A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham – #NovNov Day 6

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Today is definitely cheating, because A Wild Swan and other tales (2015) is, as the full title suggests, not a novella. It’s very definitely a collection of short stories, but it does come in at around 130 pages, so at least that bit fits the bill.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Cunningham books here, and he is definitely one of my favourite living writers. As far as I know, this is his only book of short stories – and they are all twists on fairy tales. Often they take the well-known story and see it from another point of view. What is the backstory for the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Was there a good reason that the Prince had been cursed in Beauty and the Beast? Did the Giant really deserve to have everything stolen by Jack, or to be killed?

It’s a mercy of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

The book has wonderful illustrations by Yuko Shimizu – fanciful, surreal, exuberant, a little dark. You can see some of them on Shimizu’s website.

Cunningham is so good at delving below the surface of the mundane that it feels quite odd to have his take on the fantastical. There is definitely a little of his dry reflections, such as this bit from a take on Rumpelstiltskin:

He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And…

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

I did find A Wild Swan enjoyable and quirky. Maybe my only reservation is that, creative as it was, this is nothing new. People have been reworking fairy tales for generations, and it no longer feels very fresh to rewrite them from the antagonist’s perspective. If Cunningham had been the first to do anything like this then it would have been amazing. As it is, the book felt a little unnecessary.

I often find myself thinking of a line from Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne, about his long poem about faith and philosophy The Norman Church: ”it was the sort of book which publishers accept ‘only out of deference to a writer who has supplied them through many years with better, more marketable books in other fields’.” I think about it for all sorts of books, and this was one of them. A new author would have a hard time justifying this book, but maybe his publishers thought Cunningham deserved to write what he fancied – and his name on the cover would sell plenty of copies.

So, I did enjoy this, in the same way I enjoy anything a little predictable and unchallenging. But did it need to be written?

By the way, I’ll be taking the day off a-novella-a-day tomorrow – because it’s my birthday, and I’ll be spending it with my bro. Back, maybe even with a proper novella, on the 8th!

Murder Included by Joanna Cannan – #NovNov Day 5

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A murder mystery is a fun choice for my novella-a-day challenge, because I always wants to finish a murder mystery in one day – and it’s only the length that stops me. Quite spontaneously, I took Murder Included by Joanna Cannan off the shelf this morning. It was published in 1950, though seemed to me to be set a decade or two earlier. Confusingly, it has also been published as A Taste of Murder and Poisonous Relations, which could be handy information if you want to track it down – and I recommend you do, because I thought it was really excellent.

Perhaps the title has been changed because it isn’t instantly obvious what it means, at least to more modern eyes. It refers to the idea of ‘breakfast included’ or ‘baths included’ – whatever features and facilities might be mentioned by somebody advertising rooms. Because the setting is Aston Park, a palatial ancestral home that has recently opened up to ‘paying guests’. I.e. it’s a hotel retaining a veneer of titled pride.

Sir Charles d’Estray lives there with his new wife Barbara, known as Bunny, a fairly highbrow novelist. They haven’t been married long, but it’s long enough for Bunny to realise that an overhaul is needed to avoid bankruptcy – so she spearheads the paying guests venture. Both halves of the marriage have at least one child – Sir Charles has three, all horsey and disdainful, while Bunny’s daughter Lisa is the main reason she has agreed to a marriage that never particularly appealed. She wants stability. They have lived in France for a long time, poor and with an unsalubrious crowd, and seeing Lisa expertly resurrect a drunken man at the age of twelve has convinced Bunny to take her to English respectability.

All has been going well, with various fairly long-term paying guests – some relations of the d’Estrays and others strangers – when one of them is found dead. Elizabeth – one of the relatives; a cousin – has been poisoned.

A death in a crowded country pile is hardly a novelty for the murder mystery, but there were various things that made Murder Included stand out for me. One is the cleverness of the solution, which naturally I won’t spoil – but it does include a neat trick that I don’t remember seeing used anywhere else. But the main reason I loved this book is Cannan’s writing. Here’s the police detective, Price, arriving at the scene:

He had kept silence as a loutish local constable drove him through the October dusk over hills to wrought-iron gates, yew hedges, and Elizabethan gables. A doddering parasite of a butler had shown him into this large, over-crowded, shabby, so-called study, where Colonel Blimp, after nearly wringing his hand off, had turned ‘Susie – little woman’ out of a chair and expected him to sit down in it. Now, fussing about with cut-glass decanter and silver cigarette box, he was doing his best to turn an important conference into a cosy chat.

(Susie, for the avoidance of doubt, is a dog – and Colonel Blimp is a reference to the archetype, not a character in Murder Included.) Price has been sent in from Scotland Yard because the local police are too biased in favour of the respected family and the house’s servants, many of whom are related to police officers. And Price doesn’t have any time for this sort of set up. He has his prejudices about rural people, titled people, and more or less anybody who isn’t a left-wing urbanite like himself.

Cannan can be very funny, and she spears characters so mercilessly well. That means she can make us really like the people we’re meant to like, such as Bunny and Lisa. But others are definitely victims of her pen. I’m not sure if we are meant to actively dislike Price, and she apparently did use him for other murder mysteries, but he definitely isn’t the sympathetic detective hero that many novelists would use. Here he is questioning teenage Lisa…

‘I’m sure you’re a very clever little girl. I’m sure if anyone – even a grown-up person – annoyed you, you’d get the better of them.’

Lisa looked puzzled. ‘I’m not in the least clever. I’ve never got the better of anyone. Actually if someone annoys me I answer back, but I generally get the worst of it.’

‘And then do you brood over it and think out your revenge?’

‘Good gracious no! I’m not a character out of Wuthering Heights,’ said Lisa, laughing merrily.

Elizabeth isn’t the last person to die in the story – it would hardly be a classic murder mystery if she were. And perhaps the book is published a little late to truly be of peak Golden Age, though it’s up there with the best examples I’ve read in terms of economy, style, and plot.

In fact, I would give it that great accolade, which is all too rare of detective fiction: I’d have loved it just as much if there hadn’t been a murder at all.

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl – #NovNov Day 3

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Like Amsterdam that I read yesterday, Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl opens with a death.

Now your husband is also dead, Anna. Your husband, our husband. I would have liked him to lie next to you, but you have neighbours, a lawyer and a lady who was buried a couple of years ago.

The novella is narrated by Ellinor as one long address to Anna, the first wife of Ellinor’s husband Georg – he has just died, and Anna has been dead for four decades. Anna and Ellinor were friends, and Ellinor has now been stepmother to Anna’s twins for far longer than the seven years that Anna knew them. Ellinor is now 70. Her life is far from over, but many of her ties to the past are disappearing.

This novella was published in 2016 and translated from Danish by the author in 2017. It is certainly very short – 167 pages in my edition, but with a large font and enormous margins. In that space, Grøndahl covers an impressive amount. We start in the present, with Ellinor detailing the way that her stepsons and their families have reacted to Georg’s death. Or, moreso, how they have reacted to her reaction. Ellinor has sold the house even before the estate has been properly settled, and she is moving to a house in a disreputable part of town – the part that she came from.

Ellinor’s narrative wanders further back – to the friendship she and Anna had, as well as how she met the man she married to before Georg. And to the event that led to Anna’s death. Without losing a certain gentleness in her reminiscences, Ellinor slowly shows us that the relationships were more complicated than they might seem at first:

You must allow me to place that image here, Anna. We must look at it together; please don’t lower your eyes. The worst thing was to lose you, but the second worst thing was that you never got a chance to ask for my forgiveness. You don’t hear what I am saying, and that is the worst. You don’t remember; you are not. I speak to you only because I want to be something more than an accumulation of facts and their succession.

And Ellinor goes further back still – as though, having begun to explore the past, she can’t help go further still. To her own childhood, to her mother’s younger days – as told to her, of course. As she considers a new start in the present, Grøndahl shows us all the ways that Ellinor is tethered to events in her past and those that happened before she was born. As with his brilliant novella Virginia, the war shows the long shadows it can cast across generations.

This is the third book I’ve read by Grøndahl – two very short, and one quite long. From that sample size, I prefer him in novella form. He can get so much of life into a short span, told sparsely but in such a way that we sense the depth behind the brief accounts we hear. Ellinor’s story isn’t told in many words, but there is a whole life in Often I Am Happy.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan – #NovNov Day 2

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I bought Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan around the time I read Atonement – so probably around 2003, i.e. half my life ago, more or less. I’ve been up and down with McEwan, but have somehow never read this Booker prizewinner – and now I have, it is right up there with my favourites of his.

I had assumed – you can see why – that the novella took place in Amsterdam. While there are moments there, the full impact of the title isn’t clear for a while, and much of the novel takes place firmly on English soil. It opens with the funeral of Molly Lane, and conversation between two of her former lovers. Clive is a composer, writing a symphony for the millennium; Vernon is the editor of The Judge, a newspaper that has been slowly declining for a long time and may be on its last legs.

Vernon and Clive have more in common than their mutual lover (deceased). They have been friends for a long time, and have still a friendship that is equal parts affection, competition, and disdain. McEwan is very good at the spiky sort of witty unpleasantness of a certain sort of man, and both these men are in that category. He’s also good about creative processes, and I think he writes well about musical composition. I say ‘I think’, because I can’t do it and have no idea what composers would say, but it worked for me.

Creation apart, the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and deletions; amending again until the bar is right, and playing it once more on the piano. By midnight Clive had extended and written out in full the rising passage, and was starting on the great orchestral hiatus that would precede the sprawling change of key. By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

I shan’t say too much about the plot, but both men come up against moral quandaries – harming someone, or at least not preventing harm, in the name of their art/profession. McEwan’s spin on this is that neither of them really see the moral dilemma in their own lives, but only in each other’s. And neither is nice enough for this to be a learning experience. Amsterdam is perhaps a dark comedy. Or maybe a light tragedy.

So, I thought it was brilliant – and a page-turner too. The only reservation I have is what a blank space Molly is. Yes, she is dead before the book begins, but McEwan never really gives us any sense of her vitality before she died, or why so many men were attracted to her. Or maybe she is meant to remain an enigma.

Another great Novellas in November read – keep checking out Cathy and Rebecca‘s blogs to see what everyone else is reading!

A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson – #NovNov Day 1

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It’s time for Novellas in November – run by Cathy and Rebecca – and I have rather unwisely decided to try and read one every day in November. It seemed like a great idea a while ago. I’ve done my 25 Books in 25 Days a couple of times, and it’s not many more – so here’s hoping it’ll be a fun time.

There are a couple of caveats – I’m going to chat and do a book a day, not necessarily a novella, so expect some non-fiction and perhaps some short story collections, and other rule-breaking things. The other caveat is that my eyes/head haven’t fully recovered from the mystery illness I had last year – usually all is fine now, but sometimes I get periods when I’m dizzy or have sore eyes, and neither make reading very easy. If that happens, I might have to quietly give up or postpone the project.

ANYWAY that’s a lot of intro when really I should be writing a quick review of A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson. It was published in 1933 and I bought it in 2009. It has been one of those books I’m really keen to read, and kept wanting to save it for a special occasion – eventually, after more than a decade, I decided I should stop waiting and just read it. Coming in at 191 pages, it fits my loose definition of a novella that it should be under 200pp.

The title is a bit misleading – it is all very connected with the theatre, but the child of the title is arguably not the main character, and nor is she a child for very long. She is Amy Bowker, later known as Amy Ida, who had her big break after being spotted as an angelic infant – swept onto the stage, quickly falling into a world that her working-class, naive, mildly neglectful parents don’t truly understand. Her carefully learned morals no longer make sense in this new environment. Everything becomes about her ascendancy through the stage – an ascendancy that is very up and down, teetering in the right direction. Ferguson depicts it with dry humour and clear-eyed reality. ‘Reality’ isn’t a word one would usually associate with Ferguson. A Child in the Theatre is certainly more grounded than her more famous novels. While Ferguson will never write about the grimness of the gutter – she satirises that sort of outlook in a play in A Child in the Theatre, called ‘High Tea’ – she has also peopled this book with characters who don’t wander into fantastical realms, in the way her characters often would.

I said that Amy isn’t really the central character of the novel – that title must belong to Vivian Garson, later Vyvyan Garson. She is introduced as Amy’s schoolteacher – one with very unconventional views, particularly for the first decade of the 20th century…

And then it began: the rumour, staff-circulated with shocked, apologetic titter, that Miss Garson had explained, upon inquiry, what a mistress was to the elder girls. Yes. Nell Gwyn… or Mrs Fitzherbert.

Miss Langham took the splendid line that the rumour was incredible – and invited Miss Garson alone to tea to cheer herself.

‘Miss Langham! They’ve a right to know. I mean, they’ll be wives and probably mothers themselves one day, and what is the real difference between being a wife or mistress, when you get down to brass tacks?’

Miss Langham closed her eyes. She was never herself among brass tacks.

Vivian Garson is eventually fired after being seen having a port with someone in the theatre, where she has been to support Amy’s first professional role. She can’t find another teaching job – but she has become almost obsessed with the prodigious Amy, and decides to get a role herself in the theatre. While she doesn’t end up going where Amy is, as she intends, she does become swept up in the theatrical world. As Vyvyan, a more glamorous name, she becomes part of the chorus. And then becomes a bigger and bigger name.

Vyvyan and Amy have interlocked lives, but Ferguson cleverly keeps them apart in the book. Their careers overtake and imitate each other. It’s not a case of one having success and the other languishing – at times, one is feted and the other struggles. Then it will reverse. Vyvyan never stops thinking about Amy, seeing a deep bond between them; Amy, on the other hand, seems wilfully ignorant of her erstwhile teacher and well-wisher.

Ferguson’s novels are often delightfully unhinged. A Child in the Theatre is something different. It has a recognisable Ferguson style, but is much more about the intensity of a relationship between two women, even if they seldom meet or correspond. There are so many places where the story could have played out differently, but Ferguson never gives into the predictable. She hardly ever even states the unbreakable tie that shadows both of the women. She plays out their two careers, and the bond is invisibly in the background.

Ferguson obviously has a great time writing about the theatre, and presumably draws on her own experience as a stage actress in the years before the First World War. I found it very illuminating and convincing, and there are other fascinating period moments – such as brief sections on suffragette. And it is, of course, often very funny. I did enjoy this paragraph, which feels like it came from life:

Miss Anderson came of a local family whose trade beginnings success was swamping, and whose care for the deletion of the Howdlie accent was a religion. The Andersons did not say ‘By gum,’ but by-gummery was in their blood and outlook, and to Vyvyan her struggles to imitate a lady imitating an actress imitating a mill-hand were a feast for eye and ear.

Overall, I can see why this hasn’t had the wide audience of Ferguson’s tour de force novels. It is a quieter, subtler, more sedate book in some ways. It is, of course, also quite short. But I think it is no less an achievement than many of her delightfully histrionic books. A Child in the Theatre is Ferguson in a different mode, and one I think is certainly worth seeking out.

Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.

K is for Kingsolver

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I don’t have a lot of candidates for ‘K’ in the alphabet, though perhaps more than I would have expected at first: I own and have read books by Emily Kimbrough, Jessie Kesson, Molly Keane, Margaret Kennedy, Sheila Kaye-Smith off the top of my head, and maybe even some books by men beginning with K too. But Barbara Kingsolver is my choice – partly because she wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, and also because I know she is well-loved across the blogosphere.

How many books do I have by Barbara Kingsolver?

I’ve got five books by Kingsolver, which is quite low for an author in this series – perhaps you remember the dizzying piles of Crompton and Delafield books. But there are probably more pages in these five than five books by any other author I have in the house.

How many of these have I read?

From this pile, I’ve only read three (including one I finished yesterday). Confusingly, I’ve read another two that aren’t here – and one of the pile I have read was actually another edition. The Lacuna has had a journey of getting, giving away unread, re-buying, and still not having read.

How did I start reading Barbara Kingsolver?

My first Kingsolver was The Bean Trees, borrowed from a friend and finally bought earlier this year. It was part of a postal book group I was in, where we chose a book and posted it around a dozen people before it came back with a notebook of comments and thoughts. I loved it, but then I read The Poisonwood Bible for a book group. I can’t remember if it was borrowed from the library or a friend, or if I decided not to keep it – but it made me lukewarm on Kingsolver (for reasons I’ll go into below). It was only when doing A Century of Books that I turned to Pigs in Heaven because I needed something to read to fill the 1993 slot. It was so brilliant that I got back on the Kingsolver train. (The only I’ve read that isn’t pictured is Prodigal Summer, which I listened to as an audiobook.)

General impressions…

As you may have gathered from the above – mixed! Pigs in Heaven is one of the best modern novels I’ve read (I can count 1990s as modern, right?) and I loved The Bean Trees. I did like Prodigal Summer a lot, though perhaps could have done with a little less description of the environment and more about the fascinating characters she had created. As for The Poisonwood Bible – some brilliant writing, the final quarter should have been lopped off, and the preacher was a rare misstep in Kingsolver’s aptitude for subtlety. And I’ve just finished Small Wonder, a collection of her essays, which I’ll write about soon and which were great – if rather locked in one particular moment of time.

Overall – I think she is a great prose writer, able to be just poetic enough without losing the storytelling momentum. I’m not sure the things I find interesting totally overlap with what she finds interesting, and I think she’s at her best when she doesn’t let the message overpower the story. But I will certainly keep reading her (and her ENORMOUS books) and am glad that such a thoughtful writer is finding a wide audience.

British Library Women Writers 11: The Love Child by Edith Olivier

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When the British Library Women Writers series was first suggested, one of the titles I thought about first was The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Not only is it one of my favourite novels, – novellas? – it was one of the key texts in my DPhil on middlebrow, fantastic novels. I’ve read it many times, and have pressed it into many people’s hands. I’ve written about it on here more than once. But it wasn’t in print, and I really wanted it to be.

Or… was it in print? While you wouldn’t have been likely to find it in bookshops, there was a print-on-demand version available – along with all the rest of Olivier’s novels. The editions weren’t beautiful, but they were great at making the books available. And yet I really, really wanted it between beautiful British Library covers… luckily I was like the persistent widow of the Bible, and finally the British Library agreed. (It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but I am delighted that The Love Child made it!) It was possible because Olivier died more than 70 years ago, and so the novel is out of copyright.

The Love Child was Olivier’s first novel, written when she was in her 50s – she described the idea as coming to her in the middle of the night, and feverishly writing the beginning in her bed. And that idea is this: what if an imaginary friend became real?

What makes this such a 1920s novel is that the heroine is an unmarried woman who feels herself on the shelf in her 30s – and, with so many men lost at war, she has far fewer options for marriage. While many women have always been happy without marriage and children, Agatha Bodenham is not one of those women. Not having a child is clearly an aching gap in her life.

As the story begins, she is mourning her mother – her final close family connection. Agatha starts thinking about Clarissa, her childhood imaginary friend – whom had been a wonderful (if illusory) companion until a governess poured scorn on her. She remembers the joy of playing with her, and starts to do so again.

Then one day, when Agatha was quietly sitting on the white seat at the end of the green walk, darning a black woollen stocking to wear in church the next day, and for once more absorbed in darning than in dreaming – then, all of a sudden, Clarissa came and sat on the seat beside her. She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.

Clarissa has materialised! From here, The Love Child looks at the delight of this miracle – but, as time goes on, the problems that come with it. Clarissa is increasingly visible to others, and Agatha has to deal with that. And, as she grows earlier, Clarissa begins to yearn for independence herself…

This is a short masterpiece, far better than anything else Olivier wrote. It’s sophisticated and complete, and I think ranks as one of the most perfect novellas of the 20th century. As it’s so short, this new British Library edition also includes a selection of excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography, Without Knowing Mr Walkley, which I think is a really helpful addition to the book. And, of course, my afterword – which is largely about the introduction of the first adoption law in the UK, referred to in the novel.

If you haven’t read this gem before, I very much recommend it! And don’t miss the different posts about the series appearing across blogs, YouTube and Instagram during the ongoing #FarMoreThanFiction blog tour (of which this is, I suppose, an unofficial entry!)

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

In Mrs Alfred Sidgwick’s 1923 novel, None-Go-By is the fanciful title of the Cornish cottage that Mary and Thomas decide to move to, to escape the hustle and bustle of relatives, friends and neighbours and their lives in London. Mary is our narrator, and describes how their lives have been taken over by the demands made by others – and this is intended to be something of an escape.

The cottage was so small that Thomas and I never quite got over the impression of living in a doll’s house; but, if Thomas was careful, he could stand upright in the rooms. He is a thin, tallish man with a saint-like expression that he thinks must have come on him gradually through being married to me; and even when he is out at elbows he has a way of looking presentable. What he ought to have done was entertain Mrs Lomax while I escaped upstairs and made myself tidy; but on the wrong occasion Thomas will often act with disconcerting suddenness. In this case he threw open the door of the room that contained our visitor, and there we were confronting each other. My first thought was that the room could hardly contain anything else. However, we squeezed in.

Thomas writes books with titles like The Physiological Correlate of the Instinctive Process. Mary doesn’t pretend to understand his work, but has her own interests – including less niche books and gardening. The novel opens amusingly, and the tone reminded me rather of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield – justifiably a classic, and perhaps a touchstone for a certain sort of middle-class, middlebrow humour that I love from the period.

As is perhaps inevitable in a comic novel where a couple are trying to avoid demanding relatives and neighbours, they are continually inundated with both. There is a succession of nephews, nieces, and the like who come with their all-important personal problems or a need to be distracted. A niece has left her husband, or so she believes; a young nephew floods the garden while supposedly convalescing after illness. Each comes with their own trials that Mary, as narrator, relates as comedies rather than tragedies. There is no genuine pathos in None-Go-By, nor is there intended to be.

Mary and Thomas get to know the neighbours, of whom or two are not objectionable. A snobbish character tries to hector them into keeping certain company; another unpleasant character thinks they aren’t artistic enough to remain where they are. The stakes remain low because Mary doesn’t take anything too seriously – the reader can’t really feel genuine emotions when the characters don’t seem to.

I quite enjoyed reading None-Go-By, but I did have a couple of pretty big reservations that stopped me loving the book – as I’d thought I might, when I started it. The first is hinted above – relatives and friends come and go, neighbours are introduced and sidelined, and it gives the novel a really episodic feel. We don’t really get to know a visitor until their little crisis is resolved and they’re on their way. It all emphasises the fact that Mary and Thomas can’t truly escape the maelstrom of their lives, but I found it meant the novel lost something in the way of momentum.

The other thing was Thomas. Jane wrote a very enthusiastic review of None-Go-By seven years ago, and in it she writes ‘I had to smile at gentle marital bickering between Thomas and Mary; for all that each tried to have the last word it was clear that they were two very different people who loved each other and accepted each others little foibles.’ They certainly bicker, but I have to say I found Thomas too infuriating to smile at it. Where the Provincial Lady’s husband Robert is oblivious, Thomas is astonishingly selfish and thoughtless. He often blames Mary for the chaos he causes, disregards her expressed wishes, and never thinks of anything except his own contentedness. Mary does rather roll her eyes and move on, but I think Sidgwick overplayed the card of ‘aren’t husbands absent-minded?’. It was hard to see why Mary would even want to remain married to him.

So – I started off really loving this novel, and thought it could be a real winner. And I ended up a little disappointed.

This is my second novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way – and there is enough that I liked in the tone of this novel that I’m keen to read more by her. There was just some elements to this one that jarred, while also feeling a little drab. But I feel curiously confident that there will be a book waiting for me among her output that will hit the sweet spot and become a cherished favourite. Now I just have to keep exploring…