ACOB2024

Finishing A Century of Books with Alice Thomas Ellis

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My final slot on A Century of Books turned out to be 1990, and I decided to read The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis, which I bought last year in the Lake District. When I chose it, I hadn’t realised that it is set at Christmas – but what a perfect book to take away for my Christmas break at my brother’s.

Eric and Mabel live unhappily together on a remote Scottish island, running an inn with bar and guesthouse that is largely despised by the locals and only infrequently occupied by visitors. Eric has the brainwave to place an advertisment for people who want to escape the Christmas season – where could be further from the busy commercialism of Christmas than an island where nobody goes outside the summer, bar a handful of permanent residents?

Mabel quickly abandons the island and her husband, and he is left to look after the five people who do decide to take up the offer. There is actor Jessica, best known for commericals; beautiful Jon, a less successful actor who follows her there; Anita, a dissatisfied shop worker; Harry, a depressed ex-military man, and Ronald, a self-important psychologist whose wife has recently left him. Each has their own reasons for going, and each is equal parts ready and tentative to form new connections.

Ever since I read And Then There Were None as a teenager, I’ve loved stories about random (or seemingly random) people coming together. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim is another good example, but far happier than The Inn at the Edge of the World – though perhaps Alice Thomas Ellis has something in common with Elizabeth von Arnim when it comes to descriptions of her characters. Both authors love depicting self-deception, and undercutting their characters even while they try to reveal their natures. Here’s Alice Thomas Ellis on Ronald the psychologist.

Ronald was also travelling in second-class accommodation because his wife’s desertion had left him unconfident and fearful that he might, at any moment, find himself penniless. He rationalised his decision by telling himself that, these days, there was very little difference between first and second class. He was right, but he was, nevertheless, slipping unawares into an unfortunate trend towards self-deception.

She slips in such brilliant little moments in passing, helping us to instantly understand not only the people she’s created, but the worlds they inhabit. Jessica the actress, for instance, ‘had a large pleasant face, which she could, when called upon, make beautiful’.

I found much of the novel very drily funny. Alice Thomas Ellis spares nobody and nothing. Here she has the inn’s decor in her sights. (Finlay is the man-of-all-work who seems involved in everything on the island, and his sister-in-law is the totally silent, totally capable woman who gets everything done and looks with evident cynicism on it all.)

When Finlay had gone Eric went to take a final look at the rooms which he and Finlay’s sister-in-law had prepared. The previous owner had had a regrettable passion for stripes. The wallpaper, curtains and counterpanes had all been resolutely striped and several chairs had had tartan-covered cushions on them. Eric had removed all these in his first enthusiasm and replaced them with a pale and restrained chintz he had got cheap when a shop in Glasgow, which had been too pale and restrained for its own good, went out of business.

The Inn at the Edge of the World certainly isn’t going to end up as heartwarming as The Enchanted April, but nor does it feel bleak. An unlikely friendship strikes up between Jessica and Harry, with limits imposed by their dissimilar natures. Eric admires or loathes the guests in turn, sometimes the same person, while Anita sets out to marry Ronald with the singlemindedness of a middle-aged woman exactly the right mix of imaginative and unimaginative. All the while, we remain aware of the wildness of the island – the dangerous sea around it, the possibility of being stranded, and the strange mythologies that are never too far from the everyday.

This is my third book by Alice Thomas Ellis, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought about Unexplained Laughter and The Birds of the Air. I don’t have to think twice about this one: it is far and away the best book I’ve read by Alice Thomas Ellis. She is brilliantly witty and a little dark, quietly ridiculing her characters without dehumanising them. Her deep knowledge of human nature never wavers, and though there are elements of the surreal that felt slightly self-indulgent, they don’t seep into the form and logic of the novel as they did in the other two I’ve read.

I absolutely recommend The Inn at the Edge of the World – particularly at Christmas, but it would be a great read at any other time too. I’m so glad I finished A Century of Books on a high – and with a handful of days to go, too.

Back by Henry Green

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You know when Caustic Cover Critic used to those funny posts of appalling cheap reprints of classics? Here’s an example. Among those that are simply confusing were a few that clearly put the title into some sort of search engine and stuck whatever appeared on the front. Three Men in a Boat gets three men in speedboats; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gets a seductive woman hanging outside the Colosseum; Little Women gets a woman who is admittedly quite short, but is also apparently in the military of an East Asian country.

Well, when I pick up Harvill Press edition of Back (1946) by Henry Green, I can’t help feeling that it is a similar scenario. ‘The River Picnic’ by Victor Pasmore is a lovely painting, and painted only a handful of years before the novel was published – but it does seem to have been chosen primarily for the naked back on it. And the ‘back’ in Back refers to something quite different.

It is very timely, as a 1946 novel – because the title comes from Charley Summers coming back from the Second World War, having been held as a prisoner of war for the majority of it (and also having had a leg amputated). One of the first places he goes to is a graveyard – to visit the resting place of Rose, the woman he had loved.

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delievered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he’d loved, that he’d come so far for? Why did she died? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been bestg if they had killed him, he felt, if instead of a sniper’s riflge in that roebush that had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time about that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she’s having a jolly good rest.

Charley cannot return as a grieving widower, or even a grieving partner, because Rose was married to another man – one who is ignorant of their relationship, and ignorant of the fact that their son is (probably) Charley’s. Charley does know the boy is probably biologically is, but seems pretty unmoved by it. He is too occupied with his grief for this woman. Rose remains hard for the reader to grasp: she is the catalyst for this man’s complicated series of responses, but she is something of a cipher herself. I think, and hope, this is deliberate on Green’s part.

Things get complicated when Charley goes to see Rose’s parents, who knew of their friendship. Rose’s mother has some kind of dementia, or possibly a grief-inflicted psychological response, and Rose’s father is caring for her in a chaotic sort of way. The scenes with Mr and Mrs Grant are bittersweet, of course, but also the parts of the novel where Green’s humour is at the forefront. It is undeniably a sad situation, but he finds the comedy of the absurd.

Mr Grant points Charley towards a local young widow, Nancy – and Charley is shaken by how much she looks like Rose. Indeed, he thinks she is Rose. And it’s this relationship that is the core of the rest of novel, as well as Charley’s wavering belief that she is, or is not, the woman he loved. Sometimes he seems to believe both things at once.

It’s an interesting angle on the mental disintegration caused by war, and I particularly appreciated the way Nancy’s personality manages to circumnavigate the curious box that Charley is trying to put her in, so that the reader does get to know her despite it. She resents being a ‘walking memory’, particularly for somebody else’s existence. But she also doesn’t seem able to escape a relationship of sorts with Charley who, after all, is paying attention to her in a world where not many people do.

Stylistically, I found Back rather a mixed bag. I’ve struggled with some Green novels (Living was incomprehensible), enjoyed others (Loving and Blindness), and Back was a curious mix of straightforward prose and very stylised. Well, I assume it was stylised. There were a fair few sections where Green layered on clause after clause, with a rhythm of commas which seemed purposeful. Here’s one example…

Another morning, in London, in which he worked, Charley ran across a man by the name of Middlewitch, whom he had met, in July, at the Centre where he had been to have his new leg fitted.

On a couple of occasions, these long, clause-heavy sentences take up most of a page. There are far more of a shorter, but still distinctive, variety. But not enough for it to feel like a storytelling technique? And, indeed, fewer and fewer as the book continues – so that it feels a bit like something Green tried and then wearied of. For most of Back, the writing is – dare I say it – quite ordinary. If you read this novel in isolation, you certainly wouldn’t consider him a leading light of Modernism. Perhaps, by the 1940s, he had tired of some of the formal and linguistic trickery that had earlier been his calling card.

So, I enjoyed Back and thought it was a very compelling psychological portrait. I suppose I just hoped for a bit more, and for something a bit more distinctive. It was good, but it could have been rather better.

Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

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When I ranked Muriel Spark’s novels recently, there were a couple I hadn’t yet read. A few people had good words to say about The Bachelor though nobody seemed very enthusiastic about Aiding and Abetting. But the latter filled one of my remaining slots on A Century of Books, so here we are with Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel(la), published in 2000.

Who put Muriel Spark would come up with this premise? The starting point perhaps isn’t that eccentric – what if Lord Lucan were still alive, and went to a psychiatrist? But where many novelists would reach the limit of their strangeness, Spark sees it as a place to jump off from. Here he is with that psychiatrist, Dr Hildegard Wolf (whose usual treatment style involves just speaking about herself for the first several sessions):

It was towards the end of that month that Hildegard asked him her first question.

“What can I do for you?” she said, as if he was positively intruding on her professional time.

He gave her an arrogant look, sweeping her face. “First,” he said, “I have to tell you that I’m wanted by the police on two counts: murder and attempted murder. I have been wanted for over twenty years. I am the missing Lord Lucan.”

Hildegard was almost jolted at this. She was currently treating another patient who claimed, convincingly, to be the long-missing lord. She suspected collusion.

But that’s not all. Hildegard Wolf, in turn, has changed her name as she used to be a fraudulent stigmatic (i.e. someone who regularly bled from the places Christ was wounded, and thus considered a miraculous being). As I say, who but Spark?

There are another couple of characters – related to someone who allegedly harbour Lord Lucan during his escape from justice – who are out to gather information and track him down. I found them less interesting, and that storyline less successful. And, frankly, even the two characters who might be Lucan were less interesting than Hildegard Wolf – she is without a doubt the star of this novel.

According to Louise Welsh’s introduction, Spark wrote in her notes for Aiding and Abetting that ‘the theme of novel is blood’. And that is the link. We hear about the menstrual blood that Wolf has used in her past to fake this miracle – though perhaps less information about this past life than you might expect. We hear about the blood from the nanny that Lord Lucan murdered, and the way it became uncontainable.

As Hildegard knew from her own experience as a stigmatic fraud, blood, once let loose, gets all over the place. It sticks, it flows, it garishly advertises itself or accumulates in dark thick puddles. Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood.

I didn’t know very much about the Lord Lucan case. I knew the vaguest outline of what he did – killing the nanny, having mistaken her for his wife, then fleeing – but it happened 11 years before I was born (to the day, in fact). As Spark alludes to with the title to her novel, he managed to escape because a group of titled people closed ranks and aided his escape. Many of the accepted events of the murder are referenced in Aiding and Abetting but I think the novel is probably more successful for people like me, largely unaware of the case, than they would be for those who were immersed in the details of it at the time.

As I started Aiding and Abetting, I couldn’t see why people weren’t rating the novel higher. It was so well done – typically Spark matter-of-fact-madness, with some beguiling and well-drawn characters. But as the book went on, I could see why it doesn’t rate among her finest. The confidence of the opening wanes rather, and it doesn’t really hold together as a whole. At her best, Spark has a tautness and completeness to her novels that somehow make them feel like a polished form, even when she plays with narrative time and nothing does what you expect. Aiding and Abetting, contrarily, felt rather formless and random, and not in a deliberate way. It was still good, because it’s Spark, and better than some of hers I’ve read – but I certainly wouldn’t suggest anybody start their Spark reading journey with this one.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

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I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)

Another Century of Books Round-Up

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As December continues apace, so does my need to catch up with A Century of Books posts. So here is a whole bunch of mini-reviews (more mini than review) of books I’ve read for ACOB that I don’t have a whole blog post worth of stuff to say about…

Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I got my village book club reading Lolly Willowes, and listened to the audiobook. As usual, I was bowled over by how brilliant Warner’s writing is – about the dynamics of an overlooked spinster living with her brother’s family, and the lengths she calmly goes to for some form of autonomy. I’ve read the novel many times and I always love it. It’s fair to say my book group were more mixed… and generally confused when she becomes a witch.

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) by Grace Paley
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) by Grace Paley
Both these collections have been on my shelf for a very long time, and I’ve heard such good things about Paley’s short stories… but I ended up feeling quite lukewarm, and I can’t think of anything to say about them?

The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff
A fun book explaining the principles of Tao through the principles of Winnie the Pooh et al – and quoting liberally from the books, so enjoyable chiefly because it was a bit like re-reading the Pooh books. I’m not sure I remember much about Taoism off the back of it, but I certainly enjoyed remembering what a genius A.A. Milne was.

Tentacles of Unreason (1985) by Joan Givner
A slim collection of short stories by Joan Givner, whose The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer I enjoyed so much last year. Definitely not in the same league as her autobiographical writing IMO, but very readable and some very interesting character creation. I’d definitely read more stories by her, but it didn’t have the same oh-wow-this-is-excellent spark that her other book had.

Keepers of the Flame (1992) by Ian Hamilton
This is subtitled ‘literary estates and the rise of biography’, and so I’d thought it might be similar to Janet Malcolm’s ruthlessly brilliant book about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – or, more accurately, about their literary estates and biographers. Hamilton covers a wide, wide range from Donne to Shakespeare to Hardy to Plath but I wished it had been (frankly) more gossipy. But perhaps I shouldn’t hope for a Malcolmesque book from someone who isn’t Malcolm. On its own terms, this is very well researched. It’s not really about literary estates or biography until the final chapters, but it’s an interesting enough walk through the history of authorial reputation.

Notes from a Small Island (1995) by Bill Bryson
A few years ago, I gave up on Bryson’s much-loved book about touring the UK. I’ve loved some of his books, but Notes from a Small Island felt a bit try-hard. It turns out I enjoy it an awful lot more as an audiobook – my second attempt at it was far more successful. It’s still not very subtle humour, and his book on Shakespeare is definitely much better and funnier in my opinion, but I’m glad I got closer to seeing what the fuss is about.

Uncle Tungsten (2001) by Oliver Sacks
I adore Sacks, and I loved his much-later autobiography. This earlier attempt of ‘memories of a chemical boyhood’ was interesting to me when it was autobiographical, and much more tedious when it was explaining various histories of science. I’ve realised why I love his neuroscience: because it is unabashedly about people. I’m just not interested in science that isn’t directly, obviously about people’s behaviours. That’s a failing in me, not the book, of course.

The Audacity (2021) by Katherine Ryan
Katherine Ryan’s memoir is exactly what you expect it to be. For me, that was a good thing.

Choose by M. de Momet

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Last year, I decided to watch three films which dealt with oh-so-relatable problem of “Oops! I remarried and my first spouse is still alive!” The first was the execrable modern schlock One True Loves; the second was misogynistic Too Many Husbands (1940) and the third was another 1940 hit and comfortably the best of the lot – My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and possibly overshadowed by him also starring in The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in 1940. Big year for Cary.

I will say this: the oops-remarried genre sparks some very good titles, regardless of the quality of the films themselves. When I saw Choose (1947) by M. de Momet advertised on the back of another 1940s book, I couldn’t resist getting a copy – sadly without the excellent dustjacket above. I forget exactly what the advert said, but it was clearly another novel where someone found themselves in an accidental bigamy pickle.

We rush straight into the heart of the thing. Shelly has been married to Peter for a year when (on page two) she receives a letter from her first husband, John, saying that he is coming home. He went missing during the Second World War and was presumed dead – but has in fact been in a POW camp for years, missing an arm and a leg but otherwise fully alive. Shelly’s friend George offers what I could consider some rather unduly calm advice:

“Try not to worry too much, it may settle itself quite easily. One of these two must have a greater claim.”

“But which? That’s the question. Which? John had the first claim, and Peter has the last. I can’t see the answer to this – I don’t think there is an answer.”

Before John comes home and discovers the truth, we are whisked back to their initial meeting and courtship. Indeed, the next 140 pages of this 200-page novel focus on the development of their romance and their young marriage and happiness together. Reader, any hope I had for Peter winning the husband-off quickly faded. Choose is really a fairly silly romance hung on a conceit that de Momet, for some reason, thinks should be incidental to seeing John be forceful and bold and Shelly be giggly and overwhelmed. As an example…

She held out her hand. He took it and let it lie on his outstretched palm. “What a little hand,” he murmured. “So very little – it’s like a child’s. You’re so young… so young.” His voice was low as if he were speaking a blessing.

Shelly didn’t feel lonely any more – she felt as if someone had wrapped something very soft and comforting about her as a protection from the hashness of the world.

I wondered about ‘M. de Momet’, about whom I haven’t been able to find any info. Is ‘M.’ an initial, or does it stand for ‘Monsieur’, with that French-sounding surname? My suspicion is that it’s a pseudonym – and it certainly feels more like a woman writing for most of the novel, though I was given pause by how much Shelly enjoys John explaining things to her. Surely only a man would have written that part of their wooing?

Choose isn’t badly written, and it certainly isn’t well-written. As you might guess from the excerpt above, it rattles along good-naturedly. There are some enjoyable descriptions of homes and nature and a very idealised version of young love. It toys with being daring at times, though in such an unprogressive way that I can’t imagine anybody being scandalised by the hints at sex – though perhaps we might be more scandalised now by his careless ignoring of consent.

He bent and kissed her.

“Shelly, I am going to sleep with you tonight.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s a horrid business for a girl, so we’ll get it over now. I don’t want our honeymoon to be spoilt.”

She turned her head so that her face was buried in his shoulder.

Yikes. Anyway, by the time we’re back in the present, we haven’t learned a thing about Peter or why Shelly chose to marry him – only that she turned him down a fair few times first. He doesn’t stand a chance in the choice of the title – and I’m rather astonished that M. de Momet decided to make that decision such a small part of the novel. It feels like such a waste of an inventive idea – which can be treated comically, tragically, or everything in between. Instead, in Choose it is an afterthought to a very ordinary, silly, enjoyable and forgettable 1940s romance novel.

A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam

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I have well over a hundred Persephone Books, and the hit rate of successes is astonishingly high. There’s a reason that they have the devotion and respect of legions of readers. And so why had I left A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam neglected since I bought it 2008(!)? Even after reading – and loving – Adam’s memoir A House in the Country in 2020, I didn’t race to my shelves and devour more by her. More fool me! Because A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 is a remarkable, and incredibly readable, achievement.

Over the course of the book, Adam traces the most significant societal changes affecting (and effected by) women in the UK. We see the fight for suffrage, the impact of two world wars, changing attitudes to sex and so much more. Adam covers an astonishing range of topics – divorce, abortion, equal pay, employment law, female MPs – and does so with a level of research that would be impressive with the internet. I’ve no idea how she has so many statistics, as well as anecdotes and quotations from major historical figures.

She is so good at putting her finger on significant moments, and she balances her research with a total accessibility. You can tell she is a novelist, because characters (albeit real people) are so well-drawn and impress, inspire, frustrate, or move us in turn. I’m going to end up quoting an awful lot of this book – let’s start with one of the moments that she demonstrates as seismic in altering women’s lives:

The change from a large nineteenth-century family to the small twentieth-century one, as a social custom, took place with startling speed, so that mothers could be shocked or envious (probably both) at the difference between the life of their married daughters and their own past. The transformation was brough about – not by a Lysistrata-type political campaign or by a change of heart on the part of the male sex – but, like most of the landmarks in women’s emancipation, by a material fact: which in this case was the invention of convenient birth-control equipment.

And I’m going to immediately move onto another quotation, about nursing, as it’s a very representative example of Adam’s approach to social history:

The second-largest professional women’s group was that of the nurses, who were 78,000 strong in 1911. Their record in the women’s struggle for work-status was less single-minded and less successful than that of teachers. One reason was that, since Florence Nightingale, they had been brainwashed about making sacrifices for their vocation, such as putting up with long hours, low pay and dismal working conditions, which was extremely convenient for their employers. The other, less creditable, reason was because the leaders of the profession wasted a lot of time and energy on in-fighting, mostly on the subject of class distinctions, when they should have been united against an all-male government which refused to give them even the standing of a recognised profession until it came to the point where they dare not refuse.

What makes it so representative? It’s partly because it combines a statistic with the stories of women behind the number – but it’s also a great example of the subjectivity she weaves into her history. She is unafraid of putting forward her own opinion, highlighting where people have acted poorly in history, or bringing out elements of the treatment of women that infuriate her. A Woman’s Place certainly isn’t dry. You can feel Adam’s passion throughout her record, and it makes for a much better book than if it had been otherwise.

To structure her book, Adam characterises decades by significant events and movements. It does mean that these get hermetically sealed within certain periods – so we see changing attitudes to sex in one chapter, or marriage in another, or the role of women in parliament in another, and so on. Naturally these are not things that begin and end within a decade, and you can find yourself thinking (in the middle of a section on divorce law, say) – what about the job market? It was a wise decision on Adam’s part to compartmentalise to an extent, so you just have to go with it.

While I knew a large amount of what Adam covers – as much of it overlaps with things I’ve studied in my own academic research – there was still an awful lot that was new to me. As one instance, I didn’t know about the way the suffrage movement turned their efforts fully to the war effort at the outbreak of the First World War – putting their original mission on hold in an instant. Adam describes Millicent Fawcett’s decision in a very evocative way: ‘Only the age-old obligation of women, to be self-effacing and self-sacrificing, to give up their own less important interests when a men’s crisis arose, still remained.’

Note that she says ‘obligation’ rather than ‘character’. This isn’t something that is inherent to Fawcett and her ilk – it is an expectation imposed on them, and to women throught this book. So much of this book is really a history of the way men have treated women – how their decisions and impositions either expanded or limited women’s lives. That’s not to do down the work women did to effect change (and a small group of men who battled alongside them) – just to comment that, sadly often, change happened when powerful men stopped being obstacles.

During the war, women’s lives changed dramatically: they were not only allowed to start working, but actually encouraged to. Adam turns her attention to the ways this worked, particularly on the question of equal pay. It’s a theme that recurs throughout A Woman’s Place – and I hope you’re prepared to be infuriated by the different, feeble reasons that powerful men gave to avoid passing equal pay legislation, and the similarly callous ways that they evaded paying it once legislation was passed. From the outset, though, two workplaces offered equal pay without quibble. I could have guessed for a week and I don’t think I’d have come up with the correct two:

The London bus conductresses were one of the only two groups of women workers who were given equal pay for equal work at once, without question. The others were the women welders, who had been trained by an organisation set up by the one-time London Society for Women’s Suffrage

Speaking of war, Adam says ‘a quick change of character has been demanded of them [women] every ten years or so of this century. Men are not required to be flexible in the same way.’ That seemed a rare misfire in A Woman’s Place. What greater ‘flexibility’ could be required then to be taken from your office job or factory and be told you have to start killing people in a foreign trench? There is no onus on A Woman’s Place to cover men’s 20th-century experiences, but – while I see what she’s getting at – this is quite a silly statement.

And the downside to a book that relishes in its subjectivity is, of course, that it might date horribly. Surprisingly little of substance has dated in the book since it’s 1975 publication – the two things that struck me were the assumption that there would be no minimum wage, and the other assumption that university education was free. But then there are paragraphs like this, about the high death count in the First World War leading to large numbers of unmarried women:

The war years, which had yielded such a rich harvest to the women struggling for sex equality, had cost them too much. All the gains in status and freedom and independence were, in the end, arid and tasteless without their men there to witness them. It meant that young women and girls had to face the prospect of forced virginity, and parents the long boredom of waiting for death without grandchildren to give any meaning to their old age.

This earned three pencilled exclamation marks in my margin! Women’s independence is ‘arid and tasteless’ without men?? Old people have no meaning in their life without grandchildren??? Yikes, Ruth Adam, yikes. I’ll charitably assume you are doing a bit of character work, here. (And let’s not get started on her statement that ‘The Lesbians’ – her capitals – were ‘partly a product of the mutilated society; that is, young women pairing together as a second-best because there were not enough men to go round.’)

But these are minor quibbles in a book that is an extraordinary achievement. I’d bought it, as I will buy any Persephone Book, but I hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic about actually reading it. If it weren’t for A Century of Books, A Woman’s Place could have lived on my shelves for many more years – but I’m so glad it didn’t. Ruth Adam combines an incredible amount of thorough research with a real gift for storytelling. Of course this book doesn’t tell the whole story of British women over the course of 65 years – how could it? – but it is a detailed, captivating portrait of a sizeable portion of that population. Or, to be more accurate, of the expectations they faced and the achievements they managed in the face of them. I’ll close with Adam’s final paragraph:

A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ‘feminine’ and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse; three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

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Believe it or not, I’ve only read one Georgette Heyer before – I listened to April Lady and really enjoyed it. In the three years since, I’ve bought quite a few Heyer novels but haven’t actually got around to reading any of them. A little while ago, I thought I’d see if any of the Heyer titles on my shelves matched gaps on A Century of Books – and landed on Frederica (1965), which comes rather late in her publishing career.

Like most of Heyer’s novels, this is a Regency romance – and she certainly enters into the style and ethos of a novel from the period. How many 1960s novels would open with this lack of urgency?

Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence. “In a smart new curricle, too, Mama, and everything prime about him!” declared Miss Kitty, flattening her nose against the window-pane in her effort to squint down into the street. “He is the most tremendous swell, isn’t he, Mama?”

Lady Buxted responded in repressive accents, desiring her not to use expressions unbefitting a lady of quality, and dismissing her to the schoolroom.

Uncle Vernon – more commonly known as the Marquis of Alverstoke, or just Alverstoke – is very wealthy and very selfish. His sisters are forever importuning him with requests to use his power and connections to help their various offspring, and he languidly refuses to do any such thing because it doesn’t interest him. There is a very believable grown-up-siblings dynamic between them, with a fair dose of Mr Bennett being needlessly antagonistic to his wife in Pride and Prejudice, all the while intending to help. But more often than not, Alverstoke won’t do anything for anybody else unless he finds it interesting. It’s not a very attractive character trait, truth be told, and it’s fortunate that Heyer manages to make almost every occasion an example of an exception to the rule – so the rule is really just what we are told, and the exceptions are what we are shown.

Bursting into this contented world are the Merriville family. They are oprhaned and as desolate as you’d expect of a family who will never have to work for a living. Oldest of the lot is (as we might expect from the title) Frederica – a sensible, clever, funny and caring woman who considers herself on the shelf as a spinster, aged 24. Next is Charis, who has that Regency trio of characteristics: beautiful, dim-witted, and kind. And finally three brothers, one of whom is away at Oxford. The other two are Jessamy, pious and anxious, and Felix, enthusiastic and boisterous.

It’s an enjoyable whirlwind to encounter, and Alverstoke finds himself rather taken aback. Having initially turned down the opportunity to help them as guardian, he ends up agreeing when he sees that they aren’t really mercenaries – and that Frederica is a capable, unsentimental woman. From this point onwards, none of the negative character traits that we’ve been led to believe beset Alverstoke ever really appear again.

What makes Frederica so fun is Heyer’s unceasing commitment to the Regency vibe. It’s a rich, detailed prose which you can’t read quickly, as the verbal sparring between characters is delightfully Austenesque and the narrative voice itself is, if not on Austen’s level, still great fun. Here, for instance, is Alverstoke trying to get Frederica to be chaperoned in town:

“I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!”
“You did!” she retorted. “And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!”
“Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!”

and here is Alverstoke being wonderfully bitchy to his sister:

“Do you mean to tell me that Mr. Trevor read my letter?” demanded Lady Buxted indignantly. “Your secretary?”
“I employ him to read my letters,” explained his lordship.
“Not those written by your nearest and dearest!”
“Oh, no, not them!” he agreed.”

The only downside to Heyer’s commitment to verisimilitude – in my opinion – is the vast quantity of era-appropriate slang, particularly from the boys. Here’s a selection, just flicking through: basket-scrambler, ninny-hammer, Friday-faced, high fidgets, rumgumption, Queer Nabs, mawworm, and so on and so forth. I can see how some readers would love these touches of authenticity, but they always took me out of the action. They were the only times it felt like Heyer’s researchw as being unceremoniously dumped into the dialogue.

To go back to the hero and heroine: what really warmed me to Alverstoke was his reluctant devotion to the young boys. (I didn’t need to warm to Frederica, as I loved her from the off.) And Heyer does the boys so well – especially the youngest, who believes he is offering a great treat to the men he meets by talking to them at length about mechanics, and being escorted to mills or something. Her eye for young people is so accurate, and timeless.

The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

Frederica is a long book, and did feel long. My copy was about 300 pages but the font is tiny – I see other editions are around the 400-page mark. There are some brilliant set pieces – a runaway dog; a chase after a hot air balloon – but most of the novel is simply the steady, detailed study of these people interacting, squabbling, matching wits and falling in love. I had to relax into it and not expect anything to happen quickly – but, on those terms, it was a total treat.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

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Someone in my book group chose The Razor’s Edge (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham after hearing it recommended on a YouTube video – making it my second Maugham of the year, after reading Theatre for the 1937 Club. It wasn’t one I was familiar with, and the paperback that arrived did little to encourage me – isn’t this the drabbest thing you’ve seen? Maybe it faded over time… Anyway, here’s a short and unenthusiastic review of the novel.

The novel is supposedly narrated by Maugham himself, in a conceit that doesn’t quite pay off, and concerns three main characters. The first is an American immigrant in France – a dyed-in-the-wool snob:

During the years that followed our acquaintance became fairly intimate without ever developing into friendship. I doubt whether it was possible for Elliott Templeton to be a friend. He took no interest in people apart from their social position.

Next is Elliott’s niece Isabel – an intelligent but avaricious woman, whom Maugham cannot mention without talking about how wonderful her legs are. Third of the trio (and weirdly the one that the novel’s Wikipedia page thinks is the only main character) is Larry. He is engaged to Isabel, and declares that his intentino is to ‘loaf’. When pressed on his plans, that is all they are: he doesn’t need excess money or company. He will simply exist.

Having set the ball rolling with these three, the narrator meets them at various times and in various places. Occasionally they feel the need to update the narrator with what he’s missed in the meantime, meaning that many long, long chapters are relayed to him. One of the things I hate in storytelling is when one character says, “Let me tell you about the past…” and then goes on to remember every single word of dialogue uttered many months earlier. On and on and on, all of it deadened because it’s happened and we, the reader, weren’t there. I complained about that fatal flaw in the first 80 pages or so of Theatre – in The Razor’s Edge it’s even worse, and even more monopolising the narrative. If only somebody had told him to show not tell.

It’s particularly a shame, because when the reader is present for scenes, they are much more vital and interesting. Some are even funny. Isabel’s unfortunate choice of husband leads to some fascinating, well-drawn scenes some years into marriage, while there is a protracted scene about Elliott being shunned from a socialite’s party that felt vibrant, funny, and moving. When he wants to, Maugham can do it. Why did he bog so much of the novel down in dullness and conversations we can’t possibly care about?

The Razor’s Edge wastes the talent of an author who didn’t know how to wield it. If he’d told it all as it happens, in the moment, it could have been an engaging book with brilliant characters. As it is, the brilliant characters have to fight their way through total tedium.

The Man on the Pier by Julia Strachey

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Strange at Ecbatan: Old Non-Bestseller Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding/An Integrated Man, by Julia StracheyIf you know the name ‘Julia Strachey’, it’s probably for Cheerful Weather for the Wedding – reprinted by Persephone Books, and later made into a very enjoyable film. Or perhaps you know her connection to Bloomsbury Group regular Lytton Strachey, who was her uncle (though, until I googled it, I thought she was his sister). Well, either way, let me introduce you to another of her books: The Man on the Pier (1951), later republished as An Integrated Man.

“Everything in my life is well ordered and serene. I wake up in the mornings rested and refreshed! And above all with a feeling of virtue. My days are spent unharassed by pressures that torture and distort. At the age of forty-one, I’m bound to admit that I have become that fabulous beast an ‘integrated man’!”

So opens the novel, and you can see why they chose the later title. I’m not sure it’s the most promising opening, and it does sound rather artificial to me – thankfully the tone naturalises relatively quickly. Speaking is Ned Moon, staying with a friend Reamur Cedar (!) in an estate. The opening scene is quite a funny one of him trying to avoid a chaotic maid, and that’s about the most plot the first half of the novel has. The rest of this section is conversation and description, and Strachey does both very well.

Outside, a vast summer confusion was going on. Beetles, spiders, caterpillars, ladybirds, insects innumerable were crawling in and out of flower-pots, and leaping off the tops of grasses. Hedgehogs were stealing cautiously through the long clover in the fields. Amongst the corn, field-mice, rabbits and young partridges were scuttling, where already binding-machines joggled along, clogging the air with petrol vapour. In the little orchard, beyond the yew tree, thistles were seeding and the thistle seeds and the white butterflies came floating about over everything, whilst cows coughed grassily, cats sneezed fishily, and all of this and more besides was being recorded on the air in sound and smell.

Pages are devoted to beautiful descriptions, which do not contribute to any sense of momentum but which make the novel very enjoyable to sink into. Sometimes it is the surroundings – sometimes it is merely the day-t0-day lives and habits of those present:

After dinner, reading. And at last bed, with much discussion as to who would, and who would not, have a bath. Finally, Agatha Christie, owls, and the sounds, through the dark corridors, of gushing bath-taps behind locked doors, together with innumerable clickings and latchings of bedroom doors both near and far and… sleep.

So, why is Ned staying here? To discuss with another guest, Aron, the prospect of them opening up a private school together. Neither seem to have any particular aptitude for it – unless self-confidence is an aptitude – but I enjoyed all the discussions. Particularly good is the sibling relationship between Aron and his sister Gwen (Reamur’s wife), who, in that sibling way, is unafraid to poor cold water on his pronouncements. Every time they clash is believable. They bicker without restraint, knowing that no lasting damage will be done to their close brother/sister bond, and able say things that could end flimsier relationships.

Gwen is particularly unsure that Aron’s new wife Marina will be suited to the role of headmaster’s wife. Ned hasn’t met his friend’s wife, as he was out of the country when the wedding took place. It’s clear, from Gwen’s description, that she is of a class and disposition that will struggle to mingle with the wives of teachers – it will be considered beneath her, perhaps, and be awkward for everyone.

We hear a lot about Marina before she appears, and are predisposed to be intimidated by her. Preemptively, we imagine she will be a cat among pigeons. But when does come, with her daughter Violet, something more unexpected happens. Ned instantly falls in love with her. Not only that, he decides with very little hesitation that he must have an affair with her. Even more surprisingly, she feels the same.

It’s hard to see what this mutual infatuation is based on, and it felt like a stone flung in the calm waters of the novel – and not in a good way, at least in my opinion. There is nothing subtle about a stone being flung. The Man on the Pier was such a rich, detailed, calm novel – and the introduction of a would-be affair felt quite ordinary and boring in comparison. It did lead to some of the most beautiful scenes, describing the site of a planned tryst between them – an abandoned and decrepit mansion. Strachey wrote about that location with almost mythical beauty, like describing a fantasy land. But I don’t find the possibilities of an affair anywhere near as interesting as the dynamics of siblings, friends and potential entrepeneur colleagues.

That’s personal taste, of course. For others, the arrival of Marina and the romantic storyline might be when the novel began to pick up. I would so much rather Strachey had kept confidence in her ability to write a strikingly beautiful, often amusing novel about very little indeed. If the first half of The Man on the Pier had kept going in a similar vein, I think it could have been something very special. Either way, Strachey was an excellent prose stylist and observer of behaviour, and it’s a shame that her output was so limited.