ACOB2024

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.

It’s another A Century of Books round-up!

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My century of books is much healthier than it looks, and that’s cos I have been reading a whole heap of books I’ve not been writing about. And these eleven books aren’t gonna get a whole blog post out of me… so let’s see how we can fill some ACOB gaps.

The Art of I. Compton-Burnett (1972) ed. Charles Burkhart

Charles Burkhart was such an Ivy Compton-Burnett stan (samesies) and this is one of many books he wrote or edited about her – it includes various critical essays, appreciations, reviews, obituaries etc. Most valuably, it has two interviews that ICB gave – where she is at her most irrepressible. Such a glorious mix of disingenuous obtuseness and elaborate self-revelation. I love the collection for those – everything else is fun but inessential.

More Women Than Men (1933) by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Speaking of, I never mentioned that I re-read my favourite ICB novel earlier in the year. And it’s still marvellous and ingenious.

A Thousand Mornings (2012) by Mary Oliver

So many people have said they love Mary Oliver, so I thought I’d try a collection of her poetry. I’ve definitely enjoyed some of the works I’ve seen people post, particularly around the time she died, but this collection did leave me a bit cold. Maybe it’s deceptively simple and I need to reread a few times.

Much Dithering (1938) by Dorothy Lambert

I had really high hopes for this novel about quiet, young widow Jocelyn and the three men who might end up being her next husband (at least one of whom faces competition in Jocelyn’s vivacious, selfish mother). The plot is really fun and there are enjoyable details about village life, but I’m afraid I found the novel a bit bland overall. There was something in the writing that seemed to deaden the momentum for me. A pity.

Sunday (1962) by Kay Dick

This was even more of a disappointment. Kay Dick is now best known for They, reprinted to much fanfare (though I haven’t read it). Sunday is about a woman called Sunday from her daughter’s perspective, and the various men who were in love with her at different times – as well as their complex relationship. The final sections were quite good, told in the present – but most of the book is told in a ‘My mother always used to -‘ sort of way that makes it all feel very distant. There is no urgency to the novel and I found it extremely tedious. I’m assuming They is rather better.

How To Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) by Joanna Russ

Hopefully it’s obvious that this title is satirical! Russ traces the history of literary reception, and the way that women writers have been suppressed from writing, or from finding fame if they do write, or from a glowing reception if they were famous. It’s fascinating and saddening, and I hope some things have changed in the past 40 years – but I daresay not as much as you’d hope. (I found it interesting that most of the book’s argument is written out on the front cover.)

A Song for Summer (1997) by Eva Ibbotson

We had a lot of fun talking about The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson when Claire was a guest on the Tea or Books? podcast – and it definitely felt like retreading similar ground in this WW2-set novel. The heroine is very good and very spirited; the hero is diffident but noble and musical. It was entertaining enough as a novel, but clearly not her strongest. (I also listened to the audiobook, and the narrator’s choice of voice for the hero was distractingly weird and husky.)

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) by Truman Capote

Apparently very autobiographical, this is about a fey young boy trying to find his absent father – and meeting a fascinating and eccentric group of people in his search. I really enjoyed the writing with this one, though maybe it’s not one I should have listened to. One day I’ll probably reread as a physical book, and that would do the story justice.

At The Pines (1971) by Mollie Panter-Downes

Love Mollie P-D; felt quite ambivalent about this book. It’s about the home of Algernon Charles Swinburne (poet) and his life. It’s amazing how much he’s fallen out of favour – does anybody care about Swinburne now? I hoped this book was about Panter-Downes’ experiences and reflections, and it isn’t really. She writes well, but on a subject I had no interest in. I’d much rather she wrote about herself.

Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy

This is another where I’d misunderstood what the novel was actually about. The blurb says it’s a feminist classic about a woman who sees the future – so I thought maybe she’s see a few hours into the future, and perhaps use this skill to get beyond the bounds of misogynistic control. But she actually sees visions of 2137 and the people there, all the while sectioned in a run-down hospital. The novel opens extremely brutally, and it’s a pretty bleak book throughout. I guess it’s a sort of fantasy (it’s called science fiction, but I don’t see quite how) that doesn’t interest me very much.

The Bridesmaid (1989) by Ruth Rendell

My first Ruth Rendell and I was very impressed by her writing. It wasn’t really a murder mystery, which I had been expecting, and there wasn’t actually a bridesmaid (it’s, for some reason, the name of a statue). I don’t even want to give away what happens – except that it’s a story of how love can get out of control. Wikipedia tells me it’s a fan-favourite, and I can see why.

Rereadings by Anne Fadiman

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I imagine quite a lot of you have read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, and hopefully you loved it as much as I did. It was one of the earliest examples of those little books-about-reading that have proliferated in the past couple of decades – and I love the genre wholeheartedly. There was something special about Ex Libris, and it felt like finding a kindred spirit in an era before blogging and before social media took off.

She followed up Ex Libris with Rereadings (2005), which my brother bought for my birthday in 2010. As so often, it sat on my shelves for a long time – and I took it on my recent Scottish holiday, and found it was the perfect time for it. I absolutely loved reading it.

While Anne Fadiman’s name is on the cover as the editor of this collection, she only writes the foreword. What follows are 17 essays on rereading, which first appeared in The American Scholar (which Fadiman edited). I’d only read two of the books mentioned – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Journals, Letters and Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Others mention authors I know for other books (D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, J.D. Salinger) while others focus on books by authors I’d never even heard of – H.C. Witwer, Enid Starkie, Helen Dore Bolyston and more. It really didn’t matter which book or author was being discussed, because I was swept away by every single essayist’s contribution.

Each essay talks about a book from the past, of course, but they are really more about the experience of rereading than they are about the individual books. They are about looking back over decades of time to a younger self, and comparing what you were to what you are. That might mean you’ve totally changed your mind about the book. It might simply mean that the world of possibilities, which you were living when you first read the book, has shrunk to a world of actualities, for better or worse. It was curiously moving to read each essay. A poem by Walt Whitman or a guide to wildflowers might be the hook on which the essay is hung, but they are really memoirs in miniature.

Here’s Vivian Gornick, on The Vagabond by Colette:

I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.

And here is Sven Bikerts, talking about rereading Pan by Knut Hamsun:

For such is the power of a book, a memory, that it can in a flash outwit any structure or system we have raised against it. I had, yes, steeled myself against Glahn, against the sorrow of his story, against his complete destruction by the passion that had erupted in his unguarded heart. I had not, however, braced myself against the encounter with myself, the sixteen-year-old who went at the world, at the dream of love, with the same unscreened intensity. I read Pan, but the person I met on those woodland paths was my feverish younger self. I felt sorrow from the first sentence on, sorrow so sweet and piercing that it was hard to turn the pages. Worse, though – for sorrow recollected can bring a certain pleasure – was my self-reproach. As I read I indicted myself. I had, in stages, without ever planning it, traded off that raw nerved-up avidness. I’d had to, of course; it was inevitable. We do not survive the dream of love, not at that pitch. We build in our safeguards and protective reflexes. We give in to the repetitions, let them gradually tame the erratic element. We grow wise and find balance – or perish. Still, to encounter the stalking ghost of the self here, now, at midlife…

That ended up being a longer excerpt than I intended, because once I started writing I couldn’t stop. I found his reflections profoundly beautiful. Maybe most of us could be some book in place of Pan and feel much the same way.

I could read volumes and volumes more of this, though sadly no more collections were ever published. I had only heard of one of the contributors, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a stunning, moving collection of essays that any lifelong reader will warm to – as soon as you open it, you know for sure that you are among friends.

Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson

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Moominsummer Madness

I started seeing Moomins popping up in reviews all over the place, and discovered that that it is #Moominweek! Literary Potpourri and Calmgrove have set this up, and even though I was late to the party, I rushed off to read Moominsummer Madness (1954) translated by Thomas Warburton – handily also ticking the Women in Translation Month box.

Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers – you can click her name in the tags/categories section and find all of the other reviews I’ve done – but I’ve only read one Moomin book before. She is so brilliant in her adult novels and short stories at piercing relationships between people who aren’t quite able to communicate, whether that be the beautifully unsentimental meeting of grandmother and granddaughter in The Summer Book or the who-is-fooling-whom darkness of The True Deceiver. How does that translate to a world not about humans, but instead about moomins and their ilk?

In Moominsummer Madness, a nearby volcano causes tremendous flooding in Moominvalley.

In the fair night they could see something enormous rise high over the tree-tops of the forest, like a great wall that grew and grew with a white and foaming crest.

“I suppose we’d better go into the drawing-room now,” said Moominmamma.

They had no more than got their tails inside the door when the flood wave came crashing through the Moomin Valley and drenched everything in darkness. The house rocked slightly but didn’t lose its foothold. It was soundly built and a very good house. But after a while the drawing-room furniture began to float around. The family then moved upstairs and sat down to wait for the storm to blow over.

The whole house is soon under water. Somehow they rescue food from the kitchen (why is bread edible after it’s been floating around in floodwater? Maybe we shouldn’t ask such questions) and they don’t seem very perturbed by the turn of events. Calmness is key. And, calmly, they adopt another house that floats by.

At first they are worried that they are evicting someone else, or that the residents have perished in the flood. What the reader works out pretty quickly is that this is a floating theatre. The world of stage, props and backdrops is foreign to Moominmamma, Moominpappa et al, and it’s fun to see them discovering what’s going on – helped, sort of, but a grumpy rat (Emma) that lives in the theatre and speaks often of her late husband (who passed when the iron curtain fell on him).

Along the way, some of the gang get arrested for complex reasons, and there are various sidelines about combatting an overly authoritative park keeper and adopting a group of ‘woodies’. There’s a lot going on in quite a short book, and that’s partly because it is a constant chain of events – the characters seem to take most things in their stride, so there isn’t all that much describing their reactions. But there is some lovely humour along the way. I enjoyed Jansson’s riff on the theatre:

‘I want a lion in the play, at all costs,’ Moominpappa replied sourly.

‘But you must write it again, in blank verse! Blank verse! Rhymes won’t do!’ said Emma.

‘What do you mean, blank verse,’ asked Moominpappa.

‘It should go like this: Ti-dum, ti-umty-um – ti-dumty-um-tum,’ explained Emma. ‘And you mustn’t express yourself so naturally.’

Moominpappa brightened. ‘Do you mean: “I tremble not before the Desert King, be he a savage beast or not so savage”?’ he asked.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Emma. ‘Now go and write it all in blank verse. And remember that in all the good old tragedies most of the people are each other’s relatives.’

‘But how can they be angry at each other if they’re of the same family?’ Moominmamma asked cautiously. ‘And is there no princess in the play? Can’t you put in a happy end? It’s so sad when people die.’

‘This is a tragedy, dearest,’ said Moominpappa. ‘And because of that somebody has to die in the end. Preferably all except one of them, and perhaps that one too. Emma’s said so.’

Not being super family with the family and add-ons, I couldn’t remember much about people’s characters. They are sketchily reintroduced, so I know that Moominmamma is reassuring and calm, Moominpappa is kind and imaginative, Little My is angry and looking for affection etc. But I have to admit that I can’t quite get past them all being non-human, made-up creatures. I realise that it is an imaginative failing in me, but though I enjoyed reading Moominsummer Madness, I’d have enjoyed it more if they were all humans and the story was surreal rather than fantastic.

I’ll probably keep reading Moomin books now and then, because I want as much Jansson as I can get. And, yes, this was fun. But I’m so glad that there are plenty of non-Moomin books out there to show how brilliant Jansson was at her best. (Sorry not to write a wholly enthusiastic post for #Moominweek, but I’m glad to participate nonetheless!)

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

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Christopher Isherwood is one of those authors everyone knows about, and you sometimes see mentioned, but whose wide-ranging catalogue of books doesn’t seem to get as much attention as you’d expect. Beyond the sexy German-set novels, what else did Isherwood write? A few years ago I loved Prater Violet, and recently I read one of his much later works – A Meeting By The River (1967). It’s one of his only novels not to be given a Wikipedia page, which might or might not speak to its general reception – but I thought it was really excellent.

The novel (or perhaps novella) is told entirely in letters and diary entries written by two brothers – Oliver and Patrick. They are somewhat estranged. There is clearly a history of power struggles between them, and neither trusts what they read or hear from the other. But, as the first letter shows, Oliver re-opens correspondance because he has something significant to say.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else whould be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcultta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

Oliver is about to be fully received into the Hindu monastery, renouncing the world (though, as he points out to Paddy, this wouldn’t prevent him receiving letters – he is not totally disappearing). Patrick/Paddy writes back an enthusiastic letter full of bonhomie – and the reader thinks it’s going to warm up to being a cheerful tale of brothers reuniting. It is received more or less as such, and Oliver writes back explaining the monastic process a little more. And then Patrick writes back, suggesting that he come and visit Oliver in Calcutta.

And this is the first of many times that Isherwood pulls the rug from under our feet a bit. Because, after this exchange of letters, we get our first taste of Oliver’s diary.

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is.

The reader has also probably ‘accepted what he wrote at its face value’, and I felt quite wrong-footed here. Who was correct? Was it charming, bombastic Patrick – or Oliver, whom I now knew was mistrusting and wary?

This all accelerates when, despite Oliver trying to put him off, Patrick does arrive on the scene. He alleges he’s there to support his brother and find out more about Oliver’s new life and future – but we know from Patrick’s letters to his wife and his mother that he’s trying to dissuade Oliver from taking this step. Oliver is suspicious himself, but goes back and forth on whether he can trust what he’s hearing.

In some ways, A Meeting By The River is quite a simple story of feuding brothers miscommunicating, worn down by years of mistrust and rivalry – yet also bonded in a way that cannot be dismissed. What makes it unusual is the setting in an Indian Hindu monastery. What makes it so brilliant is the way Isherwood constantly wrong-foots the reader. After each letter or diary entry, I felt on firmer ground – then you’d gradually discover how Patrick was lying in a letter, or how Oliver jumped to the wrong conclusions in his diary. Later, Oliver reads some of Patrick’s letters, and the plot thickens further when he suspects Patrick left them out on purpose, so his brother would read his lies.

It’s done so well. Isherwood is so, so good at the ways that people deceive each other (and themselves) – not in big, gradiose, elaborately crafted falsehoods, but in the small, thoughless moments the suit the occasion, without thinking about the wider implications. And that’s before I get to the affair that Patrick is trying to keep hidden…

A Meeting By The River is a slim novel, deceptively simple – but I think it is a masterpiece in miniature. Isherwood may be more remembered for the showy subversion of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, but for my money his real brilliance can be seen on show in quieter, cleverer works like this one.

My Darling Villain by Lynne Reid Banks

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It’s well-documented that I deeply love Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room and its sequels – and somehow it has taken me quite a few years to properly explore the rest of her output. Partly that’s because of how much I enjoy re-reading The L-Shaped Room, and partly it’s because I’ve been worried that the racism and homophobia that I’ve learned to expect and overlook in The L-Shaped Room might be too off-putting in a novel I’m not familiar with. Over the past few years I’ve been taking a deep breath and reading more Lynne Reid Banks.

Well, in 2021 I read The Warning Bell and it was super racist. Last year I read An End To Running and really liked it, with the caveat that it felt like two novels, barely hinged together. Onto My Darling Villain (1977) – which has ended up being the most successful of the lot for me, I’m pleased to say.

Firstly – look, my copy is signed! (Hopefully I have successfully embedded a post from my Instagram here.)

 

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My Darling Villain is, I supposed, a young adult novel – inasmuch as the characters are teenagers and the prose is suitable for a slightly younger audience – but I don’t think I’d have blinked an eye if it were marketed to adults. The main relationship may be between people on the cusp of adulthood, but the whole book is drenched in topics that could work at any age – at least any age in Britain. Because this is a book about that perennial British theme: a relationship between different classes.

The narrator of My Darling Villain is Kate. She has recently turned 15 and is (like so many heroines of such books) not in the first echelon of popularity at her school. She’s probably not in the second either, but she does have some good friends – and, together, they devise a party. It’s intended to catch the attention of a boy she has her eye on, and to be a quiet affair with a handful of people from school. She even invites a girl she actively despises, because they are curious about her mature-sounding boyfriend.

It turns out, of course, that the party is beset with gate-crashers. In an era before the internet, word doesn’t spread as disastrously far as it might – but certainly some unsavoury types come along. Crockery gets broken, food is smeared on the wall, unspeakable things happen in the bathroom, and far too much alcohol is drunk. It’s a disaster. Except for one thing – Kate meets Mark Collins.

At first, she categorises him among the unwelcome hoodlums who are doing dastardly things to the house. But he, in fact, is the one who stays behind to help clean up while others flee. And here is her first proper encounter, earlier in the evening.

“Let’s dance.”

“No thanks.”

“Why not?”

Ridiculous as it seems, I couldn’t find an answer. Except, “Because you’re an erk and I don’t dance with erks.” Maybe I should have said that. But all my life I had seen my father and mother behaving with perfect politeness to everyone who came to our house. They were even polite to the awful men who came to ask for our television licence (we had it all the time), and to the angry father who came to complain that Bruce had knocked his son off his bicycle (a lie) and even to the vicar, whom Dad afterwards described as an oily antediluvian old hypocrtie. Well, maybe Dad himself was the hypocrite, for welcoming the old fellow to his face and being rude behind his back; but I’d got the idea that the important thing was courtesy, especially in one’s own house, and because of that I was too inhibited to tell Mark Collins to get lost. So I danced with him,

He danced very well. You could say he was an expert. I’m crazy about dancing and very few boys I know really can. We danced apart, facing each other, and he fixed his eyes on mine in a strange way I wasn’t used to – our boys don’t look at you when they dance.

It’s clear from the outset that Kate categorises herself and Mark in different, well, categories. He is not one of ‘our boys’. Kate is very middle-class – slightly unconventionally so, since her father is an actor who has made a name for himself in a popular TV drama, but middle-class nonetheless. Mark is very working-class. He rides a motorbike everywhere, lives in a small house with a wide extended family, and is expected to follow his father into working as a mechanic. (Kate’s brother, meanwhile, would love to be a mechanic – but their parents aren’t unconventional enough to allow a career path that involves dropping out of higher education.)

If Mark had been in a very slightly different class, perhaps he could be snubbed. But he is so different from Kate’s that she feels she has to be ‘polite’ to him, and show ‘courtesy’. It is the performative friendliness of the middle-class. But it comes alongside the heart and hormones of a teenager. It isn’t long before Kate is smitten with Mark.

And, reader, I suspect you will be too. I fell rather hard for this pairing too. Perhaps Mark is a bit of wish-fulfilment – he is kind, honest, articulate and, of course, handsome. But Lynne Reid Banks does it well. She has crafted exactly the sort of young man that a heroine like Kate needs to open up her horizons, and to challenge her expectations.

The path isn’t plain sailing, of course. Both families have problems with them dating. Her parents are worried that her schoolwork will suffer if she is too distracted, and anxiously forbid her from getting on the motorbike – but Kate rightly suspect that class prejudice is part of their objections (and, indeed, has hardly shed her own). Mark’s family, meanwhile, feel awkward and unsure around Kate, and can feel the judgement that could come from her side. Lynne Reid Banks is so good at making a relationship – even one between teenagers – feel real and authentic, so that the obstacles they encounter seem organic rather than merely plot points.

Alongside this story are others that feel more uncomfortable – particulary one about a young woman lodging with the neighbours who claims the son of the family has got her pregnant, while nobody (including Kate) believes her. Then there’s the nearby Jewish family who face some anti-Semitism, and Lynne Reid Banks goes awkwardly over the top in her pro-Jewish descriptions, so that it somehow goes full circle and feels a little anti-Semitic itself.

I suppose what I’m saying is that there are plenty of elements in this 1977 novel that wouldn’t appear in a 2024 novel. But nothing terribly objectionable, and certainly nothing to match the racism of The Warning Bell. And Kate and Mark’s rocky teenage relationship feels timeless – certainly class remains a topic that British writers will return to, and Banks doesn’t offer any easy answers. She does give us two very appealing protagonists – flawed, absolutely, but people I ended up caring very deeply about. I can only imagine how heavily I’d have fallen for My Darling Villain if I’d read it as a teenager. I fell pretty hard as a 38-year-old.

 

The Visitors by Mary McMinnies

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On 13 May 2018, Barb at the wonderful Leaves and Pages blog wrote about The Visitors (1958) by Mary McMinnies. According to the note I’ve made inside my copy, it arrived at my flat on 18 May 2018. If you go and read her original review, you’ll know why I had to snap it up instantly. ’10-carat diamond quality, people, 24-carat gold. This is very good stuff indeed,’ she wrote.

So, why did it take me six years to actually read the book? Upon opening it, I saw that it was 574 pages of miniscule font. I calculate that it’s about 275,000 words. And I was too nervous to dive into it.

But, after doing a novella a day in May, I was ready for something mammoth. It took me about six weeks to finish it (while reading lots of other things simultaneously, of course) – but what an experience it was. I so seldom enter this fully, exhaustively into a world.

What is that world? The city and country names are made up, but it is a thinly disguised Krakow, Poland. Larry Purdoe works for the British Foreign Office and has been stationed there – bringing with him the main character of the novel, his wife Milly. Also with them are two squabbling young children and their harassed, anxious, spiteful nanny, Miss Raven. They enter a world filled with rules that aren’t quite explained to them, wielding power from representing a powerful nation, but ultimately rather at sea.

There was one other hotel in the town, with many more rooms, although not so luxurious, but if a foreigner chance to go there first instead of to the Grand, he would invairably be told that all the rooms were occupied and be directed to the Grand, because the Grand was the foreigners’ hotel. Thus matters were simplified for everyone concerned.

Milly put on her nicest tweeds, her thinnest stockings and a new hat and penetrated the labyrinth of rooms. Eventually she stumbled upon Miss Raven buttoning Dermot into gaiters.

“How’s everything going, Miss Raven? All right?”

Miss Raven, who eschewed optimism on principle, and in particular the brand indulged in by employers, did not feel bound to make any such fatuous admission. All she said was: “I’m taking them out.”

Milly is the kind of character so richly complex that it is almost impossible to describe her. On the one hand, she is superficial and greedy. She gets over her head in the black market, so she can buy astoundingly expensive porcelain while people around her are starving. She is charmed and dizzied by the circles she’s in, particularly the Americans. But she is also headstrong – ruling the household, including her husband, and much more socially purposeful than he is. She befriends the impoverished Countess Sophie and snubs a taxi driver; she despises people a couple of rungs below her on the class ladder, but is drawn to a fraught friendship with her kind, impulsive maid, Gisela.

One of my fears, in opening such a long book, is that there would be thousands of characters. In fact, I’ve mentioned almost all the principle people already. I loved that McMinnies poured out all the detail and description over a small cast. We got to know them with such depth. Hardly anything of significance happens – there is an ominous mushroom-picking trip, a run-in with some dangerous types which could turn nasty, and a very funny dinner party. But mostly it is just the day-to-day life of a foreign official’s wife, not really fitting in with either the ex-pat community or the people from ‘Slavonia’ aka Poland. It is layered, layer upon layer, filling those hundreds of pages.

I’m not sure I agree with either of the assessments from the two reviews online – Barb says ‘I dove into it every chance I had, five minutes here, ten minutes there, not wanting to miss a sentence. It was positively addictive.’ Brad’s verdict, at Neglected Books, on the other hand: “It manages to be, at the same time, both highly realistic–indeed, drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic at times, the kind of realism that’s so convincing that it can feel like the writer is holding your head under water and you want to struggle to break free–and utterly artificial.” I don’t think The Visitors is at all a page-turner – it was a novel to langour in, slowly over many days. And I can see why Brad says it is ‘drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic’, but I found it simply deserved a different kind of reading. It couldn’t be rushed. You couldn’t expect something of note to happen on every page, or even in every chapter. It needs to be leapt into, wallowed in, enjoyed on its own utterly un-abbreviated terms.

Tonally, the novel is varied and rich. There is a slightly ironic detachment to much of the description, recognising that Milly is a little absurd – but not absurd enough to truly mock. Some of the novel is rather amusing – I noted down this exchange between Milly and her young daughter, Clarissa:

“There’s something I want to ask.”

Milly softened. “Go ahead.”

“Well, what I was wondering… you’re past your first youth, aren’t you? So–“

“Just say that again?”

“What? Oh… it’s all here… wait, I’ll read it… ‘She was a woman past her first youth, say twenty-six or -seven years old but still comely…’ So what I was wondering was–“

“What book is that?” said Milly weakly. “You know, you read so much.”

“It’s one Abe lent me… and he says I can’t read too much. I haven’t got into it yet. In fact I’ve only got to the first page.”

“Quite far enough, I should say.”

Occasionally, McMinnies will get more serious and even philosophical. There is a section where the narrator berates Milly for failing to identify happiness when she finds it – constantly searching and yearning for it, but not acknowledging it or expecting it in the right places.

And then there were some sections that felt quite experimental – taking advantage of the lazy slowness of the writing to explore details that would be summarised in a handful of words in other novels. Larry hates to see women cry. Those six simple words are transformed into this curiously beautiful passage, mostly one long sentence. It is redundant, in story terms, but it is somehow glorious for that.

He hated tears; all tears, no matter who shed them, he hated them in every way, shape, or form. He hated them in prospect, the quivering lip, the sighs, the twisted handkerchief, the slow welling up; je hated the aftermath, the blotches and hiccups and shininess; he hated them near at hand, snuffled into one’s own clean handkerchief or damping one’s shoulder, he hated them at a distance on the cinema screen. He hated the threat of them, the secret weapon concealed about each female person to be employed at the least hint of an attack; he hated them for the efficacy with which in seconds they could reduce him or any man to the rank of bastard, and whilst hating himself for the bastard he indubitably was, he hated the tears that washed it home to him far more. He hated them as the outward and visible signs of self-pity, as the preface to chapters of remorse which must be ploughed through, which they would freely punctuate before an evening night might be considered well and truly spent. Most particularly he hated those tears whose purpose was to provide ‘relief’; through a vale of tears one would be frog-marched beside her, the weeper, still humbly wishing to do her a service, acknowledging oneself to blame – whilst ‘something in the oven’ burnt to a cinder or one’s own passion grew cold – and when one was permitted to clamber up the other side, panting, when the river of woe had run dry, she, the Niobe, the source of it all, would park up and say brightly: “Now I could do with a sandwich” – or – “You know I’m always this way about this time…” Tears of rage, of fatigue, frustration, petulance, jealousy, boredom; tears for the act of love (shed, at least, after it), tears to accompany weltschmerz, at the sight of the moon, say, or as an agreeably salty appetiser to a re-hash of old letters; tears with a thousnad uses, as a threat, an excuse, an outlet, useful in prevarication, provocation, useful all around the clock – God, even in dreams! – buckets and buckets of crocodile tears. How he hated them. But he had never in his life seen any quite like these.

I’ve not had many experiences like reading The Visitors. Perhaps the closest reading experience was L.P. Hartley’s The Boat. I think it’ll stay with me a long time, as there can’t be many characters I have spent such time with – time both laborious and leisurely, and ultimately completely satisfying. What an unsual, ambitious and ultimately excellent, book.