Project Names

The Silence of Colonel Bramble by Andre Maurois (25 Books in 25 Days #3)

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I read and enjoyed The Thought Reading Machine by Andre Maurois during my DPhil, and when I came across The Silence of Colonel Bramble last year, that fact and the title were enough for me to pick it up. It was published in French in 1918, and in English the following year – translated by Thurfrida Wake (great name), with the occasional verses translated by Wilfred Jackson. My appendix has the original French poetry, and my bad French is good enough to know that his translations were very approximate.

Published just after the First World War, this novella is based on Maurois’s experiences of spending the war with a British contingent of the army. Bramble was a composite character he created, and the silence of the title refers to the archetypal British colonel’s reticence – that Maurois believes contains eloquent multitudes.

This was an enjoyable and interesting view of a certain subsection of soldiers at a very significant period of time, though it doesn’t really qualify as a novel or even a novella. While there is a plot of sorts, it’s pretty much a series of vignettes and aphorisms, tied to characters.

“We are a curious nation,” said Major Parker. “To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honour is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire.”

(The poetry is incidental and rather pointless.) It’s always fun to see one’s nation’s stereotypes held up to the light by somebody from another country, though in the case of Bramble et al, I hope they’re antiquated by now. All the nonsense about honour and sportsmanship has hopefully died out, though I wouldn’t be so sure. And I do wonder what the differences are about reading this as a Frenchman in French as opposed to an Englishman in English. But it is very good-natured and affectionate, filled with the comradeship of having just ‘won’ a war together – and enough amusing and down-to-eath in amongst the jingoism to still make for good reading.

Dear Austen by Nina Bawden (25 Books in 25 Days #2)

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When I first picked this off the shelves at a lovely bookshop in Clevedon, I was thinking what you might be thinking – that Dear Austen (2005) is about Jane Austen. In fact, Austen was Bawden’s husband – who died in the Potter’s Bar railway accident in 2002. This short book takes the form of Bawden writing a letter to him, which is used as a device for explaining everything that happened in the aftermath of the crash. I suspect everybody in the UK will be familiar with it – to anybody not, I refer you to Wikipedia!

“So this is to be a personal letter about the events as I see them, telling you what has happened since that bloody accident on 10 May 2002 to all those who loved you and to some of the other stupidly trusting passengers whose lives were ended or destroyed. A year after they killed you, the contractor who was supposed to maintain that stretch of railway track declared a profit of sixty-seven million pounds.”

This is no ordinary book about grief, if such a thing exists. There certainly is grief, but there is also anger and frustration – at the maintainers of the railway who wouldn’t take responsibility; at the government that decided a court case wasn’t in the public interest; at previous governments who had privatised the railways and thus let upkeep slip.

It’s a moving and personal book, held tightly together with Bawden’s authorial control, her eloquence, and her ability to analyse her changing emotions with wisdom and insight. Not the most cheerful of books, of course, but well worth reading.

The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier

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I’m sneaking into the final hours of Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week to write about her third novel – The Progress of Julius (1933). My edition is simply called Julius – I don’t know when or why this change was made (unless perhaps it was to capitalise on the single-name success of Rebecca), but I prefer to go by the original title.

I picked this one up from my pile of unread DdMs because it had a name in the title, and thus qualified for my #ProjectNames informal reading challenge – it wasn’t one of her novels that I had heard discussed very often. Having read it, I can sort of see why…

It traces the life of Julius Levy from his birth right to the end – and his earliest days are spent in poverty in France. He has a loud and passionate mother and matching grandfather. Rather more negligible is Paul, his father, who is disparaged by everybody else in the household. He is an almost cartoonishly weak figure, good only for sitting in the corner and observing.

But Paul has a moment where he is not weak, or at least shows strength in the eyes of the world, and it leads to he and his young son escaping France – sneaking onto a train and travelling to Algeria. Here, as Julius grows, he begins to lift himself out of poverty through some legitimate projects – and lots of illegitimate ones. From stealing horses and selling them to tricking a tutor into educating him, du Maurier shows us a portrait of immoral ambition – and constant disguise. Julius only ever shows the face that is likely to win him the most reward.

Next stop – London. He has heard that this is the place to make his fortune – and make it he does, though he has been followed by the teenage prostitute whose room he frequented in Algiers. Elsa has disguised herself as a boy to sneak onto the boat with him, apparently unable to be without him. (One of the less successful plot elements, particularly towards the beginning, is how Julius is apparently an irresistible personality to all – when, to the reader’s eye, he seems to have very little to recommend him.)

With Elsa, Julius’s selfishness tips over into a sort of sadism:

The shoulders of Elsa began to shake, and her head bent lower and lower. Julius had to cover his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from laughing. He had discovered a new thing, of hurting the people he liked. It gave him an extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to know that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting.

And so it continues throughout his life. At each stage, he is ruthless and selfish – he’s what we would now call a sociopath. His financial success is the only thing that motivates him (at least until another figure comes into his life, in the final third of the book). He is, frankly, vile.

Du Maurier tells her narrative well and engagingly, but it is very straightforward. There is nothing like the twists in Rebecca or the moral ambiguity in My Cousin Rachel. And it was a bit conflicting – the novel is well written, but it is deeply uncomfortable to read.

On the one hand, plenty of the characters are anti-Semitic – initially to Paul and, later, to Julius. Despite having a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and thus technically not be ethnically Jewish himself, it is taken for granted by all characters and the narrator that Julius is Jewish. And though the narrative does not endorse these insults, you have to ask yourself what Daphne du Maurier was doing in writing this novel.

Nowhere does it suggest that Julius’s behaviour is technical of all Jewish people, or that he is intended to represent anything more than a single character – but it certainly didn’t sit well to have a Jewish character whose life is motivated solely by financial greed. This was, of course, a stereotype around in the 1930s – one being used, even as this novel was published, to stir up hatred against Jewish people in Germany. It is hard not to feel disgusted at the portrait du Maurier has painted, and at the author for painting it.

I don’t need characters to be likeable – but, even if he hadn’t been Jewish, with everything that suggests about du Maurier’s intention, he is so relentlessly terrible that it isn’t all that interesting. He has no nuanced character, nor does he especially develop. We just see him being appalling to person after person, never learning from his actions, or reflecting on his behaviour. It is a uniform and stylistically well written novel, but – as well as being almost certainly anti-Semitic – it feels perhaps a pointless novel too.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

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I don’t remember who originally told me about The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore, but that recommendation was enough for me to buy it in 2012. A few people read it for the 1955 Club a little while ago, and I’d read so many positive reviews that I finally read it. Yes, it’s rather brilliant! (By the way, I’ve included a copy of the NYRB Classics edition because it’s beautiful; mine was a film tie-in, with Maggie Smith on the cover, and it was made me want to seek out the film…)

Here are the first couple of paragraphs, to whet your appetite:

The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.

After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction. His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.

Judith Hearne is settling into a boarding house, uncertain about how she will be perceived and how she will fit in. These two pictures sum up her life – a devoted Catholic faith, and a longing for any sort of family. But she has her pride, and – on a quest for a hammer, to put in a nail for her oleograph – she is reluctant to jump straight into a friendship with her talkative landlady and the landlady’s overgrown, ugly adult son. But she is rather taken by the landlady’s brother, James Madden – an Irishman who has recently returned from many decades in the US, possibly returning wealthy.

The other friendships she has outside the house are with Moira and her various children – all of whom mock her behind her back, and see the weekly cup of tea as a chore that they can take in turns. These scenes encapsulate what Moore does so very well – showing us the pain that comes not only from Judith Hearne’s loneliness but from her self-awareness. She knows that the family are tired of her, and she notices when they exchange glances at her comments. With James Madden, she has immediate, desperate visions of them falling in love and marrying – but she is no fantasist. She knows her visions are fake, and can’t happen. There is no escape for her in fantasy.

I’ll read more or less anything set in a boarding house, and Moore is brilliant at the enclosure of it – the proximity of strangers and the factions that develop between them. This proximity is even the reason for a rape scene that is very troubling, and I don’t think would be written in quite the same way today – it is written as a terrible crime, but there is little aftermath.

What Moore is best at is developing the portrait of Judith Hearne – her desperation, her melancholy, her stupidity, her hopes and the ways in which she protects them from the eyes of others. Her crisis of faith is dealt with sensitively and without the sneer of the cynic. She is a complete and miserable character, whose life could have been far more complete – but who, one suspects, would always have managed to spoil things, or to let the fly in the ointment overwhelm and destroy her. It is impossible not to feel for her; it is impossible not to realise that she is her own worst enemy.

All this Moore achieves through superlative writing. It reminded me a lot of Patrick Hamilton in its vitality, though perhaps without the dry wit – here is more the humour of hysteria, albeit subdued hysteria. I’m so glad I finally read it – and I hope his other novels are as good.

Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren

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I love books where the writer discusses how authors have shaped them, or where they find parallels between their lives and the books they’ve read. Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm was fab; Katharine Smyth’s All The Lives We Ever Lived is likely to be on my best books of 2019. So I’ve been quietly keen to read Duncan McLaren’s Looking for Enid (2007) ever since I bought it in 2011 – and Project Names finally elevated it to the top of the pile. Well, colour me disappointed. If you don’t like reading negative reviews, then stop reading now.

Enid Blyton (which other Enid could it be?) was one of the founding authors of my childhood. She was practically the founding author – I was obsessed with her, and read almost nothing else for a handful of years. So a book following her life, and relating the author’s own memories of reading Blyton, was really promising.

We do get some of that. As McLaren takes his friend/maybe more than friend Kate on travels around the country, we learn about Blyton’s marriages and how she behaved as a mother. We marvel at her prodigious output. Much of this is openly taken from Barbara Stoney’s biography, but that’s fine. It’s quite entertaining to see McLaren pop up at Blyton meet-ups, join internet forums, and hunt for Blyton books in charity shops. Much of the format of the book could have worked (with some notable exceptions that I’ll get to).

My main and overriding problem with Looking for Enid is that McLaren is not a very good writer. That doesn’t usually matter as much in non-fiction as it does in fiction, because the interest of the topic can support workmanlike prose, but McLaren’s sentences are flat and awkward. The tone aims at informal and just ends up sounding like notes for a draft. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Well, no, I shouldn’t read it aloud! The librarian would be sure to think I was taking the mickey. The tiny little knock comes from a fairy, of course, and the second and third verses tell how the fairy stays for a glass of milk but is the scared off by the crying of the baby. Charming. I wish I did have the guts to read it aloud. Or perhaps I should read aloud the first verse of the facing poem: ‘Lonely’. In this, the poet goes out into the garden, as lonely as can be, and finds a fairy sitting beneath a chestnut tree. Would that have been the chestnut tree at Elfin Cottage? Anyway, tears were rolling down the fairy’s cheeks because he was lonely too. So the poet played bat and ball with him and they had a lovely time together. Eventually the poet’s healthy appetite meant that she had to go in for tea. She walked indoors, conscious that the fairy at the bottom of the garden was much happier now that he had got a friend like her. Charming, once again!

I made it to the end of the book, but it really is mediocre. And that’s even before we talk about the more unusual additions that profit neither man nor beast. The most obvious is that he ends each chapter with lengthy sections in the style of the Five Find-Outer series, which are mercifully marked out with small pictures in the margin, so I could skip them after a bit. A similar technique sneaks more insidiously into the rest of the book, as he often imagines conversations between Enid and others – usually in the style of her characters’ exchanges – and will flit in and out of these. Then there are images reproduced from the books which he has labelled ‘This is her…’ where the ‘…’ is replaced with different names – such as Bets, George, Father. I didn’t have a clue what that was meant to achieve. Some of his conclusions are bizarrely wrongheaded – like the seemingly genuine belief that Theophilus Goon is an intentional anagram of ‘O Hugh spoilt one’…

He mentions along the way that Looking for Enid is intended to be about her relationships with the different men in her life, but that doesn’t feel an especially dominant theme. And when he gets prurient about Enid’s sex life (and wildly oversharing about his own), I despaired. I was going to quote some of it, but, honestly, why would I put you through that? Besides being present for his sexual self-revelations, Kate – presumably a real person – is only there to say “Oh, do go on” as he puts all sorts of ramblings about Enid into extremely unlikely long-form dialogue. I hope, for her sake, that their conversations didn’t quite go like that.

I chiefly find it a shame that potential was so wasted. And it’s unlikely that anybody else will feel they can write anything similar anytime soon, because McLaren has taken this corner of the market. Frankly, don’t bother – seek out Barbara Stoney’s biography instead.

Stoner by John Williams #1965Club

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Everybody was reading Stoner by John Williams about seven years ago, largely because Vintage Books sent a review copy to pretty much everyone in the known universe. According to Kim’s review for the 1965 club, it was also the toast of the book blogging world around 2005, but that was before I joined it. Well, better late than never, I’ve finally read it – and isn’t it brilliant?

I had put it off for ages because all I knew about it was (a) it was set in a university, and (b) it was called Stoner. So perhaps naturally, I’d assumed it was about drug-taking. Mais non – Stoner is, rather, the lead character in this novel that looks at his life from studenthood and though the following decades.

Stoner has left a farming family for the bright lights of university – leaving the agriculture course for the English literature course, once he discovers his deep love for that subject. At the same time, he thinks he may have fallen in love with the beautiful, distant Edith. She gives him little encouragement, but he is beguiled, and they marry.

It is not a successful marriage – but it does produce a daughter, Grace, to whom Stoner is patiently devoted, and whom he almost single-handedly looks after in her infancy.

The trials of an impetuous marriage are one strand of the novel; the other is Stoner’s career as an English lecturer. He is, at first, competent but little more. I loved reading about his transformation into an inspiring teacher:

When he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as if he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologised to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. The love of literature, language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

I suspect Williams shared Stoner’s love of literature and of studying it – or, if not, is very good at conveying it. It reminded me of the most glorious moments of revelation I felt while studying. Any writer who can manage to put across the wonder of literature is doing something great in my book.

But things are not so simple here, either. He has friends in the department, but he also makes an enemy – one with long-lasting effects on his personal and professional lives.

Those lives are distinct throughout much of Stoner, not least because his wife has very limited interest in his career. I wondered if this was a fault of the novel, but I suppose it rings true. Many of his find that the traits we have in the workplace do not quite translate outside of it, and perhaps it is accurate that Stoner’s determined enthusiasm in the classroom finds its opposite in his passivity within marriage. He is certainly a rounded and convincing character – so sympathetic, and yet often frustrating.

Above all, Stoner is stunningly written. The prose is somehow beautiful and poetic without ever seeming to stray from everyday language. It is an amazing combination, and I don’t know how he achieves – nor how he makes this gradually unwinding portrait of a man and his environment so compelling to read.

The only significant criticism I have it is that Edith, his wife, is less well drawn. Her character is always a little undeveloped, and her nature changes so often and so violently that she often seems only a foil for the next stage of Stoner’s life. The psychology behind her actions is often explained, but never quite as convincing as the totally believable motivations (good or bad) behind everything Stoner says and does.

But, yes, I can see why this was such a success when reprinted – and I’m thrilled that the 1965 Club meant I finally read it.

I. Compton-Burnett by Charles Burkhart – #1965Club

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Ivy Compton-Burnett didn’t publish a book in 1965 – indeed, she didn’t publish one after 1963, except posthumously – but that’s no reason why I can’t find a way to sneak her into the 1965 Club. Because thankfully Charles Burkhart published a book all about her in that year. He seems to have written several books about ICB, and who can blame him, but this one is stridently called I. Compton-Burnett. (Incidentally, he is not the musicologist, so far as I can tell.)

This book is low on pages (about 130), but each is jam-packed with text, so it’s not quite as short as it initially seems. In it, Burkhart attempts an overview of all of ICB’s writing, identifying the main characteristics of it and, fairly often, defending her against prevailing opinion. His expertise in her work is quite dizzying, and it makes for a very satisfying inquiry – even if I did have to skim past quite a bit, having still got nine of her books to read,

The opening is of especial interest for the 1965 Club, as it attempts to set the literary scene. While asking why she is so well-reviewed and so little read, Burkhart also makes a few comments about the state of 1965:

Advertising is one of the typical arts of our age; and since it is a noisy age, there is a sustained shout of superlatives for every new product, whether of the literary imagination or the soap manufacturer. On the dust jackets of their books, all writers are praised; because the ‘soft sell’ has not yet reached the publishing world, the same tired troop (“remarkable”, “powerful”, “stirring”, and so on) are deployed for every first novel about sensitive adolescence, every raw and wriggling specimen of neo-romantic neo-brutalism. The babble of adjectives is sustained at such intensity, especially in America, that it tends to move right out of the range of human hearing. It is charity to suppose that this was the intention.

Every age considers itself frighteningly modern, of course, and these censures have only increased. But what is interesting is his identification of her novels as portraying the ‘eccentric family’, and doing so eccentrically – and seeing how eccentricity is considered by the critics and the masses. It is a very intelligent and well-judged exploration that makes no assumptions.

He goes on to consider the archetypal plots of ICB novels – tyrants, secrets, secrets being revealed, neighbours prying etc. – but is quick to say that they are not all the same, and nor are all the characters or their dialogue amorphous. I have been guilty of saying that her novels are all alike, but Burkhart is correct. Compton-Burnett’s signature is always clear, but the characters are almost always fully-formed, and the dialogue filled with individual traits. They perhaps all have the same unworldly register, but retain their own idiolects nonetheless. As he points out, in disputing the idea that her characters are characterless, the reader is never in any doubt about what any one character thinks about any other. Considering her households are always filled with many people (often around 20), this is extremely impressive. He also quotes Frank Kermode, who describe how conversations progress in ICB’s novels perfectly: “by exploiting in each remark unobvious logical and syntactical implications in the previous one”.

After looking at various themes (religion, ethos, money etc.), the final chapter looks at each novel in turn – assessing their quality, highlighting their successes, and reminding me of which I have or haven’t read.

I. Compton-Burnett is certainly not an introduction to that author – it only really works if you’ve read a substantial number of her novels already, and perhaps is only truly for the person who has read everything ICB wrote. But I loved it. Such an indulgence to read somebody who appreciates ICB as much as I do, and knows her work far more intimately. How I agree with him when he says “in comparison with her writing[,] most other modern writing seems unfinished, its aim diffuse and its style impure”. I’m not sure he answers the question that you might be able to make out in the photo above – Burkhart makes no grand conclusions about ICB’s greatness or the likelihood of her longevity. Judging by the fact that she is completely out of print in the UK (I think), it’s not looking good for her posterity in 2065 – but she has her devoted audience still, and this book would be a welcome addition to any of their libraries.

Tea or Books? #72: Reading at Home vs Reading Elsewhere and The Hours vs Mrs Woolf and the Servants

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Where do we like to read? And books inspired by Virginia Woolf. It’s a very ‘us’ episode.


 
In the first half of this episode, we’re adopting a question suggested by Teddy – reading at home vs reading elsewhere – and discuss our favourite places to read (alongside some wonderful suggestions from some Patreon patrons. Check out our Patreon page!) In the second half, we look at two books inspired by Virginia Woolf – one is Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light (non-fiction), and the other is The Hours by Michael Cunningham. It was a really fun discussion!

We also talk more about tea than usual, just to even things out.

Check us out on iTunes, rate/review us through your podcast app etc (even if you think I laugh too much ;) ), and don’t forget you can find us on Spotify too. Do get in touch if you have any ideas for future episodes – we always love hearing from you.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Stoner by John Williams
The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark
The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme
At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
Land’s End by Michael Cunningham
Forever England by Alison Light
Common People by Alison Light
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark #1965Club

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I hadn’t realised I was quite so close to the end of Muriel Spark’s prolific output – having read The Mandelbaum Gate for the 1965 Club, I’ve now read 19 of her 22 novels. Yep, I like Spark a lot. And one of the things I tend to like about her is how much she packs into a short work. Many of her books are around 200 pages or fewer – whereas The Mandelbaum Gate is just a few pages shy of 400. How would I feel about one of her longest books?

Sometimes, instead of a letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal verses – rondeaux, redoubles, villanelles, rondels, or Sicilian octaves – to express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one’s duty in life to be agreeable. Not so much at the time as afterwards, he felt it keenly on his conscience that he had said no word between the soup and the fish when the bright talk began; he felt at fault in retrospect of the cocktail hours when he had contributed nothing but the smile for which he had been renowned in his pram and, in the following fifty years, elsewhere.

That’s the opening paragraph, and we are immediately in Spark territory. Who else would have written that final bit? And who else would start off a novel with a quirky, irrelevant meandering about different forms of poetry. Freddy has something like diplomatic immunity, and crosses back and forth between Israel and Jordan – through the Mandelbaum gate – through which many others cannot pass. (By the way, the gate was named after a man who owned a nearby house, and so it sneaks into #ProjectNames by stealth.)

One of the people who probably should be more cautious about passing through the gate is Barbara Vaughan, a ‘half-Jewish Catholic’ who has followed her archaeologist fiancé out to the Holy Land. As a character points out, you can’t be half-Jewish – as her mother was Jewish, so was she – but Barbara is a keen Catholic who is awaiting confirmation about whether or not her fiancé’s first marriage can be annulled by the church.

And, indeed, something happens to her. In true Spark style, the moment is thrown into conversation casually, sometime after it has happened – before we dart back and forth in time and location. To add to the confusion, Freddy suffers temporary memory loss (perhaps because of sunstroke; perhaps because of something more sinister), and so when he is the ‘future’ section, he can’t remember what we have yet to learn in the ‘past’ section.

If you’ve read much Spark, you’ll be familiar with how she plays fast and loose with narrative conventions, and particularly the idea that things should be relayed in chronological order. In most of her novels, the narrator will throw in prolepsis that reveals, in a darting moment, something that might have been the denouement in the hands of another writer. Well, if she does that in a 200 page novel, she does it doubly so in a 400 page novel. I’m not going to lie – I was often quite confused, but I went with it.

Because what made The Mandelbaum Gate enjoyable is what makes most of her novels enjoyable – the peculiar characters, never quite behaving how you expect. The wry narrative voice that doesn’t trouble to make things too easy for the reader. And delightful turns of phrase. Always expect the unexpected.

It did feel to read something set in Israel and Jordan, and it is very concretely set in a particular time – 1961, to be precise, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which makes occasional appearances in the background. The cast of characters goes far beyond Freddy and Barbara, and I was particularly fond of Alexandros, a shopkeeper who has befriended Freddy.

As I said, I didn’t always know what was going on, and the disorientation is at least partly deliberate. And I don’t think The Mandelbaum Gate is quite the same success that her shorter novels can be – but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I might. I thought Spark’s powers and peculiarities might be spread far too thinly over a longer book – but she sustained them in an admirable, if not quite as perfect, a way.

 

-time

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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I knew Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman had been successful, but I’d no idea how successful until the book stats came out last year. This was a runaway bestseller, getting hundreds of thousands more purchases than the next novel in the list – at least according to the list I read. When my book group chose to do it, I was a little dubious. Other mammoth bestsellers of recent years have definitely been low on quality – i.e. The Da Vinci Code. Well, I was happy to be proved wrong. This is a case where I think the hype was pretty justified.

In case you’re one of those others who’ve yet to read it – the novel is from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant, who works in finance administration and lives alone. She isn’t very at ease socially, largely because she doesn’t understand the ways that people choose to spend their time. She has very little popular culture knowledge, and tends to speak as a mix between an eighteenth-century novel and a computer manual. (Her dialogue – never using abbreviations; overly elaborate sentences – never quite made sense to me as a concept, but we’ll leave that be.)

It’s also clear that she is not completely fine.

Gradually we piece together that something traumatic happened to her as a child, and it has continued to affect the way she engages with other people. She also longs for a way out of the loneliness she experiences. It was an interesting coincidence that the epigraph was from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I’m reading at the moment. Living alone definitely doesn’t have to mean loneliness, but Eleanor feels isolated from the rest of humanity. And her attempts to cross this divide are usually frustrated by her inability to understand social codes – and often not particularly liking the range of options in front of her.

This changes when she sees a handsome young singer. She realises she is in love, and destined to be with him. He will be the solution to her problems.

Honeyman takes us on a compelling journey with Eleanor, as she tries to orchestrate ways to get closer to the singer. At the same time, she has made her first friend – Raymond, a colleague who can see past her off-putting traits. At the same time, we continue to learn more about her past. Honeyman gives us enough info to guess and make assumptions, and little enough that we’re desperate to get more answers. It’s really impressively judged. So often, this sort of bread-crumb-dropping is just annoying, whereas Honeyman knows exactly how much info to give, and when. And even when I thought I’d worked it out, I hadn’t.

It’s a relatively long book, but very compelling – I raced through it in a couple of days. As mentioned, I’m not sure all the verbal tics quite made sense, but I did like that Eleanor is an anomaly but not repellent. Plenty of people in the book think she’s being funny when she’s really just answering their questions differently from how they anticipated. Her colleagues find her hard to talk to, but warm to her when she tries different approaches.

Oh, and there is the most wonderful CAT!

For a debut novel, it’s very impressive. I’m intrigued to see what comes next – and what the film will be like. It’s good to be a part of the zeitgeist sometimes!