Project Names

Omar by Wilfrid Blunt (25 Books in 25 Days #12)

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Ok, I really like this one. I can’t remember quite why I picked it off a shelf in 2013, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have bought it because of that wonderful cover – and because it’s about a theme that I’m interested in: fantastically anthropomorphised animals. Indeed, I wrote a section of my DPhil thesis on this, and bought this novel about a month after I submitted my final thesis. Thank goodness, being published in 1966, that Omar by Wilfrid Blunt was too late to be relevant for my remit anyway.

That cover illustration is by John Verney, and does a good job of selling the novel – but also leaps about halfway through it! The subtitle ‘a fantasy for animal lovers’ is also apt, and the narrator is certainly that. She is Rose Bavistock – an unmarried woman approaching fifty years old. She has recently lost her father (after complications when an otter bit him), but isn’t unduly upset. Animals mean a lot more to her than people do. She has had many and various pets, and enjoys the more exotic ones. So she is quite excited when she is given a bandersnatch, which she names Omar.

Blunt has borrowed the name ‘bandersnatch’ from Lewis Carroll (now perhaps more famous as a Black Mirror episode), but the novel claims that it is the same as the hyrax. Look up the hyrax; they’re cute! Anyway, after initially biting her, Omar becomes an affectionate pet and companion. But Rose starts to wonder if he is more intelligent than he lets on…

When she discovers that he knows some English, and can even read it, she is astonished. But that is just the beginning of the marvel…

I expected to like this, given my love for fantastic literature (I disagree with his use of ‘fantasy’ in the subtitle, but that’s one for people interested in fantasy theory). And I did more than like it – the novel is so charming. It was published in 1966, but reads more like a book from thirty years earlier. There is a certain nostalgic element to the novel, and Rose’s life is almost as atavistic as Omar’s. The twists that follow the revelation of the fantastic are handled well, and sustain the original conceit.

The only thing I’d mention, in comparing it to other novels in this genre like His Monkey Wife by John Collier and Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan, is that this is not a parable or fable. It doesn’t comment on its current society or contemporary anxieties, at least so far as I can tell. There’s no reason why it should, I suppose, but fantastic novels that do do that tend to have a little more depth. Omar is self-contained with very little to say about the world. It’s no the less charming for that, but it is a curio, seemingly divorced from context. And I’m very glad that I got it down from the shelf.

Letters to Louise by Theodore Dreiser (25 Books in 25 Days: #11)

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I love reading a collection of letters, and presumably that’s why I bought a copy of Letters to Louise (1959) – a collection of letters that Theodore Dreiser wrote to his friend and editor Louise Campbell (who was edited this book and wrote the commentary between letters). It certainly wasn’t because I had any affection for Theodore Dreiser, whom I have never read – though Sister Carrie has been on my shelf for a long time. Having said that, it might have gone in the moving-house-cull.

Dreiser tended to write quite short letters, often signed with alternative names (James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, etc.), but Campbell’s commentary is useful and engaging. And what I enjoyed most was the fondness and admiration that Dreiser manages to get into his letters – admiration for her editing talent. Since they met when she wrote him a letter chastising him for criticising Philadelphia, it’s impressive that he was open to the friendship at all.

Books like this are always a bit better when you get both sides of the exchange, which Letters to Louise doesn’t have, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like I know Dreiser pretty well from this short collection – or one part of his personality, anyway – and it’s fun to have Project Names and 25 Books in 25 Days come together to get something unexpected off my shelves.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (25 Books in 25 Days #10)

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is one of the books that has been on my shelves the longest, I think. I bought it in a library sale in 2004, and it has hidden on my shelves ever since – and I haven’t even seen the film. Basically all my knowledge about it comes from the famous image of Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder and the song ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. Which is a great song.

About ten years ago, I read In Cold Blood by Capote, and I wasn’t super keen to read more by him. Yes, it was very good – but it was so deeply unpleasant that it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it’s stupid to dismiss an author based on one book, particularly when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so very different – and, indeed, I was totally beguiled by it.

Our narrator opens by saying that he hasn’t seen Holly Golightly (full name Holiday Golightly! I did not know that before) for years, but used to live in the same building as her – and first encountered her properly when she kept ringing his doorbell whenever she got home at 2am or 3am. I’d somehow picked up somewhere that Holly was a prostitute, but she is not. She is a ‘cafe society girl’, whatever that means. And it chiefly seems to mean living a bohemian life with a stream of men, but guarding her independence and only giving as much as she chooses.

Holly is a wonderful creation. Any number of authors want to make a spirited, lively female character, but she is no manic pixie dream girl. She is vibrant on her own terms – initiating conversations (by, say, knocking at the narrator’s fire escape in the early hours), chopping and changing what is on her mind in a dizzying way. She is always finding new ways to express her thoughts, and refusing to bow to expectations. And there is an underlying dignity, despite any undignified place she might find herself. I think Capote achieves all of this through the dialogue he gives her. It’s a tour de force, and I’m wondering how the film lives up to it.

Screwtop Thompson by Magnus Mills (25 Books in 25 Days #9)

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I’d identified a few very short books for when my days are super busy – and Screwtop Thompson (2010) by Magnus Mills was on that list. I had plans at lunch and after work, so these 110pp (with very big font) were just right to squeeze in around the edges – though I hadn’t remembered that they were short stories. Indeed, I didn’t realise this until I got to the end of the first one, and the second on seemed so different. (Incidentally, this collection was published in 2010, but is largely made up of stories previously published in other collections – another thing I didn’t realise.)

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Mills, I think, and I really appreciate his strange style of storytelling. The same tone of the full-length novels is here – and the same curious slant on the world. My favourite story in the collection is ‘The Comforter’ – an architect meets an archdeacon outside a cathedral, and they go in to look at laborious plans that the archdeacon doesn’t really understand. The archdeacon clearly finds it all very dull – and learns that he was agreed to come to these meetings everyday, forever. Is it a parallel for purgatory? Is something sinister going on, or is it not? It’s so lightly, cleverly handled.

In other stories, something mundane takes on significance just because it’s focused on – a sheet of plastic caught on a railway fence, for instance. Elsewhere, a hotel guest spends Christmas somewhere where he always seems to just miss the other guests. The title story is about a toy that arrives at Christmas with no head. There are a few duds in the collection, where the story doesn’t quite land, or (conversely) goes a little too far – but I’ll concentrate on the successes.

Each story is a different world, but they are somehow also the same world. And that’s because the narrator – while not always the same person – performs the same role. Each story is in the first person, and the ‘I’ of each one reacts the same way to the strangenesses he encounters. He (let’s assume he) is always surprised and a little unsettled, but doesn’t question anything too much. The surreal worlds in which this narrator finds himself do not offer any answers – and the narrator seems to expect it from the outset. He may be confused, but he is accepting. The exception, actually, is ‘The Comforter’ – where the narrator seems to be in on whatever mystery the reader doesn’t understand.

And the reader takes on this role, whether or not the narrator is in the know. None of the stories have neat conclusions, and none have twist endings. We are left as unsure as when we began – often disoriented, with a sense that, if we knew just that little bit more, we would be facing a true horror. What analogy is ‘The Comforter’ setting up?  But, as he just shies away from this, Mills has got a reputation as a comic writer. I find his stories much closer to horror than to comedy – the deadpan way in which they’re delivered is chilling, but it’s a very fine line between this sort of chill and laughter.

The book is slight, the sentences are deceivingly simple, and it’s so brilliantly handled that Mills makes this much more than the sum of its parts.

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff

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This isn’t one of my 25 Books in 25 Days – not at the page count the Sherriff weighs in at! – but I wanted to add it to my participation in Jessie’s Persephone Readathon. And I read it a couple of weeks ago – my third Sherriff, but certainly not my last.

The Hopkins Manuscript (1939) isn’t my usual fare, inasmuch as it is science fiction – not a genre I usually rush towards. But I had previously read and loved a couple of his other books published by Persephone, The Fortnight in September and Greengates, and so I was encouraged to pick up my copy of this one. It certainly didn’t disappoint. The premise is that the moon is going to hit the earth – but that really is just the premise for a character study.

There is a short (fake) preface letting us know that this manuscript has been unearthed, centuries after the events of the novel – and apparently almost all vestiges of the UK have long gone. Experts comb the world to find any evidence of what that civilisation might have been like – and this manuscript is by far the longest discovered. It is called the Hopkins manuscript because it was written by one Edgar Hopkins – and he takes over the story once the novel proper starts. This is, I suppose, his diary.

Hopkins is interested in astronomy and part of the Lunar Society – which is where he is first warned that the moon is likely to hit the earth. In a state of shock, but sworn to secrecy, he heads back to his normal life. And that life is quite a lonely one. He lives alone, except for staff and the poultry that he breeds in a mildly obsessive way, and seems to regard everybody else in his small village (Beadle) as a yokel and idiot. He often reflects that none of them would understand the calamity coming, and that he has nobody of sense to talk with. In short, Hopkins is not the most appealing narrator at the start – much as the gentleman at the centre of Greengates is a little obstreperous as things kick off.

To be honest, this first section of the novel could have done with a bit of editing. We know something seismic is going to happen, and it’s important to set up the world that will be disrupted, but I got a bit impatient waiting for the moon to do its thing.

But eventually, of course, it does. By now the world has been told what will happen – or at least the UK, because Hopkins doesn’t really seem to know that the rest of the world exists, at this point. Bunkers have been built, and prayers said. Most charmingly, Hopkins has befriended a small family who live across the valley from him – a Colonel Parker and his young nephew Robin and niece Pat. These are the educated society Hopkins has wanted (though apparently without wandering far to find it), and there are some touching scenes where Hopkins’ paternal side emerges – and where he watches their lights across the valley, taking comfort from it.

But comfort cannot last. The moon arrives. The world is not destroyed, but everything changes – and Hopkins finds himself living a far different life in a semi-ruined Beadle, growing closer to Robin and Pat, but increasingly isolated from everything else.

Sherriff writes the section of the moon’s landing so brilliantly – it is very tense, while still intensely human. The aftermath is similarly well told, and the central section of the novel was definitely the bit I enjoyed most. He draws the new familial relationships beautifully, and Hopkins gradually becomes a much more likeable character – each step and shade of his character changing being done slowly and believably.

But this is not the end. The final section of the novel looks at how different countries start feuding over the moon and its apparent economic qualities – all seen from the distant perspective of Hopkins. Humanity suffers at the hands of nations’ leaders’ greed and nationalism. Published in 1939, it certainly had relevance to the Second World War – but it felt extremely relevant to Brexit and Trump and far-right parties gaining ascendance across Europe today. Some evils only change their form, it seems.

If the other Sherriff novels I’ve read have felt very much about individual groups of people, with only faint links to class or other wider issues, this one is much more a state-of-the-nation type novel. While still, of course, keeping humanity at its core. I daresay the science of what would happen if the moon did start moving is all flawed, but that certainly doesn’t bother me – and doesn’t remotely affect whether or not this is an impactful novel.

I still prefer his other books, perhaps because this one did feel like it could lose 100 pages without any detriment – but this is still wonderful, and I’m keen to see what else Sherriff has written (and fingers crossed that Persephone publish more of it!)

 

The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme (25 Books in 25 Days: #8)

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Today, I read The Carlyles at Home (1965) by Thea Holme in order to participate with Jessie’s Persephone Readathon. I don’t remember when I picked this one, but I suspect it’s been on my shelves for quite a few years.

I know very little about Thomas Carlyle – or, rather, I knew very little about him. I knew he was a historian, and that was about it. I certainly haven’t read anything by him. Somewhere or other, I had picked up the idea that he didn’t treat his wife Jane very well – but that was something that had become exaggerated in my mind, for whatever reason. According to The Carlyles at Home, Jane had a life that wasn’t noticeably more difficult than that of other Victorian wives in high society (and without much income) – which is not to say those lives weren’t hard, of course. But she was not the ill-treated woman I’d imagined.

Holme’s book is divided thematically, and then organised seemingly at random. There are sections on the Carlyles’ servants, on dress, on an extention they built on top of the house, on the garden. It is all thoroughly researched and told in an engaging, almost conversational manner. I suppose, ultimately, the amount to which you find the book interesting is strongly proportional to the amount to which you find the Carlyles interesting (and, to a lesser degree, the period).

I have to admit that I don’t find them especially interesting, and I don’t have the same fascination for the late 19th century that I do for the early 20th century. So I could certainly appreciate the way in which this was told, particularly when Holme pulls humour out of anecdotes relayed in the Carlyles’ letters (I loved the saga of the young women next door and their annoying piano playing) – but I don’t think I was the ideal audience by any means. If it had been about Virginia and Leonard Woolf, told with the same style and skill with an anecdote, then I’d have found it glorious. So – take that as you will!

One thing I did love was the illustrations which were at the top of each chapter, by Lynton Lamb – including the one at the top of this post.

Melville by Jean Giono (25 Books in 25 Days: #7)

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I loved The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono when I read it years ago – a beautifully simple story – and have been meaning to read more Giono ever since. I did start Hill once and didn’t get very far, but 25 Books in 25 Days seemed like a good opportunity to read Melville (1941 – translated from French by Paul Eprile).

It started life as the introduction to Giono’s translation of Moby Dick, and can very loosely be said to be about Herman Melville. But this Melville is very much of Giono’s own invention, as Edmund White explains in his helpful introduction to the NYRB Classics edition. Which is, incidentally, beautiful. Giono’s Melville is solidly masculine and determined, and his life is shaped partly by visions of an angel who encourages him to write the novel that is in his heart – and an Irish nationalist called Adelina, who apparently didn’t exist.

Did I enjoy the book? I don’t know, really. It is very overblown, stylistically, in a way that feels deliberate. It is impressionistic and philosophical, interlaced with conversations that are often very funny. It is more of a word picture than a narrative, and swirls around like the waves hiding Moby Dick. Yes, it was often beautiful. But it was more of an experience than a narrative, if that makes sense. I think I should re-read it one day.

He was seeing clearly. He could say it to himself, there, alone in his bed, while a broad smile moistened his whiskers: “I don’t live to keep an eye on my commercial interests. I live to keep an eye on the gods.” What’s more, he’d be ready to earn his keep, starting tomorrow if necessary, doing no matter what kind of work, even something other than writing. Not a “man of letters” in the least.

On this evening, he felt strangely free, strangely decided. He called out softly, “Are you there?” No, the fire was dying out. The embers were crackling, that was all. “That one,” he said, “as soon as he wins, he takes off. Well, as soon as he believes he’s won, because – hold on a minute there, boy! – it hasn’t been stated yet that I will write this book.”

Truly, he didn’t feel he was capable of it, unless he had a real change of heart. He looked at the sailor’s clothes he’d just bought, lying over there on the armchair. What’s he scheming? he thought. What does he have in store for me? What’s he going to turn me into?

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (25 Books in 25 Days: #6)

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I think I bought Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) partly because of the similarity of the title to Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington – but I had also read a couple of PHJ’s other novels. I thought one was great (The Honours Board) and didn’t like another (An Error of Judgement), so where would Skipton sit on the spectrum?

She is certainly a varied author – this one isn’t like either of those, but it is very good. It’s principally a character piece. Daniel Skipton is a writer living hand-to-mouth in Belgium – he has had a critically successful novel followed by a critically unsuccessful one, and neither have made him much money. What he certainly doesn’t lack is self-confidence, as we see in the opening pages as he writes a bragging and insulting letter to his publisher, Utterson. While not writing, he endeavours to make money by convincing tourists to spend too much money on fake art, prostitutes, and a nude version of Leda (which the tourists who take up much of the book find hilarious).

Having had his lunch and rinsed out a pair of socks (he had only two pairs and kept one always in the wash), he took his manuscript from the table drawer, ranged before him his three pens, one with black ink, one with green, and one with red, and sat down to the hypnotic delight of polishing. The first draft of this book had been completed a year ago. Since then he had worked upon it every day, using the black pen for the correction of simple verbal or grammatical slips, the green pen for the burnishing of style, the red for marginal comment and suggestions for additional matter. He knew well enough that the cur Utterson would like to get his hands on it. It was not only a great book, it was the greatest novel in the English language, it would make his reputation all over the world and keep him in comfort, more than comfort, for the rest of his life.

Skipton reminded me quite a lot of Ignatius J Reilly, though The Unspeakable Skipton is nothing like A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s as though a character with Reilly’s monstrous nature was transposed to a much less heightened novel – and we see glimpses of Skipton’s genuine loneliness and desperation amongst the comedy of the situations Johnson creates.

Skipton is a wonderful creation, but I also enjoyed the band whom he encounters – from light-hearted Duncan to innocent Matthew to the intellectual snob Dorothy and her passive husband Cosmo. Dorothy apparently appears in another couple of novels in this sort-of series, and I would happily read more about her. She doesn’t have Skipton’s ruthless selfishness, but her sense of self-importance is not far behind – there is a wonderful scene where she gives a literary talk to an assembly of uninterested people.

So, The Unspeakable Skipton wasn’t really what I expected – but it is a character piece done with brio, and an unusual and confident novel.

Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini (25 Books in 25 Days: #5)

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I’m a sucker for any book that deals with the writer’s fascination with another writer, and I imagine that’s why I picked up Proust’s Overcoat in 2015. It was published in Italian in 2008, and translated into English by Eric Karpeles in 2010, and is (of course) about a Frenchman, so it has been round the geographic houses. And I read it on the train, on the way to meet up with a Canadian – specifically Clare from The Captive Reader.

In the case of Proust’s Overcoat, it is not Foschini who’s obsessed with Proust, though she is certainly beguiled by learning more about him. Rather, her tale is largely about Jacques Guérin and his obsession with Proust. Guérin was the inheritor and manager of a very successful perfume manufacturer, but his private life was spent in gathering what he could of Proust’s papers and possessions.

Foshcini winds together the outline of Proust’s life, chiefly looking at his relationship with his doctor brother Adrian, with the account of Guérin – who knew Adrian, and used this tentative connection to get access to what was left of Proust’s possession after A. Proust’s widow burned them. It could have made a much longer book, so it’s interesting that she chose to make it such a short one. I almost never want a short book to be longer, even when I’m not doing 25 Books in 25 Days, and I was happy for this one to be a snapshot – almost a curio. And threaded throughout is that fur-lined overcoat – from which Proust was apparently inseparable, summer or winter. Foschini’s book opens with her seeing it, and closes with mention of it in the discussion of Proust’s legacy.

That legacy is broad and interesting, and Foschini’s little book forms an intriguing, unusual, and oddly charming corner of it.

Cynthia’s Way by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick (25 Books in 25 Days: #4)

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My little Nelson’s Library edition of E.F. Benson’s Daisy’s Aunt (which I wrote about in 2016) has a section at the back where they advertise other titles that they publish. And that’s where I read the following description of Cynthia’s Way (1901):

Mrs Sidgwick has won a reputation as a writer of ingenious comedies. The heroine in this tale is an English girl of great wealth, who to amuse herself goes to Germany and masquerades as a poor governess. These studies of German home life are accurately observed and done with much humour and art, and in the background there is a charming love story.

A century and more after it was written, this marketing copy still worked its wonders on me, and I tracked down a copy of Cynthia’s Way. People masquerading as other people is always something I enjoy in a novel, especially in a good-natured comedy – and this novel is exactly that. Cynthia combines the whimsy of somebody who would find this deception amusing, with the straightforwardness of a heroine who has to deal with the household she enters. Here she finds a welcoming mother (who is an excellent cook), some slightly naughty young boys, and – most amusingly – Wanda. She has recently turned 18, and talks constantly of poetry and love and how she’d willingly kneel at the feet of a statue of Goethe all day. (When asked if she would do the same for any great poet’s statue, Cynthia replies simply “Certainly not”.)

Cynthia’s Way reminded me a lot of early Elizabeth von Arnim, and not just because of the period and the German setting. I could imagine her embracing this tone completely, particularly when no-nonsense Cynthia starts trying to sort out Wanda’s complicated love life. All while maintaining her innocent but complex deception, and starting to fall for the older son of the family, recently returned… Cynthia is not unused to proposals, but Adrian is something rather different.

It is all very diverting and very Edwardian, if you know what I mean. Cynthia’s disguise is not penetrated by anybody, and Sidgwick doesn’t introduce any of the detailed or unlikely plot twists that E.F. Benson would have done with this premise. Instead, it is simply used to set up the novel. After this, Sidgwick relies on her cast of characters to tell a story that is largely a portrait of a time, place, and class. It’s all gently amusing and easily swallowed whole in a day, if one can spare four or five hours of reading. Which, thankfully, today I could!