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Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton

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41. Guard Your Daughters (1953)

What a heavenly book!  What a glorious find!  It has gone into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  There was never any question that it wouldn’t.

Occasionally I started a book and, after a page or two, know that I will hate it *cough* Mary Webb *cough – less frequently, it takes only the first page to tell me that a book is astonishingly brilliant (step forward Patrick Hamilton.)  Rarest of all is the book where, before the end of the second page, I know I will read and re-read it for many years to come.  We all recognise the difference between a book we admire and a book we love.  Often these overlap, but there are very few novels which feel like loved ones, so deeply are we attached to them.  Guard Your Daughters is on that list for me, now.

First off, I have to acknowledge how similar it is to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.  I mentioned that the other day, but I don’t think I can really write a review without acknowledging it again.  Guard Your Daughters was published five years after I Capture the Castle, and I think Tutton must have been influenced by it – or perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist?  (Disclaimer: I’m going to make two big assumptions – that you’ve read I Capture the Castle, and that you love it.  I won’t give away any significant spoilers, but my references to Dodie Smith’s novel might not make complete sense if you’ve not read it…. ok, disclaimer over!)

Here are some of the similarities: The narrator is a young girl (Morgan Harvey is 19, to Cassandra’s 17) who lives with her eccentric family in the middle of rural nowhere.  Her father is a writer (although Morgan’s father is a successful and prolific detective novelist, not an avant-garde sufferer from writer’s block) and there are posher folk living nearby.  Tutton even seems to make reference to Rose’s disastrous attempts to dress up for her neighbours, when Morgan and her sisters are preparing to visit theirs:

Luckily, if you bother to read a few illustrated papers you can always find out what to wear when, so that we didn’t make any crashing faux pas, such as wearing long dresses or flowers in our hair.

The most significant similarity is the feel of the novel.  Just as I Capture the Castle has a warm, nostalgic feel to it (don’t ask me how), so Guard Your Daughters feels like a novel one read repeatedly throughout childhood, even though I hadn’t read a word of it before this week.  Without being like those mawkish Edwardian children’s books where everyone Learns A Lesson, Tutton has created a wonderful family of people who love one another and, somehow, make the reader feel included.  ‘About fifty years out of date’, as one sister cheerfully confesses, and ‘living in a completely unreal world’ as another admits, but this isn’t a realist novel.  This is a novel which glories in its own delightful eccentricity – but not without serious undercurrents.

Right, the family.  While Cassandra was blessed only with one sister and one brother, Morgan has four sisters.  Dreamy, shy Teresa is the youngest (at 15) – she warmed my heart by her forthright hatred of sports.  Next is Cressida, the only one of the unmarried sisters who craves a normal family environment – she rather blended into the background, but that turns out to be important.  Morgan is the middle sister.  One year older than her, Thisbe is dry, sardonic and loves to make visitors feel awkward – the only thing she takes seriously is her poetry.  Oldest is Pandora, recently married and thus absent from the home.  When she visits, her perspective on life has changed…

“The thing is–” said Pandora.

“What?”

“I realise now – I never did before –” She hunted for words and I turned and stared at her.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I realise now that we’re an odd sort of family.”

“Well of course we are.”

“But I mean – Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!”

“Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.  However, dearest, we’ll do our best.”

It is obvious that life cannot be normal for these five – but Guard Your Daughters isn’t self-consciously wacky or absurd.  The events are entirely plausible – there are very amusing scenes where Morgan and Teresa try to run a Sunday School lesson, or Morgan and Thisbe attempt to negotiate a cocktail party, or the girls try to put together a meal for a visiting young man while subsisting on rations (and finer things illegally given by a nearby farmer.)  The various relationships between sisters aren’t unlikely either – except perhaps the standard of their conversation and wit.  What makes the Harvey family eccentric is their detachment from the outside world, and their complete absorption in the feelings and doings of the family unit, to the exclusion of almost everybody else.  (The family unit is completed, incidentally, by their father and mother.  No Mortmain-esque step-parents in sight.  The father is only mildly absent-minded, and the mother… well, she has sensitive nerves… it’s not all easy-going in this household or this novel.)

But, despite Pandora’s fears, they do manage to meet a couple of young men.  Gregory’s car fortuitously breaks down outside their gate (remind you of any novel?) and, later, Patrick offers Morgan and Teresa a lift in his car while they’re on their way to a nunnery to learn French… Aside from owning cars, these young man share bewilderment at the Harvey family, and both become objects of desire for one sister or another.  Unlike I Capture the Castle, the romance plot never becomes of overriding importance.  Far more important is the family, their love and rivalry, and definitely their comedy.  There are many very amusing scenes, and a few quite moving and difficult ones, but the main wonder of the novel is the family, and Morgan’s voice.  She is not so self-conscious as Cassandra, but has an inviting, charming, slightly wry outlook on her sisters – coloured, of course, by her love for them.  I have no idea how Tutton has created such a lovable character – if I knew, I’d bottle it.

These aren’t the sisters in the book, of course… but they could be.
(picture source)

It’s so difficult to write about a book when I have simply loved it.  I want to shelve any critical apparatus (not that I usually drag it out on my blog) and substitute rows of exclamation marks and smiley faces.  Guard Your Daughters is so warm, so funny, so lively and delightful.  It’s a warm blanket of a novel, but never cloying or sentimental.  Basically, if you have any affection for I Capture the Castle, you’ll feel the same about Guard Your Daughters.  I’m going to go one step further.  I think it’s better than I Capture the Castle.  There.  Said it.

Bizarrely, unbelievably, criminally, it is out of print.  But I’ve seen the edition I have (the Reprint Society, 1954) in lots and lots of bookshops – I think they may have overestimated the demand!  I would love people to read it, so I’ll probably buy up copies when I see them, and force them on friends and family… if it’s languishing on your shelves, then go and grab it asap.  I’m so grateful to my friend Curzon for initially recommending it to me, and later Nicola Humble (author of the absolutely essential The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920 to 1950s) for reminding me about it at a conference earlier this year.  It’s probably my book of 2012 so far, and if you manage to get a copy, please come and let me know what you thought.

Oh, what a heavenly book!

All The Books of My Life – Sheila Kaye-Smith

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I recently read one of my favourite ever author autobiographies, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All The Books of My Life (1956) without having read any of her novels.  I have read two volumes about Jane Austen which Sheila Kaye-Smith co-authored, and now I have read her autobiography (of sorts) – but I have still yet to read any of her fiction.  Should I?  Being ‘rural novels’, I have an unreasoning terror that they will be exclusively in cod-dialect, and feature sturdy (but honest) young men and flighty (but honest) young women.  Everything, in fact, that Stella Gibbons warns there might be, in Cold Comfort Farm.  My experience with Mary Webb has done nothing to assuage these fears.

Most of us turn to author’s biographies or autobiographies to elucidate their novels, or simply because we want to learn a bit more.  My way of doing things seems a bit contrary, but I happened to flick through All The Books of My Life in the Bodleian the other day (somehow it has found its way to the high-use open shelf collection – who could possibly have been reading it?) and I knew I’d have to get myself a copy.  As the account of writing and living as a novelist, it is deeply interesting.  As the perspective of a reader in the first half of the twentieth century, it is a joy.

Kaye-Smith apparently wrote an earlier autobiography about ‘my marriage, my home and my religion’, and decided that, turning seventy, it was time to dedicate an autobiography to the books she has read.  It’s like My Life in Books, I suppose.  From the book about Charles which taught infant Sheila to read, to the latest developments in her reading taste, Kaye-Smith threads the narrative of her life with the books which have influenced her.  Naturally, perhaps, the quotations I have jotted down are those which deal with the books, rather than the life.  Her life is interesting, but I found myself nodding in agreement so enthusiastically at her readerly opinions that I couldn’t help but mark them down.  Excuse a torrent of quotations… beginning (let’s keep this chronological, shall we?) with her early affection for Lewis Carroll’s Alice:

My delight in Alice in Wonderland, which I feel with increasing strength every time I read it, dates from the very dawn of understanding.  It is surely a wonderful achievement to have written a book that does not lose a spark of its magic in the re-reading of sixty years.  As I grew up I came to prefer Through the Looking-Glass – the adventures and characters are more significant and I am increasingly amazed at the brilliance of its construction – but my first introduction was to Wonderland, by means of a version specially prepared for small children and called The Nursery Alice.  This had the Tenniel illustrations, but they were all in colour, and the book must have been an expensive one for it was always kept in the drawing-room.  I remember the panic with which I saw my mother lock the drawing-room door when a thief was supposed to be about, for I felt sure that his main design was to steal my Alice.

There is something rather adorable about that, isn’t there?  I love how Kaye-Smith is able to recall the perspectives she held at various stages of her life.  Not only does she remember the books she read, but how she felt about them and the impact they had.  She covers all manner of obscure novels and esoteric books, but my next two excerpts concern well-known writers, and I’ve selected them purely because I agree with them so whole-heartedly…

I do not think a full-grown sense of humour is required to appreciate Dickens, but it is advisable to read him as I did for drama and pathos.  He is primarily a comic writer.  His character-drawing – and no one more signally then Dickens has given honorary members to the human race – is the drawing of a humorist, that is of a caricaturist, who can often show more of his model’s essential quality than a ‘straight’ artist, but certainly requires a mature mind to appreciate him at his full value.  I read Dickens not to laugh but to cry, for in those days I wanted most of a novel was the gift of tears.

And how could I resist this account of her experiences reading Ivy Compton-Burnett?  Not only do I agree with her assessment of Dame Ivy, but it shows that a false-start with her needn’t be the end of the story… encouraging words for any of you who have tried and failed to enjoy ICB!

For many years I found her unreadable, and the praise of her admirers was as the meaningless clamour of those who worship strange gods.  I myself bore all the marks of the Philistine – I complained that her novels were only dialogue, that the characters all talked alike, that they did not belong to the story and so on.  When J.B. Priestley in one of the Sunday papers investigated her cultus and found it more of a craze, I murmured ‘the Emperor’s clothes…’

Then came what can only be called my conversion.  It was one of those mental switch-overs in which a pattern that had seemed meaningless as black on white is suddenly filled with meaning by the discovery that it is really white on black.  I. Compton-Burnett’s novels are not pictures, they are designs, and bear the same relation to life as the stylized rose on the wallpaper bears to the realistic illustrations in Flowers of the Field. One does not quarrel with the wallpaper flower because it has a symmetry and formality which the model lacks.  We obtain both from the book and from the wallpaper the essential meaning of a rose – indeed there may be more abstract meaning in the wallpaper design than in the naturalistic picture.  I. Compton-Burnett is definitely an abstract novelist.
[…]
When with a deep sigh of satisfaction I closed Mother and Son I did not at once, as I should have in the case of any other author who had so delighted me, rush to order more books by the same hand.  I shall doubtless read them all in time, but they must be spaced out – probably as far apart as their actual dates of publication.  To sit down and read, say, six I. Compton-Burnett novels in succession would be like sitting down to a six-course dinner consisting entirely of caviare.  The addict would find that bad for the palate as well as the digestion – time must pass and other food be eaten if he is to recapture the original savour.  So promising myself a treat in the future not too far away, I open a novel by Monica Dickens.

Sheila Kaye-Smith (photo source)

I shouldn’t be giving the impression that All The Books of My Life is simply a collection of reviews tacked together.  When Kaye-Smith subtitles the book ‘an autobiographical excursion’, she means just that – the books really do frame an autobiography and, especially in the second half, anecdotes and reflections prompt or are prompted by comments on the reading Kaye-Smith undertook at any point in her life.  For example, there is a fascinating account of a friend in early adulthood who suffered a psychiatric-disorder which made her believe in her own false double-life.  Details of fan letters and increasing literary celebrity will appeal to anybody intrigued by the status of authors in the mid-century.  Towards the end of the book, there is quite a bit about Kaye-Smith’s Catholicism and various theological and spiritual books, which will appeal to some readers (although mostly went a bit over my head, as her spiritual reading seems rather more learned than mine.)  And any well-known admirer of Jane Austen could hardly craft a book without humour – it is a subtle wit, found chiefly in the turns of phrase Kaye-Smith uses, or wry conclusions to paragraphs…

Love and violence also swelled the sales of another spinster novelist, E.M. Hull, author of The Sheik, whose remarkable picture of desert life started a public demand for sheiks that was fostered by the cinema until it died of its own absurdity.

We all love reading the words of bibliophiles, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading blogs.  All The Books of My Life demonstrates that you don’t need to have the remotest interest in an author’s work to find their autobiography engaging, and I found herein the dual pleasures of agreement and discovery.  For all the head-nodding passages, there were two or three about books and authors I have yet to encounter.  It is perhaps surprising that more authors do not choose this bookish format for their autobiographies, and I wish more would, but I am delighted to have found (entirely by good fortune) so sublime an example.  But I still won’t be throwing my hat into the ring and trying one of her bain’t-youm-be-alost rural novels.

Talking of Grief

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I hope I don’t sound odd when I say that I am rather fascinated by the idea of grief.  Not in a sadistic way, of course, but simply because it is a fundamental aspect of human life which I have yet to experience.  Recently I have read two very different non-fiction books on the topic, and it seemed to make sense (briefly) to consider them together – Calvin Trillin’s About Alice (2006) and C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961).  Both are by husbands who are coming to terms with the premature loss of their wife to cancer, but from that point, they are incredibly different.

As the title suggests, Trillin’s book is about Alice, his wife.  It is essentially a memoir of their marriage, concentrating on those qualities he most loved in Alice – and how bravely and determinedly she was when she first had cancer, which went into remission, and then returned.  What made About Alice moving to me was, actually, the fact that I didn’t warm to Alice at all.  The characteristics Trillin adored – such as bluntness,  or a willingness to use her beauty to avoid speeding tickets – weren’t ones which I admire, which made Trillin’s portrait all the stronger and affecting.  Reminiscences – in fact or fiction – which detail how uniformly perfect the deceased was, and how terribly they are mourned by everyone, never quite ring true.  We all know that our very favourite people are not everyone’s favourite people, and a personal grief is much more powerful for being personal.

I’m struggling to know what to write about About Alice.  It’s a beautiful portrait of a relationship, as well as a woman.  It is not really a book about grief – that isn’t the sort of book Trillin chose to write.   I found it moving, but as the reflection of a life that has sadly ended, rather than reflections upon Trillin’s own ongoing life.

Lewis’s A Grief Observed is the flip-side of the coin.  There is little about Joy’s character and life, because Lewis’s focus is the process(es) of grief – particularly, grief as a Christian.  A Grief Observed isn’t a work of theology, though, because that would suggest settled conclusions, with arguments and illustrations to support and work towards them.  Lewis writes that sort of book very well (c.f. Mere Christianity), but in A Grief Observed he is openly flailing.  It really is the documentation of an ongoing process.  Lewis hasn’t edited the book to make it feel consistent or conclusive – indeed, he often backtracks or offers alternative interpretations of what he has already written.

I wrote that last night.  It was a yell rather than a thought.  Let me try it over again.
Somehow, Lewis manages to write down the varying states of his mind and spirit without sounding self-absorbed or introspective.  Grief genuinely seems to confound and puzzle him, as he tries to ascertain how he really feels, and how he will manage the future.  Part of this is concerned with his faith, and re-assessing his understanding of God.  In soaps or light fiction, grief would have ended his faith – Lewis’s relationship with God was too strong and real for that, but the pain of losing his wife does make him reconsider God’s character, and how he has previously misunderstood it.  Again, Lewis doesn’t have any predetermined conclusions here, and he doesn’t really come to any by the end of the book, but he is remarkably eloquent about his journey here.  (Sorry, I meant to avoid the word ‘journey’, but… well, it felt like one.)

A Grief Observed is starkly, vividly, astonishingly honest.   It is also eloquent and thoughtful, without losing spontaneity or genuine emotion.  Through the nature of Lewis’s approach, it is of wider applicability that Trillin’s book.  Although nobody else will have the exact experience Lewis did, plenty of people will probably agree with the general points he discovers along the way.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow.  Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.  It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop.  There is something new to be chronicled every day.  Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
I read A Grief Observed with the interest of the outsider, keen to understand a facet of emotion I cannot grasp.  One day, presumably, I will need to turn to it as a fellow-griever.  I found Lewis’s book so powerful and wise even without having experienced grief – and now, thankfully, I will know exactly where to turn when I first experience it.  And I imagine it will feel like a completely different book then.

When William Came – Saki

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If I mention the author ‘Saki’, you probably think of darkly funny short stories, if you think of anything at all.  If you were around during the brief spate where lots of bloggers were reading The Unbearable Bassington (which is exceptionally good) then perhaps that comes to mind.  What I have yet to see mentioned is his 1913 novel When William Came, which I have just finished.  The ‘William’ in question is Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the ‘coming’ is his invasion of Britain.  Although such an invasion never took place, of course, Saki is essentially predicting the First World War – a war in which, in 1916, he would be killed.

If you’ve seen Went The Day Well? – a film based on a Graham Greene story about a similar invasion in the Second World War – then you might expect When William Came to have similar resistance and trauma as its keynotes.  In fact, the invasion is over, and much is continuing as ever before.  A lot of British people have fled to the colonies, but those that remain continue their social whirl with much jollity, only some of which is forced.  Cicely Yeovil is the chief socialite here, determined that a small thing like a new monarch and official language won’t prevent her surrounding herself by beautiful young pianists and gossipy older women.

“My heart ought to be like a singing-bird to-day, I suppose,” said Cicely presently.

“Because your good man is coming home?” asked Ronnie.

Cicely nodded.

“He’s expected some time this afternoon, though I’m rather vague as to which train he arrives by.  Rather a stifling day for railway travelling.”

“And is your heart doing the singing-bird business?” asked Ronnie.

“That depends,” said Cicely, “if I may choose the bird.  A missal-thrush would do, perhaps; it sings loudest in stormy weather, I believe.
Cicely’s husband, Murray Yeovil, is returning from lands afar, having picked up only bits and pieces of the news.  He is rather horrified by the response of those known as the fait accompli – who may have considered resistance, fleetingly, but have instead settled down to dinner parties and modern dance.

I don’t know what it says about me, but I much preferred the goings-on of the fait accompli to the anxieties of the patriotic, militaristic types.  My heart leapt within me whenever Joan Mardle appeared – she is described in one of Saki’s characteristically wonderful, brief descriptive entrances:

She cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good-will and good-nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily rearmed themselves.
Always knowing what will most wound her acquaintances, but delivering these blows with disingenuous innocence, Joan Mardle would be a terrible friend, but is a wonderful character.  I love any b*tchy exchanges in high social circles – here’s another one I loved:

“I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you.  People with our colour of hair always like barbaric display -”

“They don’t,” said Ronnie, “they have chaste cold tastes.  You are absolutely mistaken.”

“Well, I think I ought to know!” protested the dowager; “I’ve lived longer in the world than you have, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness, “but my hair has been this colour longer than yours has.”
Ouch!  But this is tempered with much more straight-faced reactions to the invasion and the possibility of Britain regaining its independent feet.  Here, for example, is someone arguing the point with Yeovil:

“Remember all the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had the sea dominion is in other hands.  The enemy would not need to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies.”
In The Unbearable Bassington, Saki ingeniously balanced the comic and tragic, letting tragedy flow as an undercurrent to comedy until the climax of the novel.  In When William Came, I found the combination of insouciance and politics rather disjointed.  Comedy and tragedy are closely aligned, of course.  Anger and resignation could have worked in the same two-sides-of-the-coin way in When William Came, but the social merry-go-round didn’t really work alongside the militaristic angst.  The competing elements (in a very short novel) felt simply too different, and I ended up being a little disappointed.

Having said that, When William Came is worth reading if only for those parts of it I did love.  Nobody writes a social scene quite as bitingly as Saki, and few authors have his economy of words.  Once you’ve exhausted the short stories and The Unbearable Bassington, this is certainly worth reading, if only because we (sadly) have so little of Saki’s work to read.

Gossip From Thrush Green – Miss Read

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The first four or five days I was at home, I had a headache.  It’s related to a tooth problem, which hopefully will get sorted out, and I’ve become a cheerleader for various painkillers and antibiotics this week – but, more to the point, I needed something to read.  I couldn’t cope with anything stylistically sophisticated or experimental, or even anything which could be considered demanding in any sense of the word.  What could I choose?  Well, I’d never read anything by Miss Read, and she seemed to fit the bill.  I have three on my shelf, picked up cheaply somewhere, and so I chose one from the middle of her writing – Gossip from Thrush Green (1981).

Although I had never previously read a word by Miss Read, it was exactly what I expected.  Thoroughly enjoyable, and utterly forgettable.  It’s a little village where everyone knows each other, and cares for each other – the only differences being that some show this care, and some hide it.  Everyone gossips, especially the men, and a mischievous cat is about as traumatic as a burnt down vicarage (incidentally, not the most restful scenario to read whilst sitting in a vicarage!)

It’s been less than a week, and already all the characters and events are fading from my mind… I think the characters recur throughout the series of Thrush Green novels, so other readers might already be fond of blunt Ella, dotty Dotty, kind vicar’s wife Dimity etc.  I liked them all, but – differently though they were described – all of them spoke in the same warm, sensible way.  Miss Read (or Dora Saint, as she was called) writes in a very workmanlike way, getting the job done – which is perfectly good enough, because she clearly isn’t trying to be experimental.  With my headache, I was grateful.  Although set around 1981, when it was published, this was only clear because they talked about decimalisation.  Apart from that, it could easily have been 1950 or 1930 or even earlier.  It’s all bathed in nostalgia.  Villages still have these sorts of friendships and acquaintances – everyone is interested in each other – but they’re not quite so cut off from the rest of the world.

But how could I not warm to a novelist who takes it for granted that we know who the Provincial Lady is?

“‘When in doubt, don’t’, is my motto,” said Ella forthrightly.  “And as for love, well, you know what the Provincial Lady maintained.  She reckoned that a sound bank balance and good teeth far outweighed it in value.”
And how could I not nod my head to this?

“A quarter past three,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the bedside clock. “What a time to be drinking tea!””Anytime,” Harold told her, “is time to be drinking tea.”
All in all, this was the perfect book for me to read this week, but I think I’ll be keeping Miss Read to days when I can’t cope with anything else.  I know she has her besotted fans – Our Vicar’s Wife has read them all several times, I believe – but when I’m after comfort reading I’d rather run back to the 1920s.

Am I My Brother’s Reader?

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I’ve been very ruthless over the past couple days, and weeded out over 100 books which have gone to Barrington (a local National Trust property with a book barn) or The Honeypot (an even more local secondhand book seller – my Mum in our garage, for the church!)  I haven’t been quite as ruthless as Rachel, but I’ve been stern with myself and certainly managed to make a bit of room… and then immediately filled it with the books I sent home with Mum and Dad when I moved house.  But, whereas I’d usually keep books I’ve read unless I hated them, now they’re out if it’s unlikely that I’ll want to re-read them for years.

One book which probably won’t be finding its way back onto my shelves is The Eye of the World (1990), the first novel in The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, which I finished on the train home.  In early 2010, my brother Colin and I set each other a reading challenge.  Our tastes our not similar at all, as you’ll remember from his My Life in Books interview, and I wanted him to sample the wonder of Virginia Woolf.  Since she writes normal, sensible length books – and Robert Jordan first volume OF FOURTEEN comes in at an astonishing 782 pages – Colin had to read Orlando and To The Lighthouse, and would still get off far easier in terms of length.  As it turned out, he struggled with Orlando and called it the worst book he’d ever read.  Read more here (scroll down to August 25th 2010 entry).  I was sad but not surprised, and let him off reading To The Lighthouse.  Virginia Woolf is too brilliant to be everyone’s cup of tea, so we’ll sweep that under the carpet.

Well, The Eye of the World isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but it did take me 2.5 years to read it.  I actually read over 500 pages on a trip to and from Paris in March 2010, because it was the only book I took with me, but I only read in dribs and drabs until, determined that it should feature on A Century of Books, I took it with me on a 3.5 hour train journey, and blitzed the final 200 or so pages.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve live in a jolly place called The Two Rivers, which is attacked by Trollocs (wolf-type creatures), and Rand’s father is killed.  I forget quite how this leads to the quest, but it does…. in fact, looking back, I can’t really remember ever being told what the quest actually was.  It certainly involved walking a very long way, outwitting Dark Forces, and seeking the elliptical wisdom of an Aes Sedai  – prophetess-type – called Moiraine, who is rather pretty, if memory serves.  They wanted to get to The Eye of the World, but I don’t really remember it being mentioned until they actually got there.  Perhaps they’re just on the run from the Trollocs and sundry evil things?

And on they go.  And on.  And oooonnnn.

I will mention, before I go on, that The Eye of the World was better than I thought it would be.  At no point was the writing laughably bad, although for the most part it was pretty pedestrian.  It doesn’t hurry particularly, and one of the reasons the book is so. very. long. is that Jordan doesn’t have any sense of economising.  Here’s an excerpt chosen entirely at random, to give you a sense of the pace:

The stone hallway was dim and shadowy, and empty except for Rand.  He could not tell where the light came from, what little there was of it; the grey walls were bare of candles or lamps, nothing at all to account for the faint glow that seemed to just be there.  The air was still and dank, and somewhere in the distance water dripped with a steady, hollow plonk.  Wherever this was, it was not the inn.  Frowning, he rubbed at his forehead.  Inn?  His head hurt, and thoughts were hard to hold on to.  There had been something about… an inn?  It was gone, whatever it was.

He licked his lips and wished he had something to drink.  He was awfully thirsty, dry-as-dust thirsty.  It was the dripping sound that decided him.  With nothing to choose by except his thirst, he started toward that steady plonk – plonk – plonk.
So, as you see, nothing dreadful, nothing in Mary Webb territory.  But since we’re comparing Jordan with Woolf (which I can’t imagine has ever happened before)… well, you can’t imagine anybody reading prose like that simply for the joy of reading beautiful writing, can you?  It’s serviceable, though, and unobtrusive, which is no mean feat.  Plenty of novelists would give their left arm for that.

A book’s merits can be considered in terms of plot, character, and writing style, broadly speaking.  What The Eye of the World lacks in writing style it almost gains in character.  Although it took me the first hundred pages to disentangle Mat, Rand, and Perrin (and that gap of two years in my reading entangled them all over again) I was impressed by the complex relationships between the central characters – with jealousy, admiration, affection, rivalry, loyalty, and frustration all playing their roles.  It’s not always the most subtle character delineation, but it’s a good deal more subtle than I was anticipating.  As usual, there are forces that are plain Evil, without redeeming feature or clear motivation, but the Good characters weren’t annoyingly bland in their pursuit of all that is pure.  They did all seem as though they were about 15 years old, whereas the cover suggests they’re a decade or so older than that…?

So, the plot?  It didn’t grip me, to be honest, because it seemed just to be walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, repeat as needed.  The heroes are trapped!  Will they die?  Er, no.  The heroes are lost!  Will they find their way?  Er, yes.  The heroes are trapped again!  Will they escape?  Can you guess?  When there are another thousand books in the series, you know that the main characters are going to live for at least another few books.

I love books where not much happens, as you know.  I love To The Lighthouse, for goodness’ sake, and bar a death and an argument or two, nothing really happens.  But The Eye of the World is so fixed on its quest plot, and its up-and-down attempts to heighten tension, that when it doesn’t grab a reader the foundations of the novel must collapse.  I think I’m just allergic to the artificiality of any quest-plot.  And – not that it’s relevant – covers like this.  Why do fantasy books so often have covers like this?  And silly names?  I’m put off when writers make up gibberish languages.  I think writers should be able to be creative within the bounds of the English language (or, y’know, whichever language[s] they speak.)  I don’t see how ‘Aes Sedai’ brings anything that ‘prophetess’ doesn’t, other than making me think (for some reason) of Anais Nin.

And while I’m moaning, goodness me, it’s slow.  Colin tells me that it’s the most pacey novel in the series – but no novel of 782 pages can claim to be fast-paced.  I think it could all easily be condensed into 300 pages, max.  I suppose part of the appeal to the sort of people who like lengthy fantasy series is that length. Perhaps it makes you feel like you’re on the quest too.  (It did make me chuckle that one of the cover quotations was “I read it in three days” – for most books, an indication of compulsive, compelling reading would be “I read it in three hours.”)  I was never hugely curious to find out what would happen next, partly because it was almost always glaringly obvious what would happen next and partly because it all happened at a glacial speed.

So, summing up… neither Colin nor I have converted the other to our much-cherished writers, but I fared better with Robert Jordan than he did with Virginia Woolf.  I shan’t be reading any other books in The Wheel of Time series, but I liked The Eye of the World more than I thought I would.  I just wish someone had hidden Jordan’s pen after 300 pages.

Not That It Matters – A.A. Milne

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It’s been about a decade since I blitzed most of A.A. Milne’s very many books, and now I’m enjoying revisiting them.  I thought a trip down Milne Memory Lane would be a handy way to cross off 1919 on A Century of Books, so I picked up his collection of humorous essays from that year, Not That It Matters.

The first piece (although they are not in chronological order) starts ‘Sometimes when the printer is waiting for an article which really should have been sent to him the day before, I sit at my desk and wonder if there is any possible subject in the whole world upon which I can possibly find anything to say.’  (The final line in the book, incidentally, is ‘And Isaiah, we may be sure, did not carry a notebook.’  Which gives you some sense of the wide variety Milne covers in this collection.)

Some of the essays are very indicative of their time – from 1910 to 1919, as the essays appeared during that period in The Sphere, The Outlook, and The Star.  I’m not sure ‘Smoking as a Fine Art’ would appear anywhere today, except as a consciously controversial piece, nor could any 21st century essayist take for granted that his reader went for frequent country houseparties, attended Lords, and had strong memories of the First World War.  On the other hand, many of the topics Milne covers would be equally fit for a columnist today, if we still had the type who were allowed to meander through arbitrary topics, without the need to make a rapier political point or a satirical topical comment.  Milne writes on goldfish, daffodils, writing personal diaries, the charm of lunch, intellectual snobbery, and even what property programme presenters would now call ‘kerb appeal’ – but which was simply ‘looking at the outside of a house’ in Milne’s day.

I love Milne’s early work, because it is so joyful and youthful.  In the sketches and short pieces published in The Day’s Play, The Holiday Round and others, ‘The Rabbits’ often re-appear – these are happy, silly 20-somethings called things like Dahlia and (if me) addressed by their surnames.  They play cricket (badly), golf (badly), and indoor party games (badly) on endless and sunny country holidays.  It’s all deliciously insouciant and, if not quite like A.A. Milne (or anybody) really was, great fun to read.  When Milne turns to essays, he can’t include this cast, of course.  And he was in his late thirties when Not That It Matters was published – still young, perhaps, but hardly youthful.  He was a married man, though not a father quite yet, and his tone had changed slightly – from the exuberance which characterised his earliest books, to the calmly witty and jovial tone which was to see out the rest of his career.  Here’s an example, more or less at random, of the style which makes me always so happy to return to Milne:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” said Keats, not actually picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the general blessings of the autumn.
My main qualm with these essays is that they do often end in rather a forced manner.  He’ll put in a reference that drags everything back to the opening line, or finishes off pat in a slightly different direction.  It doesn’t feel especially natural, and is perhaps indicative of the looming deadlines Milne mentions in the first essay…

As the title suggests, nothing of life-changing importance is addressed in Not That It Matters.  He does not adopt a serious voice at any point – indeed, I cannot think of a time in any of his books where he becomes entirely serious, not even in Peace With Honour, a non-fiction (and excellent) book wherein he put forth his pacifist views.  Even at these moments his weightiest points are served with a waggle of the eyebrows and an amusing image.  That’s how he made his impact.

I do prefer the whimsy of his fictional sketches to the panache of his essays, but it is still a delight and a joy to have Not That It Matters and its ilk waiting on my shelf.  It definitely bears re-reading, and I’ll be going on a cycle through Milne’s many and various books for the rest of life, I imagine.

Tomorrow I’ll type out a whole of one of his essays, ‘A Household Book’, because I think it’ll surprise quite a few people.  And will show to my brother that I was RIGHT about something I’ve been saying to him for a decade.  Ahem.  The essay is in praise of a then-underappreciated book by a famous author… and ends with this paragraph (come back tomorrow to see what it was!):

Well, of course, you will order the book at once.  But I must give you one word of warning.  When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of ******* *******.  You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself… You may be worthy; I do not know.  But it is you who are on trial.

Art in Nature – Tove Jansson

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I’ve probably mentioned before my envy of those readers who can eagerly await the latest novels from their favourite writers, doubtless following them on Twitter and keeping an eye out for their appearances on late-night BBC programmes, etc. etc.  Well, I don’t have any of that.  All the authors I love are dead.  But one thing I do look forward to with joy is Sort Of Books commissioning more translations of Tove Jansson’s books, mostly under the excellent translating skills of one Thomas Teal.  These are slowly and steadily emerging, so that I can track their arrival with the same keenness which others (I presume) await tid-bits from @margaretatwood.

The latest-translated Tove Jansson book was published in 1978 as Dockskåpet which, I have no reason to doubt, is rendered into English as Art in Nature.  It is a collection of short stories, with ‘Art in Nature’ as the first.  Usually I have to be in the right mood to tackle a volume of short stories, but there are two short story writers – Jansson and Katherine Mansfield – whom I found so good that I will love them whenever I pick them up, whatever mood I am in.

As usual, Jansson rather defies any attempt to spot a unifying theme.  The blurb has opted for ‘witty, often disquieting’ in which Jansson ‘reveals the fault-lines in our relationship with art, both as artists and viewers.’  It is true that there are a number of artistic people who crop up in these stories – from a cartoonist to an actress, from the painter of trains to the constructor of miniature furniture – but Jansson’s gaze is, as usual, turned upon the wider canvas of humanity itself.  It always feels a little pretentious to say that Jansson’s topic is human behaviour, because isn’t that what all writers and artists use as their topic? – but someone Jansson seems more perceptive and more precise in her examination, so that the matters of plot and setting fall away beside the details of human life she unveils.

But that is too vague for a review.  It’s how I always feel about Jansson’s writing, but it doesn’t really help you know how this collection differs from any of her others, does it?  Well, Art in Nature contains two of my favourite Jansson stories yet.  One is ‘A Sense of Time’ which is about a boy and his grandmother – the grandmother has lost her sense of time; she will wake him up at 4am to give him his morning coffee, or insist that he goes to sleep in the middle of the afternoon.  It’s a rather clever little story, more reliant on beginning-middle-end than Jansson usually is.  It also includes a little sentence which helps illustrate what I like about Jansson’s subtlety:

Grandmother let her thoughts move on to John, wondering in what way he’d grown old.
I loved that she didn’t write ‘whether or not he’d grown old’, or even ‘how old he’d grown’, but ‘in what way he’d grown old’.  It immediately makes me think of all the possible ways of growing old; how Grandmother has identified different manifestations of age in her different friends; her experience of aging.  Lovely.  My other favourite story was ‘The Doll’s House’, where Alexander begins to build a model house, gradually excluding his partner Erik.  It’s all very gentle and slow and observant.  It feels appropriate that Katherine Mansfield should have written a story with the same name, albeit a very different story.  Here’s another instance of a small matter of phrasing revealing Jansson’s cleverness (I’m assuming the Swedish does the same):

The house rose higher and higher.  It had reached the attic, now, and had grown more and more fantastic.  Alexander was in love, almost obsessed, with the thing he was trying to create.  When he woke up in the morning, his first thought was The House, and he was instantly occupied with the solution to some problem of framing or a difficult staircase or the spire on a tower.
The word ‘almost’!  It turns the story on its side, a little.  I had prepared myself, by then, for a tale of obsession – for the reductio ad absurdum narrative of a man whose life is taken over.  And indeed that quality is there, in the background, but that ‘almost’ shows how measured Jansson always is.  These are still recognisable people; their actions and reactions are unlikely to be extraordinary or irrational.

Here’s another excerpt, from the story ‘White Lady’, about three women going for drinks together and reminiscing:

Regina said, “Green, white, red, yellow!  Whatever you’d like.”  She laughed and threw herself back in her chair.

“Regina, you’re drunk,” Ellinor said. 

Regina answered slowly.  “I hadn’t expected that.  I really hadn’t expected that from you.  You’re usually much more subtle.” 

“Girls, girls,” May burst out.  “Don’t fight.  Is anyone coming to the ladies with me?” 

“Oh, the ladies’ room, the eternal ladies’ room,” said Ellinor.  “What do you do there all the time?  The whole scene was like something from an early talkie, with too much gesturing.  It wasn’t a very good film; the direction was definitely second-rate.  “Just go,” she said.  I want to look at the fog on the ceiling.”
Jansson excels at depicting awkwardness, disappointment – particularly the disappointment between expectation and actuality.  Which is ideal for creative subjects, of course, as well as the tensions between friends and relatives.  Whenever Jansson writes about illustrators (as she does at length in The True Deceiver, for example) it is tempting – if reductive – to read her own experience with the Moomins into them.  In ‘The Cartoonist’, the popular cartoonist of weekly comic strip Blubby absconds:

“It was their eyes,” said Allington without turning around.  “Their cartoon eyes.  The same stupid round eyes all the time.  Amazement, terror, delight, and so on – all you have to do is move the pupil and an eyebrow here and there and people think you’re brilliant.  Just imagine achieving so much with so little.  And in fact, they always look exactly the same.  But they have to do new things all the time.  All the time.  You know that.  You’ve learned that, right?”  His voice was quiet, but it sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth.  He went on without waiting for a reply.  “Novelty!  Always something new.  You start searching for ideas.  Among the people you know, among your friends.  Your own head is a blank, so you start using everything they’ve got, squeezing it dry, and no matter what people tell you, all you can think is, Can I use it?”
How much did Jansson recycle from her own life?  How much did she feel her own ability to depict amazement, terror, delight, and so on – whether with pen or paintbrush – was redundant?  Possibly not at all; possibly Allington is just a character in a story.  I don’t know.  But she certainly had no need to feel inadequate – in fact, considering how many of these stories are about creativity, I suspect she did recognise the value of the creative arts, and she is one of my favourite practitioners of them.

There were two or three stories in Art in Nature which didn’t work for me – one about a monkey, a couple longer ones towards the end which seemed to meander a bit – but I have enough experience with Jansson to suppose that I’d probably enjoy them more another time, or under different reading conditions.  For the most part, this collection is yet another arrow in a quiver of exceptionally good books.  Do go and pick this up, or any of her previous books (although people tend like Fair Play least) if you have yet to try this wonderful writer.  And thank you, Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books for continuing to make her novels and short stories available to an English-speaking audience.  Long may you keep doing so!  As Ali Smith says, on the back over, ‘That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure.’

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris – Paul Gallico

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The Bloomsbury Group set of reprints remains, I believe, the best selection of reprints out there.  It doesn’t have the range of Penguin or OUP Classics; it doesn’t have quite the unifying ethos of Persephone or Virago, but there simply are no duds in their number.  Miss Hargreaves is obviously their finest publication, in my eyes, but as I work my way through the few I haven’t read, I continue to marvel at the treats they’ve brought back to a new audience.

For some reason, Mrs. Harris has been sitting on my shelf for two years without me getting around to reading her.  I even had a copy of Flowers For Mrs. Harris (the original UK title of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris [1958]) before the Bloomsbury Group existed, but hadn’t read that either.  How could I have waited for so long?  Mrs. Harris is a joy, and her little novel is bliss.

Mrs. Harris is a London char, whose job is to clean other people’s houses.  She takes a deep pride in her work, is very good at it, and can pick and choose her clients.  She, and her good friend Vi, are much in demand, and when she decides that she has had enough of a client, she simply drops her key through their letterbox, and moves on.  Mrs. Harris is the dictionary definition of indomitable.  Nothing phases her, and she is an eternal optimist.  She also speaks somewhat like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, par example:

“Ow Lor’.”  The exclamation was torn from Mrs. Harris as
she was suddenly riven by a new thought.  “Ow Lor’,” she repeated, “if
I’m to ‘ave me photograph tyken, I’ll ‘ave to ‘ave a new ‘at.”
Now, although she is a wonderful character, it would be a lie to say that she has many layers of complexity and an inner introspection dying to emerge.  Gallico’s novel is simple and sweet, and he doesn’t overburden himself with psychological strife etc.  There is one central motivation of the novel, and that is Mrs. Harris’s desire for a Christian Dior dress…

It had all begun that day several years back when during the course of her duties at Lady Dant’s house, Mrs. Harris had opened a wardrobe to tidy it and had come upon the two dresses hanging there.  One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace, and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower.  She stood there as though struck dumb, for never in all her life had she seen anything quite as thrilling and beautiful.

Drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs. Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers.
Yet now, flowers have been replaced by this longing for a dress that costs £450 – and in 1958, of course, that was an astronomical sum.  Coincidence, luck, and much determination (for Mrs. Harris is pretty much built out of determination) and three years later she is on her way to Paris…

It’s such a fun story.  Scarcely a jot of it is realistic – Mrs. Harris’s good humour and spirited nature act much in the manner of fairy dust, transforming all those she meets – but the novel is so enjoyable and light-hearted (albeit with occasional kicks) that the reader allows him/herself to be whisked along for the ride.  The contrast between shabby London char and elegant Parisian fashionista is, naturally, wonderful – and Gallico makes full use of the potential comedy in the situation.

Oh, it’s lovely!  It certainly isn’t very deep, even with an attempt for A Moral at the end, in the way that American sitcoms like to conclude events – but writing something sprightly and enjoyable is probably rather more difficult than writing something introspective and traumatic, and is certainly rarer.  Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is great fun, very short, and is a perfect way to spend a summer afternoon.

Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir – Cicely Greig

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My favourite thing in the blogosphere in 2012 has been Claire discovering, and loving, A.A. Milne.  Every time one of her AAM reviews come out, I more or less burst with glee that somebody else has found out how funny and delightful his many and various books are.  Most of my AAM reading happened before I started blogging (I’ve read about 25 books by him) so you haven’t witnessed my love of his books as much as you would have done had you engaged me in conversation in 2002, but – it is there!

So, that’s one favourite author off the list.  Back when I started blogging in 2007, it seemed that nobody much liked Virginia Woolf either – but plenty of people have come to the blogosphere since who share my love of Ginny.  And there’s never been any shortage of those who’ll wax literary over E.M. Delafield, Barbara Comyns, and Persephone & Virago etc.

But… but… as of yet, I haven’t found a blogger who loves Ivy Compton-Burnett as I do (although I think Geranium Cat is more in favour than not?).  There is no-one who gets as excited as I do about her novels; most people, indeed, have either never read her, or run screaming from the thought of having to read her again.

Picture source

Which is why it is so wonderful to find books which match my enthusiasm for Dame Ivy.  Earlier in the year, I read Pamela Hansford-Johnson’s enthusiastic pamphlet on Ivy Compton-Burnett – and now I’ve read something I loved even more.  In fact, it’s in my top two or three books of the year so far.  AND it’s available from 1p on Amazon.  It’s Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir (1972) by her typist and friend, Cicely Greig.

Had I know that Greig was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s typist, I probably would have read this book much sooner (according to the date I scribbled inside, I’ve had it for nearly three years.)  It’s such an interesting perspective on this fascinating author.  Gradually they became friends as well, but the Victorian/Edwardianism of Ivy’s novels extended to her understanding of social mores, and it took quite a long time for her to unbend enough to treat Greig as a friend.  As Greig writes, Ivy Compton-Burnett just couldn’t quite understand her position – as a woman who had to earn her living, but wasn’t a servant.  The mechanics and background detail of writing fascinate me, and Greig is uniquely able to provide firsthand experience of certain aspects of Ivy’s writing process – as the first person to be given the novels in longhand:

I had not yet opened her parcel with the manuscript of her novel.  We
said goodbye to each other at the front door, and I flew back to the
sitting-room.  When I opened the parcel I found fourteen school exercise
books of the cheaper kind, blue paper covers and multiplication tables
on the back cover.  I remember thinking this last detail quite a fitting
logic for a book of Ivy’s.  Her books so often have a sort of
inexorable logic about them, like twice one is two.

For Greig was not solely a typist, but also an ardent fan.  This was how she got the job: she wrote to Ivy Compton-Burnett (and, incidentally, Rose Macaulay) expressing her admiration and asking that they consider her for future typing.  Macaulay didn’t take her up on it, but months later Ivy Compton-Burnett did.  As an admirer of Dame Ivy’s work, Greig combined professionalism with the sort of mad joy that any of us would feel at this privileged position with an author we loved.  Greig echoes Pamela Hansford-Johnson when writing about her love of Ivy:

Why did I like her books so much?  I have been asked that question many times, sometimes with a note of incredulous exasperation.  With Ivy one is either an addict or an abstainer.  I became an addict from the first chapter of A House and Its Head.  Most of my friends, unfortunately, are abstainers.  Suggest her, and if they have ever tried to read one of her books their reply can be an indignant refusal.

She really is love or hate.  Greig goes on to explain her own love of Ivy Compton-Burnett, not quite as astutely as Pamela Hansford-Johnson does, but still in a fascinating manner.  But it was her firsthand interaction with Dame Ivy which makes this book so thrillingly interesting to me.  Greig has no illusions about Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fairly terrifying character, but she also recognised the fondness behind it.

Her fierceness, when it showed itself, and when I provoked it, was always short-lived.  Any breach of normal decorum, and her standard was perhaps exceptionally high, was annoying to her, and she never failed to let this be seen.  But having let it be seen, the matter was over.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was always keen for Greig to visit, and expressed an interest in her life which was far from perfunctory.  They could not meet as equals, nor did they even use each other’s first names for many years, but there was a genuine affection and (more characteristically) curiosity from Ivy.  One gets the sense that Greig’s other friendships were more free and easy, but that perhaps this was one of the most valued – and while Ivy Compton-Burnett wanted to meet Greig’s friends, Greig felt she could only bring people who also admired Ivy’s writing; few and far between.  So, although Greig also grew to know Ivy’s dear friend Margaret Jourdain, theirs was mostly an exclusive friendship, in a vacuum, as it were.  Ivy’s life, aging, and death are shown sensitively, from the angle of a friend who saw her all too rarely, and Greig balances Ivy’s life and work excellently, being herself fascinated by, and involved with, both.

I would have been scared rigid of Dame Ivy, I’m sure.  Obviously manners maketh man, but decorum and etiquette often baffle me – and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s standards were positively Victorian, as though she were part of the world she so often depicted through fiction.  Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of those authors (like Virginia Woolf, like Muriel Spark) whose writing and personality I adore, but with whom I cannot imagine being friendly or even at ease.  And yet I lap up their comments and views of the world, whether or not I agree – and Greig’s perspective offers greater potential for these.  A brief observation Ivy Compton-Burnett made to Greig is one with which I do very much agree, for her time but more especially for ours:

“Yes, that’s the worst of writers today,” Ivy said.  “They will write about something.  Instead of just writing about people, about their characters.”

That’s probably one of the wisest things I’ve ever read about writing, and if more writers today considered it then we wouldn’t have the deluge of issue-driven books, which doubtless market well but prove rather uninspiring, to me, at least.

When people ask me where they should start with Ivy Compton-Burnett, I usually recommend either Pastors and Masters (as it is an early work; a sort of Ivy-lite) or simply say that they’re all more or less the same, so it doesn’t much matter.  I’d now be inclined to suggest they start, in fact, with this book.  Jumping straight into Ivy Compton-Burnett can be an intimidating prospect; I think becoming acquainted with her through Cecily Greig’s eyes is a great halfway house, and one which (through Greig’s infectious enthusiasm and personal insight) might well pique a reader’s interest, and make Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels feel not only accessible but an absolute must.  These sorts of books are rather hit or miss, but Cecily Greig’s is one of favourite reads this year.  Hurrah!