Mackenzie

OK, that’s it. I’m going to have to start buying all the Compton Mackenzie novels I see, aren’t I? I read Buttercups and Daisies (1931) before my 25 Books challenge started, but didn’t manage to write about it – and I bought it in Hay on Wye recently. I always like to start one of the books I buy on holiday, and the intriguing opening pages of this one made it my nomination.

Here are the opening paragraphs – which, accompanied by an illustration of Mr W, were what made me both buy the book and start it immediately:

“This,” Mr. Waterall announced, on a fine Saturday morning in late September, as he gazed over the top of his paper at his wife, “this is what I have been looking for for years.”

Mrs. Waterall’s impulse was to suppose that her husband was enjoying one of those little triumphs to which he was periodically addicted. He had a habit of putting articles away in safe places, forgetting the place immediately afterwards, and accusing every member of his family, from his wife to the boy who came in to do the knives, of having interfered with his arrangements for security. Mrs. Waterall could not be blamed for assuming that. This was one of the mislaid treasures.

“For years!” Mr. Waterall portentously repeated. “Have the goodness to listen, my dear.”

Mrs. Waterall, realising that her husband wanted to read something from the Daily Telegraph, jumped to the conclusion that he had discovered another cure for baldness. She hoped it would not be as complicated a cure as the last one he had tried, when he had sat for two hours in the bathroom every Sunday morning, wearing upon his head a hemisphere of indiarubber which has kept firm by the vacuum and was connected by a long tube to an electrical apparatus emitting fizzes and blue sparks.

But what he has actually found, in fact, is a cottage in Hampshire for sale. I say cottage – it is a ‘two-roomed bungalow’, but Mr Waterall has bold ideas about what he can turn it into. He doesn’t intend to move his wife, daughter, and two sons there permanently – but he certainly intends for it to be their country house. Off he goes, to meet the man selling it. For some reason, I can never get enough of house hunting scenes in novels, particularly if they’re amusing ones, and Mackenzie’s is a corker. It becomes more and more apparent that the man selling the bungalow is a charlatan, who lies and evades questions and flatters Mr Waterall’s ego until he has agreed to take it. All he needs to do is add a few more rooms, buy some trees, and he’ll be good to go.

The novel shows how his long-suffering wife, adventurous boys, and simpering girl (simpering mostly because she knows how best to placate him for her own advantage, to the ire of her brothers) are carted out to the middle of nowhere. All does not go well. The buttercups and daisies of the title are certainly ironic. Little Phyllis falls down a well. A cow wanders in, because they don’t have a back door to the kitchen. The neighbours range from amiably mad to obstreperous.

And I loved reading all of it.

The other Mackenzie novel I’ve read, Poor Relations, was also very funny – with a put-upon protagonist whose success comes with the price of having all manner of relatives expect to live off him. In Buttercups and Daisies, we exchange an empathetic lead for one who is a well-meaning tyrant. His absolute certainty of his own rightness, and the fact that he blights lives around him without being remotely malicious, puts him in the fine tradition of characters like Mr Pooter. Mackenzie is a very amusing writer, with an excellent use of the narrative voice that undermines the character – and it’s all extremely funny.

As the novel goes on, we get more from the brothers’ perspectives, which I found a trifle less enjoyable – perhaps because it feels like we’re supposed to be on their side as they plot pranks, trespass etc., and they didn’t seem particularly likeable to me. And the tide of the novel gets taken up with whether or not the community should be called Oaktown or Oak, which does work as a conceit, but comes a bit late in the day to be the main thrust of the novel.

So, it’s not perfect – but, particularly in the first half, it’s rather wonderful. And the second half is also fab, even if I wish Mackenzie hadn’t broadened his focus so much. But one element that doesn’t falter is the ego and bravado of Mr Waterall. How I wish there were a sequel, so I could find out more about him!

There isn’t a sequel, but there are an awful lot of other Mackenzie novels out there. It seems a shame that he is basically synonymous with Whisky Galore and nothing else, when he clearly was far from a one-trick pony. Any recommendations from anyone?

(To kick off: everybody in the UK, and around the world, is thinking about Brexit at the moment. I don’t think I have the heart to talk about it myself here, because it has broken my heart a little and – combined with our last general election – I no longer feel like I recognise or understand my own country. Victoria has written about it all brilliantly. And now I’m going to seek solace in books.)

One of the books I read while I was in Edinburgh was by the appropriately-Scottish Compton Mackenzie. Like most people, I think all I knew about him was that he’d written Whisky Galore (which I haven’t read, though I’ve seen a bit of the film) and that his first name wasn’t Crompton (he often comes up when I’m looking for Richmal Crompton books by people who’ve made that error). It actually wasn’t Compton either, it was Edward, but let’s move on.

Well, according to the good people of Hutchinson’s “Pocket” Library – perhaps they put that in inverted commas because nobody has pockets big enough to fit this paperback – Poor Relations is a ‘famous novel’, and according to the Evening Standard, quoted on the cover, it is “Very witty and very amusing”. BOTH those things AT ONCE, people. (They aren’t wrong.)

The novel was Mackenzie’s seventh, published in 1919, and he went on to publish dozens of other novels before his death in 1972, including (I discover, on reading his Wikipedia article) one which is a sequel to Poor Relations. I also learn from Wikipedia that he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, as I did (floreat Magdalena!), and co-founded the SNP, as I did not.

I shall certainly look out for more by Mackenzie, as I loved Poor Relations. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t something as funny as this – his turn of phrase reminded me a lot of Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, and the whole novel has the sort of levity that characterises the best of early-20th-century insouciant fiction.

John did possess another cap, one that just before he left England he had bought about dusk in the Burlington Arcade, one that in the velvety bloom of a July evening had seemed worthy of summer skies and seas, but that in the glare of the following day had seemed more like the shreds of barbaric attire that are brought back by travellers from exotic lands to be taken out of a glass case and shown to visitors when the conversation is flagging on Sunday afternoons in the home counties.

The main character is a John Touchwood. He is – as the narrative often reminds us – a ‘successful romantic playwright and unsuccessful realistic novelist’, and has made something of a fortune at plays which the public love and the intelligentsia rather despise. That intelligentsia include his brother and his brother-in-law, one of whom is a critic who makes no bones about his own infinite literary superiority, the other of whom was recently a vicar but has decided to leave that life in order to become, himself, a playwright. Both are insufferably pompous and rude to longsuffering John, and both are hilarious to read about.

In every direction, Touchwood is besieged by ‘poor relations’ – and they are more than willing to impose. Whether it is that ex-vicar moving into his country house and (without permission) erecting a garden room in which to write, or his other in-laws ditching their children with him a refusing to panic when they are lost in a zoo, John’s patience is repeatedly tried.

The novel is quite episodic. There is something of a romance storyline thrown in, with an admirably unflappable woman whom he hires as his secretary and who insists on behaving professionally until… well, you can probably imagine that there is a happy conclusion. Before that, we move from relative to relative, often returning to the same ones again, but without much evolution in the way they treat John. Which makes sense – how many of us have sharply changing relationships with our nearest and dearest?

John himself is very likeable. He is put-upon but not weak, and he gives as could as he gets in determined ripostes and eloquent rebuttals – while still putting his hand in his pocket most of the time, despite the lack of gratitude he gets from all sides. He reminds me of characters that A.A. Milne might have created in his Punch stories, albeit perhaps slightly steelier when needed.

After reading Poor Relations, I kept coming across Mackenzie novels in secondhand bookshops – but I didn’t really know where to start, especially since he wrote so many. They were all chunky hardbacks, so I left them there rather than weigh down my luggage – but if anybody has any suggestions for others they’ve enjoyed, that would be very welcome. And I heartily recommend tracking down a copy of Poor Relations!