2000s

The Penelopiad

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(sorry that the formatting has played up on this post – I don’t seem able to change it!)

When my book group chose the category books-inspired-by-other-books, I thought it was a fantastic idea. As a group, we’d already read and loved (and watched and loved) The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and I was hoping we’d have something like Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, or Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, something along those lines. When The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (from Canongate’s The Myths series) was chosen, my heart did sink a little. And not just because my only previous experience with Ms. Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale, which so many people rave about – left me not only unenthusiastic, but downright irritated. My main problem was that my knowledge of The Odyssey is sketchy at best. I don’t know where The Odyssey, The Iliad (which I presumed had a hand in Atwood’s title) and The Aenied differ, and to be honest all I knew about Penelope was garnered from a Year 7 History video, where myths were retold by a man and his hyperactive dog puppet. And any scraps I could glean in James Joyce’s Ulysses. So, basically, I knew about the weaving-and-unweaving thing. But I was happy to learn, and hoped that I could enjoy The Penelopiad with very little knowledge of the original…

Which I did. There are probably lots of nuances I missed, but I thought Atwood’s re-telling was done well most of the time. Certainly the style was less annoying than in The Handmaid’s Tale (perhaps because she wasn’t trying so hard?) Penelope tells her life story from Hades, wandering through fields of asphodel, as you do. It is a very modern take on the whole story – Penelope’s relationship with her sister Mary was not unlike something from an American sitcom; Penelope all plain and clever, Mary all beautiful and wily.

No man will ever kill himself for love of me. And no man ever did. Not that I would have wanted to inspire those kinds of suicides. I was not a man-eater, I was not a Siren, I was not like cousin Helen who loved to make conquests just to show she could. As soon as the man was grovelling, and it never took long, she’d stroll away without a backwards glance, giving that careless laugh of hers, as if she’d just been watching the palace midget standing ridiculously on his head.

I was a kind girl – kinder than Helen, or so I thought. I knew I would have to have something to offer instead of beauty. I was clever, everyone said so – in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging – but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.

We’re on familiar Jane-Eyre territory here, aren’t we? But – and thanks must go to Bob, who alone at my book group table was familiar with the original, even teaching classics – in turns out that in Homer’s original Penelope isn’t plain. She’s not in Helen territory, but the sisterly resentment which drives much of the narrative isn’t actually in the original.

In fact, at first I thought Atwood had picked rather an easy target. Yes, The Odyssey-given-a-feminist-twist. It seemed a little obvious, even heavy-handed (which is not to say that I’m anti-feminist – in fact, I’d call myself a feminist, although of course people have different definitions of the word.) But (thanks again, Bob, who is in fact a woman) the Penelope of The Odyssey was apparently more feminist than Penelope of The Penelopiad. More together, more powerful, more respected, etc. etc. But since I haven’t read it, I’ll have to take Bob’s word for it – just adds another interesting perspective on Atwood’s retelling.
The ‘hook’ of Atwood’s narrative, though – a more original feminist viewpoint – is the death of Penelope’s twelve maids. Odysseus apparently had them hanged upon his return from his voyage. I suspect this is a footnote in Homer’s original, but Atwood plays it to its full potential, and it really is an ingenious angle: why were they killed, when they had aided Penelope? They figure as a ‘chorus’ throughout the novella, sometimes mature and sometimes very vulgar (which feels, in Atwood’s hands, a bit like hearing an elderly aunt make a rude joke) and still huddle together in their afterlife. Yet they are never given individual names, and remain simply ‘the maids.’

Although I haven’t read the original, I did enjoy some places where Atwood was clearly adapting aspects from Homer. Who knows how many I missed through ignorance, but a fair few were sign-posted for those not in-the-know, such as the following:
You’ve probably heard that my father ran after our departing chariot, begging me to stay with him, and that Odysseus asked me if I was going to Ithaca with him of my own free will or did I prefer to remain with my father? It’s said that in answer I pulled down my veil, being too modest to proclaim in words my desire for my husband, and that a statue was later erected of me in tribute to the virtue of Modesty. There’s some truth to this story. But I pulled down my veil to hide the fact that I was laughing. You have to admit there was something humorous about a father who’d once tossed his own child into the sea capering down the road after that very child and calling “Stay with me!”

The Penelopiad was one of those books I liked quite a lot when I read it, and liked less after a book group discussion on it. But I still admire many aspects of the narrative, especially subtle like bits like that quoted above – and would be keen to seek out more from the series The Myths. I didn’t even realise that I already had one on my shelves – Sally Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet. The (ongoing?) series’ titles can be viewed here – have you read any of them?

Stevenson Under the Palm Trees

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Can you believe we’re still talking about that weekend of novellas? Plenty of material yet! (And I’m already tentatively planning the next one…) Up today is Stevenson Under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel. If the name rings a bell, it might be because he earned his spurs in the blogosphere with the book A Reader on Reading – which is on my list of books to think about buying when Project 24 is over.

But before I heard about that, I’d bought Stevenson Under the Palm Trees in Oxford’s £2 shop. It appealed because (a) it was short, and (b) I love novels about writers and playing with their creations, etc. Plus I fancied throwing something a little postmodern and quirky into the mix. This is despite me never having read anything by Robert Louis Stevenson. Not even Treasure Island. Tut tut, Simon. [Edit: I have! I have! I’ve just remembered I’ve read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde]

Manguel’s novella is about Stevenson’s time in Samoa, amongst intense humidity, bright colours, and a place which captivated him without quite accepting him. He is still the white outsider amongst the close-knit Samoans, and hankers after his native Edinburgh. And then… well, here’s the opening:
Robert Louis Stevenson left the house and walked the long trek down to the beach just as the day was setting. From the verandah the sea was hidden by the trees, six hundred feet below, filling the end of two vales of forest. To enjoy the last plunge of the sun before the clear darkness set in, the best observation-post was among the mangrove roots, in spite (he said bravely to himself) of the mosquitoes and the sand-flies. He did not immediately notice the figure because it appeared to be merely one more crouching shadow among the shadows, but then it turned and seemed for a moment to be watching him. The man was wearing a broad-rimmed hat not unlike Stevenson’s own, and, even though he could see that the skin was white, he could not make out the man’s features.
The man is Mr. Baker, a missionary from Scotland, and he remains a shadowy figure throughout. When a young Samoan woman is raped and murdered, things get all the more mysterious. Don’t worry – it isn’t done in a gory or gratuitous way, more as an interesting catalyst for the rest of the novel – as the reader cannot decide upon Stevenson’s culpability or innocence.

Neither, it seems, can Stevenson – for nothing is quite certain or able to be grasped by the reader. Who is Mr. Baker? Is he a creation of Stevenson’s; is he somehow Stevenson’s double; is he simply the missionary he claims? Identities are complex, dreams and consciousness meld and the Samoan landscape is host to all manner of strange narratives and counter-narratives. Lest this seems completely baffling, I should add that Manguel sensibly keeps the curious and nebulous aspects of the novella to the plot and characters – never spilling over into unnecessarily elaborate style or language. Which is somehow even more disorientating – because, at first glimpse, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees reads as a traditional novella – only gradually does everything get complicated.

As I said, I haven’t read any Stevenson – so I wasn’t able to appreciate the (apparently) ‘playful nod to Stevenson’s life and work’, including the real life Mr. Baker, but that didn’t stop me appreciating Manguel’s novella. As an interesting extra level, the book incorporates – at intervals – woodcuts which Stevenson made in Switzerland in 1881. They are very simple, and obviously not the work of a professional woodcut artist, but still heighten the atmosphere and have their own evocative mystery.

For anybody fancying a quick dabble into the world of quirky, quietly postmodern novels, this could be a really interesting place to start – I hope my thoughts haven’t made this sound inaccessible or difficult, because it isn’t; I’m simply finding it tricky to find the right way to describe this unusual novella. Certainly something different from the rest of my weekend of novellas, and – as much as I enjoyed those – this was a playful, intriguing breath of fresh air.

Picture Perfect

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On Friday I was at The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green (yes, I did pose proudly by my name on the Bloggers’ Book of the Month stand) to hear Kim of Reading Matters interview both Friedrich Christian Delius, author of Peirene’s latest book Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006), and Jamie Bulloch, the translator. Kim did a fantastic job; Herr Delius was very interesting; I confirmed what I already suspected – one year studying German in 1999 did not stand me in good stead when a section was read from the novella.


I’ve been promising a review for a while, and Meike from Peirene more or less threatened to stop sending me books, and start sending hate mail and letter bombs instead, if I didn’t actually make good on my promise. She needn’t have worried, because Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman is my favourite of Peirene’s titles so far, and possibly the most convincing narrative voice I have read for a very long time. I certainly can’t think of a man-writing-a-woman or a woman-writing-a-man which has been more believable or evocative.

I’d better kick off my thoughts by mentioning the ‘gimmick’ behind Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman – that it is all one sentence. All 125pp of it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that at all, because if you’re anything like me it will make you a bit nervous. Especially if you were forced to read Ulysses in your first year of university, with its 100pp. at the end sans punctuation… and there’s that hint of James Joyce in the title of Delius’ book (in the English, at least) but wait! Somehow the absence of full stops along the way doesn’t hinder the novel or make it difficult to read – rather, it enhances the beautiful flow and, with the structure of paragraphs and clauses, makes it feel a bit like a constant walking pace.

Which is precisely what it is. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman follows a young pregnant woman as she walks through the streets of Rome in January 1943. Indeed, the first line is “Walk, young lady, walk if you want to walk, the child will like it if you walk” – the advice given to the woman by a doctor. She certainly takes up his advice – in terms of plot, there is very little. Instead we follow her path through Rome, sometimes inside her mind and sometimes panning around her instead. It isn’t really stream of consciousness or even in the first person, but it is still a novella entirely captivated by the woman’s mind and personality. She is kind, perhaps naive, perhaps simply someone with very human and empathetic priorities – ‘she prayed to be allowed to bring her child into the world during a night without sirens and without bombs falling on the world’. She misses her husband Gert who is in Africa; she looks towards the future as a wife and mother; she is interested in everything she passes by, without letting her curiosity hold her in one place for too long. The war is not something she feels keenly as an international affair – only where it crosses her path; where it interrupts her happy images of past, present, and future. Which is, I imagine, the most honest portrait of a young German woman’s experience of war.

Most beautifully, to my mind, is her perspective as a young Christian woman. I don’t know whether or not Delius has Christian faith (I don’t like the word ‘religious’ because it covers so vast a territory, and is a barren, emotionless word) but he certainly knows how to portray the beauty of this woman’s faith in its calmness and simple vitality. Especially moving is the conflict she feels between Christianity and her wartime national identity – complicated further, perhaps, by being in Rome.
the Fuhrer himself who, as her father and Gert sometimes cautiously hinted, made the mistake of placing himself above God, or practically allowing himself to be venerated as a god, and so exaggerated the belief in race and the superiority of the German national community,

You are nothing, your people is everything!, that the racial theories contradicted ever more sharply the obligations of humility and brotherly love, and repeatedly gave rise to fresh inner conflicts in young people like her,

without the Church and her devout parents and several courageous preachers she would not have been able to cope with the daily conflict between the cross of the Church and the crooked cross of the swastika
This woman, by the way, is not simply any mother – but is heavily based on Delius’ mother. I had a bit of a oh-gosh moment at the talk when I realised that the baby she is carrying, thinking so much about, and planning for, is Delius himself.


As an exploration of a woman’s life, this is a beautiful novella – but as an exploration of his mother’s life, it somehow becomes even more beautiful. I feel that this might be a novella I will return to in a few years’ time, and a few years after that – so much to glean from its pages. Jamie Bulloch is to be strongly commended for his translation – I can’t read Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman in its original German, but the English has such a lovely lilt and continual flow to it that I can only assume nothing was lost in translation.

Books to get Stuck into:

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf: this is the obvious comparison, I think, similarly taking place within one day (though not so short a timescale as Delius’ novella). Her journey through London and this woman’s through Rome are equally striking.

Stone in a Landslide – Maria Barbal: it might see lazy to mention another Peirene title, but I kept thinking about this novella as another moving account of a woman living through momentous times.

Screenplays

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One of the books which snuck into my novella weekend was in fact (gasp!) not a novella, but a screenplay – I read The Hours by David Hare.


I’m a bit of an addict of The Hours. It’s how I first encountered Virginia Woolf. I’ve seen the film maybe eight or nine times; I have two versions of the soundtrack (one normal; one piano version); I have the piano music. Naturally I’ve read Michael Cunningham’s brilliant novel – twice, in fact. So it was only logical that (at least until they invent some sort of The Hours computer game – fall out of a window for ten points! Throw a cake in the bin for 20!) I should read David Hare’s screenplay.

Do you read screenplays? We talked about reading plays a while ago, and quite a few of us did, but not that often. I love reading plays, and although I haven’t read many recently, I devoured all of A.A. Milne’s many plays back in 2002/3. The Hours, on the other hand, is the first screenplay I’ve ever read.

I suppose there are a few reasons for this. Chief amongst them is that not many are published. With most films there will be a team of writers, I suppose, and it is only the aficionado who’ll have a clue who wrote the screenplay. Think through your favourite films… do you know the writer? (I always find this is a useful comparison when wondering how 16th & 17th century playgoers could be indifferent to the fact that they were witnessing Shakespeare’s handiwork.) And of course Hare was a ‘name’ before he put pen to paper for The Hours.

I did enjoy reading it, but if I didn’t love The Hours so much, I doubt I would have. It felt more or less like watching the film again. When reading a play, unless I’ve recently seen a version of it, I am able to have it enacted in my mind based entirely on the text. With a film – which will almost always only have one definitive version – it is that which plays out in my head. Luckily I am always happy to re-watch The Hours, even mentally… Oh, and the printed version comes with a nice little introduction by Hare, written when only a handful of people had had access to the film.

So… do you ever read screenplays, or is it something which wouldn’t cross your mind? Is it a step too far away from literature as we understand it? Do you think a screenplay could stand on its own as literature, away from the film? Even if you never even saw the film? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Many a true word….

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“Many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.”

–The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

Two irritating people pretend to be less intelligent than they are. One is thinking about killing herself. Both waffle on about philosophy a great deal. I just kept imagining how these sort of characters would be lampooned in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

I was intending to review this months ago, but… Barbery kind of did it for me in the text. See above… (oo, a saucer of milk for table two…!)

Stranger and stranger…

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One of the fun side-effects of Project 24 (although not as frequent as I’d hoped it would be) has been reading books which have lain neglected on my bookshelves for quite a while. And one of those was The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, lent to me by lovely Curzon a long, long time ago… (and which has now become #14 on Project 24, because I accidentally tore some pages, and bought Curzon a replacement copy, keeping the original… oops! Not my usual style, promise.) It seemed the perfect sort of thing to take away with me on holiday, staying in rambling old houses converted into Youth Hostels. I read most of it in Grinton Lodge Youth Hostel, which looks like this:


So – atmosphere: check.

Everyone in the blogosphere seemed to be reading The Little Stranger around the time I was on holiday last year. I, on the other hand, was reading things by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Janni Visman… well, better late than never. Still, there must be one or two people who are later than me in reading The Little Stranger, so I won’t assume universal knowledge…

Waters, who made her name with Victorian novels (including the only I’d previously read: Affinity) has been moving steadily nearer the present, and The Little Stranger is set just after World War Two. All except the first scene, which is much earlier – the protagonist is a little boy being snuck into Hundreds Hall by his mother, who is a servant there. He loves the house, and wants to take a souvenir – hacking a plaster acorn from a corridor. From little acorns…

Next we see, the little boy has become Dr. Faraday and is heading out to Hundreds Hall because the (now sole) servant Betty is complaining of illness. Turns out she just wants to get away from the house for a bit – because she senses things are wrong. Quite how they’re wrong, she doesn’t specify; but something is wrong. But this incident leads Faraday to an increasingly close intimacy with the family – plain, unmarried Caroline; her brother Roderick who is recovering from a nasty war injury, and their dignified mother, simply Mrs. Ayres. Faraday is excited about being able to visit a house he has admired since childhood, and Hundreds Hall is certainly a powerful presence in the novel. Its former glory, and its current decay, are realised wonderfully by Waters. It’s something of a truism to say that ‘the house is itself a character’, but you have to take your hat off to Waters’ ability to invest Hundreds Hall with this power without it becoming a caricature of Gothic literature. The house remains comfort and terror; mystery and simplicity; homely and unhomely.

For soon Betty’s claims that something’s wrong seem to be true. A party is held (Mrs. Ayres’ is trying to set up Caroline with a neighbouring bachelor) where a young girl is savaged by Caroline’s usually docile dog. At the same time, Roderick is experiencing ghostly goings-on in his bedroom…

I’m not going to spoil the ensuing events, but suffice it to say there appears to be a ‘little stranger’ creating all sort of havoc for the Ayres family. Since The Little Stranger is narrated by Faraday, we often aren’t ‘present’ for the events, but Waters does a simply brilliant job of relaying them later (usually a big no-no for writers) without losing the tension. And this is quite a scary book. I’ve not read many scary books since my Point Horror phase, and perhaps a slightly creepy old Youth Hostel wasn’t the best place to read this novel… I was a little scared to close my eyes.

Waters has suggested that The Little Stranger is primarily about class issues – as Faraday rises from the servant’s son to a family friend, and can’t get over some of his lingering resentment; similarly, the grounds of Hundreds Hall are being sold off to modern estates. Waters has even said that the ghost story element was a later addition. I’m glad she did, because novels which centre around class issues can be very tiresome if not done well, especially if they’re retrospective. I prefer contemporary novels (‘contemporary’ is such a frustrating phrase… I mean contemporary-to-the-period-described, rather than contemporary-meaning-modern) which don’t feel the need to hammer home how awful middle-class pretensions were, or throw their hands up in horror at the idea of servants. Waters doesn’t fall into this trap, but I fear she’d have been nearer to it had the ghost-story element not crossed her mind.

For the most part, The Little Stranger was brilliant. You know me and long books, but I read this in two or three days; got up early to finish it, etc. etc. Waters’ writing is pacy and compelling without sacrificing style, and I am really keen to read more by her. True, there was a little bit of a drag between p.100 and p.200, but only a little – and the second half of the novel flew by.

And then… the ending. Which I obviously don’t want to discuss in detail. Close your eyes and sing la-la-la if you don’t want even the remotest spoilers, but… I was disappointed and confused in about equal measure. And I shan’t say more than that. I just wish Waters had given the novel a different sort of ending – if she had, then A Little Stranger could have been one of my favourite novels of the year, possibly the favourite. As it is, it might make top ten, but only just. Possibly very clever and cunning, but… disappointing.

More or less everyone seems to have reviewed this, so I suggest you do what I did and search for it in Fyrefly’s incredibly useful Blog Search Engine. But I will point you to this excellent discussion on Shelf Love: be warned, it is spoilerific.

Books to get Stuck into:

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier: Curzon reminded me how appropriate this would be as a companion read, and it’s the book I *always* recommend to people when they ask for reading ideas. And it’s Simon S’s favourite novel! No review on Siab yet… but see Simon S’s enthusiasm here.

The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson: my favourite American writer is definitely the Gothic side of horror, and rarely has the power of the house been drawn so chillingly or convincingly.

Simply Devine

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31. Being George Devine’s Daughter – Harriet Devine

I haven’t told Harriet that I’m doing this, and I’m hoping she won’t mind, but I’m going to write about her (auto)biography Being George Devine’s Daughter because – well, it’s simply too good not to. Harriet very kindly gave me a copy of her book a few months ago, and (my tbr pile being what it is) I only got around to it the other day. I’m not often in a I-must-read-non-fiction sort of mood, but when I am, nothing else will suffice.

To those of us in the blogging world, Harriet is probably best known as writer of this blog, but to those with more knowledge of theatrical history than I, she is the daughter of manager, director, and actor George Devine. And that ‘(auto)biography’ label I used earlier was intended to convey that the book is about both the Devines, falling into neither camp. Being completely honest, I hadn’t heard of George Devine in any but the vaguest of ways before I ‘met’ Harriet in the blogosphere – so perhaps I approached Being George Devine’s Daughter in a different way from most of its potential audience. (And I’m going to call the author ‘Harriet’ throughout this, because it feels too odd to use just the author’s surname, as I normally would in a review). But I had definitely heard of lots of other folk mentioned in the book – without being remotely name-droppy, Harriet seems to have met just about every notable theatrical personality – she is Peggy Ashcroft’s goddaughter, after all. (And she met Leonard Woolf! In the words of teenage fans of American TV shows throughout the world, squeeeee!) For someone like me, who had a very happy but uneventful childhood, and whose nearest connection to fame was a distant ancestor had been dressmaker to royalty, this all seems incredible: Harriet, naturally, takes it in her stride. Don’t our childhoods always seem normal, to each one of us? I think it must be very strange, for instance, to grow up without a twin – and never know how to answer the question “How does it feel to have a twin brother?” But enough about me.

Being George Devine’s Daughter starts with a series of letters written between Harriet’s parents, George and Sophie, during Harriet’s first years. George was away at war in India, and didn’t meet his daughter until she was a toddler. The recent (when the book was published, in 2006) discovery of these letters seems to have prompted Harriet’s book – which follows a more-or-less chronological structure, looking at her parents’ relationship and her own life. An only child, the line between these aspects is necessarily not as demarcated as it would be for those of us with siblings. Her world is her parents’ world, in and out of the theatre – and she picks up on the emotional nuances of their relationship to a greater extent than most children would. And, not insignificantly, a discovery of Harriet’s plays a pivotal role in the house dynamics.

That sort of line sounds like I’m describing the plot of a novel, doesn’t it? I’ve never studied biography as an academic subject, still less as a biographer, but my experience of them leads me to suggest that the most successful biographies could equally be novels. That is to say, they are interesting in and of themselves. It must be tempting, writing about oneself and one’s family, to have all sorts of references to jokes the reader won’t understand, or people who are relevant for one story but never again. Harriet doesn’t do this – there is nothing here that would be edited out if the book were fiction; it all comes together to form a structured narrative whole. Throughout it all, Harriet’s tone is beautifully honest and thoughtful, without being unduly introspective or (conversely) coolly detached. It is the perfect tone for autobiography, I think – one seen later in Emma Smith’s The Great Western Beach, though without Smith’s deliberate naivety. Events are not callously laid out, but instead are considered; turned this way and that; reconsidered. Yet they also form a story rather than an analyst’s discussion.

We follow Harriet’s life as she tries to determine which path to take, which career to choose, and with which men to become besotted(!) There are dead ends, surprising developments, happy and unhappy accidents. There are (as in all lives) far too many stories and angles for me to even attempt to cover them all. So many have stayed in my mind – running away from school to attend the theatre; the house by the river; the laundry-van… The book does have a chronological structure (with occasional hints of what is to come, or skips backwards to fill in gaps) but there is an anecdotal feel to it all. As such, the passage I’ve chosen is one which is generally representative rather than especially significant. It’s this sort of inventive ingenuousness which threads through much of the book, and is a joy to read:

One day she and I devised a game that proved to be surprisingly successful. We got some empty bottles with good corks, and we painstakingly wrote out messages, which we put inside, sealed up, and cast into the river. The messages began like this:

We are two ladies in distress
9, Lower Mall (Hammersmith, London, W6) is our address.
With our tutor harsh and cruel
Our lovers dear did fight a duel…

The gist of the whole thing was that we were waiting to be rescued, but I’m not sure how seriously we believed that anything would ever come of it. Imagine our surprise when one day, well over a year later, a letter came from Belgium with a finely poetic reply. A covering letter explained that our bottle had been found by an old fisherman who had taken it to his local village schoolmaster for a translation. Intrigued, the schoolmaster had sent the response. Even better, some months later I was as usual hanging over the balcony watching the passers-by when a dapper, foreign-looking young man came by and accosted me: on investigation he proved to be the very schoolmaster who had written the letter, on holiday in London and curious to see the writers of the appealing poem. He came in for a cup of tea, but whether he had been expecting a real damsel in distress or not we never found out.
It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when a friend recommends a book, in case you don’t like it. It’s even scarier a prospect when the friend has written the book, but I was always fairly confident that I needn’t be worried. And I was right. Being George Devine’s Daughter is one of the best biographies or autobiographies I’ve ever read, and up in the top ten books of any variety that I’ve read this year. My only criticism is (despite great design by Harriet’s daughter Sophie, and lots of great photographs throughout) I think this book deserves a fancier edition and printing. For an honest, moving, and thoughtful account of an immensely varied life – you can do no better. Thank you, Harriet!

Books to get Stuck into:

White Cargo – Felicity Kendal: another daughter writing about her father, and also from a theatrical background – a very moving and well-written book.

The Great Western Beach – Emma Smith: surely a modern classic of autobiographical writing, and the antidote to misery lit.

The Behaviour of Moths

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Thank you all for vindicating my purchase yesterday – you lot are probably a poor choice for the voice of my conscience, but I’m certainly happy to stick with it(!)
Ever onwards, ever in – and onto The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. Everyone else read this ages ago, I think, and indeed I had a review copy from Virago languishing on my shelves – but it wasn’t until the novel was picked for my book group that I got around to reading it myself.

The Behaviour of Moths should have been a perfect novel for me – all about the tensions in families, Gothic houses, and an unreliable narrator: tick, tick, and tick. Ginny is a lepidopterist (moth expert, in case the title doesn’t give the game away) still living in the old family mansion in her sixties. The novel centres around her younger sister’s return home after 47 years – Vivien arrives, but there are all sorts of unanswered questions and secrets between the two, which the reader hopes to disentangle…

That’s the novel in a nutshell – I won’t elaborate, partly because there are reviews all over the internet where you can read about the plot; partly because not a huge amount happens. Instead, we are left to piece together the sisters’ lives (and try to understand their parents, from the piecemeal information which emerges) as the narrative jumps back and forth from present day to their childhood and adolescence. One of the first recollections is when Vivi fell off the bell tower:

My heart leapt but Vivi must have lost her balance. I watched her trying to regain control of the toast that danced about, evading her grip like a bar of soap in the bath. For those slow seconds it seemed as if repossessing the toast was of utmost important to her and the fact that she was losing her balance didn’t register. I’ve never forgotten the terror in her eyes, staring at me, replayed a thousand times since in my nightmares, as she realised she was falling.

The fall leaves Vivi unable to have children; another catalyst for the events which unfold. And so it ambles on, with secrets gradually becoming exposed, and the relationship between the sisters coming to light.

But I was unconvinced. And not just because it was set near Crewkerne, close by where I live in Somerset – which Adams claims is in Dorset, and has a bowling alley. No, it doesn’t, Poppy, love! No, the reason I was unconvinced is because The Behaviour of Moths tries to do the unreliable narrator thing, but it all comes in a huge rush with a big twist towards the end. And then you wonder quite how we were supposed to read the rest of the novel – but there weren’t enough clues laid down, and the picture isn’t properly developed. All the details about moths are doubtless engaging, but they seem to have taken the place of a coherent narrative arc.
The Behaviour of Moths has done very well, and my lack of enthusiasm for the novel won’t trouble Poppy Adams particularly, but I do wonder quite why it’s been so popular. I found the whole thing… how shall I put it… quite bland. The blurb talks about ‘Ginny’s unforgettable voice’, but that’s the problem: it wasn’t unforgettable, it was literary-fiction-by-numbers. The style is almost ubiquitous across novels of this type – and though there were Gothicky elements (especially in the depiction of the house) which impressed and set the novel a bit apart, for the most part The Behaviour of Moths was a common-or-garden specimen. Not a bad novel by any means, and passes the time adequately, but could have been so much better. I do look forward to seeing what Adams does next, but if she couldn’t win me over with a novel which has all my favourite ingredients, then I don’t hold out huge hope.

Simon S has started suggesting similar reads at the bottom of his reviews, and I love the idea – and asked him if he wouldn’t mind me nabbing it! So from now on, I’ll try and think of books which I think did similar things better – or, with positive reviews, do similar things equally well! And link to my thoughts on them, naturally…

Books to get Stuck into:

– Angela Young: Speaking of Love – family secrets and tense relationships are as subtle and engaging as they get in this wonderful novel
– Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle – the unreliable narrator and the Gothic house taken to a whole new level in this brilliantly addictive novel

Fragile Feet

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments
Better late than never, I have finally finished Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet – which I heard about because Simon S chose it as one of his books for Not The TV Book Group. I had nearly finished when I discovered that (a) Ali is a man, and (b) he worked for the Bodleian Library, like yours truly!

I don’t think it’s necessary for me to write a proper review, because there is such a good discussion over at Savidge Reads, so instead I shall offer you a link to that discussion and tell you that I liked the book a lot, with some reservations. Indeed, I shall give you a very, very short review, and tell you to pop over to that discussion.


I liked:
–the quirky ideas: glass feet! cow-moth-things! a bird that turns things white!
–a generally impressive and engaging writing style
–Shaw didn’t just use a crazy idea for novelty value, it was well developed and quite beautiful

I didn’t like:
–jumping around between narrative strands and not quite knowing where we were, or what the time setting was
–the dialogue felt a little clunky sometimes – too many ‘ums’

A quotation:
“She could feel the encroachment of the glass like an animal feeling the tremor before an earthquake.”

These quick reviews could be the way forward! I can go to bed now…

You wait all day for one book about buses…

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

…and, to be honest, there’s still only one book about buses that comes along. Bloomsbury sent me a copy of The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills ages and ages ago, probably around the invention of the first bus, but somehow I’ve only just read it. Such is the state of my tbr mountains (which are already looking nervous about the idea of moving house in three months’ time.)

The Maintenance of Headway is a very short book (you know how I like short books) all about the politics of bus driving and the interaction of bus drivers. I really like novels about unusual professions – not that bus driving is inherently unusual, it’s just unusual for a novel to focus on a bus driver – and so was intrigued about how this one would work.

Well, the unnamed narrator works amongst a group of fellow bus drivers who must adhere to the various Bus Driving Rules. Mills was apparently a bus driver himself, so he should know what they are. Chief amongst them – and iterated as chapter headings throughout the book – is ‘There’s no excuse for being early’. And then, of course, there is the Maintenance of Headway, intended to stop that phenomenon where three buses turn up at once. These rules are sprinkled throughout the novel, and I’m certainly going to feel more sympathetic next time I hop on a bus – but any action that came alongside was so understated that I think I missed it. There are some interesting touches about the hierarchy of driving, about drivers’ various idiosyncrasies, and some nostalgia for old-fashioned buses. All understated. Understated seems to be Mills’ thing.

I hadn’t heard of Magnus Mills when I received this novel, but everyone else seems to have – he was nominated for the Booker, and has all sorts of accolades on the back of the copy I have. Indeed, he is variously compared to PG Wodehouse, The Office, Brave New World, the Coen Brothers, and Alan Bennett. What an intriguing mix. What do they all have in common? That they’re all funny – and that’s the thing, I just didn’t find The Maintenance of Headway particularly funny. Interestingly, the one bit I wanted to quote is the bit a few other reviews have quoted:

There was a man standing in the road holding a large key. He was surrounded by a circle of traffic cones, in front of which was a red and white sign: ROAD CLOSED. I pulled my bus up and spoke to him through the window. ‘Morning,’ I said. ‘Morning,’ he replied. ‘Busy?’ ‘Will be in a minute,’ he said. ‘I’m just about to relieve the pressure.’ His van was parked nearby. He was from a water company. ‘Would it be possible to let me go past before you start?’ I enquired. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I’ve already put my cones out. Can’t really bring them all in again.’ I counted the cones. There were seven in total.
It had some interesting quirks, but it wasn’t quirky in the way that someone like Edward Carey is… somehow it just meandered. For a short novel, it went an awful lot of nowhere. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it – I think it would be closer to the point to say that I didn’t understand it, or tune into its wavelength. Even after reading two brilliant reviews by Kim and John, I know I’m missing something – and I’d like to read some of his earlier novels to see if that ‘something’ doesn’t elude me there.

Magnus Mills has a whole raft of interesting-looking novels in fact – All Quiet on the Orient Express, although I know little about it except its title, has already found its way into my Amazon wishlist. Although The Maintenance of Headway didn’t bowl me over, I’ll certainly be looking out for more Mills in the future…