ACOB2018

Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – #1977Club

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Why am I always super busy during club weeks? I will do catch-ups properly towards the end of the week (yes, it is already towards the end of the week, SORRY) but I’m really excited to be getting the notifications that people are joining in. And Karen is on it like a pro.

My first 1977 Club read is one I picked up in a brilliant bookshop called J C Books in Watton, Norfolk. If you’re ever in Norfolk, make sure you get there. It’s Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – most famed, of course, for 84, Charing Cross Road, though I don’t hear a lot about her other books. Any fan of 84CCR should get a copy of Q’s Legacy pronto, which is sort of a sequel – but I’ve enjoyed all the books I’ve read by her, more or less.

A few years ago I read Letter From New York, which was about the apartment building she lived in, her neighbours, and generally life in the city – collected, if I remember correctly, from various articles over the years. I rather thought that Apple of My Eye would be the same thing – but it is not. Rather, Hanff had been commissioned to write the accompanying text to a book of photos of New York, designed for tourists to get the most out of the city. I don’t know quite what happened to that book, but Apple of My Eye rather wonderfully combines her recommended highlights with an account of visiting them herself and choosing what to include. It’s not a guidebook, it’s more a witty memoir of writing a guidebook – but could certainly function as an edited highlights of New York nonetheless (or, at least, New York in 1977).

Like many people who live in a touristy city, Hanff found that she had actually visited relatively few of the Must See Locations. (I, for instance, didn’t go to the Pitt Rivers for my first ten years in Oxford, and still haven’t made it to the Oxford Museum.) If you have all the time in the world to do something, then you never do – but Hanff realises she has to do all the things she hasn’t. And someone else who hasn’t is her friend Patsy – who also, apparently, has a couple of months to spare. So off they go!

Now, I’ve never been to New York, and I don’t really like travel guides even to places I have been. So my heart sank a little when I realised what sort of book this might be. But it was wrong to sink! While I couldn’t get my head around 5th Street this and 84th Street that, and have never understood how you know which two streets something like ‘6th and 8th’ might be – because surely that could be the same as 8th and 6th – I really enjoyed this anyway. And the reason is because Hanff is so funny about the experience of exploring – and about her friendship with Patsy.

Hanff is brilliant at writing about her friends. In Letter From New York it was Arlene (and Richard and Nina et al), and here it’s Patsy – she tells us enough about them to understand not only their characters, but how she relates to them and what their friendship is like. With Patsy, Hanff has clearly got to the point in the friendship where they can squabble slightly, tease each other, rely on each other, and say precisely what they mean. Patsy is enthusiastic about coming on this tour, but also openly reluctant to do many of the proposed activities (often because of her fear of heights). Her refrain is “write that down”, often for details Hanff considers irrelevant – though, self-evidently, did write them down. Much is also made of their East vs West friendly enmities.

Curiously, while I find all the south-of-the-river vs north-of-the-river chat in London quite tedious (mostly because they seem exactly the same to me), I really enjoyed the way Hanff wrote about East vs West. For example…

Generally speaking, West Siders look dowdy, scholarly and slightly down-at-heel, and the look has nothing to do with money. They look like what a great many of them are: scholars, intellectuals, dedicated professionals, all of whom regard shopping for clothes as a colossal waste of time. East Siders, on the other hand, look chic. Appearances are important to them. From which you’ll correctly deduce that East Siders are conventional and proper, part of the Establishment and in awe of it – which God knows, and God be thanks, West Siders are not.

Hanff, it should be noted, is from the East Side – though does feel like a fish out of water sometimes.

Luckily for me, Hanff assumes no knowledge of New York at all – up to and including telling us that theatre happens on Broadway. As she darts on buses all over the place, we see Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s, Central Park, and all the things one would expect – with a few little-known gems thrown in for good measure. The strangest part to read about was the World Trade Center  – still having bits finalised at the time of Hanff writing. Obviously she could know nothing of its eventual fate, and to read of it as an exciting new development in the city, with the best restaurant available, felt rather surreal.

Hanff is very concise in her tour – my copy of the book was only 120 pages. Obviously volumes and volumes could be written about New York, and have been, but I think this is a wonderful little book – probably even more so for somebody familiar with New York. For me, it is a funny and charming account of friendship, which just happens to have a dizzying tour of New York as its backdrop.

Tea with Walter de la Mare by Russell Brain

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This is one from my books-about-authors shelf – more particularly, my books-about-authors-by-people-who-knew-them-a-bit shelf. It’s one of my favourite genres, and the king of it has to be the memoir of being Ivy Compton-Burnett’s secretary, by Cicely Greig. Well, Sir Russell Brain was not a secretary, but he did become friends with Walter de la Mare later in life – and Tea with Walter de la Mare (published in 1957, the year after de la Mare died) is an account of that friendship.

More particularly, it’s an account of the various times Brain and his wife (and sometimes children) went to visit de la Mare – and he clearly rushed straight back to make notes afterwards. Incidentally, I didn’t know who he was – but all the info you might need is on Wikipedia. It really amuses me that he was a scientist, with the surname Brain… As for his companion – I suspect de la Mare is chiefly known for ‘The Listeners’ and ‘Fare Well’ (“look thy last on all things lovely”…) and perhaps Memoirs of a Midget, but is no longer the literary giant he was at the time of his death. And he’s also related to my friend Rachel, so she tells me.

And the book? I enjoyed this insight into knowing de la Mare (‘W.J.’ to Brain), but it has to be confessed that Brain isn’t particularly good at writing. You can only enjoy this as you might enjoy a series of index cards. His accounts are often more or less “and then he said this… and then he said this… and then he said this”. It is a jumble of topics and thoughts, from the deeply philosophical to the frivolously anecdotal. Brain faithfully records it all, and retells stories in the most pedestrian way possible. Here, for instance, is a story sapped completely dry:

Janet told him a ghost story she had heard of a man who went to stay in the house of some people whom he did not know very well. He was visited in a dream by an ancestor of the owner of the house, who revealed to him some facts which the family did not know, and which ultimately proved to be correct.

Isn’t that almost a satire of how not to tell a story? I picked it because it was amusingly bad, but it’s not a huge outlier. Though there was at least one story I very much enjoyed:

He told us about the only occasion on which he had sat on a jury. It was a slander case before Lord Reading – so good-looking. He spoke so well, and was so polite. A butcher was suing the local medical officer of health. When the jury retired, there were at first ten, and then eleven, for the medical officer, but one stood out for the butcher. He said he knew what medical officers of health were. All the rest of the jurymen argued with him in vain. finally W.J. said: “We must get this settled: I’ve got to catch a train.” Whereupon the recalcitrant juryman said: “Oh, well, if it’s a question of a train, I am with you.” So British, thought W.J.!

So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a little frustrating that a much better book was hiding behind this one – had Brain been a better writer, this could have been a wonderful gem of a book. As it was, I enjoyed flicking through it – but in much the way that I’d enjoy reading a list that gives me a taste of a period and a man, but not an enormous amount else.

But… it does smell really nice. It’s maybe the nicest-smelling book I have. So, there’s that.

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

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One of the books I took to the Peak District was An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks – a copy I bought in Washington DC, and thus one of those lovely floopy-floppy US paperbacks, rather than the stiffer UK ones. I’ve written about quite a lot of Sacks books over the years, and he’s one of my favourite writers (and people – though of course I didn’t know him personally). He’s certainly my favourite non-fiction writer – and that’s why it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t love An Anthropologist on Mars quite as much as some of the others. It’s not where I’d recommend to start.

The themes and approach in this book aren’t wildly different from many of his others – it was perhaps the structure and specific topics that left me a little cold, but I’ll come on to that later. Sacks divides the book into seven sections, each concerned with a different patient and Sacks’ diagnosis and study of their lives. Rather than summarise them all myself, I’m going to shamelessly plagiarise the Wikipedia entry:

  • The Case of the Colourblind Painter discusses an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colour, due to brain damage.
  • The Last Hippie describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s.
  • A Surgeon’s Life describes Sacks’ interactions with Dr. Carl Bennett, a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating.
  • To See and Not See is the tale of Shirl Jennings, a man who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery. This is one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such an early age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing.
  • The Landscape of His Dreams discusses Sacks’ interactions with Franco Magnani, an artist obsessed with his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. Although Magnani has not seen his village in many years, he has constructed a detailed, highly accurate, three-dimensional model of Pontito in his head.
  • Prodigies describes Sacks’ relationship with Stephen Wiltshire, a young autistic savant described by Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain”.
  • An Anthropologist on Mars describes Sacks’ meeting with Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who is a world-renowned designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University.

As you can see, the title of the collection comes from the final essay – it is how Grandin describes her interaction with the world, while trying to comprehend social mores. I have a thing about titles – they’re often so important in how we understand a book – and was a bit annoyed that this collection took a comment by Grandin and made it seem as though Sacks were the anthropologist in question.

I’ll start with the positives – the chapter ‘To See and Not See’ was completely fascinating. Jennings, the patient, technically has the ability to see – but since he cannot remember ever seeing before, he has no concept of what sight is. Having lived for decades without seeing, he cannot understand the idea of visual distance, or representation (paintings mean nothing to him). Sacks explores how our comprehension of sight creates a world around us – and the very human reaction when someone is expected to understand their world in a fundamentally different way. The footnotes lead to various useful precedents, and it’s an extremely well put together chapter.

Indeed, the first three chapters before this were also good – though not with quite the same philosophical and psychological interest for me. Sacks is very humane and empathetic in portraying (in the first chapter) a painter who can no longer see colour – recognising not just the scientific elements of this, but the enormous changes and challenges the painter must face in ways that non-artistic people wouldn’t. On the flip side, Sacks writes with admiration of Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s – awed by how he maintains his professional life.

The final three chapters were less interesting topics to me (though it’s very possible that you’d find them fascinating, if they happen to be areas of interest to you). But there were problems there that existed even in the chapters I found up my street – everything is slightly too drawn out, and without the pacing of Sacks’ best work. He lingers just that little too long on every insight, not deepening our relationship with the patient, but slowing its progress down. There are fewer tangential details and anecdotes than in other of his books, too, and it’s impossible not to wonder if this was largely a collection of things that didn’t make it into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s still Sacks, so I still liked it – if it had been the first book I’d read by him, I’m sure I’d have loved it – but it was a little bit of a disappointment after reading some of Sacks’ brilliant, brilliant work. If you’ve yet to read anything by him, head to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Hallucinations instead.

Tea or Books? #55: Versatility vs Dependability and House-Bound by Winifred Peck vs The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

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Dorothy Whipple, Winifred Peck, and authors who hop genres – welcome to episode 55!


 
In the first half of this episode, Rachel and I discuss a topic suggested by my friend Paul (thanks Paul!) – versatility vs dependability. Well, the way he phrased it was ‘would we buy a book by an author we liked if it was in a different genre’, and we interpreted it into a question that was easier to type into a subject line.

In the second half, we look at two novels from around the same period – House-Bound (1941) by Winifred Peck and The Priory (1939) by Dorothy Whipple – both of which have been republished by Persephone.

You can support the podcast at Patreon (a Patreon-exclusive blooper reel coming soon!), and visit our iTunes page. You can rate and review through the iTunes app or podcast apps, etc. Do get in touch if you’d like to suggest topics – we always love that.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
Family Man by Calvin Trillin
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Happy Returns by Angela Thirkell
The Lark by E. Nesbit
Penelope Lively
High Wages by Dorothy Whipple
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Dorothy Whipple
Marghanita Laski
Tory Heaven by Marghanita Laski
P.G. Wodehouse
Agatha Christie
Richmal Crompton
Anne Tyler
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn
Henceforward… by Alan Ayckbourn
Susan Hill
Stephen King
The Beacon by Susan Hill
A Kind Man by Susan Hill
Barbara Pym
Hilary Mantel
Penelope Fitzgerald
Beryl Bainbridge
Straw Without Bricks by E.M. Delafield
Provincial Lady novels by E.M. Delafield
Consequences by E.M. Delafield
Saplings by Noel Streatfeild
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
Anthony Trollope
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
A.A. Milne
William Maxwell
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
How To Run Your Home Without Help by Kay Smallshaw
Monica Dickens
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther
One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens
Arrest the Bishop by Winifred Peck
Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

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I’ve now read three books by Jon Ronson – the first two being So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats – but the first one I heard of was The Psychopath Test (2011). I seem to remember my brother reading it, or perhaps my friend Mel – either way, it appealed enough to start me hunting for other Ronson books, even if it took me a few more years to finally read this particular one.

Ronson has made a name for himself as someone who explores the quirky and unusual, often meeting and interviewing strange people in his unflappable, mild-mannered (and yet, simultaneously, rather anxious) way. Whether conspiracy theorists, Internet hate figures, or CIA operatives, he treats them with a Louis Theroux-esque genial bafflement. Even while he’s immersing himself in dangerous territory, he comes across rather like a calm observer – even, somehow, when he’s telling us how uncalm an observer he is.

But there can’t be many more dangerous people to meet than those who have been declared psychopaths and imprisoned in maximum security prisons. That’s where Ronson is – initially to interview somebody who alleges he faked his psychopathy to get a lighter prison sentence for GBH, and now can’t convince anybody that he isn’t mentally ill.

(Actually, this comes after a meandering and ultimately rather pointless anecdote about people being mysteriously sent strange little books – I suppose it’s intended to hook our attention, but I found those elements rather over-long and a bit of a distraction from the main theme.)

The Psychopath Test uses the prison encounter as our introduction to the titular test – developed by Robert Hare, it is essentially a checklist to determine whether or not somebody is a psychopath. There is naturally some discomfort in the world that something so drastic could be decided by this sort of test – ending, like a BuzzFeed quiz, with a ‘yes – psychopath’ or ‘no – normal’. Ronson explores the impact of the test, as well as analysing many of the people who have been criminally psychopathic.

And this is where I began to skip pages… I hadn’t really joined the dots, to realise what sort of descriptions would be included. I went in because I’m interested by the psychological aspects – though, unsurprisingly, Ronson also tells us what noted psychopaths have done. And reading about gruesome murders and sexual assaults isn’t really my jam… so, yes, I did end up darting through some of the pages.

More interesting to me were the sections this led to – about psychopaths in everyday life. Because many are not criminals – but simply can’t understand the concept of empathy. And Ronson speaks to those who have deduced that the percentage of psychopaths in the world (around 1%) becomes much larger when considering people in power – especially business leaders. It makes one think… not least because there’s one particular businessman who is rather prominent at the moment, and has never been known to show any noticeable sort of empathy.

More broadly, Ronson looks at the ways in which mental health diagnoses were determined – a frighteningly arbitrary council, seemingly – and how overdiagnosed things like childhood bipolar disorder have become. Not least because, accordingly to the experts Ronson speaks to, there’s no such thing as childhood bipolar disorder. These parts are where the subtitle – ‘a journey through the madness industry’ – becomes much more relevant, and I’d have valued more of a focus on this strand.

So, yes, there are many interesting sections in The Psychopath Test. The reason that it ended up being my least favourite of Ronson’s books isn’t simply because I’m so squeamish – it also felt like it cohered less than the other two I’ve read. His approach felt a little more scattergun, or less carefully edited together. The framing device for the book was (as I’ve said) not a winner for me, and the pacing of his journalistic elaborations doesn’t seem quite right.

The best of the three I’ve read is definitely So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is also Ronson’s most recent book – suggesting that he’s getting better as he keeps writing.,

 

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

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My book group read Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh – his second novel, and the fifth one I’ve read by him. I have a mixed history with Waugh, and this one hasn’t helped clear things up much.

The novel focuses upon a young man called Adam – a journalist who is engaged to Nina – who is trying to make his way in the world, and to gather together the money to afford a wedding. Around him there are an astonishing number of characters, most of whom are aboard a sea voyage in the opening, confusing pages of the novel. There is Mrs Melrose Ape and her gaggle of ‘angels’ with wings, called Chastity, Charity, and the like. There’s a Jesuit priest we don’t hear much from afterwards. There is Agatha Runcible, a bizarre and mildly hysterical character. There’s all manner of other people who come and go, without much certainty.

Adam is an outsider in the world he tries to enter – sometimes as a gossip columnist, sometimes as a gentleman. His attempts to get money go disastrously wrong, miraculously right, and back again, over and over – with a drunken Major playing a significant role in all these moments. And the people Adam is observing are the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – ‘Bright Young Things’ was the original title of the novel, and the title of the film adaptation, and Waugh has good fun mocking their insouciance and inconsequentiality.

But inconsequence is a hallmark of Waugh’s novels in general, and it’s my sticking point with them. Actions never have moral consequences. People routinely ruin each other’s lives for no reason, and don’t give it a second thought – which is one of my least favourite things in fiction. I don’t mind dark humour, and if people’s hubris or sheer accident mean disaster happens, I can chuckle at it. But those who selfishly destroy other lives without reason – well, I don’t find it funny even when it’s satire, and that rather spoils the joke for me. One gets the sense that Waugh isn’t a terribly nice person.

Having said that, there are other moments I found very amusing (hence the conflict!) The on-again-off-again wedding was dealt with enjoyably. Nina’s father – Colonel Blount – never recognises Adam, and is always saying how much better his prospective son-in-law is than the other suitors he’s met (all of whom are Adam). And Waugh has a brilliant way with a turn of phrase – such as:

She wore a frock such as only duchesses can obtain for their elder daughters, a garment curiously puckered and puffed up and enriched with old lace at improbable places, from which her pale beauty emerged as though from a clumsily tied parcel.

Waugh’s style is recognisably his, but there is also a heck of a lot of Ronald Firbank in here. (I felt rather chuffed that I thought this, as I learned in the afterword that Waugh also thought this – though the sycophantic editor of my edition, Richard Jacobs, disputes it.) Firbank had jumpy narratives, lots of dialogue, and a lack of clarity about what was going on – and all this appears in Vile Bodies.

Of the five Waugh novels I’ve read (Put Out More Flags, The Loved One, Scoop, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies) I really like The Loved One, and very much enjoyed Scoop. And I really disliked Decline and Fall and Put Out More Flags, for their intense spitefulness. Vile Bodies is the Waugh novel that falls most in the middle of my spectrum – I relished the bits I found amusing, recoiled from those I didn’t, and spent most of the first 50 pages not having a clue what was going on.

Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse

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Somewhat surprisingly, given that it was all about children’s books, Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm had me heading straight to the bookshelf for a P.G. Wodehouse. She wrote a very convincing comparison of Richmal Crompton’s WIlliam books and P.G. Wodehouse’s novels – if you like one, you’ll almost certainly like the other – and I went to my many unread PWGs. The only one that fit an unclaimed ACOB year, though, was Bill the Conqueror (1924).

I don’t think this is one of Wodehouse’s better-known novels – it’s not part of the Jeeves and Wooster series, or the Blandings series, though apparently some of the characters in it do pop up in other books. And what a dizzying number of characters it has, spread over both sides of the Atlantic. It’s apparently a matter of comparative ease to pop from one side to the other, and I got rather confused about who was where. But let me give a try at working out who is who and what is what…

In England, Flick is engaged to Roderick, the weak son of a newspaper magnate, but she is still in love with Bill (who lives in the US, and once saved her life). He’s besotted with his friend Judson’s sister (Alice), and also has a brainwave to start earning his own living – which happens just as his uncle disinherits the family, as he’s just adopted an uninspiring child. Bill and Judson sail off to London so Bill can work for the family pulping firm, which is in the midst of fraud. I feel like there are other subplots too, but I can’t remember all of them – even for Wodehouse, there’s a lot going on. Potentially a bit too much. Usually he winds everything together brilliantly at the end – here, there was nothing left unresolved, but some of it felt a bit extraneous.

I don’t think anybody reads Wodehouse because they’re desperate for a couple to find love. Indeed, there is quite a contrast between Bertie Wooster (who is forever getting engaged by accident, and then trying to extricate himself) and the heroes of PGW’s stand-alone novels, who are usually starry-eyed lovers who’ve fallen in love at first sight. And, yes, I didn’t really care which woman’s heart Bill conquered – I’m here for Wodehouse’s hilarious writing.

And the writing is very good in Bill the Conqueror. It has Wodehouse’s usual winning combination of litotes and hyperbole – I particularly like it when he makes an unnecessary and over-the-top reference to Greek myth, making ordinary situations jolt into the extremely dramatic, but only for the span of a sentence. But there weren’t any so-amazingly-funny-I-have-to-write-them-down moments. And his humour was a bit more intermittent than when he’s on his finest form.

It was lovely to go back to Wodehouse after too long a break, and this was an engaging, funny delight. If it had been by any other author, I’d be shouting my discovery from the rooftops. But Wodehouse is SO brilliant that I think it’s worth starting somewhere else – probably one of the Jeeves books. And it’s good to know that there are any number of books where Wodehouse will provide reliable fun – plenty of them still on my shelves.

Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

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I heard about Bookworm (2018) by Lucy Mangan on Twitter, I think, or perhaps another blog – but as soon as I’d heard the subtitle (‘a memoir of childhood reading’) I knew that I had to read it. I think it was in a Weekend Miscellany. Thankfully Square Peg sent me a copy, and I wolfed it down – it’s very hard to imagine any bibliophile not loving this book. Though I also said that about Howards End is on the Landing, and look what happened there. No matter; I’m going to maintain full confidence with this one.

Mangan was a very bookish child – in the way that only those of us who were also very bookish children will understand. Books were her sanctuary, her new worlds, her adventure, her heartbreak. This total immersion, and self-definition as a bibliophile, is the keynote of Bookworm, and it will make every avid childhood reader thrill with recognition. We feel her pain when reading is socially unacceptable in the playground, and when her parents restrict her reading to certain rooms, to encourage her to be more sociable. (Yes, reading at the dinner table was – is? – banned in my home. And yes, like Lucy I turned to cereal packets or anything else I could read, when desperation hit.)

Through the chapters, Mangan takes us from her earliest reading memories until the end of childhood. To be honest, the tales of picture books interested but did not beguile me. I don’t remember which picture books I read – except the Mr Men, and I don’t think they got a single mention in Bookworm. Was Mangan born slightly too early for them? But once we got onto other books – well, firstly it was a nice surprise to discover that I have read more classic children’s literature than I’d supposed – but mostly, it’s wonderful to read how well Mangan describes the all-encompassing experiences these books were.

Enid Blyton gets a section (hurrah!) – without a doubt the defining author of my childhood. Narnia gets a section, as do Little Women, Roald Dahl, Richmal Crompton’s William books, and both books that Rachel and I are discussing in the next episode of the podcast – The Secret Garden and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Even Sweet Valley High, with which I was obsessed for a couple of years. Even if you haven’t read these books, the enthusiasm with which she remembers them is a delight, and mixes frothy enthusiasm with plenty of reflection and contemplation. Occasionally the tone becomes a little too self-consciously Caitlin Moranesque, and the odd sentence reads a little awkwardly – the bookish kid trying to fit in with the cool gang – but most of the time she isn’t trying stylistic tics; she’s just revelling in the absolute joy that books can be. (There are also one or two tedious moments against Christian faith, and one truly shocking anti-Catholic moment that should certainly have been cut, but I’ll tidy those under the rug for now.)

Along the way (because it is a memoir of sorts, after all) we learn about her character, her friends, her family. I loved the way her father would occasionally suggest a book, with a subtle gleam that acknowledges that this is a book he loved in his childhood. I loved the depiction of a slightly anxiously moralistic child, who definitely didn’t want to read anything anarchistic or rule-breaking in books (no thank you Fantastic Mr Fox). It reminded me of my own fastidiousness as a child, that made me unable to enjoy The Twits (the idea of the food in the beard still makes me gag).

And mostly I just loved with a wonderful nostalgic journey this. I love any book about reading, but one about the world-opening potential of reading to a child is rather lovely. And it’ll certainly lead you heading straight for the children’s section of the library, to relive all the classics that filled your world and expanded your imagination however many years ago.

Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon

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During the Persephone Readathon, I chose to read Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon – which is rather an anomaly for Persephone, in that it was published in 1981. AND the author is still alive! I can only think of a couple other Persephone authors in that category. So, why did Persephone Books step so far from their usual territory of interwar literature to a novel about the kidnap of a child?

For that is what Still Missing is about – it was later adapted into the film Without a Trace. And yet it’s worlds away from the sort of book that might be conjured up in your mind. There certainly seems to be a trend in modern crime fiction for depicting the worst possible things that can happen to children or women. Whether the authors are doing that gratuitously or to expose a troubling trend in the real world, they’re not books I want to read. Whereas Still Missing is far more about the psychology of a mother going through this appalling predicament, day by day by day.

That is the power of the novel. Nothing is rushed. We agonise alongside Susan, feeling as though we are deep in her mind, even though the novel is in the third person. As for her son, Alex, all we see is him leaving for school – and not getting there. He disappears from the novel as suddenly as he disappears from the neighbourhood.

It may be that one loss helps to prepare you for the next, at least in developing a certain rueful sense of humour about things you’re too old to cry about. There’s plenty of blather, some of it true, about turning pain into growth, using one blow to teach you resilience and to make you ready for the shock of the next one. But the greater truth is that life is not something you can go into training for. There was nothing in life that Susan Selky could have done to prepare for the breathtaking impact of losing her son.

I don’t know what would actually happen when a young boy goes missing, nor (more to the point) what would have happened in 1981 – but I’m willing to believe it would be rather what Gutcheon depicts. There is the initial flurry of media interest and police action – questioning her estranged husband, getting statements from everybody in the area, putting everybody at their disposal. Her friends are either too horrified to talk to her, too awkward to know how to help, or (a select few) an essential support. Gutcheon shows people’s reactions perfectly, and dryly explains how and why people react as they do.

“Are you sure there’s nothing… funny about her?” his wife asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She was so cool,” said Pat. Uh-huh, though Menetti. Now it starts. It can’t happen to me. It happened to her, she lost her kid, but if there’s something funny about her, then there’s a reason it could happen to her but it couldn’t happen to me. Now starts the drawing away, the pulling aside, the setting the Selkys apart.

Chief among the policemen is Menetti, in that conversation above. One of the reasons the novel is in the third person (I suspect) is so that we can jump into Menetti’s mind instead – he is an intensely sympathetic character, trying to help Susan as much as possible while also maintaining procedure. She begs him not to waste time following the lead of her ex-husband – she is adamant that it has nothing to do with him – but Menetti must follow the (fruitless) most likely option. And we see him when he goes home too, anxious and resigned, the impact on his own family life all too unavoidable.

Still Missing is very gripping, but not because it is full of event. It is full of tension, but it is mostly the tension of nothing happening – of friends and journalists gradually losing interest; of the leads drying up. And of Susan’s agony remaining just as painful and stark throughout – of her own measures to find Alex growing increasingly desperate. Gutcheon judges the pacing brilliantly almost all the time – I say ‘almost’ because there are a few clunky bits, thrown in for plot and red herrings, that don’t sit well with the rhythm of the rest of the narrative.

I’m still not sure it quite fits as a Persephone, and the 1980s still lies between nostalgia and modern in a slightly off-colour, dated interim state – but it’s certainly an involving and beautifully judged read. The premise has become worn through re-use, but Gutcheon takes it back to essentials, and the novel is the more powerful and personal because of it.

A little Alan Ayckbourn

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It was lovely to see quite a few bloggers take up the challenge of A Century of Books, and quite a few of them wanted to check the small print with me. The rules, they asked – is it year of publication or year of translation? Can I count books I’m halfway through? Is this small black cat technically a book?

“Make up your own rules!” I said. “Sure, maybe that cat IS a book! Read it! Read it as much as you like!”

And nowhere has this playing-with-rules become more evident in my own reading decisions than with Alan Ayckbourn. Because I’ve counted the audiobooks I’ve listened to of his plays (with different actors for different characters), where I wouldn’t count a play I saw on stage towards my century. Does it make sense? No, of course not. Are they my rules? Yep, and I’m sticking to them.

I listened to three Ayckbourn plays (well, technically five – more on that in a mo) and I gave up on Henchforward… which was some bizarre dystopian robot thing. Apparently Ayckbourn does dystopian plays now and then, but it’s not my cup of tea and I skipped onto a different play. Btw, I’m using the year of first performance as the date for each play. #MyOwnRules.

The Norman Conquests (1973)

This is actually three different plays, all first performed in 1973 – Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. I think (?) they’re his most famous plays, and I’ve had a DVD of them since forever that I still haven’t watched. (Fun fact for Good Life fans: Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal were in the original production. Fun fact for Ever Decreasing Circles fans: Penelope Wilton and Richard Briers are on the DVD, as is Penelope Keith.)

All the plays feature the same characters, and take place on the same evening – the clever conceit is that each play looks at what’s going on in one room/space during the evening – the kitchen, living room, and garden respectively. It’s not quite as clever as Ayckbourn’s Home and Garden, in that the plays can’t be played simultaneously, but it works very well nonetheless – you can see any one of them individually as a self-contained play (though I have my doubts that Round and Round the Garden would be very rewarding done thus), or you can watch all of them and put together the whole picture.

And the plot? Broadly, Norman had been planning to run away with his wife’s sister – for a dirty weekend in (ahem) East Grinstead. Over the course of the evening, the various couples – siblings and their spouses or would-be spouses – shout at each other, flirt with each other, and come to some sort of resolution. It’s all very entertaining, even if it’s rather a stretch to believe that anybody at all would want a relationship with Norman, since he’s selfish, unkind, arrogant, and frequently rather annoying. But the title is brilliant.

Just Between Ourselves (1976)

The play is set over four consecutive birthdays, and features two couples who meet when one of them is thinking about buying the car of the other – though even this is rather up for debate, as the quietly warring husband and wife who come to look at the car can’t even decide if they want a car at all.

This play is all very tautly told, but I can’t remember many specifics… which perhaps tells that the structure of Just Between Ourselves isn’t quite as good as Ayckbourn at his finest. The main male is just as annoying as Norman, though. What is it with Ayckbourn and annoying men who somehow captivate everybody around them?

Man of the Moment (1988)

This one is rather cleverer – it takes place around an episode of a series called ‘Their Paths Crossed’. In this case, the paths crossed 17 years earlier – between the TV personality Vic Parks and a rather hapless man named Doug. I’m not going to tell you how their paths crossed (don’t look at Wikipedia!) just in case you listen yourself, or go and see it performed, because I had a great time guessing until it was revealed.

From the reveal is quite a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about forgiveness, chance, fate, and… well a bit of drama thrown in. Guess what? Vic is another terrible person. A little too terrible at times – it would be a more nuanced story if he weren’t. It might not be a coincidence that my favourite Ayckbourn play so far is Relatively Speaking, in which everyone is (relatively) pleasant.