1976 Club: Review Round-Up

It’s been another great week of seeing lots of reviews crop up across the blogosphere – thank you everyone for joining in. I haven’t read all the contributions yet, but will make sure to do so. And here is a round-up of the books covered – if I’ve missed yours, please do let me know. And there’s still a day and a half to go, of course, as I click ‘publish’.

Speedboat by Renata Adler
Words and Peace

Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken
She Reads Novels

The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss
Calmgrove

Alas For Her That Me Men by Mary Ann Ashe
Briefer Than Literal Statement

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov
Brona’s Books

Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
What Me Read

A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

A Little Local Murder by Robert Barnard
Bitter Tea and Mystery

Afternoon of a Good Woman by Nina Bawden
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond
Staircase Wit

The Iron Coin by Jorge Luis Borges
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Beard’s Roman Women by Anthony Burgess
Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books

Two pieces by William Burroughs
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Mystery of the Emerald Buddha by Betty Cawanna
Staircase Wit

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
What Me Read

The Question of Max by Amanda Cross
Scones and Chaises Longues

Catch A Falling by Len Deighton
Bitter Tea and Mystery

Deus Irae by Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny
Typings

The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
What Cathy Read Next

Bear by Marian Engel
Stuck in a Book
HeavenAli

Home to Roost by Andrew Garve
Bitter Tea and Mystery
Staircase Wit

Roots by Alex Haley
Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Buried in Print
The Australian Legend

Tintin and the Picaros by Herge
Literary Potpourri

Another Death in Venice by Reginald Hill
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
Winston’s Dad
Finding Time to Write
1streading’s Blog

Hilda’s Wedding by Elizabeth Jolley
Whispering Gums

Orsinian Tales by Ursula Le Guin
Entering the Enchanted Castle

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula Le Guin
[A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else]
Entering the Enchanted Castle
Pining for the West

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann
Stuck in a Book

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
746Books

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively
Relevant Obscurity
Laurie Welch on Instagram
Literary Potpourri

Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes
Annabookbel

The Golden Gate by Alistair MacLean
Literary Potpourri

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Words and Peace

Apalache by Paul Metcalf
Neglected Books

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
Typings

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
Stuck in a Book
HeavenAli
JacquiWine

The Voice of the Sea by Alberto Moravio
1streading’s Blog

Travels by Jan Morris
The Captive Reader

Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley
Stuck in a Book

Short stories by Vladimir Nabokov
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
ANZ Lit Lovers

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Book Word
Bookish Beck
Expendable Mudge

The Plantagenet Prelude by Jean Plaidy
Lizzy’s Literary Life
Hopewell’s Library of Life

The Space Machine by Christopher Priest
1streading’s Blog

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Dolce Bellezza

It Concerns You Too by Herman Sachnowitz
Kinship of All Species

The Girls from the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage
Book Around the Corner

Lucinella by Lore Segal
746Books

The Omen by David Seltzer
Mr Kaggsy

Wilt by Tom Sharpe
Rattlebag and Rhubarb

A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon
Staircase Wit

The Takeover by Muriel Spark
The Takeover

Abel’s Island by William Steig
Becky’s Book Reviews

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
Rick MacDonnell

Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor
JacquiWine’s Journal
Reading and Watching the World
Stuck in a Book

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Becky’s Book Reviews

Letters from Father Christmas by JRR Tolkien
Becky’s Book Reviews

1876 by Gore Vidal
What Me Read

How Did I Get To Be Forty… and other atrocities by Judith Viorst
The Captive Reader

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
1streading’s Blog
Anji Hanzel

Meridian by Alice Walker
What Me Read
Reading Envy

Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones
Staircase Wit

Two unsuccessful #1976Club reads…

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

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

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

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.

1976 Club: Post your reviews here! #1976Club

The 1976 Club is here! It’s time for the bi-annual event where Karen and I ask readers across the internet to join together to build up a picture of a particular year in books. This week, we’re asking you to read and review a book – or more – published in 1976. Any book published in 1976 counts – in whatever format, language, place.

Just put a link to your review in the comments here – on your blog, GoodReads, Instagram, wherever. If you don’t have any platform to leave a review, you can write your review in the comments.

I also wanted to start the week by sharing this apt quote from Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017), translated by Sasha Dugdale – an eclectic and poetic work of non-fiction that starts from the idea of looking at old family photographs and ranges far and wide. How perfect for the club projects is this? It really captures something of what I hoped we could achieve when I first came up with the club idea.

There is a strange stylistic kinship between texts of the same moment, written in the same cross-section of time, but it has nothing to do with authorial intention and can only be seen in hindsight. With a distance of twenty or thirty years it’s hard not to notice the single intonation, the common denominator welding together newspaper, shop sign, poem read from the stage at the all-women college, the conversation on the way home. It is as if every age produces it owns particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner. Even those who behave as if they stood outside the idea of the ‘typical’ suddenly make a linguistic gesture that’s common to their contemporaries, without even noticing it, as if they were unaware of the pull of gravity on them.