Scoop – Evelyn Waugh

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A few bloggers seem to have been reading Evelyn Waugh at the same time as each other – Rachel wrote about Decline and Fall and Ali wrote about Vile Bodies – only my review is coming rather belatedly, as I finished Scoop (1938) about a month ago. Oops. But it’s great, and very funny, so better late than never, I’m getting my review specs on (they’re the same as my usual specs, by the way.)

This is my fourth Evelyn Waugh novel, and I still haven’t read Brideshead Revisited.  I found the first couple too cruel for my liking, then thought The Loved One had the perfect mix of barbed wit and affection.  Well, Scoop continues in this vein – ridiculous and farcical things happen, people are mean and selfish, but always with a covering of good-humour – helped, chiefly, by the incredibly loveable lead character.

Like Decline and Fall, Scoop opens with a series of coincidences and misunderstandings (unlikely, but not impossible) which propel the central plot.  Unlike Decline and Fall, these misunderstandings are not malicious – but they end up with the wrong Mr. Boot being sent to the Republic of Ishmaelia by the Daily Beast.  Instead of the pushy young John Boot who’s been badgering the absolutely wonderful character Mrs. Stitch (the novel opens with her multi-tasking – on the telephone, directing the painter, answering correspondence, doing a crossword, and helping her daughter with her homework at the same time) to get him sent out there, it is William Boot, writer of the rural matters column Lush Places, who is accidentally sent.  Boot is an affable, quiet, honest young man (supposedly in his 20s, but he never comes across as younger than 45) who wants to live out his life in rural peace.  Who better to mire in the world of sensationalist foreign reporting?

Before he sets sail, there are my favourite scenes in the novel – where William Boot is meeting with an editor of the newspaper, Mr. Salter.  William thinks that he is going to be reprimanded for his sister mischievously exchanging ‘badger’ and ‘great crested grebe’ in his copy – which leads to a brilliant cross-purposes conversation with Mr. Salter, who has never stepped a foot outside London, and has the impression (shared by so many Londoners today!) that people from the countryside do nothing but drink pear cider and lean on gates.  As a staunch countryside person at heart, I laughed heartily at the limited views of the town-dweller, and the horror he felt when the great crested grebe reared its great crested head…

But things are sorted out, of course, and off William goes to the Republic of Ishmaelia (when it is suggested to him that he might well be fired if he refuses to go.)  Before we get there, I want to share this wonderful snippet of the way Mr. Salter deals with the newspaper’s proprietor:

Mr. Salter’s side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent.  When Lord Copper was right he said, “Definitely, Lord Copper”; when he was wrong, “Up to a point.””Let me see, what’s the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn’t it?””Up to a point, Lord Copper.””And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn’t it?””Definitely, Lord Copper.”
So practical! So wise! So deliciously funny on Waugh’s part.  It’s also a taste of his satirical tongue – for that is what the rest of Scoop essentially performs; a satire on journalism.

Boot and a dozen or so other journalists land in Ishmaelia, where nothing whatsoever seems to be happening, and have to send back copy in the form of telegrams.  While some journalists are fabricating spies and making the most out of the smallest incident, this is a telegram Boot sends back:

NO NEWS AT PRESENT THANKS WARNING ABOUT CABLING PRICES BUT IVE PLENTY MONEY LEFT AND ANYWAY WHEN I OFFERED TO PAY WIRELESS MAN SAID IT WAS ALL RIGHT PAID OTHER END RAINING HARD HOPE ALL WELL ENGLAND WILL CABLE AGAIN IF ANY NEWS.
Waugh has great fun crafting the telegrams from both sides, and it is here that his satire of journalism is both loudest and (I daresay) closest to the bone – with words like ‘ESSENTIALIST’ and ‘SOONLIEST’ abounding, not to mention ‘UNRECEIVED’ and ‘UPFOLLOW’.

The satire becomes rather a farce, as most of the journalists head off to a place which doesn’t exist, and the most famous reporter sends in his copy without even visiting the country.  It’s all very amusing and enjoyably broad, which makes the inclusion of a romantic interest (even one who is desperate for him to store rocks for her, and suggests that he marry her so that her extant husband can become British by extension) feels a little out of kilter, and I wouldn’t have been sad if Kätchen hadn’t been included.

Indeed, despite the focus of the novel being Ishmaelia – and Boot being adorable – I preferred the scenes set in England.  Perhaps that’s because I could understand a comedy on office politics, rural matters, and eccentric families (about a dozen bedridden relatives and servants fill his country pile) better than foreign reporting, or perhaps Waugh was on firmer footing himself.  Either way, I was always pleased when things turned back to Blighty.

As a round-peg-in-a-square-hole story, Waugh could scarcely choose a man less fitted for the role he is forced into – and that, of course, is the intended crux of Scoop‘s humour.  It’s just a bonus that he does everything else so well on top of this – otherwise the joke would probably have worn thin.  And, as I say, there is enough good-humour and camaraderie in Scoop to prevent Waugh’s mean streak from dominating, and so gentle souls like me are left entirely free to revel in the farcical hilarity, and not get anxious about the victims!

Skylark

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43. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi

I’ve been reading some pretty brilliant books recently, and not finding time to write about them, so prepare yourselves for some enthusiastic reviews coming up soon.  And let’s start the ball rolling with Skylark (1924) by Hungarian novelist Dezső Kosztolányi, translated into English by Richard Aczel, and a heartfelt köszönöm to him for doing so.  It’s gone on my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

Skylark came to my attention when Claire/Captive Reader put it in her Top Ten Books of 2011.  I added it to my Amazon wishlist, and waited… it felt, for some reason, like the sort of book which should really come as a gift.  Lucky for me, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife spotted it there, and it arrived in my Christmas stocking last year.  So, consider this a tick on the list for my Reading Presently project (where I’m intending to read, in 2013, 50 books which were gifts.)

Before I get on to the wonderful writing and moving story in Skylark, I have to talk about the book itself.  If I’m ever asked why I don’t want a Kindle, my one word reply will now be: “Skylark“.  This NYRB edition is quite stunningly beautiful – not just the lovely colours and image on the front, and that turquoise/mint green I love so much on the spine, but the feel, the flip-flop of the pages, the perfect flexibility-to-sturdiness of the cover… the physical book is a work of art here, and I am so pleased that the content matched up.

The novel starts as a not-quite-young-any-more woman called Skylark leaves her provincial town for a week, to stay with relatives.  Actually, it starts while her parents are packing for her departure:

The dining-room sofa was strewn with strands of red, white and green cord, clippings of packing twine, shreds of wrapping paper and the scattered, crumpled pages of the local daily, the same fat letters at the top of each page: Sárszeg Gazette, 1899. 
The stage is set for the importance of the home – and the way that it is subverted and disturbed by Skylark’s departure.

One might expect (I did expect) that a novel which starts with a character getting ready to leave her home will follow that character on her travels.  Particularly so in a novel whose title bears the name of that character.  What Kosztolányi does so cleverly is, instead, focus on the effects of her absence, leaving the reader to bear witness to the unsettled lives of Skylark’s father (Ákos) and mother (known simply as Mother or ‘the woman’ throughout.)

They have a very obviously unhealthy dependency upon their daughter – but, at the same time, long more than anything for her to marry.  A man who has been polite enough to smile at her is built up into a potential – and then a definite – suitor; when he fails to follow up on this non-existent intimation, he becomes a figure for bitter hatred, much to his confusion.  Mother and Father can barely cope with Skylark leaving town for a week, let alone forever, but this is still their aim in life, even while they realise that it is almost impossible.

And why?  Because Skylark is ugly.  Extremely ugly.  Not horrendously disfigured or anything, simply deeply unattractive.  From what we see of her before she leaves, and hear about her, Skylark also seems domestically very capable (if unambitious), unimaginatively kind, practical, and pretty dull.  But her parents, of course, love her dearly.

This narrative is so clever and subtly written.  It is a mixture of quite pathetic inability to manage in their daughter’s absence, with a glimpse of what life would be like without her.  They eat interesting foods at restaurants and talk to their neighbours; Ákos gets drunk at a local club (which resembles the Freemasons in some fashion), and this leads to the most moving, vital, and brilliant scene of the novel – where all the couple’s unspoken fears and thoughts come tumbling out.  Kosztolányi gives the viewpoint of both husband and wife, so we see the scene through two sets of eyes simultaneously.  It is heartbreaking and extraordinary, but it is not the sort of confrontation that ‘changes things forever’.  Things cannot really ever, we sense, be changed.

They had given her that name years ago, Skylark, many, many years ago, when she still sang.  Somehow the name had stuck, and she still wore it like an outgrown childhood dress.
That passage is from early in the novel, and I marked it as being the one which suggested to me that I’d be onto something special.  It was also the first sign of something I thought throughout Skylark, which was that Kosztolányi’s writing reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s – which is about the highest compliment I can pay to writing.  He has the same delicate touch, and the same way of showing ordinary people stepping outside of their normal routines, even slightly, and finding that everything is changed thereby, however unnoticeable this is to others.  The subtlest shift in the way acts are performed – the way Skylark holds a birdcage; the seasoning Ákos puts on his risotto – are shown by Kosztolányi to hold enormous significance.

Like a short story by Katherine Mansfield, I imagine Skylark would benefit from being read in one sitting.  At 221 pages, it could be done.  I, sadly, seemed to read almost all of it on bus journeys to and from work, and thus the reading experience was too broken up.  I will have to read it again when I have an entire afternoon to spare.

The only part of this edition I didn’t much like was the introduction by Péter Esterházy, since it barely spoke of the novel at all.  Apparently he is one of the most significant contemporary Hungarian writers, but I wish he’d written this introduction more as a fan of Skylark, and less as a fan of his own thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about the style I aim at on Stuck-in-a-Book, and how I want my posts to be a bit amusing – but it’s very hard to be funny when I have nothing but praise for a novel.  So instead, I’ll finish by saying that I went to a 1970s murder mystery party on Saturday (the one I mentioned I was writing), and somebody said that I looked like a fraudulent spiritualist from an Agatha Christie novel – must have been the floral bandana that did it.  With that image in your mind… go and buy a copy of Skylark; make it this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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And the weekend comes at the end of the week which, in Britain, finally brought warm weather!  We seem to have skipped spring altogether, and moved straight to summer – which is a shame for me, because spring is easily my favourite season.  Ho-hum.

Today I’ll be going to a 1970s-themed murder mystery party… which I’m also writing.  And that tense is used intentionally, since I still haven’t finished writing it… eek!  Best get a move on; just time to tell you about a blog post, a book, and a link.

1.) The book – isn’t new, but is a mini-project between me and Karen / Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, which we’re inviting everyone to join in with.  I love doing little readalongs with other bloggers, so if I see that they’ve recently bought a book I’ve been intending to read, I quite often pop a comment in, seeing if they’d like to read at the same time.  Karen and I talked about reading Nina Bawden together (an author I’ve yet to read, although I have a few of her books) and the only one we both owned was A Woman of My Age.  So we’ll be both be reading it, and probably posting about it sometime towards the end of the month.  Do join in!

2.) The link – I have got so obsessed BuzzFeed of late… yes, the cute animals, but also myriad other addictive lists.  I do love a list.  Most recently, I have been amazed by these optical illusions (particularly numbers 11 and 14).

3.) The blog post – read about the postal book group I’m in, and the fantastic book Danielle sent around this time, in her blog post here.

Books lost in the mind

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Do you ever read a book so slowly, over so many breaks, that you sort of lose any sense of what you thought about it?

No?  Really?

Well, I do.  (And maybe you did say ‘yes’ too.)  This is a side effect of reading so many books at once – some will, inevitably, be lost along the way – and picked up later – and finally finished, some months after they were started.  Dozens of books will have been read in between, and even a short narrative will have had hundreds of other characters tangled into it.

It’s a fascinating idea, actually – the narrative, which should ideally go from page to brain in a more or less straightforward matter of read-interpret-remember, actually encompasses many other characters and stories along the way (and is clever enough to separate them) – and that’s not even thinking about the millions of other stimuli along the way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, very kindly given to me by Nichola (an internet book friend, whom I have met a couple of times, but who seems to have disappeared – Nichola, are you out there?), but I didn’t read it in ideal circumstances.

Which is to say that I didn’t simply lose the book in my mind… I literally lost it.  For about 18 months, it disappeared – and turned up when I moved house, as things tend to.  I was about two thirds of the way through when it disappeared, so… I just finished it, without going back to the beginning.

The Saturdays is a children’s book about a family of siblings who form a club, to pool their pocket money and do something exciting together with the proceeds each week, taking it in turns to decide.  It’s good fun, very charming, and with all the over-the-top events and mixture of morals and cynicism which characterise the best children’s books.  It’s probably better read as a child, or to a child, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot.  I think I finished it off during one of my headachey periods, and it’s the perfect sort of light book for that.

But I’m not equipped to write a proper review, so this is instead mostly a pondering on how the reading (and losing) process affects the way we take in a book.  And how each novel comes with the illusory promise of a narrative we can ingest – but that no reader is ever the ideal reader in that sense; stories and characters must weave their way around all the other narratives (real and fictional) in our lives, and cope with all the broken moments of reading, and distractions and forgetting.  And, out the other side, we usually still think of the book as a whole, entire and separate from our haphazard methods of reading.

All a ramble, and not put together with any forethought (I have broken up my blogging as well as my reading; I have been answering people on Facebook and writing a murder mystery party) but perhaps something interesting to think about and to discuss…?

Comments, consider yourself answered

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Another night where I haven’t managed to write a review – the completed books are piling up by my desk, including a few candidates for Reading Presently, although I am getting rather behind with that project.

So, instead, I answered all the comments.  Gosh, I hadn’t realised how lax I’d been!  But I had fun looking back through the past posts, and have replied to 115 comments. Gasp!

A road trip

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Book reviews coming soon, promise – and those replies to your great comments which I promised last week.  But for today, I thought I’d show you the outcome of a road trip I took with my friend Mel recently.  We go to places with absurd names, and wanted to visit Kingsbury Episcopi and Curry Rivel (both amazing, no?)  We did manage to see both these Somerset villages, but also stumbled across somewhere rather brilliant on the way… and Mel took this photo:

My ediction continues…

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Remember a while ago, when I told you about my addiction to buying different editions of the Provincial Lady series by E.M. Delafield?  This was cleverly nicknamed an ‘ediction’ by Susan – and fed by lovely Agnieszka!  This arrived in the post the other day…

Agnieszka, you are very wicked for being my enabler – but very kind as well!  Thank you so much – my edillection (can you work out what that is?) is a step nearer completion…

One place; many Simons

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I find the importance of places very interesting – as I’m sure we all do.  In literature, I am particularly fascinated by the resonances of houses.  I will rush towards any novel where a house is significant for itself, especially if staircases are involved (don’t ask me why I love staircases so much, I have no idea.)  But recently I’ve been pondering about places which are neither very familiar nor unfamiliar – the sorts of places I go a dozen times over the years, but couldn’t be considered a home, and how they may thus witness different stages of life, quite coincidentally.

There are lots of places in Oxford which act as a metaphorical palimpsest in this manner, but I’ve picked Wellington Square Garden – tucked away parallel to St. Giles, it’s a neat, sweet little park – often filled with office workers enjoying their lunch in summer, or ice cream eaters on a Saturday – but, foolishly, with only one bench.

The first time I went to it would have been before I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate.  Wellington Square is right next to Kellogg College, which runs courses and lecture days for non-students.  As a sixth-former, I sometimes stumped up £30 to spend a day with my Mum and our friend Barbara, listening to lectures on various English literature topics – it’s how I first heard about my beloved Katherine Mansfield, for instance.  It was an early sign of how much I loved studying literature – and my introduction to Wellington Square gardens, where we wandered in between lectures.

I’ve witnessed many strange and eccentric things while in Oxford, and probably done a fair few myself, so it’s only one example from many that I could mention (and the only one which happened in this park.)  A pirate asked me to take his photo.  Well, a man dressed as a pirate, I assume… but, still.  I was innocently reading a book on the bench, and was approached… I expected to be asked to give money to a charity but, no, just the photograph, and… they went on their way.

Wellington Square Garden does have a literary connection for me, too – well, that is, I read a much-loved book there for the first time.  Just around the corner, on Little Clarendon Street, there is a charity shop (I forget which.)  In the basement, they have a selection of books – and in 2007 I decided to buy the slim Virago Modern Classic I picked up, because the synopsis sounded interesting and it was only about 50p.  I toddled round to Wellington Square Garden and, since it was a nice day, lay down on the grass to read it… and was instantly in love.  The novel was The Love-Child by Edith Olivier, which I have read many times since – and written about at length in my doctoral thesis, as well as putting it on my 50 Books You Must Read.

Most recently, a little over a year ago, I came here after I’d been told that the first test I’d done was positive, and I’d have to be tested for cancer.  Everything turned out to be fine, but it was a terrifying and frustrating time.  I walked from the GP down St. John Street to this park, sat on the bench and cried and cried.  And then I mopped myself up and went to work, because it was 8am and I hadn’t taken the day off.

So, Wellington Square has seen quite a lot of disparate emotions and memories – and it’s still one of my favourite places in Oxford.  Who knows what it’ll see in the future?

This isn’t the easiest meme to transfer to your own blogs, because it requires a bit of thought and memory – but I’d love to see other people picking a spot which has proved significant over their lives, but still not home or deeply familiar.  Just a place you sometimes go, which has coincidentally been the site for different moods and different events.  There’s your challenge – pop a link in the comments if you take it up.

A couple of quick things…

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I’ve never used a blog reader, but I know a lot of you do – and are probably aware that Google Reader will be shutting down soon.  Well, I’ve seen a few bloggers link to Bloglovin’, which apparently does the same sort of thing (and you can import to it from Google Reader.)  If you’d like to add my blog to a Bloglovin’ account, you can do so here.

[cartoon by John Taylor, borrowed from OxfordDictionaries.com]

The other link is from work – I put together a quiz called Bible or Bard?  As you might be able to gather, you have to work out whether a quotation is from the King James Bible or the works of Shakespeare.  I had great fun putting it together – and it’s pretty difficult, I have to say!  There are 30 quotations to test you… have a go here, and let me know how you do.

[Oops, link was to the wrong site – have fixed it now!]

I’m off home for the weekend, so I’ll be back blogging next week! (And that’s when I’ll reply to your lovely comments too – sorry I’ve left it for a while…)

Ring of Bright Water – Gavin Maxwell

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You know how I don’t shut up about Miss Hargreaves?  (Have you read it?  It’s great.)  Well, Hayley is (in a rather better mannered way) equally enthusiastic about Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water.  Since Hayley and I often enjoy the same books, I’ve been intending to read it for ages – but every copy I’ve stumbled across in charity shops has been rather ugly.  I wish I’d seen the beautiful cover pictured.  When Hayley lent me her copy (as part of a postal book group we’re both in) I was excited finally to read it.

Well, I say ‘excited’.  There was a part of me that was nervous – because I rarely read non-fiction when it’s not about literature, and I have no particular interest in wildlife rearing.  If it didn’t come with such a strong recommendation from Hayley, I doubt that I’d ever have considered reading it.  And I would have missed out.

Gavin Maxwell doesn’t really structure Ring of Bright Water in a traditional beginning-middle-end sort of way, which I imagine the film adaptation probably does – it isn’t encircled by the life of any single animal, or his occupancy of his remote Scottish home, but instead meanders through many of Maxwell’s countryside adventures.

I’m going to concentrate on the ones which made Ring of Bright Water famous – the otters – although (cover aside) you wouldn’t have much of a clue that they were coming for the first section of the book, which looks at the flora and fauna of the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and such matters as whale fishing (Maxwell is strongly against, despite having run a shark fishery – there is a constant paradox between his love of his animals and his killing of animals).  The only cohesion (and it is quite enough) is that it’s Maxwell’s opinions and voice, and connected with marine and rural life.

And then the otters come along.

The first otter only lives for a day or two, but after that comes Mij.  He is really the star of Ring of Bright Water, and the high point in Maxwell’s affections.  I can’t give any higher praise than to say that someone like me, interested in the animal kingdom chiefly when it concerns kittens, was entirely enamoured and captivated, and briefly considered whether it would be practical to get a pet otter.

Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing.  That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play or other activity.  If there is no acceptable toy, or if they are in a mood of frustration, they will, apparently with the utmost good humour, set about laying the land waste.  There is, I am convinced, something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel.
Er, maybe not.  Maxwell sets out to tell you how incomparable the otter is as a pet – cheerful, companionable, spirited – and only slowly does he reveal that they are completely untameable, very destructive, and occasionally (if repentingly) violent.

But Mij is still a wonder – or, rather, Maxwell is a wonder for the way he tells his story.  He is certainly a gifted and natural storyteller, and the reader is easily lulled into similar levels of affection towards Mij, and a complicit sympathy with Maxwell (and never for a moment what a novelist would subtly ask – that we would pity the loner, or wonder at his isolation.)

I don’t want to spoil the high-jinks (yes, high-jinks – and tomfoolery, mark you) of the book, and I don’t think I can capture Maxwell’s tone – so I will give my usual proviso for books I didn’t expect to enjoy so much: read it even if you don’t think you’ll like it!  (And if David Attenborough is your bag, then you’ll probably love it even more.)

It is a beautiful book, for the rhythm and balance of its prose alone, quite apart from the topic or the setting.  I’m really pleased that, years down the line, I’ve finally taken up Hayley’s recommendation – even if she had to lend Ring of Bright Water to me to make that happen.