1930s

Two final #1936Club titles

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I’ve never read more books for a club year – for the first time, I’ve read more than there are days in the club week. (Or, indeed, in any week.) So I’m going to double up with a couple of reads that I don’t really have that much to say about… sorry to end on an anti-climax, but do check out the links round up for lots more suggestions. My favourites from my reading week were Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons and Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse. I won’t be blogging for a week, but will update with any links I missed when I’m back – and have scheduled a post for tomorrow saying what the next club year will be!

Anyway, onto my final two reads…

Houses as Friends by Dorothy Pym

I didn’t know much about Dorothy Pym – no relation of Barbara – but I bought this in a little bookshop in Fowey because the title intrigued me. I thought it might be about houses in fiction, or houses in general, but it is basically Pym’s autobiography through the different houses she lived in. Edwin Lutyens even wrote the introduction.

The houses are all rather grand and wonderful, and she was certainly brought up in privilege, married someone equally rich, and lived bountifully. I ended up knowing quite a lot of anecdotes, but still didn’t know a lot about who she was in essentials. And all the anecdotes were told rather plainly, without the sprinkle of magic that brings them alive, or makes them sound more exciting than they truly are. All in all, I enjoyed it as a period piece, but I found it lent a little too close to dullness. And I don’t really remember anything in it, already. Not one to rush to.

No Place Like Home by Beverley Nichols

I adore Bev, though have been a bit up and down with his non-fiction. The ups are VERY up, and I love the Merry Hall series to distraction, but others – like his investigation into spiritualism – didn’t really work for me. I’d assumed No Place Like Home would be one of his books about his house, but it turned out to be the opposite: it’s travel literature. Specifically of one long trip through Eastern Europe, to Egypt, to Israel, to Turkey and Greece. Not in that order. Rather than write a full review, I’ve come up with some pros and cons. And please head to Karen’s 1936 Club review of it for more detail – and also less uncertain enthusiasm for it!

Pros

  • Beverley is always pretty funny – depending, of course, on what you find funny. I really enjoyed his grumpy take on the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
  • It’s a great snapshot of 1936 across Europe, at least from one man’s perspective – he makes reference to Hitler that show his views were no secret at the time, though Nichols doesn’t seem to realise it’s the last time for a while that this sort of trip would be possible
  • His perspective on being in the Holy Land is very moving, and he does experience genuine connection with Jesus by seeing the places that He went (and railing against those areas that haven’t been upheld)
  • His vehemence against animal cruelty is welcome to me, and some of his views were probably very ahead of their time

Cons

  • …and some of his views weren’t. He is rather xenophobic at times. He is very against antisemitism, and then is antisemitic himself a few pages later… in general, the people of other countries are not as good as the Brits, in his eyes, and it made for some uneasy reading
  • The ‘Irate Reader’ he introduces to have a duologue with every now and then didn’t really work for me. In another mood it might have done, but I found it a little irritating
  • I just don’t love travel writing that much! I find it often leans towards the visual, which I find hard to translate in my head, and I also prefer people writing about their own countries and times – to give a deeper authenticity and grounding to their writing.

SO there you go. Neither of these are my favourite reads for the 1936 Club, but this club has been my favourite one, I think. So many interesting titles, so much going on in the world, and a brilliant cross-section shared from across the blogging community. Thanks, as ever, for reading, reviewing, commenting and sharing in the fun!

Begin Again by Ursula Orange – #1936Club

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Of all the authors Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow has talked about over the years, Ursula Orange is the one who appealed most. So it was very exciting when he got three of her novels reprinted through his Dean Street Press series – and Begin Again is the third of those I’ve read. Orange is a wonderfully witty writer, and this novel is no different.

The novel opens with Leslie (early 20s) explaining to her mother why she feels she must move to London, where her schoolfriends Jane and Florence are living a lifestyle that Leslie considers ideal. Leslie wants to spend all the money she has on an art school – though it will not cover tuition and expenses for all that long – and also thinks she should probably have her own little studio, to be taken seriously. Whatever happens, she has to get away from the privileged and calm life she is currently living with her parents:

She knew, not only from Jane and Florence’s conversation (it had been some time since she had had a really good talk with them) but also from the pages of modern novels exactly the way in which young people living their own lives in London talk together – an attractive mixture of an extreme intensity and a quite remarkable casualness. “Henri says Marcovitch’s new poems are the finest things he’s ever read – will certainly found a school of their own. By the way – hand me the marmalade – Elissa is living with Henri now. He says he needs her for his work at present.” Clearly the sort of person who talked like this lived a much freer, a much wider, a much better life than the sort of person who merely said, “Good morning, mummy. Did you sleep well? When Alice brought my tea this morning she said a tree was blown down in the orchard last night.”

One of the things I like a lot about Orange is that she doesn’t have any throwaway characters. While four young women are at the centre of this novel, the secondary characters are not simply there to serve them. I loved the sardonic dryness of Leslie’s mother – which Leslie totally misses, since she expects her mother to be humourless. The reader is quite like Leslie’s mum – we have a definite affection for all the women at the heart of Begin Again, but also recognise they are young and silly.

The others are the aforementioned Jane and Florence, who work in offices and just about earn enough to pay for their unorthodox food and tiny flat – and Sylvia, who still lives in her parents’ grand home, thinking herself very modern with her thoughts on sexual and social liberation. All the women are very earnest, and their problems are real problems inasmuch as they genuinely feel anxiety about them, but Orange is also very funny about them. It’s also a joy to read about arguments over who used the hot water when you no longer have to house-share.

My favourite story of the four was Florence’s – who works as a typist, despite being pretty bad at it, and longs to be recognised as something more valuable. The other typist has fewer ambitions and class hang-ups, and is also much better at her job. The whole set-up of the office was believably unnerving for Florence, while also a joy to read about. That joy continues when the whole bunch travel over to Sylvia’s house for a party, and things get more dramatic and just as absurd.

This was a delightful 1936 read – enough genuine angst to make you take it seriously, and good-heartedness not to mind laughing at the characters. I’m not sure why Furrowed Middlebrow stopped after reprinting three of her novels, but I have my fingers crossed that they bring out the other three at some point…

Little G by E.M. Channon – #1936Club

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Little G is a terrible title but rather a lovely book. It is a 1936 title from E.M. Channon who is apparently well-known as a children’s writer and a detective novelist – this was one of her few adult non-detective novels, or possibly her only one, and was reprinted by Greyladies in 2012. It found its way onto my shelves in 2014, and the 1936 Club has been a great opportunity to finally read it.

In the opening chapter, Furnival is being told that he needs to rest by a doctor. He is a maths lecturer at Cambridge, and the doctor is worried that he is stressed and unhealthy – and prescribes him some relaxation in a little village. Furnival is very keen not to see any women there, as he is horrified by any company that isn’t adult male, child, or animal – and the doctor assures him that the village is bereft of adult women. This, of course, turns out not to be the case.

In case you’re starting to rather dislike Furnival, Channon lays on heavily his good attributes. Installed in his new cottage, he befriends three young siblings who live next door – offering them cakes and goodies that their aunt doesn’t believe they should eat. Holding even more sway with me, he likes cats – and is given one when he passes a house and is concerned for its welfare. Here he is, having slipped it in his coat pocket:

The kitten, though of tender age, had claws like steel hooks, a voice like a bat’s and enough determination for ten full-grown Toms. He objected strongly to imprisonment, and fought with determination to work his way out. Furnival had to keep a tight hand on him, making personal discovery that the needle-like teeth matched the claws for sharpness; but he cared little for that. The warm, fierce, furry little body, wriggling ragefully under his fingers, gave him a pleasant thrill of affection and ownership, such as he had not felt since the acquisition of his first guinea pig, more years ago than he cared to count. He quickened his steps: not half so much for the sake of getting rid of a troublesome pocketful, as because he wanted to take out his purchase and play with it.

The kitten, true to its feline nature, finding that its new owner cared not a jot for all its fury, gave up the unequal contest, curled itself up in a concise ball, and slumbered profoundly. The pocket was warm. Struggling was, obviously, a useless waste of energy; and there is no more profound philosopher in the animal kingdom than Felis Domestica.

Sadly, for me, we don’t see anywhere near enough of the kitten again. But that might be a relief if kittens aren’t your thing. Instead, we see Furnival interact with various villagers – his gardener, the vicar, the women who do turn out to exist, and particularly the three children. He softens over time, but he wasn’t really that un-soft in the first place. The stakes are low, but Channon stays decidedly on the right side of charming – the only part I thought was a little fey was when Furnival starts enthralling the children with stories about gravity, calling it Little G. But it is not the only Little G who turns up…

All in all, this novel was always a delight to read, and is exactly the right sort of book for many occasions when you need something fun, sweet, and very 1930s.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse – #1936Club

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When I wrote about Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, a body-swap comedy, I was wondering which others there were. Malie and Constance both mentioned Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse which, as luck would have it, turns out to be have been published in 1936. I have zillions of unread Wodehouses, but I decided to add another – or, rather, to listen to the audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil. And what a wonderful book it is.

The narrator is Reggie Swithin, the third Earl of Havershot. He is 28, has a face that he often compares to a gorilla, and has been sent off to Hollywood by an aunt to rescue his cousin Eggy from getting engaged to a gold-digger. This is all just a way of getting an earl to America, and specifically to Hollywood. Wodehouse himself worked on Hollywood scripts a good deal, I believe, and comes to the movie plot with a great amount of good-natured cynicism. Reggie is the sort of affable and daft hero of almost any of Wodehouse characters – indeed, as he introduces himself, he is ‘just one of those chaps’.

Eggy is engaged, as it turns out, not to the gold-digger but to Ann Bannister – who was previously engaged to Reggie. And Reggie, in turn, falls in love instantly on the train on the way to Hollywood – with April June, the wonderfully named and very beautiful film actress. He is in love devotedly almost before they’ve spoken, but Wodehouse fans know to distrust the sort Wodehouse woman who speaks affectedly of how she is only ever happy in the company of books and flowers, and thinks nothing of money.

Anyway, all of Reggie’s plans are put on hold by bad toothache, and he goes to a dentist. In the waiting room, he meets Joey Cooley – a golden-haired child who is considered the idol of American motherhood. Michigan mothers are en route to lavish praise on him as they speak.

Both go into their respective dentists for their respective operations, apparently of the sort that require being knocked out by gas. And, while under gas… they swap bodies.

The first Reggie knows of it is when he comes to, and his chair is surrounded by eager journalists. And so set in motion his life as a child star – with a strictly controlled routine, domineering protectors, and (most chillingly) diet of prunes for almost every meal.

We don’t see much as Joey-as-Reggie for the rest of Laughing Gas, but follow Reggie-as-Joey. Being Wodehouse, the stakes are hilariously low. He takes the metaphysical anomaly pretty well, and doesn’t waste too much time philosophising. Instead, he is chiefly anxious about having to kiss someone at the unveiling of a statue, and where he can procure some substantial food (leading to perhaps my favourite line – ‘I had had a rotten lunch, at which the spinach motif had been almost farcically stressed’).

Then, of course, there are various love entanglements – he has the opportunity to see April June in a less flattering light, and may just fall in someone else along the way…

Wodehouse is always wonderful, but some novels are better than others. For my money, this is one of the best I’ve read. He is so consistently brilliant in turn of phrase – the sort of thing he does that nobody else can do; a brilliant mix of hyperbole, litotes, inversion, and all manner of other linguistic tricks that somehow never get old. He was a comic genius.

It’s hard to remember exact quotes from an audiobook, but here are three that bat about online a lot:

  • If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t.
  • I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.
  • It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

One I liked was along the lines of ‘It would have been alright if things were other than they were, but that is just what they, in fact, weren’t’. But line after line are brilliant, and I laughed my way through this. The plot is really just decoration for his unparalleled turn of phrase, and I’m delighted that the 1936 club has given me the opportunity to read another of his masterpieces.

The Enchanted Voyage by Robert Nathan – #1936Club

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Reading Robert Nathan is one of the relatively rare times when I know what it must be like to be an Anglophile-bibliophile outside of the UK. His books are pretty easy to stumble across in the US and pretty tricky to find here – but on both my visits to Washington DC, I managed to come away with a couple of his books. I bought The Enchanted Voyage in 2015 and, as luck would have it, it’s a 1936 title.

Nathan’s novels are always pretty short and whimsical, and The Enchanted Voyage is no different. The font is enormous and even so it’s something under 200 pages – telling the story of Mr Pecket, a carpenter who is disliked by his wife and cheated by his neighbours. Or perhaps ‘cheated’ isn’t the right word, since he walks open-eyed into situations where he will build shelving (say) and be hectored into being paid rather less than the value of the wood.

But, as the opening lines tell us, Mr Pecket has one eccentric passion:

Mr Hector Pecket had a boat. He had built it himself; it stood squarely on the ground in the yard of his little home in the Bronx, very far from the water. But it would scarcely have floated anywhere else, for Mr Pecket had neglected to  caulk it, and it had no keel. Nevertheless inland and to the eye, it was a boat; a little like an ark, but with a mast for sailing, an anchor, a windlass, belaying pins, a cabin, and a cockpit. It was named the Sarah Pecket, after his wife.

Mrs Sarah Pecket is not sensible of having received a compliment. Rather, she would live to have some household income – and sells the boat to a neighbour to run as a restaurant. She puts wheels on it, to transport it round the corner. In another sort of novel, we would have a lot of sympathy for Mrs Pecket. But in the fanciful and carefree world of Robert Nathan’s heroes, this is a crime – and we cheer Mr Pecket on when, in the middle of the night, he commandeers the boat and sails – no, rolls – away. The wheels move him on the ground, and the sail determines his direction.

Along the way, he picks up a disaffected waitress and a curious dentist – sure, why not – and they continue to trundle along with the aim of getting to Florida. But the real aim is just to get away from everyday life – the humdrum, the unkind, and the unimaginative. This isn’t an escape from reality – their boat is slowly wheeling along the roads, not floating off into the sky – but it is an escape nonetheless. There is a sort of Peter Pan esque tone to the whole thing. Emotions are broad and simple things in Nathan’s work, but there is something touching about seeing them so close to the surface.

This reading club year is really interesting, because by 1936 it seems to have been rather an open secret that a major conflict was coming. While plenty of politicians were famously trying to avert it, you get the sense from reading books of the period that the general population would not have been enormously surprised to have found themselves in the middle of a world war a few years later – at the very least, the prospect of it was a dominating conversation. So how would the topic find its way into the novels we’re looking at this year?

This is the nearest that The Enchanted Voyage gets to contemporary commentary:

Mr Pecket walked down the street, carrying his shelves and his tools. He looked into the faces of men and women, and what he saw made him feel anxious and sad. It seemed to him that a new feeling had come into the world since he was young; that people no longer felt kindly disposed toward one another. Now that the bad times were over, and it was possible to work again, they seemed to be looking for someone to blame for everything.

You – you have a sharp look, you dress too well. Doubtless it was you who made all the trouble in the world. Well, just keep out of my way after this.

And you, over there – you have no money and no work. To the devil with you. Perhaps you are a communist.

Interestingly, he is seeing this is as a period when the Great Depression is largely over – but senses that there are difficult things on the horizon too. In context, it hammers home Mr P’s dissatisfaction with the world, but it’s still very much of its time. Those are the sorts of details I love discovering in these club years.

Is Robert Nathan great literature? No, not really – but he is reliably diverting, with a joyful imagination and I love spending time in his eccentric and sweet worlds.

Thirteen Guests by J. Jefferson Farjeon – #1936Club

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There are a whole bunch of British Library Crime Classics from 1936, and I have quite a few of them on my shelves. Which to choose? Murder in Piccadilly, The Sussex Downs Murder, and The Santa Klaus Murder were options, but I chose Thirteen Guests because I’ve enjoyed other J. Jefferson Farjeon novels.

It starts really promisingly. A jovial young man arrives at a country station, and leaps from the carriage – in so doing, he injures himself quite badly, because the train was in motion. A witty young woman takes pity on him – John and Nadine, for such are their names, at a delightful pair. Farjeon is great at fun dialogue that doesn’t feel forced, and I’d have loved a rom-com where they overcome their obstacles – e.g. Nadine is very funny about the fact that she is ten years older than John. That’s not what this novel is, of course.

John is persuaded to take shelter at a house where Nadine is staying – and he is the thirteenth guest. That means that, as well as the hosts, there are 13 more characters. Among them are a famous painter, a famous actress, a man who manufactures sausages, a gossip columnist, a trashy novelist, an MP…  goodness, there are so many of them.

And guess what guys? The first body that turns up is NONE of them!

I won’t write too much about this one because I’m going to put it in the ‘disappointment’ pile of British Library Crime Classics – because the writing is so good at the start, and I was so into the world he created. And I suppose the writing continues to be good, but before long I stopped noticing that because I was so confused. There are SO many characters, and the police who get involved – while very amusing – are the sort who like to list timings and places and variables over and over.

Anyway, if you have a mind for this sorts of complex detective novels than I do, then you might well love it. Perhaps very slow reading with a notebook and pen would be rewarding? But, for me, I’m afraid this one left me still have no idea who, what, why, where, or when even when I turned the final page.

Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons – #1936club

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Lots of Stella Gibbons’ novels have come back into print in recent years – from Vintage and from Dean Street Press – but Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) has been notably missing from their lists. Having read it for the 1936 Club, I can sadly see why it wouldn’t fit into 21st-century publishing. And yet it’s my favourite of her non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels that I’ve read so far.

Miss Bertie Linsey and her Pa move to London to be near Bertie’s uncle – Mr Petley – and his son Len, realising that they need family connections now that they are falling on harder times. They leave behind an idyllic countryside home that comes with plenty of beautiful trees and green spaces, but no source of income. They are emphatically not invited to live with Mr Petley and Len above their tobacconist’s shop, but Mr Petley goes as far as to find them accommodation at the nearby home of the Fells. Mr Petley doesn’t trust any accommodation outside of Radford Street, and thinks that Miss Linsey and Pa will manage to make do with the dingy, beetle-infested home run by Mrs Fell. Mr Fell, meanwhile, keeps birds in the upper rooms and seldom communicates with anybody at all.

Gibbons has given us a wonderful cast here, even if we got no more (and we get some great other people). Miss Linsey is resilient, managing to be both enthusiastic and rather sad. Pa is happier than she to get to know the Fells, but is also drawn to know the local pub. Mr Petley is quite hardened and wants little to do with his in-laws, and is affectionately controlling of his son – whose life, and love, was left in France in the First World War two decades earlier.

There is quite an emotional core to this novel, particularly in Len’s storyline of the woman he loves in France – I found a lot of it very moving. But there are also plenty of opportunities for Gibbons’ satirical streak, that I haven’t seen have such a delightful outing in any of the other non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. In Miss Linsey and Pa, she has her sights on spearing Bloomsbury – because Miss Linsey finds work first as a cook-housekeeper at the home of Dorothy Hoad and E.V. Lassiter, and later as a sort of governess for a household with very strict rules on not telling the child stories and always calling everything by its proper name. These were my favourite sections – here’s how we first meet Miss Hoad, coming into the tobacconist and meeting Miss Linsey:

She nodded and, turning her back, stared out into the street with her dark unhappy eyes. What would E.V. be doing? She looked down at her platinum watch, of so fiercely modernist a design that it suggested a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Half-past three. E.V. might be trying to write, with the wave of hair falling into her eyes.

She turned round again as the drab man came back into the shop with a smaller and even drabber woman. G*d, how awful it must be to be that kind of person and live that kind of life!

And here is one of the many very funny snapshots of Bloomsbury life:

The women friends of Dorothy and herself used frequently to announce that they must have a child.

They would plomp themselves on the sofa, fling up their feet and put their elbows behind their heads and stare at the ceiling. Then they would say abruptly ‘I must have a child.’

‘You ought to have a child,’ they would say bluntly, when one of their number complained of a headache or an inability to finish writing a novel. Sometimes they had the child (they never called it a baby), sometimes they got no further than plomping on the sofa and announcing that they ought to have one.

For quite a short novel, an awful lot goes on – perhaps because there are four central characters who get our attention and sympathy, and plenty of secondary ones who are equally interesting. The combination of satire and pathos works because we aren’t asked to combine those feelings for any particular individual – rather our laughter at Bloomsbury, say, is part of what makes Miss Linsey’s difficult life so moving. And the climactic moment of the novel succeeds in being dramatic and poignant in a way that feels honest to everything that has preceded – including layers to Mr Fell, who could easily have been a one-note character experiencing unspecified mental illness.

And why wouldn’t it be published now? Well, sadly Gibbons includes portraits of a Black character, a Jewish character, and a lesbian that are all inappropriate to differing degrees. Some in that well-intentioned ‘You won’t believe this character is from X minority and yet isn’t Y’ way that is hardly any more palatable than out and out racism. These elements are very much not the main thrust of the novel, though it would also be hard to neatly excise them.

There’s a conversation to be had about the moral responsibility of reprint publishing, and perhaps that’s a topic for another day – but no author is ‘owed’ reprinting, and any publisher is likely to decide this isn’t worth the fight. And it’s a shame that these parts pull Miss Linsey and Pa back, because it is otherwise a wonderful triumph of a novel – and, with those caveats, perhaps my favourite read of the year so far.

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp

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Gosh, I love Margery Sharp. The more I read by her, the more I think she is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century.

I first read her fifteen or sixteen years ago, buying The Foolish Gentlewoman because P.G. Wodehouse mentioned it as a book he loved in a letter somewhere. It wasn’t for a good number of years that I read more by her, but I’ve yet to read a dud – with Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour being my favourite. She does funny, she does serious, she sometimes combines them. And we can add The Nutmeg Tree (1937) to the funny shelf, though it’s not without its moments of poignancy.

I don’t really understand why she chose this title. There is a nutmeg tree but it’s not particularly dominant, and I think the title of the film is much better: Julia Misbehaves. I haven’t seen the film, but am told that it is a very loose adaptation.

Julia is misbehaving in the first scene we see her – a glorious opening, where she is in the bath, surrounded by her few possessions. How’s this for an opening line:

Julia, by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise.

We can already guess a little about her character from that ‘by courtesy’. But it takes a few more lines before we realise why her bathroom is filled with a table, a clock, and other potentially valuable items: it’s because the bailiffs are in, and she’s pretty sure they won’t intrude on a lady in the bath.

Julia is a chancer, and has had to be. As we see throughout the novel, she has had to spend much of her life seeking the next source of income – and that has involved a bit of deceit, a bit of flirtation, and a crowd of friends who wouldn’t be received in polite society and, though loyal, are sometimes necessarily fleeting. As she describes herself, she is ‘the sort of woman any one talks to about anything’. Which has its ups and downs.

And, yes, the reader loves her. This one did, anyway.

She is Mrs Packett by name, but the marriage lasted rather less than a year – a war bride, her husband was killed not long after their hasty wedding. Hasty because of war, but also because of Susan: the daughter they had. Her parents-in-law are affluent and kind, if not accustomed to women like Julia, and housed both daughter-in-law and granddaughter. But ultimately Julia decided she would be better off away from them, and that Susan would be better off – financially and otherwise – being raised by her paternal grandparents.

As The Nutmeg Tree opens, she has received an unexpected letter from Susan, now on the cusp of adulthood. She wants to get married, and her grandparents don’t approve of the speed with which she and Bryan wish to wed. Can Julia come and persuade them otherwise? And, with one eye on the bailiffs, Julia decides to go. She hasn’t seen her daughter for sixteen years.

It may be that ‘someone goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’ are the only plots in the world, but I think Sharp is very good at putting a cuckoo in the nest – with either comic or unsettling results. In The Nutmeg Tree, there is a lot of comedy to be got from Julia trying to behave, while not being completely able to keep her true nature hidden. She is the sort of person, for instance, who accidentally joins a circus on the way. But there is always an undercurrent of poignancy here too. Julia is trying to improve herself. She is not an unkind or dishonest person. She has simply had to do what she has to do. And she’s tired.

Once she arrives, she gets tangled in all the relationships there, and a handful of others yet to emerge. It’s just wonderful. Julia is drawn so consistently and with impressive nuance for a character that could have been simply bombast and delight. If the glorious initial scene isn’t matched by a series of equally delicious set pieces, the novel becomes more thoughtful than that opening might leave one to infer – without losing the humour.

Basically, Sharp is brilliant. She should be a household name, in my opinion, and it’s rare to find an author who is so varied and so good at different things. Julia, I’ll miss you, and it was a joy.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

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I’ve been reading D.J. Taylor’s enormous overview of 20th-century English literature on and off for four or five years. It’s called The Prose Factory, which isn’t a great title for a book that also covers poetry, but it’s certainly been interesting. Like anybody with a private interest, some things loom larger than perhaps they ought – and with Taylor it is George Orwell. He’s obviously a significant figure of the 30s and 40s, but it’s astonishing how often Taylor manages to mention him.

I’m actually thirty years further forward in The Prose Factory, but picking it up reminded me of its Orwell-dominance, which in turn reminded me that I wanted to read more Orwell. I’ve read the big-hitters – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – and I’ve read Homage to Catalonia. I thought all of them were brilliant, and have had several others for many years. Simply because it’s been on my shelves the longest, seventeen years, I took down Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) recently.

I think Orwell might fall in that category of author you don’t see mentioned that much in the blogosphere, simply because we all read him long before we started book blogs. I don’t remember seeing a review of this one, or any of the lesser-known novels, and it’s a pity because it’s rather brilliant. I’d love it for the opening scene alone.

Gordon Comstock is the ‘hero’ of the novel, and as it opens he is working in a secondhand bookshop that also functions as a library for twopenny books. He is working on his own poetry, and has had a volume published that the Times Literary Supplement said showed promise. The extended scene in the bookshop/library is effectively to set up Gordon’s position on a scale of intellectual snobbery. I’m glad I read it now rather than seventeen years ago, because I think most of the names in the passage below would have meant nothing to me then – whereas now I can understand them as Orwell intended the reader to: as a barometer of the reading taste Gordon is setting himself against.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were ranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyes them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding.

Some of these names might only be familiar if you’ve studied popular culture of the period – does anybody read Warwick Deeping now? – but others have lingered. It’s a mix of the middle-class and the lower-middle-class, all with pretensions above their stations. Those who read Galsworthy thought themselves intellectuals; those who read Ethel M. Dell probably thought themselves above those who read westerns. All of it makes bitter Comstock feel angry and repelled – and bitterness is the keynote of his personality.

He lives in poverty – or, at least, poverty for someone of his education and intelligence. The only people he sees are a rich friend called Ravenstock, who tries to help get his poetry published and offers (and is refused) to lend him money, his girlfriend Rosemary, and an aunt Julia who is ever poorer than him, but from whom he still borrows money. It fits his code of pride that he cannot borrow from a rich friend, but will from a poor relative.

Pride is the other keynote, alongside bitterness. His stubbornness is infuriating. He won’t let Rosemary pay for dinner when they go out, because the man must pay for the woman – even if it means he can’t pay his rent or can’t afford to eat for the rest of the week. Rosemary puts up with an awful lot, and sticks with him despite all his moroseness.

Iterated through the novel, either in Gordon’s dialogue or in his internal dialogue, is that everything comes down to money. He can’t marry Rosemary because he doesn’t have money. She won’t sleep with him – so Gordon argues – because he doesn’t have money. He can’t work as a poet because he doesn’t have money. And he doesn’t have money because he left a relatively well-paying job in advertising in order to get out of the capitalist machine.

What’s so impressive about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that Orwell has a mouthpiece for a point of view with which he evidently has substantial sympathy – and bravely chooses to make that mouthpiece objectionable. As well as bitter and proud, Gordon is stubborn, selfish, and often unkind to the long-suffering Rosemary. But there is also enough good in him to make the reader (this reader, at least) not hate him. He loves the beautiful and noble. He partly cares so much what people think of him because of his own low self-esteem, and his recognition that others have achieved much more. On the whole, he falls down on the side of being unpleasant. But it is so well-judged a portrait that he does not become a villain – rather, he is a friend that we are frustrated by and beginning to be sick of, even if we agree with him in essentials.

Orwell apparently thought little of the novel, and didn’t want it reprinted. I don’t agree with him. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four but it does have the same brilliant prose. He is the best writer I’ve read for writing that is entirely unshowy and is yet superlatively good. The plot is simple but perfectly judged, and I’m all the keener to read those other Orwells I’ve got on the shelves. In some ways, it’s a shame that his dystopian novels are the only ones that are widely remembered, because he so strikingly observed the real world too.