Divorce? Of Course by Mary Essex #ABookADayInMay No.30

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What a way with titles Mary Essex had! One of Ursula Bloom’s many pennames, she seems to have saved her best titles and best books for when she was writing in Mary Essex mode – though, confusingly, she later used ‘Mary Essex’ to write a series of uninspiring-looking medical romances. ANYway, it was as Mary Essex that she wrote the British Library Women Writers reprint Tea Is So Intoxicating and the brilliantly-named The Amorous Bicycle, as well as books I’ve not been able to find copies of – like Marry To Taste, Domestic Blister, Haircut for Samson, and Eve Didn’t Care.

And naturally I love the title Divorce? Of Course (1945) – a book lent to me by my friend Barbara. The first thing we see is a list of characters, starting with Mr Justice Forrester, Judge. It becomes clear that the list is a bunch of people in a divorce court. The petitioner is Imogen Clark; the respondent is Peter Clark. They have various legal representation and others mentioned.

But the novel starts with Mr Justice Forrester and a domestic matter:

The morning started badly, entirely due to a little altercation on the painful subject of Mr Justice Forrester’s umbrella. Mr. Justice Forrester, having reached that age when faces go melon or nutcracker (his was nutcracker), believed that if he went out without the umbrella, he was not entirely dressed and therefore, to the judicial eye, slightly indecent. His wife, the daughter of a sporting canon, of the hunting, shooting and fishing variety, thought umbrellas were – well, let us draw a veil over that particular word as used by Lady Forrester when very much annoyed.

You can see that Mr JF is not going to simply be a background character. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Mary Essex – that she will always give us humorous and arguably unnecessary details about side characters, which helps build up the world and (more importantly) amuse us. She is very good at little side-swipes and eye rolls.

Imogen and Peter have only been married a short while, but a fight has got out of hand and now they are both trying to divorce each other for deserti0n. One of the lawyers does point out that desertion has to last three years to count, but this is quickly ignored both by the characters and the plot of the novel. It was also a relatively recent addition to divorce law, spearheaded by novelist and MP A.P. Herbert and popularised by his book Holy Deadlock. One of the side characters who hears about the divorce finds it sadly unscandalous:

“Oh!” said Emily, with extreme disappointment, for that really had spoilt it! Emily considered that ever since A.P. Herbert had started messing about with the divorce laws, he had succeeded in making them uncommonly dull, which they had never been before. It was just like Imogen to be aggravating, and get a divorce on something quite harmless, like desertion.

After this set up, we travel back to see a bit of Imogen and Peter’s courtship and hasty wedding. We learn more about their respective parents, and there is plenty of detail to enjoy there – including Peter’s respectable, unaffectionate father and his enjoyably willful mother, and Imogen’s mother who is perennially shocked and shocking. Onwards we go to the scene of their explosive disagreement, which starts when Imogen spends too much on wine for a dinner party – though, as she explains, Peter had asked her to get wine, and hadn’t said how much. Infuriated, he throws an ink pot at her. Subsequent attempts to reconcile from both sides all go amiss, and thus the divorce courts get involved.

In the latter part of Divorce? Of Course, we are back in the divorce court and witness the questioning, cross-examining and so forth. I don’t know how accurate a portrayal of 1940s divorce courts it is, but it is delightful. Among my favourite moments are those where Ivy, a rather unreliable witness as their maid, refuses to repeat some of the words she overhears and has to write them down for the judge. “Oh, I think you might have said that one,” he says at one point.

The plot is thin and the ending predictable, but it’s such fun on the way. Noticeably, for a book published in 1945, the war doesn’t seem to exist and it would have been delicious escapism for her audience. Mary Essex / Ursula Bloom was a really expert middlebrow writer, easily equalling some of the better-known domestic novelists when it comes to verve and wit. Someone should have coached her not to use so many exclamation marks, and there is one character who is unfortunately referred to as a slur for an Italian throughout – those two things aside, I loved spending time in Divorce? Of Course and will keep hunting for more Mary Essex novels.

London, With Love by Sarra Manning #ABookADayInMay No.29

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Jacket for 'London, With Love'

I’ve been e-friends with Sarra Manning for years, and have read some wonderful books on her recommendation – but somehow I have never got around to reading one of her own books. There are lots to choose from, and I chose London, With Love (2022) more or less at random from the ones available on Audible. I went in a little nervously, for reasons I will explain shortly, but I finished it a complete Manning convert. What a delightful book.

London, With Love tells the story of Jennifer (/Jen/Jenny, depending on her stage in life) and Nick over the course of two decades. They meet as teenagers in the early 1980s, where Jennifer is an intelligent, bookish, uncool girl desperately seeking somewhere to belong – and Nick is (in her eyes) a cool, handsome, unknowable boy far out of her league.

Somehow, despite the abyss she perceives between them, they do end up becoming friends – and then best friends. But while she never recovers from that crush that snowballs into love, she never wants to chance telling him about it. He seems simply a dream that can’t come true.

Not that Jennifer is entirely boy-focused. One of the most impressive things about London, With Love is that Manning creates a heroine who is completely fixated on a boy but is still independent, determined and ambitious. Her love may revolve around him, but her life does not.

As the years go by, we see Jennifer trying desperately to get into publishing, and find a role that fits the love of books that never leaves her. I relished every time Manning got in a literary reference, and you could tell that she the list of books Jennifer recommends for a teenage girl to read is a list close to Manning’s heart. And this isn’t one of those novels where the heroine achieves everything she puts her mind to – as someone who also tried to get work in editorial publishing, I recognised and winced at how many obstacles are in the way, and how publishing seems set up for people who can afford to do unpaid internships. I was following Jennifer’s path a few years later, but not a great deal had changed.

Nick and Jennifer lose touch after an early misunderstanding, but (unsurprisingly) he is not then absent from the novel. Over those 20 years, their paths cross time and again – the friendship is picked up, and sometimes it wanes and sometimes it is violently discarded. Sometimes we don’t see Jennifer for a handful of years at a time, and pick up with her at the next significant Nick encounter. Other partners come and go, sometimes people that Jennifer believes she could be happy with forever – but Nick is always there at the back of her mind. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are too hurt to talk to each other. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is awkward. While there is admittedly a little bit of coincidence about how often they run into each other, more often it is believable – through mutual secondary school friends, or because their parents have been talking to each other.

Another success in London, With Love is how both characters develop and mature, while still having recognisably the core of the person they always were. Some of the things that drive them change; some stay the same. And I loved Jennifer – annoying and foolish as she can often be, particularly when she ditches her friends to spend all her time with a new boyfriend (and hurrah, Sarra Manning, for pointing out this all-too-common unkindness!) – and I loved her because she is so vividly real.

And now onto the thing that made me a bit nervous. ‘London’ is right there in the title, and I knew that different tube stops and underground lines would be significant features of the novel. Since I don’t really like London, or any city, I wondered if that would put me off. And, yes, I’m sure Londoners or Londonophiles would recognise a lot of sites and situations in this novel that passed me by, but it is not so dominant that the country mouse feels alienated.

Similarly, I was born in 1985 and so quite a few years behind Jennifer – the fashions, songs, politics, experiences that she has in her teens and 20s would doubtless be nostalgia-inducing for some readers. I enjoyed them without that same sense of recognition.

Perhaps the perfect reader is a Londoner approximately the same age as Jennifer (i.e. in their 50s now), but it is certainly not a requisite to lap it all up. I want to write something about the patriarchy and how David Nicholls’ One Day is a huge deal when this book has a similar sort of theme and is every bit as good, but that’s a whole other essay that you can imagine for yourselves.

What a lovely, memorable time I’ve spent getting to know these characters, and I’m very open for recommendations for which Sarra Manning book to read next.

Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay No.28

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After a few days of feeling a bit lukewarm, or worse, about the books I’ve been reading, it was great today to read a really brilliant little novella. Sagittarius (1957) is my first Natalia Ginzburg, though I do have Family Lexicon on my shelves – and I also have Valentino, because Daunt Books have just republished Sagittarius and Valentino and sent me copies. Thank you!

This novella, translated by Avril Bardoni, is only 122 pages but manages to get so much into that short space. Here’s how it opens:

My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. It was a modest house on two floors, surrounded by a soggy, unkempt garden. Beyond the garden there was a cabbage patch, and beyond the cabbage patch a railway line. It was October when she moved, and the garden lay beneath a carpet of wet leaves.

The house had narrow wrought-iron balconies and a short flight of steps down to the garden. There were four rooms downstairs and six upstairs, and my mother had furnished them with the few belongings that she had brought with her from Dronero: the high iron bedsteads, shaky and rattly, with coverlets of heavy flowered silk; the little stuffed chairs with muslin frills; the piano; the tiger skin; a marble hand resting on a cushion.

Like a curiously high number of narrators of my Books in May, this one is unnamed – as is, as far as I can tell, her mother. The narrator’s sister does get a name – Giulia – and much of the first half of this story is about the dynamics between the three women in their new home. The mother is domineering, determined, and relentless in her disparagement of her daughters – while simultaneously trying to praise them to others, and secure them husbands. The narrator is resentful and equally determined herself, though more often in what she refuses to be than what she actually does. Indeed, she is quite a passive character – an obstacle, rather than a catalyst.

In not many words, Ginzburg manages to show a complex, detailed, and wholly believable family group. Her little moments of seering observation are brilliant, and tell us so much about a person – for instance, the narrator comments on her mother that ‘when things were going badly for someone else, she always felt a little thrill of pleasure disguised behind an urgent desire for action’. There is love but little affection between the female characters.

The mother is ambitious for herself, as well as her daughters’ marriages, though in this case it is an ambition paired with inertia. She speaks a lot about her big plans for her future – opening an art gallery, say – but does little but talk. She relies on financial help from relatives, including her sisters who run a shop which she, the mother, believes she could run much more efficiently – though her brief stint there is unsuccessful.

Into their lives comes Signora Fontana and her curious coterie of hangers-on. She has connections to the great and the good (and, importantly, the rich) and Signora Fontana and the mother quickly encourage each other into an excitable friendship.

When we went back to the sitting room, my mother and Signora Fontana were already on first name terms. They had certainly had a good talk ranging over a multitude of subjects and had decided that the art gallery as projected by my mother should become a joint venture for the two of them; and it was going to be wonderful and exciting, a true intellectual centre in a city which had, up to now, catered so inadequately for the arts. They were sitting together on the divan like old friends, with an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts and mandarin peel beside them. Menelao was sitting on my mother’s knee, and as soon as we appeared she said that cats were better than dogs and Giulia’s puppy had tried her patience to the limit. Seeing the three of us enter together, Signora Fontana cried that she simply had to do a group portrait of us. My mother, agreeing, said that I should have to be decently dressed, however: she couldn’t bear that dreadful jumper, it made me look like a Russian factory worker.

As the novella continues, Signora Fontana and the mother are forever going for coffee together and making plans, but all the rich friends are busy all the time and the art gallery – or shop, named Sagittarius, hence the title – remains a discussion topic rather than an actuality. The reader has to wait and see whether dreams will become reality, or if there are reasons why it keeps being put off into the distance.

The plot is entirely unpredictable, but what elevates Sagittarius is Ginzburg’s clear-eyed understanding of human relationships. And particularly the lies we tell, and the lies we choose to believe. It all comes from the daughter’s perspective, and she is an interesting and well-constructed mixture of dispassionate and occasionally frustrated. Her passivity means we can go several pages where she seems objective, and then a flare up of resentment or confusion or pathos will remind us that we are reading a very personal view of the situation.

Sagittarius has made me keen to get to more Ginzburg. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s brilliant ability to sum up entire relationship dynamics through a crucial, feverish short period. And I thought of Sybille Bedford’s excellence at mother/daughter relationships. Both great authors to be reminded of, while being also very much her own writer.

Artful by Ali Smith #ABookADayInMay No.27

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I haven’t read any Ali Smith before, and I got sent Artful as a review copy when it was published in 2012 – and I decided on a whim this morning that it would be today’s book. And what a strange book it is.

It is based on four lectures that Ali Smith apparently gave at Oxford University (and since I was still a post-graduate student at Oxford in 2012, presumably I could have found my way to attending them) – On Time, On Form, On Edge, and One Offer and On Reflection. But this is not a collection of those essays. Or, rather, it is not just a collection of those essays. It hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – and opens with a woman who is mourning their partner. It has been a year and a day since they left (originally I thought they’d just gone – but it becomes clear that they have died). (By the way, I’m writing ‘they’ because I’m not sure if we know if it’s a man or a woman – though I may have just inadvertently glided past pronouns.)

The narrator goes into the study. “I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random – my study, my desk, my books now.” And the book is Oliver Twist. The title Artful suddenly takes on a new dimension when we realise it can refer to the Artful Dodger. And the narrator decides to re-read the book for the first time since university.

And then… the partner has come back. Or have they?

You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.

You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.

I’m late, you said.

And somehow all of this morphs into the essays. In the world of the book, the content of the essays has been written by the dead partner – and the narrator is reading them, occasionally (but not as often as you might think) responding to and commenting on them.

The essays themselves are much more what you’d expect. Well, at least what you’d expect if you’ve been to a lot of literature lectures – they are the sort of reflections on literature that tread the line between general and specific, and take in a wide world of books from across languages and centuries. There’s far too much content to even give an idea of it, really, and I did enjoy Smith’s way of moving from idea to idea, encompassing so much. At times it does become little more than a series of quotations with a word or two of commentary, often linking to the previous and next quotations only tangentially. There were certainly times where I wish she’d lingered more on one thought, fully exploring it before going onto another.

I think ‘On Time’ was my favourite of the four sections, perhaps simply because it was the first. And here’s a section of it:

The difference between the short story form and the novel form is to do, not with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity, ‘“The shortness of life! The shortness of life!”’ (as one of Mansfield’s characters in her story At the Bay can’t help but exclaim). Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form; it can be as imagistic and achronological as it likes and it will still hold its form. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn’t compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient.

The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time.

Maybe a book with as many ideas in it as Artful shouldn’t really be read in a day, and I should have spent more time with each thought, rather than moving onto the next. There’s also the undeniable fact that I have read huge amounts of literary theory and literary criticism in my time, and most of it is not very engaging. Smith’s is certainly a cut above the majority, but perhaps I have reached my lifetime quotient of what I find interesting in this genre? Well, I did find a lot of Artful interesting, but often with a sort of jaded “Yes, I see; I’ve read this sort of idea before. I’ve heard an undergraduate talk about it earnestly at a seminar. I’ve witnessed the novel form be dissected in clever ways over and over.” (I do recognise that I am writing this on a book blog, but there is a big difference between a reader’s book reviews and a work of literary criticism, and often I think the main difference is the point behind them.)

If I came to the ideas in Artful here for the first time, then I suspect I’d have been blown away. As it was, I did appreciate a lot but with a certain weariness. And I preferred the more fictional sections – the two characters she creates are very much enigmatic, but also intriguing and compelling. I enjoyed finding out more about them, even in the shadowy way they are revealed.

Did the merge of fiction and non-fiction work? I think so, more or less. It’s unusual and perhaps unnecessary, but does make Artful a more interesting and characterful book than it would otherwise be. Or perhaps just more artful?

The Leper’s Companions by Julia Blackburn #ABookADayInMay No.26

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I normally have little interest in historical fiction, particularly set during the medieval period, but I decided to have a gamble on The Leper’s Companions (1999). That was partly because it is such a beautiful book, and partly (moreso) because I’d read and enjoyed Julia Blackburn’s very unusual biography of John Craske. I thought if anyone could get me to enjoy a book set in 1410, it would be Blackburn.

We are thrown into a community of people who are mostly poor and ill, and often on the edge of some disaster. The miraculous and unexplained is commonplace – whether that be a mermaid washing up on the shore or a baby being born with the head of a fish (because of the mermaid’s curse, they assume). Things we’d recognise as severe illness sit alongside things that don’t make sense to a 21st-century audience. What I appreciated about Blackburn’s writing is that we are in this world on its own terms. There aren’t attempts to show what was really happening now that we have more medical and scientific knowledge, or a rationalising of medieval stories – rather, we see it all in modern English but contemporary understanding:

I walked through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me, I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

I appreciated how connected everyone was to their environment, and how open they all were to signs – whether from nature, from God, or from a mix of local and international beliefs. For instance, even those who would dismiss various of the omens that matter to this community would respect their recognition of the following omens. For the community, there isn’t a distinction:

Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

After various traumas and tragedies, as well as vows and wonders, three of the community decide to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Off go the leper of the title, a priest, the shoemaker’s wife, and fisherman’s daughter and the narrator of the book.

Here’s where I confess that I didn’t really get on with The Leper’s Companions. In the early sections, thanks largely to no attempt to put it in Ye Olde English, I was quite enjoying it. But I don’t think the quest narrative is for me in any of its myriad forms. The second half of the novel is basically the people travelling (though surprisingly little is told about the mechanics of this), meeting various people often in states of extreme misery, and going on their way. I have to admit that I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

I think Blackburn is a really good, interesting writer and she certainly creates vivid scenes. For me, there wasn’t quite enough to sustain interest in what she then did with those scenes strung together.

But it’s quite likely that I’m the wrong audience for The Leper’s Companions, and the fact that she got me to read to the end of a book set in 1410 is nothing short of miraculous in itself!

Nothing Dies by J.W. Dunne #ABookADayInMay No.25

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I meant to read Nothing Dies (1940) during the 1940 Club earlier this year – somehow, even though it is only 98 pages, I didn’t get around to finishing it. And now I have!

J.W. Dunne is one of those names that you might be familiar with from reading about the 1920s and ’30s, even if you haven’t read him directly. As the cover above says, he was known for An Experiment With Time – one of those books which was influential far beyond the reach of people who actually read it. It crops up in all sorts of places, including a mention in Miss Hargreaves, and was something of a byword for theories about time – much like Einstein or Freud are mentioned by people who never read their original works.

But, unlike Einstein and Freud, I don’t think J.W. Dunne is a household name now. I certainly haven’t read An Experiment With Time (1927) in the many years I’ve owned it, and probably should have read it for my DPhil. And, let me tell you, if Nothing Dies is a ‘brief and simple outline of the author’s famous Time theory’ (as the cover alleges) then I’m never going near An Experiment With Time. I didn’t really have a clue what was going on.

After a chapter about ‘sense data’ that is clearly intended to ease us in, Dunne starts in on his idea or time that relies on various questions of perspectives. This is one of the diagrams to elucidate matters:

In short, Dunne rejects the idea of time as something linear and one-way. We can perceive all of time from a second vantage that shows it is all available at once, and… well, I don’t really think I understood any of Dunne’s conclusions.

I haven’t quoted anything from Nothing Dies, and perhaps it will make sense to others. Certainly there was an audience in 1940 who could grasp this version – or at least enough presumed demand that this book was published. I can’t say I understood what Dunne was trying to say, let alone being convinced by it, and I have no idea how he is considered as a time theorist nowadays.

It’s always intriguing to go to the text behind the cultural phenomenon, though usually (to me) it is less interesting than the discussion of those cultural figures that filtered down to the middlebrow. I’ve always found reading about Freud more interesting than reading Freud’s writing, and I definitely get more from seeing Dunne pop up in contemporary conversations than I got from reading Nothing Dies itself.

My Face For The World To See by Alfred Hayes #ABookADayInMay No.24

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My Face For the World to See (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Hayes, Alfred, Thomson, David: 9781590176672: Books

When Madame Bibi read Alfred Hayes’ In Love earlier in the month, it reminded me that I had My Face For The World To See (1958) on my shelves. I’d bought it because I’ll always pick up a NYRB Classic, and this one looked interesting – set in mid-century Hollywood, and only 131 pages.

It’s yet another unnamed narrator – this one being, like Hayes, a screenwriter. He is very successful and wealthy, and also the same age as me (37). He’s also clearly rather discontented. We don’t learn huge amounts about his wife, except that she is currently away and he doesn’t seem to miss her very much. (‘I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all.’) While at a party, he is looking out at the sea when he sees a young woman wandering into the sea, martini glass in hand. Is she simply drunk and foolish, or is she trying to kill herself?

He suspects the latter, and so does the reader, but she is saved from drowning and more or less laughs it off. Somehow they get to know each other, which spirals into a sexual relationship quite quickly and haphazardly. She is also unnamed, but she is sharply drawn with a pathos that rings true for modern-day Hollywood too – one of the success-hungry, fame-hungry, work-hungry young actors who will probably never get more than a handful of lines in a handful of mediocre films, but cannot get away from the longing.

At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy , or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be.

The narrator doesn’t seem to have the same longing. He has found career success, but he doesn’t appear to want much more of that – but he certainly has longing. It’s unclear for what. Perhaps, as his namelessness and the title of the novella suggest, some sort of more solid identity? Some way of presenting himself to the world and to others that feels more secure, and which he can be prouder of?

The morning after the two sleep together, he wakes to find she has already left. I quote this as an example of Hayes’ writing, which I found rather exquisite without being unnecessarily embellished. He really draws you into the minutiae of a moment:

When I awoke again, she was gone. I did not at first remember she had been there; she had slipped out from beneath the blankets and left them carefully arranged as though she had wanted to create the impression, for herself too perhaps, that she had not occupied at all the other half of the bed. I remembered her with a small effect of shock. When had she gone? There was the pillow, indented; in the bathroom, a scrap of tissue with lipstick; on the floor in front of the fireplace, two glasses with what remained of the Scotch. But that was all; only the smallest sort of disarrangement, only the merest trace: she had been careful, as well as quiet.

Typing that out, it really is a riot of colons, semi-colons and commas. If I were writing it, I’d probably be tempted to tidy it up. But it didn’t seem at all obtrusive while I was reading it. Rather, it flowed beautifully to me – the pacing of his realisation, the psychological insights coming naturally alongside the visual observations.

I really appreciated Hayes’ writing, but my only drawback to the novella was that I wish he’d treated the story a little differently. On the one hand, it is just the snapshot of a brief, spontaneous, unexpectedly complicated encounter. But there are moments of melodrama and shock that feel a little jarring. Similarly, I was jarred by a graphic scene at a bullfight in Tijuana. David Thomson’s introduction calls it ‘a magnificent, remorseless scene’, but I found it an inelegant distraction to the flow of the narrative.

Perhaps it is appropriate for a novella set in Hollywood to have a few very dramatic moments, but I think Hayes’ writing would be better served by the mundane. He is so good at exploring the everyday in beautiful prose, I don’t think he needed the gimmicks of shock moments. I still think My Face For The World To See was very good, but perhaps not as good as it almost was?

It Ends With Revelations by Dodie Smith #ABookADayInMay No.23

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Back in 2012, lots of us were excited when Corsair reprinted some hard-to-find Dodie Smith novels – and with lovely cover illustrations by Sara Mulvanny. I’d already read The Town in Bloom (borrowed in an older edition from the library), but I snapped it up along with The New Moon with the Old and It Ends With Revelations, and promptly never opened them again. But the intention was definitely always there, and I’m pleased to have finally read It Ends With Revelations (1967). The title comes from that famous line in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance – one character says “The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.” Another replies, “It ends with Revelations.” Which has always irritated me, because the final book of the Bible is called Revelation, not Revelations.

ANYWAY, to turn to this book, the main character is 34-year-old Jill Quentin. Her husband Miles is a well-respected theatre actor, and she has accompanied him to an English spa town to the opening of a play that looks unlikely to do very well. It has recently been a TV series, but the transferral to the stage is pretty weak for any number of reasons, and Miles won’t mind extricating himself from the whole thing in the likely event that it ends after a few weeks.

Before I go further with the plot – my favourite parts of this novel are all the theatre things. Dodie Smith was both a jobbing actress and a playwright at different times, and writes about the theatrical world from the inside in one of her autobiographies and in The Town in Bloom. Her knowledge of the theatre suffuses the first half of It Ends With Revelations, but is seen more from an outsider – Jill has no wish to be an actor, though would have enjoyed being a stage assistant or something. Smith is very good on the various feuds and triumphs of the rehearsal process, how lines are cut and rewritten, or scenes re-directed to put focus on a different actor. You can tell it’s a world she knows well. I loved slightly knowing, caustic things like this:

They tiptoed into the back of the stalls. On the stage, a working light of dazzling brilliance dangled into a roofless composite set, made up of a sitting room and a kitchen separated by a staircase leading up to a room which suggested a look-out for forest fires. The whole gave the impression of a giant toy badly put together, rather than a place where human beings could conceivably live.

While buying chocolates for the leading boy, Jill bumps into Geoffrey Thornton. He is the local MP, as well as being a lawyer, and they quickly form an affinity. He introduces her to his daughters, Robin and Kit, on the cusp of adulthood. They are extremely self-possessed and take an instant liking to Jill – before long, they are all seeing each other, drinking hot chocolate in cafes, discussing their ‘dipsomaniac nymphomaniac’ mother with unusual candour, and sharing their tastes and interests. Perhaps my favourite two pages in the novel are where the sisters discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett.

“I almost like her because she writes about families,” said Robin. “But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.”

“Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?” said Kit impatiently. “And she does say quite a bit about backgrounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination.”

It’s totally irrelevant to the plot, and I imagine most modern editors would cut it, but I loved it so much.

The plot of the second half gets more complex, and it’s hard to write about it without giving spoilers – suffice to say that the lives of the Quentins and the Thorntons becomes increasingly entangled. There are, indeed, revelations. And among these are themes that are surprisingly modern for the 1960s, and discussed with a range of viewpoints. And, of course, anything surprisingly modern in 1967 will necessarily feel quite dated now. There are certainly passages that wouldn’t be printed today. And the debate rages on about what that means for reprints.

I really enjoyed It Ends With Revelations chiefly for the theatrical setting, but the second half worked for me too – because the revelations and twists say more about character than shocking plot, and they explain various things that were a bit mysterious in the first half. It’s a well-structured novel and pretty satisfying, give or take a few improbable relationships and decisions. I particularly enjoyed Kit and Robin, and would have liked even more from them – Smith is so good at girls of this age, as I Capture the Castle proves.

Better late than never, and I remain glad that Corsair made these lesser-known novels available to a wider audience.

To Let by John Galsworthy #ABookADayInMay No.22

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Super quick post tonight, because it’s late. In fact, let’s do it in bullet points.

  • I read To Let by John Galsworthy, originally published in 1921
  • (In fact, I listened to the audiobook – which was good, though it kept repeating lines of dialogue that I assume were meant to be edited out)
  • It’s the third of the Forsyte Saga
  • The first was published in 1906, but then Galsworthy went on a bit of a role – with one in 1920 and another in 1921
  • I read the first one a few years ago, for Tea or Books?, and then the middle one towards the end of last year
  • To Let really relies on you remembering what happened in book 1 – the doomed, cruel marriage of Irene and Soames
  • To Let is chiefly concerned with the next generation – particularly the love that blooms between Irene’s son and Soames’s daughter from their subsequent marriages
  • (But these two – Fleur and Jon – don’t know the other exists. They don’t even know that their parents used to be married.)
  • Fleur has a much more eligible, but profoundly dull, suitor
  • It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet sort of pairing, but if Romeo and Juliet don’t know why they aren’t a perfect match in the eyes of their families
  • Galsworthy is just very good, isn’t he? There’s a reason he was such a staple in the Edwardian era
  • It became fashionable to despise him in the mid-century, particularly if you were someone like George Orwell (who described bad books as ‘Galsworthy-and-water’)
  • But he really gets families, regrets, secrets, sacrifice, stubborness
  • He even makes reading about young, selfish people falling love bearable, and that’s impressive in my eyes
  • To Let has such a brilliant final line – you *almost* feel sorry for a character you’ve spent three books loathing
  • I am amazed that the three books of the first trilogy of the Forsyte Saga are so distinct, and each cover a distinct and intense theme, and yet work together masterfully as a series. Bravo, John.
  • Will I ever read the (gulp) six books in the Forsyte Chronicles? Does anyone? Perhaps in the next six decades.

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban #ABookADayInMay No.21

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In case anybody is counting – yes, I did read No.20 in A Book A Day in May and didn’t blog about it. The book I read is Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and it’s one of the books in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I thought I’d wait until then to reveal my thoughts.

And onto today’s book. When I saw Annabel reviewing Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit the other day, it reminded me that I have a couple of his books to read and they’re quite short. Previously I’ve only read Turtle Diary, which I think is his most famous novel, and… well, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001) is very different.

Peter is an artist who first encounters Amaryllis at a distance in a dream. She is getting on a bus – the bus stop, mysteriously, says BALSAMIC and the bus says FINSEY-OBAY, a place he has never heard of. And the bus is made of bamboo and rice paper in yellows, oranges, and pinks, a bit like a Japanese lantern.

He is beguiled by her (and, yes, it’s the first of Russell Hoban being very Male Author Writing About Women’s Bodies, which did get a bit tiresome). But he has seemingly unrelated dreams and cannot recapture the strange scene – and then, at an exhibition, he meets Amaryllis in person.

When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.

I like how Peter, as an artist, sees the world through art references – and not in too forced a way. The Klein bottle, incidentally, is some sort of riff on a mobius strip in which a bottle is eternal surface, or something. I have to admit that I glazed over a little on those bits, complete with diagrams, but other readers will enjoy them.

Peter and Amaryllis have a drink and they want to see each other again – but in the dreamscape. He doesn’t know where she lives or even her last name, so has to rely on this hoped reunion. And… yes, they meet there again.

As their lives continue in dreams (which they call ‘glims’, because saying the word ‘dream’ will force them to awake) and in reality, they take part in a curious experiment. Amaryllis is keen that Peter gets on the bus with her, in the dream, though neither of them seem to know exactly why. And Peter is keen to love Amaryllis forever? I wasn’t sure how the insta-love played into the structure, but Amaryllis is clearly captivating.

The novel continues, with dream and reality becoming more and more aligned. Incidents that happen in dream seem to come true; experiences aren’t clearly dream or reality. The prose remains quite spare and straightforward, which I think is wise. We know where we are within the sentences, even if not within the scenes.

At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

I did like Amaryllis Night and Day, though nowhere near as much as I enjoyed Turtle Diary. I think that’s partly because I didn’t much care about either Peter or Amaryllis. Rather, the way Hoban constructed realities was interesting – not necessarily what happened within them. And I did find his erotic gaze a little tedious. He was in his mid-70s when he wrote it, and there’s something a little boring and sad, to me, about old men writing droolingly about 20-something women’s bodies.

So, an interesting experiment that I think deserved more worthy content. But keeping up with my May challenge featuring very different books most days!