1953

Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 17 Comments

As with previous A Book A Day in May challenges, sometimes I’m doubling up on days – and in the past two days I have finished a 407pp book (The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge) and a 484pp book (This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell). Before you think I am some sort of reading superhero, I should tell you that I had read most of both of them already. One of the bonuses of having lots of books on the go at once is that it lines up quite a few candidates for this May challenge. Anyway, some quick thoughts about the two books in turn…

The Heart of the Family: Book Three of The Eliot Chronicles

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

The Heart of the Family is the third in the trilogy about the Eliot family. The first, The Bird in the Tree, was one of my favourite reads last year – I loved the family dynamics, the warmth and clarity with which Goudge wrote about them, and the no-longer-fashionable theme of self-sacrifice. I went onto read the second in the trilogy (though didn’t get around to blogging about it), and really enjoyed that one too – people often single out The Herb of Grace (also published as Pilgrim’s Inn) as their favourite in the series. I can see why, as I loved the theme of setting up a new home, but I missed Lucilla – the matriarch who rather fades into the background.

In the third of the trilogy, Lucilla is somehow still with us – well into her 90s, a little less dominant over her family’s decisions, and in a period of reflecting back on her life and all its triumphs and sorrows. David, the young man with youthful naivety and fervour in The Bird in the Tree, is now an older family man, less impetuous and emotional but still making strained decisions. He has also been successful in his career as an actor, and it has brought him a secretary – Sebastian Weber is the most significant new character in this book. Sebastian intensely dislikes David – and his arrival at the family home challenges both of their views of each other.

But this is truly an ensemble piece. We have grown to know and love (or at least understand) such a wide cast of characters, and it is a poignant pleasure to see more of them. I found myself more drawn, this time, to Margaret and Hillary – two of Lucilla’s children whom she has not loved with extravagant affection of other children and grandchildren, but who are such solid people that I couldn’t help empathising with them intensely.

As before, there is Goudge’s mix of serious Christian spirituality and wry humour. It’s such a pleasure to read a novelist who takes faith seriously, and she is also often great fun. I loved this bit…

For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.

“And up to ‘eaven ‘e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could’ave ‘eard it from ‘ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ‘im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”

So, yes, I enjoyed The Heart of the Family – but I did find it very much the worst of the trilogy. The characters were delightful to re-encounter because of my fondness for the family, but the pace and momentum was a bit lacking. It’s a long novel to more or less meander, and there is some hard-to-pin-down quality missing in this book that was there in the other two. It was good, but for some reason it felt a bit like a faint shadow of the other two.

This Must Be The Place (2016) by Maggie O’Farrell

And talking of faint shadows… I won’t bury the lede this time. I really enjoyed this long novel but, again, it’s not as good as the others I’ve read by O’Farrell. I think this is my sixth book by O’Farrell and it’s my least favourite – excellent writing and fascinating characters, but something is missing in the momentum here too. (Sidenote: this beautiful cover was hiding behind the dustjacket.)

It’s too complex a novel for me to cover everything going on – but the gist is that Claudette went missing. She is a world-famous French actor and director who disappeared one day. By the time it became clear that she’d faked her own death, she was away – people knew she was alive, and presumed she was a recluse. In actual fact, she had ended up married to Daniel, an American academic who studies speech development.

Daniel has previously been married to another woman. He has also broken off a previous relationship with a woman who was later found dead. There are children from different stages of his life, some of which he is estranged from.

In typical O’Farrell fashion, we dart all over the place – many, many different relationships and different time periods, from the 1940s to the 2010s. Sometimes we are in America and sometimes in Ireland. A lot of the story has to be pieced together, bit by bit, as more and more is revealed. I’ve described some of it in linear fashion, but that absolutely isn’t how the novel is presented.

I can cope with a bit of jumping around if there is something to keep us hooked. I thought she did it brilliantly in Instructions for a Heatwave, for example. And I did enjoy This Must Be The Place – her writing and characterisation are superb. But I wasn’t really sure what the reason for reading was. In other books of hers, there has been one or more central questions that we want answered. In This Must Be The Place, I wasn’t really sure what that was. It’s in many ways an excellent novel, but I got to the end unsure quite why she’d written it.

As I say, the writing is beautiful, so I want to end with a section that I noted – this is 1940s, with Daniel as a very young man:

Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning toward her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

So perhaps I was a little disappointed by both these books, while also thinking them rather good. It’s a case of expectations being very high, and quite hard to express justly in a quick review! I’m glad to have read them.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering

StuckinaBook All , , , 19 Comments

Sometimes it does feel like the corner of the book internet I occupy is really just Scott’s kingdom, and we live in it. Scott being Furrowed Middlebrow, of course, both blog and the series of reprints from Dean Street Press. One of the things I really like about his series is that, most of the time, they don’t just bring out one or two books by an author – they drop a whole load at once. The most recent author to get a job-lot of reprints is Scottish mid-century writer Molly Clavering – and I started with Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer from 1953. She wrote a bunch of novels in ’20s and ’30s, and this was the first of seven novels after a break of fourteen years.

It was generally considered that Mrs Lorimer, that quiet woman, was not at all a sentimental person. Therefore when Nan Gibson, her valued and trusty and frequently tiresome cook-housekeeper, announced one morning as she twitched back the bedroom curtains, ”I hear Harperslea’s been sold,” the pang which her mistress felt must have been simply because another suitable house – a house she would have liked for herself, had been bought by someone else.

There are shades of Netherfield being let at last at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – but Mrs Lorimer is not looking for an eligible young man. She is looking for enough space to host all her adult children and their spouses and offspring. There are quite a few of them, so I shan’t go into all the details – one of the most prominent is the son-in-law obsessed with his car, and his wife (Mrs Lorimer’s daughter) who feels neglected in comparison. She decides to make her own entertainment, which she does by finding the daughter of the house at Harperslea – a Nesta Rowena Smellie. There is a lot of discussion about the name ‘Miss Smellie’, and it is a name of course, but it did all feel like an unnecessary tangent. They re-Christen her Rona, which has become rather less acceptable as a nickname in the past eighteen months…

The bulk of the tension and romance of the novel comes from the various young married couples – and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what might happen between the sole unmarried child, Guy, and this Rona girl. There are some obstacles connected with her nouveau riche family and his inability to stick to any career, but the writing is on the wall from the first moment they are mentioned.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer is, indeed, quite packed with incident – a great deal of which crops up and is resolved throughout the novel, rather than tidying everything away at the end. But the beating heart of the novel is Mrs Lorimer herself, and what makes the book more than the sum of its parts. She is patient and consistently underestimated by those around her – who see her as a mother and not as someone with passionate feelings and thoughts herself. Her life is broadly happy and she is not demanding of others, but I enjoyed how Clavering showed the layered life behind the dependable matriarch.

Clavering doesn’t demand much of her reader, and this is definitely a cosy read where the stakes never feel quite as high to the reader as they do to the characters – but it’s cleverer than it might seem at first, and I’m glad to have found another fab new-to-me author from Furrowed Middlebrow.

One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey

StuckinaBook All , , , 8 Comments

There were several independent publishers I knew I wanted to read for #ReadIndies month, and of course Persephone was among them. But which one? Well, I was most excited about One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, published in 1953 but often seeming like it was a couple of decades earlier.

One Woman’s Year is a delightful journey through the year – an anthology of anecdotes, household hints, recipes, and so on. The story/anecdote bit is the longest and perhaps most delightful of each section – just tales from family life, about enjoying village life, the countryside, and everyday activities. From a very privileged position, of course, though they are not stories of expensive outings and excess. They are the sort of stories that would be brought out at family events – from a disastrous renovation project to a French exchange student. All are told with an enjoyably British sense of deprecating humour. I was often reminded of E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, which is about the best thing to be reminded of.

Then each month has a cheerful look at the favourite chore of each month, and a wry look at the least favourite. Often this is more of a story than a genuine application, particularly all these decades later, but the recipes that follow could still be followed today, for the most part. Yes, there is an unsettling predilection for curry powder, particularly for someone who spent time in India with her military husband, but I might well be giving the strawberry shortcake a go at some point.

Each month ends with a short anthology of literary passages from novels and poems. These are usually the sorts of things that leave me cold, as I like to read with proper context, but Currey’s choices are brilliantly and thoughtfully done. For instance, she brings together a section from Cold Comfort Farm with an anonymous chronicler of an early nineteenth-century village and a poem about laburnums. Each month’s anthology works beautifully together. All the more impressive because this was, of course, long before the internet – these are quotations that Currey has drawn together from a lifetime of reading.

One of my favourite things about this book is that it’s fully illustrated with woodcuts by Malcolm Ford. No publisher has a deeper appreciation for woodcuts than Persephone Books, and these are second to the ones in The Runaway among my favourites they’ve done, either in their books or in the magazine.

Initially I intended to read one section each month, and make it last a year – well, I couldn’t stop once I’d started. Thank goodness Persephone resurrected such a lovely and comforting read.

Patience by John Coates

StuckinaBook All , , , 8 Comments

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

Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

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.

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy

StuckinaBook All , , , 4 Comments

Hackenfeller's ApeAs you may have heard mentioned in the latest episode of ‘Tea or Books?’, should you listen to that, I’ve recently read Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) by Brigid Brophy – inspired by listening to a ‘Backlisted’ episode on one of her novels, and hearing her daughter speak at a conference. I think I’d bought the novel (novella?) some time before that, based entirely on the fact that short Virago Modern Classics are often interesting – and it proved to be really rather good.

I’ve read a couple of books about monkeys and humans relating one way or another – though they were both written a little earlier; Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan is about a woman trying to teach a monkey as though he were a child, while His Monkey Wife by John Collier is… well, what it sounds like. Hackenfeller’s Ape is less adventurous in its premise: the ape remains firmly an ape, and nobody is trying to get him to be anything else.

Professor Darrelhyde is (as the Virago blurb informs me) ‘a diffident bachelor’, and he’s been stationed at London Zoo to observe the mating practices of Hackenfeller’s ape – more particularly, that of Percy and Edwina. In the world of the novel (look, I don’t know if this ape even exists), the mating has never been observed, and it will be a service to science for the Professor to make notes. Only it seems the Percy isn’t keen. Edwina keeps making approaches that he refuses – and Brophy judges brilliantly the amount that we should be let into his perspective, with a certain haziness where Percy can’t quite understand his own ape-motivations.

Halfway through, things change a bit – as the Professor (and a would-be pickpocket who reluctantly joins forces with him) tries to rescue Percy from being sent into space. Bear with me – it sounds absurd, but it works.

What makes Hackenfeller’s Ape so good is Brophy’s writing. She balances light, insouciant dialogue with pretty elaborate and philosophical prose. It shouldn’t work properly together, but it really does – it makes for an intoxicatingly good mix. Here’s an example of her writing from near the beginning – where she describes the humans who have set up the zoo:

These were the young of a species which had laid out the Park with an ingenuity that outstripped the beaver’s; which, already the most dextrous of the land animals, had acquired greater endurance under the sea than the whale and in the air had a lower casualty rate for its journeys than migrating birds. This was, moreover, the only species which imprisoned other species not for any motive of economic parasitism but for the dispassionate parasitism of indulging its curiosity.

She also has a knack for wry observation that was a pleasure to read – not that dissimilar to Elizabeth Taylor, thinking about it. I can imagine either of them penning this line (which is Brophy’s): ‘He smiled in a way which, in the middle-aged man, was boyish. In a boy it would have been sinister.’

It continues, with drama and pathos, poignant and action-packed in turn. And all – may I remind you – in hardly more than a hundred pages.

My conclusions, after finishing this novella, are that I’d read Brophy writing anything. She handles this frankly bizarre premise, and mix of styles, with excellent adeptness – and it gives me great hope for diving into more of her novels in future. It will be intriguing to see how her writing works over a broader canvas.

Ring of Bright Water – Gavin Maxwell

StuckinaBook All , , 15 Comments

You know how I don’t shut up about Miss Hargreaves?  (Have you read it?  It’s great.)  Well, Hayley is (in a rather better mannered way) equally enthusiastic about Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water.  Since Hayley and I often enjoy the same books, I’ve been intending to read it for ages – but every copy I’ve stumbled across in charity shops has been rather ugly.  I wish I’d seen the beautiful cover pictured.  When Hayley lent me her copy (as part of a postal book group we’re both in) I was excited finally to read it.

Well, I say ‘excited’.  There was a part of me that was nervous – because I rarely read non-fiction when it’s not about literature, and I have no particular interest in wildlife rearing.  If it didn’t come with such a strong recommendation from Hayley, I doubt that I’d ever have considered reading it.  And I would have missed out.

Gavin Maxwell doesn’t really structure Ring of Bright Water in a traditional beginning-middle-end sort of way, which I imagine the film adaptation probably does – it isn’t encircled by the life of any single animal, or his occupancy of his remote Scottish home, but instead meanders through many of Maxwell’s countryside adventures.

I’m going to concentrate on the ones which made Ring of Bright Water famous – the otters – although (cover aside) you wouldn’t have much of a clue that they were coming for the first section of the book, which looks at the flora and fauna of the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and such matters as whale fishing (Maxwell is strongly against, despite having run a shark fishery – there is a constant paradox between his love of his animals and his killing of animals).  The only cohesion (and it is quite enough) is that it’s Maxwell’s opinions and voice, and connected with marine and rural life.

And then the otters come along.

The first otter only lives for a day or two, but after that comes Mij.  He is really the star of Ring of Bright Water, and the high point in Maxwell’s affections.  I can’t give any higher praise than to say that someone like me, interested in the animal kingdom chiefly when it concerns kittens, was entirely enamoured and captivated, and briefly considered whether it would be practical to get a pet otter.

Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing.  That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play or other activity.  If there is no acceptable toy, or if they are in a mood of frustration, they will, apparently with the utmost good humour, set about laying the land waste.  There is, I am convinced, something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel.
Er, maybe not.  Maxwell sets out to tell you how incomparable the otter is as a pet – cheerful, companionable, spirited – and only slowly does he reveal that they are completely untameable, very destructive, and occasionally (if repentingly) violent.

But Mij is still a wonder – or, rather, Maxwell is a wonder for the way he tells his story.  He is certainly a gifted and natural storyteller, and the reader is easily lulled into similar levels of affection towards Mij, and a complicit sympathy with Maxwell (and never for a moment what a novelist would subtly ask – that we would pity the loner, or wonder at his isolation.)

I don’t want to spoil the high-jinks (yes, high-jinks – and tomfoolery, mark you) of the book, and I don’t think I can capture Maxwell’s tone – so I will give my usual proviso for books I didn’t expect to enjoy so much: read it even if you don’t think you’ll like it!  (And if David Attenborough is your bag, then you’ll probably love it even more.)

It is a beautiful book, for the rhythm and balance of its prose alone, quite apart from the topic or the setting.  I’m really pleased that, years down the line, I’ve finally taken up Hayley’s recommendation – even if she had to lend Ring of Bright Water to me to make that happen.

The Foolish Immortals – Paul Gallico

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

I don’t think I’ve read any author whose work is as disparate as Paul Gallico (and I probably start all my reviews of his books by saying that.)  I started with the novel I still consider his best, of the ones I’ve read: the dark fairy-tale Love of Seven Dolls.  Then there is the whimsical (Jennie), the amusing and eccentric (the Mrs. Harris series), the adventure story (although I’ve not read it, The Poseidon Adventure surely falls into this category.)

I started The Foolish Immortals (1953) hoping that it would be in one category, it shifted into another, and then it revealed a whole new facet of Gallico’s writing arsenal.  Confused?  I’ll try to explain…

The concept of The Foolish Immortals immediately appealed to me, because it sounded like the sort of topic which could easily be given the Love of Seven Dolls treatment, revolving (as it did) around manipulation, wilful delusion, and a touch of distorted fairy-tale – the last of which seems to be the ingredient which appears, in some form or other, in all the Gallico novels I’ve read.

Hannah Bascombe is rich, old, American heiress, who has successfully invested the money her business man father left her to make herself one of the richest people in the world.  There is only one aspect of her life over which she does not have ultimate control – and that is its span.  She has, she notes, reached her three-score-and-ten, and cannot have many decades left to live.  And yet… and yet, she hopes that money and power might be able to secure her immortality.

Enter, stage-left, Joe Sears.  He is a poor man and a chancer, clever and manipulative, and sees an opportunity.  Having enlisted the dubious help of a young (but visually ageless) ex-soldier called Ben-Isaac (in case Gallico didn’t signpost it well enough, he’s Jewish), Sears manages to get an appointment with Hannah Bascombe.  To do so, he has to get past her beautiful, utterly dependent niece Clary – but, having manoeuvred his way to Hannah, he recognises her vulnerability, and thinks that it could be a good way to make himself some money…

“What if you were able to duplicate their years?  Supposing you were able to outwit the Philistines waiting to trample your vineyards by outliving them, like Mahlalaleel, Cainan, Jared and Enoch, generation after generation down through the centuries until no living man would remember when you were born and not even unborn generations of the future could hope to be alive when you died?”
He offers Hannah this possibility, based on the ages to which people are described as living in the Old Testament (often many centuries) – suggesting that he knows where they can find a food which will give Hannah the same longevity.  And it’s in Israel.

A bit of persuasion later, and they’re off.  Nobody really trusts anybody else on this venture, and everybody is out for themselves.  Things grow even trickier to decipher (for the reader too) when they stumble across a man purported to be Ben-Isaac’s missing, much-beloved uncle – a much-lauded academic who is, it turns out, working on the land.  Sears is, naturally, suspicious of this stranger, particularly when he takes over and Hannah appoints him the leader of their venture.  Who is scamming whom?

And this is where Gallico’s other genres come into play.  There is a sizeable amount of what I admired in Love of Seven Dolls, but Sears is never quite as credible a villain as Monsieur Nicholas – in neither a fairytale nor a realistic way – simply because Sears is quite an inconsistent character.  Which matches the change in genres – in Israel, things turn rather ‘adventure novel’ for a while, as they caught up in a shoot-out.  I know this sort of thing is supposed to be very exciting, but I find it unutterably tedious, and ended up skipping most of that section.

So we come onto the genre I’d yet to encounter in Gallico’s novels – the spiritual or religious theme.  As you might know, I am a Christian, but I don’t often read novels which feature faith – and, I have to say, I was a bit nervous to see how skilfully Gallico would handle it.  And, I’ve got to say, I was quite impressed – both the Jewish and Christian characters experience direct or indirect encounters with God while travelling through Israel, and these sections were moving (although, it must be conceded, entirely out of kilter with the rest of the novel.)

There are a few more twists and turns, a few more rugs pulled from under feet, and The Foolish Immortals concludes.  It is a very interesting, but maddeningly inconsistent novel.  Not inconsistent in quality (perhaps), but in style and tone.  It’s as though Gallico wanted to write a novel which took place in Israel, and couldn’t decide whether it should be about faith, boyish adventure, or unsettling manipulation – and so threw all of them in together.

Yet again, this is a book I’m criticising for not being written in the way I’d hoped it would be – but with, I think, greater justification than with yesterday’s post on Consider the Years, because in the case of The Foolish Immortals, it started off in the way I’d expected.  With this ingenious idea, Gallico could have written one of my favourite novels.  As it turns out, he’s written a good book, which I find quite intriguing, a little bewildering, and not insignificantly disappointing.

The Easter Party – Vita Sackville-West

StuckinaBook All , , , 12 Comments

Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn’t hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski’s Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I’ve only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West’s The Easter Party (1953). I couldn’t get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn’t an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose’s dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter’s witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario – and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn’t wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage – or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with “I will not pretend to be in love with you,” which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other ‘Pudding’, and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By ‘poor’ I mean, naturally, ‘only has one bathroom’ – they’re not on the streets.)  It’s not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush – it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn’t been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing – here is Gilbert’s faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don’t believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.
She is a wonderful character when she arrives – garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul – because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments…

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original – and stand above similar novels.  I don’t know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about – it’s so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it’s my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that’s not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West’s exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.
But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you’re worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not – their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that’s coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot…

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It’s a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off – but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn’t trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual – somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!