1940s

One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

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Back to normal now, folks!  You’d think I’d have taken the opportunity to write lots of reviews, ready to post… but… I didn’t.  Although I hope you were suitably intrigued by the little clues I gave yesterday… the first one up is the brilliant re-read.  So brilliant, in fact, that it’s leaping onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About…

39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

I do more re-reading now than I used to, but I tend towards books I already know I’ll love.  So there are some novels I’ll read every two years or so, and some that I don’t remember much about, but knew I loved ten years ago, say.  What I seldom do (understandably, perhaps) is re-read books that I didn’t love – those that I disliked, or thought only quite good.

Thank goodness I decided to re-read Mollie Panter-Downes’ One Fine Day.

I first read it back in 2004, and thanks to never emptying my inbox (currently at 76,992 emails – all read, don’t worry) I can tell you that I reported thus to my online book group: “I did enjoy this, but not as much as I was expecting given Nicola’s love love love of it.  I was expecting E.M. Delafield and it landed more Virginia Woolf than I thought it would??  Memorable, though.”  The Nicola in question is Nicola Beauman, doyenne of Persephone Books, who has often held up One Fine Day as an almost perfect novel.  Indeed, it was she who rediscovered the book for Virago’s Modern Classics series.

Well, turns out Nicola was right, of course.  I had initially thought One Fine Day only fairly good, whereas now I believe it is an absolutely excellent – and, indeed, important – novel.

My early comparison with Virginia Woolf is one that I stick by, although why I would have thought that was a bad thing, I can’t imagine.  But I am aware that a lot of you will be turned off by the mention of Woolf – let me encourage you not to be!  One of the reasons that I think One Fine Day is an important novel is that it is something of a bridge between the middlebrow and the modernist.  It is Panter-Downes’ style which makes the novel so exquisite, and yet it has none of the inaccessibility of which Woolf can be accused.  She has all the fluidity and ingenuity of the great prose/poetry stylist, combined with the keen and sensible observation of the domestic novelist.  Time for me to hand over to Mollie Panter-Downes for a fairly long excerpt:

The bus was full of women, sighing, sweating gently under the arms of their cotton dresses as they held on to their baskets and their slippery, fretful children.  A tiny boy screamed like an angry jay, drumming his fists on the glass.  He wa-anted it, he wa-anted it!  Bless the child, wanted what?  It, it, ow-w-w! he wept with fury at adult stupidity already frustrating his simple world.  A spaniel on the floor at somebody’s feet shifted cautiously, lifting a red-cornered eye towards his owner, hoping and trusting that no one would tread on his paw.  Human uneasiness and irritability seemed to fill the bus with hot cottonwool, choking, getting up the nostrils.  If it did not start in a moment, it might burst with pressure from its prickling cargo.  Only a young man, a hiker, seemed to sit aloof and happy in the heat.  He wore a blue shirt and drill shorts; on his knees was a knapsack.  His neck was a dull red, so was the brow of his cheerful, ordinary face.  Perhaps he had only just come out of the Army or the Air Force, thought Laura, watching him study his map with such happy concentration.  Ow, ow, ow-w-w, wept the tiny boy, unable to escape and go striding off amongst the bracken, still handcuffed to childhood.  I’ll smack you proper if you don’t stop, threatened his mother.  The young man studied his map, reading England with rapture.  The driver, who had descended to cool his legs and have a word with a crony outside the Bull, swung himself up into his seat.  An angry throbbing seized the bus, the hot bodies of the passengers quivered like jelly, the jaws of an old woman by the door seemed to click and chatter.  With a lurch, they started.  The tiny boy’s tears stopped as though within his tow-coloured head someone had turned a tap.  His brimming eyes stared out at the streets as he sat quietly on his mother’s lap, clutching a little wooden horse.

I think that’s brilliant, just beautiful.  Mollie Panter-Downes also has a great way with metaphors and similes, offering unexpected images which somehow don’t jar, and convey much more than a simple statement could.  I’m not going to be able to resist quoting MPD (if you will) quite a bit, by the way, so here’s an example: ‘Now that he was home, he could not abide the thought of other people’s bath water running out, meeting on the stairs with forced joviality, someone else’s life pressed up against one in a too small space like a stranger’s overcoat against one’s mouth in a crowd.’

It’s unusual for me to talk about the style of a novel before I address the rudiments of the plot, but I do think it’s MPD’s style which sets her apart from her contemporaries.  In terms of plot, nothing really happens.  One Fine Day, as the title suggests, is all set during one day.  The war is over, and people are beginning to get back to their old lives – only, of course, nothing can ever really be the same.  Laura (the central character, through whose eyes we see most of the novel) goes shopping, visits a family in the village, tries to retrieve her dog from a gipsy encampment, and walks up a beautiful hill.  The events of the day are, in fact, uneventful.  It is this ordinariness, in contrast to the uncertain and unkind days of war, which resonates throughout One Fine Day.  Laura’s observations and reflections are not dramatic or life-changing – but that is their beauty.  What a relief it must have been to read about the pursuit of a gardener, or the view from a hill, rather than menacing newspaper headlines and the constant worry about loved ones.  The novel relaxes into this peacefulness and freedom – but with a continuous backward glance.  The war has changed Laura.  She is

a bit thinner over the cheekbones, perhaps, the hair completely grey in front, though the back was still fair and crisply curling, like rear-line soldiers who do not know that defeat has bleakly overtaken their forward comrades.

There is an undercurrent throughout One Fine Day of changed times – not just the working-class villagers who no longer want jobs in domestic service, or need to pay strict adherence to codes of class civility.  Laura has been separated from her husband Stephen for years; he has not watched their daughter Victoria grow up.  The family is not destroyed by this, nor is it even unhappy – but it is strained, and it is tired, but resilient.  Mollie P-D conveys so perfectly the triumph and relief of this weary, determined little family unit, who do not fully understand one another, but who stand together, grateful for all they have managed to keep.

Alongside Panter-Downes’ beautiful writing, it is the character of Laura which is the novel’s triumph.  Perhaps the two cannot quite be separated, because she is built of this wonderful style – it is not quite stream of consciousness, it never leaves the third person, but it flits through thoughts and noticings and reflections as Laura does.  And she is such a wonderful character.  She reminds me a bit of Mrs. Miniver, but without her slight tweeness.  Laura loves beauty, especially beauty in nature; she is a little absent-minded and uncertain, but she is strong and caring and optimistic.  Laura is observant but not judgemental; intelligent but not an intellectual.  A line of poetry runs through her head, in relation to her everyday activity:

Who wrote that? Laura wondered absently.  She could not remember.  Her mind was a ragbag, in which scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold, were hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg.

Laura is a perfect heroine for the wave of feminism which re-evaluated the worth of domestic life.  Perhaps especially because she does not entirely idealise it herself; she describes her class and people as ‘all slaves of the turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood reflecting the civilised candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath.’  But she is a willing slave – all grumbles and laments are covered in the sheer gratitude Laura feels for life and freedom.  I can’t convey quite what a wonderful character Laura is, nor quite how perfectly Panter-Downes understands and shapes her.  To create a character who is both realistic and lovable must be one of the most difficult authorial tasks.  She is as psychologically well-developed as Mrs. Dalloway or Laura Ramsay, but as delightful as Mrs. Miniver or the Provincial Lady.  It is an astonishing combination.

I wrote blandly, back in 2004, that One Fine Day was ‘memorable, though’, unappreciative wretch that I was!  Truth be told, I had not remembered much of the novel.  And I doubt I will remember which steps Laura took, which neighbours she encountered, nor which views she expressed.  This is the sort of novel which cannot be remembered for its contents; only for the impression it leaves.  And that I certainly shall not forget.  I’m so grateful that I returned to One Fine Day, and was given a second chance to appreciate properly the work of brilliance that it is.  I am only left wondering, of course, quite how many other novels I have underestimated in this manner…??

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“An ordinary day, an ordinary family, ordinary lives, but an extraordinary novel.” – Margaret, BooksPlease

“The author’s love for this part of England absolutely sings through this little gem of a novel” – Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf

“But there were also fundamental changes in England’s social fabric, which this short novel portrays in exquisite and sometimes painful detail.” – Laura’s Musings

“It is a moving, elegiac novel about love, beauty, and most importantly, freedom” – Rachel, Book Snob

Country Moods and Tenses – Edith Olivier

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It’s no secret that I love Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (by the by, any of you who are enjoying Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, I definitely recommend The Love Child as a companion read).  I keep reading more books by Olivier, and being disappointed that they’re not as good… Well, this blog post mentioned Country Moods and Tenses (1941) as their favourite of her works, and it sounded like it might be useful for my thesis, so I got a copy online and read it speedily.  And I paid a teeny bit more to get this unusual and beautiful cover, created by Olivier’s friend Rex Whistler.

Sorry the photo is a bit dark, but you get the impression.

Well, long story short, it won’t replace The Love Child in my affections – but it’s still rather a lovely book to have on the shelf, and is quintessentially Olivier.  The more I read by her, especially her non-fiction, the more I realise that she sees herself primarily as a countrywoman, and as a Wiltshire-woman.  She was mayor, after all.

Country Moods and Tenses is subtitled a ‘Non-Grammarian’s Chapbook’, and in it Olivier outlines village life in five grammatical tenses/moods: Infinitive, Imperative, Indicative, Subjunctive and Conditional.  The associations between these and the chapters is somewhat fanciful (Indicative for travelling; Conditional for the changes of modern life; Subjunctive for human relationships, etc.) but it’s as good a method as any for discussing the countryside in a period where traditions and village-individuality was already fast disappearing.  There’s plenty of country folklore, which Olivier swears by:

Birds and animals have many habits which indicate the coming weather to a wise watcher.  If the partridges are still flying in coveys on February 1st, it foretells a late spring; if they pair as early as the last week of January, the season will be an early one.  Pheasants crow in the night to warn of the approach of bad weather, but lately they have decided that German bombs are as bad as tornadoes.  They are extremely sensitive to the sound of a coming raid, and can hear, or feel, the fall of a high-explosive bomb quite twenty miles away.  Then at once they lift up their voices in shrill chorus.
But it is not just the flora and fauna in which Olivier is interested.  She turns her attention to the human inhabitants of Wiltshire, including many photographs.  Those of scenery are a little underwhelming (being in black and white, they offer rather less than modern day equivalents) but the many and various photographers (including Cecil Beaton) have captured some astonishingly natural shots of labourers and villagers.  These were the most interesting to me.  Indeed, through Olivier’s country moods, it was human behaviour which most appealed to me. Those of us who are familiar with E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady will identify with this excerpt – which, by the by, is one of the elements of Olivier’s countryside which certainly hasn’t changed:

In spite of the country genius for making festivals out of buying and selling, nothing can prevent a Sale of Work from being a terribly dreary affair; yet every village must have at least one every summer.  For weeks beforehand the whole parish is busy with preparations.  A garden is lent; the morning arrives; the stalls are prettily arranged; and then, a few hours before the time fixed for the opening ceremony, the goods have to be hurriedly scrambled into the schoolroom to escape a deluge of rain.  Everyone agrees to make the best of it.  A leading lady of the neighbourhood declares the sale open.  The clergyman makes a tactful speech.  The members of the audience look feverishly round.  There is nothing at all to buy, and nobody to buy it.
One of my problems with Olivier’s writing elsewhere is that her writing is rarely witty – all a little too earnest. So I was grateful to find the above section, with its Delafieldian tones.  Although Country Moods and Tenses does lean towards the solemn for the most-part, these little flavours of humour help elevate the book.  And Olivier finds humour in her observations about the countryside she so dearly loves, in both present and past.

In the Middle Ages, the traveller in Europe (or even in England if he went beyond his own county) had to be an adventurous fellow indeed.  Morrison, who published one of the earliest road-books, tells his readers that they should certainly make their wills before leaving home; and one of his first bits of practical advice is an instruction on the different technique of duelling in each European country.  He tells the traveller that he will meet with more thieves in England than anywhere else; but he adds this encouraging postscript: “Having taken purses by the Highway, they seldom or never kill those they rob.  All private men pursue them from village to village with hue and cry.”
It is the future which Olivier cannot observe with laughter, from her 1941 vantage.  She worries about universal education meaning that village children no longer learn a trade, or follow in their parents’ farming footsteps; she is concerned about the buildings which are insensitive to their surroundings; she fears that village will become homogeneous, losing their customs and heritage.  Who’s to say that she was wrong?

But this certainly isn’t an exercise in hand-wringing.  Olivier writes joyfully about the countryside, even while documenting its changes.  Who knows quite what her purpose was in writing Country Moods and Tenses?  Surely she couldn’t have hoped to stall the changes.  Perhaps she just wanted a simple set of recollections.  It would be impossible to encompass all of 1940s village life in one book, but Olivier does capture at least her enthusiasm.  I’ll finish with one sentence, entirely honest, which demonstrates Olivier’s ethos – as well as the shifting sands she was up against:

And no one with a first-hand knowledge of the two could possibly prefer a screen decked with film-stars to a sty full of little pigs.

Mr. Allenby Loses The Way – Frank Baker

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This is one of those books I probably wouldn’t blog about if it weren’t for A Century of Books.  Under the terms and conditions of this challenge, I promised (er, sort of) to read a book from every year of the 20th century, and post a review of each one.  I didn’t think that would be the tricky part.  The paltry figure I currently have stated as completed is not quite so paltry as it appears, since there are three or four books which I’ve read but have yet to review.

Sorry, side-tracked.  I wouldn’t normally blog about Mr. Allenby Loses the Way by Frank Baker because it is has the two characteristics of many books I read: it’s incredibly difficult to find affordable copies, and it’s not especially good.  If it were scarce but brilliant, I’d be the first to write about it; if it were readily available and mediocre, I’d write that review too.  But since it’s impossible to find (I read it in the Bodleian) and not really worth finding… oh well, rules is rules, and this is my book for 1946.  Plus it’s nice to think that someone will have written about this book on the interwebs, because otherwise a would-be Googler would find nothing.

The name Frank Baker will doubtless ring a bell – it is he who penned one of my all-time faves, Miss Hargreaves, and I keep persevering with his work, in the hope that I find something else as wonderful.  (Miss H, as I blogged recently, even pops up her head in Mr. Allenby Loses The Way.)  But genius seems only to have wandered by once, and the other Baker books I’ve read are rather more pedestrian.  Actually that’s probably not the right term for Mr. Allenby Loses The Way because, in fact, it baffled me utterly in its strangeness.

Sergius Allenby is a diffident newsagent who lives fairly contentedly with his wife and niece.  He’s not unlike Norman, from Miss Hargreaves, in being an unassuming but imaginative man.  The family dynamics aren’t as amusing as the Huntley family’s, but it all seems fairly normal (albeit amidst the air raid sirens and rationings of the time) until a gentlemen turns up wanting to talk to Mr. Allenby.

There was something remarkable about him, thought Sergius, yet he could not easily have described him except to say he was tall, lean-figured, dressed in good but unmemorable dark clothes, with graceful, cat-like movements of the arms.  His dim eyes, blurred by heavy horn spectacles, stared down at his brilliantly polished black shoes as though within those orbs stirred some oracle who guided him.  He was like a shadow, without substance or personality.  When he opened his mouth to speak Sergius expected some extraordinary remark to issue from him.  “There is a basilisk sitting on your right shoulder.”  But he only said, in a persuasive and delicate voice, “You are Mr. Allenby, I believe?”

It turns out that the gentlemen is not, in fact, a gentlemen – but a fairy usurping the body of one.  Sergius is asked whether or not he believes in fairies, and somewhat nervously conceded that he always has done – based on the mysterious and imprecise events surrounding his own birth, abandonment by his mother, and subsequent adoption.  This confession is all that is needed for the fairy-man to grant Sergius five wishes – a transaction done with a businesslike demeanour unbefitting a fairy.

Sergius sat, drumming his fingers on the table-cloth and staring dreamily into space.  The strange referred again to his note-book.  “Hm. Yes,” he murmured, “Sergius Allenby.  To be allowed five wishes with the usual reservations.  Period, one month.  Casual wishes not operative.  No other person to assist.  Allow me to congratulate you, Mr. Allenby.  I might tell you, in confidence, that you are the only person in this area to be granted five wishes.”
“It does seem a lot.” Sergius coughed apologetically.  “It always used to be three in the old tales.”
“Frankly, there’s not much one can do with three; and first wishes are invariably wasted.”

And it is after this that the novel becomes strange.

I imagine quite a lot of you would have stopped listening when I used the word ‘fairy’.  I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect myself.  Even with my love of slightly strange novels, which dabble in the fantastic (like a certain Miss Hargreaves, don’t know if you’ve heard of it) I shudder at the thought of fairies and suchlike appearing in a novel.

Well, you’re in luck.  Turns out he might not be a fairy after all.  Humphrey Nanson occupies the other narrative thread – he is a strange sort of psychologist, who muses a lot on the nature of morality, works in an underground room filled with erotica and children’s books, and seems to be able to possess people.  Told you it became strange.  But he also enjoys toying with other people’s lives, and wielding power over them.

“There is the simple expedient of the telephone directory.  Don’t you
adore the pin of fate?  As for the joke – I would aim merely at the
baffling and bewildering of the chosen victim.  For example, Harold
Finching, warehouse clerk, receives, every Tuesday morning, through the
post, a parcel of boiled cod and bootlaces.  Miss Pennyprim, of Mon
Abri, discovers, every Sunday morning, a pair of bright scarlet bloomers
hanging from her line.  Mr. Allenby, newsagent, is visited by a
business-like fairy and told he may have five wishes.”
Curiouser and curiouser.  Even curiouserer is that Mr. Allenby’s wishes seem to be coming true…

There are some fantastic ideas in this novel.  My favourite conceit within it (which is more or less incidental to the plot) is that of an artist so absorbed in painting the sea scene in front of him that it is not until the picture is completed that he realises he has included a woman drowning herself… as indeed she has.  But good ideas do not a novel make.  Where Miss Hargreaves was insouciant and joyful with an undercurrent of the sinister, Mr. Allenby Loses The Way rather loses the joy.  Instead we have a lot of meanderings about philosophy and morality and psychology which do little other than baffle and skip round in circles.  In the meantime, the plot arcs and interweavings don’t seem to make much sense or maintain much continuity.

Perhaps most importantly, there is no character with the life of Miss Hargreaves.   She is a true one-off, a brilliant invention; I could read her dialogue with delight for months.  There is a vitality in her which spreads through her novel.  Mr. Allenby Loses The Way has no such character; everything is slightly leaden.  The writing is not bad, in and of itself, but neither is it sprightly.  The odd amusing turn of phrase reminds me of Baker at his peak, but only for a moment or two.

After I read Miss Hargreaves I had hoped I had been introduced to a wonderful writer, and could spend many happy years tracking down and loving his novels.  Instead, I am left rather desolate that Miss Hargreaves was the one bright light amidst mediocrity.  But I’ll keep trying his books.  If any of them are half as wonderful as Miss Hargreaves, it’ll have been worth the search.

Have you had that experience with any author – one brilliant book, but only one?  If so, let me know…

Ashcombe – Cecil Beaton

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Firstly, I’m so thrilled about all the response to Muriel Spark Reading Week, which will thus definitely go ahead!  More info on dates etc. when Harriet and I have conferred…

Secondly – I’m a bit wary about putting this blog post up… because I don’t have a copy of the book myself, and it’s so lovely that, if I can convey that even slightly, all the secondhand copies online will disappear.  But I can’t afford the ones that are around now, so… I’ll just have to tell you about it, and cross my fingers that I stumble across an affordable copy somewhere.  Sigh.  Sometimes I love you guys too much for my own good.

Preamble over: the book is Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (1949) by Cecil Beaton.  I wanted to read it because Edith Olivier features a lot (she first told Beaton of the house) and so I sat in the Bodleian and read it.  I also took lots of photos, but then I looked again at the photography permission form, and noticed that I’d promised not to publish any of them anywhere, including online.  Oops.  So I’ll have to see what pictures are available elsewhere.  (This photo comes from here.)

Ashcombe is about a house of that name, inhabited by Cecil Beaton between 1931-1946… actually, shall I let Cecil Beaton explain the book himself?  He kindly does so in a Preface:

My tenure of Ashcombe House began with new year of a new decade – the fatal decade of the nineteen-thirties.  “The thirties”, years marked by economic collapse, the rise of Hitler and the wars in China and in Spain, were essentially different in character from their notorious and carefree predecessors, “the twenties”, but they had one thing in common – living then you could still cherish the illusion that you might go on for ever leading your own private life, undisturbed by the international crises in the newspapers.  This illusion was finally and irrevocably shattered in 1939.

So utterly has the world changed since that summer day, nearly twenty years ago, when I stood for the firs time under the brick archway at Ashcombe, and surveyed my future home, that ways of living and of entertaining which the seemed natural today sound almost eccentric.,  Looking back through old diaries recording some of the parties that took place at Ashcombe in those days, it struck me that for this reason it might be interesting to try to string together in narrative form my recollections of that time.  The shape these recollections have assumed is that of a memoir of the house itself, but thought I see this little book primarily as a tribute of gratitude to Ashcombe, a house I shall never cease to regret, it is also and inevitably a story of the people who came to visit me there.
Someone wrote to him, on the book’s publication, to say how pleased he was that Beaton ‘made clear that we were not a group of delinquent Bright Young Things dressing up’.  And indeed, he introduces all the guests over the fifteen years as friends, rather than celebrities – even though amongst their number were Rex Whistler (who painted the image below), Salvador Dali, Diana Cooper, and other luminaries from the worlds of art, theatre, and literature.

(this picture came from a great blog post on Little Augury, which has several others from the book too)

But for me, there was one stand-out character in the book: Ashcombe House itself.  When Beaton first found it, with the help of Edith Olivier and Stephen Tennant, it was in neglected disrepair.  He eventually managed to negotiate a lease from its owner, Mr. Borley (who seems to have been appositely boorish) at a cheap rate, on the understanding that Beaton would do a great deal of restoration to the property.

And these were the sections I loved.  I’m a sucker for any property programme on television – they can be buying, selling, or building a house, but my favourites are when they transform them.  So it’s my hankering after Changing Rooms scaled up to a majestically bohemian and artistic standard.  There are plenty of photographs throughout, many showing ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots, and although they are (naturally) in black/white, they still give a wonderful picture of the process and the time.  Above all, the pictures and writing together create a three-dimensional picture of what Ashcombe was like to live in.  I love novels where houses play an important role, and it’s even more delightful when the house in question existed, and its effect was real.

Ashcombe, in this century, could be neither a gentleman’s home nor a farmer’s retreat.  It is essentially a artist’s abode; and, under the varying conditions in which I lived there, the house conformed to every change of my temperament and mood, proving as great a solace during the grey years of war as in the now almost forgotten days of gaiety.
Of course, Ashcombe alone might not give this effect.  It has latterly been owned by Madonna, which is rather a ghastly thought.  I doubt she has the same artistic sensitivities of Beaton, if her leotards are anything to go by.  Part of the charm of Beaton’s book is his character, and the friends he had.  I doubt I’d have been entertained by them so much if they were in a London townhouse, but transport them to the idyllic countryside of Wiltshire, and I’m enamoured.  I don’t mean that I was bowled over by the individuals themselves so much as the type of group.  It did make me wish for a moment that my friends were all artists and writers and theatre managers: we could go and paint murals on the walls of our country homes and put on impromptu plays in the garden.  Then I realised that my friends and I do sometimes paint together (albeit on canvas) and have been known to read out an entire Shakespeare play together – so I’m not doing too badly.   But I’ve never had a circus room (how delicious would that be?) and never had call to say “It’s too bad, they’ve broken my best silver bird-cage!”

(A painting of Ashcombe owned by Beaton, c.1770)

Sadly, of course, the years of his lease were not without sadness.  Beaton moves onto the war, and writes movingly of how it affected him and his friends – at least one of whom, Rex Whistler, was killed in action.  While this section was written no less well than the rest, perhaps it is of less especial interest than those parts of the book which focus on Ashcombe House – simply because so many other people have recorded the pain of war.  An anguish, if less extreme then no less real, comes when Beaton must end his lease and say goodbye to Ashcombe.  Or, rather, he is evicted when Borley decides that his son will move in.  Within his rights as a landlord, but still a desperately sad loss for Beaton, who so clearly loves the house.

What I didn’t expect, when I ordered Ashcombe to the library, was Beaton’s talent as a writer.  I knew him as a designer and photographer, but had not expected him to write so beautifully and simply about his house.  Without ever having seen the house, I now know it intimately – not the layout, but the feel of the rooms and the grounds and the surrounding county.

Beaton in the bathroom, surrounded by visitors’ hands(!)

Thinking about it, this might not be the ideal book for the city-lover.  Even though I currently live in a city, my heart is definitely in the fields and woods, and the spirit of the countryside.  The people there are friendlier.  The mix of nature and man and animal is much clearer to see, and beautiful even when at its most practical.  I will devote a post to this at some point, I keep building up to it, and Ashcombe is another piece in the jigsaw of why I love the countryside.  So if you love London (and so many of you seem to) or have never lived in a small village, then I don’t think you’ll be able to love this book in quite the same way that I do.  But, perhaps, as I can read books set in London with the passing interest of a tourist, so you can come on a reading charabanc, have a good look around, and then rush back to your streetlighting and taxis and neatly contained parks.  For people like me, who love villages and villagers and life in the middle of nowhere – who don’t really feel completely alive anywhere else – Ashcombe is not simply an ode to artistry, a toast to happy memories, and a lament against the far-reaching damage done by war; it is a paean to the countryside and to life lived amongst fields, and trees – and happy, playful friends, unaware of what was around the corner.

Up At The Villa – W. Somerset Maugham

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I’m trying to get through all the books I’ve read and not reviewed in 2011, so there will be a flurry of reviews over the next fortnight.  Prepare yourselves!

A while ago I did one of my novella reading weekends, but I don’t think I ever actually told you about it, before or afterwards.  One of the books I read was my first stab at W. Somerset Maugham, only eight or so years since I first bought one of his books.  Which wasn’t the one I read.  Up at the Villa (1941) came recommended by Simon Savidge (see links at the bottom) and is only 120pp – plus it has a lovely cover, so why not?

Up at the Villa is rather difficult to classify – in terms of length, it probably counts as a novella, but structurally it seems much more like a short story.  There are all manner of attempts to define the short story, and I find a few quite helpful.  Brander Matthews suggested over a century ago that “a short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of single emotions called forth by a single situation.” In 1979 Wendell Harris picked up on the same focal word in his definition: “single memorable curve of action revealing a single memorable personality.”  Poe wrote more vaguely, but sensibly, that the short story must have “unity of impression”.  All these definitions essentially suggest singularity – no room for interweaving plots, multiple focalisation, etc. etc.  Of course, there are dozens of writers and hundreds of short stories which break these rules, but rather fewer novellas and novels which fit so neatly into the definition.

Up at the Villa doesn’t take us far from beautiful young widow Mary Panton’s perspective, nor from the events of a single momentous day.  In the wake of her husband’s death, Mary is living in a beautiful borrowed villa overlooking Florence.  Her beauty is striking, she is privileged (if not quite opulent) and at the beginning of the novel she even receives a proposal from an older man who is soon to be Governor of Bengal.  Not to mention the rakish attentions of Rowley Flint, who doesn’t have marriage on his mind.

So where does this single memorable curve of action take us?  It starts with one act of generosity:

They had dined late and soon after eleven the Princess called for her bill.  When it grew evident that they were about to go, the violinist who had played to them came forward with a plate.  There were a few coins on it from diners at other tables and some small notes.  What they thus received was the band’s only remuneration.  Mary opened her bag.
“Don’t bother”, said Rowley.  “I’ll give him a trifle.”
He told a ten-lira note out of his pocket and put it on the plate.
“I’d like to give him something too”, said Mary.  She laid a hundred-lira note on the others.  The man looked surprised, gave Mary a searching look, bowed slightly and withdrew.
“What on earth did you give him that for?” exclaimed Rowley.  “That’s absurd.”
“He plays so badly and he looks so wretched.”
“But they don’t expect anything like that.”
“I know.  That’s why I gave it.  It’ll mean so much to him.  It may make all the difference to his life.”

And, one thing leading to another, it does make a difference to a lot of lives.  But I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot…

I do love stories where one seemingly innocent action leads to a huge fallout.  The only one which comes to mind right now is a broken cup in an episode of Flight of the Conchords, which probably isn’t a seriously helpful example… but you know what I mean.   I thought Maugham manipulated the situation well, and without contravening the personalities of the characters drawn at the beginning.  Mary is impulsive and romantic and not always able to deal with the outcome of her actions, and this makes for a plot which snowballs out of her control – a touch melodramatically, but still within the realms of feasibility.

My only confusion is why it became a 120 page book.  Most authors would have condensed it into thirty pages, or added more characters, more ideas, more occurrences – and another 120 pages.  It might seem an odd thing to focus on, but Up at the Villa falls between two stools, which is difficult to ignore.  What makes me want to return to Maugham, and try one of his more famous books, is that even with these reservations, I still found Up at the Villa a skillful, interesting read.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“Up at the Villa is a perfect book when you want something slightly familiar and yet something that completely throws you.” – Simon, Savidge Reads

“The pacing of the story is excellent, starting off at the slow, languid speed that you might expect from a novel about the English upper classes in Italy and gradually speeding up until it feels almost out of control.” – Old English Rose

“It’s a fine and entertaining diversion, and it’s got guns in, and sometimes that’s all we need” – John Self, The Asylum 

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

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Thanks for your lovely comments on my Holywell Cemetery post – I was a bit tentative about sharing that side of my interests, but lots of us seem to have similar activities!  I’m sorry my responses to comments have been lax of late – will get onto that soon.

Since my 26th birthday has come and gone, it’s about time I finished writing about the books I received for my 25th birthday, isn’t it?  Well, truth be told, I’ve yet to read all of them, but I have read one of those given to me by Colin: Exercises in Style (1947) by Raymond Queneau.

Oddly enough, I was offered a review copy of this back in the dim, distant past.  I said yes-please-thank-you-very-much, and they sent me… The Fox by D.H. Lawrence.  (Which, incidentally, was very good – read more here).  Not sure how that happened, but it put Exercises in Style onto my radar, and I was pleased when Col gave it to me.  Before I go further, I must add that it was translated by Barbara Wright.  Thanks, Barbara!

The premise is simple, and the execution is complex.  An everyday incident takes place, described thus on the blurb:

On a crowded bus at midday, the narrator observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately.  When a seat is vacated, the first man takes it.  Later, in another part of town, the man is spotted again, while being advised by a friend to have another button sewn onto his overcoat.

Queneau’s experiment is to find as many ways as possible to express this anecdote.  There are ninety-nine different styles used – some are expected (Past, Present, Reported Speech), some are quirky (Couplets, Cross-Examination) and some are just plain weird (Paragoge, Parts of Speech, Permutations by Groups of 2, 3, 4 and 5 Letters).

This definitely isn’t a book to read cover-to-cover in one go.  I read it gradually over the course of several months, which worked out to be a pretty good approach.  Exercises in Style is, of course, more of an experiment in what can be done with words than a gripping beginning-middle-end read.  As such, it is interesting in the abstract, wider-view – but would be far too repetitive if read in one go.  I have to admit to flicking past the styles which removed any linguistic sense from the anecdote, and the Dog Latin meant little to me, but I was impressed by how varied the same unremarkable story can be, simply through stylistic choices.

Perhaps Exercises in Style should be on hand for the aspiring novelist – it should certainly be flicked through by anybody who claims to like novels ‘in a plain, unfancy style’ – because it reveals that there is no such thing as a plain style.  True, few novels would focalise wholly through smell, feel, or sound (as some of these styles do) but Queneau reveals how many different ways a writer can approach even the most mundane objects. I’d recommend anybody interested in language or the importance of writing in fiction should have a copy of this on the shelves, to dip in and out of, smiling.

It goes without saying that, being in translation, some of Queneau’s nuances will have been lost – perhaps more important in Exercises in Style than other books, but the fact of translation doesn’t diminish the point that language choices affect the ways we read.  Indeed, it enhances it.

Rather than go on any further, I think I’ll type out a few examples, so you can see for yourself the sort of variety which Queneau creates:

Zoological

In the dog days, while I was in a bird cage at feeding time, I noticed a young puppy with a neck like a giraffe who, ugly and venomous as a toad, wore yet a precious beaver on his head. This queer fish obviously had a bee in his bonnet and was quite bats, he started yak-yakking at a wolf in sheep’s clothing claiming that he was treading on his dogs with his beetle-crushers. But the cock got a flea in his ear; that foxed him, and quiet as a mouse he ran like a hare for the perch.

I saw him again in front of the zoo with a young buck who was telling him to bear in mind a certain drill about his pelage.

Passive

Midday was struck on the clock. The bus was being got onto by passengers. They were being squashed together. A hat was being worn on the head of a young gentleman, which hat was encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. A long neck was sported by the gentleman. The man standing next to him was being grumbled at by the latter because of the jostling which was being inflicted on him by him. As soon as a vacant seat was espied by the young gentleman, it was made the object of his precipitate movements and it became sat down upon.

The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare. He was clothed in an overcoat and was having a remark made to him by a friend who happened to be there, to the effect that it was necessary to have an extra button put on it.

Couplets

On the bus once (an S, or of that ilk)
I saw a little runt, a wretched milk-
Sop, voicing discontent, though round his turban
He had a plait, this fancy-pants suburban.
How he complained, this strange metamorphosis
With elongated neck and halitosis:
One standing near who’d come to man’s estate
Refused, he said, to circumnavigate
His toes, when passengers got on and rode,
Late for lunch, panting, to some chaste abode.
There was no scandal; this sad personage
Found where to sit and end his pilgrimage.
As I went back towards the Latin Quarter
He reappeared, this lad of milk and water;
I heard his foppish friend say with dispassion:
“The buttons on your coat are not in fashion.”

The Only Way Is (Mary) Essex

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Sue, Ann, and Erika were all intrigued by the opening to Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex, which I posted the other day, and asked if I would say a bit more about her.  Here are those lines again:

It is highly probable that the tea shop would never have started at all if Commander David Tompkins hadn’t fancied himself at being something of a dab-hand at cooking.

Well, never let it be said that I ignore the cries of my people.  I do misinterpret them a bit – because I don’t remember all that much about Tea Is So Intoxicating, I decided to read one of the other Mary Essex novels I have on my shelf – the equally wonderfully titled The Amorous Bicycle.

You see, I read Tea Is So Intoxicating almost a decade ago, and I read it immediately after finished Moby Dick.  Anything would have been refreshing right then – and, while I knew I loved the novel, which is about the struggles of setting up a provincial tea-room, I didn’t know how much this depended on comparison.  Whom could I ask?  Nobody else knew anything about her.  I’m the only person to own any Mary Essex novels on LibraryThing (since Geranium Cat very kindly gave me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy.)  And I bought Tea Is So Intoxicating on a whim, because it had a brilliant title and only cost 10p. 

Turns out, I knew more about Mary Essex than I realised.  But I’d nearly finished the novel before I discovered that, so I’m going to make you wait until the end of the review to unveil the surprise…

The Amorous Bicycle (1944) takes place in Queen Catharine’s Court, an ‘ultra-modern, ultra-select block of flats situated in South London, not too south of course, because that would not have had a desirable district number for notepaper, but fairly south.’  There is a huge cast of characters (which isn’t the only thing which reminded me of Richmal Crompton’s novels) and not really any principals – although the first we meet is Mr. Vyle, the resident manager of the building.  He’s a bit of a coward, and unduly proud of his position, but basically a good egg.

I was going to go through the lot, but it might get a bit bewildering.  Suffice to say, they do all become fully-formed – it just takes quite a few pages.  Some are closer to stereotype than others – the retired Colonel and his ex-comrade cook are in the ‘closer’ category, not to mention the temperamental French chef for the building’s restaurant.  There’s also the James family – a long-suffering mother who is more than willing to share her sufferings, her actressy daughter and casual son, and her estranged husband (preposterously called Henry James) who is ditched by the mistress he absconded with, and tries to go back to the family he hasn’t seen for a decade.  There’s a coquettish young woman; a coquettish older woman; a browbeaten decorator determined to paint every flat ‘pile blew’; a lascivious doctor; a self-important, plagiarising novelist… the list goes ever delightfully on.

It all sounds a bit like a soap opera, doesn’t it?  Well, it’s closer, as I said, to Richmal Cromptons novels – a useful comparison only, of course, if you’ve read any of them.  Gossip and intrigue sustain the residents of the building, all of whom seem to be contemplating romantic alliances to greater or lesser extents.

I am no great fan of romantic novelists.  If that is all they bring to the table, I must confess myself bored – but you probably know how greatly I prize good writing and Essex’s is certainly not bad.  It would, admittedly, be infinitely better if she had never discovered the use of the exclamation mark.  I think it can be used to great aplomb in dialogue (c.f. The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, still my forerunner for Read of 2011) but is nigh-on unforgivable in narrative.  It always looks amateurish.

BUT – Essex’s writing is funny.  Of course humour is subjective, but I think a lot of you might enjoy her humour too – it reminded me of E.M. Delafield, in that wry, observational style which occasionally does a little twist in the middle of a sentence.  Her unexpected turns made me smile – she is especially good, I thought, at introducing characters with quick, witty sketches.  Which is a mercy, given how many of them there are.  Here are three examples:

He was under forty, and good-looking in a rugged, rather ugly way.

The next one hit a bit close to home…

Professor Tyrrell, unmarried, and completely self-contained, lived in Number Ninety-one.  He was pedantic, he was finicky, he spoke repulsively correct English, in fact it was so correct that it was wrong.

And, self-deprecatingly, this was my favourite:

He was a vegetarian, and looked it.
Only the other day, when reviewing Edith Olivier’s Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady, I lamented that she hadn’t availed herself of the many opportunities to laugh at the absurdities of wartime.  Well, Essex barely comments on the more serious aspects of war (all but one person seem miraculously unaffected by any actual fighting) but is rather wonderful on the deprivations suffered by economising housewives and frustrated customers.

She proffered the menu.  It read Lunch 3s.6d. (and on the back Dinner 6s.).  Bread, one penny, Napkin, one penny, Coffee, sixpence.  Minerals and soda water.  On reading the menu, which on the face of it looked to be lengthy and extremely good, one’s mood changed, because most of it had a tendency to boil down to Spam.

Indeed, it is the rumour of a far-off fishmonger selling ‘dabs’ (whatever they might be) which compels Miss Hungerford-Hawkes to belie the dignity of her years and procure a bicycle.  This is the first, but by no means the last, mention of bicycles in The Amorous Bicycle.  Essex’s title derives from the well-known rhyme ‘Daisy, Daisy’ (read it here, if you don’t know it.)  For somehow, often quite tenuously, the advent of bicycles to Queen Catharine’s Court leads to all sorts of happenings, romantic and otherwise (and it is rather nice that Essex focuses on romances between those not in the first flush of youth – this is by no means a youthful romance-by-numbers novel.)

I did have to laugh at the following line – I know enough evangelical cyclists to understand.  (Guys, it’s just a mode of transport.  I don’t tell you at length how great walking down the street is.  Just saying.  Oh, and when I’m driving, please don’t cycle down the middle of the road, or jump red lights.  Ta.)

Really, Mrs. Plaistow decided, people with bicycles were very much like people with babies, they just couldn’t stop talking about them.

And not everybody has a fondness for this wartime economy:

Mr. Vyle didn’t think so much of a nice bike.  He found that biking made his ears cold, and he was fed to the teeth that he would probably have to give up his car because he couldn’t get the petrol for it and he knew that Mrs. Vyle would point out that other people had “ways.”  Mr. Vyle hadn’t any ways.  He was rather alarmed at the prospect of what might happen to him if he tried any tricks.  All the same he’d see this blasted war somewhere else before he bought himself a nice bike, as Tutton suggested.

Incidentally, when I worked in Rare Books in the Bodleian, I dealt with a lot of boys’ comics from the early twentieth-century.  Throughout the early 1940s the back cover held advertisements for a bike manufacturer (showing boys on bikes capturing Nazis; using their bike bells to win the war, etc.) but each said essentially “Sorry, bicycles not available during wartime, but keep an eye out once the fighting’s all over.”  The residents of Queen Catharine’s Court do, admittedly, have some trouble procuring their vehicles – but a fair few manage it in the end.

While I was reading, I wasn’t trying to decide whether or not Mary Essex was a great novelist.  She obviously isn’t.  My quandary was whether or not she was good – and, exclamation marks aside, I decided that she was.  I’d certainly read more by her, and have one more waiting on my bookshelf.  Her characters and plots don’t reinvent the wheel, but are diverting enough, and her style is pleasantly amusing.

So, that twist I promised you.  While hunting around on the internet, I discovered what I had already suspected – that Mary Essex was a pseudonym.  What I had not expected was that I had already heard of Mary Essex under her actual name – which is (drum roll)… Ursula Bloom.

I expect a lot of you have heard of her.  Perhaps you’ve seen her mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records.  Because Ursula Bloom wrote over 500 books, under various names.  In terms of quantity, she could look Barbara Cartland in the eye.

This discovery did leave me a bit shocked… how could someone so prolific actually write good books?  I know a lot of you will think “All that matters is that you enjoyed it.”  That’s partly true, but I’ve always been a believer that literary merit exists, and that books can’t be judged entirely subjectively, or on how pleasing they are to the reader.  Was my judgement wildly off?  There are so many books I have disparaged or discarded because of poor writing, yet I thought the writing in The Amorous Bicycle above average.

So… I am left puzzled.  Did Ursula Bloom put extra effort into her Mary Essex titles, or am I so enamoured by the 1940s that I’ll forgive a wartime novelist that which I’d condemn from a 21st century writer?  I don’t know… but I’d love any of you who’ve read any Mary Essex to comment, or if you’ve got one languishing on your shelves – grab it, read it, and get back to me.

Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady by Edith Olivier

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Those of you who eagerly await my ‘hilarious’ pun-nomenal post titles may have noted that, of late, I’ve gone for simple titles when doing book reviews.  This is partly so I can tell what I was reviewing when I look at archives, and partly to make the search engine work better… but I do miss trying to think of laboured ways to pun, of an evening.

Which isn’t really relevant to anything at all, only I felt I could have had a field day with Edith Olivier’s Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1940).  Nothing springs to mind right now, of course… (Landlady Olivier… no. Holding The Thoughts… no.  Night to See You, To See You… Night!  Ok, stop Simon.)  Shall we get on with the show?

It’s no secret that I love Olivier’s novel The Love-Child.  I’m currently writing a chapter of my thesis which centres around it, and it’s probably in my top ten favourite books.  So far my other encounters with Olivier have been somewhat less impressive (unless you count the genuine excitement of reading her actual diary, in Wiltshire Record Office) but I am abundantly hopeful – and thus, when I saw Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady in Taunton, I grabbed it.  (And, y’know, paid for it and everything.)

Being specific, this book is (purportedly) ‘presented by’ Edith Olivier.  It takes the form of edited diaries from the pen of Miss Emma Nightingale.  Olivier’s preface indicates that she compiled Miss Nightingale’s war diaries, deposited with her the night before Miss N died: ‘All the sentences I have printed here are hers, though I have rearranged them in order to bring them into chapters.’  Now, Jane, in her lovely review, took Olivier at her word.  I’m more cynical.  I’m pretty sure she’s lying.  Remember when Margaret Forster wrote Diary of an Ordinary Woman and there was a small kerfuffle because it turned out the ‘ordinary woman’ was entirely made up?  Well, I expect Olivier’s kerfuffle was even smaller, but… it does seem as though Miss Nightingale is a creature of Olivier’s imagination.  There’s her name, for starters (‘night thoughts’ of Miss Nightingale? A little coincidental.)  Also the fact that the book doesn’t even slightly resemble a diary – for instance, she often writes looking back over several years, retrospectively.  And finally, the style is very much Olivier’s own.  It often reads exactly like her own autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley, which I have yet to review here.

None of which, naturally, prevents it being a very enjoyable book.  It’s quite an odd, roundabout concept – but whether or not Miss Nightingale ever existed, the wartime thoughts are interesting, engaging reading for any of us interested in the home front of the war years.  Which is quite a lot of us, no?

The plot (as it were) of the book is quite unextraordinary.  Ordinary, if you will.  Essentially it narrates the experience of a fairly old woman, living in a small village during wartime, and offering up her home to lodgers.  These range from military men to a famous actress – each of which Miss Nightingale welcomes happily, and observes shrewdly.  For the most part, I enjoyed and respected the calm, kind manner in which Miss Nightingale coped with the uncertainties and upheavals of conflict.
I have found that the happiest way to carry on in the war is, not to worry about any immediate effect of what we are actually doing, but to do it as well as we can, and then to look away and watch nature all around, slowly reaching her effortless and sure fruition.  That is the complete change of air and scene which we so often think we must have.  There is no repose like the realisation that one’s little daily drudgery is already part of something beyond itself.I am endlessly interested in home-front perspectives on war, but what I really love is the good old British if-you-can’t-laugh-what-can-you-do attitude to anything and everything.  One need look no further than E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime to realise that the most unsettling of circumstances can be dealt with humorously – and that was what I found most lacking in The Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady.  It’s very rarely funny.  It isn’t unduly earnest, but does lapse into the prosaic on occasion.  Some situations had inherent humour, and those came across well, but I felt Olivier/Nightingale could have made this a more engaging narrative if she had allowed herself to be a bit wittier.  The humour, when it comes, is subtle…
One complication was that a party of mothers and “expectant mothers”, whose children were sent here, had been themselves evacuated to another place beginning with the same letter.  The authorities had imagined that this alphabetical proximity naturally carried with it a geographical one, but unfortunately this was not the case, and the other village was about twelve miles off.  For some days this caused a ferment.  First of all, one of the mothers (who further happened to be “expectant”) having been located in this remote spot, arrived at our school screaming for her children who had been sent here.  She and her two children made a terrific scene, yelling and shrieking in the school yard, while I tried to explain that as the two places were in different rural districts the exchange must be arranged by the two councils.  I promised that this would be done as soon as possible.  No good.  The yells grew louder.  The Chief Billeting Officer, being a stickler for law-abiding, refused to let me take the matter into my own hands.  I therefore conveyed the party to his office, where I pointed out to him that, unless we made an exception in this case, the “expectant mother” would soon be “expectant” no longer, and that the alteration in her status might take place in his very office.  This changed his opinion, and he delightedly consented to our sending the whole family, as quickly as possible, at least twelve miles away.(Incidentally, for two rather different angles on WW2 evacuees, see Evelyn Waugh’s spiky, rather cruel novel Put Out More Flags or Terence Frisby’s touching memoir Kisses on a Postcard.)

The final two paragraphs of the book reflect what is deep within my own heart too, and which couldn’t be understood by people who haven’t lived in a village.  It’s made me want to write a post dedicated to villages, to see if I can offer up an alternative to Rachel’s paeans to New York and London, places (sorry!) I would loathe to live.  I might well write that soon, but for now I’ll hand over to Olivier/Miss Nightingale (the quotation at the end, by the way, is apparently from George Borrow):
That is the happiness of living in this place, and indeed in any country place in England to-day.  We are not cut off from the life-and-death struggle of our country, for has not this bee called “a war of little groups”, in which the Home Guards and the housewives take their place behind the aircraft and the tanks?  Yet we still live on in our own homes, and if other homes are like mine (s I am sure they are) it s still possible for a visitor to say, as he enters our doors, “Here, one can hardly realise the war”.  And that is perhaps the best thing we can ever give to the strangers within our gates.
So the colour of the trees still matters to us, and also to our lodgers.  It has mattered to us – spring, summer, autumn, and winter – all through the past three years; and, as for the winters, it must be admitted that the war ones have been very hard.  They really might have been planned by Hitler.  Yet, in spite of that, now they have taken their place among the visual memories of a lifetime, what rare effects of beauty some of them are found to recall!  There was that marvellous Sunday morning when the rain froze as it fell, and the trees were suddenly hung with tinkling icicles, chiming with little ghost-like echoes of the church bells which had long been silent.  There are no icicles to-night, and there are no bells; but “there’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath.  Life is very sweet, brother.”Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady is a very slim volume, under a hundred pages, and doesn’t really have the quality of Nella Last’s War or the magnitude of Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges – but there is plenty of room for many voices, and this is a quieter angle, from an older perspective, and still makes for interesting reading.  Olivier still hasn’t equalled The Love Child here, but of course it is a very different kettle of fish.  For anybody interested in wartime England – I’d recommend picking this up if you stumble across it, and further recommend that you go and read Jane’s enchanting review.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

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Like many people my age, my first encounter with John Steinbeck was when studying Of Mice and Men during my GCSEs.  Unlike a lot of people, flogging out every detail of a novel (and then watching the video because we’d never quite finished reading the book) didn’t put me off reading for life – but neither was I desperate to read any more Steinbeck.

So, when my book group chose The Pearl (1947) for this month’s read, I was happy to give Steinbeck another go.  I hadn’t disliked Of Mice and Men, but I’m yet to click with any of the Great American Novels (on the list which left me cold at best: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick – although I did love To Kill A Mockingbird).  Well, there could scarcely be more different novels than Of Mice and Men and The Pearl – it’s difficult to believe they’re by the same author.  And whatever my feelings about the former work – The Pearl is captivatingly brilliant.

At only ninety pages long, The Pearl is barely a novella – the blurb of my copy labels it a short story, but I think it is most fitting to call it a fable.  That is certainly reflective of its tone and atmosphere.  It tells of Kino, his wife Juana, and their baby Coyotito.  They are Mexican pearlers, living in La Paz in extreme poverty – but a close, kind community.  That is, those of their race (which I think is Mexican-Indian) care for one another – the rich townsfolk are selfish colonisers who refer to Kino and his people as ‘animals’.

What I loved most about the book was its style and tone, which felt authentically as though it were an inherited folk-tale, told through the generations.  I daresay there’s all sorts that could be said about an outsider imposing a fable on this community, ya-dah-ya-dah, but that’s not really the point – Steinbeck has crafted something which never feels forced or voyeuristic, but as though it were part of the lifeblood of people like Kino.  Folk-tales tend to present the world in an unexpected way – in The Pearl, the Mexican-Indians experience events through melodies.  Not simply singing about them, but sensing them – Kino can hear the Song of Evil approaching; he can hear the Song of Family.  He can hear many interweaving melodies, and trusts them.

Now, Kino’s people had sung of everything that happened or existed.  They had made songs to the fishes, to the sea in anger and to the sea in calm, to the light and the dark and the sun and the moon, and the songs were all in Kino and in his people – every song that had ever been made, even the ones forgotten.  And as he filled his basket the song was in Kino, and the beat of the song was his pounding heart as it ate the oxygen from his held breath, and the melody of the song was the grey-green water and the little scuttling animals and the clouds of fish that flitted by and were gone.  But in the song there was a secret little inner song, hardly perceptible, but always there, sweet and secret and clinging, almost hiding in the counter-melody, and this was the Song of the Peal That Might Be, for every shell thrown in the basket might contain a pearl.
It will come as no surprise that Kino finds a pearl – and it is enormous.  It is, he believes, The Pearl of the World.  What follows is akin to a parable – unsurprisingly the arrival of wealth does not bring happiness; rather, it brings complications and anguish.

I shan’t give you all the details.  Although they are somewhat predictable, as with all stories (and especially folk-tales) the importance lies in the way in which they are told.  I was very impressed by Steinbeck’s technique in mounting tension (a trait he also uses, of course, in Of Mice and Men) – he manages to make a very simple tale extremely gripping.  If I knew how he did, I’d be a great writer myself.

The Pearl isn’t simply a morality tale.  That wealth doesn’t equate happiness is both true and a truism.  Steinbeck’s use of a straightforward tale is much more sophisticated – an incredibly engaging, beautiful narrative.  It isn’t the sort of book I could love in a fond, intimate manner – in feeling like a folk-tale passed down through generations, it keeps the reader at a distance – but this story of Kino and his family is still captivating, and a masterpiece of simplicity and authorial economy.

Things to get Stuck into:


The Blue Fox by Sjon – this sparse Icelandic tale kept coming to my mind whilst I was reading – perhaps because Sjon, like Steinbeck, envelops the reader entirely in the atmosphere of his tale.


The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono – for another well-told fable, with beautiful woodcut illustrations, you could do no better.

The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

Despite the tidal waves of books that come into my possession, and the fact that I rarely leave the house without buying at least one book (I’ve bought five since I did the meme on Friday) only relatively rarely do I buy a book on a complete whim.  Usually I’ve read other things by the author, or heard good things, or am following up a blog review etc.  These links can be tenuous, and tend to create an ever-widening field of gosh-yes-I-think-I’d-like-that books.  But occasionally I buy one, knowing nothing whatsoever about it or its author.

And that, dear reader, is how I came to buy The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. 

I was lured in by the fact that it was an NYRB Classic, and they’re always beautifully produced, whatever else may come inside.  And I was further tempted when I saw that it was a ‘fantastic exploration of virtual realities’ (thus potentially useful for my thesis) and had apparently inspired the film Last Year in Marienbad, which has been in Amazon basket for years.  Apparently it was mentioned in ‘Lost’, too, but I didn’t see any of that.

This novella (only a hundred pages) should probably be classed as science fiction, and there is definite allusion to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau in Bioy Casares’ title – but this isn’t a tale of robots and computers, but of one lovestruck, bewildered man.  He isn’t named, and seems to be known as The Fugitive, since he is hiding on the (fictional) island Villings to escape the death penalty in his home country of Venezuela.  The Invention of Morel takes the form of his diaries.  The opening paragraph flings the reader into the catalyst of the novella:

Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time.  I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time.  The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again.  As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record.
Despite having appeared to be a deserted island, complete with abandoned chapel and museum, suddenly the shore is filled with people – eccentric people, dressed in clothes of the past, dancing and socialising in the unseasonal heat.

The Fugitive is most interested in one of the women, whom he names Faustine.  She (although the narrative does not explicitly say so) resembles Louise Brooks and was inspired by Bioy Casares’ fascination with that film star.  The Fugitive follows her, watching her sunbathing and spying on her activities and – as people do in novels – falls besottedly in love with her, without ever engaging her in conversation.  His rival for her affections, who does have conversation with her and everything, is the Morel of the title.

And then all the tourists disappear.

It’s always difficult to tell how much a novel’s style is due to its author, when it comes in translation.  Either Bioy Casares deliberately wrote most of The Invention of Morel in a disconcerting, imprecise style, or Simms didn’t do a great job translating.  The novella is quite difficult to read.  It certainly doesn’t flow.  It is disjointed, not entirely chronological, meandering through speculation and confusion in between scribbled declarations of love.  All of which certainly echoes The Fugitive’s confusion, thrusting the reader into the same bewilderment he must be feeling.  What makes me suspect that this is deliberate is this paragraph, about Morel explaining his ‘invention’ (fear not, I shall tell you when to look away, if you want to avoid spoilers!)

Up to this point it was a repugnant and badly organized speech. Morel is a scientist, and he becomes more precise when he overlooks his personal feelings and concentrates on his own special field; then his style is still unpleasant, filled with technical words and vain attempts to achieve a certain oratorical force, but at least it is clearer.

Although this refers to Morel’s speech, it also reflects upon the style and structure of The Invention of Morel itself.  After this point, it becomes much more lucid and readable.  Which means Bioy Casares is being rather clever, but doesn’t make the first two-thirds of the novella any easier to read…

Ok, now I’m going to tell you what Morel’s ‘invention’ is – so run away, if you don’t want to know.

*Doo-be-doo-be-dooooo*

Ok, still with me? Here it is: Morel has recorded all of their actions for the week – but not simply audio and visual, but all five senses.  What The Fugitive has been witnessing is one of the endless replayings of the week, which keeps that group of visitors to the island in some curious form of immortality – and which explains all manner of other strange phenomena.

The Invention of Morel has been filled with all manner of clues from the outset, which make sense looking back, but merely seem confusing upon first reading them.  I especially liked this one:

I went to gather the flowers, which are most abundant down in the ravines.  I picked the ones that were least ugly.  (Even the palest flowers have an almost animal vitality!)  When I had picked all I could carry and started to arrange them, I saw that they were dead.

What originally seems to hint towards The Fugitive’s delusional or deranged state (and can that interpretation ever be ruled out, in fantastic works?) slots into the reader’s new understanding of the novel.

Giving away this device shouldn’t prevent you having a rewarding reading of The Invention of Morel.  The book doesn’t rest upon the power of a twist, as many less intellectual books and films do – rather, Bioy Casares explores themes of isolation; what constitutes immortality; what rights ought scientists to have over humans; even the power of love.

The final third of the novella, being so much less stylistically confused and confusing, allows these themes to come to the fore and it was definitely this section which I most valued and enjoyed.  Perhaps a slow, thoughtful reading of the first two-thirds would prove equally rewarding.  As it was, I did feel rather like I was battling through quicksand, never able to settle into a comfortable reading rhythm – but, after all, probably that was what Bioy Casares intended…?

Others who got Stuck into it…


“It’s the kind of read that’s slightly unsettling and not with a lot of closure.” – Amy, My Friend Amy


“I was delighted to find The Invention of Morel to be such a quick and engaging read, and yet one that has depth if I chose to read it on a deeper level in the future.” – Rebecca, Rebecca Reads


“As a mystery it’s engaging, and all the threads come together in an intricate weave with no frayed lines to tug on.” – Stewart, BookLit