1980s

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

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I bought The Children’s Bach (1984) by Helen Garner in Oxford’s newest bookshop, Caper, a while ago. I might have mentioned the shop before. From the outside, it looks like a children’s bookshop – all joyful colours and suchlike – and it is, indeed, a children’s specialist. But there is a sizeable section at the back for adult books, all arranged together under headings like ‘the mundane everyday’ and ‘incredible journeys’. It’s a fun idea that invites serendipitous finds. When I came across the W&N Essentials reprint of The Children’s Bach, I couldn’t resist. This cover is so beautiful – one of my favourites of recent years.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner | W&N - Ground-breaking, award-winning, thought-provoking books since 1949

I’ve been listening to a lot of Garner’s non-fiction in the past couple of years, but I did start my reading journey with her about 15 years ago with The Spare Room. My return to her fiction – only my second novel by her – reminds me of how taughtly she tells stories of disrupted domesticity.

In The Children’s Bach, Dexter and Elizabeth meet after years apart. They were at university together but drifted apart – yet, when they reunite, they almost unquestioningly bring their attendant worlds together. Dexter and his wife have two young children, Arthur and Billy (whose unspecific disability is dealt with in a way that felt quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t be done now). Elizabeth is dating an untamed musician, Philip, and he has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth’s closest relationship is with her much younger sister, Vicki, who is still on the cusp of adulthood while Elizabeth is heading into middle-age. The coming together of these families ultimately brings about a crisis.

A synopsis of Garner’s book is one thing. The reading experience is quite another. Garner has cut away at the plot until what is left is really an impression of a plot. There is an excellent scene where each line of dialogue and narrative is clearly a moment from an extended evening – it is the most filmic scene I’ve ever read; the most clearly like a film montage. It’s extremely effective. Writ on a larger scale, that is what the whole of The Children’s Bach does. You won’t find lengthy examinations of motivations and emotions – rather, Garner gives us stark glimpses into these people’s lives. That means that the choices people make play out almost before you realise they’ve made them.

And then, on the other hand, Garner gives some scenes unexpected breathing room. As David Nicholls highlights in his enjoyable introduction: ‘Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand.’

But the main star of The Children’s Bach is Garner’s writing. The unwavering, merciless observation she brings to her non-fiction is less intimidating in fiction, but no less present. She is exceptionally good on small domestic moments – and, much harder, equally good on the occasional abstract or nebulous moments. Here’s something which combines most – the recognisable ‘braced for more sobbing’ leading into a lovely dream scene.

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

Threaded throughout the novel is music. The soundtrack – of Bach, of Philip’s grungier music – is never used heavy-handedly, but at the same time gives us insight and a rhythm to the story.

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

The only drawback I found with The Children’s Bach is how unknowable the characters are. Or is that a drawback, or simply a choice? Garner’s impressionistic writing is stunning to read, and every paragraph has the weight and confidence of a poem. I often stopped and reread sentences simply because they were so beautiful with such well-judged balance to them. But I don’t think I could describe the characters. Philip and Vicki are the exceptions to that rule, but the others felt like ciphers – or perhaps like containers for Garner’s beautiful observations and discrete moments. Is it deliberate, or a casualty of the novel’s sparseness?

Some critic apparently said The Children’s Bach was one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, which is the sort of silly thing that critics say when they want to get noticed. I can think of many short novels that I think are probably better, though perhaps not many that are as delicately and deftly done. With stronger depths to her characters, it would be a masterpiece. And perhaps those depths would come with rereading – my main takeaway from the experience is that I’m keen to reread, and perhaps find still more than I did this time. While googling for reviews, I discovered that Whispering Gums did exactly that.

So, how to conclude? I think there’s a strong chance that this is a brilliant novel, and it’s certainly a brilliant piece of writing. And perhaps it couldn’t have been such a beautiful reading experience if it had been more grounded. Or perhaps it would feel more grounded the second time around? Well, why not find out for yourself?

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann #ABookADayInMay Day 8

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Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I first heard of Lucy Ellmann when her behemoth, one-sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport made a big splash. I was and am intrigued to read it, but rather put off by the length. So when I came across a copy of her first novel, Sweet Desserts (1988), and it was only 145 pages – well, that felt much more manageable. A quick few thoughts about it… but also please watch Rick’s video and Jill’s response.

The novella is about Suzy and Franny, sisters from Illinois who grow to adulthood in a curious kind of dependent competition. They are forever watching what the other is doing, perhaps sabotaging it, and self-destructively bound by something that must be quite close to love.

Over the course of the novella, they move to Oxford with their academic father and develop as adults. Suzy is perhaps the dominant voice, and we see her failing career as a would-be academic alongside her erstwhile relationships with unsuitable or uncaring men – some of which last years, and none of which seem wise or happy. But Ellmann finds the humour in this bleakness. I’m not sure I’d necessarily call Sweet Desserts a comic novel, even a black comedy, but it is strewn with bitterly funny lines and observations.

Suzy is drawn with some depth, but is also driven as a character by her dual appetites: for food and for sex. Binging food is a way she copes with trauma, and seeking sex is a way she tries to find self-worth. The through-theme about her eating and her weight is curious. I don’t think it would be written about in quite the same way today, but nor is it a disparaging or mocking portrayal. Rather, Ellmann explores Suzy’s relationship with eating and weight with a sort of wry detachment.

It was in Oxford that the secret eating began in earnest: I caught Franny hovering around the fridge with suspicious frequency and started to copy her. My hips soon seemed enormous in their circumference. It was all a great revenge on Daddy, fascinated as he was by his own repugnance towards Rubens’ women.

Sweet Desserts jumps around timelines a bit, but the most distinctive thing about it is the way the narrative is interspersed with a miscellany of other texts. From art criticism to recipes to self-help books, they make the novella feel a bit like it is found in a maelstrom of the everyday. It is immersed in the world of Suzy and Franny, whether that is cereal boxes or radio programmes.

Frachipan Fancies

Fill the boat with the franchipan mixing, and then pipe lines across the sweet paste which has been previously thinned with water to piping consistency. When baked, wash over with hot apricot jelly.

It’s an ambitious and interesting first novel, and I think Ellmann has a brilliantly distinctive voice. I’m not sure why she chose to make it so short – Sweet Desserts doesn’t feel like it needed to be a novella, and could easily have sustained another 100 pages or more. But then who knows if I’d actually have picked it up – and I’m definitely glad I did.

The novel that turned into All Of Us Strangers

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Strangers (Paperback)

I loved Andrew Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers and think it’s criminal that Andrew Scott and Jamie Bell haven’t won every award under the sun (and Paul Mescal and Claire Foy can have some too). It sent me off to read the novel on which it was loosely based – Strangers (1987) by Taichi Yamada, translated from Japanese by Wayne Lammers. Interestingly, the original Japanese title translates as ‘Summer of the Strange People’, so it’s had a few metamorphoses.

There’s nothing more irritating that somebody comparing a novel to an adaptation if you haven’t seen it, so I’ll just say that Haigh made plenty of changes to his screenplay for All of Us Strangers – though probably not as many as you might imagine by his slightly disingenuous remarks that he ‘doesn’t remember’ what happens in the original novel.

I listened to the audiobook, so won’t be able to quote from the novel – but here’s the premise. Hideo Harada lives alone in a big apartment block which is in fact mostly offices, and hardly anybody else lives in the building. He is recovering from divorcing from his wife, not mourning the relationship so much (the divorce was his decision) as he mourns the life it gave him. Hideo is a middle-aged TV scriptwriter who only really seems to have one close friend – a TV producer with whom he has worked, and who reveals he is planning to ask Hideo’s ex-wife to marry him. It is the death knell to their friendship and (the producer insists) to their professional relationship. The only other person in his life is his adult son, whom he doesn’t see very often. 

Despite these sadnesses, Hideo is not a very emotional man. He wishes some circumstances were different, but he doesn’t seem to rail against them particularly. He is a man used to tragedy: his parents died in an accident when he was a teenager. And when connection is offered to him, he doesn’t take it up. A beautiful young woman, Kei, is the only other person in the apartment block one evening. She comes to his flat, hoping she can join him for a drink. He turns her away.

Not long later, Hideo bumps into Kei by the lifts. One thing leads to another, and they start a friendship that quickly becomes a sexual relationship. So quickly that it’s hard to tell exactly what is propelling it, besides our repeated assurances that Kei is beautiful.

The far more interesting relationship is happening simultaneously. On a whim, Hideo goes back to the neighbourhood where he grew up. He goes to a show, and Yamada has some fun at the expense of a mediocre comedian in a sort of variety show. From the back, Hideo hears a man call out, and thinks he recognises the voice – but he can’t see the man. After the show finishes, though, this man beckons Hideo to go with him. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see Hideo, nor does he think Hideo will object to going. And Hideo follows, dumbstruck.

I’m going to say why, though do skip if you’d like to go into Strangers entirely without spoilers.

The man looks and sounds exactly like… Hideo’s father. Despite the fact that Hideo’s father died more than 30 years ago. This man hasn’t aged since that date – he is, in fact, rather younger than Hideo himself. Hideo follows him back to his humble home… and finds the doppelganger of his mother there too. He hasn’t time travelled, because all the modern conveniences are present. So what’s going on? They both speak to him affectionately and without reserve. I was struck by how some of the nuances of Strangers were lost by being in translation: my understanding (from context clues in the novel, and from reading Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds about the Japanese language) is that there are many different grammatical impacts that depend on the register used. For instance, a parent speaking to a child would use different verb endings (maybe?) to a friend speaking to a friend, or a stranger speaking to a stranger. I imagine Yamada makes most of this function of Japanese, in the maelstrom of confusion and trying to establish precisely what is going on and what relationships are at stake.

Strangers is a short novel, so the emotional impact of this encounter is dealt with efficiently. There is plenty of plot and we aren’t given much time to linger in these emotions – which gives the book a feeling of spareness, reluctant to let the reader or the characters get bogged down in the full implications. I think it works, though it could have worked equally well if a longer work had been dedicated entirely to this surreal relationship.

Instead, Strangers hovers on the edge of horror. I didn’t find it particularly scary, which I was nervous about, but it certainly incorporates ideas of fear rather than simply nostalgia or love. Chilling is perhaps the word, though in a way that is interesting rather than challenging. The fear doesn’t come from the encounter with his parents, or parent-like people – rather, it is his own deepening illness. People keep remarking how unwell he looks – how gaunt, like he has the sudden weight-loss of aggressive cancer. But when he looks in the mirror, he seems perfectly fine. What is going on, and is it connected to his visits to his ‘home’?

I thought Strangers was unusual and very good. It’s trying to do things in a genre that I don’t fully understand, and I’ve read so few Japanese novels that I don’t know how much of an outlier it is. Plot-wise it has a lot of similarities with the All of Us Strangers film. Tonally, it is often worlds apart. Both are experiences I can firmly recommend.

 

Golden States by Michael Cunningham

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You won’t find much mention of Golden States (1984) by Michael Cunningham online – or even in the next novels that were published, which silently erased his debut novel. In an interesting and deep interview Cunningham gave around 2001, he said this about Golden States:

I never felt good about that book, because I wrote it too fast. Because I knew it wasn’t the best book I could write. I’ve always felt that literature and reading have so many enemies—and writers are the very least of the enemies of writing and reading. But I do sometimes find myself looking through the books in a bookstore and galleys people have sent me, thinking, you could have done better than this. You did not put your ass on the line. Here’s just another book taking up space in the universe, and this is part of what is making it hard to keep books alive in the world. They just stack up like cordwood. I’m so much more interested in some kind of grand ambitious failure than I am in someone’s modest little success that achieves its modest little aims. I felt that I had written a book like that, and I wasn’t happy about it. My publisher very generously allowed me to turn down a paperback offer and it has really gone away.

It’s an interesting take on a novel that I think is much better than Cunningham thinks it is. He doesn’t need to be ashamed of it at all.

Golden States is about David, a young boy living with his mother and sister Lizzie in California, and his experiences on the cusp of young adulthood. Parts of him are very childish – he constantly squabbles with his sister, and plays games (and then fall out) with his nearby best friend. Parts of him are beginning to develop more, so he is asking questions about his future, his older half-sister’s (Janet’s) long-term relationship, his place in the world. Recurring antagonisms continue alongside something new. Here is one conversation, but almost any in the first half of the book could be used as an example of the way Cunningham combines the frivolous and the undercurrent.

Janet and Lizzie glanced at one another. “What’s nine times seven?” Lizzie asked.

David put his fingers in his ears. “Don’t do that,” he said, and his voice sounded to him as if he was speaking from a cave. Janet said something, and he unstopped his ears. “What?” he asked her.

“My feet are cold,” Lizzie said.

“Then go inside. What did you say, Janet?”

“Let’s all go in,” Janet said.

“That’s not what you said.”

“Men,” Janet said to Lizzie in a lofty, lecturer’s tone, “always want the facts.”

“That’s not true,” David said.

Janet patted his knee. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the lizard inside before she freezes to death.”

“Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said. She had begun hopping on one foot, and shivering.

“Go on,” David said. “I’m going to sit here a little longer.”

He hoped Janet would send Lizzie in alone, but she got up and slipped her arm around Lizzie’s skinny shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “See you inside.”

“See you,” David said.

Lizzie tucked her hand under Janet’s belt, glanced over her shoulder, smiled knowingly, and said, “Sixty-three.”

As with most Cunningham novels, the book is about interiority – but the sort of interiority that surfaces in conversations with anyone and everyone. People, particularly David, never quite express what it is that they are trying to convey, but keep determinedly trying. Cunningham’s talent is combining this philosophical search with everyday dialogue and the details of the mundane. A thwarted shoplifting or a sibling dispute speak to much larger matters – things that David cannot comprehend, so he feels frustrated and confused. Many of Cunningham’s characters feel frustrated and confused, but the older ones at least expect it. David has yet to learn the limits of understanding.

In the second half of the novel, the dynamic changes. Janet is back in San Francisco – and David decides he has to travel there, for reasons I won’t spoil. And off he goes, with little money and a lot of nervousness about the journey. From here, Golden States becomes something of a travel or quest narrative – the curious people he’ll meet along the way, including one character who I think would be written rather differently now. The blurb says he ‘guides [David] across the threshold of sexuality’, but David is a child and the scene is deeply uncomfortable, even if not at all graphic.

I found the second half of the novel very tense, but preferred the more relaxed dynamics of the first half. I think they play better into Cunningham’s strengths as a writer – which include writing little gems of insightful sentences, like ‘The day would not settle into itself; would not descend from its feeling of suspension, as if the real day was yet to begin.’ There is a poeticism to his writing that is threaded through everything, even when contrasted with quite austere dialogue, and that won’t be to everyone’s tastes. For me, Golden States shows all the promise of the psychologically fascinating novelist Cunningham would become – and, indeed, bears comparison with many of his later novels. If it isn’t his masterpiece, or even the runner up, Golden States is still a very able and intriguing book of which Cunningham should be proud.

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.

The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek (Novella a Day in May #11)

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The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories by Du Maurier, Daphne [1907-1989]: (1981) | Little Stour Books PBFA MemberWhen I was looking at how to double up Novella a Day in May with Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, there weren’t a lot of options my shelves. If du Maurier wrote any novellas, then I don’t have them. But The Rebecca Notebook and other memories does come in at novella length, and has been waiting on my shelves since 2009.

I’m sure every one of you has read Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier’s runaway bestseller of 1938, and also (I would argue) her best novel. It’s been adapted for stage and screen many times, and has certainly reached classic status. That was also true in 1983, when du Maurier was in her mid-70s and The Rebecca Notebook was published. “Why, I have never understood!” claims du Maurier in the introduction – not so much that she can’t believe it has been popular, one suspects, than that she thinks it no better and no worse than all the rest of her output.

Anyway, its popularity is sufficient to sell this collection of non-fiction pieces – though the notebook itself accounts for only about 20 pages. It is an outline of the novel, though as she details later chapter it becomes rather more fleshed out with scenes and dialogue that she wanted to note. The survival of the notebook is owed to a plagiarism legal case, brought by Edwina MacDonald for a novel called Blind Windows, which du Maurier had never heard of. Du Maurier’s notes were thus used in her defence.

My only memory of the plagiarism suit was that the notebook was produced in court, and after cross-questioning the judge dismissed the case. I gave the notebook to dear Ellen Doubleday as a memento, and all I can recollect, after that first visit to the States, was being seasick all the way home in the Queen Mary.

When, after many more visits to the Doubledays, dearest Ellen died, she left the notebook to her daughter Puckie. Puckie returned it to me. And I reread it, for the first time in thirty years, when I received it.

It is a curio, and I did find it interesting to see how much du Maurier kept the same and how much she changed from this 20-page outline. The ending changes, and Mrs Danvers becomes creepier. That famous opening section is introduced – or, rather, moulded from the original epilogue (which is also included, after the notebook). All of this is only interesting if you love Rebecca – which I do, so it was.

The rest of the book is essays written at various times across du Maurier’s long career. The first concerns her famous writer grandfather, the next her famous actor/director father. The ones I found most interesting related to Menabilly (the model for Manderley in Rebecca) – I hadn’t realised that du Maurier wrote Rebecca simply on the strength of trespassing in the grounds of the abandoned house, and it wasn’t until years later that she managed to negotiate a lease and live there for a couple of decades.

Other essays are less convincing – I can’t imagine anybody is interested in du Maurier’s idiosyncratic and somewhat naïve takes on religion, and certainly you won’t be by the time you come across them for the third time – but there is enough of interest in parts of this collection to make it very much worth tracking down.

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

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Occasionally I post a book on Instagram which gets a chorus of approval from people who’ve loved it. Never more so than when I posted that I was reading Susan Hill’s 1982 The Magic Apple Tree. It sounds like a children’s book but it is not – the subtitle ‘A Country Year’ gives a bit more of a clue about what you’ll find inside. This is a non-fiction look at life in Hill’s Oxfordshire village – called Barley here, though I imagine that’s a pseudonym – over the course of a year.

The book is divided into the four seasons, and each section starts with a description of the titular apple tree (after, in my edition, a beautiful full-page engraving by John Lawrence. They look like woodcuts but are credited as engravings, so let’s go with that. Here is the opening to the section on spring:

The blossom opens slowly, slowly on the apple tree.  One day the boughs are grey, though with the swellings of the leaves to come visible if you look closely.  The next day and the next, here and there, a speck of white, and then a sprinkling, as though someone has thrown a handful of confetti up into the air and let it fall, anyhow, over the branches.

The weather is grey, it is cold still. The blossom looks like snow against the sky. And then, one morning, there is snow, snow at the very end of April, five or six inches of it, after a terrible stormy night, and rising from it, and set against the snow-filled sky, the little tree is puffed out with its blossom, a crazy sight, like some surrealist painting, and all around us, in every other garden, there is the white apple and the pink cherry blossom, thick as cream, in a winter landscape.

And another day, just before the blossom withers and shrinks back into the fast opening leaves, there is the softest of spring mornings, at last it is touched by the early sun, and the apple tree looks as it should look, if the world went aright, in springtime.

Though Hill is writing about one particular year, much of the book could be about any year. The seasons are, of course, roughly the same – though with enough differences to make each year distinct for a bit, before they all fade into one. But there is no plot that puts The Magic Apple Tree specifically into any particular 1980s year. In any approximate time could Hill have discussed what she grew, what she cooked, which village events she attended, how her neighbours dealt with cold weather and unpassable roads, and so on and so forth. In some ways, it could be similar to 40 years later – though now, living in my own Oxfordshire village, I am rather more easily connected with the outside world.

What I most loved in the book were flavours of the village community. The brothers who lived in a run-down house, selling illicitly made cider and completing each other’s sentences. The amiable rivalry at the village flower and produce show. The bartering system of goods, and the friendly competence of villagers who’ve lived in the same spot for decades or generations.

Hill and her then-husband Stanley Wells are not among those who’ve lived there for long. They are relative newcomers – and I can attest that it is quite easy to become part of an Oxfordshire village on short acquaintanceship. Certainly, Hill seems at the centre of activity. There is an element of sharpness that those of us who read her book blog will remember. She is certainly sure of her views, and offers them decidedly. It makes The Magic Apple Tree all the more distinct, as nobody else would or could have written this sort of book with precisely her perspective. Sometimes she offers her opinions as fact, but that is all part of the character of spending the year in her company.

Large sections of The Magic Apple Tree are about gardening and cooking, and these are the parts that I enjoyed a little less. Hill includes recipes and, while some recipes are eternal, others are curiously tied to their decade. And I am not a gardener, so am unlikely to take any of the advice she gives in that quarter – most of her advice being about the growing of fruit and vegetables, which she much prefers to growing flowers and non-edible plants.

But there is still plenty to delight, in the less practically minded parts of the book. Hill’s perceptive eye is turned not just on her fellow humans but on all the other living beings around her. Any description she gives of flora or fauna is done with beauty and accuracy, and without the cluttering of undue sentiment. She is able to delight in the active world of nature around her, and we can share in that delight, without it ever stepping in the fey. For example…

On the last Sunday in August, at about eleven o’clock, in the morning, I carried a pile of bolted lettuces and old pea haulms down to the compost heap, and, as I was stuffing it down, I glanced up into the Buttercup field. It was a fine morning, the early mist was rolling back across the Fen and cows and trees and fences were emerging from it in the sunshine. Near at hand, the grass was glittering with dew. And not ten yards away from me, looking straight into my face, was a dog fox, big and bold and handsome, sniffing the air. I waited. He waited. He had been on his way to our garden, there was no doubt, at all, he would have been up and over the stone wall and among the hens in seconds. And the hens were all out of their run and scratching about the garden.

Then the fox caught my scent and turned and went streaking away down the slope towards the willows and up the Rise on the opposite side, brush up, ears pricked, and I called the hens in with a handful of corn, and shut the gate on them, just in case.

I really loved The Magic Apple Tree. I might have loved it still more if there had been a little more on fellow villagers and less on practical advice, but that is by the by. It is charming and honest and vivid, with much to recognise and to remember.

Still Life by Richard Cobb – #NovNov Day 16

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Today’s book is cheating a bit, because I started it in September – and somehow it fell to one side, and I read the second half today. And it is twenty or so pages over the self-imposed 200pp limit. But no matter. I always loved Slightly Foxed Editions – not just beautiful books, but so brilliantly chosen. They’re always memoirs, and often of people I know nothing about. Sometimes, as in the case of Still Life by Richard Cobb, I’m none the wiser about why he’s famous by the end of the book. That’s fine.

Cobb grew up in Tunbridge Wells in a family that was respectable but not very well off, and Still Life is as much a paean to the Tunbridge Wells of his childhood in the ’20s and ’30s and beyond as it is to his family or anything else. Indeed, it starts with the different roads that lead into the town – viewing it from different angles, trying to work out where to start. As Arpita wrote in her review, the beginning of this memoir isn’t it strongest feature. It feels rather impersonal, and we don’t quite know where we are – disoriented, as we don’t quite settle in his house or in any one place.

But, thankfully, Still Life gets better and better as it goes on – and as Cobb fills in the gaps. He gradually adds details of neighbours, shops, customs. I loved his portraits of local notable people – not notable for their rank or even their achievements, but for their longevity, eccentricity, or other addition to the array of people in the community. I found particularly fascinating the contrast when the Second World War came and went – how people returned to their privacy and hierarchies, after a period where more doors were opened and people stood on ceremony less.

It continues with different ways of looking at the town, as a conceit, and here is the opening to a chapter called ‘Doors and Windows’:

In the course of my walks, at whatever time of day, I would pass many front doors behind which I had penetrated; and thus I came to see Tunbridge Wells as consisting of a series of interlocking privacies; a mingling of addresses at fixed times, and according to unstated, but recognised, conventions. There could be a proper time for the drawbridge to be brought down and for a carefully restricted breach of privacy. One would not expect to gain entry through a front door – unless it was that of a doctor or a dentist – in the morning, or any time much before 3. People did not ask one another to lunch, though they might arrange to meet at lunch -as they might meet for morning coffee at the Cadena or the Tudor Café – in one of those established that seem to have marked the Thirties and that served modest, three-course southern English meals by well-spoken ladies, generally in couples, and wearing artistic smocks over their tweeds, to show that they were not servants.

I loved what Arpita wrote about Still Life: ‘For as the dextrous miniaturist painter adds infinitesimal detail to his work of art, so too has the author added layer upon layer of minute detail of his retelling of childhood.’ That’s the feeling I got from this memoir too. Perhaps I enjoyed it more and more as it went not just for the things he included later in the book, but because I had more of a background to see each person and trait against. It was cumulatively enjoyable.

Another success from Slightly Foxed – but, at this point, that’s more or less tautology. The SF Editions remain one of the finest curated lists out there.

The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden – #NovNov Day 8

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Thank you for all the birthday good wishes for yesterday – Colin and I had a lovely time, successfully escaping an escape room with some friends, then seeing fireworks. There are always handy fireworks displays near our birthday, courtesy of Guy Fawkes Night.

Today I was back on my novellas in November challenge, with Deirdre Madden’s second novel, The Birds of the Innocent Wood from 1988, when she was only 28. It starts at quite a pace – rattling through the tragedy of Jane’s childhood, with both parents dying in a house fire and being sent to a convent. We see that she thrives on making others react emotionally to her tale of woe – and it’s something she tries on James, the man she starts dating and whom she will marry.

She had a deep contempt for all those who had known from birth what it was to be loved. She did not believe that they could ever know how strange and wonderful it was to watch another person gradually fall in love with them. She certainly watched James, and watched him with a steady fascination, as a naturalist might watch a butterfly uncrumple itself from a chrysalis, or wiltingly die in a killing jar. She would always make a point of arriving early for their meetings, so that she could conceal herself at a distance and covertly watch him arrive and then pace the street disconsolately, looking at his watch, as he waited for her. Then she would leave her hiding place and approach him, her eye steadily fixed on his, so that she would not miss the moment when he caught sight of her. Because to see that moment was the whole point of the exercise: to see his face change, to see the relief and the tenderness and the love with which the mere sight of her filled him was the highlight of the entire evening. It made her feel dizzy with power.

It did all feel a bit dizzying at the beginning, to whip through so much plot so quickly. I feel like Madden might space it out more, as a more mature writer. But things settle a bit once it’s established that she is in an unsure and discontented marriage to James – living in remote countryside, with the only neighbour being a woman oddly like Jane, with whom she has an instant and lasting antipathy.

And then chapters begin to alternate – half is Jane’s young married life, and the other half are adult twin sisters Sarah and Catherine. They are Jane’s daughters – we learn early that Jane has died, though don’t know how. Madden does well at delineating the twin sisters – what they have in common and what they don’t. And something they do have in common is a hidden secret.

This is the first of my Novellas in November project that I think would have been better if I hadn’t read it one day. Perhaps because it covers so much time, perhaps because her writing is gentle and subtle, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is really a novella to linger over. I wish I’d spent a bit more time in the eerily described landscape, inhabiting these awkward, haunted lives.

I really love Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday. This earlier novella is evidently not as mature – the writing is very good, but doesn’t have the same piercing precision. She does manage to weave images of birds well through the novella, deliberately but not disruptively. On its own, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is very good – it’s only because I have read her later work that I see the ingredients are there for the extraordinary novelist she will become.