Mackail

What Next? by Denis Mackail – #1920Club

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I promise not all of the authors I’ve chosen for the 1920 Club begin with ‘Mac’ – but I’ve been meaning to read a few more Denis Mackail novels that I’ve had around for a while. His name is probably familiar to you from Greenery Street, the sweet story of early married life that Persephone republished – but he was prolific and there are plenty of other novels to explore, though most of them are pretty difficult to find. What Next? was his first.

What Next? is set over the course of three days, and it’s rather a dizzying novel in terms of what happens and it terms of how it’s written. The hero, for want of a better word, is Jim. He’s a young, affable, wealthy, rather hopeless young man who is immersed in club life, spends his days doing little of value, and frequently proposes to a young woman called Mary who is very fond of him and refuses to take him seriously. In other words, they’re the sort of young pair familiar to any Edwardian reader of Punch, and who more or less survived the First World War as archetypes, slowly petering out in the decades to follow.

Jim continues to affable but very soon ceases to be wealthy – as the rich relative who had kept him living luxury dies, leaving behind a bankrupt and ruined company. Jim learns in the first pages of the novel that he has been left with practically no money, and must learn to economise. Which he does by going to his club and having dinner, and unloading his cares onto his manservant, Lush.

Lush proves not just to be good at serving drinks and listening – he is also something of a financial mastermind, and needs only capital in order to accumulate enormous riches. And it’s here that we come across the first of the many times that Mackail gives a character an enormously long, expository speech. Lush explains in great detail what he intends to do, but it’s the sort of detail that is more confusing than none – somehow still very abstract, and I left with no real clue what Lush intended to do to re-secure the riches. Luckily Jim seems to be convinced, and lends Lush his last remaining money to give it a go – and Lush disappears.

Jim believes that Lush has absconded with his cash – but no, of course not, he returns and has trebled it! He even explains how, in a long, expository speech – that doesn’t seem even remotely related to what he said he’d do in the first place. Never mind.

Around this point, the novel shifts into being much more about a road trip, unveiling a corrupt fellow, and reuniting Mary and Jim. There’s precious little connection between the first half and the second half – except a fondness for monologues that last several pages. It becomes a sort of romantic moral caper at the end, and the financial stuff that dominated the first half of the novel is quietly forgotten.

So, What Next? shows a great deal of writerly immaturity when it comes to plotting, structure, and exposition. Here’s the weird paradox – I really liked it. Mackail might be weak at those things here, and I’ve seen similar issues in novels he wrote nearly thirty years later, but what he’s so great at is tone. He is great at creating something sprightly, whimsical, joyful. There are hints of A.A. Milne’s ‘Rabbits’, or of a toned-down Wodehouse. Very much of its era, it’s the sort of atmosphere I lap up in a novel – and totally reflective of its era, as is befitting for a club readalong.

And I had to single out this bit to quote…

Of the literary contents of his not inconsiderable library he had a fair but by no means exhaustive knowledge, finding, as many have found, that a book which while still lying unbought and uncut in the monastic odour of a bookseller’s shop cannot be put down, has yet an unaccountable habit of losing its interest when removed to one’s own fireside; and having also fallen a victim to the weakness, only to be indulged in by the rich, which does so much to keep the literary world on its legs, of always ordering the whole of an author’s output whenever he had derived pleasure from a single example of it.

By Auction by Denis Mackail

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Denis Mackail’s 1949 novel By Auction is one I’ve been reading on and off for months, but I finally finished it recently. It’s not his best… it was a little bit of a slog to get through at times, sadly. But I wanted to post a little about it, because there are moments I found brilliant.

The novel is about a young man seeing his ancestral home – or the objects therein – be auctioned off to pay debts and such. As he wakes up for his final morning there, and then sees the auction, it brings back a whirlwind of young memories (particularly of his brother, who died at war) and a series of young women who seem more or less interchangeable to me. The dashes between past and present were slightly confusing, and I couldn’t always work out which young women were where. But, anyway, if I didn’t relish these sections – I loved when Mackail was writing just about the auction. That was captivating, and almost always irrelevant to the plot. And I wanted to share this section on the auction, that I thought was brilliant:

“Going – ” said Mr Murcher, once more. Looked round, but only for an instant, for he knew his own congregation by now; and rapped – for at his desk he no longer just jerked – with the butt-end of his pencil-case. He had now achieved almost his maximum speed.

His skilled, photographic mind knew exactly which members were, except as part of the essential background to this production, no use at all. Which kept their heads. Which could be relied on to lose them. Which wanted larger bits of furniture. Which wanted oddments. Which – very important, this – had a weakness for what in a shop would have been quite unsaleable. Which were quick, which were slow; not always the same thing as which were rash and which were cautious. Which were rich, yet perhaps mean. Which were poorer, yet if led on, and personally addressed – for he would remember all names, too, or get them swiftly from his clerk – might be reckless.

He was a conductor. This was a symphony. Unrehearsed, and in a sense with a new score. But he was attuned to it. One symphony, after all, if you have experience, is much like another. The pencil-case was his baton. It started each theme. It singled out strings, brass, woodwind, or percussion; in other words the various characters gathered round him. Occasionally it combined them, in a great, orchestral swell. Then it paused. “Going – ” he said. The theme was over. He began again.

There was ballet, too; of a somewhat simple yet rhythmic nature. For perpetually, as he spoke, cajoled, jeered – Tod sometimes felt that he went a bit far with his jeering, but had to admit that it often gained its effect – or cracked jokes, the four strong men, singly, in pairs, or once or twice as a trio, came gliding up the gangway or in from the wings, with objects and articles of different sizes.

Always, or almost always, as one object or article was being exhibited and appraised, another was being removed, and yet a third was awaiting its turn. The strong men were quite expressionless. They neither led the laughter – not that Mr Murcher was so inexpert as to crack a joke every time – nor joined in it. Nor, again, did they seem aware of the baton.

Yet their steady, relentless coming and going, and the gradual but incessant redistribution of the goods in the tent, was more than rhythmic; it was slightly hypnotic. At one and the same moment you could see what you had lost or won, what you must instantly decide whether to go for or not, and what was on the point of taking its place.

Past, present, and future, as one might say, formed the basis of this choreography; which as calculated to disturb even the steadiest nerves, for who can bear all three together?

Ian and Felicity by Denis Mackail

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Ian and FelicityFans of Greenery Street – one of the loveliest of Persephone Book’s novels, about a young married couple being happy – may not know that there were a couple of sequels. One is a collection of short stories that I haven’t read, and I have an inkling that not all of them feature Ian and Felicity Foster; one of them features them SO much that they’re right there in the title. Ian and Felicity was published in 1932, seven years after Greenery Street. That doesn’t sound that long, but prolific Mr Mackail had published eight books (!!) in between – and so it is with a sense of nostalgia that we head back to the young couple to find out how they’re getting on down the line.

I should add at this point that Ian and Felicity is extremely difficult to track down, and the copy I read belongs to my friend Kirsty (who somehow managed to find a copy on ebay). I borrowed it approximately a zillion years ago, but finally got around to reading it a little while ago.

In America, the novel was called Peninsula Place – and that gives you a clue that the setting has changed a little. Ian and Felicity have outgrown their Greenery Street flat, and now have two children and a bigger town house a little way away from their first marital home and another step up the property ladder. They look back fondly (as the reader must) on that happy place – but this replacement is no less happy. Mackail (thank goodness!) has not started writing a gritty novel or a miserable one. Things continue in much the same tone – though with added parental anxieties, and the occasional wondering (often quickly quashed in slightly over the top internal self-reflection) whether life wasn’t all a bit simpler back in the Greenery Street days.

I loved reading Ian and Felicity. It was light and fun and an antidote to the unhappy marriages that populate so many novels – even those that are otherwise not unhappy books. My main qualm with it was the complete and utter lack of plot. I don’t need a lot to happen, but I would have liked more structure to the novel – it’s so episodic that it feels more like a series of notes, or loosely linked vignettes, than a novel. It wasn’t a big obstacle, but I don’t think it would have taken much to give this more of an overarching structure, and it would have lifted the novel into a whole new territory. (My only other qualm was how much Ian seems to loathe spending even a moment with his children, and how normal and admirable we’re supposed to think this; different times, of course, but this is not a model of every 1930s fictional father.)

But, as I say, it was still a lot of fun. Here’s a bit of the opening, to give you a taste:

“Dinner!” said Felicity, as she passed the open drawing-room door. “Come along, darling!”

“What’s that?” said her husband’s voice.

“Dinner, darling.”

“Supper, you mean,” said Ian’s voice; but he was coming. “Don’t exaggerate,” he said, actually appearing. “I’ve been in to look once, and I know just what we’ve got. Blancmange, again.”

“Well, darling, you know it’s Sunday.”

“As if I could forget it,” said Mr. Foster. But he smiled as he pulled down the front of his waistcoat, and he would certainly have pinched his wife’s arm with his other hand, if she hadn’t dodged him and gone through into the dining-room.

Harmless fun, isn’t it? Impossible to find a copy, but if you badger your local library, they might find one in the stacks. Or you might strike it lucky like Kirsty – keep an eye out on ebay!

 

The Majestic Mystery by Denis Mackail

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This review is part of The 1924 Club. To discover more, and see all the reviews so far from across the blogosphere, visit my hub post or Karen’s hub page. Do keep new and old 1924 review links coming, and thanks for all the contributions so far!

Denis MackailWhen I was thinking about which obscurer authors I could sample for The 1924 Club, Denis Mackail came to mind. He is best known now as the author of the Persephone title Greenery Street and as Angela Thirkell’s brother. My housemate Kirsty had recently been reading and enjoying his books, and I had been intending to read more ever since I read Greenery Street in 2004. Despite a few of his titles on my shelves, I still hadn’t got around to it – but I didn’t own his 1924 novel The Majestic Mystery. Indeed, looking at the prices online for the very few available copies, I was surprised that anybody owned it. And then I discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that it had been released as an unabridged audiobook. I signed up for  free trial at Audible and was able to hear it.

The difficulty with blogging about an audiobook, of course, is that it’s much harder to check back for details – and much harder to give quotations. So this will necessary be a sketchier post than if I’d read the hard copy – forgive me! And there will also be some spoilers, though I shan’t say whodunnit.

The Majestic Mystery was Mackail’s only detective novel, if such it can be called – it belongs to the ‘amateur sleuth’ realm, and few sleuths come more amateur than this. Peter is our man; he has been on holiday to The Majestic Hotel with his friend James; they are both journalists on a newspaper, keen to rise above the literary pages and start covering front page news. And front page news takes place in front of them – in the form of the murder, by shooting, of a theatre manager who is staying at the hotel. Peter happened to be in the corridor at the time – so why didn’t he hear a gunshot, and should he be protecting the pretty young woman who ran out of the room just before he entered?

The hallmarks of a brilliant detective story are many and various, but – in the best – characters behave logically, and blind alleyways take place despite (rather than because of) the characters’ actions. Well, in The Majestic Mystery nobody seems to follow much logic. Peter decides to protect a woman solely because she is pretty – he has just met her, and has no idea whether or not she is innocent, and it causes all manner of delays and confusions. He sees somebody hide something down the back of the sofa, but can’t be bothered to cross the room to find out what it is. He tells all manner of lies for no obvious reasons.

And yet he is extremely affable, as is James – indeed, they are extremely similar. They come from the same school as a lot of A.A. Milne’s characters – witty, well-meaning, whimsical. They are incapable of being particularly serious, even in the face of murder, and do seem unusually stupid at times. The plot may be littered with unlikelihoods, but the writing is a delight. I wish I could quote it, but it’s the sort of light-hearted, insouciant, and extremely amusing prose that I love reading so much. Mackail does have an extremely light touch, and it more than makes up for a flimsy plot.

So, what sort of detecting does take place? As with seemingly all non-Christie practitioners of the genre, coincidence plays a large part. People also can never be at a scene without leaving some object behind them. And then, to cap it all, the only reason the mystery gets solved is because the culprit decides – apropos of nothing – to confess all to Peter about a year after the event.

Perhaps you can see why Mackail didn’t return to whodunnits. His is far from the weakest I have read, and there is a neat and almost plausible twist, but his strengths lie in prose rather than plot. A great detective novel can have good prose, of course, but what it really requires is a brilliant use of plot.

I should put in a word for the narrator Steven Crossley, who does a brilliant job both with the narrative and with the different voices. I’d definitely listen to him again, and he is pretty prolific. If you fancy joining in the 1924 Club and can listen to eight hours before the end of the week (!) then I certainly recommend The Majestic Mystery as being great fun, if not great genius.