1980s

The Warning Bell by Lynne Reid Banks

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The L-Shaped Room is one of my favourite novels, and I’ve read it and its sequels quite often over the years – but have read oddly little of Lynne Reid Banks’ other novels since a brief spate about twenty years ago. And I’ve owned The Warning Bell (1984) since probably about 2003, so it seems about time I read it.

Maggie is a teenager when the novel begins – with two brothers, the censorious Ian and the more laissez-faire Stip, and parents who seem ordinary and conservative to her. She longs to escape the community in Scotland that she sees as backward and repressive, and dreams of finding success as an actress. Her best friend Tanya longs for the same thing and, as the novel opens, they have both been caught in a series of lies to go and see a production of Oklahoma.

The same deceit comes into play a little later when Maggie goes to drama school – throughout which she is deceiving her father into paying, as he thinks she is doing a different course at a different university. She is aided and abetted by her secondary school drama teacher – indeed, it is this teacher’s idea – and Banks is great at the feelings of guilt and freedom that intertwine, even if she is a little more haphazard on the actual details of how this deception would take place. When it comes out, the proverbial inevitably hits the fan.

Maggie seems a little similar to The L-Shaped Room’s Jane in the opening chapters of the novel. Like Jane, she is at odds with her father and has to start a life estranged from her family – albeit for different reasons. But where Jane enters a new community in her block of flats, gradually getting to know and love the people around her, Maggie’s immediate future is rather darker. She is sexually assaulted by a man she is dating, discovers she is pregnant, and decides to marry him.

The title of the novel is explained in the early pages of the novel, and this is one of many moments where the bell is clanging loudly…

Maggie’s mother once said, ‘You know, Maggie, the vainest and most futile mental exercise in the world is tracing back some accident or blunder to its origins, and letting one’s heart gnaw itself in regret that one didn’t know what was going to result. You know: ”If I hadn’t gone there, met so-and-so, done this or not done that…” One’s whole life can turn on some tiny thing. It’s not fair. There ought to be a bell, a warning bell, sounding at dangerous corners. But there never, never is.’

But Maggie, on reflection, decided that there very often is a warning bell. It may not go clang-clang with great noisy obviousness. But it rings in other ways. She could remember many turning-points in her own life which were marked by bells of a sort. Her innumerable blunders had not resulted from an absence of bells, but her wilfulness in ignoring them.

In justice to Banks, the rape is recognised as being horrific, and Maggie’s decision to marry Bruce is not presented as something wise or justified. I’m racing through the plot a little here, because the novel is packed with incident, but Banks is very good at conveying the feel of living another person’s life, and I certainly felt plunged into Maggie’s – including all the mistakes, horrors, rejections, pressures and so on. Considering dark things happen, The Warning Bell is not a bleak novel at all. Banks recognises the confusing way that life can be a tapestry of bad and good simultaneously, without one blocking out the other.

I was really loving the novel, in fact. Banks writes brilliantly, and I was getting the same sense of full immersion that I always get when I re-read The L-Shaped Room. But then… Maggie and Bruce move to Nigeria. And… yikes.

There are definitely racist elements in The L-Shaped Room, but I always felt that they were on the part of the character – and that she grows to realise she is terribly wrong. In The Warning Bell, the way Nigerians are portrayed is just as racist in the narrative voice as in the different characters’. They are all depicted as unintelligent, primitive, and desperate to be servile to the white characters – who consider themselves set apart and far better in every way, and the narrative seems to agree with them. It was really unpleasant to read, and the sort of casually racist set up that I was surprised to see so openly in a novel published so recently.

Things improve when Maggie returns to the UK, and she deals with the conflicting impulses of motherhood, career, romance and friendship. These are all more or less eternal themes of women’s lives, and Banks brings them together convincingly and compellingly. Well, convincing insofar as becoming a national TV newsreader is considered a fall-back option for a wannabe actress.

My only criticism in this second half of the book is that the pacing is sometimes a bit awry. It does seem to enter rather a gallop in the final section of the novel, jumping ahead both in terms of time and the emotional curve of the narrative. So, overall, your stomach for this novel will depend on how much you can cope with the horrendous racism that’s prevalent for about fifty pages. I loved diving back into the incredible storytelling that Banks is so good at – but with a nasty taste in my mouth at the same time.

Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle

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Ever since I read Claire’s review of Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle (1988), I’ve been keen to read it. That was back in 2012, and I bought a copy while I was in Washington D.C. in 2015 – and have finally read it. Claire was right, of course, and I encourage you to go and read her wonderful review.

My only other experience with L’Engle is A Wrinkle in Time, and that put me off a little bit, because I didn’t like it at all – but my distaste for young adult science-fiction is weaker than my trust in Claire’s opinions. And Two-Part Invention could scarcely be any more different. For one, it is a memoir – in fact, the fourth in a series of memoirs, though I only learned that after I’d finished. In it, L’Engle largely focuses on her relationship with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, flashing easily between their first meetings and their current experiences. Those experiences are dominated by a serious illness that Franklin is facing – this is no charming reminiscence. Often it is brutal, though undercut with the gentleness that is the keynote of L’Engle’s personality and style.

I love any book where a house is important, and Crosswicks is central to this memoir. It’s the New England farmhouse where L’Engle and Franklin lived for many years – sometimes splitting their time between it and New York, and sometimes becoming so immersed in the life of the small community that they ran the local shop. It’s where L’Engle is sitting while she writes Two-Part Invention, which has an almost diary-like feel at times. She is in the midst of her husband’s terrible illness, not knowing what the end of it will be – or even the next step. Parts are penned while they wait for individual diagnoses, as stepping stones either to or away from something disastrous.

On the other hand, she looks back to their meeting with somewhere between clear-sightedness and rose-tinted glasses. I suppose it’s the sepia of nostalgia that, even if it is scrupulously honest, cannot help being fond of those long-ago versions of oneself. I liked everything about this book, but I particularly enjoyed these sections. I find anything set in the theatrical world fascinating, fiction or non-fiction, and so I loved L’Engle’s memories of encountering the dashing leading man – and being surprised when he was interested in her, a bit-part player. One of the delightful things about Two-Part Invention is what I learned about American theatre of the mid-century:

Those of us on the lower rungs of the theatrical ladder were encouraged to work on scenes from other plays in order to develop our acting techniques. We were allowed to rehearse on-stage, although, because of the rigid rules of the stagehands’ union, we were not allowed to move any of the furniture. Occasionally we made bold to shove a table or chair out of the way, but we had to be sure we were not caught doing it (otherwise, the stagehands would have had to be paid), and we had to put whatever it was back in exactly the place from which we had taken it.

Two of my most interesting jobs in The Cherry Orchard were musical. At the end oft he first act I played a small lullaby on a recorder. It was necessary that I be in full costume and visible from at least one seat in the audience; otherwise, I would had to join the prohibitively expensive musicians’ union.

L’Engle doesn’t go into enormous detail about her writing career, though some of her books appear as milestones in other events, particularly her debut. It is a bit startling to see others appear in passing, when presumably they took a lot of time and energy to create, but I suppose L’Engle chose the thematic remit of the book – which is chiefly her relationship with her husband, and how that came to be and developed.

It might sound like the two strands of this memoir would be at odds – that the present-day waiting for test results and diagnoses might clash with the theatrical and romantic nostalgia. The brilliance of Two-Part Invention is that they flow in and out of each other so well. And I suppose that’s because they are connected by L’Engle’s love for her husband – both the memories and the current anxieties are founded on that depth and honesty of love that only comes from decades spent together, through thick and thin.

One of the things I found interesting in Claire’s review was that she was a little jolted by L’Engle’s writing about faith, though came to appreciate the way L’Engle wrote about it and the depth of intimacy that this brought. I was also a bit jolted by it – because it’s so rare to see people discuss their faith this freely and honestly. As a Christian, I of course loved seeing it – without the need to apologise or dampen it down. Very refreshing, and made the memoir feel all the more real and relatable to me. Perhaps I can’t relate to much in L’Engle’s life, but I can certainly relate to that.

Perhaps this wasn’t the perfect time to read this memoir, given that a pandemic isn’t an ideal world in which to read anything with a health crisis at the centre of it – and yet, despite the darkness that runs through the centre of this book, my main feeling coming from it is that it was beautiful to spend this time with L’Engle. It is like spending time with a good, honest, vulnerable friend – and I’ll certainly keep an eye out for the others in the series now.

Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett

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I bought Family Skeletons (1986) in 2011, shortly after seeing Henrietta Garnett give a talk about her life at a bookshop in Oxford. It was a fun evening, not just because her life is interesting but because she was quite clearly several drinks past sober throughout. My main memory is that she continually took glasses off and put them back on, holding the notes from which she was reading at great distances each time. It was a continue whirl of outstretched arm and the other spiralling her glasses on and off.

Anyway, it interested me enough that I wanted to read her novel. And I was interested before any of this happens, because she is from a literary an artistic dynasty – being the daughter of David Garnett and the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell. With such heritage, one could hardly avoid writing a book. Despite the title of this one, it is not a roman à clef.

Catherine is the heroine in this one – a young and naive woman, just turned adult, who has lived a sheltered life in a beautiful Irish estate called Malabay. Only her eccentric uncle Pake lives with her, excepting some staff. He has given her a love of literature and nature, but doesn’t like her to travel far from Malabay and admits few visitors.

Tara – a man; have men ever been called this? – is allowed in as a cousin, but these family ties don’t stop Tara and Catherine falling in love, against Pake’s better judgement. He is older and less innocent than Catherine, and he is amused by her total lack of understanding of the world. It is a passionate and unwise relationship, and one that Garnett describes with sort of language and images you can easily imagine a Bloomsbury Group member using.

Once, she woke during the night, frightened by the half-forgotten image of a dream already scudding out of her head. She had been transformed into a hare and was being pursued by dogs. The dogs were not far behind her and she could smell their dreadful hot breath. Her soul was still her own, but the dogs were hunting her. When she woke, she found that Tara was kissing her and stroking the nape of her neck.

“What is it, Catherine? You twitch in your sleep like a frightened animal.”

“I was an animal in my sleep and I was frightened.”

She kissed him.

They made love again and fell asleep in one another’s arms.

Their relationship does reveal some family skeletons – but there is also the unsettling tension between Malabay and the locals, and in Ireland of the 1980s you can probably imagine what the undercurrent of those tensions is.

Overall, I was impressed by Garnett’s writing. This wasn’t published just because of her family connections. A lot of the novel is in dialogue, and she is good at the emotions that hover below the surface and come through awkwardly – even if her characters are perhaps more willing to discuss their feelings than most Brits would be.

It’s often quite bitingly witty too, particularly when Pake is being scathing, or when his ex-wife Poppy turns up. You do feel for Catherine, a little boat on the sea of all this wit, intelligence, and experience – having to learn how to craft her own personality against a backdrop of so many powerful personalities.

It’s certainly a very evocative novel, and the plotting includes some big events and revelations without losing the sense that we are in a deeply real world. Somehow it doesn’t feel of the 1980s, though some of the plot is inextricable from it – take that away, and it could easily be the 1930s. Perhaps that is the ethereal timelessness Garnett brings to the narrative.

What a talented family. She died just over a year ago, and this was her only novel. A shame – I would certainly have been intrigued to see what came next.

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm

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As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

Cases that formally terminate – i.e. end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient – are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

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I loved this book! It was one of those times when I had to decide between racing through it and treating myself to a few pages at a time – and I went largely for the latter route, reading a bit with my breakfast each morning.

I bought The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne back in 2013 in Malvern, and have been a bit nervous about picking it off the shelves. I thought it might give away the endings to all the Christies I haven’t read, which is probably about half of them. My fears were allayed as soon as I read the preface – Osborne promises not to give away any murderers or major spoilers, and he sticks to this throughout.

The book goes through Christie’s works one by one, in order. Each section gives some context about Christie’s life at the time, a few details about the set up of the novel, what the critics and public thought etc. There’s about two pages per book – which, considering how many she wrote, comes together for a very satisfying book. Osborne is so good about giving you a taste of what makes each book original. In a short space, he might tell us how it fits into Poirot’s career, how Christie was inspired to begin, how it was reviewed, whether there were adaptations. He is remarkably good at hinting at a novel’s ingenuity – or, alternatively, if it repeated a trick or wasn’t as convincing as others – without giving a single jot away. There are plenty of biographical details about Christie, even though this isn’t quite  a biography. He gets the combination of elements perfectly.

And this is a critical work, in the sense that he shares his opinions. He’s not afraid to point out some of her weaker work, but he is obviously also an avid fan – most of the time he is enthusiastic and picks out the reasons why he likes the books. It’s not quite an out-and-out appreciation, but nor is it one of those dispiriting works where the writer seems to have chosen a subject they barely respect. Osborne writes very affectionately. And he is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Christie, and I enjoyed the times where he points out that other Christie critics got things a bit wrong.

I really enjoyed Osborne’s tone of voice, and his very English sense of humour. For example…

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so.

He’s also not afraid to point out errors in Christie’s novels, with the acuity of the superfan. This section is perhaps not quite representative, as it is more detailed than most, but…

Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were the singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews and in the novel Evil Under the Sun; (iv) the plot another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel A Murder is Announced; (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate.

This is one of the few times when he names which novels/stories share traits – a little unfair, if you happen to have read one but not the other. More often he’ll just say that something appeared earlier, without specifying where.

Osborne clearly knows a lot about opera and music, and it is these areas where he often picks up on errors. Elsewhere, he teasingly decides to pretend Christie deliberately included the mistakes – for instance, suggesting that Poirot’s inaccurate French is clearly a result of spending too much time in England, or that Miss Marple has got absent-minded and forgetful when certain details don’t line up.

I mostly enjoyed Osborne’s personality shining through. It’s a little less palatable when he goes on a tangent about how longer jail terms are needed for criminals, or a very unnecessarily impassioned defence of the use of the n-word in the original title to And Then There Were None. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is cut in the revised and updated edition from 2000, that I don’t have.

But his other quibbles are all part of the charm for me, and make it feel even more like you’re listening to a keen fan discussing their favourite author.

As I say, I’ve read about half or so of Christie’s books, and I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hadn’t read any or many. I definitely enjoyed reading about books I knew a bit more than those I didn’t. But to anybody who loves Christie – this is a total delight.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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It always feels slightly different to read a book that is a worldwide bestseller. I’d obviously heard of The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, but I couldn’t tell you a lot about it. Except that I’ve always got it mixed up with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I also hadn’t read.

Well, my book group chose this book and I borrowed a copy from my brother Colin, who hadn’t been enthusiastic in his mini review of it. This edition is translated from the Portuguese by Alan Clarke – I don’t know if there are mutliple translations out there. I was certainly intrigued by the atmosphere of the opening paragraph:

The boy’s name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an abandoned church. … an enormous sycamore had grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

In case there are others who didn’t know the plot – it’s about this boy called Santiago who lives in Andalusia, where he is a shepherd. But he dreams of more from life, and can’t stop thinking about a fortune he received from a fortune teller – that he should travel to Egypt to discover treasure.

Off he goes to Africa but not, he quickly learns, materially nearer Egypt than he was when he started. I can’t remember if it’s spelled out, but I’m pretty sure he’s in Morocco – where his money gets stolen by a conman, and he must work for a crystal merchant. He is still determined to raise the money to find this supposed treasure.

Rather late in the day, he does get to Egypt and meet the alchemist – who seems more minor a character than I’d have anticipated from the title. And then it all becomes a mixture of magic realism and an Aesopian fable.

So, what did I think? Well, I really enjoyed the first third of the novel. Santiago is a wonderful character – an interesting mix of determination, hope, uncertainty, and naivety. All of the stuff in Morocco was a delight, and I would happily have read a novel of his experience in the crystal shop – becoming something of a surrogate child to the crystal seller. I’ve never been to Morocco, but I felt rather like I had when I was reading this.

But as the novel moves forward, and Coelho loses any sense of being tethered to the ground, then I lost my affection for The Alchemist. And it’s not even my documented reluctance for magical realism. It’s because the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar. It’s everything I kind of suspect the most run-of-the-mill self help books might be. I felt like Coelho’s sensitive eye for character was rather wasted in a series of philosophical truisms.

He’s continued writing ever since, but I haven’t heard of any of the other books. I’d love to try something else by him if he’s written anything that is less queasy. And I can do no better than quoting a line from Col’s thoughts: “A life-changing book, the blurb claims, but I suspect mostly for people who believe horoscopes.”

 

 

What Hetty Did by J.L. Carr (25 Books in 25 Days: #15)

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What Hetty Did (1988) is the fourth novel I’ve read by J.L. Carr, and each time I feel like I understand him as a writer a little less. He’s so varied! The one he is probably best known for is the elegiac, lovely A Month in the Country. Well, What Hetty Did is not much like that – though it does include one of the same characters. Indeed, characters from at least four of his other novels pop up in this one.

Hetty (actually Ethel) is a bright A Level student who is not much liked by her mother and openly disliked by her father. She decides to up and leave – at least until such time as she might get a place at Cambridge. A chance encounter on a train gets her recommended for a guest house. While staying there she decides to try and find the biological mother who gave her up for adoption. Various other eccentric characters mill around the outskirts.

Eccentric is definitely the key term for this novel. Carr seems to have got odder and odder, as a writer, as he got older – and was in his mid-70s when What Hetty Did was published by an imprint that Carr had set up. Hetty is a whirlwind of a character, and not a very likeable one – more determined than pleasant. And the strange way in which things are described is due to some sort of disconcerting energy in the narrative. It’s like Angela Carter but the events are mundane, even if the prose is not.

Did I like it? I honestly don’t know. It’s an impressive feat, and quite distinctive – but such an odd way of telling a relatively simple plot that I never quite felt I could find myself on stable ground. But if nothing else, it’s nice to read a novel set in my homeland of Worcestershire – that doesn’t happen too often. And Bredon Hill even gets a mention, which was the hill abutting my village!

Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido

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Ten years ago, Bloomsbury sent me a set of Barbara Trapido books for review. Ten years ago! And, yes, I read and reviewed (and really liked) Brother of the More Famous Jack back then, but it has taken me a decade to read my second Trapido – Noah’s Ark (1984). And I’m still rather unsure what I thought about it.

My first thought, as I read the opening, was how good the writing was. Here is most of the first paragraph, which I’m going to quote at length because I think she does such a good job of throwing you into an intriguing and unconventional world:

Ali Glazer was stitching up her husband’s trouser hems, but had paused to glance up at the kitchen pin board in some fascination. The photograph of a man, bearing a disconcerting resemblance to Thomas Adderley, had been torn from a Sunday magazine advertisement and pinned there by Ali’s older daughter Camilla. The girl herself had had no awareness of that resemblance which now so forcibly struck her mother and had fixed the picture there merely because she liked the man’s collarless Edwardian shirt. The man – in keeping with the clichés of capitalist realism – was manoeuvring a white stallion through a dappled glade of redwood trees and was advertising cigarettes. Ali noticed that Camilla had fixed him rather high on the pin board where he beamed out, as from a higher plane, above the two postcards pinned side by side below him. This hierarchical arrangement struck her as altogether suitable given that she had always elevated and revered Thomas, while the postcards had come from people to whom she felt predominantly antipathetic. 

I say ‘unconventional’, but I suppose Ali’s world is rigorously conventional. It is only her outlook, or the perspective that Trapido gives us, that makes it feel quirky and unusual. I was completely beguiled by that writing, and keen to immerse myself in whatever came after the first few pages – would Ali reconnect with Thomas? What would this mean for her marriage to the benevolently controlling Noah, who obviously doesn’t think that Ali is capable of very much, and mistakes her imaginative eccentricity for something inferior to his rational good sense?

Then Trapido did the thing that so many novelists do, and which always puts me off. We go back into the past. That was one scene in the present, to set a stage that we will work our way too. I never know why this is such a common trope, as I always find it deadens a novel. Oh well, I suppose I’ll put up with it.

We skate back to Ali’s past – between marriages. She has split up with her obnoxious ex-husband Mervyn, and is trying to work out how best to live life as a single mother – when Noah walks into her life, besotted and determined to sort out the disordered way in which Ali has allowed herself to become a doormat. Having seen how Noah treats her in the present day, we do get some benefit of hindsight, as it were, but it also removes some of the tension of wondering what will happen.

And the novel continues to be eccentric. We jump forward in time, or across continents, with very little warning. Trapido’s own eccentric authorial gaze refuses to let us get settled. Her writing style is never unduly odd, and certainly never breaks with the conventions of grammar etc., but the things she chooses to highlight often keep the reader on his/her toes. We spend more time being shown how different characters react to the prospect of head lice than we do to major life events. Everything is slightly off kilter. And I think that’s good?

I have to admit that I was a bit thrown by the novel. That started when one adult character starts lusting after an 11 year old Camilla, openly and in front of others, and nobody says anything. The hints of paedophilia are infrequent and never followed up in any way, but elsewhere, Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness. And then I found the disconcerting way she puts together sentences and scenes was building together into something I couldn’t quite grasp. Much of the time I really admired it, but it made it difficult to identify the centre of the novel – to have anything concrete to hold onto.

Perhaps it’s a case of needing to be in the right mood for Trapido. I was definitely in that mood when I started the novel, and was loving it. The writing was really wonderful. By the time I finished it, the mood was faltering. Had I read it at a different time, I suspect I’d be writing an unadulteratedly glowing review of Noah’s Ark. I still think she is a richly inventive and unusual writer, but I’m going to be selective about when I start reading her again.

The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace

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I was reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott for my 1986 entry in A Century of Books, but it’s a big book and felt too important a read to rush through for the sake of a reading challenge. And so I turned to the other 1986 books waiting on my shelves – it turns out I have a lot, and I was toying with Margaret Forster, Henrietta Garnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, Diana Athill, Quentin Bell, Barbara Pym… but settled, in the end, of The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace.

I don’t remember exactly the conversation that led to this, but Kim (of Reading Matters) kindly sent me her copy back in 2012 – I think perhaps the twins were mentioned in an Oliver Sacks book? – and it’s been waiting patiently until then. The edition is a 1998 reprint, including a new chapter, and is clearly marketed to fit into the post-David-Pelzer proliferation of misery memoirs. The tagline – ‘the harrowing true story of sisters locked in a shocking childhood pact’ – is nonsense that does the sensitive book a disservice.

June and Jennifer Gibbons are the twins of the title, born in Yemen and growing up in Haverfordwest in Wales (a pretty miserable town, I have to say, having gone there a few years ago). The Gibbons were a loving family, excited to add to their number – and, having moved to Wales, were dealing well with the tensions that came from being one the few black families in their 1960s community. But as the girls grew older, they were clearly different from their family and from local families. They were more or less elective mutes – speaking to each other in words so fast and curiously stressed that it sounded like another language, but never speaking to their parents or older siblings. Their younger sister was the exception to the rule.

Baffling teachers, June and Jennifer didn’t seem to match any evident diagnosis – and, indeed, Wallace doesn’t attempt to give them a diagnosis. Trapped in a world of their own, spending hours in their bedroom with their dolls and stories as they grew older, they were an enigma to the world at large. Limp and uncommunicative in public, they clearly had a ferociously active sororal relationship. They also wrote prolifically – fiction (which they furtively sent off to publishers, and eventually self-published) but also diaries. Wallace uses these diaries – which they wrote for years, covering enormous quantities of pages in tiny handwriting, to recreate their experiences. Often we see things from their perspective in the narrative, with the diaries silently referenced – most movingly when they deal with how much June and Jennifer love their family, even while never expressing it or communicating with them at all.

In their later teens, things changed. They start stalking some brothers. They lose their virginities with frantic determination. And they go on a spree of ill-concealed burglary and arson that will lead to them going to court – and, ultimately, Broadmoor. On a life sentence (of which they served eleven years), for crimes that usually warranted a few months’ sentence.

It is a fascinating tale, and Wallace does her best to show us the deeply complex relationship between June and Jennifer – drawing from the diaries, because of how little she or anybody else can see of it from the outside. And the power dynamics and repressions behind those silent exteriors were truly extraordinary.

Time and again the twins returned to this theme. They saw themselves as the ultimate unhappy couple, Jennifer as the quirky, irascible husband, June the victim wife, and although they switched roles in most of their other games, in this they remained consistent.

The ‘silent’ of the title isn’t quite true. As they got older, they spoke more – and seemed to have held relatively normal conversations with the teenagers they became involved with, as well as answering Wallace’s questions at least at times. But their twin relationship certainly plays into some of the stereotypes associated with twins in the popular consciousness – that we inhabit a world apart, unknowable to outsiders, and that the relationship might be unhealthy or dangerous. I can’t count the number of times people have asked me if Colin and I have a secret language, or if we can feel each other’s pain, or communicate psychically. Or, more generally, what it’s like to be a twin. Well, as I’ve said before, I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be a twin – but I also can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the closed and claustrophobic world June and Jennifer inhabited. My relationship with Colin is the most special in my life, and I don’t doubt that there are dynamics there that no other relationship could have, but it’s definitely not the curious mix of passionate hatred, obsessive love, and controlling fear that the Gibbons had. Theirs is truly a unique existence.

As for the writing – I think Wallace used the diaries well, and told their story without being unduly melodramatic. Indeed, I found the whole thing curiously sedated. It’s not bad writing by any means, but having discovered Janet Malcolm and Julie Salamon this year, I have new high standards for this variety of non-fiction. Wallace felt a bit unambitious in the way she wrote – though you could also argue that she was letting the extraordinary circumstances tell their own story. And they did do that, but I think I’d have valued the book even more if there was a little more to the writing.

I’m glad to have finally read it – thank you, Kim!

Desirable Residence by Lettice Cooper

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Most authors write the same sort of book over and over again. And I don’t just mean the Ivy Compton-Burnett type, where each novel is resolutely interchangeable (and yet brilliant). Even those who are able to shift in terms of format, character, genre tend to have the same worldview and sensitivities as they keep going.

That’s why it was so interesting to read Lettice Cooper’s 1980 novel Desirable Residence, published when she was 83. Most of us who know her are probably chiefly familiar with the 1930s novel The New House – one of the few books to have been both a Virago Modern Classic and a Persephone. And it’s great – and very of its time. How would this octogenarian take the 1980s?

The novel is, again, about people moving into a new house – but that’s about the only similarity there is. In this case, it’s a small block of flats – old Hilda Greencroft on the top floor, the Blackstones on the next down – and a young couple have started squatting in the ground floor flat. ‘The first three’ is the ominous title given to the first half of the book – Polly and Dennis Dyson, and their baby Brian. Unable to cope with living with Dennis’s mother any longer, Polly has dictated this move – clinging to the vague strength of ‘squatters’ rights’ and hoping that any media attention given to their eviction will get them a council flat.

The neighbours are surprised but not especially horrified. Hilda is a kind lady who sees the vulnerability beneath Polly’s hardness. The Blackstone parents are chiefly occupied with their own foundering marriage, while their son Simon is obsessed with the well-intentioned cult he intends to join, and their daughter Tasmine thinks this is a perfect opportunity to do some research for a school project.

But things take a turn when other squatters hear about the place, and join Polly and Dennis. ‘The others’ (the second half of the book) shows us as a group of petty criminals move in – unafraid to victimise Polly and Dennis, and distinctly changing the dynamic of the house.

I was amazed that Cooper wrote this novel. It has the same storytelling talent of her earlier novel, but there is nothing false or jarring about the sharp modernity of it. She throws around expletives, and I found it genuinely scary at times – her violent characters are chillingly real. Here is a writer who changed with the times, equally convincing as the 14 year old as she is when writing old Hilda.

The one fault I found, in fact, is offspring of this talent – we are taken into every character’s mind, even if they only appear for a few pages. This means the narrative force gets a bit diluted – and I think the novel would have felt a bit more focused if there had been one dominant character to act as the lens for the events.

Still, a very surprising – and surprisingly good – novel. Luckily I have a few more of hers on the shelf, waiting.