ReadingPresently

Faulks on Fiction (audio) – Sebastian Faulks

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As you see from this post’s title, I didn’t read Faulks on Fiction (2011) in the traditional sense, but rather I listened to it on audiobook.  This was something of a novel (ho ho) experience for me, as I haven’t listened to an audiobook all the way through for more than a decade, perhaps nearer 20 years.  Indeed, for me – when I had trouble sleeping as an undergraduate – audiobooks were basically lullabies.  I’d stick Diary of a Provincial Lady, or Felicity’s Kendal’s White Cargo, or the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham in the cassette player, and go to sleep to the sound of their voices.  Those were the only cassettes I owned, so I got very familiar with first ten minutes of each side…

But I asked for the CD (how times have changed) of Faulks on Fiction for Christmas a couple of years ago, and my parents kindly gave it to me.  I listened to it gradually, mostly last winter on my iPod, because I had daily walks into town of 45 minutes each way (and couldn’t afford to get the bus all the time).  Then I got the job at OUP, could afford to take the bus, and somehow left the final CD of ten until last week…

I haven’t even properly mentioned the author yet, although you’ll have worked it out.  Sebastian Faulks (known for his novels, particularly Birdsong, none of which I have read) presented a TV series looking at selected novels in the history of British literature, and this was the tie-in book.  I only actually watched one of the episodes – on heroes – and didn’t bother with the rest, because it all seemed a bit dumbed down.  Someone told me that the book was better (well, duh) and they weren’t wrong.

Faulks addresses various ‘categories’ – heroes, villains, lovers, and snobs – and tracks each through the history of literature. So he’ll start with a Defoe or a Swift, moving on through Austens, Eliots, Brontes, via Woolf, Lawrence et al, and finally an Amis or an Ali.  It is of course a subjective overview of literature, and the four categories we suggests could only ever be a necessary structuring device (arguably all four appear in most of the novels Faulks chooses), but I liked the idea of picking out these motifs.  With only one or two examples per century for each category, it could hardly be considered comprehensive, and I baulked a bit when Faulks attempted to draw wider conclusions from his chosen examples – but no matter, I suppose it is what is expected of anything with so broad a title.

There is always that main problem with books which summarise books: that you’ve either read the book being summarised or you haven’t.  If you have, you don’t need to be given the outline of the plot (although I found it did often help my faulty memory), and if you haven’t, you don’t want spoilers.  I appreciated the run-through on books I never intend to read, but did end up fast-forwarding through sections on tbr pile candidates.  Having said that, I listened to his thoughts on The End of the Affair by Graham Greene before I read it, and had still fortunately forgotten everything he said.

In either case, my favourite moments were when Faulks was talking about the books, rather than giving summaries.  I didn’t always agree with him – see my post on Faulks and Pride and Prejudice – but I’m a sucker for intelligent, accessible discussion of great liteature.  His groupings are intriguing and his discussion is warm, witty, and well thought-through.  Of course, it’s been so long since I listened to most of it that I can’t really recall what he said, but the CD I listened to last covered Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, and I enjoyed hearing what he had to say about the creation of Barbara, and how the novel differed from the film.

As for how the format affected my listening… Well, I found it impossible to separate the speaker from Faulks, even though they were definitely different people (the narrator, incidentally, is James Wilby).  I could definitely have done without his attempts at accents – I can understand the eager actor relishing the opportunity to wander from Russia to Yorkshire and back again, but it was rather distracting.  But, aside from that, I quite enjoyed listening to an audiobook.  There were times when skipping would have been easier than fast-forwarding, or skimming backwards easier than rewinding, but Wilby has an engaging voice and it was the perfect entertainment for walking to and from town, as it could be listened to in discrete bursts without much being lost.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves – Jacques Bonnet

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My friend Clare has struck gold again with Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, which she got me for my birthday a month ago.  Admittedly it was on my Amazon wishlist (and thus must have been mentioned by someone in the blogosphere… was it you?) but girl still done good.  I’ve added it to my 50 Books You Must Read About not simply because it’s wonderful, but because it is so perfect a book for the bibliophile blogger.

Published in 2008 in French, and translated by Siân Reynolds in 2010, Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a sort of memoir and sort of essay collection about what it is like to live with and love books – but on a scale few of us can imagine.  Bonnet is the proud owner of several tens of thousands of books – about 40,000, if memory serves – and talks about people with similar numbers of books as though they were in secret fraternity, which is rather adorable.  Better yet, he is first and foremost a reader, and his books reflect that:

I’m talking about a working library, the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read – including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title – as well as the ones you mean to read one day.  A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one.
People who collect books primarily for their value, or who think a first edition is infinitely preferable to a tenth, are anathema to the whole-hearted lover of reading – I could empathise so much with Bonnet, although I have no plans to have a library quite as large as his.  I can see myself getting to ten thousand, though, especially if I use Bonnet as my conscience – he has the delightful habit of many bloggers I know; being able to justify any and all book purchases.  I’m sure some of you are longing to write in the comments about betraying libraries or cutting down trees or the lust of avarice, but Phantoms on the Bookshelves is not a book for common sense responses, it is a book for illogical aspiration and unashamed book-adoration.

But practicality is certainly not left behind.  I love reading about the ways in which people organise their bookshelves, and this is all the more important if books are likely to disappear forever if disorganised.  Bonnet writes fascinatingly about finding space for big collections, and about the various schemes he has considered for his own collection – which reveals it to be far broader than I can boast.  He worries about where to put authors born in Yugoslavia, now that it no longer exists, what to do with his Frisian books, and all sorts of other considerations which my largely-British largely-literary library has never really had to worry about.

His chapters on not just on organising bookshelves, of course. He writes wonderfully about reading itself (‘every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it’), about diaries, dictionaries, destitute authors, and – heartbreakingly – those libraries lost to destruction.  Not just Alexandria and the like, but personal libraries lost to fire, and what the possessors did afterwards.  Bonnet also suggests – another way in which these bookshelves are filled with phantoms – that the enormous library is possibly a doomed creature:

we may be pretty sure that vast and unwieldy personal collections of a few tens of thousands of books are likely to disappear, taking their phantoms with them.  This little book is being written from a continent which is about to be lost forever
He blames e-readers, I think, but perhaps the premium of space will also play its part.  But I can’t see why there wouldn’t still be just as many people who can afford to have this luxury as there were before…

The mark of a great book about books is whether or not familiarity with the titles mentioned matters.  One of the reasons I love and cherish Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing is because so many of the authors she writes about mean something to me, either through having read or meaning to read.  I love Alberto Manguel’s books on reading, but tend to skim bits about Borges (and love the bits about Lewis Carroll).  Well, Jacques Bonnet mentioned maybe one book I’d read, and another couple I’d heard of, and it didn’t matter at all.  Even though a sizeable portion of the books mentioned have never been translated out of French, I still loved reading about them.  That’s impressive work, Monsieur Bonnet.

I name-checked Manguel there (and a review of A Reader on Reading is forthcoming) – I love his books, but not in the same way that I love Phantoms on the Bookshelves.  Manguel is a great reader, of course, but he is almost always scholarly at the same time – Jacques Bonnet is more like the friendly face at your book group who will enthuse about managing to squeeze another bookcase into the corner of the living room.  More of a bibliophile friend, in general.  Phantoms on the Bookshelves certainly isn’t a philistines’ book by any means, but nor does it alienate with erudition.  It would be another perfect Christmas gift for the bibliophile in your life (or to drop heavy hints about) – it was the perfect birthday gift for me.

Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books

Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell

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William Maxwell is an exceptionally good writer; I think that would be difficult to dispute.  Famously he was an editor of the New Yorker (editing, amongst many things, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories – leading to the miracle of wonderfulness that is their collected letters), and it is those skills which he carries over into his fiction writing.  A close eye to detail, an observing nature, and a delicate precision in his prose that makes reading his novels a lengthy exercise in perception and patience.

All of which means that I have to be in the right mood to read Maxwell.  When I am, nothing is more glorious.  I can luxuriate in his sentences and his precise (that word again) cataloguing of human emotion.  If I’m not in the right mood, it wearies me – it requires proper attention, and sometimes I am not a good enough reader to give it.  This, incidentally, is how I feel about many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, too – and, like A Game of Hide and Seek (for instance), I started, shelved, continued, shelved, repeat as needed, and eventually finished Time Will Darken It (1948).  It took the best part of four months, but it was worth doing it like this – had I rushed it, I would have resented it.  As it is, I think it was wonderful.  (Thank you, Barbara, for giving it to me back in 2009!)

The focus of the novel is on Austin King and his family in Draperville, as his cousin’s family come to visit, and the aftermath they leave behind them.  There are broken hearts, accidents, threats, arguments – but these make up a patchwork which portrays a community, rather than being of utmost importance themselves.  And the highlight of this community is Austin King himself.  He is a very Maxwellian character – patient, kind, uncertain, and never entirely able.  He lives in the shadow of his great (late) father, having taken on his partnership in a law firm; he lives his wife Martha who seems cold and distant, but is really (as Maxwell scrapes away the layers) confused and unhappy.  And then he lives with his boisterous cousin Mr Potter, his chatty wife, caddish son, and besotted daughter.

One part of King’s life which is largely satisfactory is his relationship with his daughter Abbey, or Ab.  Many Maxwellian characters are good fathers, and even though I am not a father of any variety, I love reading his portraits of these relationships – which always remind me of Maxwell’s lovely relationship with his own daughters, as shown through his letters.  He is always a sensitive writer, but perhaps most of all when it comes to Ab.

The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances.  They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day.  At what moment, from what hiding place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling.  And when it does, the result is not always disastrous.  Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives.  Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure.  You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.
There are some many characters and events that I can’t begin to list them all, so I’ll just quote one incident I thought rather lovely.  Here Miss Ewing – Austin’s aging legal secretary – is talking to him about his father:

“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here.  I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work.  He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate.  He was more like a friend than an employer.”

Austin nodded sympathetically.  What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true.  His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing.  Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant, and her old-mad ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her.  He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship.  But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.
Maxwell often does this, and does it so well – a specific event will lead into generalised maxim, but one with such heart and such insight that all my wariness of generalisations is washed away.

The only times this approach doesn’t work very well (in my opinion) is when Maxwell gets too homiletic for too long.  There is the odd chapter which might as well be the third act of an Ibsen play, and sometimes he forgets to give us enough of the specifics before he gets onto the reflections.  But they are small flaws in a novel which is extraordinarily insightful and complex.  No character’s action or reaction is careless or implausible – sometimes they are extreme, but only where extremity is believable.  He is truly an astonishing writer – I just wish I were always as capable and adept a reader.

Oh, and the cartoon… a while ago I said I’d start doing pun covers, as a bit of silliness, and promptly forgot all about it.  Well… they’re back!

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read; beautiful, maddening and thought provoking” – Rachel, Book Snob


“The greatness of Maxwell’s writing is that he looks deep inside each character, and he looks with humanity, without judgement, indeed with what I can only call love.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“I liked the way the town and its characters came to life, as a sepia-tinted photograph does. There is an old-fashioned, autumnal feel to this novel.” – Sarah, Semi-fictional

Pink Sugar by O. Douglas

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One of the shameful things about this year is realising how many books my dear friend Clare has given me over the years which I have yet to read.  Her name has appeared a few times already in my Reading Presently project (as the bestower of Four Hedges, Cullum, and possibly How The Heather Looks) and is likely to appear at least a couple of times more – but, for today, she is the provider of Pink Sugar (1924) by O. Douglas, the pseudonym of John Buchan’s sister Anna.  I’ll call her O. Douglas in this review, to make things simple.  It’s the only Greyladies edition I’ve read so far, although I’m thrilled that they have reprinted a couple of Richmal Crompton books, including the wonderful Matty and the Dearingroydes.  And, guess what, Pink Sugar is rather fab too.

Kirsty Gilmour is 30 and has made a home for herself in the Borders (so the blurb says for me), taking in an old aunt who fusses and worries, but is rather lovely, and three children Barbara, Specky, and Bad Bill. The novel opens in conversation between Kirsty and her livelier friend Blance Cunningham – Blanche was quite a witty character, and I was sad that she almost immediately departed the scene (she also said wise things like “People who knit are never dull”) but we are not at a loss for characters after her departure.

Kirsty is rather gosh-isn’t-the-world-wonderful at times, thankfully offset with some quick-wittedness; like Lyn I sympathised more with the minister’s unhappy sister Rebecca, and found the characterful novelist Merren Strang more amusing – but Pink Sugar needs someone like Kirsty at its heart, because it is neither an unhappy novel nor a caustic one.  It is emphatically gentle and life-affirming, where a cup of tea and a dose of self-knowledge are the inevitable accompaniments to evening.

The children veer a little towards Enid Blyton territory, but that’s no bad thing (especially compared to modern literature, where happy children seem such a rarity), and there is a wildly unconvincing love plot thrown in to tie things up, but Douglas’s good writing and refusal to bathe too deeply in sentiment made me able to love relaxing and reading this.

One aspect of the style I couldn’t get on board with was Douglas’s frequent recourse to Scottish dialect, for the maids, cook, etc.  It was so impenetrable that I ended up skipping forward a few pages every time it appeared, so fingers crossed that I didn’t miss anything of moment there…

And in case you’re wondering what ‘pink sugar’ has got to do with anything, as I was for quite a long while, thankfully it is explained by Kirsty in the narrative.  Excuse the rather long quotation, but I couldn’t find a neater way to cut it off…:

“I was allowed to ride on a merry-go-round and gaze at all the wonders – fat women, giants, and dwarfs.  But what I wanted most of all I wasn’t allowed to have.  At the stalls they were selling large pink sugar hearts, and I never wanted anything so much in my life, but when I begged for one I was told they weren’t wholesome and I couldn’t have one.  I didn’t want to eat it – as a matter of fact I was allowed to buy sweets called Market Mixtures, and there were fragments of the pink hearts among the curly-doddies and round white bools, and delicious they tasted.  I wanted to keep it and adore it because of its pinkness and sweetness.  Ever since that day when I was taken home begrimed with weeping for a ‘heart’, I have had a weakness for pink sugar.  And good gracious!” she turned to her companion, swept away by one of the sudden and short-lived rages which sometimes seized her, “surely we want every crumb of pink sugar that we can get in this world.  I do hate people who sneer at sentiment.  What is sentiment after all?  It’s only a word, for all that is decent and kind and loving in these warped little lives of ours…”
So ‘pink sugar’ is essentially akin to seeing the joy in life – and is, perhaps, a codified reference to any reader or critic who would sneer at Pink Sugar itself, as a novel.  Admittedly, it isn’t Great Literature, nor is it trying to be, but I think Douglas is doing herself an injustice with this sort of self-defence.  Pink Sugar isn’t a lightweight romance with no thought given to the style or characterisation.  It doesn’t stand on sentiment alone.



Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“The strength of the book is the atmosphere of village life.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading


“Pink Sugar is a lovely, sweet, frothy concoction of a novel” – Christine, The Book Trunk


“I am so very happy to have made the acquaintance of O. Douglas.” – Nan, Letters From a Hill Farm

Beowulf on the Beach – Jack Murnighan

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I’m not great at reading on ‘planes, and I thought (on my recent trip to the US) that it would be best to take a book I could read in short segments, rather than attempting to sustain a narrative.  While rooting through my books-about-books shelf, I stumbled across Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits (2009) by Jack Murnighan.  It was first suggested to me by an online friend, Sheila, and I put it on my Amazon wishlist – from where it was bought by my brother a few years ago.  Thank you Colin, and thank you Sheila if you’re still reading SiaB!

I think there are two things most bloggers and bibliophiles think when they see a list of books: (1) yay! a list! (2) wait, how could they have missed out/included this/that…  Well, Beowulf on the Beach is an extended exercise in both (1) and (2), tied together with Jack Murnighan’s very amusing style – so, of course, I loved it.

Let’s start with the gimmicks – and, no mistake, this is a very gimmicky book.  It would have to be, really.  Murnighan has selected the 50 ‘greatest hits’ of literature, and tells us what they’re about, what the ‘buzz’ is, the best line, fun facts, what’s sexy (!), and what to skip.

When I read, I hope the book will reach me in at least one of three places: where I zip, where I button a shirt, and where I put on a hat.
A neat sentence, and once which tells you the sort of literary scholar Murnighan is – one who isn’t afraid to talk about what is ‘sexy’.  Yup, he’s not using the word to mean ‘the best bits’, he literally means ‘is there sex in this book?’  Which is obviously a bit silly, and very awkward when we get to Lolita, but… well, it’s a gimmick, as I said.  Equally untenable is the ‘what to skip’ bit – perhaps it works when he’s talking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Homer’s Odyssey, but it’s pretty ridiculous to advise skipping huge chunks of a modern novel, which probably wouldn’t make sense.

But none of that really matters, because I don’t think Murnighan intends us to take those sections particularly seriously.  What I really enjoyed is how Murnighan refuses to put on a scholarly voice, and instead brings out how enjoyable reading great works of literature can be.

Anna Karenina is like a sundae with a dollop of Madame Bovary as its base and a squeeze of melted Middlemarch poured over the top.
Since I’ve not read any of those three novels (well, the first hundred pages of the third), I can’t comment on the accuracy of Murnighan’s simile, but I love the idea of it nonetheless, and it is a good example of his lack of holy cows.  Charles Dickens becomes Chuck, Murnighan refers to ‘zingers’, etc. etc.  It’s all very informal, and great fun – but also very informative.  Murnighan is nothing if not passionate about literature.  Here’s part of what he has to say about One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Forget magic realism.  Right now.  If I hear you say the words, I’ll sneak up behind you with a piano-wire; I’m not kidding.  Yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is associated with that dimwit’s category (lumping him with the epigone Isabel Allende and other charlatans), but his imaginative leaps are the least important about this book.  To reduce Garcia Marquez’s narrative genius to such an infantilizing pseudoconcept as magic realism is high treason in itself, but to allow that academic manure to be what people talk about regarding this novel, as if humanity doesn’t need to be sat down, as a whole, at grandpa Gabo’s knee and told what’s really important, that is utterly inexcusable.  Literature classes have a sacred book on their hands and they make it sound like the trip journals of a peyote fiend.  For shame.
Eeks.  Truth be told, Murnighan’s tastes could scarcely be more different from mine.  He says Paradise Lost is the best work ever written (I don’t even think it’s the best work Milton wrote beginning with the word ‘Paradise’), Moby Dick the best novel (snore), and Faulkner the best novelist (haven’t read any, but…).  While he covers more of the globe than I do with my reading, there is a rather shameful paucity of female writers responsible for these 50 books – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.  Of course, he is not to blame for the sidelining of women throughout literature’s history, but the inclusion of authors like Robert Musil, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy rather than (say) Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Muriel Spark – all of whom have at least equal claim to canonicity – does speak some prejudice.  Make no mistake, Murnighan is a big fan of overtly masculine, guns-and-big-themes literature, and proudly states it; we were never going to coincide in our literary tastes.  (His chapter on Pride and Prejudice is, by the way, pretty poor… I don’t think he got the point, since he thinks it’s all about ‘romantic fantasies’, instead – as I would suggest – of being chiefly about self-knowledge.)

I was also left wondering whether Murnighan ever read anything that wasn’t canonical, since he seems to have read all fifty of these books dozens of times.  Does he ever pick up something he’s never heard of, and discover an unexpected gem?  That (as I’m sure you’ll be aware) is one of the greatest joys of the reader’s life.

But these are small criticisms for a book which, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, could only be found perfect by a bibliophile were that bibliophile to compile the list themselves.  Whether or not you’ll use Beowulf on the Beach as a manual for the reading life, skipping the bits Murnighan advises against and bookmarking the sexy bits… well, I doubt you will – but any lover of literature will delight in a very witty, very intelligent, entirely biased and totally enthusiastic reader sharing those enthusiasms.  A perfect Christmas present for the bibliophile in your life – and a perfect birthday present to me from Colin back in 2010.

Symposium – Muriel Spark

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I really thought I had written about Symposium (1990) by Muriel Spark months ago, when I read it, but a quick search suggests that I, in fact, did not.  And that was foolish on three levels – (a) I’ve forgotten quite a lot about it, (b) it was a lovely gift from Karen/Kaggsy and thus part of Reading Presently, and (c) it’s one of the best Muriel Spark books I’ve read.

In some ways, it is not simply a collection of people around a table, or a series of events, but a symposium of Sparkian traits and tricks – a pantheon of Sparkisms, characteristically condensed into only 140 pages.  There are (of course) the flashbacks and flashforwards which subvert the typical ways in which authors dispense information, and moments which would be big ‘reveals’ in most novels are slipped in incidentally.  There are self-important characters who dramatise their lives when nobody is really listening.  The narrative – as always with Spark – is darkly dispassionate, showing things happening without permitting emotion to enter the tone of the narrative, even for a moment.  Selfishness, cruelty, greed, avarice, and foolishness are all present in spades.  And, oh, I loved it.

The first words are definitely dramatic:

“This is rape!” His voice was reaching a pitch it had never reached before and went higher still as he surveyed the wreckage. “This is violation!”It was not rape, it was a robbery.
This is one of the pivotal moments of the narrative, despite appearing on the first page – the narrative weaves back and forth, with Spark’s usual disregard for linear structure, with this burglary appearing repeatedly in the timelines of the various characters.  It is Lord and Lady Suzy who have been robbed, but this is not the only robbery which takes place; while the guests assemble at Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan’s dinner party, another burglary is taking place…

The dinner party (or, indeed, symposium) is depicted in the present tense, and the conversations swirl snippily in Spark’s inimitable style, conversationalists never quite on the same plane as each other, and logic never quite being followed.  And then Spark takes the reader back into the recent history of everyone at the table – and further back still, so that this slim novel encompasses Marxist nuns, a complicated case of possible insanity, and family tensions between a newlywed and his mother.

“I don’t give it a year,” said Hurley Reed.  He was referring to William Damien’s marriage.”
You might be able to tell that many of the specifics have now gone from my mind, as I read Symposium months ago, but quotations like the one above reveal why I love Spark so much.  That quirky way of expressing herself, so the reader is constantly being jolted in their expectations, and conventions of narrative being consistently disturbed.  And of all the Spark novels I’ve read (which is about a dozen, I think) this is probably my second favourite after Loitering With Intent.

Since it is an amalgam of everything that I love about Spark, and representative of so many of her characters and writing quirks, I can’t decide whether it would make a brilliant entry-point for sampling Spark, or if it can only truly be appreciated by somebody who has already developed a love for Dame Muriel… maybe the latter; for us Spark appreciators, it is a delightful treat, of her best qualities neatly parcelled up.  Karen – thank you so much!

Others who got Stuck into it:


“What I read this time was a murder mystery but the really brilliant thing about this book is that next time I read it when doubtless […] I’ll find myself reading a book about love, or obsession, or family, or friendship…” – Hayley, Desperate Reader


“Spark doesn’t play to the emotions – I was watching them all from a distance, detached.” – An Adventure in Reading


“A perfect little morsel of the macabre set against the backdrop of everyday life.” – Polly, Novel Insights

Cullum – E. Arnot Robertson

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I’ve been meaning to read something by E. Arnot Robertson for years, and as part of Reading Presently I picked up Cullum (1928), which my lovely friend Clare gave to me, it being one of her favourite books.  Being a tale of a young woman’s first doomed love affair (we are told in the first line that it is doomed) and featuring my bête noire, fox-hunting, I was a little nervous… but needn’t have been.  Cullum is really good – moving, engaging, and – most importantly – witty.  A novel about love and hunting without humour would have been unbearable.

The girl in question – possibly the one looking poignantly to her left on the cover of my Virago Modern Classic – is 19 year old Esther Sieveking, half-English, half-French, and entirely ready for a sexual awakening which will take her beyond her circle in Surrey.

Which of us could fail to empathise with this statement – one which probably brought most of us to the blogosphere in the first place?

I was desperately eager to find a companion who could enter into the intangible world of books and ideas, where I spent half my time.
Esther thinks she might have found a way out when she learns that a poet, one Mrs. Cole, is living nearby… My mean side emerges in my love of fictive character assassinations, particularly those given in measured, well-paced prose.  If it helps, I share four out of five of Mrs. Cole’s listed traits:

I learnt in ten minutes that she was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker and an anti-vivisectionist, and that she had innumerable other fads.  She was of the type that should have had many children, instead of only one son and many affectations.
She is a poet.  Nobody likes mocking writers like writers, and here is a demolition of Mrs. Cole’s poetry:

I was shown a collection of worn cuttings that had become illegible at the folds through constant handling. They contained sad little pieces of verse which always referred vaguely to ‘you’ in the last line.  ‘You’ had either jilted her of passed away; it was impossible to tell which, but they were all melancholy and had the most comprehensive titles; ‘Life,’ dealt with in eight of ten lines; ‘Love,’ inaptly, being a little longer.
Mrs. Cole isn’t herself a very important character, but she does provide the means by which Esther meets Cullum Hayes.  I don’t seem to have bookmarked any paragraphs which describe him, but essentially he is perfect for Esther.  Handsome, amusing, and persistent, he speaks romantically when needed and flippantly when needed.  Considering the other potential suitors in her life have, to this point, been of the damp, somewhat pathetic variety, the arrival of Cullum is easily enough to sweep her off her feet, and (seemingly) she him his.  (That ending of that sentence almost makes sense, and was too fun to write to ignore.) (So was the ending of that one.)  And, boy, does it get passionate – particularly for 1928.

Did I want him!  Many times, when I was with him and when I was alone, at nights, I had longed for him, almost faint for a second with the desire for his kisses, which I could only imagine.  Love, feeding on itself, had grown greatly.  Cullum obsessed me; all of me, mind and body.
So why did this not aggravate me, as pontifications on love are apt to do?  It was the humour which surrounded them.  Robertson is very amusing on the travails of working for a rubbish women’s magazine if one has any literary pretensions, and also quite biting of the huntin’ fraternity (Esther does hunt, but hates the idea of it at the same time.)  Here’s a sample which made me smile…

I saw a great deal of him.  He formed a habit of dropping in two or three evenings a week at my boarding-house.  Sometimes we talked, or if I had brought back some work to finish from the office, he read or smoked in the arm-chair in my bedsitting-room, to the thrilled horror of several elderly boarders of both sexes, who were convinced that he was my lover, since he had been allowed into a room which undeniably held my bed, even though it might be disguised as a sofa during the day.  That was conclusive.  The old ladies believed the worst because they secretly hoped it was true; the dear old gentleman because, in the virile period of his youth, it would have been so.
And, of course, Cullum turns out to be a bad’un – a liar and delusional fraud, and repeat offender at that.  I don’t know why Robertson chose to reveal that in the opening line – perhaps to avoid the trap of the novel being structured like a romantic penny dreadful? – but it gives Cullum a structure oddly akin to The End of the Affair – except we see the beginning, middle, and end, all the while knowing how it will end.

Having compared Cullum to The End of the Affair, I should point out the difference that tone makes.  The structure and the emotions may have significant overlap, but Cullum – for all its passion and anguish – still felt like a fun, light book with dark moments.  The End of the Affair, on the other hand – even with the comic detective – was a dark book with light moments.  And here ends a spontaneous comparison of two books I doubt anybody has compared before!

Thanks, Clare, for another gem.  I really should immediately read all the books you give me, shouldn’t I?

Six Fools and a Fairy – Mary Essex

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I forgot to take a photo…
This one is from here,
where you can buy a copy

You may remember that, back in November 2011, I wrote about Mary Essex’s The Amorous Bicycle, which was very witty and fun and delightfully middlebrow – and I puzzled over the fact that Essex (in fact Ursula Bloom) had managed to write so many novels (over 500) and still put out quality.  Sometime before that, Jodie (known to us as Geranium Cat) kindly sent me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy (1948), saying that she’d tried it a couple of times and couldn’t get into it… fast forward a couple of years, and my Reading Presently project has propelled me into finally getting it down from my shelves.  How would I find it compared to The Amorous Bicycle and another Essex novel I’d loved, Tea Is So Intoxicating?

Well, I’m afraid it’s not as good… That sounds like a very ungrateful way to start a Reading Presently review, so I shall also say that it was a fun read, and just what I wanted for relaxing in the evenings after working away ferociously on my thesis, but it’s an idea which doesn’t quite get off the ground.

And that idea is a school reunion where each of the six men recounts a story, relating to each course, about… well, I’ll let Charles Delamere explain:

“I should enjoy it immensely if we each told our own story.  About the woman, the one woman who meant something out of the rut to us.  The one each of us remembers most forcefully.”
The courses are Consomme Paysanne, Sole a la bonne femme, Vol-au-vent, Roast Lamb, Gooseberry fool, and Angels on horseback.  Give or take a few accents that I’m too lazy to find.  I’ll confess, I was already unsure about how things would go when this premise was set up.  Surely it would lead to a great deal of disjointedness?

It’s essentially a series of short stories, each of which relate all-too-appropriately to the course in question, and each of which recounts a lost love.  At one point a character makes a caustic reference to the stereotypical heroes and heroines of an Ethel M. Dell novel, but Essex isn’t far behind – her heroes aren’t swarthy silent types, but they do all fall into much the same mould as each other.  I usually hate the criticism that “He can’t write women” or “She can’t write men”, because it is (usually) silly and reductive, suggesting there are only two types of people – but Essex does seem, in Six Fools and a Fairy, to be under the impression that all men fall in love instantly, are proud, and are quite keen to hop into bed as soon as poss.  And throw into that stereotype that they’re all generally a bit hopeless.  She spends a while delineating her characters at the beginning, but it’s pretty impossible to tell the difference between them when they start talking.

Each chapter tells a difference character’s story, only occasionally returning to reunion dinner, and since they have only about thirty pages to do, we whip through fairly stereotypical tales of misadventure and the-ones-that-got-away without building the characters up enough for the reader to care.  And then the story is over, and we’re onto the next.  The chapters aren’t even structured as anecdotes, but instead are shown through an omniscient narrator.  It’s all a little bit bewildering and unnecessary.

Mary Essex is certainly an engaging writer, though, and it’s easy enough to whip through the chapters.  She has that ability to write a page-turner, even if (once turned) one has no particular wish to mull over what one has read.  For a novelist renowned chiefly now for romance literature, though, this book – the first of the three I’ve read which prioritises romance – is surprisingly less interesting than Tea Is So Intoxicating and The Amorous Bicycle, which are about gossipy villagers and amusing incidents.  For wit has absented itself from Six Fools and a Fairy, creeping only into the odd line, then slinking out again quickly.

So, diverting enough for a quick read, if one doesn’t want to feel at all challenged or invested.  But while her other novels made me think she was approaching the middlebrow joys of Richmal Crompton or even E.M. Delafield, had I read Six Fools and a Fairy first, I’d never have bothered with another.  Thanks very much for giving me a copy, Jodie, but ultimately I’m not too far from your assessment of it – and I think I’ll be passing it on again.

Mr. Skeffington – Elizabeth von Arnim

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A couple of times I have had the pleasure of staying with bloggers, who have kindly put me up (and put up with me) when I’ve needed a bed to crash in while in London.  One of those times I stayed chez Rachel/Book Snob, which was lovely – and even lovelier was that she sent me away with Mr. Skeffington (1940) by Elizabeth von Arnim as a present.  (I did give her a book to say thank you for having me, I should perhaps add, if I ever want bloggers to let me stay with them again.)

Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the most varied writers I’ve read, and there is little to link (say) the fairytale niceness of The Enchanted April with the deliciously biting satire of The Caravaners.  And then there is my current favourite, Christopher and Columbus, which has elements of both.  Where would Mr. Skeffington fit into the von Arnim spectrum?  Well, it turns out I’ve now read one of her more sombre, reflective novels… and, indeed, her last.

The novel is called Mr. Skeffington, but the central character is his ex-wife Lady Skeffington (Fanny to her friends) who divorced him over his affairs when she was still in her twenties, and is now approaching the grand old age of fifty.  In order to get on board with the novel, we have to accept the premise that fifty is terrifyingly old (although, since von Arnim was in her mid-seventies when she wrote the novel, she ought to have known better.)  But for Fanny it is a dreaded landmark, principally because – having been a renowned beauty all her life – a recent illness has taken her beauty from her, and quite a lot of her hair, and a tactless doctor tells her that she may soon be an eyesore.

An eyesore?  Was he suggesting that she was an eyesore?  She, Fanny Skeffington, for years almost the most beautiful person everywhere, and for about five glorious years quite the most beautiful person anywhere?  She?  When the faces of the very strangers she passed in the street lit up when they saw her coming?  She, Noble, lovely little Fanny, as poor Jim Conderley used to say, gazing at her fondly – quoting, she supposed; and nobody quoted things like that to eyesores.
I’ve got to say, reading Mr. Skeffington made me quite grateful that I have never been handsome – it must be very difficult to lose something like that, but especially so for Fanny, who doesn’t have many other character traits to offer – or, at least, hasn’t had to rely on them.

But that isn’t all.  The reason she consults the doctor in the first place is because she keeps having hallucinations of Job Skeffington, her estranged husband.  She can’t think why, since she has barely thought of him for years and years… but he won’t stop appearing before her eyes.

And then the novel takes us back through the men who have courted her since her divorce.  The novel is oh-so-chaste, so none of them have done more than fling themselves adoringly at her feet, and she has done little than laugh politely and ignore them – but she determines to go and find them, to make herself feel young and beautiful again, and reassure herself that she isn’t an eyesore.

So, in succession we see Fanny visit… New College, Oxford, to see an undergraduate who was recently (and somewhat inappropriately) besotted with her – only to see him busy with a much younger woman.  Then off to an older man who once loved her deeply, and still cherishes the letter she writes to him, but is shocked by her appearance after a decade or two (while she, in turn, is shocked by his) – and he, after all, is married to a young woman by now.  And then off to a vicar, living with his sister, who loved her when he was but a promising young curate, and now lives abstemiously on starvation rations.  And possibly more.

It’s an interesting conceit for a novel, but it does end up making everything feel rather disjointed, somehow.  Somehow the different meetings don’t hold together, so Mr. Skeffington is more like a series of similar short stories than a single narrative – and, although there are some interesting or delightful characters (I particularly enjoyed the vicar’s sister, who remained certain that Fanny was a prostitute, but steadfastly determined to look after her charitably, when Fanny is mega-rich) they aren’t given the opportunity to grow or impact the novel much.

And the end… well, I shan’t give it away, but it is so emphatically a tribute to a famous Victorian novel that, if it isn’t deliberate, it’s plagiarism.

This is Elizabeth von Arnim, so of course the novel is good – she is always an excellent writer – but I think it might be a novel I’d be better off reading in about fifty years’ time.  Perhaps then it would feel like a paean to youth and a empathetic mixture of nostalgia and regret… but, though I enjoyed it, and appreciated von Arnim’s writing, I missed the raucous humour of her satires.  I’ve now encountered another facet of von Arnim’s myriad writing talents… and I’m not sure I’m quite ready for it.