1950s

Patience by John Coates

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A couple of weeks ago, Jessie at Dwell in Possibility organised a mini Persephone readathon. Basically, an excuse to get a Persephone book off the shelf and dig in – and I had a quick mosey through the ones I have unread on my shelves, and opted for Patience by John Coates, originally published in 1953.

Coates is one of those rare[ish] creatures – a male Persephone author – but his main character is a woman. ‘Patience’ is there as a theme throughout the novel, but it is also the name of the main character. She is a devoted mother to her children, and thinks she might be on the way to another. Here’s the rather wonderful opening line:

It was odd, thought Patience, that surprises never came singly, and that the day she asked herself whether she was going to have another baby, poor Lionel should have asked himself to tea.

Lionel is Patience’s brother and something of a hassle. His wife has recently left him to join a retreat, permanently, and he is busying himself with interfering in Patience’s life and her marriage. He’s always quite interfering, but he has particular reason this time: because he’s discovered that Patience’s husband, Edward, is having an affair.

That might be rather a devastating discovery for many wives, but Patience isn’t unduly perturbed. Her relationship with Edward is one of thoughtless acceptance. She has been taught to be submissive and so she lets him sleep with her, and she is proud of the offspring of that marriage, but it seems never to have crossed her mind that one might love one’s husband, or want to spend time with them.

An awful lot of things have never crossed Patience’s mind. Coates has created something rather extraordinary in her – because she is clueless and naive, taking things on surface level, kind to everyone and absolutely predisposed to like them. But she is never, never the butt of the joke in the narrative. Patience would be a slightly absurd comic character in the background of most novels. Here she is a heroine, and I loved her. She is fundamentally good, even if the way she understands the world and its morals is a mixture of pragmatic, idiosyncratic, and Catholic.

I’ve buried the lede, but Catholicism is one of the big themes of this very funny novel. Importantly, Coates isn’t mocking Catholicism – I have zero time for novels that mock people’s faith – but he is funny about people who twist scripture and the tenets of the church for their own ends, or who are half-hearted in it. This early sentence amused me, and gives a good sense of Coates’ tone – it’s about why Patience is married to a non-Catholic:

For darling Mummy had been unable to find any eligible Catholics for her daughters, what with the war being on and perhaps not trying very hard.

Because of her firmly-held faith, Patience can’t get a divorce. Even when things get more complicated, as she falls instantly in love with a man called Philip… and that’s just the beginning of the complications that follow.

I have only two qualms about this novel. One is the love-at-first-sight thing. Maybe it does happen sometimes, but it just feels a bit silly in a novel. The other is that Patience thinks a lot more about the church than about God, which is a little at odds with the genuine nature of her faith.

Besides those details, I loved Patience. Coates is really good at putting together this bizarre twist on a moral dilemma, in a novel that could easily have been a miserable tale about unhappy marriage in a different author’s hands. Instead, Coates sustains the humour and lightness of the novel, and keeps the reader – well, this reader at least – fully empathetic with Patience, and really liking her. But then again I never find unworldliness offputting in someone, real or fictional, unless it means that other people have to deal with the mess they leave behind them. And that’s never the case with Patience.

Such an unusual topic for a novel, handled perfectly, and a delight from start to finish.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The tone of the novel is a deceptively simple one; Patience’s voice is perfectly delightful, childlike whimsy. Despite its few flaws I really thoroughly enjoyed this surprising little novel” – HeavenAli

“While it is, in many ways, quintessentially ‘Persephone’, it is also quite strikingly different, and fills a gap in the Persephone canon that I hadn’t realised was there before.” – Book Snob

“It’s a rare occurrence but sometimes a Perephone title just doesn’t suit me and this was one of those times which was mildly disappointing as it’s the one I’d had the highest expectations for.” – Desperate Reader

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

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It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott at the excellent Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Every time I want all of them, and every time I only manage to read a handful – but thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a review copy of My Caravaggio Style (1959) by Doris Langley Moore. Don’t worry too much about the title – I’ll come onto that in a bit.

Quentin Williams is the narrator. He works in an antiquarian bookshop and is the writer of fairly unsuccessful biographies of people nobody much cares about. In a chance conversation with a passing American, he somehow manages to suggest that he has access to the memoirs of Lord Byron, believed to have been destroyed. One thing leads to another, and Quentin decides that he’ll give forgery a go.

Moore was a Byron expert and there is plenty of background detail about Byron here – or, rather, enough so that those of us who’ve never read a word of Byron don’t feel entirely adrift. She even does a good job of making you feel the significance these memoirs would be, though mostly because they’d be worth a lot of money. The cleverest thing is that we are always reluctantly on Quentin’s side when it comes to the forgery – because he is such an intensely dislikeable person.

I hope this was deliberate. He is arrogant, careless of the feelings of others, and particularly unpleasant to his girlfriend Jocasta. Every time he describes her, he talks endlessly about her beauty and stupidity. It’s the sort of viewpoint that is at the very worst edges of men-writing-about-women, so either Moore was impersonating a terrible man, or needed a quiet talking to. Let’s assume the former. This is the sort of thing Quentin says about Jocasta…

Such a vapid and unworthy comment quite irritated me. I had never regarded my beautiful Jocasta as an intellectual girl but she had been brought up by highly cultured grandparents, and I saw no reason why she should appear – no, I won’t say vulgar, for she had too little pretension ever to be that, but – I can only repeat – childish.

While we cannot forget the chief reason that he is dating her – she is so beautiful, y’all – it’s never clear what she sees in him. And, indeed, she’s very keen that they get married, despite him having no redeeming qualities at all. Quentin is rather easier to cheer for when he visits his great-aunt – by some convoluted reasoning, he needs some manuscript books from her attic and also needs her to witness him receiving them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Moore can be very witty – particularly in these sections. For example…

It was curious that so much good will towards the human race should be combined in my great-aunt with an inveterate reluctance to allow any member of it whom she saw at close quarters to be comfortable.

To distract Jocasta from finding out about the forgery, Quentin sets her off doing a research project on Byron and animals. She gets really into it and starts to love reading Byron – rather ludicrously, Quentin gets terribly jealous that she should love Byron. His reasoning is fairly unhinged: Byron was a notorious womaniser and thus he doesn’t want his girlfriend falling in love with him. Despite, of course, Byron being long dead. And so he tries to write things in the forged memoir that will alienate Jocasta…

It’s all bonkers, but Moore manages to make the logic of the novel work well. I found that I wanted Quentin to succeed in his efforts, even as I wanted Jocasta to get as far away from him as possible. It’s always fun to read about literary obsessions taken to great lengths, and once different Byron scholars get involved (including ‘Doris Langley Moore’ as a character!) it’s all very amusing and dramatic.

And the title is apparently a reference to something Byron said about his own writing, though that does make it one of those slightly silly titles that only makes sense to the in-crowd. That aside, Moore did a great job of making this interesting to someone who doesn’t care at all whether or Byron’s memoirs are discovered.

Another success for Furrowed Middlebrow. Just as long as Moore knew she was creating an idiot and not a hero.

 

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden

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I love taking a trip to the secondhand bookshop in Wantage, which is less than half an hour from my house. It’s a real treasure trove, and I never come away empty-handed or anything like it. Among my recent haul was Return Journey (1954) by Barbara Goolden, and I was so taken by the premise that I started it immediately. But before I looked to see what it was about, I was drawn in by those stunning cover. Isn’t it a beauty?

It reminds me a lot of a village called Lower Slaughter that isn’t a million miles from me, and where I once accidentally gatecrashed a fete.

“You do not feel,” said the Assessor gently, “that you are altogether satisfied with your Record?”

“Most dissatisfied,” confessed the New Arrival. “I have the feeling, you see, that I am a complete failure.”

The Assessor take up a file. “You were, I think, an English spinster of the upper middle-class, living in the country?”

“Hampshire,” prompted the New Arrival, “the Surrey side, very convenient for London. Not that I myself liked town life, the traffic always confused me. I was killed, you recollect, by a tram. So bewildering. I thought it was going, when, in fact, it was coming.”

The ‘New Arrival’ is Veryan Meadows, and the place she has newly arrived is the Pearly Gates. Before her record is read, though, she is given the option of returning to Earth for any year of her life. And she can choose whether to have a change of heart, a change of mind, or a change of physical appearance. She chooses to go back to her youth, and to be beautiful.

Isn’t that a brilliant premise? Well, it swept me away, certainly.

As it happens, it was the most brilliant thing about Return Journey. I enjoyed reading the novel, but I feel that Goolden could have made more of the idea.

When she is sent back on her terrestrial way, the celestial powers that be decide to give her an added attribute, along with her beauty – the ability to express her opinions. She has always been rather shy and unsure of herself – which, coupled with plainness, led to an unhappy life as ‘an English spinster of the upper middle-class’. So here she finds herself again, the daughter of a minister in a small village. She is unused to having any male attention, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the sudden attentions of, among others, the curate. Any young gentleman is bewitched by her looks; any older man or woman seems to think she is unnecessarily odd. And you can sort of see their point. While the Assessor gave the ability to express her opinions, she does seem to be [a] pretty stupid and [b] bizarrely literal. Any turn of phrase is taken at face value, and her repeated questions madden quite a few people.

It’s unclear whether she remembers her heavenly adventure, or realises that she’s having a second lease of life. And that’s the major drawback of the novel for me. If we had Veryan reflecting on the differences this time around, or cynically thinking about how beauty has altered perceptions of her, it would be rather intriguing. What a lot to explain. Instead, it’s an enjoyable small-town novel where the heroine is unusually pretty and unusually dim. It’s good fun, but it rather wastes the initial premise.

Goolden is neither dim not literal, and she is rather good at one of my favourite authorial tricks – showing when characters are inadvertently revealing their true nature, or using quick narrative asides to send up the characters. Return Journey ended up being one of those novels that slightly frustrated me, because it could obviously have been better than it was – if Veryan had had an ounce of the wit and intelligence that Goolden has, it would have been much improved. More fun than seeing a virtuous innocent be virtuously innocent.

So, this has ended up one of those confusing reviews where I might sound more negative than I feel. Return Journey is fun and diverting. It’s only that I think it could have been truly brilliant. Maybe next time around?

Uncle Samson by Beverley Nichols

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I was looking through my Beverley Nichols books, trying to decide which one to read next – and only one of them was eligible for Project Names. And so that’s the one I chose! Step forward Uncle Samson (1950), which I hadn’t even heard of until I found it in an extremely disorganised bookshop in Cheltenham earlier in the year.

Apparently it is a sequel of sorts to the excellently-titled The Star-spangled Manner and, like that former book (which I have not read), it is Nichols’ impression of America. And those impressions are certainly varied and interesting!

America is, of course, an enormous country. Nichols can’t hope to encapsulate everything there is to say about it, or even a hundredth – but the selection of chapters he writes are certainly fascinating. It’s worth starting by saying that this is not primarily a funny book. Nichols is a delightful humorist, but in Uncle Samson he is much more in journalistic mode. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the odd moment of levity in his phrasing. I particularly enjoyed this, from when he goes to visit a funeral home of the sort that Evelyn Waugh pastiches in The Loved One:

It would obviously be impossible to encompass all these attractions without exhaustion, so I contented myself with a brief visit to Lullaby Land, and then went on to the “Mysteries of Life” garden, containing a large statue by Ernest Gazzeri, which suggested that though the sculptor might have known a lot about the mysteries of life he knew little about the mysteries of anatomy.

A glance at the American death industry comes after sections on religious cults, including a notable one led by Father Divine (I had to Wikipedia it, but it’s definitely interesting!) and on the horrors of socialism.

The most animated Nichols gets is the section on race. While many of Nichols’ views were not particularly progressive for 1940s/1950s England (particularly as regards class), he was certainly ahead of the curve on racism compared to the lawmakers of 1940s/1950s America.

Every year 30,000 light-skinned [African-Americans] “crossed the colour-line” and began a new life as whites. If we were told that every year 30,000 Americans broke the barbed wire of concentration camps and regained their freedom we might sit up and take notice, for America is a great democracy and does not incarcerate her citizens unless they have committed a crime. Yet America runs the greatest concentration camp the world has ever seen, and the only offence of its occupants is the crime of having been born.

I think he writes more about race than anything else, and he is baffled and angry about it – recounting his own embarrassment that he hadn’t considered the obstacles that would be in the way when he tries to meet up with a black friend. America still has a terrible problem with racism, and a President who is openly racist without seeming to suffer from his voting base – but Uncle Samson does remind us that at least some progress has been made. And I’d have written a rather more hopeful sentence there under the previous President, as opposed to the one who thinks black American women should “go home”.

Let’s move onto cheerier things. He meets Walt Disney! That is rather an enchanting chapter. I don’t know how accurate it is as an overall portrait of Disney, but Nichols certainly seemed won over by him – particularly his childlike enthusiasm for Fantasia – and tells of employees who are similarly devoted. I hadn’t expected an interview with Disney when I started reading Nichols’ work, but why not?

Another surprise, and a fascinating section, is Nichols visiting Alcoholics Anonymous – as an observer rather than a participant. He writes glowingly about what a wonderful initiative it is, and wishes that something similar existed in the UK.

What a curious and beguiling set of topics Nichols addresses! It’s interesting to compare this with modern-day America, and the topics that Nichols would write about now. Race and the movies would both still be there. Funeral homes probably wouldn’t (while guns and the lack of a national health system certainly would). Some things have changed a lot and some things don’t seem to have changed at all.

I was a little disappointed when I started and it wasn’t a comic work, but I was quickly won over. It doesn’t rank up there with Merry Hall, but it’s very good in a different mood. Nichols is a great journalist/essayist – nothing here pretends to be objective, and it’s all the better for it. For a very singular trip to mid-century America, track down a copy now.

Letters to Louise by Theodore Dreiser (25 Books in 25 Days: #11)

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I love reading a collection of letters, and presumably that’s why I bought a copy of Letters to Louise (1959) – a collection of letters that Theodore Dreiser wrote to his friend and editor Louise Campbell (who was edited this book and wrote the commentary between letters). It certainly wasn’t because I had any affection for Theodore Dreiser, whom I have never read – though Sister Carrie has been on my shelf for a long time. Having said that, it might have gone in the moving-house-cull.

Dreiser tended to write quite short letters, often signed with alternative names (James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, etc.), but Campbell’s commentary is useful and engaging. And what I enjoyed most was the fondness and admiration that Dreiser manages to get into his letters – admiration for her editing talent. Since they met when she wrote him a letter chastising him for criticising Philadelphia, it’s impressive that he was open to the friendship at all.

Books like this are always a bit better when you get both sides of the exchange, which Letters to Louise doesn’t have, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like I know Dreiser pretty well from this short collection – or one part of his personality, anyway – and it’s fun to have Project Names and 25 Books in 25 Days come together to get something unexpected off my shelves.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (25 Books in 25 Days #10)

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is one of the books that has been on my shelves the longest, I think. I bought it in a library sale in 2004, and it has hidden on my shelves ever since – and I haven’t even seen the film. Basically all my knowledge about it comes from the famous image of Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder and the song ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. Which is a great song.

About ten years ago, I read In Cold Blood by Capote, and I wasn’t super keen to read more by him. Yes, it was very good – but it was so deeply unpleasant that it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it’s stupid to dismiss an author based on one book, particularly when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so very different – and, indeed, I was totally beguiled by it.

Our narrator opens by saying that he hasn’t seen Holly Golightly (full name Holiday Golightly! I did not know that before) for years, but used to live in the same building as her – and first encountered her properly when she kept ringing his doorbell whenever she got home at 2am or 3am. I’d somehow picked up somewhere that Holly was a prostitute, but she is not. She is a ‘cafe society girl’, whatever that means. And it chiefly seems to mean living a bohemian life with a stream of men, but guarding her independence and only giving as much as she chooses.

Holly is a wonderful creation. Any number of authors want to make a spirited, lively female character, but she is no manic pixie dream girl. She is vibrant on her own terms – initiating conversations (by, say, knocking at the narrator’s fire escape in the early hours), chopping and changing what is on her mind in a dizzying way. She is always finding new ways to express her thoughts, and refusing to bow to expectations. And there is an underlying dignity, despite any undignified place she might find herself. I think Capote achieves all of this through the dialogue he gives her. It’s a tour de force, and I’m wondering how the film lives up to it.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (25 Books in 25 Days: #6)

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I think I bought Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) partly because of the similarity of the title to Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington – but I had also read a couple of PHJ’s other novels. I thought one was great (The Honours Board) and didn’t like another (An Error of Judgement), so where would Skipton sit on the spectrum?

She is certainly a varied author – this one isn’t like either of those, but it is very good. It’s principally a character piece. Daniel Skipton is a writer living hand-to-mouth in Belgium – he has had a critically successful novel followed by a critically unsuccessful one, and neither have made him much money. What he certainly doesn’t lack is self-confidence, as we see in the opening pages as he writes a bragging and insulting letter to his publisher, Utterson. While not writing, he endeavours to make money by convincing tourists to spend too much money on fake art, prostitutes, and a nude version of Leda (which the tourists who take up much of the book find hilarious).

Having had his lunch and rinsed out a pair of socks (he had only two pairs and kept one always in the wash), he took his manuscript from the table drawer, ranged before him his three pens, one with black ink, one with green, and one with red, and sat down to the hypnotic delight of polishing. The first draft of this book had been completed a year ago. Since then he had worked upon it every day, using the black pen for the correction of simple verbal or grammatical slips, the green pen for the burnishing of style, the red for marginal comment and suggestions for additional matter. He knew well enough that the cur Utterson would like to get his hands on it. It was not only a great book, it was the greatest novel in the English language, it would make his reputation all over the world and keep him in comfort, more than comfort, for the rest of his life.

Skipton reminded me quite a lot of Ignatius J Reilly, though The Unspeakable Skipton is nothing like A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s as though a character with Reilly’s monstrous nature was transposed to a much less heightened novel – and we see glimpses of Skipton’s genuine loneliness and desperation amongst the comedy of the situations Johnson creates.

Skipton is a wonderful creation, but I also enjoyed the band whom he encounters – from light-hearted Duncan to innocent Matthew to the intellectual snob Dorothy and her passive husband Cosmo. Dorothy apparently appears in another couple of novels in this sort-of series, and I would happily read more about her. She doesn’t have Skipton’s ruthless selfishness, but her sense of self-importance is not far behind – there is a wonderful scene where she gives a literary talk to an assembly of uninterested people.

So, The Unspeakable Skipton wasn’t really what I expected – but it is a character piece done with brio, and an unusual and confident novel.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

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‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That quote often appears on lists of best opening lines, but it might be as far as most people get into The Towers of Trebizond (1956) by Rose Macaulay. She hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion completely, as a handful of her novels remain in print, but it’s fair to say that the average person in the street won’t be able to tell you a lot about her. She’s an author I love, but I’ve had very mixed success with her novels. At the top of the tree are Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, which are very funny while also being incisively insightful about mid-century society. At the bottom is the turgid Staying With Relations. The much-feted The World My Wilderness fell in the middle for me, being very well observed but lacking the humour she does so well.

Where would The Towers of Trebizond fall on my list? It’s among her best known, but various red flags worried me – since I don’t particularly enjoy books set in countries that the author isn’t from, and I particularly don’t get on with travel books. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with this one… but I made my book group read it, so that I’d find out!

Laurie is the narrator and, for much of the book, she details the journey she takes from Istanbul to Trebizond, along with Aunt Dot (Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) and her friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Dot is there to improve the lot of women, while Father Hugh is hoping to convert the masses to his particular brand of High Anglicanism. Somewhere along the way, Dot and Hugh go missing – possibly to Jerusalem, possibly to Russia – and rumour spreads that they are spies.

Macaulay apparently referred to the writing as a ‘rather goofy, rambling prose style’, and I can see why. The tone is often a little detached, curious, and wry – with the same sort of lengthy, relatively unpunctuated sentences that make Barbara Comyns’ style so quirky. Here’s an example:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

The main topics she addresses are faith (and distinctions between different denominations), history, and travel. Much of the book is her musings on these, with plenty of contributions for her companions while they’re about. I think it’s largely commendable for how impressively of-a-piece it is. She does not let up this style – it is consistently well done and totally all-encompassing. I guess it’s then just a question of whether or not you like this style.

While they were travelling around, I found it all a bit muddy. I couldn’t really distinguish the different places they were going, and I certainly found the interpersonal bits much more interesting than her reflections on the places she was seeing. Without anything concrete to hang onto, it was all a bit – well, the most fitting word I can think of is, again, muddy.

I could still definitely appreciate the skill that went into the creation of this portrait, and I did find a lot of it funny. Being a Christian and having been brought up in an Anglican church, I did enjoy some of the discussions of faith – though I always find that it’s non-Christians who find denominations so fascinating, and we’re happy just to do our best to follow Jesus. Macaulay has a wonderfully arch tone, and the faux matter-of-fact style did work – I just wish she’d set it in England. (The section I found funniest was when she was reflecting on having often used a line from her phrasebook about not speaking Turkish, only to discover later that she’d mixed up lines and was actually asking to speak to a Mr. Prorum, or something like that – who did turn up at one point, nonplussed.)

And, indeed, the sections of the novel I liked best were at the end, when she has turned to the UK. There is a very odd sidestep into her trying to raise a chimp – complete with driving lessons – that I thought was marvellous. In fact, having now been to book group, it was one of those times when discussing it made me like it more – reflecting on all the funny scenes and the unusual way Macaulay presents them. It’s all an impressive achievement, for the way in which it is sustained, if nothing else – and, while it doesn’t quite rival my favourite Macaulays for me, I can see why other readers would consider this her masterpiece.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

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I don’t remember who originally told me about The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore, but that recommendation was enough for me to buy it in 2012. A few people read it for the 1955 Club a little while ago, and I’d read so many positive reviews that I finally read it. Yes, it’s rather brilliant! (By the way, I’ve included a copy of the NYRB Classics edition because it’s beautiful; mine was a film tie-in, with Maggie Smith on the cover, and it was made me want to seek out the film…)

Here are the first couple of paragraphs, to whet your appetite:

The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.

After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction. His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.

Judith Hearne is settling into a boarding house, uncertain about how she will be perceived and how she will fit in. These two pictures sum up her life – a devoted Catholic faith, and a longing for any sort of family. But she has her pride, and – on a quest for a hammer, to put in a nail for her oleograph – she is reluctant to jump straight into a friendship with her talkative landlady and the landlady’s overgrown, ugly adult son. But she is rather taken by the landlady’s brother, James Madden – an Irishman who has recently returned from many decades in the US, possibly returning wealthy.

The other friendships she has outside the house are with Moira and her various children – all of whom mock her behind her back, and see the weekly cup of tea as a chore that they can take in turns. These scenes encapsulate what Moore does so very well – showing us the pain that comes not only from Judith Hearne’s loneliness but from her self-awareness. She knows that the family are tired of her, and she notices when they exchange glances at her comments. With James Madden, she has immediate, desperate visions of them falling in love and marrying – but she is no fantasist. She knows her visions are fake, and can’t happen. There is no escape for her in fantasy.

I’ll read more or less anything set in a boarding house, and Moore is brilliant at the enclosure of it – the proximity of strangers and the factions that develop between them. This proximity is even the reason for a rape scene that is very troubling, and I don’t think would be written in quite the same way today – it is written as a terrible crime, but there is little aftermath.

What Moore is best at is developing the portrait of Judith Hearne – her desperation, her melancholy, her stupidity, her hopes and the ways in which she protects them from the eyes of others. Her crisis of faith is dealt with sensitively and without the sneer of the cynic. She is a complete and miserable character, whose life could have been far more complete – but who, one suspects, would always have managed to spoil things, or to let the fly in the ointment overwhelm and destroy her. It is impossible not to feel for her; it is impossible not to realise that she is her own worst enemy.

All this Moore achieves through superlative writing. It reminded me a lot of Patrick Hamilton in its vitality, though perhaps without the dry wit – here is more the humour of hysteria, albeit subdued hysteria. I’m so glad I finally read it – and I hope his other novels are as good.

Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake

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My friend Clare bought me Mr Pye (1953) by Mervyn Peake, and I added it to my wishlist after I saw it being compared to my beloved Miss Hargreaves – a comparison I will look into more thoroughly later in this post. Project Names seemed like a good opportunity to pick it up – and what an intriguing world and character Peake creates

I only really knew Peake’s name in connection with the Titus Groan books, which I have not read, and had assumed he was exclusively a fantasy writer. While this novel incorporates elements of the fantastic, it is set firmly in the real world – specifically Sark, one of the Channel Islands. Here’s the opening of the novel:

“Sark.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man in the little quayside hut. “A return fare. Six shillings.”

“A single, my friend,” said Mr Harold Pye.

The man in the little hut looked up and frowned at the unfamiliar face.

“Did you say a ‘single‘, sir?”

“I believe so.”

The man in the hut frowned again as though he were still not satisfied. Why should this fat little stranger be so sure he wanted a ‘single’? He was obviously only a visitor. A return ticket would last him for three months and would save him two shillings. Some people, he reflected, were beyond hope.

“Very well,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“And very well to you, my friend,” said Mr Pye. “Very well indeed -” and with a smile both dazzling and abstracted at the same time he placed some silver coins upon the table and with a small, plump, and beautifully manicured forefinger he jockey’d them into a straight line.

Mr Pye is extremely warm and friendly with everyone, almost disconcertingly so. He doesn’t seem to quite understand the rules governing social interaction, as his slightly uptight landlady Miss Dredger soon discovers. He bustles into her life, keen to improve her through cheerfulness and advice from God – whom he refers to as the ‘Great Pal’. It’s rather endearing, and yet we understand how Miss Dredger might feel rather unsettled by the whole thing.

A mainstay in Miss Dredger’s life is her enmity with another local – Miss George. There is a very funny scene when they squabble over who will use the island’s transport to get down the steep hill – where Mr Pye’s luggage is waiting to be collected. His attempts to find a compromise do not go down well, but his personality is so forceful that they find themselves doing as he says. And then he invites Miss George to move in with them…

But while Mr Pye is having a dramatic effect on the island, there is also an effect happening to him. I shan’t say what it is, but a physical metamorphosis starts to cause him great alarm – and fans of Miss Hargreaves will notice a definite similarity at this point. Birds of a feather, and all that.

And are they birds of a feather? I can see many things they novels have in common – chiefly that an extraordinary being appears and disrupts a community, unaware that they are quite as unusual as they are. But the tone feels quite different at times, and I really liked Mr Pye where I love Miss Hargreaves.

Peake does have a great way of creating a strange dynamic and seeing what will happen next. His illustrations are also delightful, enhancing the novel’s quirkiness and charm. I can’t quite put my finger on what stopped this being an absolutely-loved-it read, because all the ingredients are certainly there. While it probably won’t be on my Best Books of 2019 list, it’s certainly a great example of imaginative character creation, a Bensonian community of genteel feuders, and exactly the right splash of the fantastic.