ACOB2014

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

StuckinaBook All , , , , 4 Comments

Over at Vulpes Libris we’ve started another Shelf of Shame week – where the book foxes dig out the books they’ve been intending to read for ages, or feel vaguely ashamed that they haven’t read. As I seem to be less well-read then all the others, I choose authors I’ve not read (let alone individual books). Last time I chose Christopher Isherwood; this time I chose Aldous Huxley. It seems that there are all sorts of men of the interwar period whom I haven’t read. And I haven’t even turned my attention to the Macho Men of American Literature (Hemingway, Bellow, Roth, etc.) who remain a barren land to me.

Like Isherwood, Huxley completely surprised me – not at all what I was expecting. But this time around, it came as rather a wonderful surprise. The novel is Crome Yellow (1921), and the review can be found over at Vulpes Libris. It’s one that I think a lot of SIAB readers will like, and that may come as a surprise to you too…

Mrs Harris MP – Paul Gallico

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

Is it a bird? Is it a ‘plane? No, it’s actually a book review on Stuck-in-a-Book! Sorry that it’s been so long since my last one. Especially since I’m going to talk about a book I finished over six weeks ago…

When I went to the Lake District a while ago, I took a range of books – some that benefited from a long, uninterrupted read on a train, and some that would fill gaps between dashing off on multiple buses to get to a wedding, get on a train, etc. And I turned to Mrs Harris MP (1965) by Paul Gallico when I was tired from the long journey and sitting on a bench waiting for a lift (that eventually didn’t come… but that’s another story).

Anybody familiar with Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (also published as Flowers for Mrs Harris) and Mrs Harris Goes to New York will doubtless already know and love the redoubtable Mrs Harris. A London char, she is a wonderful mix of no-nonsense and fairy tale. Her greatest dream, in the first book, was to own a Paris couture dress; in the second she heads off to New York on a quest, and in the third she wishes – as you may have guessed from the title – to become an MP.

The novel opens with Mrs Harris and John Bayswater the chauffeur disagreeing over a political broadcast. She thinks it’s all two-face hogwash, and that she could do better herself… which isn’t long off happening. ‘Live and Let Live’ is her political mantra, and it is tangled up with an argument about giving working people a chance, not being teddy boys, and above all not lying. She makes, still – perhaps more than ever, quite an appealing prospect in the world of politics. She is not interested in spin and self-promotion; she wants to stand for the little people. And Mrs Harris is so full of vim and character that the bland, careful politicians don’t stand a chance.

Except things are a little more complicated than that. In all his novels, to some extent or other, Gallico seems to offer a sting in his fairy tale. Sometimes that sting is extremely dark (as in the very brilliant Love of Seven Dolls), sometimes it’s fey (Jennie), but it’s always there. In Mrs Harris MP it appears in the machinations of her supposed political ally… and appears perhaps more subtly in the after-effects of Mrs. Harris’ political campaign.

Like the other novels in this series, Mrs Harris MP is light and frothy and completely enjoyable. All of which means that it was probably very difficult to write. Mrs Harris is a wonderful creation – and perhaps equally wonderful, in my eyes, is her timid but loving friend Mrs Butterfield. It’s all quite silly, with (in this one perhaps more than the others) a note of the serious – and if you are sick of deceitful or boring politicians, or of a government that sidelines the poor, then this might provide some much-needed respite.

The City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings

StuckinaBook All , , , , 2 Comments

If your reading tastes are anything like mine, then you’ve doubtless read a lot of books about the Second World War. But how often has that Second World War been in the 1980s?

That is the premise to the 1920 novel The City of Endless Night, which takes place in 2151. Despite my aversion to sci-fi, I found this book really interesting and good – and so unexpected for 1920. My full review is over at Shiny New Books…

Many things Milne

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 12 Comments

Issue 3 of Shiny New Books had not one, not two, but three posts about A.A. Milne & family – and I’d really encourage you to go and read them all.

Curiously enough, none of them are actually reviews of books by A.A. Milne himself (as in the books weren’t by him… neither were the reviews, but that is perhaps less surprising.)

I reviewed a long-term favourite, which I re-read as Bello have just reprinted it – Ann Thwaite’s brilliant, award-winning biography A.A. Milne: His Life. Review here.

Another long-term favourite is Christopher (Robin) Milne’s The Path Through the Trees, the middle of his autobiographical trilogy – so it’s not so much about being Christopher Robin as it is about fighting in WW2 and opening a bookshop, but I love it. Claire (The Captive Reader) reviewed Bello’s reprint here.

And then I put together Five Fascinating Facts about A.A. Milne.

Let me know which Milne books you’ve read, or would like to read!

Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 4 Comments

46. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

The first of my reviews I’m going to point towards, over at Shiny New Books, was the most unexpected treat. Indeed, it’s going on my 50 Books list – which is coming towards a close now, and that makes me nervous. (What if I read something superlatively brilliant just after putting the 50th book on the list?)

I had thought Penelope Fitzgerald was already represented, as I’ve loved The Bookshop and At Freddie’s – but apparently neither quite made the list. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends is a little more outside the box – being a biography of a turn-of-the-century poet – but has just as wide an appeal, honest. It’s one of the few biographies I’ve read where the subject mattered less than the writer – not ostentatiously in the writing, but in my response to it.

Do head over to my Shiny New Books review for the complete picture…

Cinderella Goes To The Morgue by Nancy Spain

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments
Image from here.
Sadly no d/w with my copy.

In amongst all the excitement of a new issue of Shiny New Books, I’ve remembered about a little pile of books that have been waiting a while to be reviewed. Most of them are books I started before my reader’s block, and staggeringly finished some time later – such as Nancy Spain’s Cinderella Goes To The Morgue.

I posted about Nancy Spain back in April, after coming across mention of her in a re-read of Ann Thwaite’s wonderful biography of A.A. Milne, and asked if anybody had read her detective novels. There was quite a lot of interest, and Scott was even reading one as he wrote. Karen later followed up with a lovely review of Poison For Teacher, but I was lagging behind. I bought a copy of one of her books which filled a gap in A Century of Books, and eventually managed to finish Cinderella Goes To The Morgue (1950), which came somewhere in the middle of her detective novel output.

It stars her ‘detective’ (not much detecting seems to go on), the lovely Russian Natasha DuVivien. We know Natasha is lovely because we are told so more or less every time she does anything – and she does a lot more of crossing and uncrossing her lovely legs than she does anything else. She is a rather enchanting mix of naive and worldly-wise, never nonplussed but also a little detached from the doings of lesser mortals. And, being a Russian in a 1950 novel, she is always having the most curious syntax:

“I am so sure,” said Natasha, “that you are right. But what motive could anyone ever have for killing another person? It is always worrying me. Unless, of course, they are mad people,” she added vaguely, looking out of her window. 

Her breath made a little fog of its own on the glass, within the world, yet not of it. 

“Oh,” said Mr Atkins briskly, “jealously, ma’am. Jealousy and passion and hate. And greed. The usual things.” 

“The Seven Deadly Sins,” said Miriam gently. “Lust and anger. Any of them, in fact, barring sloth.”

This excerpt hopefully demonstrates the archness of Spain’s writing (I love that ‘within the world, yet not of it’ – a sort of paraphrase of John 17:16 – and how many authors would say it of foggy breath on glass?) and also serves to introduce us to Miriam. She is Natasha’s slightly more worldly (and, it has to be said, slightly less lovely) friend. And it is she who gets them tangled up in the local pantomime.

The title is a bit of a red herring. Early on in the book, it is actually Prince Charming who pays an unexpected visit to the morgue – and Miriam steps into her shoes. She isn’t the last body to be carted out of the theatre (the show must go on), but the murder mystery plot is really incidental to the novel. It’s not an Agatha Christie situation, where whodunnit is paramount – and brilliant. In Cinderella Goes To The Morgue it is neither. The solution is cursory and unconvincing, but that really isn’t the point. My favourite sections, indeed, were those which didn’t deal with the murder mystery, such as:

Outside some shrill little voices were suddenly raised in screaming and breathless information about ‘Good King Wenceslas’.

“How odd it is being,” said Natasha inconsequently, “that this old man who is once looking out of a window and that is absolutely oll I know about him.”

“He was deep and crisp and even for a start,” said Timothy.

“No, no,” said Natasha. “That was his page.”

I loved these interludes, and only wish there had been more of them. Spain often sneaks in unexpected words or slightly silly descriptions of things, in the middle of a police questioning or a discussion about potential murderers, which are easy to miss if one isn’t careful. I’m going to keep coming back to that word ‘arch’, but it describes Spain perfectly.  I’d have quite liked her to take it up a notch or two more, so that the novel was a step nearer farce, but she still has plenty of fun satirising the detective novel (“Look at her now! She deserves to be murdered“) and the theatrical world. Although my dramatic ventures have gone no further than the village stage, I still loved her riffs on people who abuse the limelight:

“Hampton,” said Tony Gresham suddenly. “Hampton has given Mic and Mac carte blanche to ad. lib. in the Baron’s Kitchen. Isn’t it dreadful?”

Miriam paused in the act of tucking her hair into a superb white wig with side curls.

“No!” she cried horrified. “You can’t mean it. Well, we’ll be lucky if this pantomime is over by one in the morning. Very lucky.”
There are a whole host of characters I’ve not mentioned at all, from angry producers to the delightfully appalling ‘Tiny Tots’ (and their aggressive Stage Mothers). All the ingredients are there – I have to confess, though, that the novel didn’t quite live up to the sum of its parts. I very much enjoyed it, but had hoped it would become a book to add to my 50 Books List… I don’t want to add on a negative note, and I can’t pinpoint any reason why this isn’t an all-time favourite, but I also don’t want to oversell it!  But anybody with an interest in arch detective fiction and mid-century silliness could do a lot worse than tracking down Nancy Spain. Do report back if you do!

A Diet of Dame Agatha

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 8 Comments

For the sake of updating my Century of Books, and because I have precious little else to update Stuck-in-a-Book with at the moment, here’s a rundown of the Agatha Christies I’ve been reading of late. I imagine there will be another update to come soon, but hopefully I can extend my reading range a bit soon, as I need to read Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares for book group next week!

It’s difficult to write properly about detective fiction, and it’s even more difficult to write differently about lots of detective fiction, so I’ll just give you a couple of impressions per book.

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
Very Wodehousian beginning, and Christie does humour well.  But I never like Agatha as much when she’s doing gangs and spy rings and all that.  (I also wonder how recently she’d read The Man Who Was Thursday.)

Elephants Can Remember (1972)
I was warned off this one after I’d started, but I actually loved large chunks of it – Ariadne Oliver (a detective novelist with a famous Finnish detective) is a wonderful opportunity for Agatha Christie to talk about her own career wittily, and (having met her for my first time in Hallowe’en Party) I loved seeing her again.  But the plot was pretty flimsy.

Curtain (1975)
Poirot’s last case, written some decades earlier, it’s amusingly anachronistic at times, but has a good plot and the ever-wonderful Captain Hastings.

Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952)
More Poirot, more Ariadne Oliver! And a good plot, although perhaps not one of the very best. Or perhaps I’m just saying that because I guessed part of the ending, and I always prefer to be fooled.

Murder in the Mews (1937)
Four novella length stories about Poirot, one of which (the longest) was very good, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. The others were fine, but I got the impression that Christie hadn’t considered the ideas good enough for a full-length book.

I have four more Christies out of the library, so I’ll fill you in when I’ve rushed through those… and then hopefully I’ll have broken my Reader’s Block!  Thank goodness there is an author I can turn to during those periods, where it seems inconceivable that anybody could actually finish reading a book (so many WORDS!) as otherwise I’d be going mad.

Muddling Through

StuckinaBook All , , , , 3 Comments

One of the types of books I most love are those incidental, silly-humour books from between the world wars. The sort that is achingly middle-class and frivolous, neither lewd nor politically astute, but something that folk in the 1930s would have laughed through and put on their coffee tables. Sometimes those books are collections of essays, but occasionally they come in the shape of Muddling Through by Theodora Benson and Betty Askwith (illustrated by Nicolas Bentley).

The subtitle is ‘Britain in a Nutshell’, and such is what it purports to be. It considers England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in turn, pointing out the national characteristics of each, and the distinctive traits of various regions. All is done in staccato sentences, which are supposedly comprehensive but, of course, are nothing of the kind. (‘Cambridge always wins the boat race. Cambridge has sausages.’)

Yes, the joke is rather one-note, and utterly silly, but it rather beguiled me – as a snapshot of a period, as much as anything else.

The other thing which made this a snapshot of its publication year (1936) was how generous the publisher is with space. It’s an above-average-height hardback, and a lot of the pages are almost empty.  It adds to the humour (because it becomes all the clearer that they are dismissing places and people in a handful of words) but, to those of us familiar with the ‘wartime restrictions’ notes in the wafer-thin-paper hardbacks which were soon to follow, it feels anachronistic.

So, a silly book, but just the sort of silly I love.

Delight – J.B. Priestley

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don’t think I ever got around to a proper post about it.  It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause.  Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it – Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.

Somehow I didn’t get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn’t resist it – it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!

I haven’t read any of Priestley’s novels, although I’ve read one play and seen another – and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don’t know.

Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live ’til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him.  And the things that delight him are truly delightful – covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels).  Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight.  Here’s an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:

And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred.  But where are they, these fountains we love?  We hunger for them and are not fed.  A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes.  What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?

Well – as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise.  But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy – there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint.  I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this… it’s just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader’s shelves.