1980s

And now for something completely different

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“That’s the point of book groups, isn’t it? To make you read something you wouldn’t normally.” When I hear those words at book group, it usually comes after everyone has declared that they loathed the book in question. But sometimes something can come out of nowhere and be a total joy. Well, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole wasn’t a *total* joy, but it was near enough.

Ignatius J. Reilly is the biggest character of the book, in every sense of the word – he dominates the narrative, but his gargantuan size, fearsome dialogue, and sense of self-worth means he dominates more or less everything else too. He is a deliberately unattractive character – obese, flatulent, ‘full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chips.’ He is disgusting – and alarm bells were going off with me. I am a bit sensitive to these sorts of things. I could do without a character whose bodily functions are so uncontrolled, and whose preoccupation with his ‘valve’ is mentioned on more or less every page. To be honest, this was the aspect of the novel I could have done without even when I’d realised I loved the book – but it sets the scene for a completely over-the-top character.

Ignatius lives with his long-suffering widowed mother, Irene Reilly. I loved her. She mostly ignores Ignatius’ intellectual ramblings, and simply implores him to behave and get a job. It is a delight to read their dialogue together – while he brings Boethius and Marx and whoever else into conversation, she’ll reply about a cream cake and the need for a bottle of wine.

In an amazing opening scene, Ignatius is apprehended by a policeman, for looking suspicious. Somehow this is the catalyst for all manner of events – an old man with a Communist-obsession enters their life, as does the hapless policeman, Angelo Mancuso – who spends the rest of the novel being forced by his boss to don various costumes. Surreal. And then Mrs. Reilly accidentally drives her car into someones property, and gets the bill for it… meaning Ignatius has to get work. Ignatius explains to his mother how difficult he found it working at the New Orleans Public Library, since they employers ‘sensed in him a denial of their values’. She replies:
‘But, Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks.’

‘That is exactly what I mean,’ Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.

‘All you did was paste them little slips in the books.’

‘Yes, but I had my own aesthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing.’
Nevertheless, he starts off working for Levy Pants, ‘filing’ (for which read: throwing all the files into the bin, and trying to organise a factory uprising – one of the best scenes in the book, which had me laughing aloud on the train.) The office brings some more wonderful characters to the narrative, my favourite being Miss Trixie – an 80 year old who spends her workdays sleeping at her desk, forbidden from retiring by the interfering of Mr. Levy’s failed-psychologist wife.

And the plot winds on and on, incorporating Ignatius’ job as a hotdog-salesman; the efforts of a seedy club to bring in those customers who want to see a bird pulling a dress off a Southern belle; the flamboyant party of those in the ‘French quarter’; Mancuso being stationed in a toilet… it gets increasingly bizarre, but is structured brilliantly by Toole – plotlines overlap and intertwine, and the whole thing relies heavily upon coincidence – but that’s part of the delight.

But far and away the most delightful aspect of A Confederacy of Dunces is the language. It reminded me quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh, more especially Put Out More Flags and Decline and Fall. That is to say, selfish characters talking bombastically – hilarious put-downs or exaggerated philosophical ponderings. Here’s a bit that made me laugh. Mrs. Reilly ends up dating the old man with the fear of the communiss [sic] and leaves a pamphlet for Ignatius to read:
‘Yes, I saw one of those pamphlets in the hall this afternoon. You either dropped it there on purpose so that I could benefit from its message or you tossed it there accidentally during your regular afternoon wine orgy in the belief that it was a particularly elephantine bit of confetti. I imagine that your eyes have some trouble focusing at about two in the afternoon.’
He also starts a letter ‘Beloved Myrna. I have received your offensive communication. Do you seriously think that I am interested in your tawdry encounters with such sub-humans as folksingers?’ Genius. Each character has their verbal tics, which come back time and again (in the way that Dickens’ wonderful characters have their iterated phrases) – so that even Irene Reilly’s ‘honey’ and ‘precious’ could have me laughing; or Lana’s ‘investment’. And I haven’t even told you who Lana is. A Confederacy of Dunces is so rich in characters.

This is all a million miles away from the Provincial Lady or Jane Austen, or the usual stables of my literary loves. But it isn’t that far from the sort of silly things I say with my friends, especially my friend Clare – we talk nonsense to one another, hyperbolically, and teasingly. Not with Ignatius’ bile, I hope, but… I still find it hilarious, even if my views are (of course) far from being his. John Kennedy Toole, presumably, does not envision Ignatius as some sort of anti-hero – he must be being held up for pillory. Or rather you don’t stop to evaluate who is right or wrong, because you’re being swept along on a tidal wave of the bombastic, absurd, and exaggerated.

I can understand if this review doesn’t appeal. I don’t think there is anything I could have read which would persuade me that I’d enjoy A Confederacy of Dunces – except for the novel itself. It could easily have been dreadful, and if I were the author I’d have toned down a few of the more bodily elements, but I think it is a work of extraordinary energy, exaggeration, and creativity. Some people at book group were arguing that it showed genuine insight too – perhaps it did; I didn’t really want to know. I’m much happier taking the novel as a breathless, mad tour de force, writ large.

There is a sad story behind it. Toole finished writing the novel in the 1960s, and killed himself in 1969, partly because he couldn’t find a publisher for it. Only his mother’s perseverance and belief in him led to its eventual publication. She eventually persuaded author and college instructor Walker Percy to read it. He writes in the Preface: There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
Thus, in my own humbler way, did I approach A Confederacy of Dunces, certain – even determined – that I would hate it. And my reaction ended up being precisely the same.

Baker, Baker…

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Since we’ve had three posts about short stories this week, let’s have another! I didn’t plan to do any sort of themed week, and I rather suspect the theme will screech to a halt after this review, but for today… step forward Frank Baker and Stories of the Strange and Sinister.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that, although Frank Baker wrote one of my very favourite novels (Miss Hargreaves) I have only read one other of his books. It was Before I Go Hence, which I quite enjoyed – but it was nowhere near the standard of Miss H., and I worried that I’d like his work steadily less and less… so stopped. But it’s been three years since I read that, and short stories is moving the goalposts a little, so I tried again, with more reasonable expectations.

Stories of the Strange and Sinister was published over forty years after Miss Hargreaves, in 1983, the year Baker died. It was also his first work of fiction for twenty-two years, although including stories written between 1947 and 1983. The stories – as the title suggests – all touch upon the strange and sinister, but I don’t think any of them were intensely frightening. Which is good for me; I’d rather read strange stories than horror stories – which is why M.R. James has remained on the shelf for now.

Intense repugnance. That is one definition of horror to be found in the dictionary. Or, power of exciting such feeling. I think it is more. It is also what is totally unexpected: the long sunlit lane that has only a brick wall at the end, the worm in the rose, the sudden ravaged image of one’s own tormented face in a window pane. That which has sudden power to corrupt and defile. A stench where sweetness should be; darkness where light should be; a grin where a smile should be; a scream searing into a night where silence should be. An old withered hand where a young hand should be… And no escape from whatever it may be that has suddenly come upon the visitant. No escape.

This is the beginning to perhaps the creepiest story in the collection, ‘The Chocolate Box’, about a man who finds a severed hand in – you guessed it – a chocolate box. But, thankfully, it is a definition Baker doesn’t keep to. Even in his darkest moments, he can’t help introducing a touch of that whimsy which makes Miss Hargreaves so irresistible. For instance, in the middle of my favourite story in the book – ‘The Green Steps’ – the narrator refers to the disturbingly insane character as ‘about as talkative as a Trappist monk in Holy Week.’

In ‘The Chocolate Box’ the narrator writes:
But this is not a story about music. I must keep it out, otherwise it will flood the pages and consume me.
Baker suffers from the same predicament. He is obviously too great a music lover to allow it far from his mind. There is a story about warring partners in a music shop; one about a singer who morphs into a bird; a haunted piano…

But there are moments of terror too – the sack which follows its victim around the house; the presentiment of a steam-room murder… In Baker’s hand, we never wander too far into Gothic territory – but the sinister undertones to Miss Hargreaves have become much more alarming, and much less balanced out by humour. The whimsy still – as I said – hides in the corners, but there remains much to chill, even if not give nightmares.

As always with short story collections, I find it impossible to outline many of the stories, or give a proper feel for the collection as a whole – but I think Stories of the Strange and Sinister has convinced me not to abandon Baker just yet. It’s pretty expensive to track down, and probably isn’t really worth the £20 or £30 that various online sellers are requesting, but there are some interesting and original ideas and thoughtful writing – especially in that first story, ‘The Green Steps’. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from early in that story, which is both evocative of Baker’s atmospheric tone, and so many coastal villages in Cornwall (a county Baker loved) with their mysterious, historic and ambling paths:
I had observed him often and I had good reason to know where he lived, for it was very close to our cottage, up the cliff path, that bends sharply uphill over the harbour and the boatmasts that swing and sway in the gales; a path too narrow for any traffic, with rows of cottages, different sizes, shapes and colours, on one side. From the windows of our living-room which overlooks an area – a waste bit of land where kids keep rabbits in hutches and women dry clothes and men saw wood in winter – I would often, and still often see, the Scavenger. Above the area there are steps, the Green Steps they are called, worn away dangerously, all uneven, ground by the feet of many generations, the stone crumbling, little weeds growing from the cracks. I’d always had a curious familiar feeling about the Green Steps; they brought back a hint of the past to me, a paragraph of my boyhood, as though I’d been there years ago; and I knew I hadn’t.

Andrina

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Ages ago I won Andrina and other stories by George Mackay Brown on Hayley’s blog Desperate Reader. So enthused was she, and so keen that I read it, that I got it to the top of my pile in surprisingly quick time for me (putting this in perspective, I’m currently reading a book someone gave me over three years ago) – but then didn’t blog about it, and now am looking back in my memory to see what I thought. As such, I’m probably more likely to give impressions about the book as a whole, rather than individual stories.

Every time I write about short stories, I say how difficult it is. The themes will be so sprawling, the characters so diverse, that trying to find a unifying voice is tricky. Hayley suggests, in her review, that GMB is drawn to ‘time, tide, season, poetry, and faith’ – which is pretty wide, but probably fairly accurate. From the beautiful island photograph on the cover of my copy, I was expecting something from the same stable as Tove Jansson – with chilly descriptions, unsentimental characters, lots about the minutiae of human interaction, etc. etc. So I was a little surprised when the first story was all about a whaler, with some quite wordy letters being sent to a woman with the improbable name Williamina. I can’t say I was smitten.

But I persevered – and what I will say is that the collection is mixed, but mostly on the good side of that! George Mackay Brown is very interested in fables and legends, and the whole book feels a little as though it had been translated from Old Norse or Icelandic or a language with a similar oral tradition. What do I mean by that? I suppose it’s his odd choice of language – the sort of things we encounter in Anglo-Saxon literature, with turns of phrase relating to the most primitive forms of existence. This can be incredibly effective – I especially loved this line:

Days, months, years passed. A whole generation gathered and broke like a wave on the shore.
On the other hand, for those of us who never read historical fiction – which I recognise is a failing in myself, not the genre – it sometimes grates a little. Or, if not ‘grate’, does wear a little thin occasionally… but only occasionally.

The title story ‘Andrina’ is one of the best, and one of the few which felt more in the traditional mould of beginning-middle-twist-end. If I had to pick a favourite story from the collection, it would be ‘Poets’, which is actually a group of four stories, set in different times and places, carefully displaying four poets (some creating written poetry; some more metaphorical). In ‘The Lord of Silence’ within this group, Duncan is a poet who never utters a word:
He grew up. He was a young man. He learned to hunt, to herd, to plough. He learned to drink from the silver cup, pledging his companions in silence. His father went once on a cattle raid into the next glen, and did not return. They managed to get his body from the scree before the eagle and the wolf made their narrowing circles. The women of the glen, who mourned in a ritualistic way, had never seen such stark grief on a human face: the mouth of Duncan opened in a black silent wail.
Maybe it is when GMB’s own interest in poetry overrides, that I lose my way sometimes. As someone who has an admiration for poetry, but rarely an enjoyment, I think I was occasionally left on the sidelines with some of the stories. I could see that they were beautiful, and with many of them I could relish that beauty and engage with the characters, writing, themes – but with others I could only sense beauty, not feel it. There is no doubt that GMD is a talented and evocative writer, when he finds the right reader – and whilst I certainly wasn’t completely the wrong reader for Andrina and other stories, which I’m very glad I’ve read, and mostly enjoyed – I think there could be ideal readers out there for whom this would be an incredibly special book.

Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark

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32. Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark

I do love the blogosphere… all the bloggers and blog-readers, and all the talk of books going on all around the place. I am probably a little hypocritical, in that relatively few of the books I read come from blogger recommendations. So much of my reading time is taken up with book group choices and the occasional review copy (not to mention, of course, all the books I have to read for my studies) that when I can be self-indulgent and simply pick something off the shelf, nine times out of ten it’ll be something I’ve been saving for years, or know that I’ll like. If I read a great review, quite often I’ll buy the book or pop it on a bit of paper somewhere, but it’s not all that often that I’ll have the reading space for it to swoop to the top of the pile. Bloggers – you’re setting me up for my retirement. I just need the career bit in between.

Which makes me realise that I should find some more hours in the day, to fit in all your fab suggestions. If it weren’t for the blogosphere, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with Muriel Spark again. I’d read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means, and not been bowled over by either of them. It was a couple of bloggers who made me pick up The Driver’s Seat, and I loved it. I reviewed that novella here, and it led to a discussion of ‘Third Time Lucky‘ – when the third book you read by an author is the one to grab you.

Well, if third time was lucky, fourth has unearthed a gold mine, if that mixing of metaphors works. When I wrote about The Driver’s Seat I asked which Spark I should read next, and ‘N’ (gosh, isn’t that mysterious?) recommended Loitering With Intent. I have a feeling someone else did, maybe even in Real Life – and so I took myself off to the library and borrowed it. The return date was hastening, and I thought I’d take it with me to Devon.

All of which is a lengthy introduction to saying that Loitering With Intent (1981) is possibly my favourite novel read this year, and certainly proves to me that Spark is very much my cup of tea. (By the by, I don’t think I like any of the covers I’ve seen, so I’ve just gone with the one I read. Spark deserves a nice cover designer! I hope someone’s listening…) Maybe it’s too well known to get onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, but I won’t take the risk of not broadcasting how good it is…

Loitering With Intent somehow manages to be an incredibly clever novel, without being in the least self-congratulatory or off-putting. Even more dangerous, Spark’s novel is narrated by a novelist, and largely concerns the writing of a novel – so many pitfalls to avoid, and so much potential pretension – all of which Spark skirts around without even a hint of self-importance. Fleur Talbot is writing her first novel, Warrender Chase, and it is occupying all the time that she isn’t at work, and quite a lot of her thoughts when she is at work. Her job is as a secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association – he has gathered luminaries and ‘characters’ to write their memoirs, which he will seal in a vault for seventy years.

Fleur is not dissimilar from her near-namesake Flora in Cold Comfort Farm, inasmuch as she sits back and records the eccentrics and strange creatures around her. But where Gibbons’ Flora documented – she got involved with their lives no end, of course, but never really seemed unduly affected by their idiosyncrasies – Fleur isn’t so invulnerable to the bizarre behaviour by which she is surrounded. It rather seems to rub off on her. She grows varyingly attached to various members of the Autobiographical Association, such as snob and scented Lady ‘Bucks’ Bernice Gilbert, and young(ish) Maisie Young, who has one permanently disabled leg and is fixated upon the Cosmos and ‘how Being is Becoming’. Above all, Flora develops a fondness for Quentin’s mother Edwina – a mad, lively, incontinent, and be-pearled old lady bursting with character, but somehow more ‘real’ than many old-women-with-gusto who crop up in fiction. In amongst these weave a whole cast of wonderful creations – focally, Dottie: the wife of Flora’s lover. Flora is an odd sort of Catholic…

As I have said, Flora is not invulnerable to the group’s eccentricity – and we’re never quite sure how far we can trust her narrative voice, or to what extent we are supposed to identify with it. Which, since Fleur is an authoress, is interesting. Throughout the novel the reader gets glimpses of a treatise or two on novel-writing – how much of it is Spark’s own view? Does Loitering With Intent have, hidden within it, the rudiments for a how-to of creative writing? Impossible to judge… but here are three snippets which I enjoyed pondering:

But since then I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

** (I changed “beautifully” to “very well” before sending the book to the publisher. I had probably been reading too much Henry James at that time, and “beautifully” was much too much.)
**
I knew I wasn’t helping the readers to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think.

But Fleur’s writing doesn’t end with her work-in-progress. As part of her secretarial duties, she has to edit the submissions of the Autobiographical Association. Spark is very funny about Fleur’s low estimation of the group’s writing abilities, and the manner in which Fleur augments the perceived dullness of their memoirs:
The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents’ absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver.
As a hint of what is to come, it turns out that Fleur’s flight of fancy does, in part, turn out to be truth. Which Stuck-in-a-Book reader could fail to notice similarities to Miss Hargreaves?

This becomes the crux of the novel – where does Fleur’s imagination end, and where does plagiarism begin? Similarities between the Autobiographical Association’s activities and the manuscript of Warrender Chase grow ever greater – how much is coincidence, how much does Fleur absorb, and how much does she write before it happens? The parallel stories – both (of course) fiction, but one accepted as ‘true’ in the novel; fiction and meta-fiction, if you’re feeling in that mood – intertwine and overlap, and Spark does it all so very, very cleverly. I won’t say any more.


As with all my favourite novelists – and Spark could swiftly join that group – style contributes heavily to my appreciation. Spark is sharp, witty, and sees straight through any form of dissemblance. I need to revisit The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means sometime, as I must have missed something. I’m late to the party on this one, but the latest converts are the most enthusiastic – I foresee more Sparks being read before 2010 is over. Thank you, blogosphere!

Travelling Light

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I still have a small pile of novellas to talk about (I’ve realised that it doesn’t necessarily take any less time to write posts on short books) but I haven’t yet written about Tove Jansson’s Travelling Light – which has leapt, as I rather assumed it would, onto my list of favourite books this year.

Regular readers of S-i-a-B will know that Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and a new translation of her work (this one by Silvester Mazzarella, with another brilliant introduction by Ali Smith) will get me into the literary equivalent of a tizzy. I have to be in the right mood for reading short stories usually, but when they come from the pen of Tove J, they race to the top of the reading pile. And these were no exception.

Unlike Jansson’s best known adult work, The Summer Book, these stories don’t share the same sorts of settings and characters. We range from familiar Scandinavian islands to mysterious woods to the cabin of a ship to – most innovatively – an almost post-apocalyptic town. Though the scenarios vary wildly, each is clearly the work of the same writer, for Jansson brings to each and every story a stirring and extraordinary insight in the workings of the human mind and – more especially – the interaction of people. These people often covertly clash with each other, or don’t let on everything they are thinking; they feel awkward, distrustful, inadequate. Characters often say things which are disconcerting because they are so unexpected, but also because they are so perceptive and true.
“Anyway, solitary people interest me. There are so many different ways of being solitary.”

“I know just what you mean,” said X. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. Different kinds of solitude. Enforced solitude and voluntary solitude.”

“Quite,” said Viktoria. “There’s no need to go into it further. But when people understand one another without speaking, it can often leave them with very little to talk about, don’t you think?”
That comes from ‘The Garden of Eden’, one of the longest and one of my favourite stories in the collection. The mid-length story is so difficult to get right – it doesn’t have the quick impact of a five page story, but also shouldn’t meander too much. ‘The Garden of Eden’ gets it just right in its depiction of Professor Viktoria arriving in a mountain village west of Alicante, and trying to create a truce between two warring women. There are so many layers to the story, none of them overblown, and the whole piece is wonderfully more than the sum of its parts.

But Jansson’s insights into human character don’t preclude her beautiful descriptions of the natural environment. I was particularly taken with this, from the same story:
At that exact moment the setting sun broke through a gap in the mountain chain and the twilit landscape was instantly transformed and revealed; the trees and the grazing sheep enveloped in a crimson haze, a sudden beautiful vision of biblical mystery and power. Viktoria thought she had never seen anything so lovely. She remembered once a set designer saying, “My job is to paint with light, that’s all it is. The right light at the right time.” The sun moved quickly on, but before the colours could fade, Viktoria turned and walked slowly back to her house.I don’t really read in a visual way, as it were, but this description really worked for me – and it’s typical of the beautiful images that Jansson places congruously alongside the interaction of flawed and interesting characters.

If I had to choose just one story as my favourite, it would be ‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories’ – a deliciously, deviously clever story concerning the reunion of two women, and the disunity of their shared recollections. One is vampirically changing and appropriating the other’s memories – all shown very subtly, very believably. It represents everything I love about Jansson’s ‘touch’.

‘The Summer Child’ is about a disconcerting child visitor, anti-social but not malevolent:
When it came to giving people a bad conscience, he was an expert. Sometimes all he had to do was just look at you with those gloomy, grown-up eyes and you would instantly be reminded of all your failings.I wonder if Jansson was thinking of her own writing when she wrote those words. The human mind and soul cannot be held up to such close inspection without the reader glancing at their own. But although Jansson exposes so many home truths, entirely without sentimentality, Travelling Light is far from a depressing or distressing collection. Instead, it makes you marvel with fascination, soak in the wonderful prose, and be grateful that there existed someone with so precise, perceptive and unpredictable a view of the world.

You’re So Unreliable!

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One of my holiday reads (yes, still working my way through reviewing those – it’ll probably coincide with my next holiday by the time I finish with it) was Wish Her Safe At Home (1982) by Stephen Benatar. I heard about it from this article, reprinted in The Week. I’ve only just noticed it was written by the usually rather imbecilic Cosmo Landesman (Col and I find his film reviews very useful – you can guarantee that whatever he writes, the exact opposite will be true) – had I spotted Landesman’s name on it before I wouldn’t have proceeded. Glad I did! And, had that article not appeared on my horizon, Aarti’s enthusiasm would surely have filtered through! To get an idea of how much she loves Wish Her Safe At Home, just think about me and Miss Hargreaves…

Benatar’s novel made the press mostly because of his determination to give it a readership. That article elaborates on how he (very gently) approached people in various bookshops, suggesting they might like to read Wish Her Safe At Home (and probably his other novels too). He also set up his own publisher to reprint his own novels. And it takes some gumption to approach Penguin Classics and suggest his own, moderately successful, novel should enter that hall of fame. They wanted an introduction from a notable name, John Carey was happy to oblige (if the name is familiar it might be because, like me, you’ve flicked through The Intellectuals and the Masses) – but Penguin still turned it down. The beautiful New York Review of Books Classics were, thankfully, more sensible – hence the novel’s current incarnation.

So that’s the story the newspapers enjoyed – man battles against odds; gritty determination rewarded. We Brits do love an underdog – but don’t let any of that stand in the way of Wish Her Safe At Home being read on its own merits. It’s worth remembering that it was shortlisted for the James Tait Memorial Prize (a better indication of a good book than the Man Booker Prize, I reckon). So let’s get onto the story that really matters – the one within the pages of Wish Her Safe At Home.

Rachel Waring – who had once been ‘almost pretty’ – has inherited her great-aunt’s Georgian mansion, and leaves her dull job and incompatible flatmate, having instantly fallen in love with the house when she visited it. Moving there hadn’t been the plan, but its lure is such that she is immediately certain that she must:

The exterior of the house was beautiful. Terraced, tall, eighteenth-century, elegant. Oh, the stonework needed cleaning and the window frames required attention – as did the front door and half a dozen other things. But it was beautiful. I don’t know why; I just hadn’t been expecting this.
I always find the attraction of houses fascinating in novels. As someone who could happily spend all day staring at a beautiful home, who gazes into estate agents’ windows at properties I could never possibly afford, and who regards Kirstie and Phil as something akin to surrogate parents… well, I can sympathise with Rachel thus far.

But that isn’t all – the house has a plaque to Horatio Gavin, ‘Philanthropist and politician’, who had lived there 1781-1793. Rachel develops an interest in Gavin, and determines to find out more about him…

It’s not just dead philanthropists who catch Rachel’s interest. Indeed, more or less anybody she meets is considered a potential conversational partner, even if she is appraising and judging them at the same time. Benatar’s skillful presentation of Rachel’s voice gives her inner thoughts and outer expressions all tangled up with one another, and also fuses in the odd line here and there which show that neither are quite right… more on that later. First, here’s an example of Rachel’s lack of edit-button in her outbursts to anybody in close proximity…
“I think I should like to have been somebody’s favourite aunt,” I said. “I think it might have been fun.” This, to the woman whose table at the teashop I had asked to share.

She smiled, hesitated, finally remarked: “Well, perhaps it’s not too late.”

“No brother no sister, no husband – somehow I get the feeling it might be!”

“Oh dear.”

“Did you ever see Dear Brutus?”

“Dear Brutus? Yes! A lovely play.”

“Wouldn’t it be fine if we all had second chances?”

She nodded, now looking more relaxed. “Oh, I’d have gone to university and got myself an education!” I reflected that she probably needed one. “But otherwise I don’t think I’d have wished things very different.” She gave a meaningless laugh and started gathering up her novel and her magazine. Poor woman. What a lack of imagination. (And what a dull, appalling hat.) Yet I realised that I envied her.
It’s not just strangers in cafes, though – Rachel becomes friendly with an assortment of local people, especially her youthful gardener and his wife, Roger and Celia. Their lives get increasingly tangled up, in the most cheerful and whimsical way imaginable… or so it seems.

For it quickly becomes apparent that Rachel is not a reliable narrator. Whenever this realisation dawns in a novel, I get a little shiver down my back – what to believe, what not to believe! At first she seems unhinged in a jolly way – singing to herself, accosting everyone with sunny optimism and faux-schoolma’am whimsy. She meanders along the line between being consciously eccentric and… something less healthy. She gets increasingly bizarre, and it becomes clear that she is not sane… As John Carey writes in his introduction, ‘It reminds us how thin the boundaries are between the mad and the imaginative, the mad and the sensitive, the mad and the acute.’ She becomes obsessed with Horatio Gavin, the philanthropist who’d once lived in her house. We can no longer trust her version of the events she narrates – but second-guessing the truth is a twisting and turning game, written with excellent subtlety by Benatar. So much cleverer, so much better than The Behaviour of Moths, which tried something similar.

And Rachel’s is truly a unique voice. Witty and biting and joyous and enthusiastic and… yes, rather unhinged. Whether or not it is convincingly female is another question – I don’t mean feminine, for a female’s voice needn’t be feminine, but somehow it seemed as though it might not be a million miles away from Benatar’s own voice – though presumably his is rather tempered! That aside, Wish Her Safe At Home is quite extraordinary, and would certainly bear a careful re-reading. It’s not remotely the sort of novel I was expecting from the cover, or even from the blurb. I was expecting a novel which felt much older – this novel is unmistakably modern. Not through expletives or slang or modern references, but perhaps in tone. [Edit: I think what I actually meant, having read Aarti’s comments and reassessed, is that the novel felt timeless. When I said ‘unmistakably modern’ I meant it obviously wasn’t a 1940s reprint, in the way that The Little Stranger could have been – this novel could have taken place at any time, and it takes a while to work out when it is set.] And yet it combines this with a sense of history, and a charm which is uncommon in post-war novels. It’s an extraordinary read, and I am glad that Benatar’s persistence and determination paid off.

It shouldn’t be unusual, but John Carey writes an unusually good Introduction. Not unusual for him, I mean, just unusual in general. I’ve now used the word ‘unusual’ so often that it has lost all meaning… Aside from some lazy anti-Christianity, Carey writes insightfully and with an eye that is both analytical and appreciative. More on that topic tomorrow, methinks…

Do let me know if there are any unreliable narrators I should meet (although don’t let me know if their unreliability is a huge spoiler for the book!)

Books to get Stuck into:

To be honest, this most reminded me of the book I read immediately beforehand – The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – because of the influence of a house, etc. etc. Instead, I’ll pick a couple novels with unreliable narrators, which is always an interesting angle…
Prince Rupert’s Teardrop by Lisa Glass – ok, being honest, this book was far too gruesome for me to enjoy – but it’s also the best and most unnerving unreliable narrator I’ve encountered.

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth – and this is the next most unnerving! The tale of a scarily obsessive neighbour… but told from the perspective of that self-deluded neighbour. Very clever, and decidedly gripping.

Stone in a Landslide

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The weekend miscellany will be a bit delayed this week, as I wanted to write about Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal (translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell), and the launch event in London yesterday evening… which I would have done last night, but we provincial folk have to travel back to our provincial homes, all provincially. (By the by, sorry for only one pic… Blogger is doing something where it won’t accept any pics if they go below the first few paragraphs. Thanks, Blogger…)

Which to talk about first? Erm… let’s start with the book, and move onto the event, because after all that’s the order in which I did things. Chronology, folks – it’s your friend.

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal is a Catalan classic, originally published in 1985 (which was described last night as ‘modern’, but since it’s the year I was born I couldn’t feel it was that modern) and – like all Peirene’s titles – very short. At just 126 pages this novel (novella? Let’s stick to ‘novel’ for now) manages to encapsulate an entire life, from childhood to death – and never does it feel rushed.

Anyone could see that there were a lot of us at home. Someone had to go.
The opening line of the novel – and I think it’s rather a great one – sets the tone for the narrative throughout. Conxa’s voice could be called dispassionate, but perhaps a fairer description is ‘stoical’ or ‘resilient’. She moves to her aunt’s house; later gets married and has children; sees her family disrupted in the Spanish Civil War, and ends the novel in a state that, in other hands, would be tragic. But Conxa never bewails her fate, there is no gnashing of teeth – rather, her story is told simply and honestly. I love what Polly wrote in her review – “Barbal’s writing is simple but not simplistic”. Conxa is given a voice that is undemonstrative, flowing along in a way that is unobtrusive but never dull. I don’t know how Barbal does it, because each individual sentence is very plain, but somehow they combine to make a voice that is startlingly present and human.

Polly has done much better than me with her review, as have the others out there, because all I can think to say is that it’s a good, good book, with ingredients that shouldn’t quite have worked, but in Barbal’s capable hands it does so. It seems to me impossible to analyse Stone in a Landslide’s component parts and discover why it works, but suffice to say: it does.

I’m so grateful to Meike and Peirene Press for making these European modern classics available in English, and in such beautiful editions too. For more details see their website and their witty blog. If you have any suggestions for European books published after 1945 and under 200pp. long (and which haven’t yet been translated into English) do let Meike know your ideas: meike.ziervogel@peirenepress.com

And… onto last night! Meike very kindly invited some bloggers along to the launch of Stone in a Landslide, and so it was a mini-reunion for me, Simon S, Polly, and Sakura. Which was lovely, nice to see you guys, sorry I was teasing you all… The four of us – and seemingly the rest of London – piled into the tiny bookHAUS shop to hear a bit of introduction to the novel, and Claire Skinner (yes, the mum from Outnumbered, though doubtless she has Shakespeare under her belt too) read sections from the novel. It was very hot, but very good – Skinner’s readings were an especial treat; she really ‘got’ Stone in a Landslide and brought its simplicity and truthfulness alive.

And Meike wins gold stars and suchlike for being one very lovely lady! Although there were lots of very important-looking folk there, she made us feel really welcome – we had a nice chat, and I realised afresh just how brilliant the people behind independent publishers are. The relationship between bloggers and smaller publishers is still in its early days, but can be so mutually joyous – last night being a great example. Long live bloggers, and long love Peirene!

Books to get Stuck into…

I’ve chosen a couple of books which you might like if this review’s whetted your appetite. I think they both work as links, but for very different reasons…

Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair: for another short book encapsulating an entire life, you can do little better than Sinclair’s excellent 1922 novel.

Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell: completely different tone, and non-fiction to boot, but this incredibly well written account of Orwell’s experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War gives an alternative angle and would make a fascinating companion read.

Brother of the More Famous Jack

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments

Back in the mists of time, Bloomsbury very kindly sent me a set of Barbara Trapido’s novels – which featured in a Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany back here – but somehow I’ve only just got around to reading the first: Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982). I’m afraid the title remained a mystery to me to the end – they do mention that it is in reference to W.B. Yeats, but I’d never heard of Jack Yeats (is that the point?) and I couldn’t see why the title had been chosen… anybody able to enlighten me, do pop your answer in the comments, please.

But that’s by-the-by, really, because I was very impressed by Brother of the More Famous Jack. It is, although I hate the expression and usually hate the genre, a coming-of-age novel. That phrase always makes me shudder and think of ghastly books like The Catcher in the Rye (which we didn’t much like as a whole, remember?) but Trapido’s novel is much better than that. We see Katherine start off as an ingenuous eighteen year old, thrown into the maelstrom of the Goldman household. And since the novel is in the first person, we feel thrown into it as well. Eccentric, forthright Professor Jacob – a ‘creative and inspired grumbler’ – his kind but sharp wife Jane, and their six children (especially Roger and Jonathan, competing at various points throughout the novel for her affection) provide a world of which Katherine has no experience. They are in turns enchanting, frustrating, and bewildering – for the reader as much as Katherine. Katherine herself it is difficult not to like, if only for this: ‘I reverted, as I do in moments of crisis, to rereading Emma, with cotton wool in my ears.’ A sound course of action for anyone, I think you’ll agree. At the same time, Katherine is not a wholly endearing character – more an empathetic one. Watching her grow wiser, we understand rather than adore Katherine.

And aside from the characters, Oxford is often a star of the novel. Although a country bumpkin like me is captured more by the descriptions of the Goldmans’ rural estate, I must admit to being won over by this depiction of Oxford, as experienced by Roger Goldman: Oxford was a place of magical cobbled lanes which led to the sweet-shop. It was a place where tea came with strawberries before the peal of bells for Evensong, where Grandmother, in a Pringle sweater and thick stockings, took one to watch punters from the bridge over the High Street, and where one went through doors into secret gardens with high stone walls. He never came to see it as a place afflicted with too much trad and old stones. He was not, as I was, embarrassed by the idea of privilege. He described to me with an almost hol joy the journey he would make from the railway station, past the litter and grot beside the slime-green canal, past the jail and on into St. Ebbes towards the ample splendour of Christ Church. The middle section of the novel, where Katherine heads off to Rome and a volatile relationship with a jealous Italian, is less successful and at times a little wearing. Trapido is much more successful when back amongst the Goldmans – my only quibble about them is that all their names begin with J. With Jane, Jacob, Jonathan, John and all the various appellations therefrom, it did get a bit confusing… I suppose it was deliberate, and with ‘Jack’ from the title being conspicuously absent… I don’t know. Another potentially interesting angle about which I require enlightening.

Like many of the novels I enjoy, Brother of the More Famous Jack is more about character and style than it is about plot – which makes it difficult to describe or recommend successfully. So I suggest you just pick up a copy and give it a go. It’s not my favourite novel this year and it isn’t cosily enchanting or anything like that, but I might just be inclined to agree with the blurb which claims that, with this novel, Trapido redefined the coming-of-age novel.

Books to get Stuck into:

Dodie Smith – I Capture the Castle: I’ve never actually blogged about it, but this is THE quintessential coming-of-age novel – and the only one before Trapido’s that I’d ever enjoyed. Funny, wise, and I’m even prepared to use the word ‘enchanting’.

Angelica Garnett – The Unspoken Truth: fiction, but heavily influenced by her own life, these four stories evoke the same ingenuousness amongst wry bohemia.

In the Garden…

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

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I’ve been taking part in a Faith and Fiction Round Table discussion of Tobias Wolff’s In The Garden of the North American Martyrs – to be honest, the ‘Faith’ bit didn’t seem to come into the discussion that much, but it was still fun to compare notes. Quite a few of us have sections of the discussion on our blogs – check out the links at the bottom. It’s my first dabble in this sort of thing, hope you find it of some interest… let me know if you’ve read any Tobias Wolff.

Amy: I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the short story form. Unless a story is particularly well written with strong momentum and a sort of “punch to the gut” feeling, I often wonder why I even read it. There were a few stories in this collection that I thought were excellent, but for the most part, I simply appreciated the perceptive writing. I am curious as to how all of you feel about short stories and additionally how often you read them.

Hannah: I’m not a big fan of the short story form, either, Amy. However, this may be my favorite short story collection I’ve ever finished — at least since college. (That’s not exactly saying much, though, because I don’t read many.)

Pete: I have a sort of love/hate relationship with short stories and this book is a great example of why. There’s no doubt that the author is an incredibly perceptive writer and I was engaged throughout the book on that strength alone. But there are quite a few of the shorts that left me feeling like I hadn’t ‘gone’ anywhere. To my way of thinking, that’s the point of a story, to take the reader with you somewhere. At times, I felt like these shorts just sort of ran out of gas before any destination was reached.

Now, let me say also that I’m often wrong about such things. My first reaction to something like No Country for Old Men is similar. Sometimes endings have to work on me a bit before they sink in and satisfy (and sometimes dissatisfaction is the point, right?). But in the case of a short story, I feel like there’s not enough journey in the first place to necessarily earn that open ending.

I have several shorts myself that I’ve never published anywhere for this very reason. I feel like they contain a lot of solid writing and solid characterization, adequate conflict, etc. but they just don’t really ‘go’ anywhere. So in the drawer they sit.

RC: I actually really appreciate the short story form for the fact that the goal isn’t necessarily to go somewhere, but use a few characters, a simple setting, and a short period of time (usually) to say something, and it’s often in the going nowhere that fosters the discussion because if you walk away saying “nothing happened” that that probably means you have to look deeper at what the author is saying. (Whether you like it or not).

Simon: Like a few of us, I have a love/hate relationship with short stories. One of my favourite writers is Katherine Mansfield, and I think the short story can create some of the best writing – but also some of the worst. For the most part I found that Wolff’s stories veered towards the former, but some of them didn’t do anything for me.

Kate: I pick up a short story collection every once in a while, but it isn’t my typical type of book. I know what I like to read and tend to stick to it. I decided to participate in this discussion to force me out of my comfort zone. I’m glad I did, but I didn’t like the book.

Stephen: Amy, I don’t read many short stories either, but I really liked these because it felt like there was something to talk about with every one of them, a lot going on beneath the surface. I think you make a good point, RC, that these stories require you to look deeper at what the author is saying when at first it seems nothing much is happening.

For the rest of this discussion, check out these blogs:
The Quirky Redhead, My Friend Amy, Strange Culture, The Fiddler’s Gun, Rebelling Against Indifference, Wordlily

Nella Last

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30. Nella Last’s War

I’ve mentioned a couple of times on here about Nella Last’s War, which I’ve been reading gradually for a few months. I knew that I was one of the last (no pun intended) to pick this up, but hadn’t realised that it was first published back in 1981 – before I was born! So it’s taken me my whole life so far, but I’m delighted to have finally come upon this – I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t feature in my favourite books of 2010.

For those not in the know (or thought it was Nella’s Last War – or, like me, confused Nella Last with Nella Larsen) this diary is taken from a Mass Observation diary compiled by ‘Housewife, 49’ Nella Last during World War Two. She documents the war from the perspective of a mother in Northern England, with solider-age sons (Cliff and Arthur), living a fairly ordinary life with an ordinary husband in an ordinary neighbourhood.

But this diary is anything but ordinary. Though Nella did not think herself a clever woman, nor believe that she had fulfilled her half-held ambition to be a writer, she has a quite astonishing gift. I’ve read quite a few diaries and letters and similar, but only Virginia Woolf compares – they both have an intelligent voice, a way of describing everyday events with unusual images or perceptive insights which reveal so much about them. Unlike most people’s diaries (certainly unlike mine) there is little repetition, no undue introspection, no references to unknown people who appear and disappear. True, these may have been edited (I don’t know how substantially) but had Nella Last intended to write a novel, the structure, and precision in her language, couldn’t be bettered.

And of course, the period was not uneventful. I find reading about major events from an individual’s perspective so illuminating.

Wednesday night, 5 June, 1940
This morning I lingered over my breakfast, reading and re-reading the accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me was a harp that vibrated and sang – like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walked through a park, a big bed of clear, thin red poppies in all their brave splendour. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old – like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy trash and rubbish. It was a very hot morning and work was slowed a little, but somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.I could quote so much from this book, but I’m just going to give you another – one of my favourite excerpts, a beautiful passage, all the more beautiful because it is from true experience, and not a honed image from a novel.
Saturday, 6th November, 1943
How swiftly time has flown since the first Armistice. I stood talking to my next-door neighbour, in a garden in the Hampshire cottage where I lived for two years during the last war. I felt so dreadfully weary and ill, for it was only a month before Cliff was born. I admired a lovely bush of yellow roses, which my old neighbour covered each night with an old lace curtain, to try and keep them nice so that I could have them when I was ill. Suddenly, across Southampton water, every ship’s siren hooted and bells sounded, and we knew the rumours that had been going round were true – the war was over. I stood before that lovely bush of yellow roses, and a feeling of dread I could not explain shook me. I felt the tears roll down my cheeks, no wild joy, little thankfulness. Oddly enough, Cliff has never liked yellow roses. When he was small, he once said they made him feel funny, and his remark recalled my little Hampshire garden and the first Armistice. Now Cliff is in another war – and we called it the ‘war to end all war.’
A year or so ago Nella Last’s Peace was published, which carries on her diaries until 1965 – Our Vicar’s Wife has a copy, so I’ll borrow it from her at some point. I didn’t see the TV programme Housewife, 49, based on Nella Last’s War, with the rather wonderful Victoria Wood – but apparently it was rather good. Which is only fitting for a book, and a woman, so exceptional as Nella Last. As a diary, it can scarcely be bettered – and as a perspective on the Second World War from the home front, this book is invaluable and should be read for many years to come.