1940s

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

StuckinaBook All , , 5 Comments

When I reviewed Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s brilliant, brilliant novel O, The Brave Music – which is being reprinted by the British Library in the autumn, hurrah! – Sarah wrote in the comments that I should try her 1947 novel Proud Citadel. I was very much looking out for my next D.E.S, so I ordered a copy – and it came with this lovely, atmospheric dustjacket.

Like O, The Brave Music, the novel starts with a young girl – but we follow her for about 25 years, rather than to the edge of adulthood. Jess has just lost her mother and is moving to a distant relative in Yorkshire.

Out of the turmoil and hardships and deep devotion of her eleven years had emerged three salient precepts: you must never lie or break a promise, you must never get into debt, and you must never love anybody too much.

Jess has been through an awful lot for her age, and takes this journey anxiously and uncertainly. At every stop, she asks the train guard if they have yet reached Sunday Halt – until he gets exasperated and three young boys start teasing her. One is clearly the ringleader whom the others follow – and Jess wonders at his unkindness but also his charm and magnetism.

She gets out at Sunday Halt and is given unclear directions through the town, out to the moor, and to the cottage where Mary is waiting for her. She is guided by that dominant, cruelly charming boy, whom she learns is Randy – to Jess, he shows kindness. And as she is crossing the moor and catches her first sight of the sea, we get one of the many wonderful passages in the novel that describe the landscape and its effect on the observer:

Jess stood and stared in silent astonishment. In all her wildest dreams of the sea that Mother had talked about she had never imagined such a fierce and turbulent loveliness as met her sight. The lines of white she had glimpsed from the train now revealed themselves as the edges of deep, curling, grey-green waves that rose in incredible majesty and stood poised for a breath-taking instant before hurling themselves with a shout on the sharp black teeth of rock that thrust out from the sandy foot of the cliffs. And then what a boiling and a surging of brownish, foam-flecked water! What a flat, shining floor of sand as the waves retreated, gathering audible breath for the next attack! What a sharp thrill of expectancy as each wave swung slowly up and up and over…

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions in books, my eye just glides over them unintentionally – but Smith wrote so wonderfully about the moor in O, The Brave Music and writes equally wonderfully about moor AND sea in Proud Citadel. It’s always stunning while also being descriptive – nothing fanciful, but prose from someone who knows and loves the sea and the moor and is able to convey why.

When Jess arrives with Mary, she finds her first loving home. Mary is a delight – wise, kind, mildly witchy, and able to encourage good sense and adventure in Jess. As she grows older, her life becomes tangled with so many members of the community – and especially the three boys from the train and, from them, even more especially Randy.

It took me a while to finish Proud Citadel, which no doubt partly because of coronavirus anxiety. But it was also because of the one major flaw in the novel, in my eyes – there are so many characters, and we spend scenes with so many of them. You eventually realise that all of them are pretty much necessary to Jess’s central story, even though it often doesn’t seem like it at the time, but I found it hard to juggle so many households in my mind and in my sympathies. There are about five characters I’d have cut from being the major focus of scenes – they could still be there, but without interrupting Jess’s story so much.

Because Jess is a fascinating character. She is adventurous and can be as wild as the sea, but she has a deep core of morality – and, having been let down so often in her youth, cannot bear people who break a promise. The novel is in the third person, but I felt like I was let into Jess’s world entirely.

And, while I flagged at times in reading it, I still raced through the final third of the novel and felt bereft once I’d finished it. There’s nobody like Smith for making you fall in love with a community, a landscape, and feel adrift once you are no longer with them. I’m sure I’ll re-read this one, as I have already re-read O, The Brave Music, and perhaps next time it will feel like coming home to the village – and the large cast of characters will be familiar faces to whom I am returning.

The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

I picked up The Vanishing Celebrities (1947) by Adrian Alington in Oxford a couple of years ago, partly because the title sounded fun, partly because I love the look of Albatross paperbacks and partly because I thought it would be a Golden Age detective novel. As it turned out, it was a lot more than that – and a total delight that sadly seems to have become almost completely forgotten. [Sidenote: this is number 5364 in the Albatross paperback series. Who knew they had so many, and how come I so seldom find them?]

The setting is Spindlesby Castle, and the opening chapter has ghostly figures from different periods of the castle’s past congregating – they know something is about to happen, but don’t know what. These ghosts only appear at the beginning and end of the novel and were rather a distraction than anything else – I’d have cut them, though they may have been a satire on something I don’t know about.

Because most of the other characters are clearly satires – either of real people or of types; I don’t know enough of popular culture from 1947 to be certain. But present at the houseparty, organised by the Duchess of the castle and reluctantly permitted by her husband, are…

  • Trackless Butterworth, an explorer
  • Olivia Hitchforth, an actress and Trackless’s wife
  • Aurora Fairground, a tennis player, and her mother
  • Carlotta Trott, a detective novelist who invented Sir Cecil Sweetlip and who is in a bitter rivalry with Fay Peabody, inventor of the detective Aristede Foufoupou
  • Viola Ramshott, MP
  • Virgil D. Schrenkenkraut, an American film magnate
  • The Ambassador of Strubania
  • Len Trooper, a handsome singer
  • Mr Titterways, who is not famous but somehow always turns up where famous people are

You see that Alington has a way with names. Carlotta Trott and Fay Peabody are obviously spins on Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and there’s a later reference to Tenderly Jones, ‘the man who writes whimsically about gardens’, who I think must be Beverley Nichols. Whether the others are types or real people, they are a delight. My favourite to read was perhaps Aurora Fairground, whose reputation her mother is keen to preserve – whenever anybody asks her about her tennis career, she says that she would rather have babies of her own, and is just a girl who loves England and happens to be good at tennis.

An alternative title for The Vanishing Celebrities in some editions was The Room in the West Tower – put those two together, and you’ll work out happens. There are rumours that anybody who slept in a room in the West Tower disappeared by morning. Viola Ramshott, MP, has no time for such nonsense and says she’s will sleep there to no ill effect – and by morning, of course, she is gone.

In the silence which seemed inevitably to follow any observation put forward by Aurora, Carlotta Trott made her first contribution to the discussion. She had been listening to the others with a somewhat cynical smile. Now, thinking that a suitable moment had arrived for the kind of sensational intervention which Sir Cecil enjoyed, she said, adopting her best Sir Cecil drawl, ‘Have you tried draggin’ the lake?’

‘Er – no,’ said the Duke.

Carlotta’s smile became still more cynical.

‘Not a bad idea, what?’

‘A very interesting idea,’ replied the Duke, ‘really a very interesting idea indeed. But as a matter of fact, Miss Trott, there is no lake.

A succession of these celebrities decide to sleep in the room for increasingly unlikely reasons, and they disappear. Various policemen turn up, including people from Scotland Yard with ridiculous nicknames – my favourite was ‘What’s More You’ll Be A Man My Son’ Darby. Fay Peabody pops up to score one over her novelist nemesis.

As a detective novel, it’s not the most impressive. The solution is pretty laughable – but in the good sense as well as the bad. The whole thing is really funny. Alington has a great ear for witty dialogue and, having established the ludicrous characters, frequently made me laugh by dropping in just a few representative words from them. We don’t even have the usual straight man, watching on and being the reader’s perspective on the zany world. Everyone is absurd. It’s a delight.

I suppose the danger in any novel that draws on figures of the period, or even on types of the period, is that they are less relevant when those figures and types have faded. But I loved this even when I wasn’t sure who Alington was drawing on, and the whole thing was a total joy. If you can get your hands on a copy, do – otherwise I hope that it might catch the eye of the British Library Crime Classics series at some point…

A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

StuckinaBook All , , , , 13 Comments

Stefan Zweig is rather brilliant, isn’t he? A Chess Story [also published as Chess and A Royal Game], from 1941, is the third Zweig novella I’ve read and the best so far – a really astonishing achievement in so few pages. Translated by Alexander Starritt, I should say – someone at my book group had a very different translation, based on our comparison of the first few lines, but it hurts my head to think too much about the variations that are possible with different translators at work.

I didn’t know anything about A Chess Story when I started it, and I was very glad about that. It made the whole experience so much more surprising and revelatory – so part of me wants to tell you to stop reading this review and just get a copy. Preferably the gorgeous Pushkin Press edition I have. But I’ll keep going anyway.

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us – it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure.

The narrator is an interested and friendly man, but we don’t learn all that much more about him. Rather, he is there to introduce us to other people – to be the intrigued onlooker, always ready to give backstory when necessary. Zweig breaks all sorts of narrative ‘best practice’ rules, or what we would now consider rules, and somehow gets away with it. For example, he jumps from this present moment into a full history of the celebrity in question: Mirko Czentovic, chess prodigy.

We learn that Czentovic came from poverty and was considered unusually stupid. He barely communicates, and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. Except one day he reveals himself to have a preternatural ability for chess. One thing leads to another – Zweig tells it very well – and Czentovic is now a big deal. He’s also a mercenary, and will only play chess if it’s monetarily worth his while.

A competitive man on board the ship, and the narrator, manage to get together a group who are willing to put together the price. And it looks like the hubris of the amateur and the arrogance of the professional will be the story here. It would have been a good story. But, in the middle of the second match, someone joins the crowd of spectators. And, diffidently, he calls through an instruction. It quickly becomes clear that he is brilliant at chess himself – but once the match is over, he doesn’t want to play again.

Dr B is his name – and the second half of the novella becomes about something completely different. I won’t say what, though it’s easy enough to discover online if you want to. It’s about how he became so talented at chess – and why he doesn’t want to play again. Frankly, it’s astonishing.

All the more astonishing is how vividly Zweig creates two worlds – the ship and this other world that I won’t say too much about – in only a hundred or so pages. He could have made it a novel of three times the length, but there is a great power in his brevity. It says more about its time than novels ten times as long; I suspect it will stay in my mind for a long time. I’ve seldom read a better portrayal of mental illness, and the final chess match in A Chess Story is one of only two times that a sport has held any interest for me – the other being the cricket match in The Go Between.

If you’ve never read Zweig before, this is a great place to start. And I’m keen to get as many more as I can.

My favourite novel of the year? (O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith)

StuckinaBook All , , 35 Comments

I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

StuckinaBook All , , , , 5 Comments

I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

Miss Carter and the Ifrit by Susan Alice Kerby

StuckinaBook All , , , , 11 Comments

When I was offered some review copies of the new Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, top of my list was Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945) by Susan Alice Kerby – and not just because it qualifies for #ProjectNames. It’s just the sort of premise I absolutely love – and, as it turned out, also a novel that I loved.

Possibly my favourite genre of books is the fantastic – books set in this world, but with an element of fantasy of them. It’s the sort of book I did my DPhil on, but I hadn’t heard of Kerby or her novel – thankfully it was published a bit too late to match the focus of my thesis, or otherwise I’d have been anxious about leaving it out.

To look at Miss Georgina Carter you would never have suspected that a women of her age and character would have allowed herself to be so wholeheartedly mixed up with an Ifrit. For Georgina Carter was nearing fifty (she was forty-seven to be exact) and there was something about her long, plain face, her long upper lip, her long, thin hands and feet that marked her very nearly irrevocably as a spinster. That she wore her undistinguished clothes well, had a warm, human smile, was fond of the theatre and had never occasioned anyone a moment’s trouble or sorrow, were minor virtues which had never got her very far.

That’s the opening paragraph, and that’s the Miss Carter who is the mainstay of the narrative. She has lived a quiet, unassuming life. As it’s wartime, she is working for the government’s censorship department – blacking out bits of letters – but, otherwise, she has spent years in middle-class isolation. She has one good friend, and that’s about it. The rest is propriety, boredom, and a little loneliness.

Into this life comes the Ifrit – whom she names Joe. He emerges from wood that she is burning on her fire, freed from a curse of centuries. And he is to obey her every whim. (I had heard the word ‘ifrit’ somewhere before, but didn’t know exactly what it was – the OED says it’s an alternative spelling of ‘afrit’ – essentially a genie.)

What I loved about Kerby’s novel was how she takes this fantastically unlikely scenario and makes every subsequent step believable. Joe is enthusiastic and bombastic, and is gradually taught to behave in a way more befitting the 1940s. The extent of his fantastic abilities is rather elastic and not always coherent – he can shape-shift and conjure up any foods required, but he has to dart around the world at lightning speed to gather clothing.  But it doesn’t really matter – if anything, it makes the reader feel as enjoyably dizzied as Miss Carter.

And Miss Carter is a wonderful character. Kerby starts with the isolated spinster trope, and gives us added dimensions – of ‘might have beens’ and ‘maybe still could bes’. She is sharp but uncertain – independent but unsure of this strange new thing happening to her.

It’s such a fun book, and Kerby handles the absurdities and humour well alongside a genuine pathos. I heartily recommend it, and if the other new Furrowed Middlebrow books are this unusual and winning, then we’re all in for a treat.

Mrs Tim Carries On by D.E. Stevenson (25 Books in 25 Days: #17)

StuckinaBook All , , , 10 Comments

Like a lot of people who read Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson when Bloomsbury republished it about ten years ago, I was keen to read the rest of the series. And, like a lot of those people, I came up against the extortionate secondhand prices one had to pay. So hurrah and hurray for Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press for bringing them back into print! And an extra hurrah for sending me review copies – I wolfed down Mrs Tim Carries On (1941) today.

I should probably be avoiding 243pp books during 25 Books in 25 Days, but I couldn’t resist. And Mrs Tim is just as lovable as I remembered her – dependable, wise, but not with rose-tinted glasses. Her diaries give her exasperated opinions of locals, but also affectionate ones. They show her anxieties and pride as a parent, while also finding humour in everyday life. Only this time, of course, it is wartime.

It’s interesting to see how Stevenson adapts the character to the difficulties of war. Like the Provincial Lady books (which remain a very evident influence on Stevenson), she has taken a humorous character from the 30s and brought her into the war-torn 1940s. While the Provincial Lady looks at the most farcical elements of war, and the hypocrisies of those caught up in the civilian effort, Mrs Tim is a bit more restrained.

I proceed to explain my own particular method of “carrying on”. None of us could bear the war if we allowed ourselves to brood upon the wickedness of it and the misery it has entailed, so the only thing to do is not to allow oneself to think about it seriously, but just to skitter about on the surface of life like a water beetle. In this way one can carry on and do one’s bit and remain moderately cheerful.

This isn’t quite true, though. Mr Tim is an active soldier, and there is more anxiety tied in than this statement suggests. Not only for his fate, but around the possibility of invasion, and the threat of bombs. It is less all-out funny than the Provincial Lady (and, if we’re being honest, not quite as good) – but a more poignant portrait. And, to be honest, almost nothing is as good as the Provincial Lady. If this isn’t quite, then it’s still rather wonderful – and all the more wonderful for being readily available again.

Melville by Jean Giono (25 Books in 25 Days: #7)

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 12 Comments

I loved The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono when I read it years ago – a beautifully simple story – and have been meaning to read more Giono ever since. I did start Hill once and didn’t get very far, but 25 Books in 25 Days seemed like a good opportunity to read Melville (1941 – translated from French by Paul Eprile).

It started life as the introduction to Giono’s translation of Moby Dick, and can very loosely be said to be about Herman Melville. But this Melville is very much of Giono’s own invention, as Edmund White explains in his helpful introduction to the NYRB Classics edition. Which is, incidentally, beautiful. Giono’s Melville is solidly masculine and determined, and his life is shaped partly by visions of an angel who encourages him to write the novel that is in his heart – and an Irish nationalist called Adelina, who apparently didn’t exist.

Did I enjoy the book? I don’t know, really. It is very overblown, stylistically, in a way that feels deliberate. It is impressionistic and philosophical, interlaced with conversations that are often very funny. It is more of a word picture than a narrative, and swirls around like the waves hiding Moby Dick. Yes, it was often beautiful. But it was more of an experience than a narrative, if that makes sense. I think I should re-read it one day.

He was seeing clearly. He could say it to himself, there, alone in his bed, while a broad smile moistened his whiskers: “I don’t live to keep an eye on my commercial interests. I live to keep an eye on the gods.” What’s more, he’d be ready to earn his keep, starting tomorrow if necessary, doing no matter what kind of work, even something other than writing. Not a “man of letters” in the least.

On this evening, he felt strangely free, strangely decided. He called out softly, “Are you there?” No, the fire was dying out. The embers were crackling, that was all. “That one,” he said, “as soon as he wins, he takes off. Well, as soon as he believes he’s won, because – hold on a minute there, boy! – it hasn’t been stated yet that I will write this book.”

Truly, he didn’t feel he was capable of it, unless he had a real change of heart. He looked at the sailor’s clothes he’d just bought, lying over there on the armchair. What’s he scheming? he thought. What does he have in store for me? What’s he going to turn me into?

Mrs Christopher by Elizabeth Myers

StuckinaBook All , , , 9 Comments

I first stumbled across Elizabeth Myers at a book fair in Sherborne. Mum and I had gone on a day out there, travelling by train, just to enjoy a mosey around. While there, we spotted a sign to a book fair – and, naturally, went to have a look. It turned out to be one of those places for book dealers and rich folk, rather than the ordinary reader. I’m not particularly interested in whether or not the book I want to read is a first edition, and I’m definitely not interested in valuable books of topography – which seemed to make up quite a chunk of the stock. After a bit of browsing, I came away with The Letters of Elizabeth Myers – which ended up being my favourite book I read that year. Though admittedly it was while I was at university as an undergraduate, and the amount of non-course reading I managed to do that year was extremely low.

I later realised that the book was probably stocked there because Myers was an author of local interest – she lived in Sherborne. In, it turned out, the house next door to a friend we visited in Sherborne (albeit many decades earlier). She was married to Littleton Powys, one of the Powys brothers – including T.F. Powys and John Cowper Powys. They share with me the honour of having been the son of the vicar of Montacute.

Myers died very young, aged only 34, but did have three novels published during her life. I’ve read the most well-known of those, A Well Full of Leaves, and I don’t remember anything about it except that I wasn’t super impressed. But #ProjectNames encouraged me to get Mrs Christopher (1946) off the shelves. The copy I have is a presentation copy signed by Myers and her husband – to somebody who was apparently trying to dramatise the novel, though I don’t think that ever happened. (I’m assuming this Nora Nicholson is not the same as the actress, but who knows.)

That’s a long build up to telling you about this book. It opens somewhat dramatically – Mrs Christopher shoots a man named Sine through the temple. He has been blackmailing her, and she has had enough. At the end of her tether, she reaches into her purse – which for some reason has a loaded pistol in it – and does the deed. But she is not alone: three other people are also in the room, all of whom have been blackmailed by Sine.

Mrs Christopher is not your typical murderess. She is a quiet and conscientious widow in her 60s, and she is keen that nobody else gets the blame for her actions – and so gives her name and address to the three strangers in the room. And then off they separately go. But Mrs Christopher knows that she will confess – and, opportunely, her son is at Scotland Yard. She goes to him and tells him what she has done.

In an effort to test the resolve of human nature (or, let’s be honest, to engineer the plot), she offers up £1500 that she has in savings to see if the three others in the room will inform against her, if a reward is offered. She thinks they won’t; her cynical son thinks they will. Either way, she has confessed and looks likely to hang – which she takes in her stride.

The remainder of the novel is divided into three distinct sections. In each one, we follow another of the blackmailed people as they leave the scene of the crime – back to their lives. Myers does an impressive job at creating each of these worlds, so that they feel complete and well developed for the 50 or so pages in which they appear. There is Edmund, determined to rescue a woman he knows from life as a prostitute; Veronica, who has run away from her husband and desperately wants a baby with the man she is living with; Giles, a doctor who does illegal abortions and has only ever been fond of his studious younger brother. Each is fully realised, with positive attributes being constantly offset by their weaknesses and hubrises. Each section leads towards the question: will they betray Mrs Christopher for the sake of £500 – which was, of course, a fortune in the 1940s.

One of the things I appreciated about it was how faith is woven in. Myers was a Christian herself, and many of the characters in Mrs Christopher are either people of faith or people seeking God. I see sympathetic or accurate depictions of faith so seldom in novels that it is always a welcome feature!

And this novel is certainly thoughtful. The writing is occasionally a like workmanlike, and there are moments that it leans towards the melodramatic, but a whole lot less than you’d imagine from a description of the opening scene. Indeed, Myers uses the premise pretty elegantly – and it’s impressive to have such distinct sections to a novel, almost a series of linked stories, without it feeling disjointed. All in all, I thought Mrs Christopher was a pretty good contribution to my names-in-titles reading project.

Alice by Elizabeth Eliot

StuckinaBook All , , , , 5 Comments

I’m sure you know about the exciting and excellent Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press – if not, hurry to them – and today I’m going to share my post about Alice by Elizabeth Eliot. Below is the beginning of my review – you can read the rest over at Shiny New Books.

Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly fits that category for me, but after reading Alice (1949), I’ll be keen to read more Eliot.

Despite being called Alice, the narrator is Margaret – she first encounters Alice when they are at boarding school together, in the late 1920s. It is immediately clear that Alice has left a significant effect on her schoolfriend, with Alice’s almost artless carefreeness showing options for a bohemian lifestyle that Margaret can’t quite aspire to.