Inevitably, not every book in A Book A Day in May is going to be a success. The past couple of days have both been novellas that are gonna go straight to a charity shop (unless someone from the UK would like me to post to you – in which case, let me know). (You might not want to when you’ve read the reviews.)
The Cheval Glass (1973) by Ursula Bloom
When I read Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex – one of Bloom’s pseudonyms, and now in the British Library Women Writers series – I was amazed that a book so enjoyable and well-crafted could be written by an author of 500+ novels. How could one maintain that level of quantity AND quality? Well, I’ve long suspected that she saved her best work for the ‘Mary Essex’ name – and The Cheval Glass suggests that might be the case. It’s the first fiction I’ve read under her own name, and it’s pretty bad.
Pearl is a young girl living in a family’s ancestral home. Her mother Mary was taken very ill during childbirth and becomes an invalid, having to stay in bed most of the time – so Pearl entertains herself by rambling around the large house and its attics, inventing friends to play with. More on that later.
While Mary is ill, her husband (James) falls in love with Hilary, an artist who has rented a house in the village. This happens entirely off the page. We no sooner encounter her than this love is taken as read. Curiously (in one of several signs of terrible editing), we hear about the meeting twice. We also hear, twice, about Mary getting terminal cancer. Quite how that relates to difficult childbirth, I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s the sort of novel where people decide to Honourably Do The Right Thing and then tell each other about it thoroughly unnatural dialogue. Here’s James, speaking to Hilary…
In a low voice he said, “I could never part with you, Hilary. This love has come to pass and is for ever. When the hour comes and she goes,” he choked a trigle uneasily, for it hurt him, “when the hour is here, we will marry after a reasonable waiting period, and the neighbourhood will think that we became so accustomed to each other during her illness that this automatically ensued. They will accept it as being that.”
Alongside all of this is the significance of the cheval glass. It has been in the family for generations – and, in it, Pearl starts to see one of her ancestors from generations ago. Here she is, telling Hilary about it:
“There is a lady here,” she whispered, complacemently and calmly. “Another lady,” she said, as though this was merely a piece of information which she accepted as being true. No more.
“Another lady?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the glass,” said the child, and stared up at her with a curious look in her eyes. She went on more slowly. “It is so very difficult to tell anybody who is grown-up, but she lives here. She does not always come when I want her. But most times. She is here.”
It’s a promising premise, but Bloom does very little about it. Everybody more or less immediately accepts that the mirror is a portal to the past, and ‘the lady’ (always in inverted commas) doesn’t seem to have anything more pressing to pass on than vague relationship advice to Hilary. Poor Pearl seems to disappear from the novel after the first half, having been seemingly its heroine, and The Cheval Glass becomes about Hilary’s rather tedious love triangle/square.
It’s a very weak novel, and shows clear signs of having been written at speed without any editing. Every sentence is clunky, and I found it rather a chore to get through. From now on, I think I’ll stick to Bloom when she appears as Mary Essex. Such a shame, since the cover is so striking.
The Grasshoppers Come (1931) by David Garnett
This one isn’t bad so much as it is not my taste. From the title, I thought it would be about nature – and that is how things start, with a three-page description of the heat and the ‘stridulations’ of grasshoppers:
As each day of the early summer passed, the sun grew hotter, the fine windless weather more settled, and the stridulation noisier, more incessant, and the little whirlpools, which seemed to catch up the flying insects over the reeds, larger and more powerful, holding them up longer in flight.
But then it becomes clear that it’s other flying things that are going to take centre stage – for this is also an aerodrome. Garnett cleverly describes the planes in similar manner:
Round and round they flew, some higher up wandering off a little way over the surrounding country, others lower down, and these lower machines were continually shutting off their engines and gliding almost silently in to land, dropping their tails as they settled down and bounced upon the earth, when, after a short run, they stopped until suddenly the engine was opened up again, and they would roar across the grass into the eye of the wind and fly away.
From here, it becomes a novella about life at an air base and descriptions of flying, with a variety of pilots I struggled to tell apart except one of them is a woman (in an era where all female pilots seemed to be celebrities). I suppose, in 1931, reading about flying was quite thrilling. I found it all a little tepid.
The Grasshoppers Come then gets into adventure mode, I think, with all manner of challenges and obstacles to the flying. Towards the end someone is stranded after a crash and has to survive of the self-same grasshoppers of the title, and I found this section the most compelling – perhaps because it didn’t rely on flying as inherently interesting.
So, there we go. Two more novellas off the shelf and off to a charity shop!
