1960s

Coronation – Paul Gallico

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God bless the Queen!  And God bless lovely Alice at Bloomsbury, who recently sent me a copy of Paul Gallico’s Coronation (1962).  I wish I’d had this in my hands over the Jubilee weekend, because it would have made perfect reading.  It still made pretty darn brilliant reading this weekend.

Here’s how the novel opens:

The wheels of the Coronation Special from Sheffield, due at St. Pancras Station at six o’clock in the morning of Coronation Day, 2nd June 1953, sang the steady, lulling dickety-clax, dickety-clax of the British Railways.  Approaching a crossing, the engine shrieked hysterically into the drizzly night as it pulled its heavy load through the countryside, London-bound.  In the third-class compartment occupied by the five members of the Clagg family and three other passengers, no one slept, though Granny kept nagging at the two children to try to do so because of the long exciting day ahead.
The Clagg family are absolutely adorable.  One can’t help love them.  They are the every-family, so resolutely normal, and excited to be on this once-in-a-lifetime trip.  The Claggs are Will (salt-of-the-earth foreman at a mill, hard-working and kind, never quite as eloquent as he’d like) and Violet (slightly fraught wife, anxious to please her children and society equally), Violet’s crotchety mother (known simply as Granny) and two children, Johnny and Gwenny (11 and 7 respectively.)  They’re both rather lost in worlds of daydreams – for Johnny, it is the prospect of being a soldier (preferably one who dies to save the Queen – good man!) and for Gwenny it is princesses et al.  Not really challenging gender stereotypes, Mr. Gallico, but nobody could describe Coronation as a challenging book in any way.  No, it is instead a delightful whirlwind through the Claggs’ day out in London for the Coronation, with occasional parallel glances towards the service itself.

The Claggs have managed, through Cousin Bert, to secure rather impressive tickets.  Initially 25 guineas each, they snapped them up for only £10 a piece (still rather a hefty sum in those days, of course – they have had a family vote to forfeit the annual seaside holiday in favour of the Coronation trip, despite Granny’s moanings.)  The tickets include shelter, seating, and – to Violet’s almost childlike excitement – champagne.  It isn’t just the children who engage in daydreams; Violet is pondering how it will feel to be like a lady in the films, having champagne poured for her by a butler…

Over this first section of the novel, as the train speeds towards London, there is an undertone that, perhaps, things are all a little too good to be true…

I shan’t spoil anything, but let’s just say that things don’t go entirely according to plan…

But this is not a dark tale like Gallico’s (brilliant) Love of Seven Dolls, nor overly sickly-sweet, as I found Jennie.  Although it does have something of the structure of a fable, the utter believability of the Clagg family prevents it feeling like something Aesop would have penned as a moral warning.  Each member of the family has their vices and irritations, but you can’t help desperately wanting good things to happen for them.  Creating one well-rounded, sympathetic, good-but-not-cloying character is impressive.  To give us five in one cohesive family, each yet different from one another, is sheer brilliance.

And then, of course, there is the Queen.  Although we don’t see anything directly from her perspective, Gallico captures the love which many Britons (and others) felt towards the Queen – and which monarchists like me still feel: ‘the journey to London was something very ancient in his blood, a drawing of himself as a loyal subject to the foot of the throne, a gesture, a fealty and a courtesy as well.’  It is too great a feat for me to put myself in the mind of a republican, but I’ll go out on a limb and assume that you would still be able to love this novel for its delightfully accurate portrayal of family dynamics, not to mention Gallico’s wit and sensitivity.

Oh, what a lovely little book it is!  It doesn’t match Love of Seven Dolls for me, because I think that is a novel of very rare excellence, but, in a different mould, it is a sheer joy.  I raced through the novel in less than 24 hours, and I’m sure I’ll read it again.  Hopefully for the Queen’s 75th Jubilee!

To finish – it doesn’t hurt that Bloomsbury have produced an exceptionally beautiful volume, with the incomparable David Mann designing the cover.  It’s a special little book – and perfect to read in this Jubilee year.

(Long live the Queen)

Moominpappa at Sea – Tove Jansson

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You probably know that I love and adore Tove Jansson.  She is, indeed, one of my all-time favourite writers, and the only author whose books I eagerly await.  (Yes, she’s dead, but they’re being steadily translated – a newly translated collection of short stories coming soon from Sort Of Books!)  Until now, though, I hadn’t read any of the Moomin books for which she is best known.  Aware of this, Margaret Szedenits very kindly gave me a copy of Moominpappa at Sea (1965) which is actually the final book to feature the Moomin family, except some picture books.

Only the beginning of Moominpappa at Sea takes place in Moominvalley, and only the Moomin family appear.  Apparently there are lots of other characters, but I got to know thoughtful, adventurous Moominpappa, wise, diligent Moominmamma, anxious, imaginative Moomintroll, and fearless, feisty Little My.  They have a map on their wall, a dot on which marks an island (or perhaps, Little My suggests, some fly-dirt) with a lighthouse – Moominpappa decides that the family will move there.

“Of course we run the risk of it being calm tonight,” said Moominpappa.  “We could have left immediately after lunch.  But on an occasion like this we must wait for sunset.  Setting out in the right way is just as important as the opening lines in a book: they determine everything.”
After a wet and windy journey across the sea, they arrive on the island – deserted, except for a taciturn fisherman – and head towards the lighthouse.  Everything is not quite as they hoped.  The beam of the lighthouse doesn’t work, there is no soil for Moominmamma’s garden, and worst of all – the lighthouse is locked and they can’t find the key.  Without being too much like an educational TV programme, Tove Jansson incorporates many different responses to change – whether it intimidates, infuriates, or energises people.  Moominmamma is definitely the family member who most wishes they had never left.

In front of them lay age-old rocks with steep and sharp sides and they stumbled past precipice after precipice, grey and full of crevices and fissures.

“Everything’s much too big here,” thought Moominmamma.  “Or perhaps I’m too small.”

Only the path was as small and insecure as she was.
And then it all gets a bit surreal.  Not only is are they followed by the Groke – a curious creature which fills them with fear and turns the ground to ice – the island itself seems to be alive.  The trees move, the sea itself has a definite, often petulant, character.  The Moomins take this in their stride – they almost seem to expect it.

Moominpappa leaned forward and stared sternly at the fuming sea.  “There’s something you don’t seem to understand,” he said.  “It’s your job to look after this island.  You should protect and comfort it instead of behaving as you do.  Do your understand?

Moominpappa listened, but the sea made no answer.
So, what did I make of it all?  I definitely enjoyed it, and I especially liked Tove Jansson’s deceptively simple illustrations throughout – they enhanced the story, and also softened its edges, as it were.  The emotions and actions of the Moomins are often quite human, and the illustrations remind us that we are in a different world – they give the prose a warm haze.

And yet I never felt I quite knew what Jansson was doing.  I was expecting that it might all be a sort of allegory, in a way, for how humans respond to change.  But the Moomins aren’t simply there to represent types of response – they form a family unit as valid as those in any novel, even if there isn’t quite the same depth of development in these relationships (in this book, at least.)  The characters certainly often speak wisely, or demonstrate their feelings through actions (as Moominmamma does with her painting), but I couldn’t ever forget that this was a children’s book – and that, in this case, the children’s book really did feel like a watered-down version of the adults’ novels.

I wasn’t sure how Tove Jansson’s books for children would relate to the wonderful novels and stories I’ve already read.  It seemed to me, after reading Moominpappa at Sea, that it was like the skeletal equivalent of something like Fair Play.  Janssons’ great talent is her deeply perceptive descriptions of everyday interactions between people – incredibly nuanced and yet subtle.  She only gives the bare bones of this in Moominpappa at Sea.  Well, more than the bare bones – more, I daresay, than a lot of adult novelists – but not with the finesse of which I know her capable.  I still loved reading it, and I’m very grateful to Margaret for giving me the book and the opportunity, but I now feel comfortable that I have not been thus far missing Jansson’s greatest work.  She may be best known for the Moomin books but, based on what I have read of her oeuvre so far, she saved her finest writing for elsewhere.

Two Sparks: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Only Problem

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Although I’m actually writing this in advance of Muriel Spark Reading Week, I’m confidently going to predict that we’re all having a great time, and that you’re all putting up brilliant, thought-provoking pieces on this wonderful novelist… yes?  Yes.

Since it’s my day to post, I’m going to write fairly speedily about two Spark novels that I’ve read recently – and hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have finished at least one more.  (There will be no shortage of Spark reviews around the blogosphere this week, but if you fancy reading all my archive posts on Spark, including this one, click here.)  I chose The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) because my supervisor said it might be a useful comparison to Lolly Willowes, and The Only Problem (1984) because it looked really interesting, and also one that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else in the blogosphere.  Cutting a long story short, I thought they were both brilliant – neither take the crown away from Loitering With Intent as my favourite Spark novel yet, but both add to my cumulative for Spark.  You’ll be avidly reading Spark posts here, there, and everywhere, so I’ll try to keep my reviews brief… and hopefully enough to intrigue you to read them!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is centred, indeed, in Peckham Rye – and concerns the arrival and influence of one Dougal Douglas (sometimes going by the name of Douglas Dougal.)  The novel opens with the aftermath of a bride being jilted at the altar – indeed, with the bride’s mother insulting the jilting groom.  It’s all a little confusing (deliberately, one imagines) and it’s difficult to get the story straight – especially since everyone is superimposing their views and imaginings over the facts.  The brief chapter concludes:

But, in any case, within a few weeks, everyone forgot the details.  The affair is a legend referred to from time to time in the pubs when conversation takes a matrimonial turn.  Some say the bridegroom came back repentant and married the girl in the end.  Some say, no, he married another girl, while the bride married the best man.  It is wondered if the bride had been carrying on with the best man for some time past.  It is sometimes told that the bride died of grief and the groom shot himself on the Rye.  It is generally agreed that he answered ‘No’ at his wedding, that he went away alone on his wedding day and turned up again later.
This is a great example of how Spark plays irreverently with the normalities of narrative.  And if the reader expects everything to be neatly unfolded by the end of the novel, then he/she clearly hasn’t read much Spark before.  She obeys few authorial ‘rules’, and weaves her narratives with little concern for the reader’s expectation.  If she were writing a play (and she has; I should read them) she would unveil Chekhov’s gun in the first act, and nobody would ever lay a finger on it again.

But as someone notes on the first page of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, “It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here.”  She is quite right… although it is difficult to trace exactly how Dougal Douglas influences the community, his influence is undeniable.

He turns up somewhat out of the blue, and starts working at ‘Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles, a small but growing concern.’  His role is fairly vague.  Mr. Druce, the head of the company, is keen to hire ‘an Arts man’, and Mr. Druce places Douglas Douglas in charge of ‘human research.’

“I shall have to do research,” Dougal mused, “into their inner lives.  Research into the real Peckham.  It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.”

This research, it appears, chiefly constitutes attracting the workforce from their duties, calmly meddling in their lives, and undermining their confidences.  Dougal is all things to all people, and yet (although it is never asserted directly) it appears he might be an incarnation of the Devil.  He certainly has growths in his temple which rather resemble sawn-off horns – and the events which ensue from his presence have rather the hallmark of evil.

It is a fascinating concept, and one which has Spark written all over it.  She never gives us the certainty (as Sylvia Townsend Warner does in Lolly Willowes) that we are dealing with the Devil.  There isn’t really certainty about much, for either the reader of the residents of Peckham Rye – but events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal’s presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark’s brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

* * * * *

The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Spark’s fourth novel; The Only Problem comes somewhere towards the end of her almost half-century of novelising – but they are unmistakably by the same author.  The concept is quite different, but the manner of approaching it is still very Sparkian.  I say that the concept is different, but thinking about it, these two novels both concern the nature of evil, in some way – though both rather skirt round the issue.

‘The Only Problem’ of the title is, according to Harvey Gotham, the problem of suffering.  Accordingly, he has taken himself off to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job, and his mind rarely wanders from this topic.  His own suffering seems to take the form of interfering relatives and his ex-wife Effie, whom he abandoned in Italy over a stolen chocolate bar.  The sort of premise which makes me know I’m in the delightfully odd world of Muriel Spark.

Amongst the cast are Effie’s sister Ruth, and Ruth’s husband (Harvey’s old student friend) Edward.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together.  Harvey had never, to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten.

That is a very Sparkian relationship.  I can’t think of any uncomplicated friendships in the eight Spark novels I’ve read – there is always some element of uneasiness or sharpness, or simply the failure to communicate naturally which characterises so many exchanges throughout her work.  I love conversations and plot expositions which subvert the normal rules in some way, or ignore the anticipated responses – it’s on the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett – and here is an example from The Only Problem.  There are some spoilers in it, so skim past if you want to avoid them:

Anne-Marie had put some soup on the table.  Harvey and Ruth were silent before her, now that she wasn’t a maid but a police auxiliary.  When she had left, Ruth said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this down.  I’m pregnant.”
“How did that happen?” Harvey said.
“The same as it always happens.”
“How long have you known?”
“Three weeks.”
“Nobody tells me anything,” Harvey said.
“You don’t want to know anything.”

We aren’t long in the cerebal world of theological exegesis.  Effie – it is claimed – has become involved in a terrorist organisation, and the police think that Harvey is also somehow implicated.  In vain does he protest (although never especially animatedly – Spark’s characters tend towards the calm and detached) that he hasn’t spoken to Effie for years.  The rest of The Only Problem follows this mad chain of events – Harvey calmly continuing to offer his readings of Job, while the police interrogate him and his wife’s motives and actions remain mysterious.

Spark doesn’t, however, permit the obvious parallels.  A lesser novelist (had they been able to think of the juxtaposition) would have used the wider action of the novel as an example of the problem of suffering.  Instead, like in all the novels I’ve read by her, Spark just lets things happen.  There isn’t really any rhyme or reason, or grand overarching narrative point; there are no neat conclusions, just the brilliance of Spark’s eccentric but observant writing.

So, two more gems to the Spark canon!  I’m so pleased Muriel Spark Reading Week gave me the encouragement to read more Spark.  Do continue to put links in the comments box, if you’ve reviewed a Spark novel or written anything about our Muriel – and I hope you’re having a fun week!

Short non-review today…

StuckinaBook All , , 60 Comments

For the sake of A Century of Books, I must record that I have read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) – but I have no desire to write about it.  I hated reading it.  The writing was good.  But it is a horrible book, about a horrible murder committed by horrible people.  People will, I daresay, suggest that I am shying away from ‘real life’, but unpleasant actions are no more real than pleasant ones.  The usual, indeed, is rather more real than unusual.  There is a greater amount of reality in the Provincial Lady books than within the pages of In Cold Blood.  I cannot understand why anybody wants to read crime books, let alone true crime books: one half of the world does not understand the pleasures of the other.  Reading In Cold Blood could never be a pleasure for me, and the amount of displeasure it caused me wholly obscured any admiration I should feel towards Capote for his writing ability or his experimentation with genre.  I wish I had never read it.

Any books for which you feel like this?

Blooming Smith

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Following your recent advice and comments, tonight I’m going to blog about a novel which is very difficult to find at an affordable price, or indeed to find at all. Having re-read I Capture the Castle a while ago, I was intrigued to see what else Dodie Smith had to offer. I asked around, and general consensus was to look out for The New Moon with the Old or, failing that, The Town in Bloom. I can’t afford £20-£30 for novels I know nothing about, and Oxfordshire libraries didn’t have The New Moon with the Old, so I went for The Town in Bloom (1965).


The novel kicks off with a reunion between friends known as the Mouse, Moll Byblow, Madam Lily de Luxe and Zelle, reminiscing about their days living in a ‘club’ together in the 1920s, going through turbulent youthful events and trying to find work in the theatre. It’s now over four decades later. But… Zelle is absent, as she has been at all their five-yearly reunions. But is the shabby old woman across the road, who reminds ‘Mouse’ (the otherwise unnamed narrator) ‘of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror’, actually Zelle? And, if so, has she donned a disguise, or have 45 years apart led her to destitution?

And suddenly the novel flings us back those 45 years, to Mouse leaving her aunt’s house and arriving in London, at that club. We see her first experiences through the lens of her journal, which feels like we’re in familiar I Capture the Castle territory…
I am here at last! I arrived this afternoon, at Marylebone Station so I only had a short taxi drive – I wished it could have been longer as it was thrilling to be driving through London on my own. And it was such a lovely day. The trees here are further out than they are at home. Home! I haven’t one any more. That thought doesn’t make me feel sad. It makes me feel wonderfully free.Mouse, despite her nickname, isn’t particularly timid, and isn’t all that different from Cassandra of Smith’s more famous novel. Both are young and inexperienced, but oddly confident and more worldly than they seem. Both are incredibly introspective, yet manage not to be annoyingly so – although Mouse gets rather closer to ‘annoying’ than Cassandra does. But while Cassandra is isolated in a highly romanticised setting in rural Suffolk, Mouse is flung into the maelstrom of the theatre. Oh, and the journal fades away after a few pages – being replaced with first-person narrative (so she is hardly ever called ‘Mouse’ in the book) but from the distance of 45 years.

I love books about the theatre, fact or fiction, especially if it’s about theatre of the 1920s or 1930s. So I lapped up the first half of The Town in Bloom – which is set in a theatre run by actor-manager Rex Crossway, last in a line of theatrical Crossways. Dodie Smith was herself both an actress and playwright (it was as pseudonymous playwright C. L. Anthony that she first found fame) so she writes this section in an informed and entertaining manner. Mouse launches herself into his world through an impromptu audition for The School for Scandal, playing both Sir Peter and Lady Teazle.
I played both of them. First, as Sir Peter, I looked to my right and used a deep, rich voice. Then, looking left, I became Lazy Teazle and used a lighter voice than was natural to me. Backwards and forwards from right to left I went, speaking fast because I feared Mr. Crossway would stop me. I particularly wanted to reach what was, for me, the high moment of the scene, when Sir Peter tells Lady Teazle she had no taste when she married him. Lady T. then goes into fits of laughter – that is, she did in my interpretation. And never had I laughed better, louder or longer than I did for Mr. Crossway. I checked my laughter with some very amusing gasps and continued the scene. Still Mr. Crossway did not interrupt me. So I went on until Lady Teazle’s exit when I sketched a pert curtsy to Sir Peter – and then made a very deep one to Mr. Crossway.It was a brave, and a delicious, decision on Dodie Smith’s part to make Mouse no prodigy – she is an appalling actress, and no amount of advice from Crossway can make her anything else. So, instead, she starts working in one of the theatre offices with Eve Lester, a kind, sensible, and wise woman in an environment of those who are often kind, but rarely the rest.

The backstage goings-on of a theatre fascinate me, and I loved all the minutiae of rehearsals, editing, understudies etc. – and a very amusing scene where Mouse takes it upon herself to replace the ill leading lady halfway through a play, completely changing the interpretation, and rather ruining the whole affair. All written rather cleverly, and Mouse’s combination of naivety and knowingness make for a fun read.

But then…

Yes, Mouse falls in love with Mr. Crossway. Of course she does. At which point The Town in Bloom becomes significantly less interesting, while she repeatedly tries to seduce Mr. Crossway into an affair. I know there are plenty of real life relationships with big age gaps which work well, but I find them almost universally disturbing in novels – even up to and including Emma and Mr. Knightley. This is the sort of affair where Mr. Crossway laughingly calls her ‘my dear’ a lot, and she pontificates on how she will never love anybody else, not as long as she lives. And so on and so forth.

There are a few more twists to the tale, and her flatmates do play more significant roles than this review suggests, but I’m afraid The Town in Bloom turned into a rather tedious novel. There is enough momentum from the first half – and the lingering question from the prologue of what happened to Zelle – but the re-focus upon a rather tawdry romantic storyline is significantly duller than the theatrical focus of the earlier section to the novel.

In this respect, as in several others, The Town in Bloom is something of a pale shadow of I Capture the Castle, and I can quite see why nobody has bothered to reprint it for a while. I wish Smith had had the courage to leave out the romance/affair/adultery storyline altogether – this would have been an infinitely better novel without it, and would also have been rather further away from I Capture the Castle territory, and thus easier to appraise on its merits, not judged on its comparative demerits.


And not a dalmatian in sight.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

StuckinaBook All , 11 Comments

Recently at work my colleague Sarah started telling me about a book she hadn’t read, but heard might be interesting. It was about an old spinster who starts to invest her household objects with personalities, and is obsessed with her fox fur… Sarah was still in the middle of her sentence when I ordered a copy of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc. It ticked lots of boxes for me, and I was quite excited – that very brief synopsis could have been written with me in mind.

Violette Leduc wasn’t very well known until she wrote her autobiography La Batarde, at which point she apparently became the darling of French literary culture. I hadn’t heard of her, but 1960s France is hardly my area of specialist knowledge. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur (originally La Femme au petit renard) was published in 1965, and became a bestseller. My edition is translated by Derek Coltman, and was published in 1967. It’s back in print, still with Peter Owen and Coltman’s translation, but the cover was so hideous that I had to get an earlier copy. And accidentally tore the dustjacket when I opened the package.


I’m always a bit cautious about saying characters are unnamed, because I never notice or remember names in novels, but I’m *pretty* certain that the old-ish lady (‘She was handling her sixtieth year as lightly as we touch the lint when dressing a wound’) is unnamed. The plot of this novella (104pp) is very simple – this unnamed narrator is living in dire poverty. She subsists on bits of sugar and dry rolls, and scrounges through bins and gutters. What money she has tends to be spent on travelling on the Metro, rather than food – she gains her nourishment from the company of others. She is, I should add, rather unhinged. Everyday events and insignificant acts by others are interpreted as being of great importance. As the novel continues, she gets more and more unbalanced – developing a deep closeness with the inanimate objects in her flat (somehow she scrapes together rent, but fears this may be last month there). Above all, she is besotted with an old fox fur that she once found, thrown out by someone else. Let’s have a quick glance at how she treats it:
As each day passed, she kept him more and more closely confined, eventually refusing him even the flattering light of the moon. She would squander a match for him on dark and moonless nights; she would move the flame to and fro along his length, enchanted at burning her fingers for his sake. Then, in the same dark night-time, he would warm up that place behind her ear where we need other people so much. What had to happen happened: he grew more beautiful as he acquired greater value, and he gave her what she asked of him.
I had, in my mind, the sort of novel I was expecting. A bit like Barbara Comyns, perhaps, but a bit madder. Well, it was certainly pretty mad, but sadly it didn’t click for me quite in the way that Comyns does. I enjoyed reading The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, and thought there were some brilliant and poignant moments – but Leduc’s style rather defeated me. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it veers in that direction – a style that I often love, but has to be done really well to succeed. In Leduc’s novel it comes paired with an attempt to portray mental instability through language – which I always find a bit hazardous. I love the idea in theory, but I don’t think I’ve read any novel where it really worked – I’ll have to think on that and get back to you; that might deserve a post of its own.

Part of the issue might well be Derek Coltman’s translation – or maybe just the fact that it was in translation at all. It’s unfair of me to bad-mouth Coltman’s work without knowing what the original is like; either Leduc or Coltman is responsible for the stilted feeling I got whilst reading the novella.


Do you ever get the feeling that you should go back and re-read a novel very slowly? I have an inkling that’s what I should do to get the most out of The Lady and the Little Fox Fur. Perhaps I’m being critical because I had such high hopes for loving this novella – I don’t want you to come away this review thinking it’s bad. The idea is lovely and quirky; the unhinged mind of the lady is convincing – to the extent that I didn’t always know what was going on! It just wasn’t quite the gem I was hoping I’d found. Still, a much more interesting book to read than the latest top ten hardback – I love throwing a quirky little book into my reading now and then – and I think I’ll re-read it in ten or twenty years’ time, and perhaps come to a different conclusion.

In an awkward fashion, I’m going to peter out with a quotation – the lady is standing outside a cinema. I liked these paragraphs, and it’s also fairly representative of the style, and of the woman’s character. What’s your response to Leduc’s writing?
On Wednesdays they always changed the programme, so that on Tuesdays the photographs outside were always neglected, abandoned: she could pretend they were her transfer. A dark-haired man, a blonde woman; a blonde woman, a dark-haired man. The actors’ names left her utterly indifferent: their real names for her were the names of the people she saw kissing one another on the streets. Her forefinger followed the broken line of the hair, stopped up the eyesockets, crushed the mouth, or paused if the lovers’ mouths were pressed together in a kiss. Prudish and indiscreet, at those moments she would look down with blind eyes at the drawing-pin in one corner of the photograph. She was a sack of stones holding itself up of its own volition, this woman who had never had anything, who had never asked for anything. If the edge of the wind had caressed her neck at that moment, had caressed her neck just below the ear, then her heart would have stopped. She would have given her life and her death for another’s breath that close.

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

It’s about time I paid heed to Virago Reading Week, which has been popping up all over the blogosphere this, er, week. Thanks Rachel and Carolyn! I love it when publishers are hailed in this manner – long-term SiaB readers may recall I ran an I Love Hesperus week many moons ago, and of course have enjoyed Persephone readalongs, and cheered from the sidelines for NYRB Classics. As luck would have it – it certainly wasn’t my organisational ability – I happened to be halfway through a Virago when the week began, and even my current sluggish reading pace has allowed me to finish off The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns.


Props to Thomas (that’s a good American expression, right? As is that ‘right?’ there.) for his Virago banner, by the way. If you think you recognise those pics, head over here for Thomas’ competition.

It’s no secret that I love Barbara Comyns – she’s probably in my top five favourite authors, certainly top ten – and I’m fast reaching the end of her books. Just two novels to go… so I’m treasuring them as I go, and The Skin Chairs is no exception.

When I first started reading Comyns, I thought her novels were bizarrely different from one another, in terms of style. It’s only now, looking back, that I realise I started off with the three most disparate I could have chosen – Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and The Juniper Tree. Having read more of her books, I realise that she does have an identifiable tone – surreal but matter-of-fact; an unnerving but captivating mixture, and one which leads to a very unusual angle on events. As shown most effectively in The Vet’s Daughter, but also on occasion in The Skin Chairs, even cruelties are dealt with in this unshockable, even tone. Here’s an example:

When she had gone we let Esme’s mice loose in the sitting-room, although they didn’t seem to enjoy it much, keeping close to the skirting board most of the time. There used to be a girl in our village who was continually beaten by her parents and I remembered she used to walk like that, close to the walls.

Lest you think this is a miserable book, I must add the scolding given to children when they sit on some graves: ‘Nanny found us and said that we had no respect for our bottoms or the dead.’ There are plenty of laugh-aloud moments.

The Skin Chairs is told in the voice of ten-year-old Frances, one of six children, who must go and stay with her Great-Aunt’s family: ‘My mother[…] sometimes became tired of us and would dispatch us to any relation who would agree to have one or two of the family to stay.’ Shortly after this, and having endured Aunt Lawrence’s unwelcoming home, Frances’ father dies and the rest of her family move to an unlikeable, small modern house. Relative poverty is a theme throughout Comyns’ writing, and she relishes writing of their privations – nightdresses made out of old sheets; ‘not being able to play with paint’, and so forth.

As with other Comyns novels, not much happens. This one has a little more of a central thread through it than some, in terms of the family’s destiny, but Comyns is best at her bizarre hangers-on. Chief amongst these is Mrs. Alexander, with her red-purple hair, turbans, mustard-coloured car, and golden shoes (repainted each evening by her chauffeur.) She keeps monkeys, and cleverly builds a wall after buying a piano, so that the bailiffs can’t remove it when she goes into debt. Then there is young widow Vanda, who neglects her baby, but thinks she’s doing a good job as the infant never goes short of orange juice. How Comyns thinks of all the tiny details, I can’t imagine. So many are bizarre and wonderful – unexpected, but not dwelt upon – and always mentioned so calmly.
The first day at school was not so bad as I expected. The worst part was when most of the girls trooped off into the dining-room and we had to eat our sandwiches in one of the classrooms. The only other occupant was a particularly plain girl wearing a patch plaid blouse and eating a pork pie. She said she adored eating pork pies and ate them in her bath.

And those skin chairs of the title? Yes, they’re human skin, and belong to a Major who lives in a large house in the village. They pop up near the beginning of the novel, and reappear every now and then – with some significance, but the true justification for the novel being called The Skin Chairs doesn’t rest with that. I think they’re the perfect symbol for what Comyns does best: the domestication of the surreal; the macabre passed over with matter-of-fact interest, and no more – there is probably a girl eating a pork pie close by, which will be equally involving.

If you haven’t read any Comyns yet, I urge you to do so (The Skin Chairs is going for a penny on Amazon.) The more I read of her, the more I feel sure that she has been unjustly neglected – and is one of the most intriguing novelists of the twentieth-century.

I’ve got an idea…

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

…but, thankfully for three men called Mike, Steve, and Dan, it is not the same idea as the title of Rohan O’Grady’s novel republished in the latest batch from the unutterably wonderful Bloomsbury Group. I can’t believe how little I’ve been heralding the return of this series, and I promise to Do Better. First stop, Let’s Kill Uncle.

On the face of it, this is an unusual choice for inclusion. The rest of the books have been in the first half of the twentieth century, more or less, and funny in an insouciant and harmless way. Let’s Kill Uncle was published in 1963, and is rather more sinister than anything else Bloomsbury have published in this series. There are large dollops of humour too, but you’re unlikely to find the following sentence in Miss Hargreaves or Henrietta’s War: “Maudie and I never had a family,” said Uncle sadly, “although we wanted one. So you see, Barnaby is doubly precious to me. I adore children.”

He did indeed. Several little girls to whom he had taken a fancy had vanished into thin air.But I’m getting ahead of myself. O’Grady’s novel is about an orphan called Barnaby Gaunt (wouldn’t Dickens be proud of that name?) who is sent for a holiday to a beautiful Canadian island. He’s renowned as a bit of a trouble-maker, and the gentle couple who take him in don’t quite know how to respond. They lost their son in the war, and Barnaby is a supposed substitute – but doesn’t live up to this image. He is disobedient and mischievous, although not a mean-spirited child… there are reasons for his behaviour, which will become apparent.

And there is Christie. She is the only other child on the island, and equally wild in spirits, though rather more inclined to obedience in front of adults. Their escapades together could have been the stuff of Enid Blyton (with perhaps a little edge) – except the fable-esque anxieties about smugglers become a much more real, and thus more chilling, threat from a murderous uncle. For Barnaby is due to inherit ten million dollars, and Uncle doesn’t want that happen. Uncle is a seriously twisted character – very psychologically manipulative (he beats Barnaby for being good, for instance, or tells him he may go to bed, but continually calls him back with idle comments) and with a history of many murders – but the exterior of a placid, harmless man. So, when Uncle turns up on the island, Barnaby and Christie resolve to take the only logical path: kill Uncle first.

The plan goes into action – whether they succeed or not I won’t tell you, but suffice to say there are all manner of adventures along the way. This is such a difficult novel to categorise. It’s not really like the other Bloomsbury Group novels I’ve read – it’s not cosy, it’s not really a novel to be loved and cherished; it’s too chilling for that. Uncle is simply too evil. But neither is it a ‘scary book’ – there are flashes of humour (‘The children loved the little church; it was such a pleasant, peaceful spot in which to plan a murder’) and a light-heartedness to the children’s activities which was at odds with their murderous plans. When I read in the blurb that Donna Tartt had called Let’s Kill Uncle a ‘dark, whimsical, startling book’, I was a little confused. Surely those words clash a bit when placed together? And I’m still not sure that there is much whimsy in the novel, unless you describe any scene without blood as whimsical – but it’s certainly the lightest dark book I’ve ever read. Or possibly the darkest light book.

So, there you go! Perhaps not what I expected from the Bloomsbury Group series, but certainly a good read – both dark and light, a strange and clever mixture. And not a little unnerving…

I haven’t seen the 1966 film, but found the trailer on YouTube – it seems to be quite a loose adaptation. For those who share my fear of s***ers, don’t watch the last ten seconds of the clip:

Books to get Stuck into:

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns – I chose this one because it’s got another depiction of an evil parent-figure. Alice’s dad is like Uncle, in that they are all the more chilling for not being exaggerated. The portrait in The Vet’s Daughter is far more unsettling and brilliantly drawn, but the similarities are there…

Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd – not really much of a link, but I struggling to find similar books – the link here is an island!!

Travels With My Aunt

StuckinaBook All , 17 Comments

As far as I’m aware, until this month I had never read a book with the word ‘Aunt’ in the title – and now I find myself reading two of them. Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene, and Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse – both very funny. Perhaps Aunts are a source of untapped hilarity (also languishing on my shelf is Cordial Relations: The Maiden Aunt in Fact and Fiction by Katharine Moore, so more to discover there, too…)

My lovely book group has themed months, where the shortlist for voting must be suggested within a theme or idea. Next month, for example, is books set in Oxford (I’m holding out for Jill by Philip Larkin). Last month was books about geographical journeys – and I suggested Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene, which was eventually victorious. I hadn’t read it – indeed, I knew almost nothing about it – but has been told by one or two people that I should read some Greene. And I’m very glad that I did.

Henry has never met his Aunt Augusta before she turns up at his mother’s funeral: “It’s odd how we seem to meet only at religious ceremonies. The last time I saw you was at your baptism.” His quiet life working in a bank, tending his dahlias, and generally not doing very much – it’s all about to be wildly disrupted. His is not a spirit of adventure – ‘The bank had taught me to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.” But Augusta is no-nonsense, fairly eccentric, and determined to change him. But I’ll let Henry do the describing:

I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, old-world in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the odd setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

For Aunt A is well-travelled. When she suggests a trip, Henry thinks Brighton would be a good destination, and it does offer an interesting excursion – little does he know that their travels will later include Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay… Truth be told, the destinations aren’t hugely important in themselves (which rather relieved me, as I’m not usually a fan of travel literature, and was glad that the novel didn’t turn into it) but rather act as settings for the illicit and extraordinary activities with which Augusta is involved. I don’t want to spoil them for you, but safe to say the police get involved along the way.

Having written that, you might be surprised to learn that the character I was reminded of most, from the earliest chapters onwards, was Miss Hargreaves. In the unlikely event that you’ve missed me talking about Miss Hargreaves, probably by favourite novel, you can read my eulogies here. Miss H was written in 1939; Travels With My Aunt came out in 1969 – and Aunt Augusta is more or less what I’d expect Miss Hargreaves to be if she’d lived thirty years later, and been rather less respectable. I can’t imagine Miss Hargreaves saying, for instance, “A brothel is after all a kind of school.” But the characters have the same indomitable spirit, eccentric manner, and amusingly unpredictable speech. The success of Greene’s novel, for me, is through character – through Augusta and Henry’s conversations, where two wholly different characters meet and travel together. The first half of the novel focuses upon character (broadly speaking) and the second half more on plot – which I found perhaps less interesting, though apparently it is more akin to Greene’s literary thrillers.

I haven’t read anything else by Greene, and I’ve been told that Travels With My Aunt is the unGreenelike Greene novel, but I was so charmed and amused by this spirited novel that I’ll definitely be trying some others. Anybody got anything to suggest? I’m also keen to see Maggie Smith in the film, but (of course) it hasn’t been released on DVD… (Oh, and for the thoughts of another member of the book group – I’ve just spotted Harriet’s review!)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

28. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

Well done to those who correctly guessed We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the image I shared the other day – and well done to those with the foresight to have bought the book already. As well as being my favourite ever book title (doesn’t it make you want to read the book, without reading a word more about it?) this is a quite brilliant novel. Initially published in 1962, this great image is from the new Penguin reprint in the UK. I first read the novel in 2006, I think, and re-read it yesterday, just to make sure it was still great… a second read removed some of the suspense, of course, because the questions were no longer unanswered – but it actually brought a new dimension to the tale, too, as I shall explain…

I’m going to do my best to write about this book sans-spoilers, since it has so many wonderful twists and turns. I’m going to give away much less than most reviews do, so if you want to try We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the same starting point I did, perhaps don’t follow the links at the bottom…

The opening paragraph gives a few important bits of information:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
The first chapter shows Mary Katherine – also known as Merricat – walking through the local town, seeing the trip like a board game; she ‘misses turns’ if she crosses the street, for example. ‘The people of the village have always hated us.’ What a stunning first chapter Shirley Jackson has written – without knowing why the Blackwood family are pariahs, we feel such tension, such awkwardness and fear as Merricat makes her way through the village. And she is the victim of childish chants:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
Once home, she is not in a world of normality. Merricat believes she can protect her family and her house through nailing books to trees, burying marbles on the land, and storing away words – melody, Gloucester, Pegasus – which, so long as they aren’t spoken aloud, will prevent danger. Because the novel is from Merricat’s first person perspective, these superstitions are spoken without any defensiveness or recognition of a lack of logic. Which transports the reader into a surreal, unsettling viewpoint… Constance is more normal, though agoraphobic, unable to move beyond the perimetres of Blackwood land. Uncle Julian, the other remaining Blackwood, is obsessively creating a history of what happened to the family, especially the night they died. He is also mentally disintegrating, every bit as unsettling as Merricat’s bizarre internal logic. Oh, and then there’s the rather wonderful cat, Jonas, the only truly sane member of the family.

Though a short novel, Jackson packs a huge amount in. Not only the readers’ curiosity to discover what happened to the rest of the Blackwood family, but also a consuming tension in the atmosphere of the novel. This was Jackson’s last novel, and (of the three I’ve read) the best – suffering from agoraphobia herself whilst writing it, she perfectly creates the joint security and terror of the home. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Gothic from the title onwards, but Jackson also writes a fascinating psychological study – this slim book has everything, and on re-reading is all the more impressive, for the clues and presentiments scattered throughout. The pace quickens, the events escalate, but the tone never eases and Merricat’s unique angle on the world never lessens.

When I first read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I hadn’t heard of either the book or the author – it was in a postal book group, sent by Lisa from Bluestalking Reader. I feel a bit bad including it in a ‘books you might not have heard of’ list, since it’s been all over the blogosphere since then, but just maybe you’ve missed one of the following reviews (I’ve only included blogs I know and like – a search reveals dozens and dozens more! Search via Fyrefly’s Blog Search Engine, linked to the left, under People To See):

Books Please (spoiler-free)
The Bookling
Read-Warbler
The Asylum
A Striped Armchair
Books and Cooks
Things Mean A Lot