1970s

The Home by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #26)

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THE HOME | Penelope MortimerLook, yes, I’m cheating again – The Home (1971) isn’t a novella, since it’s 230 pages, but I had a bit more time to read today, and I thought I’d spend it here. And I’m so glad I did – The Home is brilliant (and, indeed, rather better IMO than the other Mortimer I read earlier in May, My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof).

The home of the title is the one that Eleanor Strathearn moves to after leaving her husband Graham – because of his affair with a younger woman, also called Eleanor though known as Nell. He has bought her the house, under some sufferance, and she has taken almost all the furniture. She goes with their youngest son, Philip (15) – they have four other children, adults living lives of careful detachment from their parents.

The course of the novel follows the aftermath of this split, and brings in their respective mothers too. Mortimer is brilliant at combining different permutations of the family and showing the dynamics that emerge – sometimes confiding, sometimes awkward, usually fraught in some way.

What I loved most about The Home is the tone of voice. Mortimer is drily funny and quite odd, and fans of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge will find a lot to enjoy. Her descriptions of people are always slightly off-kilter and wonderful. Here is Eleanor’s mother, Mrs Bennet:

While not exactly believing in God – the prospect was a little ridiculous – she was devoted to death, regarding it as the cure for all evils, by which she meant life. However, she remained indomitably alive. Other elderly ladies – at the time of the break-up she was eighty-two – suffered from fluttering hearts, poor eyesight, deafness, arthritis. Mrs Bennet was healthier than she had been at eighteen, and as much in command of her faculties. She also grew more knowledgeable every year, and was now far better informed about politics, the arts, drug addiction, space travel, sexual permissiveness and other topics of absolutely no use to her than her husband, a gentleman farmer and Justice of the Peace, had ever been.

There is a cynicism about romance and relationships throughout The Home – one character says, “Whoever heard of a happily married couple in 1971?” – but there is also a sort of hope that is as indomitably alive as Mrs Bennet. Or at least a triumph of hope over experience. Everybody wants slightly different things, and knowingly damages and disregards the people around them in pursuit of these things – but doing so, at the same time, with genuine love and care. It is all excellently observed.

I don’t know The Home is less well-known than some of Mortimer’s other books. It probably isn’t quite the exhilarating tour de force of The Pumpkin Eater, but it is certainly recognisable as the same brilliant authorial mind. I loved it.

Novella a Day in May: Days 16 and 17

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Day 16: Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) by Per Petterson

TAshes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Amazon.co.uk: Petterson, Per, Bartlett, Don: 9781846553707: Bookshis 1987 book was translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett in 2013, which is when I think I got it as a review copy. Well, here I am, almost a decade later I’ve read all 118 pages of it. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is a novella or a series of short stories – it’s kind of both, in the way that Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is. Arvid Jansen is an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s, living with his family on the outskirts of Oslo, with a scathing older sister, a worrying mother, and a father who never stops speaking about ‘before the war’. There is also a grandfather, who dies in one of the first chapters/stories – a brilliant portrait of a young child’s mingled grief and indifference, scared of things changing but not really in mourning, and trying with inadequate words to convey all he is experiencing but not really comprehending.

Petterson is very good at giving the child’s point of view – it has that matter-of-factness, and at the same time building an understanding of the world. Here is Arvid thinking about his mother, and about ageing:

She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

Some of the dangers in Jansen’s world are philosophical and abstract, like this. But there is also malice in his world. There are bullies, there is the animosity between his father and his uncle, and his father’s drunken sadness. Petterson combines the contemplative with the unsettling.

Apparently Arvid Jansen appears in quite a few Petterson works, usually rather older than this boy. I haven’t read any of those, but now I’ve met Arvid as a child, I’d be intrigued to encounter him as an adult.

Day 17: The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath (1978) by Dodie Smith

the girl from the candle-lit bath dodie smith 1978 001This was Dodie Smith’s last novel, written when she was in her 80s, and it is quite a departure from her earlier work. While I Capture the Castle might feature the heroine in a bath when she first encounters the hero, nobody would describe Smith’s most famous work as a thriller. And that is what The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath is at least trying to be.

Nan is fairly recently married to an MP, and is worried that he is having an affair – she has spotted him handing a parcel to a shadowy stranger, and he is being coy about where he’s been. We never really get to know him, and even Nan doesn’t seem to particularly like him, but such is the start of the plot. In the first few pages she meets a taxi driver, after twisting her ankle and needing a lift, and he begins to talk to her about the possibility that her husband is hiding something even more significant.

The novella is told through a series of ‘tapes’, as Nan decides to record herself speaking, as a way to think things through. It’s an interesting device that felt a bit like a 1970s update of the 18th- or 19th-century heroine who had to commit all her thoughts to letters, no matter how precarious the situation.

And the title? Nan is famed from a TV advert, before she later made a success in television.

It began with something quite idiotic. I did a very well-paid commercial, advertising a soap first made back in the eighteen-nineties. They copied a wonderful bathroom in some old country house, with a marble bath, gleaming silver plumbing and all sorts of elaborate details, and they lit it only by candle-light. I came on in an exquisite negligée, took it off and stepped into the bath, but owing to the dim lighting, clever cutting and various tricks, I was never seen quite nude, even though the bath water was clear and not a bubble bath. Again and again I was almost seen but always something – usually the soap, in a silver soap dish – got in the way. The commercial was a great success and I became known as ‘The Girl in the Candle-lit Bath’ and got quite a large fan mail.

Her husband allows (!) her to start acting again, and the part of this novella I most enjoyed were her experiences re-entering the theatre as an understudy. At the same time this novella was published, Smith published the second volume of her memoirs – which, if memory serves, looked at the period of her own life when she was trying to make it as an actress. Smith is clearly at home in this world.

Where she is less at home is the thriller – the story suddenly takes a leap for the more dramatic, after a relatively promising start, and we are lost in a sea of chases and espionage and peril. It’s not at all convincing, and mostly feels very silly. I’d read Barb’s and Jane’s very unflattering reviews, and at least forewarned is forearmed. I quite enjoyed the first half, which have elements of Smith’s delicious humour (“Anyway, they hated the idea of the public tramping over beautiful old houses, which should be private, part of their owners’ private lives. If the Slepes ever acquire a private life they’ll be bitterly disappointed”) but the second half is too absurd and unsuccessful to make this a book worth seeking out.

Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Novella a Day in May #4)

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Journey Through a Small PlanetOops, I keep cheating on this novella challenge – though today’s cheating was accidental, since I was about 30 pages into Journey Through A Small Planet (1972) by Emanuel Litvinoff when I realised it was an autobiography. Simply from seeing it on the shelf, I had assumed it was a sci-fi novella – though that in itself would have been a surprise, being worlds away from The Lost Europeans, my (brilliant) previous experience with this writer.

Instead, we are taken to the East End of London in the years after the First World War. Emanuel is the son of working-class Jewish immigrants from Russia, living in a community that shares his poverty and his ethnicity. I won’t say faith, because Emanuel determines relatively early in childhood that he doesn’t want to follow the Jewish religion, though of course he remains Jewish. And in the eyes of many people at his school and, later, his first places of employment, he is still Russian. Even though he has never been there. Sadly, recent political decisions in this country show that British-born children of immigrants don’t today have much more certainty that their nationality will be respected…

I found the writing in The Lost Europeans captivatingly beautiful. In Journey Through A Small Planet, the prose is much more understated – Litvinoff is more interested in translating the perceptions of his childhood than in framing it elegantly. We see how he is bullied and ostracised at school, both by pupils and teachers – on the first day, his form teacher makes much of his ‘foreign’ surname, and sets the trend for the way Emanuel will be treated by everyone who encounters him. Despite there being a significant Jewish population in his area of London, none of his contemporaries at school seem to be Jewish – and Emanuel feels all the more alienated because he doesn’t see himself in his community either. Judaism pales in comparison to Communism in his mind. He is captivated by faintly understood tenets, and Litvinoff takes us inside the passion and in-fighting of those on the left of the spectrum in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Of course, Emanuel is also occupied with less abstract issues. There is hunger, there is lust, there is envy – all the human emotions, conveyed with all the sense of newness that everyone feels in experiencing them for the first time. Eventually he disappears from home in a way that seems very far-fetched, but presumably happens. And the autobiography – or perhaps memoir – ends almost in the middle of a scene.

Along the way, the infant Emanuel and the adult Litvinoff coalesce. The emotions are the child’s, but he blends it well with the observational power of the reflecting adult. It combines to give the memoir an authenticity that is amplified by perceptiveness. Here’s a rather lovely bit I noted about a child (otherwise a background character in the book) whose father returns from long exile:

Acquiring a father unexpectedly like that could be either horrible or marvellous for a boy. In Mendel’s case it was marvellous. You’d see the two of them walking hand in hand through the raucous streets, talking to one another as if no one else in the world existed. They went to museums, parks, art galleries, visited the Tower, climbed the Monument, inspected the Palace Guard, all things that Mr Shaffer must have dreamed of doing with his son during those long years of waste and deprivation in Russia. If the boy was happy, the man was ecstatic. I saw him one Sunday standing in the marketplace utterly dazed by the mounds of ripe fruit, barrels of shmlaz herring and pungent strings of sausages, gazing at these and the stalls flowing with coloured silks and heaped with new-smelling leather, as if the wonder of the world was spread before his feasting eyes. And the way Mendel smiled up at the tall man you’d think he was the father, not the child.

If Journey Through A Small Planet didn’t bowl me over quite as much as Litvinoff’s fiction, it impressed me in a different way. Definitely recommended – and now I’ll re-shelve it in the correct section of my library.

Love by Angela Carter – #NovNov Day 25

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It is very brave to call your novella something so broad and essential as Love – as Angela Carter did in this book from 1971 – because it necessarily seems to give a grand universality to something specific. In the case of this story, the bizarre relationships between Annabel, Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz. (This cover isn’t the one I read – it’s one on Wikipedia that I rather love, though I’m not sure how representative it is of the novella.)

Like Magnus Mills’ Three To See The King I read yesterday, Carter writes a surreal and unnerving world – but where his is told sparely, Carter’s prose is luscious and almost ornate, even when she is describing unpleasant things. This excerpt isn’t unpleasant, but it is near the beginning of the book and seems to offer a symbolic sense of being drawn to two opposites – when she sees sun and moon simultaneously.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

The ‘love triangle’ isn’t quite that – Buzz is just obsessed with his brother and Annabel, who have their own overwrought and dangerous relationship. The depiction of Buzz is quite odd. He is introduced in a voluminous dark cape, and seems to live in it; the other characters call him a freak, though without being exactly clear what they mean by that.

Throughout the novel, these three tussle with love and power and violence – drawing others into their web, while also playing at some distorted version of the domestic. It’s all rather strange, like a portrait that – once you look closer – has features that can’t possibly be true, or that unnerve on examination.

This is the third or fourth Carter novel[la] I’ve read, and I certainly admire her writing. In something like Wise Children it is also a bit fey and even joyful. Love has funny moments (”It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian”) and moments of neat insight (‘the false cheerfulness of five in the morning’), but overall it is not a joyful book by any means. Carter is perhaps one of those writers I recognise as great, but don’t especially relish spending time in the company of. It’s undeniably good, but leaves me with a feeling of having a bit sullied.

Two unsuccessful #1976Club reads…

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I’ll finish off my reviews for the week with a couple of 1976 books that I didn’t really like or dislike. Both had pluses and minuses, but were really just mediocre [in my opinion] and so I shan’t say too much about them. I’ll do another post before the end of the week, rounding up all the many wonderful club reviews I’ve seen.

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann

I bought this a few years ago because of Lehmann’s connections with Leonard and Virginia Woolf – I’d already read his very bitter memoir of working with them, Thrown To The Woolfs. He spent eight years as managing director of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, but his career covered many other literary avenues – running his own publishing house, founding periodicals, writing poetry and biography, and championing many poets. His sister was the novelist Rosamond – and In the Purely Pagan Sense was, I think, his only novel. And it is only scarcely a novel – because the first-person narrator, Jack Marlowe, is clearly more or less Lehmann himself.

As I’ve been writing afterwords for the British Library Women Writers series, about societal changes for women through the early twentieth century, it’s amazing how often I have to resist writing about sex again. It is one of the biggest shifts of the period – not so much what was happening, but what was permissible to write about. And gay sexual relationships seem to have followed a similar trajectory, though not at exactly the same time. When In the Purely Pagan Sense was published, gay sex had been officially legalised in the UK for a handful of years – but clearly Lehmann didn’t yet want to put his own name to the descriptions in this novel.

And, good lord, there is precious little else in In the Purely Pagan Sense. Essentially it is a litany, from adolescence through to his fifties, of Marlowe’s sexual conquests. He doesn’t seem ever to have encountered a man who wasn’t sexually attracted to men – and, specifically, to Marlowe himself. We don’t learn an awful lot about the many men he engages with – usually a brief physical description, particularly the size of their thighs, and whatever happened in the bed, and onto the next. There are two or three who linger for longer periods, and they were quite interesting. But otherwise it’s mostly soft porn, and it all gets a bit tedious.

This is against the backdrop of enormous events of the mid-20th century, and the blurb optimistically says ‘his pursuit of pleasure also provides an accurate and revealing picture of Europe between the wars’, but he is too preoccupied with one sort of ‘revealing’ to bother too much about any other.

Lehmann writes well, and I’m sure he could have written a psychologically much more interesting novel. This one was entertaining to turn pages, but it’s going to a charity shop.

Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley

This biography was the eleventh book published by Persephone Books – and it’s curious that, so early in their publishing history, they issued a book that is such an outlier to their usual output. Being by a man, about a man, quite late in the century, and a biography, it is a Persephone minority in many ways. So surely it must be brilliant? Erm…

I don’t know how well know Grenfell is as a war poet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him mentioned out of the context of this biography – and I didn’t see much of him as a poet within it. As the Persephone site says, ‘so much of it is about his mother’, Ettie. There is far, far more about her – her passions and assignations – than it is about Julian, who only really comes into his own in the final hundred pages of this 400-page book. And when he does, he seems truly awful – relishing war, and seeming to think it universal that people would quite enjoy killing.

Of course, there’s no problem with writing a biography of an unpleasant person, or even several unpleasant people. But I found the whole book a curious mix of good writing and total clumsiness. Mosely relies heavily on quoting letters and the like in full, often one after another. He doesn’t seem to have any sense of pacing or perspective, and rambles in whichever direction catches his attention. We learn almost nothing about Grenfell’s development as a writer or, truly, about him as a writer at all. It seems bizarre to call the book Julian Grenfell and have him such a cipher in the background for most of the book.

And yet, the writing is often really impressive, and I did find myself whirled along by it a lot of the time. Particularly towards the end. Here’s a section (though one where his summary of Julian’s views on war is not reflected in anything else he says):

To feel oneself within the processes of destruction and yet to love life because these are the processes out of which life continually comes – this is dangerous, because destruction can thus be encouraged. This was Ettie’s predicament: she wanted to make war holy. But then Ettie, ashamed of childish feelings, had toc all war by grandiose names; her dangerousness was in the delusion. Julian saw war for what it was – its childishness and terror – and he did not want to describe it otherwise. And so, in spite of his pleasure, he does not seem an encourager of war; pleasure did not involve approbation. That he did not seem to want to go on living was perhaps the sign of Ettie’s victory over him: the growing-up part of him had been too much alone. As a dying hero he could be a child in his mother’s arms again. But part of him would still be amused by this. He could see both the scene and himself in relation to it: this ‘he’ that saw being neither victim nor killer; but codifier; artist.

Julian Grenfell is certainly a very unusual biography, and perhaps that means it will be loved and admired by some – it’s a risky approach, because it can equally leave someone like me nonplussed. If you want something beautifully written, bewilderingly structured, and very coy on the topic of its central subject, then you might well prize Mosley’s book.

Since both books covered here are concerned with the past, neither are very reflective of what was going on in 1976. But I always think, each club year, to see how the previous years of the 20th century were considered from that vantage.

From my week’s books, I had three successes and two not-quites – I think The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore ended up being my favourite of the five.

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor – #1976Club

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Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor | Hachette UKBlaming was Elizabeth Taylor’s final novel, written while she knew she was dying – and death and mourning are very much at the heart of the book. It opens with Amy and Nick on a cruise. It is to celebrate Nick’s recovery after months of illness, and the first chapter or so is what you might expect of a Taylor novel set at sea – acute observations, gentle interactions, characters reflecting on their own lives as they go about the minutiae of each day.

And then… Nick dies, and it becomes a very different sort of book.

The reader hasn’t spent much time with Nick, so we do not really mourn him – meaning that we can observe Amy’s grief almost impartially. We grow to know her as a widow, and it is through this lens that we truly begin our readerly relationship with her, even though it is the newest and briefest period of her life. Back home, she already begins to feel an awkwardness with her son and daughter-in-law. Taylor describes the surprising, unsettling qualities of grief well, and carefully avoids any passages of exposition which lay bear emotions. It is gradual and beautiful.

One of the people Amy and Nick met on the cruise was an American novelist called Martha. The relationship was a little imbalanced even at the beginning – Martha seemed to want to give more and take more than they did. As ever, Taylor is subtle: Martha is not an imposition they sardonically mock. She is welcomed as a friend – but perhaps not to the extent she wants to be.

And, of all the people in Amy’s life, it is Martha who becomes central after Nick has gone. She arrives, clearly intending to stay for a while. And the novel then becomes about two people, slowly and often ungraciously getting to know each other. There is a sort of dependence that is only limitedly related to friendship. And it is certainly still Martha who wants the relationship to be maintained, even while – to the outside – she seems to be offering more. Taylor is wonderful at dialogue, and particularly good at the prose between dialogue – even more impressively, she can go from the mind of one speaker to the other, and make it feel natural in the narrative. It’s difficult to do without feeling disorienting. I loved the ‘surprisingly to Amy’ at the end of this section:

‘What happened to the domestic help? Who used to come in, what was it, two mornings?’

‘Mrs Carpenter?’

‘Whoever.’ Martha shrugged.

Amy, suddenly fed up with it all, leaned back and smiled, pretended to look as if Martha’s yawning were catching, and she might drowse off any minute.

‘Ernie saw to Mrs Carpenter,’ she said.

Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or for you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed that sort of tenacity as coming from having no choice.

‘What was the war like?’ she now – surprisingly to Amy – asked.

And what sort of novels does Martha write? Taylor describes them in perhaps my favourite section of the novel – what a wonderful satire of the sort of novel that proliferated in the ’70s:

Sometimes she thought about Martha and wondered what she was doing, and from curiosity borrowed one of her novels from the library. It was very short, but all the same she skipped through it – and thought what a stifling little world it was, of a love affair gone wrong, of sleeping-pills and contraceptives, tears, immolation; a woman on her own. Objects took the place of characters – the cracked plate, a dripping tap, a bunch of water-sprinkled violets minutely described, a tin of sardines, a broken comb: and the lone woman moved among them as if in a dream. The writing was spare, as if translated from the French.

What doesn’t feel very of its period, on the other hand, is the presence of ‘Ernie’ mentioned in the earlier quote. He is a live-in servant with his own variety of a servants’ hall – albeit it is just him in there, cooking for Amy and then eating uninspiring snacks himself. I loved how Taylor wrote his discomfort at the effrontery of Martha coming down to his quarters – and his growing dependence on her interruptions. But how many households had live-in domestic staff in the mid-70s, particularly one which seems well-off but not upper-class? Ernie’s presence is often both amusing and poignant, but didn’t feel quite of the novel’s time.

I should say, Blaming is often quite funny – particularly where Amy’s grandchildren are concerned. It’s certainly not a comic novel, but Taylor knows how to weave together the comic and tragic in a way that is recognisable from reality. Actually, a small criticism: Taylor is so good at small observations, and so I was surprised at a couple of moments – both connected with sounds – that leapt out at me as not working. See what you think…

Already she wore so many [bracelets] that when she raised her arms to smooth her hair, there was a rippling, chiming sound as they softly clashed down to her elbows.

and

An old magnolia grandiflora was dropping leaves with quite a clatter onto the pathway.

I found ‘clashed’ and ‘clatter’ such odd choices in these passages, which are quite far apart in the novel. Perhaps they are meant to be discordant, but these moments didn’t work for me. They jarred in an author who is usually so good at precision.

Overall, Blaming is a very good novel and a worthy closing to Taylor’s brilliant career. I haven’t even touched on the cleverness of the title, and the different meanings it has. Is it a quintessential 1976 novel? No, probably not. But every year sees the end of eras as well as the beginning of new ones, and this novel is really a farewell to the decades that preceded it.

Bear by Marian Engel – #1976Club

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Some bloggers and books are inextricably linked. Someone talks about a book with such passion, and perhaps often, that they and the book become united. I think that’s probably true of me and Miss Hargreaves. It’s definitely true of Dorian and Bear by Marian Engel.

You probably know Dorian’s brilliant blog, or have encountered him on Twitter – and he has written a wonderful article about this novella. Because of him, Bear has been on my horizons for a while. When it was reprinted by Daunt Books this year, I got a copy (and it was another recommendation, really, because Daunt are so flawless in their choice of reprints). When it turned out to match the club year, it was a no-brainer to pick up.

Lou is a librarian in Toronto, though her role seems to encompass archivist as well. Describing her job is one of the first moments I stopped to note down the beautiful precision of Engel’s writing:

Lou dug and devilled in library and files, praying as she worked that research would reveal enough to provide her subject with a character. The Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel. Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed.

Her role might sound wonderful to the likes of you and me, but she has grown weary of it and wishes to escape her lonely urban life. When the Institute for which she works needs someone to go to Cary’s Island, part of a legacy left by Colonel Jocelyn Cary, she is the person for the job. The idea is that she is to catalogue the library, find out what she can about Cary, and report back about whether or not the estate would make a good place to develop a research facility.

I love novels about outsiders going to small, isolated communities. Those narratives can take so many directions – perhaps it will be a new lease of life, perhaps unsettling, perhaps a panacea, perhaps antagonistic. Bear takes parts of all of these. Lou finds a sort of freedom in being unleashed from her life – and the locals are hesitantly welcoming. But there is much more to discover. Here she is, after talking to one of the locals who is sometimes kind and sometimes not:

She made as if to go inside the house again, for it was dark and she was tired and cold, but Homer stood looking at her uneasily, shifting from foot to foot. She wondered if he was going to touch her or to denounce her. She wanted to get in and get settled. There had been so much day; she had a lot to think about. She was impatient.

‘Did anyone tell you,’ he asked, ‘about the bear?’

Nobody has. It says something about the beguiling way that Engel writes that it somehow doesn’t leap out as ridiculous that her role on the island includes caring for a bear, and that nobody has mentioned it. But apparently the Careys have always had a bear – and there is one, enormous and noisome, chained to the ground. Apparently docile, but who knows what would happen if he were given his freedom.

Gradually, Lou starts to be curious about the bear. There is something about sharing this isolation with one other living creature that starts to give a sense of companionship. But she never forgets the essential danger of the bear – that he could end her life on a whim. She seems almost intoxicated by this potential for danger – as she is intoxicated by the sense of escape she has from her ordinary life.

And, yes. Moment by moment, the narrative edges closer and closer to a sexual relationship between Lou and the bear – so that, when it happens, it is shocking but it somehow coheres with everything that has gone before.

I think the reason Bear can cope with its bizarre, extraordinary plot is the fineness of Engel’s writing. She uses all the senses, as well as exploring Lou’s mind in sentences that are sparse but beautiful. Here’s an example of her writing treading that line between poetic and straightforward, finding the perfect place in between:

He smelled better than he had before he started swimming, but his essential smell was still there, a scent of musk as shrill as the high sweet note of a shepherd’s flute.

It is a short novel, perhaps a novella, and I read it in a few hours. There is something dizzying about it. While Lou dices with danger, the tension I found in the novel was really about Lou’s discovery of herself – of the limits of new frontiers, and how gently she can travel beyond those limits.

When I mentioned I was reading Bear, I got the impression that a few people wondered how I’d cope with the theme. Gasping emojis and the word ‘No’ were among the comments I got on Instagram. But it is far from my first moment of fictional bestiality! I wrote a chapter of my DPhil thesis on animal metamorphosis, and it also encompassed animal marriage and, yes, sex with animals. It crops up in Lady Into Fox by David Garnett and His Monkey Wife by John Collier – there is nothing new under the sun etc. etc. So the relationship that emerges between Lou and the bear might be the shocking detail that people remember most – but, at its heart, Bear is much more sophisticated than a can-you-believe-it moment.

Almost any story can be beautiful if told beautifully, and Engel’s writing is a sensuous, careful delight. I’d suggest going into the novella without worrying about where the plot will lead. Go for the journey.

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore – #1976Club

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brian moore - the doctor s wife - AbeBooksSheila Redden has come to France to celebrate her anniversary with Kevin, the doctor of the title. She has come ahead of him, as he has been caught up with work – and they’ve returned to the place where they had their honeymoon fifteen years earlier. Before heading to the very same hotel in Villefranche, she is spending a short time in Paris, visiting an old friend and her current boyfriend. Her life is painfully ordinary. She loves her teenage son Danny, though not all-encompassingly. She supposes herself to love her husband and her life, because that is what one does. Sheila is an introspective woman who manages to avoid looking too close.

Coming back to France isn’t just stepping back into a past of their early romance, it is escaping the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That term has been used in our earliest ‘club’ years and in our latest, though here it is different than in the ’20s, of course. Sheila is a ‘Catholic’, very much inverted commas in place, and has no strong political leanings – just a horror of the death and destruction that is happening in her homeland.

In Paris, Sheila gets talking to a young American called Tom. He is charming, funny, and – most unusually of all for Sheila – interested in her. They share an evening of conversation, walking around the sights of Paris, discussing their pasts, presents, futures. It is a perfect evening, and Tom tries to persuade Sheila to stay longer – particularly as her husband is further delayed. But she insists she has to go to the hotel in Villefranche.

Moore is very good at moments that illuminate a life: that tell you enough in a microcosm that you can understand the broader dynamic of a relationship or state of mind. Even rarer, he is good at doing it unshowily, letting the moment be an ordinary part of a day and letting the reader recognise its significance.

Ninety minutes later, the plane began its approach to Nice, flying along the coastline over Saint-Raphael and Cannes. Through the window she saw villas on cliffsides, emerald swimming pools, white feathers of yacht sales scattered in the bays. When she had first looked down on this coast long ago on her honeymoon, she had turned in excitement, saying: ‘Oh, Kevin, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to live here all the time?’ only to have him take her literally and answer, ‘I suppose it would, if all I wanted to do was water-ski the rest of my life.’ She remembered that now, as the plane wheeled, pointing down toward land. Below her, cars moved, slow as treacle on the ribbon of seafront road. The plane skimmed the tops of a row of palm trees, came in over a cluster of white rectangular hangars to land with a jolt of its undercarriage and a sickening rear jet thrust.

She hasn’t been at the hotel for very long when the reception call and say there is a gentleman waiting for her in the lobby.

When the lift reach the ground floor and paused for that little airbrake moment before it finally settled, all at once she knew. The lift door opened, showing the lobby, him standing there, throwing his head up at sight of her, very excited, smiling, awaiting her reaction. ‘Hello, Sheila. Mind if I join you?’

It was then she saw how nervous he was.

‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I hate to be left behind at airports.’

It sounds a bit manipulative out of context, but Moore goes out of his way to make Tom kind, selfless and respectful of Sheila. She is so unused to being put first, and to be found vital as a woman – and she quickly falls in love with this younger man. It is mutual, and they quickly find themselves in bed together. As we had known they would from a prologue at the beginning of the book.

The Doctor’s Wife then treads three lines, I think. One is Sheila finding a new world before her, and her new relationship with Tom. One is Kevin trying to resurrect his marriage from Northern Ireland – enrolling Sheila’s brother, who is also a doctor, to try and help plan how best to overcome what he sees as a temporary insanity. And one is Sheila dealing with the collapse of her marriage through a series of phone calls and a lot of personal reflection. Each is captivating, and the reader feels a constant whirl of pity, hope, and compassion.

Moore is such a sensitive and subtle novelist. It’s one of those plots that could come across quite tawdry, but there is a beauty to this novel – because it is concerned most deeply with people, not with their actions. While the plot is about adultery and its aftermath, it’s really ‘about’ Sheila and her being shaken into a fresh development as a person.

As in his best-known work, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore gets deep under the skin of an unhappy and unfulfilled middle-aged[ish] woman, and does it brilliantly. If that is his masterpiece, then The Doctor’s Wife isn’t too many paces behind it.

Sun City by Tove Jansson – #WITMonth

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I bought Sun City by Tove Jansson in 2007, at which point there wasn’t that much of Jansson’s work available in English. This was one of two novels that had been translated in the ‘70s, and then she had languished – until Sort Of Books started their noble work of publishing translations by Thomas Teal. Teal was also the translator back in the day, and did Sun City – so I knew I was in good hands with him when I finally took this off the shelf. To be honest, I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of running out of Jansson things to read – but if not for Women in Translation month, then when?

The setting of Sun City sets it apart from Jansson’s other books, and perhaps helps explain why it was picked for translating into English first. Rather than her usual Finnish islands or towns, we are in St Petersburg, Florida – at an old people’s home called the Berkeley Arms. The residents are mostly American, and it’s a world away from where Jansson spent her life. (I’ve read two biographies of Jansson and I still can’t remember if she visited America, but I’m almost certain she wasn’t there for any extended period.)

While Sun City was only Jansson’s second novel, she was already 60 by the time it was published (1974) – not old, but also not looking at this retirement home through the callous eyes of youth. The newest resident is Elizabeth Morris, intelligent and reserved and a little unsure about her new community, and it looks at one point like she might be the protagonist – but this becomes very much an ensemble piece. Much of the ‘action’ takes place in the rocking chairs outside, which are strictly assigned to individual residents, in practice if not in theory (‘To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St Petersburg […] Only death could move the rocking chairs in St Petersburg’).

Mrs Elizabeth Morris of Great Island, Nebraska, seventy-seven years old, had the second rocking chair from the railing by the big magnolia. Next to the magnolia was Mr Thompson, who pretended to be deaf, and on the other side was Miss Peabody, who was very shy. So Mrs Morris could sit and think in peace. She had come to St Petersburg several weeks earlier, alone, with a sore throat, and once at the Berkeley Arms her voice disappeared completely. On a page from a notebook Mrs Morris had supplied information about her name, her condition, and some antique furniture that was to arrive later. Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey.

If you’re familiar with Jansson’s writing, you’ll recognise her tone – certainly in sentences like that last one. I like that the long, lonely journey could either be the one that has brought her from Nebraska to Florida, or could simply describe her life. It feels like familiar Jansson territory in the writing, if not the setting.

Sun City continues in an episodic way. An estranged spouse of one of the residents turns up; a couple of residents die; there is a trip away from the Berkeley Arms. There is also drama among the people working there, particularly one in a relationship with an eccentric young man who believes Jesus will soon return and is waiting to be collected by a fringe Christian organisation.

A lot of Jansson’s writing is episodic. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether her most famous work for adults, The Summer Book, is a novel or a series of interlinking short stories. Sun City is definitely a novel, but what makes it feel a bit different from her other work, and perhaps a little less successful, is that the moments that happen are all a little overly dramatic. It feels like, in transferring her canvas to America, Jansson has taken on board the idea that everything in America is bigger: the events are bigger, the reactions are bigger, the potentials for change are bigger. I have to be honest, I missed the gentleness of her Scandinavian backdrop, where lives are no less full but somehow the stakes seem to be lower.

If this were my first novel by Jansson, I’ve no doubt I’d have wanted to read more. Her sentences are still beautiful and insightful, and the partnership with Teal is reliably great – but the good news for people looking to explore Jansson is that the best stuff is already in print, in translation. This is an enjoyable coda, but Jansson is at her finest on her Finnish island.

Not After Midnight and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek

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I’ve read quite a few of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, but I don’t think I’d previously read any of her short stories – some of which are, of course, very famous from the film adaptations that were made of them. Last year I was toying between reading Not After Midnight and Other Stories and Don’t Look Now and other stories – both of which I owned – before I opened them and discovered they were the same collection under different names. One went to a charity shop and I read neither – but now I’ve finally read it.

In this collection, Daphne du Maurier’s tackles what I think is the hardest form: the long short story. I’m not usually a fan of short stories that go beyond 20 or so pages, because it feels like they are wasting the unique attributes of the form. But in Not After Midnight, du Maurier writes five long short stories – and I may as well take them in turn.

Don’t Look Now

The famous one! I’ve never seen the film, but I’m certainly aware of it – but we’ll be considering the story, of course. It opens:

“Don’t look now,” John said to this wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.”

It’s a good start. John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, grieving the loss of their young daughter Christine – she has recently died of meningitis. The holiday is marred a little by news of seemingly random murders – somebody is roaming the streets with a knife. The couple get talking to this ‘couple of old girls’, one of whom tells John that he has second sight. When he sees a small girl wearing a pixie hood running in fear down a street, the lady tells him that Christine is trying to warn of danger in Venice.

When their son is taken ill at school, Laura flies home. John is going to drive home, but a mysterious incident makes him remain – and leads to a very dramatic and spooky ending.

This is an excellent story, deservedly renowned for its tension and creepiness, as well as a very good depiction of a British holiday in Italy. My main reservation with it is that du Maurier seems to think grieving a dead child is something only a mother would do. John tends to his wife, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered that Christine has died. But, that detail aside, a marvellous story.

Not After Midnight

Timothy Grey is a schoolteacher on holiday on Crete, suffering from some unspecified illness – possibly a nervous breakdown. He demands a chalet near the sea, because he intends to paint – the hotel staff are reluctant, because somebody staying there recently died…

The other notable guests are the Stolls – Mr Stoll is rude, loud, and drunk; his wife is silent and possibly deaf.

The title of this story is excellent, and for much of it du Maurier sustains the same tension and intrigue as ‘Don’t Look Now’ – but I found the ending rather unsatisfying and quite plebian.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh is an aspiring actor who finds impelled to go off to Ireland to find a man called Nick, once close friends with her father. On her father’s deathbed, he has reminisced about Nick – and, in his dying moment, looks at Shelagh with fear and horror. Shelagh hopes for answers, or at least some attempt of posthumous reconciliation, by finding Nick. But when she identifies where he lives, she is ambushed and kidnapped by Nick’s accomplices, and forced to stay on his island.

Rather unsettlingly, they start that of charming, flirty conversation that sometimes happens between kidnappers and kidnappees in films, and presumably never in real life. This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome; it is instant.

There are a couple of revelatory twists in this story – one of which is to do with contemporary politics, and one of which is pretty horrifying. More something from Greek myth than life. Anyway, this was another story that started really interestingly and couldn’t sustain that intrigue satisfactorily, in my opinion.

The Way of the Cross

The only story in the collection without any sort of horror element, this is another tale of Brits abroad – in this case, Jerusalem. A group led by a stand-in vicar are touring the Holy Land, each with their own anxieties and reasons for being there. Perhaps the most memorable of the group is nine-year-old Robin – the only person there who seems to have read the gospels – who leads them in a chaotic attempt to find the Garden of Gethsemane.

This is a really good and unusual story, though one that doesn’t fit the feel of the collection at all. It is quite poignant, as the group face humiliations and failures – realising the trip is not the once-in-a-lifetime experience they’d hoped for, and finding out things about themselves and others that they’d rather not know. As I say, this isn’t horror – there is nothing creepy about it – but there is an underlying sense of lives being sadly changed, which is perhaps more horrifying than the jump scares of the earlier stories.

The Breakthrough

Some sci-fi thing about capturing essences that I didn’t enjoy at all, but that’s probably because I find sci-fi rather tedious at the best of times.

Ok, overall rather a mixed reception from me. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is brilliant, and ‘The Way of the Cross’ is great in a very different way. The other stories are largely readable, but all could have done with some rethinking and editing. Du Maurier is exceptional at premises and settings, but doesn’t always know how to keep those things going for the length of a long short story.