I’d Rather Be Reading by Anne Bogel – #NovNov Day #23

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I went to my reliable books-about-reading shelf for today’s book – well, it’s not so much a shelf as the worktop in my kitchen, because readers in small flats have to use every spare inch of space for books. I love Anne Bogel’s podcast ‘What Should I Read Next?’ and have twice (unsuccessfully) applied to appear on it. But I hadn’t yet read this little book about reading, which my dad got for my Christmas present a few years ago.

In it, Bogel does what she does on the podcast – shares an infectious love of reading. It’s not the most personal-memoir-esque book in this genre, though there are moments which reveal how books have been there for her in crises and in joyful circumstances, and a little about what reading means to all the members of her family.

Bogel casts her net a bit wider – writing in a way that is deeply true to her own life as a reader, but likely to be very similar for many readers (perhaps only some titles changed, and some ages shifted up or down a few years, and a slightly different progression of career, family, education). She writes about how books have meant different things to her at different times, how she deals with buying vs borrowing books, the first time she sobbed at a book – and the books she sobs at now, and how rewarding a reading twin can be – notably not the same as a twin who reads, but rather someone with very similar tastes to you. As I can attest, this is unlikely to be your actual twin.

I loved a couple chapters of humorous lists – one on how to organise your bookshelves, which is certainly not as straightforward as that sounds, and another on bookworm problems. Here are a couple of quotes from that chapter:

You’re at a killer used book sale and can’t remember if you already own a certain title You decide you do and come home. You were wrong and regret your lost chance. You decide you don’t and come home and shelve your newly purchased third copy. You accidentally buy two of the same book at the book sale.

And

You accept that it’s time to cull your personal library. You lovingly handle each book, determining if it brings you joy. It does. They all do. You are full of bookish joy, but still woefully short on shelf space.

I’d Rather Be Reading is a lovely little book – full of bookish joy. It isn’t as idiosyncratic or personal as some books about reading, and perhaps for that reason won’t be quite as memorable in its details – but it’s the perfect book to reassure any devoted reader that they are not an anomaly in the world, and that plenty of other people feel exactly the same.

The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning – #NovNov Day 22

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I was sent The Invisible Host (1930) by husband-and-wife authors Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning the other day, a review copy from Dean Street Press. It isn’t actually released until 6 December, but I couldn’t resist tearing into it straight away – and read all 186 pages at a breakneck speed today, stopping only, reluctantly, for work.

And what made me so furiously keen to read it? Well, that enigmatic line on the cover: ‘Was it the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None?’

It’s kept as a question because there’s no way of knowing if Christie knew the novel, or the play and film that were adapted from it before And Then There Were None was penned. But there are certainly extremely striking similarities.

In the opening chapter, eight people receive the same mysterious telegram:

CONGRATULATIONS STOP PLANS AFOOT FOR SMALL SURPRISE PARTY IN YOUR HONOR BIENVILLE PENTHOUSE NEXT SATURDAY EIGHT O’CLOCK STOP ALL SUB ROSA BIG SURPRISE STOP MAINTAIN SECRECY STOP PROMISE YOU MOST ORIGINAL PARTY EVER STAGED IN NEW ORLEANS – YOUR HOST

Each has their own suspicions about who might have arranged the party – and each of these other people also happens to be a guest. There is a famed actress, a noted doctor, a dodgy lawyer, a society hostess, a clubman, a writer – so on and so on. Each has a reason to despise one of the others there. Each doesn’t question that a party would be held in their honour.

But – much like And Then There Were None – they are in for a nasty surprise. Once they arrive in the penthouse, the exit is sealed and a radio soon starts playing. Their invisible host has a message for them:

”Ladies and gentlemen, you must be tired of gatherings at which you hear only the soft bubbling of elegant effervescence. The ideal entertainment would be at once a diversion and a creative challenge. It is absurd that one should have to assume the mental attitude of a grocery clerk before he can be entertained. One has a right to look with critical curiosity at the entertainment offered him. So to-night, my friends, I invite you to play a game with me, to pit your combined abilities against mine for suitable stakes. I warn you, however, it has long been my conviction that I should be able to outplay the most powerful intellects in our city, and to-night I shall work hard to prove myself – and you. For to-night, ladies and gentlemen, you are commanded to play an absorbing game  a game with death.”

As this is a New Orleans penthouse, rather than Christie’s inaccessible island, there is a bit more explanation needed about how the door is electrified and the walls are unscalable etc etc. Manning and Bristow successfully seal off all possible exits, leaving us to the enjoyment of watching eight people deal with the prospect of their entrapment and death. For, the host tells them, one of them will die each hour until there is nobody left. But if they manage to outwit him in any of the specially chosen fates, then he will let them live and will die in their place.

And – yes, reader, the characters start dying.

I shan’t spoil anymore, except to say this novel is a delicious, fast-paced, very satisfying read. I loved every moment. Some of the mechanisms involved are a little more elaborate than Christie would have allowed herself, but nothing is too outlandish. And the revelation of the murderer is guessable, if you spot the details along the way – which, of course, I didn’t. I never do.

I’ve read a fair bit of vintage crime, including Joanna Cannan’s excellent Murder Included earlier in Novellas in November – but this one might well be the most fun and best non-Christie murder mystery that I’ve ever read. A total delight from beginning to end. I’d heartily recommend that you preorder it today. And did Christie read or watch it and decide that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery? Perhaps that is the best unsolvable mystery about the whole thing…

Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

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For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Father Malachy’s Miracle by Bruce Marshall – #NovNov Day 19

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What a delightful novel. I bought Father Malachy’s Miracle (1931) early last year because the premise sounded so interesting, and because I had previously read Marshall’s novel High Brows as part of my DPhil research. And the book was really fun, as well as funny, and has made me keen to seek out more of Marshall’s work.

Father Malachy is a monk who is visiting a Catholic church in Glasgow, there to instruct the priests on chanting liturgy. Father Malachy reminded me of Trollope’s Septimus Harding – in that he is simple, kind, faith-filled, and a little shocked and saddened by the wantonness of the world.

In conversation with a local priest of a different denomination, the topic of miracles comes up. Father Malachy believes that God is still capable of doing miracles, and will still perform them if there is good reason. The Protestant minister doesn’t believe this (incidentally, this is not a universally held Protestant viewpoint, by any means. I suppose I am Protestant, inasmuch as I am not Catholic, and I certainly believe God still performs miracles). And so Father Malachy asks God to work a miracle, to bring faith back to an increasingly faithless Scotland.

And which miracle? Well, in the spirit of moving mountains into the sea, Father Malachy asks for the Garden of Eden to be moved to a Scottish island. What is the Garden of Eden? In this instance, it is a dance hall that is near the Catholic church, and believed by some of the priests there to be a hotbed of sin – though Father Malachy himself is rather more charitable towards them. Anyway, the Protestant minister is incredulous:

”Do you honestly mean to stand there and tell me that, in this twentieth century and in this metropolis of learning, God could perform the miracle of transporting this home of light and healthy amusement through the ether? Mr dear Father, please reflect upon what you are saying.”

This is exactly what he means. The day and time is set. And… the dance hall lifts up into the air, and lands on the distant island.

One of the things I loved about Father Malachy’s Miracle is that Marshall restrains himself from putting all the drama into this miraculous event. We don’t see anything from the perspective of the people being supernaturally transitioned. We don’t even visit the Garden of Eden after it has landed. Rather, the novel is about Father Malachy – about the drama he has unleashed and its consequences; about his reflections on the wisdom of the act, and reactions from other priests, journalists, laymen, and a canny film producer. Throughout, Marshall never sneers at faith. I only found out afterwards that he was Catholic himself, but it makes sense. So few novelists write well about faith, and Marshall is among them.

Which is not to say the novel is po-faced. Oh gosh, far from it. His tone reminded me of Compton Mackenzie when he’s being witty, or even E.F. Benson. I enjoy that he can take religious faith seriously while still indulging in a slightly bitchy tone. On the second page, he describes a woman ‘whose hat was one of those amorphous black affairs which would have been, at any moment, out of fashion in any country’ – and I knew I was sold. Actually, the page before that I had already noted how much I enjoyed this eyebrow-raised scene setting:

Outside, on the grey ribbon of platform which ran dismally along the side of the train, newsboys were pushing on wheels pyramids of the contemporary literature, gay magazines within whose covers female novelists split their infinitives and modern deans argued as to whether twin beds in matrimony were of the esse or merely of the bene esse of the sacrament. Outside, boys were selling sticky sweets and cigarettes, and porters were pushing luggage, and flabby, colourless people were jostling one another with impatience as though their departure for Falkirk or Edinburgh were important and as though the dreadful immorality of their souls shone out, for all to see, through the pigginess of their earthly faces. Outside, Queen Street Station, Glasgow, looked just as depressing as the Gare du Nord, Paris, and suggested, just as adequately, milk-cans, lavatories and eternal damnation.

It’s such a ’30s novel, which is certainly a good thing in my book. I loved the characters, the story, and the way that Marshall handled everything. The only thing I didn’t like was the blurb on the edition I read – which gives away so much plot that it includes something that happens on p189 of 191 pages. Tut tut!

Father Malachy’s Miracle is so up my street that I wonder if anybody else would enjoy it as much as I did. It might be hard to find out, as copies online do look a bit scarce and expensive. But if you speak German then you might have better luck tracking down Das Wunder des Malachias – or even watching the award-winning film from the 50s. If this review has sparked your interest, I’d recommend tracking the novel down one way or another.

Ludmilla by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 18

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Earlier in the month I read The Lonely by Paul Gallico, and today I read the other half of the book I have it in – Ludmilla, originally published in 1955. It was printed as a separate book initially, but it is only about 50 pages – including drawings by Reisie Lonette.

For those who’ve read Gallico’s Small Miracle, it is quite similar. Set in Liechtenstein, it’s about a festival where cows are paraded with ribbons etc, and the cow at the front is the most celebrated one of the year. The Weakling cow covets the prized position, though barely produces any milk and is lean and unimpressive. But a prayer to St Ludmilla might just sort things out…

You who believe that animals are dumb and incapable of reason or emotions similar to those experience by humans will of course continue to do so. I ask you only to think of the yearning and heartache that is the lot of the poor and not-so-favoured woman, as she stares through the glass of the shop window at a gay Easter hat, a particularly fetching frock, the sheerest of stockings, or a pair of shoes with little bows that seem to dance all by themselves; lovable articles, desirable articles, magic articles out of her reach since she can neither buy them, nor earn them as a gift, yet things that she knows would transform her in a moment from someone drab and unnoticed, into a sparkling queen, a ravishing beauty that would draw all eyes to her. Or, if not all eyes, then at least a few, and if not a few, then just one pair of eyes, and in the end, the only pair that mattered. Are you a book editor? Find your job on Jooble.

Ludmilla is very slight, but has its charm. The cow is rather a lovely character. It is a curious choice to pair it with The Lonely, because they have nothing in common (except for Gallico’s not-entirely-enlightened perspective on the role and motivations of women). Gallico can be fey or dark or both, and this one couldn’t be feyer if it tried. Fun, if minor.

Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing – #NovNov Day 17

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Particularly Cats (1967) is the third book by Doris Lessing that I’ve read – but nothing in the dystopian Memoirs of a Survivor or the grim The Fifth Child would have led me to expect something like Particularly Cats. It is 108 pages of absolute joy for a cat lover.

In a way, it’s like Elizabeth von Arnim’s All the Dogs of My Life, in that it is a memoir that concentrates on cats that Lessing has owned, or who have owned Lessing. But though it mentions various cats from different stages of Lessing’s life, it’s really about two – known as grey cat and black cat.

Before we get to their lives, we do get a whistle-stop tour of Lessing’s experience of cats in her Zimbabwean childhood – there are many, living unbridled lives that interweave with those of wild cats. Sometimes domestic cats mate with wild cats; sometimes they become wild. They are at the mercy of hawks, and they are many miles from the nearest vet. It is a tumultuous environment to have pets.

Then Lessing fast forwards to cats in London, and particularly to the black cat and grey cat. At the time she is writing the book they are only two and four years old respectively, and so very much present concerns – and they cannot abide each other. Lessing’s descriptions of their ongoing feud, and the forms it takes, is more fascinating than any battle I have read about.

Writing about cats can be tricky. Lessing is beautifully successful – because she is loving without being sentimental, and observant without being fanciful. She clearly understands cats deeply, and never tries to credit them with any anthropomorphism that doesn’t fit. And, at the same time, she recognises the nuanced and varied behaviours that different cats have. Lessing describes them with an anthropologist’s fervour, and with an affection that knows they can never be fully understood by a non-cat.

To love Particularly Cats as much as I did, you probably have to love cats as much as I do – or at least find them as fascinating as I do. I would happily read about cats’ doings and habits for many more pages, but I’ll leave you with just one moment. If cats don’t interest you, this wouldn’t be for you – the book would be far less enjoyable for me if it were about dogs, for instance. But if you’re a felinophile, and can cope with the reality of nature red in tooth and claw, then I urge you to get hold of a copy.

As a kitten, this cat never slept on the outside of the bed. She waited until I was in it, then she walked all over me, considering possibilities. She would get right down into the bed, by my feet, or on to my shoulder, or crept under the pillow. If I moved too much, she huffily changed quarters, making her annoyance felt.

When I was the making the bed, she was happy to be made into it; and stayed, visible as a tiny lump, quite happily, sometimes for hours, between the blankets. If you stroked the lump, it purred and mewed. But she would not come out she had to.

Still Life by Richard Cobb – #NovNov Day 16

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Today’s book is cheating a bit, because I started it in September – and somehow it fell to one side, and I read the second half today. And it is twenty or so pages over the self-imposed 200pp limit. But no matter. I always loved Slightly Foxed Editions – not just beautiful books, but so brilliantly chosen. They’re always memoirs, and often of people I know nothing about. Sometimes, as in the case of Still Life by Richard Cobb, I’m none the wiser about why he’s famous by the end of the book. That’s fine.

Cobb grew up in Tunbridge Wells in a family that was respectable but not very well off, and Still Life is as much a paean to the Tunbridge Wells of his childhood in the ’20s and ’30s and beyond as it is to his family or anything else. Indeed, it starts with the different roads that lead into the town – viewing it from different angles, trying to work out where to start. As Arpita wrote in her review, the beginning of this memoir isn’t it strongest feature. It feels rather impersonal, and we don’t quite know where we are – disoriented, as we don’t quite settle in his house or in any one place.

But, thankfully, Still Life gets better and better as it goes on – and as Cobb fills in the gaps. He gradually adds details of neighbours, shops, customs. I loved his portraits of local notable people – not notable for their rank or even their achievements, but for their longevity, eccentricity, or other addition to the array of people in the community. I found particularly fascinating the contrast when the Second World War came and went – how people returned to their privacy and hierarchies, after a period where more doors were opened and people stood on ceremony less.

It continues with different ways of looking at the town, as a conceit, and here is the opening to a chapter called ‘Doors and Windows’:

In the course of my walks, at whatever time of day, I would pass many front doors behind which I had penetrated; and thus I came to see Tunbridge Wells as consisting of a series of interlocking privacies; a mingling of addresses at fixed times, and according to unstated, but recognised, conventions. There could be a proper time for the drawbridge to be brought down and for a carefully restricted breach of privacy. One would not expect to gain entry through a front door – unless it was that of a doctor or a dentist – in the morning, or any time much before 3. People did not ask one another to lunch, though they might arrange to meet at lunch -as they might meet for morning coffee at the Cadena or the Tudor Café – in one of those established that seem to have marked the Thirties and that served modest, three-course southern English meals by well-spoken ladies, generally in couples, and wearing artistic smocks over their tweeds, to show that they were not servants.

I loved what Arpita wrote about Still Life: ‘For as the dextrous miniaturist painter adds infinitesimal detail to his work of art, so too has the author added layer upon layer of minute detail of his retelling of childhood.’ That’s the feeling I got from this memoir too. Perhaps I enjoyed it more and more as it went not just for the things he included later in the book, but because I had more of a background to see each person and trait against. It was cumulatively enjoyable.

Another success from Slightly Foxed – but, at this point, that’s more or less tautology. The SF Editions remain one of the finest curated lists out there.

Tea or Books? #99: Do We Like Essays? and Brook Evans vs The Crowded Street

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Winifred Holtby, Susan Glaspell, and essays – welcome to episode 99!

Sorry for an unintended long break, but we’re back and Rachel even has a new mic – hopefully has helped with the sound issues, though there may be some teething problems while we get used to it. (I do my best but I am certainly not a professional editor!)

Don’t forget – we would love your questions for episode 100. Do send questions to teaorbooks@gmail.com, on anything you’d like to know about – from books to podcasting to tea to anything else.

In this episode, in the first half we talk about essays – and it is surprising that we haven’t done it before. In the second half, we compare two Persephone books – Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street and Susan Glaspell’s Brook Evans.

We’d love to hear from you – and please do review and rate the podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice. And you can find us on Patreon too.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers
Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village by Marit Kapla
Akenfield by Ronald Blythe
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
The Poor Man by Stella Benson
Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan
Murder Included by Joanna Cannan
When I Was A Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
If I May by A.A. Milne
Once a Week by A.A. Milne
Delight by J.B. Priestley
Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay
Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm
Edith Wharton
The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss
Fran Lebowitz
Gloria Steinem
Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde
The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson
Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
E.V. Lucas
George Orwell
Max Beerbohm
Notes to Self by Emilie Pine
Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins
Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield
Fidelity by Susan Glaspell
Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson
South Riding by Winifred Holtby
National Provincial by Lettice Cooper

The White Riband by F. Tennyson Jesse – #NovNov Day 15

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A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse has just come out as a British Library Women Writers title, and I think it’s probably the book for which she is best known – but it is far from her only book. I have two or three others on the shelves, including The White Riband from 1921. Even for a novella, it is extremely short – 121 pages in my edition, but with not many more than a hundred words per page.

I couldn’t work out quite when it was set – it might be contemporary, but it has a feeling of being rather older, and is set up like an eighteenth-century story with chapters labelled ‘In which Loveday sees one magpie’ and similar. The ‘heroine’ is, indeed, Loveday – a young and impoverished girl, whose local reputation has been permanently coloured by her parents not being born. Being conceived before marriage is a common trait in the community, but the parents are expected to marry – ideally before the baby is born. Loveday’s misfortune is twofold: that her father is foreign, and that he is dead. And the mother, of course, is more damaged by the gossip. As Tennyson Jesse amusingly puts it, ‘the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women about whom other people talk so much’.

Loveday has a chance encounter with a wealthy and beautiful young woman, Miss Le Pettit, who takes a fancy to Loveday’s striking looks. She suggests that they could dance together at the Flora dance – a local custom that everybody attends. And with her artistic eye, Miss La Pettit envisages Loveday’s red lips and dark hair being set off by being dressed entirely in white.

Loveday was left with that most dangerous of all passions – the passion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pettit she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover – she imagined she was in love with another human being, while in reality she was in love with those feelings in herself which that other had evoked. 

She becomes beset with the idea of getting hold of a white sash, to accompany the slightly yellowed white dress that had once been destined for her mother’s wedding. She doesn’t have long to secure what she wants, and her quest takes over most of the rest of the story.

It is, of course, a very slight novella. It could probably have been a short story, given the scope – but I do think the novella length suits the emotional weight of the character and plot. And probably it wouldn’t have had the same effect if it had been substantially longer or shorter.

The White Riband is simple and rather poignant, and I really liked it. There are hints of the empathetic author who wrote A Pin To See The Peepshow, similarly examining the limits of women’s lives and seeing how their emotional life can overflow these imposed boundaries. The canvas is much smaller, but I think the portrait is equally compelling.

The Silent Traveller in Oxford by Chiang Yee – #NovNov Day 14

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In 2009, I was in the Bookbarn in Somerset and somehow got chatting to someone who worked there. It came up that I lived in Oxford, and he was determined that I should read The Silent Traveller in Oxford – published in 1944, the fifth of twelve books Yee would write as ‘The Silent Traveller’, visiting or living in different places in England and, later, Scotland, Ireland, France, Japan and America. It took me a long time to get to it, but I really enjoyed my day spent with Yee. And much of that day was also spent in Oxford, walking many of the bits that he talks about.

Yee moved to Oxford because his flat in London had been destroyed by bombing. That is one of the few acknowledgements that war gets in this book, which is otherwise almost halcyon in the way that wartime seems to have bypassed life and tradition in Oxford. Students are still studying, drinking, rowing. The streets still throng with people, and history and modernity still jostle each other amicably.

It’s hard to describe exactly what Yee’s approach to his travels is. Some of the time he is staying with acquaintances and relates their stories; some of the time he is invited into colleges and learns what sets each one apart. But much of the time he is simply walking, enjoying the small moments he stumbles across – whether human, animal, or simply landscape. I liked that he doesn’t restrict himself to one tour of the streets and pathways of Oxford, but retreads and retreads them, telling us about similar journeys but with different occurrences. He is as beguiled by a duck or autumn leaves or the colour of stone as he is by people and buildings of greater repute or consequence.

He also isn’t a tourist, as such – he lives in Oxford for two or three years, and while the book does feel like Yee is constantly an outsider keenly observing, it is drawn from a long period living here. It gives him a familiarity and fondness for it that isn’t possible for a day visitor. He does incorporate aspects of his earlier life in China – sometimes contrasting English and Chinese people, sometimes being inspired by similarities. I loved this, from one of his wooded walks:

This leisured rhythmical swaying of leaves and flowers had an intoxicating effect on me. I became drowsy, though my thoughts were clear. I thought of willows in my own country. It is impossible to travel any distance in China without seeing willows. They are as popular as chestnut trees in England, and because of their popularity they have come to play a big part in our daily life. At the Ching-ming festival when we visit our ancestors’ tombs we break off a few young willow branches to bring back home and hang on the entrance gate as a sign of spring. In far-off days when we parted from our relations or friends we waved willow branches as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between us, because the long slender branches blown by the wind seemed to cling to the departing ones and prevent their going.

I lived in Oxford for thirteen years, and still live in Oxfordshire, so I am very familiar with it – I enjoyed following his walks in my head, and thinking about how much and how little has changed in the eight decades since The Silent Traveller in Oxford was written. But I think there would be a lot to enjoy in this even if you’ve never been – and that’s because of Yee’s tone. He comes across as such a gentle, kind man. He doesn’t go for outright comedy, but there is a lightness to his touch that is joyful. And his illustrations add something rather lovely – this is the Radcliffe Camera, where I worked part-time as a library assistant for seven years.

It took me a long time to join Yee on these travels, and perhaps I wouldn’t get as much out of a book set somewhere I don’t know well, but I would still happily accompany Yee on another of his silent travels one day.