1940s

Westwood – Stella Gibbons

StuckinaBook All , 16 Comments

Why, dear reader, why does it sometimes take me so long to review books?  I read Westwood (1946) by Stella Gibbons whilst on holiday with Colin, thought it was very good, have promised you reviews a dozen times… and only now do I get around to writing about it.

Firstly, many thanks to lovely Vintage books for sending me this copy, and super praise to Pep Montserrat who did the beautiful cover illustration.  Like everyone who has read it, I love Cold Comfort Farm and was excited when I heard that Vintage were hot on Virago’s heels, in publishing more of Gibbons’ work.  Then I read Lynne Truss’ excellent introduction, published in the Guardian (but now not available online) and simply had to read the novel.

In her introduction, Truss writes that ‘If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbons’s Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion.’  Those of you who know my thoughts about the relative merits of Austen’s novels may be surprised to learn that this actually encouraged me to read Westwood(!)  Obviously Truss’ analogy can only be taken so far, but she has a point – Westwood is not a comic novel (although it has funny moments), rather it is slightly melancholic and very contemplative.

The heroine of the piece is Margaret Steggles, a plain and uncertain type with a thirst for learning and an appetite for adventure which she keeps sensibly subdued.  She is only 23, unhappy with her job as a teacher and with her home life – her father is prone to affairs, and her mother is disappointed that Margaret is not more like her feisty good-time-gal friend Hilda.  But naturally things do not remain thus.  Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath and, when returning it, becomes embroiled in the lives of self-important playwright Gerald Challis, his spoilt, snobbish daughter Hebe, and her husband, the painter Alexander Niland.  They are an eminently fashionable set, full of ideas of Art and Beauty, and Margaret wants in.  The nearest she can get, to start off with, is the somewhat hysterical Jewish refugee Zita, who lives with the family and is not quite a housekeeper but definitely not one of the family.

“I like you, Miss Steggles.”

“Thank you.  I like you too,” sais Margaret, who in her present mood would have liked anyone.

“Good.  Den we are friends,” announced Zita, putting out her hand while her eyes overflowed.  Margaret took it and they exchanged a solemn clasp.  “Oh, Miss Steggles – what iss your name?” she demanded, interrupting herself.

“Margaret.”

“Zo.  I shall call you Margaret.  You will call me Zita?”

“I’d love to, Zita.”

“Margaret, I haf a many sadness.  I tell you about it.”

Margaret was so inexperienced as a confidante that no feeling of dismay overcame her on hearing this threat; indeed she hardly heard what Zita said, so overjoyed was she at the prospect of frequent visits to Westwood as Zita’s friend.
As you can see from the ‘iss’ and ‘Zo’ used so liberally, Zita does border a little on stereotype – but she is the liveliest inclusion to the novel, and that which most demonstrates Gibbons’ comic touch.  I am guilty of that which Truss does in the introduction, presumably as inadvertently as I am, of quoting the sections which amused me most.  For, as I said, this isn’t, broadly, a comic novel.  At its heart is Margaret’s awkward attempts to become part of a society which only tolerates her.  There is a desperately sad moment where Margaret overhears Hebe’s opinion of her – it’s in the same area as ‘consciously naive’ and ‘you will be limited as to number – only three at once.’  (Ten points if you recognise those references!)

She especially wants to be involved in Challis’ life, and falls rather in love with him – although from the reader’s perspective it is a trifle difficult to see why.  He is pompous, with high-blown ideas about Beauty which would make Keats seem like a materialist.

“A landscape without hills,” he suddenly pronounced, “is like a woman without mystery.”

There simply was not any answer to this, especially as his unhappy audience realized that whatever she said would be wrong, so she replied feebly:

“Oh – do you think so?”

“The monotony of an endless plain,” continued Mr. Challis disparagingly surveying the mild meadows on every side, “drives men mad.”
But Challis’ Achilles’ heel (and one of the other funny threads through the novel – although funniness laced with tragedy) is his belief in the Beauty of the common innocent girl, provided she be physically attractive, of course.  And the one he sets his eye on is Hilda – remember her?  Margaret’s feisty friend who would, in contemporary soap parlance, undoubtedly be described as a tart with a heart.  Challis bumps into her walking home from the train (“I have been sent by Providence especially to escort you”) and he decides to call himself Marcus Antonius, and she Daphne.  Hilda’s good-natured willingness to put up with him until she is bored, and his slavish (would-be adulterous) devotion to a girl whose nature he has so completely misunderstood, is both farcical and saddening.

Indeed (sweeping generalisation alert) that is how Gibbons treats a lot of the material in Westwood.  It is the kind of plot and the (large) cast of characters which could easily be tragic or comic, and Gibbons treads a path between the two – lingering, perhaps, on the tragic, but never fully abandoning the comic.  Being asked to empathise with Margaret, rather than laugh at or with her, takes Westwood away from the hilarious tour de force of Cold Comfort Farm, but also creates a more thoughtful, thought-provoking work.  Both novels introduce a whirlwind of characters, but while Cold Comfort Farm can rely upon the witty epithet to describe someone, Westwood delves deeper – which does, at times, make the novel feel a bit overcrowded and perhaps overlong – but is also ultimately perhaps more satisfying.  If I were one of these novels to reread next, I must admit it would be Cold Comfort Farm – for an uproarious escapade – but I doubt I would gain as much, and I certainly wouldn’t think as much.  The novels are so different that it is nigh on impossible to say one is better than the other, but what is obvious is that Westwood should never have gone out of print, and Vintage are to be commended for rectifying whosever oversight that was.

Others who got Stuck into this…
I’m going to copy Jackie’s lovely idea of quoting other bloggers who have reviewed the book, and point you in the direction of their reviews.  I think it’s a great addition to Jackie’s blogposts – I’m all about the blogging community.  I’ll just pick two or three each time, so as to feel more like I’m including people in a selective list rather than accidentally excluding people from an exhaustive list!

“[…Margaret] is a masterpiece and definitely earns Gibbons the right to be compared with Austen.[…]” – Hayley, Desperate Reader

“[…] do read this if you love a warm, witty, beautifully written and leisurely novel […]” – Hilary, Vulpes Libris

Shaving Through The Blitz

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

I believe, when I told you about my purchases in Hay-on-Wye, I advertised Shaving Through the Blitz (1943) by G.W. Stonier as being akin to ‘Mr. Miniver’, had that book ever existed. Which probably got quite a few of you interested.


Well, it isn’t anything like that, really. About all is has in common is that is was evidently once columns in a paper. But it’s still really good. Keep reading…

I was expecting whimsy and cosiness and a general determination to ignore the more brutal aspects of war in favour of bottling pears and entering flower shows – that sort of thing. And I was prepared to devour it in the same spirit. But Stonier’s book – and his narrator Mr. Fanfarlo – is of a rather different temperament. It’s quite lyrical, in a semi-experimental manner, moving through the sights, sounds, and feelings of wartime London, rather than narrating them in a straightforward manner. Fanfarlo is also proudly aesthetic, and is given to this sort of moral dilemma:

Suppose during an air raid I held Botticelli’s Venus under one arm and an old woman unknown to me under the other, with the chance of saving one but not both, which should I choose? Immortal painting or crumbling flesh and blood? The first! As an artist, I claim that right.

I say moral dilemma, but he is not unduly given to morals. Shaving Through the Blitz was surprisingly ‘progressive’ – Fanfarlo lives with a woman called Lizzie, who would quite like him to propose, but doesn’t intend to force the matter. He works, in a fairly dispassionate way, at the Ministry to ‘provide slogans that shall be breezy and full of dare-and-do’. There were definite overtones of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Which is a hint that Stonier can be very funny at times, even while being aesthetic and high-falutin’. I particularly liked a little conversation about a young man writing for the Mass Observation project. A lady comments:

“That’s bad. Can’t you break him of it? My little nephew was a terrible mass-observer, too, before he got married.”

That puts Nella Last et al in their place, doesn’t it?

As always, it is deeply interesting to read about the war from those who experienced it. I feel like I have a fairly informed awareness of the (upper)middle-class housewife’s view of war, from various contemporary novels, but Stonier provides a viewpoint I hadn’t really encountered before. All the pieces slotting together is satisfying, to create a portrait of how wartime Britain would have felt. And this (lengthy) excerpt, below, made the book worth finding, all by itself. I think it a really moving, unusual angle upon the way the war changed, and how people at home changed their responses to it. I’m going to finish off this post with it, and encourage you to track down a copy of Shaving Through The Blitz if you can. Not the most whimsical of wartime books, but perhaps one of the more unusual.

How it has changed in the last eighteen months! Do you (who does not?) remember the carefree evenings when we all used to go for strolls in the new-found dark? It was a spree then, to walk to a theatre, or merely to walk, to stumble over sandbags and cross the road by others’ lights. “Sandbags!” we would exclaim as we picked ourselves up and went on to discover lamp-posts. Friendliness displayed itself in many ways, in a noisy jostling, in such illumination as was allowed. Torches stared at one another, cigarettes flickered a dialogue on street corners. Along Tottenham Court Road gaiety had lost nothing with the lights down, and a bubbling trail of voices down each pavement drew whisperers out of side-streets and brought even the sedentary to their doors. A gross amiability, the adolescent pleasure of being heard but not seen, infected every one who was being nudged, shoved, swept along and held back by the stream. A match would flare nearby, thrillingly, in the darkness, to reveal a face lit from below: a girl’s sucked-in cheeks over a cigarette, a beaming negro, perhaps, delighted with hours when others were as black and easily tickled as himself.

All that has disappeared – the lingering, the voices, the cigarette dream; and now with darkness falls the hush. Emptiness, but with every cranny filled. London has been given over to a monstrous drama, an act of darkness from which ordinary people, you and I as individuals, shut ourselves away. Earth and sky contract to form the arena; the city puts up its searchlights, a beetle laid on its back and helplessly wavering its legs, while the hornet drones overheard; night after night the assailant returns, the victim quivers with upturned belly. “A very bad night,” says Mrs. Greenbaum, heaving over in the morning to probe her fatness with an indignant finger, “an awful bad time it was last night, sure.” The rest of us, having shared the same delirium, with the same hornet boring down to a point in our bellies, nod stoically and blink at our silly nightlight.

Recapturing

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

Wow, thanks for all your comments yesterday – that was quite impressive, and every single author was recommended to me… well, thanks for that! Someone (anonymous) did say that they suspected I’d only read Brideshead Revisited by Waugh – but, in fact, I have not read that, and I have read The Loved One, Decline and Fall, and Put Out More Flags – so there you go! I must confess, composing this list did make me realise how many authors I have sampled. But that would be a rather more self-congratulatory list to make. Instead I shall challenge you COWARDS who weren’t going to make your own lists – hie to it! (Heehee…!)

I’m having a mini-reader’s-block at the moment, and seem to be mostly re-reading books for the past few weeks. Not sure quite what the cause is, but I daresay the remedy is Jane Austen – but for now I’m content going over some familiar ground.

I’ve been meaning to re-read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) for ages and, as I mentioned the other day, my book group has been reading it this month. It catapaulted it up my must-reread list, and I’m delighted that I did – since I was a bit worried that it might not work now that I am much older than Cassandra. I was 17 or 18 when I originally read it – so perhaps not the age at which most people become life-long-lovers of this delightful novel – but it was Cassandra’s age.

For those who don’t know the story, Cassandra lives in a castle with her older sister Rose, younger brother Thomas, father known as Mortmain (their surname), stepmother Topaz, and sort-of-servant Stephen. She famously opens the novel “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – for this is where she starts recording her life in a diary, trying to capture the people around her. There is an atmosphere of a fairy-tale permeating the book – not surprisingly, given the family live in a castle. Cassandra thinks back to the first time the family saw it:
All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn’t enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with TO BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in it at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back – I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to go back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was – but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.
But it’s now a rather tumble-down castle, falling apart, and from which most of the furniture has been sold. Mortmain wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Jacob Wrestling (think Ulysses, in terms of being experimental and avant-garde) but the proceeds have dwindled after fourteen years (including a little spate in jail, for having threatened his – now dead – wife with a cake knife). The family thus live in poverty – but although they bemoan and bewail this, it never feels quite real – it is never meant to. They have to share towels, and can barely afford to eat – but that fairy-tale feeling prevents anything feeling too serious.

Cassandra does her job of ‘capturing the castle’ so well that I’m going to find it tricky to detail the characters quickly… but I’ll do my best. Mortmain is absent-minded and idle; Topaz idolises him and communes with nature a lot; Topaz hankers after finer things in life, and will do much to achieve them; Stephen is subservient and besotted with Cassandra; Thomas more or less loiters in the background.

Of course they are all rather more complex than that, but you have to meet them first-hand to appreciate them, so we’ll move on to Cassandra, the narrator. And what a wonderful narrator she is. Through her eyes, we see all the events of family life – especially the arrival of American brothers Simon and Neil to the large nearby house, the estate of which includes the castle. Their arrival is the catalyst for change at the castle, as Rose determines to marry Simon, whether or not she loves him (and she hopes she does) to help her family escape their destitution. Only after Simon and Rose have got engaged does Cassandra realise she has fallen in love with Simon herself…

In Cassandra, Dodie Smith has created someone quite extraordinary. The basic plot of I Capture the Castle is not the stuff of the finest literary mind – crossed wires; crossed lovers, and so forth. But because they are focalised through Cassandra, they are fascinating. Somehow Smith manages to present a teenage girl in love whose viewpoint is not remotely irritating – instead it is credible, and raises sympathy rather than annoyance in the reader. I was lucky enough not to fall in love until after I was a teenager, so I didn’t experience all the woes of angsty, unrequited teenage love which Cassandra endures – so I cannot really empathise, nor say how realistic Cassandra’s emotions are, but I do know that she is a wholly engaging heroine.

I love her for her slightly skewed view upon life, and the slightly odd, inexperienced things she says. Some examples: ‘I know all about the facts of life. And I don’t think much of them.’ She labels champagne ‘lovely, rather like very good ginger ale without the ginger.’ And perhaps her wisest piece of advice – ‘No bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.’

Dodie Smith is very clever, and she incorporates in the novel the criticism which might be directed at Cassandra – she overhears Simon telling Neil that he thinks her ‘consciously naive’. It is the perfect description for part of her personality (she is mostly, however, unconsciously naive) – but by including it like this, Dodie Smith makes the reader leap to Cassandra’s defence, and love her all the more. Spending the whole book in her company, it is important that we do love her – and I do.

I Capture the Castle is, incidentally, the only diary-style novel I’ve read which actually felt like a diary. Cassandra often breaks off entries because something has happened, or starts writing by saying she has something exciting to relate, but will try and contain herself. Much as I love books like Diary of a Provincial Lady and Diary of a Nobody, they both strike me as a little unrealistic – when on earth do they actually write their journals?

But that’s just the icing on the cake. I Capture the Castle is almost perfect in every way – Dodie Smith is not a great prose stylist, perhaps, and it’s interesting to see her write undisparagingly about Mortmain, who is essentially a Modernist author – which Smith obviously isn’t. But I Capture the Castle is cosy, amusing, warm – and yet not dull or predictable or everyone-is-happy-all-the-time. It’s like a fairy-tale brought into the 20th century, and not allowed to be either saccharine or gloomy. Instead, it is just right. Perhaps I should recommend it to Goldilocks…

P.S. the film is brilliant too. Perhaps I’ll write about that properly someday.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

StuckinaBook All , , 19 Comments

36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Lizzy Siddal and I agreed to do a readalong of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (1947) when I realised that we both had recently got copies – I bought it off the back of a recommendation from my friend Rhona, and I am hugely indebted to her, because Hamilton is an incredibly good writer, and The Slaves of Solitude is a great novel. It is often hilarious, but somehow also increasingly bleak. As you can see, it’s straight onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. It’s not often that you can tell from the first paragraph that a novel will be brilliant, but almost from the first word of The Slaves of Solitude, I knew I was onto something special.


It’s 1943 in Thames Lockdon, a rather dreary suburban town in which 39 year-old Miss Roach (we don’t learn til about halfway through that her unwelcome Christian name is Enid) has found herself, since she’s been bombed out of her flat in Kensington. She is forced to live in a boarding house, inaptly named the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but it might as well be the third circle of hell. I know I quoted this section in an earlier post, but I’m going to do so again – this is the paragraph which made me certain that Hamilton was a writer of no small talent, and that I was in for a treat with The Slaves of Solitude.
As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – “The Rosamund Tea Rooms”. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no more – merely, if anything, “Mrs. Payne’s”. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and quietly had their error made clear to them.It was the word ‘half-hearted’ that did it. So few writers would have picked that word, there, and it creates such a perfect image.

There can be few places described as dispiritingly as these Tea Rooms. The guests creep miserably around the house, obeying the notes which proliferate:
Mrs. Payne left or pinned up notes everywhere, anywhere, austerely, endlessly – making one feel, sometimes, that a sort of paper-chase had been taking place in the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but a nasty, admonitory paper-chase. All innovations were heralded by notes, and all withdrawals and adjustments thus proclaimed. Experienced guests were aware that to take the smallest step in an original or unusual direction would be to provoke a sharp note within twenty-four hours at the outside, and they had therefore, for the most part, abandoned originality.I just meant to write that there were notes, but when I flicked to the page in question, that quotation was irresistible. I have a feeling this review will go in that direction – Hamilton’s writing is just too delicious and perceptive and perfect for me to paraphrase. He is a prose writer par excellence and, even though I’m going to try and make some comparisons, in reality utterly defies comparison. He has the breadth and rich extravagance of Dickens, but the subtlety, nuance and irony of Austen. Reading it is like being in a whirlwind, but also in the calm at its centre. Hamilton never puts a step wrong.

Although we see this horrible place through Miss Roach’s jaded eyes, it is one of her boarding house companions who is most memorable – indeed, as Harriet writes in her review, he is surely one of the most memorable characters of all English literature. His name is Mr. Thwaites and he is the dominant figure in the small kingdom of the Rosamund Tea Rooms. He is in his sixties, but has lost neither energy nor the habit of bullying. Mr. Thwaites is a grotesque, but one who is entirely believable. His hideously affected tricks of speech are recorded perfectly by Hamilton, each a separate anguish to Miss Roach. I hope Harriet doesn’t mind me copying across a section from her review, as the examples she has chosen are perfect; these are Harriet’s words, with Hamilton’s/Thwaites’ in the brackets:
He is fond of substituting the third person verb for the first (“I Keeps my Counsel — like the Wise Old Bird”), is partial to hideous cod dialect (“I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said”), and falls into dreadful and protracted archaisms (“She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee house…there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?”)
Like all great comic nemeses, Mr. Thwaites is both a joy to read and a horror to imagine. He is secretly pro-Hitler, and loathes the Russians – one of the points of attack against Miss Roach, since he willfully misconstrues her silence on the topic of Russians as an all-abiding love for Socialism:
This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr. Thwaites’ embittered vision, were undoubtedly perceived as being “all equal”, and so if the Germans went on retreating westward (and if Miss Roach went on approving of it and doing nothing about it) before long we should, all of us, be “all equal”. “My Lady’s Maid,” continued Mr. Thwaites, “will soon be giving orders to My Lady. And Milord will be Polishing the Pot-boy’s boots.” Failing to see that he had already over-reached himself in anticipating very far from equal conditions, Mr. Thwaites went on. “The Cabby,” he said, resignedly, “will take it unto himself to give the orders, I suppose – and the pantry-boy tell us how to proceed on our ways.” Still no one had anything to say, and Mr. Thwaites, now carried away both by his own vision and his own style, went on to portray a state of society such as might have recommended itself to the art of the surrealist, or appeared in the dreams of an opium-smoker.
But this hellish existence is not static for Miss Roach. She meets an American Lieutenant and begins an uncertain, meandering relationship with him – which mostly involves sitting next to him at the local pub while they both drink too much, and being nonplussed by his roars of affection or amusement. Miss Roach is plagued by doubts as to whether she should take his intentions seriously or not – alternatively laughing at herself, and wondering what she might miss out on. It is all observed so perfectly, so subtly.

And then there is Vicki Kugelmann. Vicki is a young German woman and a friend of Miss Roach – believed to be shy and unassuming, albeit with ghastly old-fashioned and odd linguistic quirks (“Hard lines, old fellow” ; “Do be sporty!”) – until she is persuaded to move into the Rosamund Tea Rooms. Their quiet friendship develops somehow, as Vicki becomes more domineering and cavalier herself, into a passionate and unspoken hatred. Vicki manages Mr. Thwaites as Miss Roach could not dream of doing; she patronises and frustrates Miss Roach; she flirts with the Lieutenant.
“No,” said Vicki. “That is not me, my dear. I do not Snatch. I do not Snatch the Men….”

Miss Roach was about to say something, but Vicki, still patting her, went on.

“No, my dear. I put him off. Have no fear. I do not Snatch. I am not the Snatcher.”

Then, with a final “No, I am not the Snatcher. Do not be alarmed. I do not Snatch,” the German woman, in a dignified way, left the English one alone in the dining-room of the Rosamund Tea Rooms.
Through the second half of the novel, this battle weaves and wends itself, on many fronts. On the small stage of a boarding house, Hamilton enacts the most impassioned and fierce of antagonisms – but always in miniature, and always in undertones. Anger seethes through the dialogue, but it is quashed by the modes and manners which Miss Roach will not – cannot – relinquish.


I had vaguely heard of Patrick Hamilton, because of his novel Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, but hadn’t heard of The Slaves of Solitude. (Actually, a search of my inbox shows me that ‘Anonymous’ mentioned it on this post back in 2009 – thanks, whoever you were!) Why? But why? Hamilton is a great writer, and this is a great novel. It is so rich; so filled with perfect observations and finely sculpted dialogue. (Hamilton was, after all, a successful playwright – amongst his works is Gaslight, later a famous film.) Nothing is over the top; everything is subdued and repressed by the force of good manners and Miss Roach’s enforced calmness. But that makes each line more potent, and each emotion more powerful.

What else can I say? The Slaves of Solitude is unusually, astonishingly good. I could read it over and over again. Instead, I shall move onto the rest of Hamilton’s output – thank goodness there is more, and bless Rhona for introducing me to his genius.

A House in the Country

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

We recently chatted about how titles can influence the way in which we read a novel – I loved all of your contributions, and encourage anyone who hasn’t to read the comments to this post, all fascinating. Well, the book I want to write about tonight has a title that is somehow both very appealing and entirely unrevealing: A House in the Country (1944 – set in 1942) by Jocelyn Playfair. It was the second Persephone book that I started during Persephone Reading Weekend, but didn’t finish until a little while later. It had been on my shelf for years; I loved the gentle, rural title, but knew nothing whatsoever about its contents.

Having read it, I can now say that my expectations were wildly misplaced – and yet I loved the novel, for reasons quite different from those anticipated. A House in the Country is not a cosy paean to countryside ways, but a deep, moving, and surprisingly controversial novel.


Cressida Chance (wonderful name) lives in the house of the title, and has started taking paying guests. The idea of paying guests completely foreign now, but it must have been an ingenious way for people to get a bit of extra money without demeaning themselves – and to provide houses for those who needed them during war. If someone were to make a list of things which would attract me to a novel, having big old houses at their centre would definitely make the list. Here’s Cressida’s, from the viewpoint of John Greenacre, who is arriving to be one of the said paying guests:
He half turned away from the view of the house. As he did so the sun caught every pane in the high, evenly spaced windows of the lovely front and spread warmth over the old red bricks so that the house glowed like a jewel against the dark trees behind.
I’m rather captivated, don’t know about you. But the most captivating thing about the novel is Cressida herself. She is a wonderful heroine, and I’m not quite sure how to put her personality into words. She is sensible but not dull; strong-feeling but not excessively passionate; loving but neither dependent nor demanding; caring but not sentimental. She seems to have just enough of all virtues to be attractive, and not enough to become irritating. Her feet are certainly made of clay. She is a remarkable creation.

Cressida is undoubtedly the beacon of Playfair’s novel. Against her fully-realised, exquisitely drawn character, it did feel as though others rather faded into one another. With the exception of Tori, that is – ‘a little beetle of a man’ from war-torn Europe, who has seen and suffered much. Other than him, the rest of the cast didn’t really come alive, and seemed mostly there to provide occasional colour and interest, rather than pathos. But Playfair doesn’t really need more than her main players to make an impression.

I tell a lie, Miss Ambleside is a great addition to the mix. Her type is familiar, and the target of much delicious caustic humor in novels of the period. Miss Ambleside is one of those people who constantly feel martyred, incapable of seeing how insignificant their sufferings are:
Miss Ambleside’s life in London had never been far from the normal. During the blitz she had done a great deal of visiting in the country. And now Miss Ambleside’s gloom drove her to consider the possible advantages of living in London again. One could open one’s house in the country, but then there would be the trouble of servants. It was all very difficult and trying. Perhaps dear Cressida would keep one a little longer, until one could see which way things were going. But in that case one would lose one’s hair appointment, and getting another was always problematical. There were difficulties, it seemed, whichever course one decided upon.
Those of you who don’t fancy sizable chunks of quotation, look away now – because what I find most fascinating about novels from this period is their perspective on the war. Plenty of historical novels try and deduce this from a distance, but there is nothing quite like reading the views which were expressed there and then, whether in fact or fiction. So here are another couple of excerpts, the first from Cressida’s viewpoint, and the second from a man in active service, returning to England. They offer competing, but novelistically equally valid, perspectives on the effects of war at home – and demonstrate Playfair’s sophistication. She hasn’t got simply one view to hammer home.
People talked a lot about the various hells of war; the dust and heat in the desert, the steam and exhaustion of the tropics, the ice terror of the sea, the nerve-shattering clash of actual battle anywhere. But there was another sort of hell; the hell of impatience. Living in England, surrounded by normal people, living near-normal lives, trying to do a job that seemed to have no end and no purpose, a life of exercises and long journeys in lorries from one English village to another, without even an air raid to give reality to what felt like merely an irritating and prolonged succession of manoeuvres. Much better, she thought, to be right away from England, where the spectre of pre-war life was not always hovering in the background, constantly reminding one of normality, making it impossible to cut oneself off and become really a part of the machine humanity had to become in order to fight this latest form of war.

* * *

Charles could not have said in so many words what it was he had expected to find in England. Perhaps he had not quite imagined that the entire countryside would be a blackened ruin, that people would be picking their way nervously between yawning bomb craters and darting into underground holes as soon as daylight began to fade. Perhaps he had not quite expected to see on every face the hard lines of heroism and stark, but controlled, fear. But England had been for three years described in terms of heroism, in outsize headlines. It had been loudly called the war-torn, the noble, the indomitable, the last outpost of civilisation. Surely it was natural to suppose that all this hyperbole must have a visible cause. But it was certainly difficult to detect in the stolid, well-fed faces of the English people any sign of undue heroism, or any indication that they were making a brave struggle to support life on insufficient food and unremitting hard labour under the constant fear of death. Here and there, it was true, there were ruined and burnt-out buildings. But there were always burnt-out buildings to be seen from railway-trains, and these ruins looked as if they had quite gently decayed under the slow wear of time rather than been blasted asunder with savage violence in a few seconds. Even the thousands of broken windows merely suggested small boys with stones rather than death-dealing splinters of steel and iron.
Decades of talking about the war, and people’s stoicism, and the bravery of the home front has built up a picture for those of us not alive then. And, of course, it has much truth to it. But a passage like that I’ve just typed seems, to me, so much more vivid and truthful – a fascinating angle on expectation, reality, and wartime confusion.

What is difficult to remember, when reading novels of this period, is that neither author nor reader knew who would win the war. Published in 1944, it was still possible (or at least not impossible) that England would be occupied by the Nazis. Propaganda of the Brave British Soldier was doubtless still indefatigable. And this makes Playfair all the more brave in her extremely honest, often critical discussions of warfare. Characters suggest that war is futile; that few soldiers know why they are fighting, and that ideals are far below blind obedience, when it comes to motive.
We are always being told the German people don’t want war, the English don’t want war; no one wants war. And yet we have war. We have war because we have been herded, they’ve been formed into masses, they’ve been taught to obey without question, to fight and die without hesitation. But men have not been taught to take the advice Christ gave them when He said “Know thyself.”One can only imagine what a brave stance this was to offer in 1944.

A House in the Country is not without its faults. The major one is that which so many ’20s-’40s novels stumble into, and is certainly seen in more than one Persephone and Virago title (much as we love ’em – and we do, of course): it is too earnest. That’s probably a sign of the times, more than anything. Nowadays we don’t like to take things *too* seriously, at least in our fiction – that’s not to say that serious topics aren’t addresses, but that they’re always laced with humour. Plenty of contemporary novelists did know this – you won’t find earnestness in the pages of the Provincial Lady, and yet she does hit home time and again. I’m not saying the novel should have avoided all its pontificating moments – they are often done thoughtfully and thoroughly, but… when you get to another speech about honour or why men choose to fight, etc. etc., you can’t help wish a little that Playfair had spread her delightful humour more evenly into every corner.

And this, despite its more serious and even harrowing moments, is a very funny novel. Playfair has something of Delafield’s wry analysis of character, and is not above a thread or two of Wodehousian humour now and then. I liked odd touches like this:
As always, the moment Cressida crossed the threshold, the dogs appeared from apparently nowhere, their extreme empressement obviously assumed partly out of excitement, and partly to give an impression of not having been on one of the spare beds.I haven’t even mentioned the other story threading through the novel; that of Charles Valery in the wreckage of a destroyed ship, surviving alone at sea, and eventually making his way back to Cressida’s house (which is actually his own). These sections, naturally given his solitude, take mostly the form of his thoughts – they aren’t intended to have the humour or sparkle seen elsewhere in the novel, but they are involving and thought-provoking. Of course, these separate strands of the novel come together, but not in the way which you might expect…

All in all, A House in the Country is another Persephone triumph (and one with a very good, informative Preface). It’s not one of their books which is much mentioned in the blogosphere, but I think it should be. I have read few novels with so intriguing an angle on wartime living, and – as I have said – Cressida is a wonderful character. This isn’t the novel I was expecting, when I pulled the title off the shelf, and it certainly isn’t as relaxing a read as I’d anticipated – but I’m happy to say that it is a better one, and significantly more thought-provoking.

Quaint Irene

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The post title is one for all you Mapp and Lucia lovers, but the book in question is nothing to do with Benson – rather it is To Tell My Story (1948), the autobiography of Dame Irene Vanbrugh. (I’m assuming that her name should be pronounced Eye-reen-ee? Much prettier than Eye-reen, to my mind.) You might not think you’ve heard of her – except from the mentions made of her on my blog, when I’ve noted what I’m currently reading – but she has a certain amount of significance. Once one of the nation’s favourite stage actresses, and one of the first to enter the profession from an upper(ish)-middle-class background, she was Gwendoline in the first The Importance of Being Earnest; co-founded R.A.D.A.; married Dion Boucicault Jr. (son of the playwright); and appeared in the first British colour film. That’s quite a curriculum vitae, isn’t it? And yet what made me seek out Irene’s autobiography was seeing her name in the dramatis personae (gosh, two Latin expressions in one paragraph) in many of AA Milne’s collections of plays. Indeed, this is what she has to say about Milne:
He was a fair-haired, gentle, rather shy personality with a certain detachment of outlook. In his plays and verses he creates a world of his own, peopled with real flesh and blood seen behind a gauze of true fantasy, without being whimsical. The nurseries are warm and cosy, the living rooms comfortable and welcoming, the gardens gay with flowers. You can’t think of them otherwise yet you know if the gauze was rudely pulled asunder and the people were caught up in cold realities they would be true to nature and rise to what might be asked of them.

At first I found him difficult to talk to as he resented my wholehearted devotion to the technique of the older playwrights, which he was inclined to belittle. But it was a joy to me to learn to appreciate his method, and during the years he worked with us we became firm friends.
My curiosity, although piqued by Vanbrugh’s friendship with Milne, certainly went beyond that. As I’ve mentioned recently, I find theatrical history fascinating, especially from the perspective of someone with long and distinguished a stage career as Dame Irene. It was interesting to compare Vanbrugh’s autobiography with that other Dame and doyenne of the stage – Judi Dench. A lot has changed (Vanbrugh addresses, for instance, whether or not it is proper for a girl to become an actress, and there seems to be a far more rigidly observed hierarchy from leading lady down) but a lot is the same. There is a continuing love of fellow actors, and of acting, that shines from the page.

Unlike Dench’s book And Furthermore, this isn’t simply a string of interesting anecdotes. Although Vanbrugh rarely delves into her private life too deeply, she does talk about becoming a widow. Much of To Tell My Story moves away from tales of specific performances to more general, and very fascinating, ruminations upon all manner of aspects of acting – from etiquette to creating a part to being in a revival, etc. etc.

It must be confessed that Vanbrugh was probably a more natural actress than she was a writer. Most of the time her prose is serviceable, with occasional shimmer or glisten. It certainly isn’t clunky, and when she turns to describing characters or plays she is very insightful and doesn’t waste a word. But I’m not sure she could turn her hand to fiction (although at least she wouldn’t colour her prose purple). It came as something of a surprise, then, when her writing developed in leaps and bounds for chapter 2. It told of her first meeting with J.M. Barrie. Suddenly there was wit in her phrasing, piquancy in her portraits, and more than a pinch or two of irony….

…all of which was explained when I got to the end of that chapter, and she confessed that it was, in fact, Barrie himself who had penned it. It is a neat trick, and you realise why the portrait of him had been somewhat more amusing and less charitable than most of her other character descriptions. It does, however, throw doubt upon the following paragraph, at the beginning of that chapter:
Up to now I had never “created” a part. I had been various young ladies but the characters had all passed through other hands before I had the fingering of them. What was expected of me was to reproduce the style of my predecessors, to be so like them in my voice, manner, elegancies, deficiencies, dimples and the way I clicked my teeth, that if their parents were in front they could still think they were gazing on their child. It is a commonplace that nothing of the actor survives his passing from the scene but I wish to stab this statement with a hairpin. If he created a part we go on reproducing him in it so carefully that it is still him you see in it rather than us. We are dressed up in him as in old garments. I wanted not to copy a picture but to paint one, to put something of myself into a part to present my own deficiencies if I had nothing else. I longed to click my own teeth in my own way.
Did Barrie write this, or Vanbrugh? Is it something Vanbrugh believed? I knew it was a convention of 16th and 17th century drama, but had assumed it had died out by the 20th… any theatre historians able to tell me?

I must confess one of the reasons I loved reading To Tell My Story – and I definitely loved reading it – is that it is unusual. You know me – I do enjoy reading things a bit out of the ordinary, which you wouldn’t find on the 3 for 2 table at Waterstones. Most of you are the same, I think. It’s a lovely feeling, to rescue a book like this from forgotten corners of dusty bookshops and neglected shelves – and to find much to love.

I want to leave you with two excerpts from To Tell My Story, showing that Vanbrugh’s writing – although not always perfect – definitely has its moments. The first, from a toast she gave at an event to celebrate Shakespeare’s birth, is funny; the second is moving and sad. I do recommend that you hunt this book out, if you have any interest in the theatre of days gone by. It’s a wonderful resource, as well as a captivating life.
During the twenty-six years of happy married life with Dion Boucicault I always stated my occupation as ‘married’, but now I shall boldly describe my occupation as ‘actress’ and if it is questioned I shall say that it was openly acknowledged in public on Shakespeare’s birthday at Stratford-on-Avon, if necessary mentioning it was some years after his death to prevent any further confusion occurring as to my possible age.

* * *

During the fourteen months of the run in town (an immense run in those days) [of His House in Order by Pinero] a poignant incident stands out to me. Bella Pateman, who played the part of Lady Ridgeley, came to my dressing-room one evening and said, “I went to see my doctor today; he tells me I must have an operation for cancer. Isn’t it bad luck?” The remembrance of the way she she those last four words have always remained with me. It showed how in real life the deepest tragedies are often taken so simply and with such few words so unlike the way one might imagine anybody would receive their death sentence, which indeed it was.

From Tiny Acorns

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I’ve been looking forward to Persephone Reading Weekend for ages, so apologies that I’m joining in quite late in the day – yesterday I was so tired that I went to bed at 8.30pm. The fact that I was still awake at 2am was not fun… nor did I read much of this book during those hours (my eyes always give up before the rest of my mind/body does) but it was a quiet day today, so read the rest of it – ‘it’ being Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. (And aren’t the endpapers beautiful?)

I bought Saplings (1947) in 2004, I think, and somehow it has languished on my shelves since then. It even came on holiday with me once, but didn’t get as far as being read – no real reason for this neglect. Perhaps because I haven’t read any of Streatfeild’s books for children? Perhaps simply because it came in over my 300pp bench-mark for ideal reads. But it finally came down from my bookcase, and I can report back.

I’ve got to confess – the first few pages didn’t win me over. It would be nice to be completely positive during an Appreciation Weekend, but I’m afraid I’m going to pick a few holes in Streatfeild’s work – although overall I was very impressed. Let’s get that out there now, so that this doesn’t feel too complainy a review. But those first few pages – we’re on a beach with the Wiltshire family. Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday (yes, Tuesday – has this ever been a name?) are messing about, playing, and doing things like this:
Kim was singing to a tune of his own, ‘The sea, the sea, the lovely sea.’ His happiness was given a sharp edge by fright. The day was going to be very scrumptious. Dad and Mum were here, and there was going to be a picnic and prawning; but first there’d be the bathe and Dad would make him swim to the raft.Oh. This felt very much like Streatfeild hadn’t taken off her children’s-writer hat, and was merely giving adult novel writing a go. My heart sank a little.

When the focus switches around to their parents Alex and Lena, however, things started to improve. Alex is a hands-on father, always conscious of what his children might be feeling, and doing his best to help them grow up properly and well-disciplined without being thwarted or unhappy. He is one of the best fathers I’ve come across in literature – rather better than E.H. Young’s William, I’d say – and still fairly convincing. His major fault, in my eyes, is sending the children to boarding school. Lena, on the other hand, is not of a maternal disposition, and misses being her husband’s sole object of affection. Through the eyes of the holiday governess Ruth, this is how Lena comes across:
On other counts Lena was not so good. She never even pretended the children came first. But did that matter? Was that not out-balanced by the perfect love always before the children’s eyes? Ruth, helping herself to peas, knew one of her more noticeably amused flicks was crossing her eyes. Was it perfect love the children saw? Certainly Lena loved Alex, but perfect love in her philosophy was an ill-balanced affair, almost all body, the merest whiff of soul.It is in her allusions to Lena’s various, ahem, appetites that Streatfeild most prominently demonstrates that this is not a children’s book. (P.134 made me gasp a little…) But alongside this we do get the bread and butter of children’s lives – the four children are well-drawn, and certainly have formed and individual characters. Kim the show-off, who craves attention but can’t control the way in which he seeks it; Laurel the dependable eldest sibling, but fraught on her own; Tuesday who wishes only to have her family around her; Tony who asks such pertinent questions, and worries too much. All painted convincingly with Streatfeild’s brush – but still it feels a little like one is reading a children’s book with longer words… There’s even a Nanny of the indomitable variety.


But things are about to change. I shan’t spoil the big event which changes the course of the novel, but suffice to say that a tragedy occurs to alter the lives of all concerned. And it’s from here that Streatfeild comes into her own – we follow the children to their various schools as they cope with this tragedy in their various ways. They come home for holidays, and we see the reunions then. In the background is always the war – rarely creeping nearer than the background, but certainly getting no further away.

Somewhere towards the last third of the novel Laurel, Tony, Kim, and Tuesday are split up for the holiday and must each spend time with a different Aunt. There were definite overtones of Richmal Crompton’s Matty and the Dearingroydes here – snapshots of various intriguing or eccentric family units. It should have been a different novel, really – they just came flitting past, and were gone before you could grasp hold of them. I’d happily read many more chapters, for instance, about the vicarage family where loving vicar’s wife Sylvia lovingly makes up holy reasons to excuse her children doing things their father might find worrying. Since Streatfeild is, like me, a vicarage child, it would be fascinating. Structure isn’t Streatfeild’s strong suit – Saplings seems to explode somewhat, proliferating with characters and going off at tangents, right until the final pages.

Structure may not be her trump card, but there is still a lot to love in the novel. Chief amongst these is the way in which she demonstrates the damage done to families and children by war. A lot of this damage would have been done by separating them from each other and their parents in their schooling, but war still has its undeniable effects. There is a rather silly Afterword from Dr. Jeremy Holmes, a Psychiatrist who reads Saplings through the lens of child psychology. In doing so, he completely ignores the fun that Streatfeild pokes at this field – it is no coincidence that the Aunt who makes generalisations about child psychology is the only one who has no children of her own. Despite this misreading, it is true that Streatfeild is insightful into the child’s mindset – although she would never, I am sure, have labelled this insight psychology.

Perhaps it is unfortunate for Saplings’ sake that I have read so many good books this year. One can’t help think how much better E.H. Young creates family dynamics; how much more insightfully Barbara Comyns gives the voice and mind of children; how much more poignant Marilynne Robinson can be. Comparisons, as Mrs. Malaprop intended to say, are odious – and on its own merits, Saplings is a fantastic read. It’s engaging, occasionally moving, and certainly enjoyable. Maybe seven years on my shelf had built up its potential too greatly for me? I shall learn not to lament the novel Saplings was not, and heartily enjoy the novel that it is.

At Laski

StuckinaBook All , 14 Comments


If you’re familiar with Stuck-in-a-Book and my reading habits, you’ll know that it usually takes a while for books to work their way up the tbr pile. Understanding friends are very kind, and don’t complain, but Hayley (also known as Desperate Reader) will be pleased to finally read my thoughts on the book she very generously bestowed upon me: Love on the Supertax by Marghanita Laski. Truth be told, it might have been a loan originally, but Hayley sweetly said I could keep it. Crime does pay, it turns out.

Marghanita Laski is a name a lot of us know, and a lot more people encountered her through Persephone Books, who publish her novels The Village, Little Boy Lost, To Bed With Grand Music, and The Victorian Chaise-Longue. I’ve read the second and fourth of those, and haven’t quite been able to put my finger on what it is that defines Laski – those novels had little in common, and Love on the Supertax throws another tone into the mix, leaving me very satisfied, but rather confused.

Love on the Supertax (1944) is Laski’s first novel, and is a very amusing romp through the battle of the classes, and the eternal question of whether romance can flourish between people of different classes. This has been a theme in the English novel from Richardson’s Pamela onwards. But I don’t recall it being done in the way Laski does… in that Clarissa is desperate to leave her privileged background and become part of the socialist working-class. Yes, you’re thinking, we’ve been here before with Lady Chatterley, and still aren’t sure we want our wives and servants reading it. Well, fear not; there is no sense of Clarissa getting a thrill from dabbling below her class – instead, Sid feels he is wandering below his. For it is accepted by all that he would be marrying below himself, if uniting himself with posh Clarissa – not the other way around.

A fairly simple start for a satire, perhaps, but it works so well. The scene where Sid introduces Clarissa to his parents is hilarious – her wafer-thin slices of bread don’t go down well. Here’s another taster, to give you the idea:
“No,” said Sid Baker. “I think you’re a good deal too much influenced by superficial differences, and that you attach too much importance to heredity. Personally, I think environment is far too influential. I’d guarantee that if you took an aristocrat’s child at birth and placed it in a working-class home with all the environmental advantages that would entail, that child at twenty-one would be indistinguishable from me.”I loved Love on the Supertax, and it adds another string to Laski’s complex bow, for it is again so unlike the other Laski novels I’ve read. A quick read, it has charm and wit – and although I daresay it was motivated by a serious point, Laski has the writerly wisdom not to over-emphasise any social critique. Instead, this is a tongue-in-cheek and very amusing novella casting an unusual view on 1940s England. Thanks, Hayley!

Things to get Stuck into:

Economy Must Be Our Watchword – Joyce Dennys: I feel a bit guilty suggesting this, since it is more or less impossible to find, but Dennys’ tale of a selfish and unself-aware (or self-unaware??) woman trying to economise is so, so very hilarious.

Piece of Waugh

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And now for the second novella choice recommended by Simon S… (and various other people, I think, but I can’t remember who) – The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. I don’t remember buying this, but I’ve had it on my shelves for years, back from the days when I routinely mixed up E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh (though two 20th century writers with more variant styles would be hard to imagine) and before I’d read either of ’em.

As with The Driver’s Seat, this is the third novel I’ve read by the author, and easily my favourite of those three. (That gives me an idea for a blog post… come back tomorrow, friends). You can see my thoughts on Put Out More Flags here, and apparently I never got around to writing about Decline and Fall. Whilst I thought both of those novels were very good, and often very funny too, there was a cruel and selfish streak running through them that affected my wee sensitive soul. I couldn’t laugh when I was that appalled and upset for the innocent bystanders being tricked or left devastated. In The Loved One (subtitled An Anglo-American Tragedy) the humour is rather gentler – perhaps because Waugh is laughing at an institution rather than individuals. The lack of cruelty may not satisfy the ardent Waughite, I’d be intrigued to know, but it left me able to love the novella without any reservations.

Which probably isn’t immediately apparent from the novella’s setting – an undertakers/funeral home/cemetery in Los Angeles. Called ‘Whispering Glades’. Oh, and next door (where our English hero Dennis works) is the ‘Happier Hunting Ground’, providing similar services for pets. Now, I haven’t read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, exposing the American funeral system with all its (at that time, in 1963) over-the-topness, abuses and exploitation – but I can only imagine it makes a great companion read to Waugh’s 1947 novella. (According to LibraryThing, I don’t even own the Mitford book… can this be true?? On my Amazon wishlist it goes…)

So – where Jessica Mitford went, Waugh had gone before. Through the eyes of Dennis, who aspires to raise the standards – and the prices – of the Happier Hunting Ground, we are taken around an overblown and ridiculous funeral home and invited to laugh at all its ludicrousness. You can be buried according to temperament – and pay more for proximity to, say, a statue of Goethe. You can give description of how you want your loved one (for they would never be called ‘the deceased’ or anything like that) to look:
“Have you brought any photographs of your Loved One? They are the greatest help in re-creating personality. Was he a very cheerful old gentleman?”

“No, rather the reverse.”

“Shall I put him down as serene and philosophical or judicial and determined?”

“I think the former.”

“It is the hardest of all expressions to fix, but Mr. Joyboy makes it his speciality – that and the joyful smile for children. Did the Loved One wear his own hair? And the normal complexion? We usually classify them as rural, athletic, and scholarly – that is to say red, brown, or white.”
If that line didn’t make you crack at least a smile, then perhaps you need to book yourself into Whispering Glades. For you can book ahead, as it were, as exemplified by this lovely line (the words Simon S quoted which made me determined to read The Loved One):
“Can I help you in any way?”

“I came to arrange about a funeral.”

“Is it for yourself?” In amongst all this there is, of course, romance. Dennis catches the eye of a corpse beautician – and has competition from the aforementioned Mr. Joyboy. That all adds a fun subplot – it’s fairly astonishing, the amount Waugh manages to pack into a slim book. Nothing is wasted, there is no extraneous matter – and it’s rather a lesson to those novels which ramble on for chapters and chapters unnecessarily. Oh, just one more line I wanted to share, which demonstrates Waugh’s delicious humour: “Here is the strangulated Loved One for the Orchid Room.”Of course, beneath the layers of humour there is a far more serious heart to the novel – the concerns Jessica Mitford raised, which Waugh leaves the reader to recognise unaided. Which is sensible – his is a work of fiction; Mitford’s was non-fiction. I have no problem with a bit of didacticism in literature – it is a very modern bewailing, and seems to me to betray some insecurity – but Waugh lets comedy do the job, and thus gets through to an audience which might never pick up a copy of The American Way of Death. Not, of course, that this was an option when The Loved One was published.

Do go and see Simon S’s review of The Loved One, which persuaded me to (eventually!) pick up my own copy.

Little Boy Lost

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Well, I’m still heading back to healthiness (though still not eating much – could be a cheap day out tomorrow!) and have managed to finish another Persephone. This is the one which lots of people raved about last year, and which made it to the top of my Persephone Must Read List. Oh, and it’s short. Step forward Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski.


Like Miss Ranskill Comes Home, this novel is from the late-1940s – but while Todd’s novel offers an unusual perspective on the war, Laski turns her eye to the chaos of the post-war world. Hilary – whose wife Lisa was killed by the Gestapo – is visited by another underground activist and told that his (Hilary’s) son is missing. Hilary has only seen his son once, the day after he was born. The rest of the novel follows Hilary to Paris as he tries to track down his son, and work out whether or not the boy he finds (Jean) is indeed his son.

Hilary is fairly taciturn, self-absorbed, and not particularly alert to the feelings of others – but he is someone still a very sympathetic character; even for someone like me who doesn’t have children and can’t tap into the desperation of his search. It doesn’t hurt, on the sympathy front, that Hilary is described as:

a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print. He would read anything sooner than nothing, fragments of sporting news torn up in a lavatory, a motor journal on a hotel table, an out-of-date evening paper picked up in a bus. He would covetously eye the books held by strangers in trains, forcing them into conversation until he could offer his own read book in exchange for something new. But if, by ill-luck, he was reduced to reading nothing but haphazard chance finds that offered his mind only the bare fact of being print, he would become dreary, unhappy, uneasy, like a gourmet who suffers from indigestion after eating bad food.

That description could make me forgive Hilary a lot – even, almost, when he starts criticising Winnie-the-Pooh as unreadable. I can only assume Laski hadn’t read it of late, otherwise my opinion of her has gone down a lot….

Although the plot is fairly simple, its handling is beautifully subtle, especially as the novel progresses. Some of the earlier scenes are closer to thriller than ‘literary fiction’, for want of a better word – in that they seem to be about plot rather than character. But once Hilary has found Jean, their parallel emotional journeys are drawn brilliantly well. Hilary is reluctant to become attached to a child who might not be his; Jean is unused to any special attention, but is wary of accepting it with its unpredictability. It’s all done quite beautifully.

With all this subtlety, it is such a shame that Laski crams in a ridiculous last-minute character and accompanying quandary. I shan’t reveal too much, but it comes down to Hilary having to decide between lust and love, but the lust aspect is insultingly unconvincing and the character representing it seems the afterthought to an afterthought.

Putting this aside (and the novel would have been so much better without it) Little Boy Lost is an exceptional novel, and I’m very grateful to all those who waved flags for it last year. Now, should I go and add another tick to the poll?