1950s

The Street by Dorothy Baker – #1951Club

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1951 ClubYou might well know the name Dorothy Baker. A few of us read Young Man With a Horn for the 1938 Club, and Cassandra at the Wedding is another well-known book by her. And, when I saw The Street in 2011, it was Baker’s name that rang a bell – though, at that point, I hadn’t read her.

Here’s the curious thing. I think I’d suspected this before, but without confirming it – this Dorothy Baker is a different Dorothy Baker. While the famous one wrote about quirky things in America, The Street is about the working classes in the Black Country. I’ve dug around but not managed to find out much about this Dorothy Baker – except that she is, according to a library catalogue, connected with the BBC. Very mysterious, and something I’d forgotten to investigate until after I’d put it in my pile for the 1951 Club.

So, having read four extremely good books for the 1951 Club (one to be reviewed tomorrow), it’s about right that this one should only be OK. It’s certainly not a dud – but it’s very novel-by-numbers.

It’s all about Dora – a kind, anxious, emotional young girl living with her grandparents, having been more or less deposited on them by feckless (but slightly glamorous) parents. They’ve kept her three siblings, who never emerge from the shadows of the novel, but this unusual situation is never really alluded to – instead, Dora’s parents exist as occasional threats that she might be torn away from her life on the street.

While the novel is called The Street, we don’t see all that much outside of Dora’s grandparents’ house, and her school. And I think Baker fondly believes she has captured a snapshot of working-class life – which I absolutely can’t believe she has. There is the occasional moment of drunkenness thrown in to show ‘real life’, and poverty which demonstrates itself only in the miserly whinging of various passing uncles, but the characters mostly speak in the anonymous tones of middle-class stock characters. It could very easily have been a provincial house party.

The writing certainly isn’t bad – each scene is engaging, if a little earnest at times – but what holds The Street back from being a very good novel is the lack of momentum in it. There is something of a plot, mostly around the deaths and marriages of Dora’s relatives and her own (rather naive) budding into early adulthood, but not much pulls the reader through the novel. It wasn’t a chore to read by any means, but I would also quite happily have given up at any juncture without any real curiosity about what happened next.

We need light and shade, don’t we? It’s just as well that I didn’t get too exaggerated a view of 1951’s merits – consider this a slight lull before, tomorrow, I finish the week with my favourite of all five.

Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett – #1951Club

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Darkness and DayWhen we chose 1951, I was mostly excited that I could finally read an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel for a club outing. I’ve mostly been reading authors and books that I’ve long meant to get around to (which has been lovely), but I also treated myself to what I think is my 10th Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. I’ve got to the stage where I can’t remember which I’ve read and which I haven’t – because all the titles are the same. You’ll see what I mean when you see a sample of the ones I’ve read: Parents and Children, Mother and Son, Elders and Betters, A House and Its Head, A Heritage and Its History. Have I read A Father and His Fate? A God and His Gifts? I don’t know.

Her 1951 novel is Darkness and Day, which is the last of her novels that I bought (I have them all, except her first novel, Dolores – which I thought was impossible to find, but apparently the 1971 reprint is widely available). It starts off with a much smaller cast than I’d anticipated – just Sir Ransom Chance (what a name!), his daughters Anne and Emma, the servant Mrs Jennet, and the housekeeper/companion/dogsbody Miss Hallam. Anne and Emma could be considered the darkness and day of the title (though this later has myriad interpretations): the older sister is cynical and selfish; the younger is selfless and kind. The scene is a deliciously odd debate between servant and master as to whose place in life is better:

“I envy you, Jennet,” said Sir Ransom. “Because it is the proper thing to envy people placed as you are. Not because I really do.”

“Well, I shouldn’t expect it.”

“Do you envy me? That is not the proper thing. But tell me if you do.”

“Not on every count, Sir Ransom.”

“You mean you have longer to live. Why do people always think of age? Or why do they ever think of anything else? I often wonder why I do. Perhaps I don’t.”

“Well, I have the advantage of thirty years there.”

“Jennet, we do not talk of our advantage over people.”

“It is not a thing I can often do. I am not in danger of the habit.”

But we end up seeing surprisingly little of them – the cast gets much wider when we move to another house.

Like all Compton-Burnett’s novels, this one is set in late Victorian opulence. The families live in enormous houses, usually with a big household staff – and the house down the road is one such. The second son of the house is returning home, bringing his wife Bridget and two young daughters, Viola and Rose. They bring with them a secret; one that led to them leaving, and which has blighted their lives.

Some people say that nothing happens in Compton-Burnett’s novels. Well, I defy any novel to match this one for plot and twists – which I shan’t spoil here – and it ties together many different characters in an unlikely but satisfying way. What makes ICB’s novel so unusual is that it takes you a while to work out what the bombshell is. In a swirl of people correcting each other and talking about the inconsequential, the bomb is dropped, almost in passing. And several characters see their world in a whole new light – the darkness and day here represent ignorance and enlightenment, as is made (sort-of) explicit in the text.

What can I say about Compton-Burnett’s writing that I haven’t said before? This novel has the same unique, love-it-or-hate-it style of all her others. It’s mostly dialogue, there is a lot of pernickety arguing, and it is (if you like it) very funny indeed. The keynote of a Compton-Burnett novel, I realise, is that there is no such thing as an acknowledged truth. Whether it is a maxim or an attitude or what, no character will allow an assumption to stand unchecked – instead, it is passed around the characters until it is unrecognisable.

This is true (as always with ICB) with characters of any age or strata. The servants, the masters, and the children will all debate and analyse in the most highbrow words imaginable, and my favourite sections were when Miss Hallam attempts to be a governess to Viola and Rose. She approaches the task with affected good humour and gentleness; they meet it with stony independence and a refusal to take anything at face value. It is very, very funny.

“Are you painting?” she said, in a tone of pleasant interest.

“Well, you can see we are,” said Rose.

“Yes, I can. It was a useless question, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“But I am afraid painting is not lessons.”

“Of course it is not, or we shouldn’t have been doing it before you came.”

“Well, you don’t want to do it now I am here.”

“We do want to,” said Viola.

“I mean that I cannot let you do it.”

“You did not say what you meant.”

“How can you prevent us?” said Rose, continuing her work.

“I am not going to prevent you. I am going to ask you to put away your painting things, and I am sure you will.”

This confidence was not justified and the minutes passed.

How did this stack up against other ICB novels? Well, besides the slightly uneven apportioning of time spent with characters – it felt odd to kick off with several characters that we barely saw again until much later in the novel – I thought that Darkness and Day was fantastic. It’s not worth especially tracking this one down, though, because all her novels are pretty much the same – which does make me feel a bit of a fraud for including it in the 1951 Club. Yes, it was published in 1951, but Ivy Compton-Burnett paid absolutely zero heed to the changing fashions of writing, and continued writing in exactly the same way for forty years. Sorry for cheating – but I couldn’t resist.

Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh – #1951Club

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Opening NightNgaio Marsh is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read for many years – and I don’t think I’ve actually read anything by her, though I wouldn’t swear to it. Anybody who loves Agatha Christie has probably at least thought about trying her contemporaries – and, in my time, I have given Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers attempts (liking one and rather disliking the other). Well, Marsh is probably my favourite of that trio of anti-Christies, based on Opening Night – but I am a sucker for anything set in the theatre. This one falls in the middle of her writing career – though the heyday of the Golden Age of Detection was surely coming to an end.

Martyn Tarne (are any women actually called Martyn?) has come from New Zealand to England with the ambition of becoming an actress. Indeed, she has done this a little in NZ – but London is calling her, and she has come to the weary end of auditions (and also to the end of her money) when she arrives at the final theatre on her list. It’s The Vulcan (the novel was called Night at the Vulcan in the US) – notorious as the site of a murder in the dressing rooms some years earlier, but now re-established as a respectable theatre. Only there’s no part going.

But… Ella Hamilton needs a dresser. Martyn is in the right place at the right time. She becomes Ella Hamilton’s dresser.

From this moment, we are thrown into a wonderfully-realised world of 1950s theatre – cattiness, competition, camaraderie and all. Ella Hamilton is married to Bennington, but having an affair with Poole. A nervous young actress, called Gay Gainsford, is unsuccessfully trying to play a part that Martyn would love to play. The cantankerous author of the play wanders around, telling people they’re appalling and quoting Shakespeare at them. A friendly Frenchman comforts everybody and does their work for them. It’s a fantastic ensemble, and I adored being in this melee of rehearsals and reprisals. Marsh is rather a witty writer – I enjoyed this description of the play:

Martyn tried to find out from Cringle what the play was about. He was not very illuminating. “It’s ’igh-brow,” he said. “Intellectually, it’s clarse. ‘A Modern Morality’ he calls it, the Doctor does. It’s all about whether you’re brought up right makes any difference to what your old pot ’ands on to you. ‘ ’Eredity versus enviroment’ they call it. The Guv’nor’s enviroment, and all the rest of ’em’s ’eredity. And like it always is in clarse plays, the answer’s a lemon. Well, I must go on me way rejoicing.”

But I was beginning to wonder if it was a murder mystery at all. I knew Marsh was a detective novelist, and this edition was published by The Crime Club, but page after page was going by without a hint of a death. Well, fear not – eventually it comes, although not until halfway through. Opening Night is clearly far more about the wonderful setting and characters, rather than a drawn-out detection process.

There is a detective on the scene – Inspector Alleyn. I believe he is a regular in Marsh’s novels, as perhaps his assistant Fox is, but they weren’t particularly distinctive in Opening Night. Alleyn is wry and wise, and a little paternal to Fox – but they don’t seem very vivid against the backdrop of the theatrical characters Marsh has created. I’m sure they would, after reading several in their series.

Marsh obviously has a fondness for the theatre, and there are some nice references. I enjoyed this one, having enjoyed the first two plays mentioned – though I have no idea what Sleeping Partners is or who wrote it:

“Tell me, Mike,” Alleyn said, “are many young women of your generation like that?”
“Well, no, sir. She’s what one might call a composite picture, don’t you think?”
“I do, indeed. And I fancy she’s got her genres a bit confused.”
“She tells me she’s been playing in Private Lives, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and Sleeping Partners in the provinces.”
“That may account for it,” said Alleyn.

Nobody will ever topple Christie in detective fiction stakes (as I probably say with dulling regularity when I mentioned detective novels), but I loved reading Marsh – Opening Night was a real 1951 delight. Indeed, the year is shaping up to be pretty special.

School For Love by Olivia Manning – #1951Club

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School For LoveI wish I could remember who bought me School For Love by Olivia Manning… I know that I’ve had two copies at different times, and currently have one, but other than that its history is clouded in the vagaries of my terrible memory. Anyway, it’s been on my tbr for a while – as has Manning more broadly, though I have shied away from the Balkan Trilogy because anything that comes in a trilogy seems like too big a commitment to make to the uninitiated.

I started School For Love with absolutely no knowledge of what it was about (having not read the blurb or the introduction). It came as something of a surprise that it was set in Jerusalem, and that there wasn’t a school in sight. Instead, recently orphaned Felix has arrived at the house of a distant sort-of-relative, where he is being offered a place as a paying guest. Felix is young, devoted to his late mother, and rather lost in this confusing 1945 world. Miss Bohun seems like a Godsend, and he is grateful for the place in her household – which also has eccentric Mr Jewel in the attic, a maid, a sort-of servant (Frau Leszno), and that servant’s son – Nikky, who is almost always described as handsome whenever he is mentioned. Later, a Mrs Ellis also joins the house – a glamorous woman (in Felix’s eyes), unconcerned with the mores and opinions of the house.

Oh, and a Siamese cat called Faro. (Incidentally – this NYRB Classics cover is so perfect that it’s almost unbelievable.) That’s also not the last time you’ll hear about Siamese cats in the 1951 Club…

Manning creates an astonishing character in Miss Bohum – because she is in many ways bad, but it is also impossible to view her actions too severely. She is a miser, clearly taking as much money as she can from her houseguests, while also pretending to be self-sacrificing and motivated entirely by kindness – indeed (and this makes her less wicked than she could be), she seems genuinely to believe these are her motivations. She can imagine slights and unkindnesses in those around her – while we also learn that she has subtly forced people out of the house, taking it over as her own when this was never the original intention.

The nuance of Manning’s depiction of characters also comes in showing them to us through Felix’s perspective. Not directly – the novel is in the third person – but his views colour all our understanding of them. And he spends much of the novel being in loyal agreement with Miss Bohun – unthinkingly, because she should be right about things. He feels cross on her behalf when she talks of people’s ingratitude; he accepts her edicts as gospel. Only as the novel continues does he – conflicted – begin to feel the scales fall.

I haven’t even mention Miss Bohun’s cult, the ‘Ever-Readies’. What a great choice on Manning’s part. I would have loved to see a little more about them, as she wrote very entertainingly about them, but I suppose it is part of the effect to keep them a bit cloaked and mysterious.

We don’t see very much of 1945 Jerusalem, so School For Love isn’t much of a case history of a time and place – instead, it is a character study, and a depiction of how a young, uninformed boy feels when transplanted from all he knows. It’s a little bit like The Go-Between, in the sense of an innocent seeing a world he doesn’t quite understand – more affected it than anybody could quite realise. The plot is really that: his gradual comprehension of the people around him, and the fall of the idol of Miss Bohun – but in a measured, quiet way. It is all rather beautiful and poignant, and vividly real.

My only real quibble with the book is its title – which does very little to evoke the content of the novel, and might well make somebody think they were going to read a rather different sort of story. It is explained, fairly late in the book – Mrs Ellis quotes part of a Blake poem:

Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love

And that is why she thinks of life as a school for love. It is one of many things that Felix learns, though not in the way that Blake describes. And what I learned is what a good novelist Olivia Manning is. The 1951 Club got off to a great start with me – I hope it’s also going great for you!

A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau

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A Wreath for the EnemyPamela Frankau is one of those names that has been around the edges of my consciousness for years – it’s hard to read about interwar fiction, academically, without seeing Pamela and Gilbert Frankau (her father, it turns out; I had assumed brother) mentioned a lot. Yes, I’ve got her confused with Pamela Hansford Johnson in the past, but having read A Wreath for the Enemy (1954) now, I shan’t make the mistake again – mostly because I thought it was really, really good.
Many thanks to my good friend Caroline for giving me a copy of this book – Caroline was in my Oxford book group and, very sadly for us, moved away a while ago. We’ve stayed in touch, and she sent me A Wreath for the Enemy because she thought it would be up my street. What an unusual, clever, innovative novel it is. And how’s this for an opening line?

There had been two crises already that day before the cook’s husband called to assassinate the cook.

It is told in three sections, though with overlapping sets of characters. In the first, we see Penelope Wells and her family – looking after an eccentric hotel on the French Riviera. She calls her father and stepmother by the first first names, and is one of the most deliciously unusual child characters I’ve ever encountered. She is an adolescent, but one who has learnt language from books rather than friendships – guess who can relate? – and her conversation is a delight. It would be precocious if the character were showing off, but she isn’t; it’s simply the only way she knows how to communicate.

“Painful as it is to refuse,” I said, “my father has acquired visitors and I have sworn to be sociable. The penalty is ostracism.”

What a creation on Frankau’s part. She has brilliantly drawn a girl turned eccentric by her upbringing (when we meet her, she is writing her Anthology of Hates) who is quirky without being irritating, and a world away from a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. For the reader, she is endearing and interesting – but with an undercurrent of sadness: she has not chosen her upbringing any more than anybody else has, and she clearly has some understanding

Penelope meets the Bradley family, and is enamoured by the children Don and Eva. They come from a strikingly conventional family (Penelope’s father calls them ‘the Smugs’), and they find her enticing – she, in turn, admires the conventionality of them. It is an unusual but entirely plausible friendship – which lasts until a disreputable woman known as The Duchess comes to stay at the Wells’s hotel. The Bradley parents are shocked… and the section ends with something tragic, beautifully understated while at the same time having a significant emotional impact on them all.

The second section jumps forward a few years, and is from the perspective of Don. He is now at a boarding school, and beginning to rebel against his father’s conventionality – chiefly through his friendship with Crusoe. Crusoe is an older man in a wheelchair, brusque and direct with all, but with evident fondness for Don and a certain amount of wisdom. But absolutely no regard for ‘doing the right thing’, in the British-upper-class sense, and Don has to choose between his father’s commands and the new world he has glimpsed – while also still affected by the events of the first section of the book. And I shan’t talk too much about the final section – but Penelope is back, everybody is older, and new challenges come to the fore.

What makes A Wreath for the Enemy so brilliant, to my mind – well, it’s the writing, and the quirkiness, and the great humour – but it’s also the unusual way in which it’s written. It’s as though Frankau took a traditional novel, threw it up in the air, and wrote up what fell to the ground. It should feel disparate and jagged, but the different elements are ingeniously combined. It’s something of an abstract portrait, where the reader is left to fill in some gaps – but can understand a whole world of half a dozen characters, just be the brief moments we see them.

I will confess that I had always rather assumed that Frankau wasn’t very good. She was so prolific, and (I think I’m right in recollecting) disparaged in the highbrow/middlebrow debate – but both these facts are true of authors I love, so I should have realised that she’d be a winner. If any of her other novels are up to the quirky, imaginative, and confident calibre of A Wreath for the Enemy, I greatly look forward to reading them. And I have The Willow Cabin next on my tbr…

Others who got Stuck into this…

(I could only find one, but it’s a lovely one.)

Fleur Fisher: “This is lovely: a quite beautifully written book that speaks so profoundly. I find myself wanting to say so much, and at the same time being almost lost for words.”

H.G. Wells and His Family by M. M. Meyer

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As I’ve probably said before, I love books about authors from a unique perspective. All the famous ones have biographies written about them, of course, and I daresay there are several authoritative and scholarly biographies of H.G. Wells that I could have bought – but I’m rather more intrigued by the personal angle. Show me a book that only one person could have written, and I’ll run towards it. My favourite is probably the book about Ivy Compton-Burnett written by her secretary (Cecily Grieg or Cicely Greig or some variant on that – one day I’ll learn which), but I would also recommend H.G. Wells and His Family (1955) to any Wells enthusiasts.

 

Who was M.M. Meyer? Well, she was the governess to Wells’ children. Her experiences looking after the two boys form the mainstay of this book – even if we first hear of them as ‘Professor G.P. Wells and Mr F.R. Wells’ in her introduction, with a touching pride in their achievements and maturity. As the first paragraph states, though:

Some of the most cherished memories of my long career as a Swiss governess in England take me back to the four and three-quarter years that I spent in the literary household of Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Wells – first t Spade House, Sandgate, then at No. 17 Church Row, Hampstead, and finally at Easton Glebe, near Dunmow, Essex.

As this paragraph might suggest, Meyer isn’t the most sparkling prose stylist in the world. The memoir is quite prosaic in form, relating incidents one after the other, but it is the tone of happy nostalgia – as well as Meyer’s unique placement to observe these moments – that make the book so enjoyable. Whether it’s the family playing a variant of consequences (‘consequences’ is called ‘exquisite corpses’ in American English, I believe? Or was? I read the entirety of Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester without knowing that, and it was baffling), or the only time Wells shouted at her, these are stories that nobody else could relate first-hand – and a biographer would flatten, losing the moving enthusiasm that Meyer clearly has about every aspect of the family. She even includes pictures of their consequences and other doodles, having preserved them for years.

What did I know about Wells before I opened up this book? Well, besides a relatively small percentage of his books (sidenote: I bought The Bulpington of Blup by him recently; who knew THAT existed?) and the fact that he was A.A. Milne’s maths teacher, it was mostly his adultery. His serial womanising seems to be the keynote of his personal life in biographers’ eyes. It’s refreshing that Meyer doesn’t mention it – possibly it was not widely known in 1955, but you get the impression that she wouldn’t have talked about it either way. But it does make the reader smile a little guiltily over notes like this, which appears in a section she writes as a diary:

September 27th. Miss Rebecca West arrived to-day. She looks about twenty-two years of age, and is very vivacious. She writes in the Freewoman, and has just reviewed Mr. Wells’s new novel Marriage.

This book is doubtless only a footnote in a literary or biographical analysis of H. G. Wells – but how enjoyable it was. If anybody has any other recommendations for this sort of book – notable authors as known by their friends, employees, or acquaintances – then please do let me know!

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

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Seize the DayOne of the books I bought in the US in 2013 (in Alexandria, Virginia to be precise) was Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. I daresay I could have found a copy in England, but it felt right to buy one of the Big American Writers while in the US of A. And eventually I read it, and then there was quite a gap before I got around to writing this…

I went in with some trepidation. There are all sorts of those Big American Writers whom I’ve still not read. Faulkner, Hemingway… well, those are the only two I can think of right now that I’d put in the same intimidating category as Saul Bellow. But now I’m not quite sure why I put him into that category at all – Seize the Day was really good, and not at all off-putting or difficult or testosterone-filled in the way that I imagine those other two are. (Am I wrong about them too?)

Seize the Day (1956), for anybody else in my position of Bellow ignorance, is apparently considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century and was Bellow’s fourth novel. It’s also super short, which is a criterion that meant more to me than those other things – my copy weighs in at only 118 pages.

The hero – though he is far from that – is Wilhelm Adler, a failed actor who is in a mire of frustration. He is estranged from his wife and children and a disappointment to his elderly father – as his father is not reluctant to let him know. Wilhelm has moved into his father’s hotel, and is trying to reconnect with him, though it is not made easy. The focus of Seize the Day is a single, ordinary day: Wilhelm is going to have breakfast and an argument with his father, and is musing on the various failures of his life. We go in and out of his mind, reliving the past, seeing how everything went wrong by increments. Here, for example, is an overview of his dashed hopes of becoming a filmstar, after he was invited to a screen test:

But when Venice saw the results of the screen test he did a quick about-face. In those days Wilhelm had had a speech difficulty. It was not a true stammer, it was a thickness of speech which the sound track exaggerated. The film showed that he had many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable. When he shrugged, his hands drew up within his sleeves. The vault of his chest was huge, but he really didn’t look strong under the lights. Though he called himself a hippopotamus, he more nearly resembled a bear. His walk was bearlike, quick and rather soft, toes turned inward, as though his shoes were an impediment. About one thing Venice had been right. Wilhelm was photogenic, and his wavy blond hair (now graying) came out well, but after the test Venice refused to encourage him. He tried to get rid of him. He couldn’t afford to take a chance on him, he had made too many mistakes already and lived in fear of his powerful relatives.

More recently, he has lost much of his savings in an ill-fated financial dalliance with Dr Tamkin, a self-professed psychologist who is really fraudulently preying upon Wilhelm’s weak character. Yet even here, there are shades of grey. We aren’t seeing the conniving nemesis manipulating the vulnerable hero – it is more nuanced than that.

Most nuanced, and the section I most admired, is the conversation between Wilhelm and his father. If Wilhelm embodies the death of a certain sort of American dream more broadly, these exchanges look more closely at the universal desire to make one’s parents proud. Dr Adler is fairly harsh in his refusal to excuse his son, and is clearly disappointed in him, but Bellow manages to make us see that this is one conversation in a long line of similar conversations. Wilhelm is asking for pity where his father can only feel disgust at his self-pity. Each line of dialogue is believable while being a blow to the heart.

It’s hardly revelatory to say that I think Saul Bellow is a very good writer, but I had expected bravado and grandiose writing, rather than the subtlety and even delicacy – yet somehow a forthright delicacy – that he puts on the page. I’m last to the party, but I can certainly see myself returning to Bellow when in that sort of frame of mind.

Next stop, Faulkner?

The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff

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Lost-EuropeansJudging by the number of comments, reviews where I get you to click somewhere else aren’t necessarily as popular as reviews here – but THIS one is hopefully different because, guys… THIS IS THE LAST BOOK ON MY 50 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BUT MAY NOT HAVE HEARD ABOUT. (That list is over in the right-hand column, fyi.)

The list has been going since I started the blog in April 2007, although it has slowed over the years as I ran out of the backlog of titles I wanted to add, and worried about the end drawing near.

Do I start another list? Don’t know. But watch this space for a little celebration of 50 Books next week.

ANYWAY The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff is the book in question. It was published in 1958 and is about Germany after the war, and what it was like to visit as a Jewish German who was evacuated to England. But what makes it so good is Litvinoff’s extraordinary writing.

It doesn’t hurt that the book is beautifully produced too.

Head over to Shiny New Books to read all my thoughts, but here is the beginning of my review. And look out for 50 Books celebration and PRIZE next week!

Have you ever had the experience of starting a novel and, before you’ve got to the end of the second page, you are so bowled away by the writing that you already know that you’ve found one of the best books you’ll read that year? It happens to me very seldom – Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude did the sane thing – but it certainly happened with Emanuel Litvinoff’s 1958 novel The Lost Europeans, reprinted as part of a beautiful new series by Apollo.

Death on the Riviera by John Bude

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Death on the RivieraAnother Shiny New Books review – this time of the latest British Library Crime Classic, and my first John Bude (despite having the rest of them on my shelf!), 1952’s Death on the Riviera. He does get wonderful covers, doesn’t he? To be honest, it’s not my favourite of their offerings – Alan Melville still holds that crown – but it’s good fun. Read the whole review, or be enticed by the opening to it…

I’ve got all the John Bude reprints that have appeared in the British Library Crime Classics series, and have given several to other people, but Death on the Riviera (1952) is actually the first of his that I’ve read. Like all the others, he has been given a beautiful cover – but what of the contents? Well, it’s a fun detective novel that won’t stand up to rigorous examination, but is none the less enjoyable for that.

The Eye of Love by Margery Sharp

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The Eye of LoveI’m rather astonished that I’m managing to join in with the Margery Sharp celebrations at Beyond Eden Rock (organised by Jane) – chiefly because I only managed to start The Eye of Love (1957) on Saturday, and have had a very busy weekend. Indeed, it’s been a busy old year so far, which is the reason I must give for not having published as many blog posts as I’d intended so far. But the combination of fierce determination and (more importantly) Sharp’s excellent writing have made me finish just in time.

The Eye of Love is the third Sharp novel I’ve read so far, and it’s been on my shelves for many years. The reason I chose this one is because it turns out it’s the only one I have in Oxford (I had intended to go with Britannia Mews) – but it is rather lovely, and (sorry, but the connection is irresistible) sharp.

This is Sharp’s quirky take on a romance novel, her motif being that the ‘eye of love’ sees things that other eyes cannot; basically, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, the beholders are a middle-aged couple, one of whom (born Dorothy Hogg, but choosing instead the name Dolores Diver) fancies herself a Spanish Rose type, comb in hair and shawl around her shoulders, but is known by laughers in the street as Old Madrid. Her inamorata is Mr Gibson, a portly man who has made his money in retail. As the novel opens, they are deciding that they can no longer be a couple. They have been in love, and lovers, for a decade – but both decide, unspoken, that people of their disparate stations do not marry. Instead, Mr Gibson must marry a Miss Joyce, solely for business reasons.

They are both rather distraught, but Sharp’s masterstroke is adding a third element: the young girl Martha. She is Dolores’ niece by marriage, orphaned and living with Dolores, and a more convincingly stolid and dispassionate child never existed in fiction. She is not mean or intentionally rude, she is simply completely uninterested in the emotional lives of the adults around her. Where Dolores hopes she will be a shoulder to cry on, or even some sort of go-between, she naively and honestly makes no indication that she misses him at all. Martha adds wonderful comedy to the novel, and Sharp draws her beautifully. Oh, and she’s also something of an artistic genius, unbeknownst to everyone (including herself).

Martha is not the only element of comedy. The narrative is always undermining the characters’ emotional effusions or deceits. When Miss Joyce accepts Mr Gibson’s proposal, with supposed surprise, Sharp adds:

As she moved impulsively to accept his embrace, she impulsively pressed a bell; the maid who brought in the champagne must have been very handy.

That repeated ‘impulsively’ works wonders. It is a very amusing book, and that – as in Cluny Brown, which I failed to finish in time for Margery Sharp Day 2015 – is due chiefly to this way Sharp has as a narrator. The most ordinary events are lent a spin of dry humour, but, vitally, Sharp remains intensely affectionate about her characters – and so does the reader. That is the keynote of the novel, that has various twists and turns and interlacing events: Dolores and Mr Gibson may appear ridiculous to many, but Sharp ably makes it so that the reader, like the characters, sees them instead through the eye of love.

Incidentally… my copy is The Popular Book Club, eventually a subscription book-of-the-month type club, and my copy still had the original brochure tucked in it (at around p.20, suggesting that they didn’t get very far). It features a little bit about the author…

Margery Sharp brochure