Project Names

Conversation With Max by S.N. Behrman

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Yes, I’m still working my way through #ProjectNames reviews, and am likely to do so for a while longer! Conversation With Max is a 1960 book by S.N. Behrman, and if that name sounds familiar then you might have come across Duveen, which was reprinted a few years ago and which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. That was a biography of a bizarre art dealer, and this is a memoir of a friendship with Max Beerbohm – so Behrman is nothing if not eclectic.

Beerbohm is chiefly remembered today for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson, about a woman so beautiful that all the undergraduates in Oxford drown themselves. I’ve read a couple volumes of his essays and have many more, but I don’t think I really understood what a cultural figure Beerbohm was in the early twentieth century – or at least according to Behrman.

The structure of Conversation With Max belies the singular ‘conversation’, in that Behrman returns several times to Beerbohm’s house – to hear stories of his long writing career and his life. The former apparently started when he wrote an impassioned piece about make-up in an Oxford undergraduate magazine, which seems as unlikely a start to a writing career as any.

I have a soft spot for memoirs of writers that come from a specific and subjective angle – whether that be H.G. Wells from the perspective of his children’s governness, Walter de la Mare from someone who went to tea, or Ivy Compton-Burnett through the lens of her secretary. (Yes, those are all real examples of books I have actually read.) Behrman perhaps forges his own connection, as a fan and journalist, but there is a definite sense of sitting in Beerbohm’s home, hearing his stories, and being in the presence of a biographer who is happily overstating the importance of a single cultural figure. He is not pretending to be objective. Here’s the opening:

The hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max Beerbohm. I first made Max’s acquaintance, one might say, in the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian. When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign “RAPALLO” (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there. I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer of 1952, it came about.

(The book also seems to have appeared as a series of articles – the first is available online, if this opening has caught your attention.)

At the time, Beerbohm was known as much for his drawn caricatures as his writing. It’s hard to recognise the impact that individual caricatures could have, in this era where every public figure is open to ridicule or affectionate mockery at any moment of any day. I suppose, also, that the sphere of intellectual life was smaller and more insular. Whether or not you are interested in Beerbohm’s output in art and literature, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Conversation With Max presents one artist/writer’s life through nostalgia and anecdote.

And that’s what made this book special to me. Not so much the individual examples chosen, but that a book of this sort exists – affectionate, leisurely, and somehow revealing the life of a writer more intimately than the most tell-all biography. Because, by the end, we also feel like we have been invited into Beerbohm’s home, and have become his friend.

Love Notes From Freddie by Eva Rice

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I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.

Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.

The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.

They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.

Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.

From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.

So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.

Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

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Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

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I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

Ann and Her Mother by O. Douglas

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Image result for ann and her mother o douglasAlongside a few others, I picked up an O. Douglas novel in homage to a friend called Sarah – I’ve written a little bit about her, and why, at the bottom of this post. Like the other Douglas novel I read this year, this one was kindly given to me by my friend Emily’s mum, and it came from her mother’s library.

I chose Ann and Her Mother (1922) because it fit Project Names, and it turns out to be a little different from the other two I’ve read – Pink Sugar and The Proper Place. Both of those novels have quite a lot of plot and movement – whereas Ann and Her Mother takes place entirely across a handful of days, in conversation between Ann and – you guessed it – her mother. Ann is in her late 20s and her mother is what the 1920s considered old. Certainly she is old enough that Ann thinks it’s appropriate to write down an account of her life. The novel does acknowledge that there wouldn’t be a wide public for the ghostwritten memoir of a minister’s widow, and does so with a nod and a wink – because this is exactly what is written.

Another review I’ve read points out that it’s very autobiographical, but I don’t know enough about O. Douglas’s life to notice the similarities – other than that she was really called Anna Buchan, sister of the famous novelist John. In the novel, at least, the mother’s life has been dominated by the death of four people – recently, her husband; longer ago, two sons in war and a daughter in infancy. Douglas manages to write about the death of this young innocent in a way that sidesteps the mawkish because it is so heartfelt and genuine.

The loss of these four aside, there is much to amuse in their reminiscences of being respectively a minister’s wife and a minister’s daughter. Ann is a little quicker to see the ridiculous than her mother, and is occasionally reprimanded for not depicting the locals kindly. And she writes very well about growing up in the manse – having grown up in a vicarage myself, this rang SO true:

“I do so agree,” said Ann; “‘a bright, interested expression’ is far too often demanded of ministers’ wives and families. What a joy to scowl and look listless at a time. You know, Mums, a manse is a regular school for diplomatists. It is a splendid training. One learns to talk to and understand all sorts of people—just think what an advantage that gives one over people who have only known intimately their own class! And you haven’t time to think about yourself; you are so on the alert to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. You have to try and remember the affairs of each different member, how many children they possess, and all about them, and be careful to ask at the right moment for the welfare of each.”

I have seldom read a less urgent novel. It is not one to keep you up late reading to find out what happens. There is almost no pace. But that is deliberate, and it perfectly suits a certain reading mood. I enjoyed easing myself into it in an evening, letting the gentleness wash over me. However painful the topics covered, this is not a painful book to read. The affection the two have for each other, and their optimism and faith, makes it an ideal novel to soak in.

Douglas does anticipate the inevitable criticism of the novel, as not being edgy enough, by having Ann send the unfinished manuscript of her mother’s Life to a friend…

“Here’s a nice state of things,” said Ann.

“Is anything wrong?” asked her mother.

“Well, I don’t know whether you would call it wrong or right. Mr. Philip Scott sends me back my MS., with his criticism of it. I agree with most of the things he says: my language is too incorrigibly noble, my quotations are very frequent——”

“But if they’re good quotations,” Mrs. Douglas interrupted.

“Oh, they’re good quotations. ‘It was the best butter,’ as the poor March Hare said. But what he objects to most is the sweetness of it. He says, ‘Put more acid into it.'”

Reader, she does not put more acid into it. This novel is entirely absent of acid. Perhaps it would feel too saccharine in some moods, and I did tend to pick it up only when it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read – but, at those times, it could scarcely be bettered. And is mercifully light on the Scottish dialect, impenetrable to non-Scots like myself!

And here’s a bit about Sarah, and how I came to pick up the novel.

It’s odd to mourn a friend that you’ve never met. I’ve been in an online book group since 2005, and it has settled into the same handful of like-minded readers for about the past ten years. We don’t all read the same books, but we have similar taste – and it is a lovely place to share reading tastes and recommendations. And, of course, other aspects of life come alongside. We’ve all become friends – and those of us in the UK meet up once a year. I’ve met a couple of the readers from the US. But I never met Sarah.

She was a very active member of the group, often starting and continuing conversations. She was encouraging, kind, and funny, and the group relished having her. Earlier this year she died, and I miss her contributions deeply – despite not even really knowing what she looked like. But I knew more important things, like her love for her husband and family, her infectious love of reading, and her favourite authors. Among them was O. Douglas, and several of us in the group used reading an O. Douglas novel as a way of saying thank you and farewell to Sarah.

The Wells of St Mary’s by R.C. Sherriff

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I was a little late in the day to R.C. Sherriff, but have now read and loved all three of his novels that Persephone publish – with Greengates being my favourite, I think. And naturally it made me want to read more of his. Bello have republished a few as ebooks and POD, but I got this quirky little paperback online relatively cheaply – and, while on holiday, read The Wells of St Mary’s (1962). It’s a few decades later than the Persephone novels, but every bit as good.

Our narrator is Peter Joyce, who lives in a large house on the outskirts of a village called St Mary’s. He is a magistrate and retired colonel. The Joyces have lived there for many years, but being landed gentry doesn’t bring the same riches it once did. Joyce is rather down on his luck financially, at least compared to his family’s former wealth – he does still have a butler – and its made him a bit cautious to invite old friends to stay. But one old friend does come – Lord Colindale (whom he also calls Colin – is his name Colin Colindale??) They haven’t been in touch for a while, and when Lord Colindale arrives, Joyce sees why – Colindale was renowned for being a powerful man of politics, journalism, and public life, and now he can’t move more than a few feet without the use of crutches. His vitality has been taken by rheumatism.

Don’t stop reading, if you think a novel about rheumatism doesn’t sound very gripping! I should also mention that, very early on, Joyce says that the account he is writing is connected with a murder. We don’t know who will be murdered, and we are constantly watching out for developments in the novel, to see who the victim and perpetrator will be, and why.

While taking his friend on a short tour of the village, they come across St Mary’s Well. It is on Joyce’s land, and still manned by an old man who has worked for the family since Joyce’s grandfather’s time – if ‘worked’ is the word, since he is often drunk and very few people come to the wells. It has been used since Roman times, and there is a building around the well, but the locals wouldn’t dream of going – and the number of tourists fighting their way down the overgrown path to the well is dwindling. But it has supposedly miraculous health-restoring qualities, and Colindale decides to take a drink.

And – yes! He finds the next morning that he doesn’t need his crutches. He is miraculously cured by the water of the well!

From here, things in the village start to change. Colindale uses his public position to tell the world about the well – and the next day the roads are jammed with cars getting there. The village puts together a committee to decide how they will make the most of this potential windfall, and most of the villagers sink their savings into shares. After all these highs, obviously not all will go well… but that’s all I’m going to say. And it’s obvious from early on, because Sherriff ends an awful lot of chapters with things like ‘but that was before the worst day of our lives’ etc.

I love fantastic fiction, and the premise of this novel puts it in that category. But more than that, I love Sherriff’s writing. In all of his novels, he is so, so good at unshowy writing that just drags you in and keeps you captivated, while being constantly gentle and character-led. It’s a real gift, and the sort of talent that doesn’t come around all that often. Whatever his genre or his idea, he gets us right in the midst of the community – he can sell any premise without the reader blinking an eye, and there is as much nuanced humanity in his sci-fi post-apocalypse as in the tale of a retired couple buying a house as there is in this novel about a miraculous well.

I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be enough fiction on my end-of-year list, but this would be a worthy addition. And now I need to track down the rest of his novels, evidently…

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Quite a while ago I was asking Twitter what recommendations I could get for funny, well-written, modern fiction. All the modern fiction I read – which is admittedly not much – seems to be quite serious. So I wanted the twenty-first-century equivalent of all those twentieth-century writers who knew how to be funny AND turn their hand to prose.

One of the suggestions that came up more than once was Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer, which has the added distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend Tom even lent me his copy – and, even better, it turned out to be a surprise entry for Project Names, where I’m reading lots of books with people’s names in the title. Because our main character is one Arthur Less. I never worked out if this was intended to sound like half-or-less, or if it would require a very particular English accent to get that from it.

As it satirised at one point in the novel, Less is a middle-class, middle-aged white man with sorrows. Though undoubtedly living a privileged existence, he is definitely on the unhappy side of things. His writing career is rather lacklustre (“too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”), he is single, and as the novel opens he is (a) not recognised by the person organising a sci-fi event he is supposed to chair, and (b) receives a wedding invitation from an ex-boyfriend. In order to avoid the wedding and the unacknowledged feelings it would bring, Less decides to accept all the author engagements that he usually ignores. Wherever they are in the world.

As luck would have it, they all neatly line up and take him across the globe. But he is usually not wanted for his own work, but because – in his youth – he was the lover of a revered, older poet. That seems to have secured whatever reputation he does have.

Usually I find this sort of structure to a novel quite annoying – where it’s just a series of events, without a central momentum or the same set of characters to engage with. I don’t know how Greer makes it so compelling, but he certainly does. I thought Less was very good indeed – and, yes, very funny. Part of that humour came from more orchestrated humour, like Less’s belief that he speaks good German (cleverly rendered in an English translation); a lot is a gentle ongoing satire of the life of a very self-conscious, not very happy writer. Even where he is revered, he realises it is because his translator is an excellent writer. He is simply a mediocre man not quite able to accept that mediocrity – for who, after all, accepts their mediocrity.

And despite this, Less is not the butt of all the jokes by any means. The reader becomes very fond of him. I wouldn’t say I was desperate for a happy ending, but I certainly sympathised with him – Greer has the impressive gift of writing warmly about a character without writing dishonestly about him. I don’t know how much is a self-portrait, other than Greer is, like Less, also a gay writer nearing 50 who hadn’t previously had enormous success with his novels.

The things that happen in the different countries, and the transitory other characters who pop up, don’t feel as important as this central portrait. Indeed, I only finished the novel recently and I can’t remember much of the plot. But I do remember the commitment to a character and a lightly satirical style that must have been very difficult to pull off – and I can see why the Pulitzer Prize would want to reward this sort of assured writing.

 

 

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

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I loved this book! It was one of those times when I had to decide between racing through it and treating myself to a few pages at a time – and I went largely for the latter route, reading a bit with my breakfast each morning.

I bought The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne back in 2013 in Malvern, and have been a bit nervous about picking it off the shelves. I thought it might give away the endings to all the Christies I haven’t read, which is probably about half of them. My fears were allayed as soon as I read the preface – Osborne promises not to give away any murderers or major spoilers, and he sticks to this throughout.

The book goes through Christie’s works one by one, in order. Each section gives some context about Christie’s life at the time, a few details about the set up of the novel, what the critics and public thought etc. There’s about two pages per book – which, considering how many she wrote, comes together for a very satisfying book. Osborne is so good about giving you a taste of what makes each book original. In a short space, he might tell us how it fits into Poirot’s career, how Christie was inspired to begin, how it was reviewed, whether there were adaptations. He is remarkably good at hinting at a novel’s ingenuity – or, alternatively, if it repeated a trick or wasn’t as convincing as others – without giving a single jot away. There are plenty of biographical details about Christie, even though this isn’t quite  a biography. He gets the combination of elements perfectly.

And this is a critical work, in the sense that he shares his opinions. He’s not afraid to point out some of her weaker work, but he is obviously also an avid fan – most of the time he is enthusiastic and picks out the reasons why he likes the books. It’s not quite an out-and-out appreciation, but nor is it one of those dispiriting works where the writer seems to have chosen a subject they barely respect. Osborne writes very affectionately. And he is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Christie, and I enjoyed the times where he points out that other Christie critics got things a bit wrong.

I really enjoyed Osborne’s tone of voice, and his very English sense of humour. For example…

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so.

He’s also not afraid to point out errors in Christie’s novels, with the acuity of the superfan. This section is perhaps not quite representative, as it is more detailed than most, but…

Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were the singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews and in the novel Evil Under the Sun; (iv) the plot another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel A Murder is Announced; (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate.

This is one of the few times when he names which novels/stories share traits – a little unfair, if you happen to have read one but not the other. More often he’ll just say that something appeared earlier, without specifying where.

Osborne clearly knows a lot about opera and music, and it is these areas where he often picks up on errors. Elsewhere, he teasingly decides to pretend Christie deliberately included the mistakes – for instance, suggesting that Poirot’s inaccurate French is clearly a result of spending too much time in England, or that Miss Marple has got absent-minded and forgetful when certain details don’t line up.

I mostly enjoyed Osborne’s personality shining through. It’s a little less palatable when he goes on a tangent about how longer jail terms are needed for criminals, or a very unnecessarily impassioned defence of the use of the n-word in the original title to And Then There Were None. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is cut in the revised and updated edition from 2000, that I don’t have.

But his other quibbles are all part of the charm for me, and make it feel even more like you’re listening to a keen fan discussing their favourite author.

As I say, I’ve read about half or so of Christie’s books, and I probably wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hadn’t read any or many. I definitely enjoyed reading about books I knew a bit more than those I didn’t. But to anybody who loves Christie – this is a total delight.