up and he PREFERS them that way, but he is otherwise an engaging and sympathetic lead. Once a child prodigy, he is struggling to live up to that – and navigating his unpopularity and uncertainty about his future. Hassan is very funny, much more charismatic, but without a clue where his life is heading. Lindsey is entirely too much a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it was 2006 and perhaps YA authors didn’t know better yet.

It definitely helped that I have an existing fondness for John Green, and I found this a page-turner, enjoying every moment, even while recognising that I’m not really the audience. Someone half my age would doubtless find a lot of solace in this sort of book – I didn’t learn any life lessons, but I had a ball reading it.

Omar by Wilfrid Blunt (25 Books in 25 Days #12)

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Ok, I really like this one. I can’t remember quite why I picked it off a shelf in 2013, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have bought it because of that wonderful cover – and because it’s about a theme that I’m interested in: fantastically anthropomorphised animals. Indeed, I wrote a section of my DPhil thesis on this, and bought this novel about a month after I submitted my final thesis. Thank goodness, being published in 1966, that Omar by Wilfrid Blunt was too late to be relevant for my remit anyway.

That cover illustration is by John Verney, and does a good job of selling the novel – but also leaps about halfway through it! The subtitle ‘a fantasy for animal lovers’ is also apt, and the narrator is certainly that. She is Rose Bavistock – an unmarried woman approaching fifty years old. She has recently lost her father (after complications when an otter bit him), but isn’t unduly upset. Animals mean a lot more to her than people do. She has had many and various pets, and enjoys the more exotic ones. So she is quite excited when she is given a bandersnatch, which she names Omar.

Blunt has borrowed the name ‘bandersnatch’ from Lewis Carroll (now perhaps more famous as a Black Mirror episode), but the novel claims that it is the same as the hyrax. Look up the hyrax; they’re cute! Anyway, after initially biting her, Omar becomes an affectionate pet and companion. But Rose starts to wonder if he is more intelligent than he lets on…

When she discovers that he knows some English, and can even read it, she is astonished. But that is just the beginning of the marvel…

I expected to like this, given my love for fantastic literature (I disagree with his use of ‘fantasy’ in the subtitle, but that’s one for people interested in fantasy theory). And I did more than like it – the novel is so charming. It was published in 1966, but reads more like a book from thirty years earlier. There is a certain nostalgic element to the novel, and Rose’s life is almost as atavistic as Omar’s. The twists that follow the revelation of the fantastic are handled well, and sustain the original conceit.

The only thing I’d mention, in comparing it to other novels in this genre like His Monkey Wife by John Collier and Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan, is that this is not a parable or fable. It doesn’t comment on its current society or contemporary anxieties, at least so far as I can tell. There’s no reason why it should, I suppose, but fantastic novels that do do that tend to have a little more depth. Omar is self-contained with very little to say about the world. It’s no the less charming for that, but it is a curio, seemingly divorced from context. And I’m very glad that I got it down from the shelf.

Letters to Louise by Theodore Dreiser (25 Books in 25 Days: #11)

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I love reading a collection of letters, and presumably that’s why I bought a copy of Letters to Louise (1959) – a collection of letters that Theodore Dreiser wrote to his friend and editor Louise Campbell (who was edited this book and wrote the commentary between letters). It certainly wasn’t because I had any affection for Theodore Dreiser, whom I have never read – though Sister Carrie has been on my shelf for a long time. Having said that, it might have gone in the moving-house-cull.

Dreiser tended to write quite short letters, often signed with alternative names (James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, etc.), but Campbell’s commentary is useful and engaging. And what I enjoyed most was the fondness and admiration that Dreiser manages to get into his letters – admiration for her editing talent. Since they met when she wrote him a letter chastising him for criticising Philadelphia, it’s impressive that he was open to the friendship at all.

Books like this are always a bit better when you get both sides of the exchange, which Letters to Louise doesn’t have, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like I know Dreiser pretty well from this short collection – or one part of his personality, anyway – and it’s fun to have Project Names and 25 Books in 25 Days come together to get something unexpected off my shelves.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (25 Books in 25 Days #10)

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is one of the books that has been on my shelves the longest, I think. I bought it in a library sale in 2004, and it has hidden on my shelves ever since – and I haven’t even seen the film. Basically all my knowledge about it comes from the famous image of Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder and the song ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. Which is a great song.

About ten years ago, I read In Cold Blood by Capote, and I wasn’t super keen to read more by him. Yes, it was very good – but it was so deeply unpleasant that it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it’s stupid to dismiss an author based on one book, particularly when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so very different – and, indeed, I was totally beguiled by it.

Our narrator opens by saying that he hasn’t seen Holly Golightly (full name Holiday Golightly! I did not know that before) for years, but used to live in the same building as her – and first encountered her properly when she kept ringing his doorbell whenever she got home at 2am or 3am. I’d somehow picked up somewhere that Holly was a prostitute, but she is not. She is a ‘cafe society girl’, whatever that means. And it chiefly seems to mean living a bohemian life with a stream of men, but guarding her independence and only giving as much as she chooses.

Holly is a wonderful creation. Any number of authors want to make a spirited, lively female character, but she is no manic pixie dream girl. She is vibrant on her own terms – initiating conversations (by, say, knocking at the narrator’s fire escape in the early hours), chopping and changing what is on her mind in a dizzying way. She is always finding new ways to express her thoughts, and refusing to bow to expectations. And there is an underlying dignity, despite any undignified place she might find herself. I think Capote achieves all of this through the dialogue he gives her. It’s a tour de force, and I’m wondering how the film lives up to it.

Screwtop Thompson by Magnus Mills (25 Books in 25 Days #9)

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I’d identified a few very short books for when my days are super busy – and Screwtop Thompson (2010) by Magnus Mills was on that list. I had plans at lunch and after work, so these 110pp (with very big font) were just right to squeeze in around the edges – though I hadn’t remembered that they were short stories. Indeed, I didn’t realise this until I got to the end of the first one, and the second on seemed so different. (Incidentally, this collection was published in 2010, but is largely made up of stories previously published in other collections – another thing I didn’t realise.)

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Mills, I think, and I really appreciate his strange style of storytelling. The same tone of the full-length novels is here – and the same curious slant on the world. My favourite story in the collection is ‘The Comforter’ – an architect meets an archdeacon outside a cathedral, and they go in to look at laborious plans that the archdeacon doesn’t really understand. The archdeacon clearly finds it all very dull – and learns that he was agreed to come to these meetings everyday, forever. Is it a parallel for purgatory? Is something sinister going on, or is it not? It’s so lightly, cleverly handled.

In other stories, something mundane takes on significance just because it’s focused on – a sheet of plastic caught on a railway fence, for instance. Elsewhere, a hotel guest spends Christmas somewhere where he always seems to just miss the other guests. The title story is about a toy that arrives at Christmas with no head. There are a few duds in the collection, where the story doesn’t quite land, or (conversely) goes a little too far – but I’ll concentrate on the successes.

Each story is a different world, but they are somehow also the same world. And that’s because the narrator – while not always the same person – performs the same role. Each story is in the first person, and the ‘I’ of each one reacts the same way to the strangenesses he encounters. He (let’s assume he) is always surprised and a little unsettled, but doesn’t question anything too much. The surreal worlds in which this narrator finds himself do not offer any answers – and the narrator seems to expect it from the outset. He may be confused, but he is accepting. The exception, actually, is ‘The Comforter’ – where the narrator seems to be in on whatever mystery the reader doesn’t understand.

And the reader takes on this role, whether or not the narrator is in the know. None of the stories have neat conclusions, and none have twist endings. We are left as unsure as when we began – often disoriented, with a sense that, if we knew just that little bit more, we would be facing a true horror. What analogy is ‘The Comforter’ setting up?  But, as he just shies away from this, Mills has got a reputation as a comic writer. I find his stories much closer to horror than to comedy – the deadpan way in which they’re delivered is chilling, but it’s a very fine line between this sort of chill and laughter.

The book is slight, the sentences are deceivingly simple, and it’s so brilliantly handled that Mills makes this much more than the sum of its parts.