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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.

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

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I bought The Children’s Bach (1984) by Helen Garner in Oxford’s newest bookshop, Caper, a while ago. I might have mentioned the shop before. From the outside, it looks like a children’s bookshop – all joyful colours and suchlike – and it is, indeed, a children’s specialist. But there is a sizeable section at the back for adult books, all arranged together under headings like ‘the mundane everyday’ and ‘incredible journeys’. It’s a fun idea that invites serendipitous finds. When I came across the W&N Essentials reprint of The Children’s Bach, I couldn’t resist. This cover is so beautiful – one of my favourites of recent years.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner | W&N - Ground-breaking, award-winning, thought-provoking books since 1949

I’ve been listening to a lot of Garner’s non-fiction in the past couple of years, but I did start my reading journey with her about 15 years ago with The Spare Room. My return to her fiction – only my second novel by her – reminds me of how taughtly she tells stories of disrupted domesticity.

In The Children’s Bach, Dexter and Elizabeth meet after years apart. They were at university together but drifted apart – yet, when they reunite, they almost unquestioningly bring their attendant worlds together. Dexter and his wife have two young children, Arthur and Billy (whose unspecific disability is dealt with in a way that felt quite shocking, and probably wouldn’t be done now). Elizabeth is dating an untamed musician, Philip, and he has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth’s closest relationship is with her much younger sister, Vicki, who is still on the cusp of adulthood while Elizabeth is heading into middle-age. The coming together of these families ultimately brings about a crisis.

A synopsis of Garner’s book is one thing. The reading experience is quite another. Garner has cut away at the plot until what is left is really an impression of a plot. There is an excellent scene where each line of dialogue and narrative is clearly a moment from an extended evening – it is the most filmic scene I’ve ever read; the most clearly like a film montage. It’s extremely effective. Writ on a larger scale, that is what the whole of The Children’s Bach does. You won’t find lengthy examinations of motivations and emotions – rather, Garner gives us stark glimpses into these people’s lives. That means that the choices people make play out almost before you realise they’ve made them.

And then, on the other hand, Garner gives some scenes unexpected breathing room. As David Nicholls highlights in his enjoyable introduction: ‘Major confrontations are overheard but never described, while smaller incidental scenes – a cello lesson, a conversation in a playground with a strange scabby boy, the experience of getting locked in a cemetery – expand.’

But the main star of The Children’s Bach is Garner’s writing. The unwavering, merciless observation she brings to her non-fiction is less intimidating in fiction, but no less present. She is exceptionally good on small domestic moments – and, much harder, equally good on the occasional abstract or nebulous moments. Here’s something which combines most – the recognisable ‘braced for more sobbing’ leading into a lovely dream scene.

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

Threaded throughout the novel is music. The soundtrack – of Bach, of Philip’s grungier music – is never used heavy-handedly, but at the same time gives us insight and a rhythm to the story.

Athena understood why people gave up playing an instrument. She knew she did not play well, that her playing, even when correct, was like someone reciting a lesson in an obedient voice, without inflection or emotion, without understanding: a betrayal of music. She took her hands off the keyboard. There was dust on all the keys except those an octave either side of middle C. She closed the lid.

The only drawback I found with The Children’s Bach is how unknowable the characters are. Or is that a drawback, or simply a choice? Garner’s impressionistic writing is stunning to read, and every paragraph has the weight and confidence of a poem. I often stopped and reread sentences simply because they were so beautiful with such well-judged balance to them. But I don’t think I could describe the characters. Philip and Vicki are the exceptions to that rule, but the others felt like ciphers – or perhaps like containers for Garner’s beautiful observations and discrete moments. Is it deliberate, or a casualty of the novel’s sparseness?

Some critic apparently said The Children’s Bach was one of only four perfect short novels in the English language, which is the sort of silly thing that critics say when they want to get noticed. I can think of many short novels that I think are probably better, though perhaps not many that are as delicately and deftly done. With stronger depths to her characters, it would be a masterpiece. And perhaps those depths would come with rereading – my main takeaway from the experience is that I’m keen to reread, and perhaps find still more than I did this time. While googling for reviews, I discovered that Whispering Gums did exactly that.

So, how to conclude? I think there’s a strong chance that this is a brilliant novel, and it’s certainly a brilliant piece of writing. And perhaps it couldn’t have been such a beautiful reading experience if it had been more grounded. Or perhaps it would feel more grounded the second time around? Well, why not find out for yourself?

Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks

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Long-termers here will know how much I love The L-Shaped Room, and over the past couple of years I’ve been exploring more of Lynne Reid Banks’s considerable output – further prompted by her death earlier this year. Her writing for novels slowed considerably, and in fact she only published two novels for adults during my lifetime. The first of those is Casualties (1986). And the insipid cover is certainly the worst of the 1980s.

The narrator is Sue. She is a frustrated writer in a frustrating marriage. She rows often with her husband, Cal, and is irked and upset by the way he and she differ in raising their children. Any conversation ends in a fight and it’s clear that she is debating ending the marriage. Her work is no better: having written one literary novel, she found she was able to get more success and more money writing soppy books she can’t respect. But the economics of the household demand it.

The fact that I’ve just invested nearly £3,000 in a word processor and printer, complete with all the floppy trimmings, which should make me feel better about it somehow, but has only made everything worse because now I can turn out four books a year with as little effort as I formerly took to write three.

Effort. There. That’s the key to much of my disquiet. It’s become effortless, and writing shouldn’t be. My first (I nearly said my real) book was written in blood, sweat and tears. Now I sit down for a regular three-hour stint most days and out it pours. I see it coming up in those little eerie green letters on the screen and wonder where it’s all coming from and feel like a conduit running between that costly machine and some over-embellished silver-gilt cornucopia on a chypre-scented pink cloud somewhere.

Into this very comfortable and middle-class life – but one Sue finds deeply unsatisfying – comes contact from Mariolain. Mariolain – there is a curious footnote from Banks, saying she knows it should be spelled Marjolijn, but has decided not too – is a friend from Sue’s distant past. They were close as teenagers, and penpals until that petered out. There was one moment of reunion, years back, but nothing since. On something of a whim, Sue agrees to take her family to visit Mariolain  in Holland.

The best parts of the novel, in my opinion, are the dynamics of the two families meeting. Mariolain and Sue manage to resurrect long-forgotten affections, finding their differences and changes interesting rather than sad. Their respective husbands and children are less enthusiastically brought into the clash, and Banks is very good on the well-meaning, uncertain union of a whole group of people who have very little in common. Each family naturally forms into individual tribes, while there are members of each who seek greater sympathy on the other side. It’s clearest in the children – feuding siblings will form a united front against a common ‘enemy’ – but it’s there in the adults too.

Less successful, in my opinion, is the main reason for the novel. Mariolain was a child during Nazi occupation. Her family sheltered Jews, and lived through the dire food shortages and abiding fears of occupation. Much of the novel takes place in flashback to these scenes.

Perhaps Banks could have written a brilliant novel set entirely in that time and place. What worked less for me is what often doesn’t work in novels which flashback: even the most urgent events lose urgency if they are buried in the past. There was a vibrancy to the contemporary scenes that wasn’t there in the historical ones, even when the historical ones were undeniably more momentous. It’s the reason I tend not to read historical fiction, and it deadened sections of the novel.

More compelling was what we saw about the far-reaching impact of this trauma. Early in the novel, Banks spells out the novel’s theme in Sue’s voice:

I can see now that Cal is right when he says that the worst thing about wars is not the casualties that happen on the battlefield, but the ripples going out from them, on and on towards some shore so impossibly remote in terms of time that effectively it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it would be more subtle to show rather than tell, but at least we know where the novel is going and which bits we should pay most attention to. I thought Cal’s summing up was more powerful:

Cal took a deep breath and turned to me. “It’s not over yet, here,” he said. “The war. In England it’s over. I didn’t realise.”

“We weren’t occupied,” I said.

Is it still possible to write a contemporary novel about the effects of the Second World War? The youngest people who remember it would be perhaps in their 80s, so there’s still scope for it – but perhaps not with the culture-saturating sense that Banks can bring to 1980s Holland.

A hallmark of Banks’ writing is how compelling it is; how urgently you want to turn the pages. She creates worlds that you are totally immersed in, never more so than the l-shaped room and the block of flats its in. Sadly I can’t say the same for this novel, which is interesting rather than captivating. The cover quote from the Daily Telegraph says “How lucky we are to have Lynne Reid Banks! Casualties is her eighth novel and easily the best.” Well, I absolutely agree with the first half of that. By no stretch of the imagination is Casualties her best novel – but I’m glad to have read it nonetheless.

All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel

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I see quite a few people write about Alberto Manguel’s non-fiction, about reading and libraries, but not so often his novels. I picked up All Men Are Liars (2008, translated from Spanish by Miranda France) in Washington D.C. in 2013, off the back of enjoying that non-fiction, and it’s interesting to see how the kind-hearted wisdom that characterises his non-fiction does or doesn’t transfer here. I was also drawn by Jason Booher’s excellent cover design.

The title is a quote from (some translations of) Psalm 116 – but this isn’t a biblical book, or even the feminist polemic you might expect from that title. In context, the phrase is really about the way different accounts of the same instance will contradict.

The instance, or at least the person, is a writer called Alejandro Bevilacqua. He has died in suspicious circumstances, falling from his balcony the day before his masterpiece was published, and the various characters of the novel take it in turn to narrate their history with him – and what they know of his death. Amusingly, the first of these men is an author called Alberto Manguel…

While at times it feels like they are under police inquiry, they are actually speaking to a journalist called Terradillos, who is piecing together the truth about Bevilacqua’s life, or is at least trying to. Each account is as much about the speaker as it is Bevilacqua, and we quickly get a sense of their character.

He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like St Thomas, the Apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Each person has their frames of reference, their own go-tos for metaphor, and their own placing in the geopolitics that is the true heart of All Men Are Liars. Because almost everyone involved is an Argentinian ex-pat whose lives were forever changed by the brutal politics of the period. Bevilacqua was imprisoned and tortured for reasons that were unclear to him, and other speakers in the novel have experienced similar ordeals.

There are central questions in the novel – who truly wrote Bevilacqua’s masterpiece, which his lover found amongst his belongings and got published without his involvement; what machinations led to Bevilacqua’s torments and death – but above all it’s an experiment in perspective. What even is lying, if people can tell untruths without realising? Where is the line between deceit and subjectivity?

All Men Are Liars is an interesting and pretty captivating novel, though I did feel a bit at sea by my poor knowledge of mid/late-century Argentina. Manguel is a delightful companion even when he’s writing about dark topics, and there were continual chinks of light coming through the miseries and antagonisms he describes.

I think I’d still start with his non-fiction and treasure books about reading above this sort of fiction, but there is probably more urgency to All Men Are Liars than anything else I’ve read by Manguel. And I think that’s the truth?

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Interpreter of Maladies Audiobook by Jhumpa Lahiri | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

A Century of Books can sometimes turn up some real gems that I wouldn’t have otherwise read. When I was looking through my books, I didn’t find anything I particularly wanted to read from 1999 – so I did some googling about 1999 books, and decided to listen to the audiobook of Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection of short stories. And, my goodness, it’s among the best short story collections I’ve ever read.

The stories are mostly about the lives of people in India or part of the India disapora abroad – largely the US. Each story is primarily about relationships – the things that are said and unsaid, or taken for granted, or misunderstood. Lahiri is so, so good at circling around a pairing of people, whether they are a couple, colleagues, or strangers, and gradually creating a complex portrait that tells us about their whole lives in a snapshot.

Two of my favourite stories in the collection are about married couples. In the opening story, ‘A Temporary Matter’, Shukumar and Shoba are a couple whose relationship has grown strained and silent – but they take advantage of a protracted power cut to use each evening to share things they’ve never told each other. (‘The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter; for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.’) The secrets range from surprising to bitterly shocking. It’s such a beautiful and restrained portrait of a couple who have faced tragedy and don’t know how to communicate.

The other married couple I was fascinated by are Sanjeev and Twinkle in ‘This Blessed House’. They have recently moved to a new home in Connecticut, and begin to find Christian relics around the house, hidden in corners, behind radiators, in drawers. Twinkle is delighted by them all – while Sanjeev doesn’t understand, since they aren’t Christians, and is increasingly embarrassed by her exuberance. It’s perhaps the funniest story in the collection, but still has a lot to say about a marriage where husband and wife don’t quite understand each other – and what happens when only one of the pair is troubled by this.

I’ll just mention the title story, since you might be wondering what an ‘Intepreter of Maladies’ is. Mr and Mrs Das are Indian Americans visiting India – they have grown up abroad and don’t understand either the language or the culture, but treat it with the slightly patronising fondness of the tourist. Mr Kapasi is hired as their driver and tour guide – when he is not doing this work, he is a translator at a doctor’s clinic. While Mr Kapasi’s wife belittles the work, Mrs Das is very complimentary about how vital his role is: without his translation, his interpreting of maladies, the patients could never be treated. And Mr Kapasi takes her kindness and encouragement as a sign that they could become long-distance friends, penpals, and perhaps more. It’s a touching story about how the significance of a relationship in one person’s mind doesn’t guarantee the same in the other person’s mind.

Lahiri’s stories are mostly calm. There are some bigger changes in people’s lives and relationships, but even these are just larger-than-usual ripples on the surface of seemingly tranquil lives, not crashing waves. Her vantages and choices of perspective are interesting and unusual, and she uses them to reveal so much about ordinary human lives. And the writing is simply beautiful, with a measured, thoughtful rhythm to the sentences that feels observational rather than overly poeticised.

This is my first Lahiri book and it surely won’t be my last. Having listened to the audiobook, I’m going to make sure to pick up a paper copy when I have the chance. Lahiri is a stunningly good writer, and I’m glad I’ve finally read her.

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

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Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris | Goodreads

I remember falling in love with David Sedaris. I was staying in a Youth Hostel in the Lake District, having gone there to give a talk on ‘the fantastic fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’ to a room of people who couldn’t hear much of what I was saying. My bedroom was under the stairs, so I could hear people walk up and down throughout the night. But it was nice to get away, and of course it meant plenty of uninterrupted reading time.

One of the books I’d brought with me was Sedaris’s book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I’d picked out of my book group’s lucky dip Secret Santa. I didn’t know anything about the book or the author. Indeed, I thought it was a novel, and for some reason had decided the narrator was a young girl. It got confusing when the cast of characters changed in the second chapter, and when the narrator was addressed as ‘David’.

I pieced it together, of course, and now know that Sedaris is one of the most beloved humorists of his generation – sharing tales from his eccentric family’s eccentric life, sparing no details and no blushes. His parents, siblings, and long-term boyfriend come in for the most exposure, but anybody who crosses his path is likely to be dealt with in excruiating, gloriously witty prose.

And Barrel Fever (1994) was Sedaris’s first book. It is the only one of his books which divides into ‘Stories’ and ‘Essays’. The former are clearly fictional – for instance, the male narrator of ‘Parade’ has an energetic sexual relationship with Mike Tyson, having dumped Charlton Heston- but there is an interesting note in the beginning saying ‘This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.’ Is this the handiwork of a lawyer? Or do all his books have this disclaimer? Sedaris’s style relies on exaggeration and selection, but I would have assumed that his essays are based in at least some truth.

In my copy, there are only four essays – compared to 12 stories. I started by listening to the audiobook, which confusingly has fewer stories, retitles an essay, adds in one from Me Talk Pretty One Day, and cuts the most famous – ‘SantaLand Diaries’. It also had the cover art for Naked, so maybe I should have been forewarned. Anyway, once I’d compiled the audiobook and the print book, I read everything in Barrel Fever and more – and it is already clear in his first book that Sedaris is much better at the comic personal essay than he is at the short story.

‘Diary of a Smoker’ is a funny, short essay about how Sedaris’s family’s history of smoking, and how annoying it is when well-meaning non-smokers try to get you to quit:

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

‘The SantaLand Diaries’ made Sedaris famous, and is about his exploits and annoyances as an elf for Macy’s department store during the Christmas rush. It is every bit as scathing, self-loathing, and ridiculous as you’d expect from Sedaris writing that scenario – hovering just on the right side of good taste, as there an awful lot of innocent young children who are vulnerable to his sharp tongue.

But my favourite is ‘Giantess’, because it is so sublimely Sedaris. It’s very short, following Sedaris as he works as a painter ande decorator, while simultaneously in talks with the editor of Giantess magazine about submitting erotic fiction about abnormally tall or supernaturally growing women.

The editor of Giantess called to say he’d received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himsefl as Hank, saying, “I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you’ll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on, if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I’m talking about here, Dave?” Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall, and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”

It’s not exactly the sort of thing I usually read about, but I loved the specificity which Sedaris gives to the absurd. It’s the unasked-for use of ‘Dave’. It’s the exactitude of the height range, and the mundanity of submitting stories to a publication that doesn’t get any less mundane because of the variety of publication. Sedaris looks at the ridiculous face-on and finds a world-weariness in it.

I also enjoyed reading the stories, I should add. My favourite was the satirical ‘Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter’, perhaps because it is the nearest to Sedaris’s voice – albeit through a depth of distortion. For the most part, though, the stories seem an exercise in creating the most unpleasant people possible. Some are cruel, some are so thoughtless that they ruin other people’s lives, and some are evil to the point of absurdity. Individually, they were diverting – but it grows old quite quickly to simply have dreadful characters doing dreadful things. It’s a trick that obscures the more subtle ways that Sedaris can create character and twist scenarios into something special.

There’s no wonder that Sedaris pursued the personal essay for all his subsequent collections. Who knows how much is fiction and how much is genuine autobiography, but the blend is clearly where Sedaris excels. Barrel Fever is most interesting as an author trying his hand at different styles, and he made the right conclusion for his future books.

The Clocks by Agatha Christie

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The Clocks - Wikipedia

I’ve reached the point where I can’t really remember which Agatha Christie novels I’ve read and which I haven’t. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it means I can go back and re-read them and will have probably forgotten who the murderer is. Or, more likely, think I’m being very clever when it comes back to me.

But I definitely hadn’t read The Clocks before. Published in 1963, that means it falls towards the end of her writing career – but before the books got really bad. It’s also technically a Hercule Poirot but, for reasons we will come onto, it doesn’t really feel like one.

(Btw, I shan’t give away huge spoilers – like the culprit – but there will be some milder spoilers in this review, so you are warned.)

The location of the murder is 19, Wilbraham Crescent. Christie describes the street in a way that I enjoyed:

Wilbraham Crescent was a fantasy executed by a Victorian builder in the 1880’s [sic]. It was a half-moon of double houses and gardens set back to back. This conceit was a source of considerable difficulty to persons unacquainted with the locality. Those who arrived on the outer side were unable to find the lower numbers and those who hit the inner side first were baffled as to the whereabouts of the higher numbers. The houses were neat, prim, artistically balconied and eminently respectable. Modernisation had as yet barely touched them – on the outside, that is to say. Kitchens and bathrooms were the first to feel the wind of change.

I think that’s a lovely observational, about kitchens and bathrooms, and it’s expressed well and elegantly. Christie is often unfairly dismissed an excellent plotter and poor writer, but I disagree. A lot of The Clocks is quietly amusing and she has a good eye for social detail.

Anyway, a young typist called Sheila Webb is called to a new client’s house. Mrs Pebmarsh has requested her by name to 19, Wilbraham Crescent, and off she goes, letting herself in (as instructed). She finds a living room with numerous clocks on the mantlepiece and other places – far more clocks than anybody would normally need. And, more curiously, they are all at 4:13pm – an hour ahead of the current time.

But that’s the strangest thing Sheila finds in the room. The other, behind the sofa, is the body of a dead man.

She runs out screaming, and encounters our narrator for half the novel – Colin Lamb. Christie goes back and forth between third-person narrator and Colin’s perspective, and he is really our detective for the novel. He’s also rather smitten by Sheila.

We gather some facts: Mrs Pebmarsh says she did not request a typist. She does not know who the man in her house is, and she is blind – so he may have been there for a while without her noticing. Colin begins questioning all the various neighbours, who do rather get confusing, as we pretty quickly go to lots of different houses and encounter a large number of people who may or may not have any bearing on the novel. It’s an opportunity for Christie to enjoy herself though – there’s a ‘cat lady’ totally devoted to her cats; there are some rowdy but intelligent young boys; there is a glimpse of a certain type of political discourse in 1963:

“Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.”

“Must have been foreign,” said Mrs Curtin. “Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with the Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.”

Plus ça change, if I may.

So, where does Hercule Poirot come into this? Just barely. We know that we are in a Poirot novel because of there are stray mentions of Ariadne Oliver (and Christie has her usual good time poking fun at Oliver for choosing a Finnish detective when she doesn’t know anything about Finland). The man himself enters by way of interview with Colin Lamb, an old friend – or, rather, a younger friend whom Poirot tries to educate, but in a sort of frustrating way where he never says what he means. A few times, Colin Lamb traipses off to Poirot’s residence to lay his new findings at Poirot’s feet and get some sort of enigmatic reply in return. At no point does Poirot himself talk to anybody else involved, or visit the scene of the crime. It’s all rather strange. Why is he there at all?

For much of The Clocks, I thought I was onto a real winner, and wondered why it wasn’t talked about more about Christie’s oeuvre. It was a page-turner with entertaining writing and a fun (if occasionally slightly overwhelming) cast of characters. The sidelining of Poirot was odd, but I went with it. Even the occasional hints of spy rings didn’t put me off – and I find Christie very tedious in spy mode, which she couldn’t resist returning to.

Well – without spoilers – The Clocks did end up being a disappointment to me. I’ll just say that the solution wasn’t at all satisfying, and it felt very anti-climactic compared to her usual cleverness. I feel like the inventive set-up deserved a better pay-off. I’m glad I read it and I enjoyed myself, and from another author I’d be very impressed, but this definitely isn’t one of Christie’s masterpieces.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

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When I was in Canada last year (how I miss it and how I want to return!), I met up with Debra and she very kindly gave me a copy of The Stone Diaries (1993) by Canadian literary royalty Carol Shields. I was familiar with Shields but had never read her, and didn’t really know what to expect. As luck would have it, 1993 was proving a tricky year to fill for A Century of Books – and it was very useful to have The Stone Diaries on hand. And what an unusual, and unusually good, book it is.

Towards the end of the novel, its heroine Daisy reflects:

All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a thottled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone — anyone — to listen.

It’s a good question: what is the story of a life? In some ways, Shields’ approach to the question is conventional. The Stone Diaries follows the life of a fairly ordinary Canadian woman from birth through to her death as an octogenarian. The sections are called things like ‘childhood’, ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and so on. Daisy falls in love (not necessarily with the man she marries); she has friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Her one brush with the something that threatens to be extraordinary is becoming a popular gardening columnist, but she doesn’t truly become a celebrity. She has children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is an ordinary life, well-lived.

But The Stone Diaries is not an ordinary novel. Here’s how it starts:

My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: “Take some slices of stale bread,” the recipe said, “and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.” Of course she’s divided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scarcity of currents, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.

You can quickly tell that this is no ordinary narrator. This section is in the first-person – but telling us about an event she can’t have witnessed, down to the detail of the recipe. Throughout the novel, the narrative chops and changes between the third-person and the first-person – sometimes taking us into Daisy’s eyes and sometimes looking at her from a distance. It swirls between the two without pause, giving us a sense of the panoramic.

Add to this that the storytelling sometimes comes with preternatural knowledge, and sometimes more as you’d expect from the more off-the-shelf Bildungsroman. And then there’s a chapter entirely in letters, and another on different characters’ perspectives on what happened to Daisy. In the hands of most authors, this mix could be an awkward technique – but Shields wields it expertly. The tone and the narrative approach really elevate The Stone Diaries above the ordinary. It is handled with such assurance, which is perhaps no surprise as Shields was almost two decades into a revered career. More to the point, it never reads pretentiously – The Stone Diaries manages that exceptional feat: being both narrative experiment and page-turner. I think the only element that didn’t work for me was the inclusion of photographs of the characters, which felt a little bit self-indulgent.

I haven’t told you much about the other characters or the plot, but to be honest they are secondary to the prose and the confidence of the storytelling. You may end up not remembering all the grandchildren, or even quite disentangling the complexities of Daisy’s father, adoptive parents, relatives, lovers and so forth. But you’ll remember how different the novel felt, and how powerfully you are enveloped into one woman’s life.

Treasures of Time by Penelope Lively

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One of the things I love about my book group is how varied our book choices are – not just the latest hit novels, but ranging back over a century and more. Somebody suggested we read some Penelope Lively (she was a local, after all) and we landed on her second novel, Treasures of Time (1979).

The concept feels both modern and somehow very old-fashioned: a TV crew is making a documentary about a late archeologist, Hugh Paxton, and we witness what this exploration looks like in the lives of his widow, daughter, sister-in-law and so on. What makes it feel old-fashioned is how unintrusive the documentary crew is – they aren’t trying to sensationalise anything, and any secrets that are dug up will be a byproduct of a fairly earnest attempt to Hugh Paxton’s life. (The resultant documentary, which we see towards the end of the novel, seems laughably slow.)

But the late Hugh Paxton is not the most interesting person in this book, nor is his relationship with anybody paramount. To me, the most fascinating dynamic in this novel is between Hugh’s widow, Laura, and their daughter Kate. (Could Lively have chosen any more stereotypical middle-class white women’s names than Laura and Kate! Endless mid-century novels have one or the other.)

Laura is not a monster. To most of her acquaintance, she is probably considered charming and capable. But to Kate, she is often brutal – brutal with the polite kindness of a mother who ‘wants what’s best’ for her daughter and continually belittles her. She makes constantly clear that Kate is a disappointment: not beautiful enough, not successful enough, not elegant enough, not married enough. There is a very telling moment early on where Kate tries to decide what to wear to see her mother – knowing that she will be criticised if it is too casual (as being disrespectful and unflattering) and equally criticsed if she dresses up (silly and over the top). But she can’t help try, forever reframing her understanding of herself through her mother’s gaze.

Kate is no pushover herself. She is clearly damaged by her domineering, probably well-meaning mother – and it comes out as determination and bad decision making.

There are a scattering of sympathetic characters in Treasures of Time, with my favourite perhaps being the enthusiastic, wrong-footed documentary maker. But Lively isn’t very interested in whether people are sympathetic or not. Rather, she is searing in how she presents any human relationships – perhaps more at home when describing familial relationships than romantic ones.

Lively is also very good on class. I thought this was brilliant (and heaven knows I still encounter enough middle-class people desperate to be considered busy beyond belief in their very ordinary lives):

He had discovered with surprise, on his arrival in the southern white-collar counties, the furious busyness of the professional classes. You could not hold up your head in society, it seemed, if you were unable to claim intolerable pressures, both inside an occupation and, even more, outside it. At a sherry party in his supervisors house, he had listened with interest to a group of (he gathered) unemployed women vying with one another in their accounts of lives have never a spare moment to, dizzy in the service of Parent Teacher Associations, Conservation Societies, adult literacy campaigns and ornithology. Going home again, he found himself taking a new view of his parents’ untroubled appreciation of the eight hour day in the five day week. If he had asked his father if he was busy, he would have stared in incomprehension: if you were at work, you were at work, and if you were at home you were at home, and that was all there was to it.

This is all sounding like a very positive review, and I do admire a lot about Penelope Lively’s writing. But I’ll end by admitting that I do struggle to love her novels. I’ve read a handful, and indeed some with very overlapping themes (a biographer in According to Mark; reflections on a long life in Moon Tiger) and it can feel like I’ve looking through a clouded pane of class. It is expertly done, but I don’t quite feel connected to it. I admire, but I haven’t yet felt touched by her writing.