1998

A Book A Day in May – Days 17, 18, 19

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I’ve not been blogging, but I have been keeping up with my reading. One of these (the middle) I read entirely outside on a sunny Saturday. The first and last of the trio were books I mostly listened to as audiobooks, then finished off 180 and 140 pages (respectively) in the paper copies. It’s quite fun to mix and match that way. Let’s race through some quick thoughts about the three books…

Tipping the Velvet - Wikipedia

Day 17: Tipping the Velvet (1998) by Sarah Waters

I’d read all of Waters’ other novels, but somehow not got around to her first. As you’ll probably know, it tells the story of Nancy. She grows up in a Whitstable family whose living is made by selling oysters – and by all the messy process that precedes selling them. This was back in the days when oysters were eaten by the bucketload by all and sundry, not reserved for fancy restaurants – because we are in Victorian times. The 1890s, to be specific.

Nancy is content with fairly simple pleasures, until one time she attends a variety show. There, she is beguiled by Kitty Butler – a singer and male impersonator. Night after night, Nancy goes to watch the show – impatient for the other acts to finish so she can watch Kitty. Eventually they meet, and Nancy gets past her starstruck-ness to form a friendship with Kitty – and then follows her to London, to work as her dresser. Along the way, they have developed a romantic relationship.

I shan’t spoil all the turns of the novel, but suffice to say this isn’t Nancy’s last lesbian relationship in the book. Indeed, Tipping the Velvet is very episodic – often, for whatever chaotic reason, a period of Nancy’s life will end and she is catapulted into another. It will come with a whole new set of characters (a wealthy dominatrix, for example, or a charitable brother and sister), leaving the previous set behind. Almost every woman she meets seems to be a lesbian, or at least bisexual.

Of all the Waters novels I’ve read, this is probably my least favourite. She’s obviously a very good writer, excellent at character and turns of phrase. And goodness knows Tipping the Velvet became a huge seller, so my opinion scarcely matters – but I did find the plot to be quite weak. She is renowned for her clever plotting and twists now – this novel doesn’t have any twist or really any plot. It’s just a series of things that happen to Nancy, with very little to link them, and a new cast of characters whenever things start to pall. I’d certainly have preferred a much shorter novel that concentrated on a smaller number of them. But, yes, by gosh Waters can write. I often thing her masterpiece is ahead of her – to be honest, I don’t think her editor (editors?) have done her a service. Her novels always, in my opinion, are very good but fall short of what they could be. The perfect Waters novel is still to come.

Day 18: The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) by Yoko Ogawa

Rachel and I will be discussing this on the next episode of Tea or Books? so I won’t write about it now – but I did really like it.

By Nightfall: Michael Cunningham

Day 19: By Nightfall (2010) by Michael Cunningham

Now that I’ve read all of Cunningham’s novels – yes, even the first one that he disowned – I’m having to re-read to get my fix of Cunningham. He is up there with my favourite living writers, though admittedly I don’t read a huge amount of living writers – but I don’t think there are many I prefer.

When I first read By Nightfall, in 2017, it was my third of his novels. I still wasn’t sure whether I loved him or if I just loved The Hours and now, rereading, I can see why By Nightfall didn’t help me quite make up my mind.

I shan’t repeat everything I wrote in that earlier review, but I found the focus of the novel – art dealer Peter living a privileged life in New York and worrying about his wife and daughter, annoyed and attracted by his sexy young drug addict brother-in-law – to be a bit eye-rolly. Were the passages about art, culture and society deliberately pretentious or a satire? I’m still not sure, and I think it’s probably somewhere between the two. And Peter, too, has probably adopted this lifestyle with an initial irony that quickly became unironic.

I stand by what I said earlier – that the pacing is all off. Too much is left to happen in the final third of the novel, and it feels like it ends too suddenly. But I forgive all this much more willingly now. Because I just love, love, love Cunningham’s writing. When his sentences are so sublime, I can forgive anything slightly too arch or abrupt. Nobody is better than him on beauty – its attractions and its limitations. Few equal his ability to depict self-consciousness – assessing everyone while constantly questioning how other people are assessing you. And I’ve never been to New York, but it still feels like Cunningham knows and depicts it intimately, with the censure and celebration of an insider.

When I unnecessarily ranked Michael Cunningham’s books, By Nightfall came in 7th out of 9. I think I stand by that. But it’s a healthy #7 – I still admired and enjoyed it a great deal. Rather more than when I first read it – and perhaps the next time I’ll like it even more.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan – #NovNov Day 2

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I bought Amsterdam (1998) by Ian McEwan around the time I read Atonement – so probably around 2003, i.e. half my life ago, more or less. I’ve been up and down with McEwan, but have somehow never read this Booker prizewinner – and now I have, it is right up there with my favourites of his.

I had assumed – you can see why – that the novella took place in Amsterdam. While there are moments there, the full impact of the title isn’t clear for a while, and much of the novel takes place firmly on English soil. It opens with the funeral of Molly Lane, and conversation between two of her former lovers. Clive is a composer, writing a symphony for the millennium; Vernon is the editor of The Judge, a newspaper that has been slowly declining for a long time and may be on its last legs.

Vernon and Clive have more in common than their mutual lover (deceased). They have been friends for a long time, and have still a friendship that is equal parts affection, competition, and disdain. McEwan is very good at the spiky sort of witty unpleasantness of a certain sort of man, and both these men are in that category. He’s also good about creative processes, and I think he writes well about musical composition. I say ‘I think’, because I can’t do it and have no idea what composers would say, but it worked for me.

Creation apart, the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and deletions; amending again until the bar is right, and playing it once more on the piano. By midnight Clive had extended and written out in full the rising passage, and was starting on the great orchestral hiatus that would precede the sprawling change of key. By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

I shan’t say too much about the plot, but both men come up against moral quandaries – harming someone, or at least not preventing harm, in the name of their art/profession. McEwan’s spin on this is that neither of them really see the moral dilemma in their own lives, but only in each other’s. And neither is nice enough for this to be a learning experience. Amsterdam is perhaps a dark comedy. Or maybe a light tragedy.

So, I thought it was brilliant – and a page-turner too. The only reservation I have is what a blank space Molly is. Yes, she is dead before the book begins, but McEwan never really gives us any sense of her vitality before she died, or why so many men were attracted to her. Or maybe she is meant to remain an enigma.

Another great Novellas in November read – keep checking out Cathy and Rebecca‘s blogs to see what everyone else is reading!

My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

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A lot of the books I’m reading this year are ones I bought in 2011 – and I’m remembering that I bought a lot of books that year, because I only bought 24 in 2010 and I was making up for last time. One of those was My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq, published in 1998 and translated from French by Helen Stevenson in 1999. I thought it would be good to pick up now, because August is ‘women in translation month’ in book blogging land.

My husband’s disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I’d bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.

Did my husband disappear because that evening, after years of neglect on my part, irritated and tired at the end of a hard day’s work, he was suddenly incensed at having to go back down five flights of stairs in search of bread?

This is the opening paragraph of this short novel. I’m normally not at all drawn to books about people disappearing, because it seems such an overdone genre – but this is not a gritty crime novel. We don’t learn a great deal about the woman’s husband, as a person, nor about how the investigation is proceeding. Rather, we spend the 153 pages of this story in the mind of the unnamed narrator as she tries to understand the new world she is in. And as her perceptions start to splinter.

Darrieussecq’s writing, in Stevenson’s translation, is an impressive mixture of the spare and the poetic. Every sentence is beautiful and not at all showy. Whether it’s the narrator being momentarily distracted from her emotional turmoil by a sunset, or things on a kitchen counter, or reflections on what she misses most about her husband’s presence, Darrieussecq brings the perfect amount of weight and beauty to each observation. The writing becomes more fluid as the novel goes on, and felt positively Woolfean at times.

The same subtlety is seen in the way the novel progresses. The first sign of things not being quite ordinary are the horror tropes that recur. The narrator thinks about being stabbed in the shower, about being buried alive. Sometimes these thoughts are fears and sometimes they are warped comforts. And somehow this bleeds into her thinking about the nature of existence. She begins to wonder if her husband has somehow dematerialised.

I paced round the room, resigned. My husband had to be somewhere, maybe in form of a gas at the very outer edge of the universe, but he still had to be somewhere, leaning over the edge (what we have to image as its edge) and watching me now; like the dead, whom the living know are still present, stuck in the mist or under the table or behind the door, out in the barn rapping with their knuckles, in the kitchen bending the spoons, in the corridor rattling their chains and, for the more subtle among them, rippling the curtains when there’s no wind outside. My husband, in imitation of the dead, would send me a sign and bring me back to life.

As the days pass and she begins to hallucinate, it is not always clear what is happening and what is not. Being all in her voice, there is an evenness to it all – because she never questions her sanity, even as we see her confusion and unhappiness turn her mind.

The whole thing is mesmerically beautiful and quietly unsettling. The reader is always on shifting sand, and Darrieussecq is too clever a writer to let us stand firm even at the end.

Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs

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Ethel & ErnestEthel & Ernest: A True Story (1998) was one of the books I bought in the splendid little bookshop in Ludlow about a month ago, and it felt appropriate to read it over Christmas, given that Briggs is most famous for his festive creation The Snowman. I first heard him talk about it in a documentary that was shown a year or two ago, and determined to keep an eye out for it. For some reason, it seemed like the sort of book that one should discover serendipitously, rather than ordering online, if that makes sense.

It tells, in graphic form (not a graphic novel, of course, but I don’t know if there is a proper compound noun for graphic non-fiction) the whole of his parents’ lives together. They meet (so the pictures allege) when she was a maid waving a duster out of a window, and he a milkman who thought she was waving at him. On such premises are great marriages based. With affection and insight, Briggs charters their life as a young married couple, moving up in the world a bit, having a son – Raymond himself, of course – and coping with war.

As they get older, so does Raymond – and he begins to disappoint them a little, choosing art school over a stable career. Ethel – who has always cared deeply for propriety and improving her station – wants him to cut his hair and behave better. She also ticks off Ernest whenever he says anything she considers indecently amorous – but these qualities are offset by, say, her passionate refusal to send Raymond away as an evacuee, and sacrifice when she sees she must. (I can’t find many examples of the artwork to use, so trust me on that being in there.)

Ethel and Ernest 1

How much Briggs gets right about Ethel and Ernest is up for debate, particularly in relation to their opinion of him. The graphic form allows only snapshots from a long period of time, and no introspection at all, so we can only guess how successful Briggs was in an objective portrait (or even if this was his aim). Doubtless Ethel or Ernest would have created something completely different, yet this is a book which is filled with affection – Briggs has somehow managed to convey how dearly he loved his parents without crafting a graphic hagiography. This love is particularly evident towards the end where, of course, Ethel and Ernest die.

All is tied together with Briggs’ characteristic style as an artist- a mixture of naivety and domesticity that feels mimetic and welcoming, without being cloying. It’s not exactly charming, because it hits too hard, but it is certainly moving: an excellent tribute to two ordinary people who, to Briggs, were inevitably extraordinary.

The Restraint of Beasts – Magnus Mills

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Magnus Mills has been hovering around the edges of my reading consciousness for some time, including having read two of his novels – The Maintenance of Headway (good, but didn’t quite work for me) and All Quiet on the Orient Express (much better) – but I’ve always felt that I could really love a Mills novel, given the right novel and the right timing.  Well, about three years ago my then-housemate Mel gave me The Restraint of Beasts (1998) – where better to re-start with Mills than with his first novel?  (N.B. Mel, now that I’ve finally read the book you got me for my birthday in 2010, will you buy me books again?)

Our narrator is anonymous (which I confess I hadn’t noticed until I read the Wikipedia page for the novel) and has just become the foreman of a Scottish fencing company, led by the domineering Donald and contentedly useless Robert.  He is a foreman of a small team – Gang no.3 – which consists of just three people, including himself.  The others are Tam and Rich – inseparable but taciturn, fairly lazy, and undemonstrative.  Having been introduced to his team (and discovering that he is replacing Tam in the foreman position), the narrator and his colleagues are sent off to fix the fence of a local farmer, which has been erected poorly.

If this is all sounding rather dull, then I should let you know – the activities of the heroes (or lack thereof) are determinedly boring.  They put up fences.  They travel to England to do so, and vary the monotony of hammering in posts only with trips to the local pubs, which provide almost no incident, and are generally almost empty.

One of the things studying English for so long has enabled me to do, I hope, is identify how a writer creates certain effects or atmosphere.  I hope Stuck-in-a-Book generally shows that sort of insight into a novel, or at least tries to.  But with Mills and The Restraint of Beasts (which is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far), I am almost entirely unable to say why it works.  Here is a sample paragraph for you…

Their pick-up truck was parked at the other side of the yard.  They’d been sitting in the cab earlier when I went past on my way to Donald’s office.  Now, however, there was no sign of them.  I walked over and glanced at the jumble of tools and equipment lying in the back of the vehicle.  Everything looked as though it had been thrown in there in a great hurry.  Clearly it would all need sorting out before we could do anything, so I got in the truck and reversed round to the store room.  Then I sat and waited for them to appear.  Looking around the inside of the cab I noticed the words ‘Tam’ and ‘Rich’ scratched on the dashboard.  A plastic lunch box and a bottle of Irn-Bru lay on the shelf.
And, believe me, things get technical.  I’ve learnt more about putting up fences than I’d ever imagined I’d know.   (Fyi, they’re usually being built to pen in animals – the restraint of beasts, y’see.  Excellent title.)  Mills worked as a fencer himself for some years, so you could be forgiven for thinking this was turning into an odd autobiography.

But, in amongst this, occasionally bizarre or momentous things DO happen, and they are treated with as casually and matter-of-factly as the tedium of standing in the rain with a fence hammer.  That is one of the reasons I loved this novel – I love surreal and black humour, but I hate anything disgusting, unduly frightening, macabre, or viciously unkind (so psychological thrillers almost always off the menu.)  Mills lets the moments of darkness become instantly surreal simply by giving us a narrator who does not see the difference between life-changing, terrible incidents and the everyday minutiae of the construction industry.  (Note that I’m deliberately avoiding telling you what these dark moments are, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise!)

Somehow, throughout plain and ‘deceptively simple’ (sorry, had to be done) prose, Mills expertly implies growing menace and claustrophobia.  The humour is still there – never laugh-out-loud funny, but always a dry, bleak humour – but the darkness seems to be spreading.  And from the opening pages, the reader is pulled from page to page, without almost nothing happening… how?  I don’t know what is in the writing that makes it work so well, as tautly engaging as a detective novel.  It’s obvious that All Quiet on the Orient Express was written after The Restraint of Beasts, because it follows a similar premise and style, but with a firmer structure.  And yet I refer The Restraint of Beasts, perhaps because it is more daring in its lack of structure.

And what is it all about?  I haven’t the foggiest.  The ending (which, again, I shan’t spoil) isn’t conclusive at all, but dumps a whole load of clues about the meaning of the novel.  I wondered whether it might be a metaphor for fascism, or perhaps communism, or… well, I don’t know.  It doesn’t much matter, and I’d have been rather cross if it turned out to be a heavy-handed metaphor for anything (only George Orwell can get away with that), so I’m happy to let it be simply an excellent, bewildering, disturbing placid novel.  If you’ve yet to try Mills, start here.

It’s been a while since I did a ‘Others who got Stuck into…’ section, because I have a terrible memory, so…

Others who got Stuck into The Restraint of Beasts…


“He is able to turn the ordinary into something sinister in a way that defies description, so that you’re never quite sure whether a terrible event is going to happen or whether the author is just playing with your sense of the dramatic.” – Kim, Reading Matters


“There are a number of things said that seem to be evasions or euphemisms that are not explained. Everything is sinister and suspect.” – Kate, Nose in a Book


“It has an undercurrent of mystery and black farce that I felt it could have done without, as it remains an unresolved and unlikely subplot.” – Read More Fiction