1929

Three more #1929Club books

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It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Giono, Jean, Abram, David, Eprile, Paul: 9781590179185: Books

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman by Stephen Leacock – #1929Club

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Stephen Leacock is one of the authors I first got really into, and I’ve put together quite a collection. Like a lot of the authors I loved around 2002-2005, I binge-read a lot at the time and now only read one every few years. When I spotted that The Iron Man and the Tin Woman was a 1929 title, it was a great opportunity to make this one my next Leacock.

It’s not one of his best known or easiest to find, in this country at least, and I think it’s a really interesting addition to the 1929 Club because it’s about the future. While in Leacock’s characteristic style of humour – dry exaggeration – it shows what was considered to be the frontiers of modernity in 1929. Some of the sections are what might happen in a couple of decades’ time, while other sections highlight things that seem alarmingly modern in everyday life. For example, there is the idea that life is far more regulated by rules and bureaucracy:

“Dear me!” sighed Angelina, “I suppose it’s wicked to say it, but sometimes it seems terrible to live in this age when everything is so regulated. Did you read that awfully clever novel that came out last week called ‘Wicked Days’ that told all about our great-grandfathers’ time when people used to just do almost as they liked?”

“No, the book was suppressed, you know, immediately. But I heard something of it.”

“It must have been awfully queer. Anybody could go round anywhere and visit any house they liked and actually, just think of it!—go and eat meals in other people’s houses and even in public restaurants without a Sanitary Inspector’s Certificate or anything!”

Edward shook his head. “Sounds a bit dangerous,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’d like it. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had a cold in the head, you might catch it. Or suppose you found yourself eating in a restaurant perhaps only six feet away from a person infected with an inferiority complex, it might get communicated to you.” He shivered.

“Let’s sit down,” said Angelina suddenly. “I want to go on talking, but I don’t feel like walking up and down all the time. Here’s a bench. I wonder if we are allowed to sit on it.”

“I’ve got a Sitting License for two in my pocket,” said Edward, “but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s been stamped.”

I also love any time when Leacock apes popular styles of writing, and applies them to mundanities to highlight their absurdities. It’s something he often returns to and I can’t quite describe what he’s doing and why I enjoy it so much. Anyway, here’s an example – where he is satirising the tell-all memoir:

I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.

First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.

And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.

My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.

I found The Iron Man and the Tin Woman a mixed bag – and enjoyable, but with limits. Leacock is always diverting, and he has a real eye for human foibles and a gentleness, even a kindness, in the way that he teases them. But the premise of this book has its limits. When his vision of the dizzying future is 1950, it’s understandable that some of the impact is lost by 1950. For instance, he suggests people will be taking round-the-world tourist trips within a day by 1950 – and, the brilliantly observant bit, will be rather bored by them and glad to get home. Now, the humour relies a little on the possibility of this happening. 70+ years later, we know it hasn’t. It’s still fun, but without the frisson of possibility that a 1929 audience would have seen in the background.

The other thing that stands out, reading this almost a century after it was published, was how eternal the complaints about modernity are. Among the ideas that are highlighted in this book are:

  • too many cars on the road
  • marriage not being taken seriously
  • everything being too commercialised
  • young people not respecting their elders or being willing to work hard
  • advertising being devious

It just goes to show that every generation complains about more or less the same things. And, of course, every generation sees themselves as the pinnacle of modernity – for good and bad – as every generation is the pinnacle of modernity, until they are replaced. If The Iron Man and the Tin Woman is probably best read in 1929, it was still fun to read today. Definitely not where I’d recommend somebody start with Stephen Leacock, but plenty to enjoy for the existing fan.

Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1929Club

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For years, the only novel by Mollie Panter-Downes that was available was her last – One Fine Day – which is also her masterpiece. By comparison, her earlier novels were extremely scarce. The British Library Women Writers series has reprinted My Husband Simon, and there must be question marks out there about her others. Are they worth reprinting? Well, I am in the fortunate position of owning all her novels, and Storm Bird happens to be a perfect candidate for the 1929 Club.

I was quite surprised when the main character of Storm Bird turned out to be a man who has recently been widowed. Martin Thorpe is old for 1929, though wouldn’t be considered so now – in his sixties. Florence is the wife who has recently died, and she immediately fades into the background. We don’t learn a lot about her along the way, and it seems that Martin began forgetting her long before she died. For the most part, the narrative isn’t particularly interested in her either, but I did think this passage was beautifully done:

It was a little cruel that when Martin Thorpe thought of his dead wife it was only as a woman who had made the last twenty-five years extraordinarily comfortable, for she had been a creature of quite a few memorable moments and much talent for a sturdy kind of companionship. Although she had never understood him, he had loved her deeply, yet when he tried to conjure up her fine dusky looks he found only a blurred impression of good food and a quiet skill in handling servants. Her ringing laugh was becoming increasingly difficult to remember, though the culinary triumphs of her dinners were as vivid in his mind as ever. He could even recall the clothes she wore better than the body which had once turned his feet from Mexico to Broad Street. Plunging into the chilly waters of death, she had left surprisingly few and trivial garments on the bank.

Florence’s real purpose is to have provided Martin with a daughter, Leslie, now an adult and rather dependent on her father financially and socially. We are not far into the novel when Martin spots Sara across the room at a party that is too bohemian and self-congratulatory for his liking. She is young and striking, and Martin is struck.

He stopped in the middle of his talk to ask her with startling suddenness how old she was. She told him ‘twenty-four’. He stared at the years separating them, and thought how hot, dusty, and jaded he must seem to her, glowing with that magic which he envied with an envy almost like hate.

The reader can see what is coming from the outset, though I have to admit I was rather hoping it wouldn’t. Perhaps there are good relationships in real life with around a 40-year age gap, but they just seem icky on the page. To me, at least. There is something so uncomfortable about an old man romancing a young woman, particularly with this wealth imbalance. Sara has been an artists’ model to make money, and her nude form can be found in paintings in exhibitions and homes. Martin is wealthy in a way that means non-wealth has barely appeared on his radar.

The marriage of Martin and Sara is dealt with cleverly by Panter-Downes. We don’t see much of the development of the relationship. It is sprung on us with suddenness – in the same way that it is sprung on Martin’s daughter Leslie. Unsurprisingly, she is not particular won over by the idea. If the reader is reacting the same, then one line of dialogue might be intended to chastise us:

“If only she wasn’t so young! That’s what makes it -“

“If only,” said her father softly, “your objections weren’t so distressingly conventional.”

After this, it’s a novel about what happens when two people from different worlds marry, with clearly few people on their side. One of the things I found interesting about it, as so often in club years, is how certain societal trends are considered to be at an extreme – when we know, from our 21st-century vantage, that it was simply the tip of the ice-berg. In this instance, I’m thinking about this line:

Divorce was so easy in these days; all her friends slipped in and out of marriage as though it were a shoe which pinched here or was too loose there.

As you’ll have seen from some of these lines, I think Panter-Downes’ writing is often very good in Storm Bird. You can certainly see signs of the observational, detailed prose writer she’d become. I think where the novel falls down a little is in character and plot. It often feels quite cartoonish, or derived from melodramas and penny romances. That is to say, people behave like characters in a book, rather than people.

I looked up how old Panter-Downes was when she wrote this – 22. About the age of Sara, but choosing to focalise the novel through Martin. And what does a 22-year-old know about being widowed after a long marriage? It’s clear that, at this stage of her writing career, Panter-Downes was learning from books rather than from life. And it shows. There is no psychological depth to Storm Bird; it is more histrionic than moving.

It’s interesting as a way of seeing what Panter-Downes would become – and only two years later she would write a rather better book in My Husband Simon, perhaps because it is so clearly autobiographical. In Storm Bird, she was trying to put herself into another life – as great writers always have – but simply wasn’t good enough to that yet.

Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell – #1929Club

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I’ve been meaning to read some Gladys Mitchell for years, and have had a couple on my shelves for at least eight years – what better opportunity than the 1929 Club, where I can encounter her detective Mrs Bradley in her first mystery.

I am familiar with some of the many Mrs Bradley mysteries through the TV series of them, starring Diana Rigg, that was on in the late 1990s. I see from the Wikipedia page that there were only five episodes made, which is odd as I remember there being far more. The first of them was, indeed, Speedy Death – though I don’t remember how accurately the script follows the original text. Something that definitely isn’t accurate is the casting. Here is the description of her, given by one of the characters:

Then there is Mrs Bradley. Know her? Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic sort of dame. Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age. I believe she is one. Good little old sport, though.

Elsewhere she is described as a ‘playful alligator’. And every time she is mentioned, the narrative mentions her ugliness, her appalling outfits, her witchlikeness. Not necessarily somebody you’d naturally think noted beauty Diana Rigg should play?

Besides her looks, Mrs Bradley is chiefly notable for her love of psychoanalysis – very much on-brand for 1929, where Freudianism was discussed everywhere, even if it wasn’t believed by all that many people. ‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-time chat,’ as D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1923. Mrs Bradley is an author of books on this topic, and cheerfully cynical about human nature.

“We are all murderers, my friend,” said Mrs Bradley lugubriously. “Some in deed and some in thought. That’s the only difference, though.”

I haven’t mentioned this particular murder. It’s your classic mansion set up – a family have invited various notables to come and stay for a house party. Among them is the groom-to-be of the daughter of the house, who is also a noted explorer. Not long after everyone descends on the house, he is found dead in his bath – only it turns out that he is, in fact, a woman.

From here, things follow much as you might imagine from a Golden Age detective novel – at least in terms of plot. There are numerous suspects, there are police questionings, there is at least the possibility of more corpses along the way.

I actually found the plot a little flimsy and frenetic – things dart from one crisis to another, with not much in the way of detection happening between them. Many of the characters are similarly flimsy, though no more so than you’d encounter in many different novels. While the solution is a bit haphazard, and Mrs Bradley’s detection techniques are unorthodox, what made me really enjoy Speedy Death was undoubtedly Mrs Bradley herself. I can certainly see why Mitchell thought she should keep going with this detective, and indeed keep going for many more decades. She is larger than life, but Mitchell is brilliant at controlling that largeness – she is exuberant, ridiculous, confident but always consistent. Mitchell knows exactly what she’s doing, and deploys this bombastic character to best effect.

Perhaps later Mrs Bradley novels have a slightly more sophisticated plot, and less of a feeling that everything has been flung at it – even Agatha Christie put far too much into her debut detective novel. I’m looking forward to finding out, and re-encountering the entertaining burlesque that is Mrs Bradley.

Paying Guests by E.F. Benson – #1929Club

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I suspect E.F. Benson is like toffee – a little is a total delight, but you wouldn’t want to have too many in a row. It’s been a few years since I last picked up an EFB, and so I absolutely loved heading to Paying Guests for the 1929 Club.

Though the novel is called Paying Guests, the people in this book are very much living in a boarding house. ‘Paying guests’ or ‘PGs’ was a polite fiction that people used in the period to make the arrangement seem more genteel – often it would be just one or two people staying as paying guests in the home of people they knew, at least tangentially. Here, the residents are a mix of long- and short-term, mostly longer, and they aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

The boarding house is run by two widowed sisters, one quite fluttery and inclined to panic, the other less invested and more inclined to enjoy seeing the worst in people. Their residents include retired Colonel Chase who nightly shares his triumphs in walking or cycling; Mr Kemp the hypochondriac and his daughter Florence who is permitted no will of her own; Miss Howard the amateur artist and musician who performs ‘improvisations’ that she has practised for many hours beforehand; Miss Bliss who is at Dolton Spa to take the waters but insists that Mind will heal her – and a handful of others, less prominent.

Like a lot of Benson novels, the joy mostly comes from the combination of people who have nothing to do but gossip about each other and try to come out top in a relatively amiable, never-ending tussle for dignity. Some have their eyes on something outside of this community – marriage, perhaps – but most have resigned themselves to staying exactly where they are. Or perhaps ‘resigned’ is not the right word – they are perfectly content with their minor gripes, antipathies, observations. It could be a much sadder novel if you didn’t suspect that most of the characters wouldn’t change a thing.

The biggest plot point in Paying Guests is probably Miss Howard’s exhibition of her paintings. Which is described with Benson’s typically merciless observation of the way a certain sort of person speaks:

“Are you going into town?”

“Yes. I’ve got to see about my little pickies being framed. Just fancy! I’m going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches. So rash! But nobody would give me peace until I promised to.

This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said “Oh, you must!” again and again and again. She had to yield.

“So frightened about it,” said Miss Howard, “I shall certainly leave Bolton the day before it opens, so as not to hear all the unkind things you say about it.”

The fate of this exhibition is probably the highest stakes in Paying Guests, and I did find it as compelling as much more dramatic plots in other novels.

The other element of the book I really loved was Miss Bliss and her Mind. Benson doesn’t use the term Christian Scientist, but she is certainly something of that ilk – trying to persuade everybody that their illnesses are illusory, and that even lost objects can be found with sufficient application to Mind. She herself is clearly severely unwell, but finds plenty of excuses to explain this away. Again, in another novelist’s hands this could have been desperately sad – but, in Benson’s, it is deeply funny.

I still have a few other 1929 titles on the go, but I think this is going to be my favourite 1929 Club read. Sheer fun.

 

No Love by David Garnett #1929Club

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no love david garnett dj

Considering I wrote about David Garnett substantially in my doctorate thesis, it is a bit embarrassing how few of his novels I’ve read. In my defence, I wrote about his first books (Lady Into Fox and The Man in the Zoo), so his later books were less relevant – but I must have bought No Love more than ten years ago and had it waiting on my shelves. (The picture above is borrowed from Barb’s review.)

Garnett was particularly prolific in the 1920s, after his bestselling 1922 debut, and he’d already written another six or seven books by the time No Love came out in 1929. It helps that all his early books are so short. This one starts with an arresting line…

When in 1885 Roger Lydiate, the second son of the Bishop of Warrington, and himself a young curate, became engaged to Miss Cross, the marriage was looked on with almost universal disapprobation.

Roger and Alice are on honeymoon in the south of England when they head out by boat to Tinder Island – a location that I think is made up, though it might be a real place with a new name.

“Let us land here,” said Alice, and she was not disappointed when they found themselves wandering through an immense orchard of flowering plum trees. The petals were falling, and when the young people passed out of the first orchard into the one beyond it, they would have seemed to our eyes like a newly wedded couple standing on the church steps, though the thought did not come to them, since confetti was not used in England in the eighties.

It doesn’t take long for them to decide to live there, and Garnett writes (at this stage of No Love) with a sort of fairy tale tone that makes spontaneous, life-changing decisions feel par for the course. The practicalities of being the only inhabitants of an island are dealt with, but rather swiftly. A little work on the land and they are good to go in Tinder Hall – the island’s only, ancient house. They have a daughter, Mabel, and five years later a son called Benedict.

But before long they need more money – and so they sell a section to Captain Keltie, who is much wealthier, after he and his wife fall in love with the island after a serendipitous visit. They build an enormous faux-Elizabethan house.

From the first its size had alarmed the Lydiates; it was its size indeed which had led Roger to fear that it might ultimately be meant to serve as a training college for Dr Barnado’s boys. The house was far larger than seemed reasonable for a family of three. On the ground floor there were hall, dining-room, drawing-room, morning-room, library, billiard-room, conservatory, kitchen and offices; whilst upstairs two bathrooms, a nursery, and twelve bedrooms seemed to show that the Kelties intended to entertain largely.

At first, the Captain Keltie, his wife and their son Simon show no signs of moving into the completed home – but, once they do, the dynamics of the island shift forever. And the lives of the two families are equally changed. No Love follows what happens over the next few decades – on the island, and away.

Garnett often writes about love and tempestuous love affairs, and there are a fair few in this novel despite its title, but I think he is much more interesting on other topics. The friendship between Simon and Benedict is a case in point – we see how two young boys fall into adventures and risks together, but how the disparity in their wealth and their temperaments changes the friendship over the years. Their living arrangements mean they have something of the closeness of family but without its permanence. It’s a relationship that seems to linger even as the two get older and have no especial wish for it to continue – they can’t quite escape this quasi-brotherhood.

As mentioned, I am less interested when Garnett writes about romantic love – but some of his insights into the way characters love were certainly well done. For example…

He distrusted any happiness which came as easily as her love, suspecting it to be a snare to entrap him. All through life he had fought, and his enthusiasms had been met with mockery and he had learnt that the value of anything was proportional to the opposition it provoked; and instinctively he believed that since this was unopposed it could not be love.

I enjoyed reading No Love – Garnett has a natural lightness and gentle dryness to his prose that works best, in my opinion, when he is using it to approach slightly eccentric or unusual characters and situations. Particularly in the first half of No Love, there is plenty of opportunity for this. It works less well when he is trying to be searing or a little sordid. But, being 1929, nothing is too close to the bone – and I found a lot to enjoy here. It’s no Lady Into Fox, but that was a tour de force that would have been impossible and needless to replicate.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

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For #ReadIndies month, I had to pick up one of the many unread British Library Crime Classics I have on my shelf. Or, more precisely, piled high on top of a bookcase. Quite a lot of people have recommended The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley as one of the best ones, and I’ve had it for yonks.

It’s a great premise for a detective novel. Roger Sheringham, who apparently appears in other Berkeley novels, has assembled a group of people to help him solve a murder. I did have to make notes about who they all were, because he does a slightly unhelpful thing of telling you about them before he tells you their names – but it includes a dramatist, a detective novelist, an avant-garde writer, a solicitor, and a sort of timorous nobody.

The police have given up the case as lost. Can the Crime Club help? The dead person is Joan Bendix – poisoned, as the title suggests, by chocolates. The chocolates in question were given to her by her husband, but only because he bumped into Sir Eustace. He received them in the post, purporting to be from the chocolatiers, looking for a sponser. He rejects them – handing them to Graham Bendix. Later that night, both Bendixes – Bendices? – eat some chocolates, but Joan eats more. By the end of the evening, she is dead.

The brilliant thing about The Poisoned Chocolates Case is that each chapter gives a different solution, as the group take it in turns to present their detection and their conclusion. And, of course, the person they’re accusing of murder.

A couple of pretty unlikely solutions are given in the first chapters – but I have to admit that the third culprit/solution was the one I’d guessed from the outset. Oops! In the later chapters, Berkeley is very good at giving extremely convincing deductions – and then, in the next chapter, revealing why they were false conclusions and how the characters take false steps. Berkeley is clearly enjoying teasing the genre and exposing the tricks that detective novelists play. How often they use false syllogisms to make the denouement convincing. All of that.

Which does mean that the novel’s final solution is arguably no more convincing than any of the others – and the two extras at the end, contributing in the 70s by Christianna Brand and for this edition by Martin Edwards, are certainly not the most convincing – but it’s one of those rare detective novels where the satisfaction doesn’t come from the solution. It comes from seeing behind the curtain, at the construction of detection.

Eve in Egypt by Stella Tennyson Jesse

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A year ago, Michael Walmer sent me a review copy of Eve in Egypt (1929) by Stella Tennyson Jesse. And look, here I am, I finally read it! It turns out it needed another August before I could turn to so vibrant a cover.

This was Tennyson Jesse’s only book – and, as you may well have surmised, she was the sister of the more-famous F Tennyson Jesse. Her sister wrote novels like A Pin To See The Peepshow and The Lacquer Lady that weren’t connected to her own life. Stella, on the other hand, drew influence straight from her own experiences. I suspect she was not much like Eve, but she certainly went to Egypt. And, boy, you’ll know it by the end!

Here’s how we meet Eve:

The funny thing was that Eve woke up that morning rather depressed than otherwise. “ If,” as she said to herself afterwards, “ I had had that wonderful feeling that something beautiful was going to happen, I could
have understood it; but to think that everything lovely in life began that morning, and that I never guessed it !
I only woke up with that horrid feeling of there being something unpleasant in the background. That does
really seem odd.”

And, after all, the something unpleasant had not been so very bad. To be exact, it was two proposals ; and
though Eve, like all nice-minded young women, deprecated the idea of a proposal that she couldn’t accept,
nevertheless there remained in her mind, as in the mind of every woman similarly situated, a pleasant residue — a sort of nice sugary sediment, as it were. After all, every proposal is a tribute to one’s charms, there’s no
getting away from that.

She is quintessentially 1920s – or at least a certain sort of 1920s. She is quite flighty and superficial, though with a heart under it all. The reason she goes to Egypt is largely to get away from having to respond to those two unwelcome proposals. And so off she goes with her sister Serena (charmingly ignorant), Serena’s husband Hugh, and the knowledgeable Jeremy.

It’s entirely obvious to the reader from the outset that she will fall in love with Jeremy, and this plot chugs along nicely in the background as we take a tour of Egypt. And this is where STJ’s experience certainly comes into play.

I’m always a little reluctant to read The Brits Abroad novels. I would rather read a novel set in Egypt written by an Egyptian (any recommendations?). But I was drawn in by the insouciance of this one, and it does deliver. Tennyson Jesse does an admirable job of making the info-dumps feel like they’re part of the conversation, and even gives humour to them and uses them to develop character. But it’s hard to deny that there are sections that scream “here’s my research!” Yes, Jeremy is educating the party – but perhaps we didn’t need quite as much of an overt history lesson.

Having said that, I was very interested by some temples that were left to flood when a new dam was built. As Jeremy explains, the locals need water and sometimes artefacts have to suffer the consequences. I went to Wikipedia. Turns out the UNESCO came along and thought that maybe the temple shouldn’t suffer the consequences, and dismantled and moved it. If I could remember the name of the temple, I’d put a link…

The experience is enhanced by some photos spread throughout the book, which I’m assuming were taken by Tennyson Jesse. As the back of this new edition says, it’s both ‘Literature – fiction’ and ‘travelogue’. I don’t tend to get on with the latter, but there was enough of the former to beguile me – and this was a fun, delightfully predictable story. And – again – what a stunning and happy cover!

First and Last by V.L. Whitechurch

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Guys, I don’t know if you realise, but I’m hilarious. And that’s why I decided the last book of 2017 and first book of 2018 would be… First and Last (1929) by V.L. Whitechurch. Well, at least I amuse myself.

This is my second novel by Whitechurch – the first was the very amusing Canon in Residence – and I picked it up in a bookshop in Stratford-on-Avon a few years ago, when I was (happily enough) hunting for more books by him. He is one of the few vicar-authors, indeed canon-authors, and the title of his novel is a reference to the Bible: ‘so the last will be first and the first will be last’. Jesus actually says it twice in the Bible and, in scriptural context, I think it’s mostly about how the poor are not excluded from Heaven, and nor are those who find faith late in life.

The novel isn’t really about either of those things.

It is about what happens when somebody from a poor background – young Tom the fisherman – comes into vast fortune, through a combination of luck and ability. He saves a rich man who gets caught in sailing difficulties and, in turn, is offered an education far beyond the means of his family and his class (particularly given that this section is set in 1881). The other character we follow is Alan, the stepson of the vicar, who has to leave the vicarage when his stepfather dies – most of the inheritance goes elsewhere, and his future looks much poorer than he realised.

Such is the set up of the characters and their fates (and an ill-advised dose of dialect from local fisherman alongside). The novel skips forward forty years, where Tom is Sir Thomas, a rich businessman (and war profiteer) whose fortune is partly ill-gotten; Alan is a clergyman with a very small income, widowed and not very happy with his life. Tom has a son; Alan has a daughter. You can probably guess what happens when they re-emerge in each other’s lives… but it all happens charmingly and interestingly. Whitechurch is a great storyteller.

I didn’t mark down any passages to quote, so here’s a bit I’ve picked more or less at random, to give a sense of his prose:

The Reverend Alan Crawford, Vicar of Lingmarsh, was tired – tired in body and in mind. He had been paying a round of parochial visits in his widely scattered country parish, trudging along lanes thick with mud, taking ‘short cuts’ over fields to outlying cottages, all the afternoon.

Altogether he had paid seven calls, and each visit, with, perhaps the exception of one, had added to his sense of weariness – a weariness that had come over him before ever he fared forth on his parochial round.

I really enjoyed reading First and Last, and I think any fan of middlebrow novels from the interwar period will love the characters, pace, and comfort of the novel. What prevents it being a brilliant novel, to my mind, is partly the lack of humour (did I imagine it in Canon in Residence, which I recall being tantamount to farce?) and partly the ways in which the characters lean to stereotype. The good people are a little too good; the wicked a little too wicked. First and Last isn’t at all moralistic (in the negative sense), but it does follow firmly trodden moral paths – and, as a parable is unlikely to show thorough nuance in its participants, so First and Last does paint a little in black and white.

But, given these limitations, I think it’s a delightful and absorbing book – not great literature, but certainly a great read. And a great way to kick off 2018 and A Century of Books.

The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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The True HeartThis beautiful, beautiful edition of The True Heart (1929) by Sylvia Townsend Warner was given to me as part of a wonderful Secret Santa present from Christina (the secret was eventually revealed!) in a Virago Modern Classics LibraryThing exchange. That was back in 2014, and it recently got to the top of my list by being nominated by Ali when I asked people to tell me what to read from my tbr. Thank you both, because I loved it!

It is slightly shaming that, despite writing about Warner at length in my DPhil thesis, I had only read a few of her novels. Because my thesis was thematic, I concentrated on the novels which fit the criteria (they had to be fantastic, for one thing – if you want to know about fantasy vs fantastic, then that can be another post one day!). That meant that I spent a long time reading the diaries, letters, essays etc of Warner and others, but didn’t look too hard at the novels which came after the ones I was interested in.

I was also rather nervous – because, while I love and adore Lolly Willowes, I liked Mr Fortune’s Maggot rather less, and was bored rigid by Summer Will Show and The Corner That Held Them. That may well be because of my struggles with historical fiction, and I know those novels are well-loved by many. But it meant I was curious how I’d feel about The True Heart.

The novel has two things in its favour: it’s set in the Victorian period, which is apparently within my remit for acceptable historical fiction (and within living memory when Warner wrote it), and it was written in the 1920s. Yes, that is often enough for me to fall in love with a book, but in this case it’s notable because I think Warner was at her best with her first few novels – and this one was her third.

I’ve rambled long enough without actually telling you anything about the plot. Apparently it is a retelling of Eros/Cupid and Psyche, though I had forgotten that when I was reading it (and don’t know the myth, thinking about it, so who knows.) Our heroine is Sukey Bond – a bright and imaginative orphan, who leaves her orphanage to be farmed out to… well, aptly, a farm. She is 16, and the place out in the Essex marshes has been found for her by Mrs Seaborn – a woman whom Sukey admires and idolises beyond all others. In the months that passes, it is a sort of idol of Mrs Seaborn that she keeps in her mind, while she tries to get her head around her new scenario. Here’s a fairly length excerpt, which gives you a hint of Warner’s greatest strength – her style. I love how her writing mixes the pastoral, the emotional, and the wryly amusing.

 

She hoped that Zeph would offer to take her to the sea, for though she knew that she had but to follow the windings of the creek eastward to find her way there by herself, she lacked courage to go alone. Herds of cattle and horses grazed over the marsh; but she did not dread these, for she soon discovered that the worst they did was to follow her, snorting and inquisitive, but not intending her any harm. It was the sea itself that she dreaded. The Bible had taught her that the sea was to be feared. storms arose there, the cruel floods clapped their hands. Perhaps a wave would take hold of her and bear her away, or perhaps she would see a ship wrecked.

She hoped in vain. Zeph had a poor opinion of the sea; he would have thought it no compliment to a respectable young girl to offer her a sight of that inscrutable nuisance. When they set out he turned his face firmly inland, conducting her to inspect Mr Hardwick’s new silo. Sukey gazed with due respect at this rarity. It reminded her of the Tower of Babel, and she thought how dreadful it would be if Zeph suddenly began to speak French.

The family are chiefly of the ‘poor but honest’ variety, though the girlfriend of one of the sons (Prudence) is more of a minx who is determined to subjugate Sukey. She has recently been in Sukey’s maid role, and thinks that the best way to elevate herself to equality with the family is to distance herself from her former life. Sukey continues to be something of a naive innocent.

It is with this frame of mind that she meets Eric. She first mistakes him for the third son of the family, but is quickly disabused on this front. He is, in fact, Mrs Seaborn’s son – a kind, nature-loving young man, usually silent. His first overtures to Sukey are offering to show her where he has found a secret orchard. And, drawn to kindness and gentleness, Sukey falls in love with him. They get engaged, in private, near a church – which Eric thinks they can just climb into to be wed.

It is only later that he has a seizure, and Sukey is told by the malicious Prudence that Eric is considered an ‘idiot’. He is taken away from the farm.

We follow Sukey as she quits her job, leaves her things, and goes to find Eric – hoping to be welcomed by the Mrs Seaborn she has built in her head. That’s not quite how things go. And the rest of the novel sees Sukey try to win the freedom and independence that she and Eric need for their simple, harmless love. Along the way she meets curious characters (including Queen Victoria!) and there are amusing incidents – my favourite being where she offers to be a maid at a house which, the reader quickly realises, offers other services…

This is a beautiful book, unsentimental in every scene, but never cynical or too detached. Rather, it shows the strength of a character and the gentle power of determination. Above all, it shows Warner at her best descriptive power and storytelling ability.

I don’t think it’s up there with Lolly Willowes, which is truly a tour de force, but The True Heart is still a great novel and I’m grateful to Christina and Ali for working together – albeit unknowingly! – to get me to read it.

Others who got Stuck into it:

Heavenali: “The novel is deceptively simple, but it is a glorious non-sentimental celebration of love, and the wonderful capacity of the human heart.”

Rough Draft: “The beautiful and deeply textured descriptions and the odd encounters give the novel a fantastic, dream-like quality.”