I’m watching Eurovision; I’m typing up thoughts about novellas. What a day.
Day 13: Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes
Ooof. I’ve read a couple of Barnes novels before this one, and never really seen what the fuss was about. But I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad Elizabeth Finch would be.
The narrator is remembering a teacher – Elizabeth Finch, referred to often as EF – who has had a lasting effect on his life. Think someone with the unusual pith and dignity of Jean Brodie, dispensing philosophical insights that have her pupils thinking for decades. Except that everything she says is only a couple of notches above a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign in terms of profundity.
One of the things she introduces the class to is Julian the Apostate, who hated Christians sometime many centuries ago. Don’t know much about him? Don’t worry, Barnes then includes an ‘essay’ by the narrator where he dumps all the knowledge he has about Julian. It reads like a Wikipedia article, only it’s 50 pages long. We get the facts and theories about Julian the Apostate, It’s astonishingly inelegant, in terms of novel writing.
Elsewhere, in the first and final sections, his writing is serviceable and only occasionally embarrassing (some of the dialogue he gives Elizabeth Finch is really awkward, and clearly she is a mouthpiece for a middle-aged man). But the best this novella gets to is mediocre, and at worst it is bafflingly poorly done.
Day 14: Sing Me Who You Are (1967) by Elizabeth Berridge
I bought this back in 2009 because I knew her name from the Persephone collection of her short stories, but I might equally have bought it for this glorious cover. The illustrator – Reg Cartwright – did three or four Berridge reprints in the 1980s and they are so characterful and wonderful.
What’s more, it is accurate to the premise of the novel. Harriet Cooper and her two Siamese cats arrive at the farm which belonged to her recently dead aunt, and where her cousin Magda and her husband Gregg live. Her aunt hasn’t left her the farm, or the land, or anything – except, pictured there on the cover, the bus.
Wading through the still-dewy grass – for the bus lived in shadow half the year, and this was autumn – Harriet went through the wooden gate set in a gap in the hedge and up on to the step. She unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door, which folded inwards down the middle. Stepping inside she became aware of the musty smell of disuse. How long, a month, six weeks? Enough for damp to invade this thin shell. She would open windows, light a fire, banish it.
She has stayed there on and off over the years, and now she has brought her few possessions to live there indefinitely.
The story then looks at how her life alongside Magda and Gregg brings up past and present tensions, as well as affinities. Central to them is the memory of a man known as Scrubbs – who deeply affected each of the three. He has been dead for a long time, but he is still impacting all of their lives, and the way they interact with each other. Along the way, secrets come out…
I’ve read three other Berridge books, and have yet to find one that I really love. This is a good novel, and Harriet is an interesting, layered character – but I think I’m really hoping for a book that will live up to those wonderful covers. If Berridge were a little weirder, or a little more stylised in her prose – a dash of Beryl Bainbridge, say – then I think I’d love her. As it is, her realism lacks a little something. And yet I’ll keep reading them, because I feel like there might be something even better in her oeuvre – and something that lives up to those covers.
I think it’s astonishing that some authors think they can get away with dumping in info that sounds straight from another source and trying to disguise it as a conversation or a letter or in this case an essay. I have liked some things by Barnes, but this is disappointing.
It really annoys me, even when it’s a diary or something – the reason I love Agnes Grey more than Tenant of Wildfell Hall!
The Barnes sounds awful. I do wonder if a new author would be allowed to dump a 50 page essay in their short novel.
Those Berridge covers are wonderful, she is an author I keep meaning to try. I keep hoping I’ll find the Abacus editions in charity bookshops. No luck so far…
Yes, definitely screams ‘author who has done us good service in the past, so we’ll let him get away with it’!
I think I felt similarly to you about the Berridge. The set-up was intriguing, with plenty of potential to deliver, but somehow it didn’t quite live up to the initial promise. (As you say, those covers are fabulous!) Have you read The Story of Stanley Brent? That’s easily my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.
I have read Stanley Brent, and liked it, but wasn’t totally blown away. I think Sing Me might be my favourite of the ones I’ve read, so I’m yet to be amazed by one…
I think you could start a whole new blog about book jacket illustrations and no doubt it’s been done. One of my all time favourites, introduced to me by your blog, is the cover of Omar by Wilfrid Blunt.
Not only is the cover illustration absolutely charming, the book lives up to it too. One of my treasures not to be parted with.
Oo there must be a blog like that, and I want to read it! And I’m so glad you love Omar – such an unusual book.
Now I’ve got to read Omar by Wilfrid Blunt and not the Julian Barnes!
Oh dear…. and I was so looking forward to the Barnes!!!!
I’d say it could just be me, but I’ve yet to see a positive response… even the jacket copy is praise for other books
An interesting pair and at least you’re getting 31 books off your shelves, right?
Yes indeed :D
I’ve only read one Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I only read 10 of them and just couldn’t be bothered to read the last 20 pages.
Ha! Well, that says it all