1980s

One Valium or Two?

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Now, I am neither a housewife in the 1980s nor a single woman in the 1990s, but I have recently been discovering what these predicaments are like – through fiction-based-on-fact and fact-based-on-fiction, respectively. Today I’ll talk about the housewife in the 1980s…

I picked up Diane Harpwood’s Tea & Tranquillisers: The Diary of a Happy Housewife (1981) in a charity shop for a pound. I was enticed by the cover, and the fact that it was published by Virago, into thinking that it might be a 1980s version of EM Delafield’s superlatively wonderful Diary of a Provincial Lady. In some ways it fits… Jane Bennett has been married for ten years, has two children, and is a housewife always watching the pennies. Where Delafield’s experience as a housewife was in this house in Devon…


…Diane Harpwood and her heroine are based in a small, rather depressing neighbourhood. Jane constantly fights with her husband David, despite also being rather smitten by him. She admires her friend Cathy for doing a correspondence course to get some A Levels (or perhaps O Levels, I forget) but is herself stuck in domestic drudgery. Here’s an illustrative excerpt:
Saturday 28th: I left home tonight, flew the nest, scarpered. I’d had E-nough, and enough they say is as good as a feast, or in my case a glut. So the atmosphere in the old homestead has been a trifle chilled tonight.

I’ve been on my feet since half-past six this morning and my bum has scarcely come into contact with a chair all day. I’ve been making beds, tidying up, changing sh*tty nappies, tidying up, washing sh*tty nappies, tidying up, preparing, cooking and clearing up after breakfast, lunch and tea, washing the kitchen floor which is permanently filthy with bits of petrifying food and assorted muck carried in on everyone’s shoes, except for today, when it was clean for a while.By now you’ll be getting the gist. Perhaps you’re nodding your head in thoughtful sympathy. Or perhaps, like me, you’re wishing she’d drowned herself in the sink at breakfast. The blurb describes Tea & Tranquillisers as ‘hilarious and heartbreaking’ and… well, it’s not. There were moments of pathos in amongst the whinging, but for the most part this book was utterly humourless. Just page after page of complaining about her lot. If you want a book about being a poor housewife (though a bit earlier) look at Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. For an updated look at provincial motherhood, you can do no better than Provincial Daughter, by EM Delafield’s own daughter, RM Dashwood. But not this book… oh, that EM Delafield could have written it! Yes, her life was probably rather easier, at least on the manual labour front – but she turned a wry, self-deprecating eye upon her life and her dilemmas. There is a world between self-deprecating and self-pity.

And, lest you think I’m being all chauvinistic, this is not a feminist book by any stretch of the imagination. There are all sorts of household jobs and decisions that she can only envisage a man doing, and quite often you want to shake her and say “a woman is quite capable of a bit of DIY, you don’t have to wait for your husband to do it while you make the dinner!”

As you can see, I was quite frustrated by Tea & Tranquillisers… it wasn’t all bad, there were some quite touching moments, but on the whole I thought it was an ill-conceived, humourless whine. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about that single woman in the 1990s… and, just to give you a sneak preview, the book in question meets with rather more favour! Oh, and it’s not Bridget Jones’ Diary…

The True Deceiver

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Since most of the authors I like are dead, it’s unusual for me to wait with excitement for a book to be published. I can normally just buy the backlist from abebooks, and work my way through them… well, Tove Jansson is dead, but she also wrote in Swedish, so I’m having to wait for the wonderful Thomas Teal to translate them. Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and I couldn’t wait for The True Deceiver to be published – it’s coming out in October, but I begged an advance copy because I just couldn’t wait any longer.

All my reviews of Jansson’s previous books are under this link, which will take you to my thoughts on The Summer Book, A Winter Book, and Fair Play. Those who don’t like Jansson call her books boring – and if you read books primarily for plot, then she won’t be the author for you. But if you choose your books for character, writing style, and atmosphere – I’ve never come across any better writer. As Ali Smith writes in her wise introduction, Tove Jansson is ‘the opposite of charming’. Her books do not charm, they are far too honest for that, but they certainly appeal. She does not believe that the opposite of charming is repulsive – the opposite of charming is truth. So many modern novels assume human nature is disgusting, and that the only significant acts are ugly ones – Tove Jansson’s writing quietly, mesmerically shows characters who are beautifully real.

The True Deceiver is a little different from the other Jansson books I’ve read. Still set in snowy Sweden, still focusing on the co-existence of two women (a theme found in The Summer Book and Fair Play), there is more of an edge to this novel. Katri Kling is blunt, friendless, and entirely honest without being malevolent. She is blunt not because of malice, but because she sees truth as far more important than etiquette, and isn’t encumbered by emotions. She loves only two things – numbers, and her brother Mats, ‘a bit simple’. Katri’s character is shown in the way she is said to speak: ‘Other people talk, you make pronouncements’. Living away from the village, in ‘the rabbit house’, is Anna Aemelin. She is a disorganised, semi-reclusive illustrator of children’s books (yes, Tove was the illustrator of the Moomin books, but the very opposite of disorganised). Anna’s talent is the depiction of the woodland floor, in great, caring detail. But she has to include rabbits in her pictures, and the rabbits are covered in flowers – all the letters from fans, young and old, ask her why they are covered in flowers, and she always makes up a different answer. She never works on these books in the winter, so her paintbrushes are hibernating, as it were.

Katri takes some food up to Anna’s house, and develops an interest in the lady… but why? She fakes a break-in at the elderly artist’s home, to persuade her that she needs companionship… and so, with her brother and her dog, moves in. The motives for her actions are mysterious; the unacknowledged battle for power between Anna and Katri continues silently and subtly. Who is deceiving whom? And what effects are the women having on the lives and personalities of each other?

Katri starts sorting out Anna’s muddled finances and contracts. A portion of each financial victory is set aside for her brother – ‘Every time she wrote a captured sum of money into her notebook, she felt the collector’s deep satisfaction at finally owning a rare and expensive specimen.’ She even perfects the forging of Anna’s signature, and her writing style. And yet her motives remain unclear.

“Attention,” Anna said. “Giving another human being your undivided attention is a pretty rare thing. No, I don’t think it happens very often… Figuring out what someone wants and longs for, without being told – that probably requires a good deal of insight and thought. And of course sometimes we hardly know ourselves. Maybe we think it’s solitude we need, or maybe just the opposite, being with other people… We don’t know, not always…” Anna stopped talking, searched for words, raised her glass and drank. “This wine is sour. I wonder if it hasn’t stood too long. Don’t we have an unopened bottle of Madeira in the sideboard somewhere? No, let it go. Don’t interrupt me. What I’m trying to say is that there are few people who take the time to understand and listen, to enter into another person’s way of living. The other day it occurred to me how remarkable it is that you, Miss Kling, can write my name as if I’d written it myself. It is characteristic of your thoughtfulness, your thoughtfulness for me and no one else. Very unusual.”

“It’s not especially unusual,” Katri said. “Mats, pass the cream. It’s simply a matter of observation. You observe certain habits and behaviour patterns, you see what’s missing, what’s incomplete, and you supply it. It’s just a matter of experience. Get things working as best you can, then wait and see.”

“Wait and see what?” said Anne. She was annoyed.

“How it goes,” Katri said, looking straight at Anna, her eyes at this moment deeply yellow. She continued very slowly. “Miss Aemelin, the things people do for one another mean very little, seen purely as acts. What matters is their motives, where they’re headed, what they want.”
Jansson’s talent lies in showing the great depths of human interaction in the most unassuming ways. Skim through The True Deceiver and it might seem that not much happens, but read at the gradual pace her writing deserves, you realise what an unusually talented writer Jansson is. I haven’t read anything better than her collected output, especially in terms of style, from the last fifty years. Of course I am reading at one remove, and I cannot praise Thomas Teal’s translation enough – though I can’t compare it to the original, the result is so perfect that I can only assume Jansson and Teal are on the same wavelength. A real treat, and I do hope desperately that Sort Of Books continue to publish further translations of Jansson’s novels – and in such beautiful editions, too.

Henrietta’s War

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I’m sure it won’t have escaped your notice how excited I am about The Bloomsbury Group – not Virginia et al, but the reprints being published by Bloomsbury this year. Amongst them is my favourite novel, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker – but they are coming out in instalments, and the first two are The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, and Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennys. I believe the latter was suggested by Karen at Cornflower (see the links on the left; she now has a book blog and a separate domestic blog) and is the first one I’ve read. Not published until 7th July, I believe, but available for pre-order in quite a few places. (I also wrote about The Brontes Went To Woolworths a while ago, a book I now have in three different editions, though looking back at that review it’s pretty vague and woolly, sorry.)

It’s just as well that I’m using stock pictures, rather than taking a photograph of my copy of Henrietta’s War, as it’s pretty battered. I took it up to London, and carried it around all day, loth to be apart from it. (And what a beautiful book it is too, I love the designs of this series, so well done Sarah Morris for your design, and Penelope Beech for your illustrations – delightful.) Quite simply, Henrietta’s War is wonderful, and I never wanted it to stop.

Henrietta’s War was originally a series of articles in Sketch magazine during the Second World War. In the 1980s (the year I was born, actually) Joyce Dennys was doing her Spring Cleaning and came across the articles – and they were published in two collections. Henrietta’s War and Henrietta Sees It Through. They take the form of letters from Henrietta to Robert, a childhood friend away at war.

It is very Provincial Lady-esque, which can only be a good thing. In the first few pages we had a Robert, a Lady B. and even advice concerning the planting of bulbs, which happens on page one of The Provincial Lady (EM Delafield, but I’m sure you knew that). They’re even both set in Devon. It took me a while to cope with a Lady B. we were supposed to like, unlike Delafield’s condescending Lady B. – but, of course, this hindered me little. The humour is very similar – self-deprecating, and appreciative of the ridiculous even while she is proud of England’s bravery. The letters are also accompanied by Dennys’ own delightful sketches – have a look at Elaine’s review of Henrietta’s War over at Random Jottings to see some examples (one of which I have stolen) as well as reading Elaine’s wonderful thoughts, of course.

Henrietta represents the middle-class women in England, plucky and determined to carry on as normally as possible. They garden and chat and squabble – resisting the overly-zealous scrap metal collectors, and slowing down the knitting bee so as not to finish too soon, can be slotted into their daily lives. ‘There’s not much glamour on the home home-front. Ours not the saucy peaked cap of our untrammelled sisters [in the ATS]. Ours rather to see that the curtains are properly drawn, and do our little bit of digging in the garden. Ours to brave the Sewing Party and painstakingly make a many-tailed bandage, and ours to fetch the groceries home in a big basket.’ In the background are Henrietta’s husband, Dr. Charles; friends and occasional enemies Faith, Mrs. Simpkins and Mrs. Savernack; Henrietta’s children Linnet and Bill.

I think this quotation demonstrates the mixture of pluckiness and ability to laugh at oneself, which characterise both Henrietta’s War and so much writing of the period:

‘I was thinking to-day,’ said Lady B dreamily, ‘that if all we useless old women lined up on the beach, each of us with a large stone in her hand, we might do a lot of damage.’
‘The only time I saw you try to throw a stone, Julia, it went over your shoulder behind you,’ said Mrs. Savernack.
‘Then I would have to stand with my back towards the Germans,’ said Lady B comfortably.

Henrietta’s War is quite simply a wonderful, witty, charming, and occasionally very moving book. It deserves to be in the company of Diary of a Provincial Lady and Mrs. Miniver as great chroniclers of the home-front – and I can only hope that Bloomsbury will reprint Henrietta Sees It Through at some point in the future.

The House of Dolls

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I’m afraid I haven’t taken the draw for Yellow yet, and so there’s another day to enter the draw.

Good guesses, guys, but nobody got the novel I’m going to talk about – it’s The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns, author of 50 Books… entry Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. (By the way, I always refer to the list as my 50 Books, but the 26 you see listed are the only ones I’ve added to it so far… it’s ongoing, and suggestions always welcome!)

The House of Dolls has, in the very vaguest way, similarites with The Enchanted April – that is, both are about four women living in a building together. And that’s probably where the similarities end. In Comyns’ novel the women are middle-aged prostitutes – but ones which didn’t enter the oldest profession in the world until they were middle-aged, in response to their rent prices going. They live in the upper portions of a house belonging to long-suffering Amy Doll and her young daughter Hester. The four women upstairs are, like The Enchanted April, distinct – well, Berti and Evelyn are slightly similar: catty, brash, sarcastic and, deep down, desperately needing each other. Evelyn is described as ‘inclined to be a poor man’s edition of Berti’, and doesn’t have her brilliant red hair. Spanish Augustina – known as The Senora – is the most successful of the women, and the least emotional. Finally their is my favourite, shy Ivy Rope, who invites a mild dentist to their rooms, and hasn’t the heart to reveal her occupation when he believes it to be a date.

Before Our Vicar’s Wife throws up her hands in horror at the salacious material I’ve been reading, this isn’t salacious. Despite their lifestyle, absolutely nothing finds its way to the page, and this was from the pen of eighty year old Barbara Comyns whose humour is quirky rather than rude. I’ve commented with Comyns before that all her books seem to be very different – The House of Dolls is, stylistically, not wholly unlike The Juniper Tree (reviewed here) – but that was a Grimm fairytale updated, and had that air of myth and allegory. The House of Dolls doesn’t have the wonderful, frenetic surrealism of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, but does hint in that direction with daughter of the house Hester, who bunks off school to make china mosaics with a slightly mad man in an abadoned house – a lovely, entirely innocent, subplot of the novel.

Despite all Barbara Comyns’ novels being different from each other, the one thing they have in common is my appreciation. And (hurrah!) they’re pretty short. I don’t think is her best by any means, but anything from her oeuvre is worth reading – next up for me is her first novel, Sisters By A River. This slightly bizarre author is too underrated, and if her novels are not all great, they are certainly very good.

Friend or…

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Wow! Unanimous for ‘music’ – I thought the results would be a little more even… and, in fact, I’m going to put in the lone vote for ‘art’. I counted doing-it-myself, and pictures on the covers of books, etc. etc. – I couldn’t cope without it, whereas music has always been an enjoyable peripheral to my life. But I feel a little culturally out of my depth now that I know what aficiandoes you all are! Art 1: Music 20.

Without any attempt at a link here, I’m going to mention a book I read the other day for my course – Foe by J. M. Coetzee. I’d always avoided him, mostly because I got him mixed up with another author, whose name I can’t now remember… somehow these prejudices stick, even when they are proved irrational, and I’d never picked up one of his books. After Foe, I think I might change my mind.

Foe is a novel related to Robinson Crusoe – which I haven’t read, so I daresay I missed hundreds of nuances, but I know *enough* not to miss them all – not really a retelling or a new perspective, but an exercise in the idea of storytelling, narration, truth… The lead character is Susan Barton, washed up on Crusoe’s island after having been victim to a ship’s mutiny. The Cruso (note the missing ‘e’) and Friday she encounters are subtly different to Defoe’s, and sometimes not so subtly different (Friday’s race is changed; Cruso seems to have no real knowledge of his background and continually gives different versions of it). But the most interesting part comes when Susan is back in England, meeting the author Foe – or (De)Foe if you will – who is turning her story into a novel. But here the tussle for control over the narrative begins – and becomes increasingly complex as Susan’s long-lost daughter arrives, though Susan is adamant that she is not her daughter – has Foe invented her? What power does he have over their lives?

As a venture into the stormy waters of postmodernism, this is happily an utterly accessible and enjoyable novel (the overlap of experimentation and readability is sometimes narrow in this field, isn’t it?) – Foe raises all sorts of fascinating questions, but also lets you nod at these with interest and still read a rather good novel. Oh, and it’s short – always a tick in the ‘pro’ column for me!

Bloomsbury Baby

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I wasn’t sure whether or not to introduce this book to my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, but the longer it is since I read it, the better it seems in my mind… so, step forward Deceived with Kindness by Angelica Garnett. In the end, I’ve included it because it’s such a useful and captivating book about the Bloomsbury Group, whether or not you know anything about it before.

It’s been months since I read it and, like The Brontes Went to Woolworths, I’ve been promising to review the book on here for simply ages… so forgive me if I repeat all the things I’ve already mentioned about it over the past weeks.

Deceived with Kindness is the seventh non-fiction book in the 50 Books, but like most of the others listed there, it is literary in nature – Angelica Garnett was the daughter of Vanessa Bell, and thus the niece of Virginia Woolf. She was also Duncan Grant’s daughter, believed Clive Bell was her father for many years, and later married David Garnett (author of 50 Books entrant Lady Into Fox) – so she is well qualified to give her autobiography the subtitle A Bloomsbury Childhood. In fact, her book is less an autobiography than a focalised biography of the group – how could it be anything else with such fascinating people around her? They’re all here – as well as those mentioned above are Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes…

I’ve read a few books about the people Angelica writes about, especially Virginia Woolf , but though others might put years into research and erudition, Angelica Garnett doesn’t have to do all this because the material is right in front of her. Which means she can treat the topic without a scholarly reverence or a postmodern desire to re-evaluate the concept of being or anything like that – instead, there is an intriguing meld of affectionate childhood memoir and biography of the renowned. She sees them as her family and family friends, but also recognising their importance in literary history. We see her childhood relationship with Vanessa and Clive Bell, and later some moving chapters on discovering that Duncan Grant was her actual biological father. Before this, she reaches back into her mother’s upbringing, and provides brief but well-drawn biography, imbued with filial feeling. Her encounters with ‘The Woolves’ were of particular interest to me – and the relationship between Virginia and Vanessa is viewed with understanding and compassion: ‘Of Vanessa’s love for Virginia there was no question: she simply wished that it could have been taken for granted.’

I’m not sure I’ve given an accurate impression of Deceived with Kindness – the greatest quality of Garnett’s book is an intimacy which gives the reader greater access to the Bloomsbury group than any other biography I’ve read. For an introduction to the group, or something to add to your extant knowledge, this book is invaluable – and definitely one to read before starting Susan Sellers’ excellent novel Vanessa and Virginia.

No need to be Saki

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Our Vicar’s Wife and I, along with some local friends, are in the midst of a literature and arts week – one of Our Vicar’s Wife’s creation and assembly, that is. Yesterday it kicked off with sophisticated afternoon tea and an informal book group, where we all talked about what we’d been reading recently. Today started off with a book group on Mary Ann Shaffer’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Soceity, for which Our Vicar’s Wife had asked me to talk a little about the history of the epistolary novel… I was rather embarrassed and spoke too quickly, but didn’t go too badly. Always fun to mock Pamela a little bit…

In the afternoon we had a look round some of the studios and gardens open for Somerset Arts Week – saw some wonderful watercolours, exceptional animal sculptures, and fun designs with fabrics. Lots of things I’d have spent money on if I had it. A trip to a local book barn (not the Bookbarn) led to my buying Miss Mole by EH Young, and then we had a play reading of Noel Coward’s one-act play Ways and Means. Tomorrow we’re off to Lyme Regis to play at Persuasion and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

In the evening, not part of the schedule but coincidental, I flicked on to a repeat on BBC4, called Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? I was so excited when we first got BBC4, the cultural channel supposedly crammed with programmes about literature and art and such like. Hmm. Hasn’t really happened – I’ve probably wanted to watch about three programmes in the three years we’ve had it. But tonight has added a fourth – Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? According to IMDB it was first shown on 2 May 2007, so I’m hopelessly behind the times, but am very glad they chose to repeat it. The programme is based on three short stories by Saki, and stars the wonderful Gemma Jones. I’ve never read anything by Saki, but have had a collection of his work on my shelves for years, which I think Our Vicar’s Wife gave to me. Having had a sample of his work, I am now very keen to read them – and each story is so short that it would do before bed.

The three stories used for Who Killed Mrs. De Ropp? are ‘The Story-Teller’ and ‘The Lumber-Room’ from Beasts and Super-Beasts, and ‘Sredni Vashtar’ from The Chronicles of Clovis. Though with seemingly little connection, they are all linked by an overbearing female relative and mutinous children – so the makers of the programme assimilated these into one overbearing female relative and one group of mutinous children. What is most impressive about this programme is that it came directly from the books – almost nothing wass altered. Since Saki was a character, he did the narrative bits. And it’s wonderful – the stories are slightly macabre, they also have a deliciously light tone, almost EM Delafield-esque. For instance:

[On a train:] The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite ‘One the Road to Manderley.’ She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line aloud two thousand times without stopping. Whoever it was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet.

Any Saki-lovers out there? I’m going to make a start on Beasts and Super-Beasts forthwith.

Return! A plethora of books

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I am back from a week in Northern Ireland and a weekend in Warwickshire, and hope some of you are still around – will try and pop into most of the blogs tomorrow to say hello and catch up, but too late to do that tonight. Instead, will give a round-up of three books I’ve read recently… that’s right, leave me alone for a week and I have to burst with bookish things. None of these three books would make my top ten of the year, but each was worth writing about – and that might be where the connections end. We’ll see if any more come up as I write…

Capuchin Classics kindly sent me another of their reprinted novels – Tom Stacey’s The Man Who Knew Everything, which was published as Deadline in 1988. If you’re thinking ‘Oh, wasn’t that a film with John Hurt and Imogen Stubbs?’ then I’ll stop you there – Stacey’s foreword to this slim novel makes it clear that he has no wish to be associated with that film. Despite talented actors, ‘the director and editor went to ground for three months to emerge inexplicably with an edited version, not readily intelligible, which re-shaped the story as a tragedy of love’. So, if it is not a tragedy of love, what is it? Granville Jones is an aging newspaper correspondent in the 1950s Gulf, writing occasional dispatches and mostly idling towards the end of his life, reflecting on the two women who have played significant roles therein. He is there when a coup threatens the island’s leader, also a personal friend, and must report on it – and must meet the journalistic deadline before anyone else gets there.

In some ways it’s a pity Stacey had to lose the title, as it lends the narrative an urgency which can’t always be felt by those who, like me, haven’t lived the journalist’s life. It doesn’t help that Granville isn’t a particularly likeable character (I felt more than a little sympathy for his abandoned family) but he does come into his own when in conversation with the island’s leader, the Emir. ‘We have grown old together, Jonas. You and I are too old to fear to die.’ All in all, an interesting novel with some touching moments, but requires a mind with a greater political bent than mine possesses.

Piccadilly by Laurence Oliphant was also a reprint, but my copy is a 1928 reprint of the 1870 original. Victorian literature forms too large a gap in my reading, which I decided to rectify with the shortest Victorian novel I owned. Piccadilly is described as a satire on London politics of the 1870s – well, I’m not particularly clued up on the political scene of that era, or indeed any era. No matter, I continued regardless. The hero, Frank Vanecourt, decides to launch himself on a life of selfless charity, and to write a book:

‘I shall tell of my aspirations and my failures – of my hopes and fears, of my friends and my enemies. I shall not shrink from alluding to the state of my affections; and if the still unfulfilled story of my life becomes involved with the destiny of others, and entangles itself in an inextricable manner, that is no concern of mine’.

It might not astonish you to learn that the story of his life does become involved with the destiny of others – specifically his noble (and quite lovable) friend Grandon; the woman Grandon loves, Lady Ursula; and Ursula’s mercenary mother Lady Broadhem. What unravels is a complex and often amusing plot of secrecy and blackmail and love and much introspection and expostulation from Vanecourt – presumably mocking a vogue for novels of this ilk. Some rather unsavoury, but perhaps inevitable, racism occasionally spoils what is quite a witty work, but I can’t help feel I’d appreciate Piccadilly more if I’d read any of the sort of novels which it mimicks.

Finally, a collection of short stories by Mathias B. Freese, Down to a Sunless Sea, which I was sent to review. Full marks on the title – I do like quotations in titles, as I might have mentioned before. Vulpes Libris are kicking off a week on short stories over on their blog, and very interesting I’m sure it will prove to be – whilst they’re at it, perhaps someone could answer a query. Why does the short story so often attract the macabre? I thought (and wrote!) quite a lot about the Victorian short story for a dissertation at university, but the macabre didn’t pop up nearly so often… Freese’s collection has large doses of it, and wasn’t always my cup of tea, shall we say. I did want to mention one story, though, which seemed head and shoulders above the rest – ‘Young Man’. It’s a little like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in style, but communicates some sort of mental illness, in an atemporal confusion. If I could remember Genette’s Narrative Discourse, then all sorts of terms would be appropriate. This is part of it:

One day his daughter asked him, “What’s on TV for children tonight, Daddy?”
One day his wife said, “Someday it will be all right.”
One day he asked himself, “Is this it?”
Again his daughter asked him, “What’s on TV for children tonight, Daddy?”
“Watch me, instead,” he replied

Mrs. Hat

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There are a few books I’ve finished over the last month, and not blogged about, but they’re now all in boxes… I’m moving house on Wednesday, to the other side of Oxford, and my bookcase is moving tomorrow – thus I had to empty it, and consign all my books to boxes. I did, however, see my new bedroom for the first time today, and it has lots of shelves already there! Hurray! My books need no longer be in piles by my bed. I’m sure they will be, but at least it will be out of volition rather than necessity.

I can just about remember the book I finished early this morning, without fishing it out of the box, and it strays a little from normal Stuck-in-a-Book territory: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. I started reading this two or three years ago, simply because the title captured me, somehow it got shelved (I think termtime and essays got in the way) and now I’ve finished. For those who don’t know, it’s non-fiction, described by Wikipedia thus: “The book comprises 24 essays split into 4 sections which each deal with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisphere of the brain) while the third and fourth describe phenomenological manifestations with reference to spontaneous reminiscences, altered perceptions, and extraordinary qualities of mind found in “retardates”

Gosh, doesn’t that sound dull. Well, it isn’t. Each chapter looks at certain patients/clients (as they were called, though Sacks rather disparages the term) and their medical predicaments – Sacks documents his interaction with these people, and his discovering why their conditions occur, without being too blinding-with-science. A woman who can only see the left-hand side of any object; twins who can identify the day of the week for any date over a span of 8000 years; the man, indeed, who mistook his wife for a hat. What makes this book interesting is twofold – the amazing things which the brain can do or cease to do, or ways in which illness can manifest itself, but secondly, and more importantly, the compassion and humanity with which Sacks describes the cases under consideration. One feels he was bucking a trend in his field of medicine in 1985, when the book was published, and has hopefully led the way. A unique compendium, perhaps, and one which is sometimes upsetting, often enlightening, and always fascinating.

L’arbretrary

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Back to books, and back to Barbara Comyns – she appears in the 50 Books with her excellent, surreal novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and I previously read an autobiographical novel Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which is told through the childlike voice of a naive young wife and mother – and I couldn’t resist The Juniper Tree when I discovered that it was adapted from a tale from the Brothers Grimm. One of my pet interests is myths turned into domestic literature i.e. the fantastic transferred to the everyday, contained so that it plays out through human emotions rather than the mystical or extreme.

I didn’t know ‘The Juniper Tree’ (by Brothers Grimm) before I read The Juniper Tree (by Barbara Comyns… this is going to get confusing…) and I think it’s best to approach it that way. Reading about the Grimm’s tale on Wikipedia afterwards, I was stunned by how Comyns managed to work the tale into the novel, weaving aspects in subtly and artistically. I could appreciate this in retrospect, but if I’d known the tale beforehand then the plot would have held no secrets. Whether or not you know it, I urge you to seek out The Juniper Tree.

Bella, estranged from her mother and with illegitimate young daughter Tommy in tow (yes, daughter), takes up work in an antique store in Twickenham. In the first paragraph, she encounters a mysterious woman:

‘I noticed a beautiful fair woman standing in the courtyard outside her house like a statue, standing there so still. As I drew nearer I saw that her hands were moving. She was paring an apple out there in the snow and as I passed, looking at her out of the sides of my eyes, the knife slipped, and suddenly there was blood on the snow. She turned and went into her house before I could offer to help.’

As the blurb writes, the first glimpse of Gertrude Forbes is at once fairytale and sinister. Gertrude and her husband, Bernard, befriend Bella – she becomes a regular visitor at their large house, complete with extensive garden and juniper tree. The Forbes’ long for a child; Bella longs for friends and love; Tommy longs for a family. Longings collide and events grow gracefully macabre.

Having read three novels by Comyns, I am astonished that they all come from the same pen – they are so different. The Juniper Tree doesn’t have the vulnerability of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, or the surreal humour or Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead; in their place is a haunting domesticity – everything calm on the surface, but an awareness throughout that the relationships between each character simmer with potential change and tragedy. The majority of the novel can be read as a simple domestic tale, until a twist which cannot be ignored towards the end, but the whole work is fraught with an intermingling of the fairytale and the sinister. The Brothers Grimm tale, read either beforehand or subsequently, brings out even more layers in The Juniper Tree. I don’t think there is any other novelist I’ve come across who writes so subtly the disturbing and the domestic, or whose oeuvre is so brilliantly varied. If that is not too bold a statement to make on the basis of three novels.