Quite a while
back now, I posted about the Friends of the SF Public Library book sale and
mentioned that I had acquired my first Norah Lofts novel. Part of the reason I couldn't resist picking
it up was that it would be the first "War Economy Standard" book to
(permanently) grace my bookshelves.
Although these titles—printed on cheap, thin paper, relatively small
print, and flimsy bindings—are hardly the crème
de la crème when it comes to reader-friendly editions, the thought that
they were produced in wartime England somehow makes me feel a connection to
what, for me, is one of the most interesting times in literary—or any
other—history.
War
Economy Standard books came with this seal:
And,
although I haven't seen this in other WES books I've borrowed from libraries,
the Lofts book also has this disclaimer:
These
notices notwithstanding, the book's ability to evoke its original
readers—probably predominantly women, reading the book after an exhausting day
of war work or waiting in queues or even while crowded into a bomb shelter—more
than makes up for the small print and paper that, I suspect, might simply dissolve if splashed with water.
Only a
night or two after finishing The Brittle
Glass, Andy and I happened to watch Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. And now and
then while watching Garbo chewing the scenery (I admit that although we liked
the movie we also indulged in a bit of mockery of the great Garbo's melodramatic
close-ups—gazing forlornly at the ceiling before pausing the movie to refill
our drinks and so on), I found myself thinking of Sorrel Kingaby, Lofts' memorable
heroine. The two heroines perhaps have
little in common (and I doubt that Sorrel spent quite so much time worrying
about her close-ups), but they are both women ahead of their time, occupying
nontraditional positions for women, but also having to face the limitations,
restrictions, and resentments those positions entail. Suffice it to say that I found Lofts' version a bit more convincing, though.
Set in
England in the years just after the French Revolution, The Brittle Glass follows Sorrel from birth until after her
father's death, when she takes over his business and runs it "just like a
man." Josiah Kingaby has, bitterly,
had little choice but to leave it to her, since his only son—out of a total of
five children—has died in childhood. He
has alienated Sorrel with shoddy treatment, due to his resentment of her sex,
but she is, in fact, a chip off the old block.
Cover of a more recent reprint |
This
novel—unlike so many of the books I write about here—is heavy on plot. There is drama, bitterness, adventure,
danger, resentment, romance, and crime galore, and Lofts is certainly a gifted
storyteller—or else I am a pushover—as I found the novel compulsively
readable. It would therefore be a shame
to give away very much of the plot, so I'll focus on characters and themes
instead.
The
story is told in turn by four main narrators, each of whom sees Sorrel from a
different perspective—plus a fifth, who may be more or less Norah Lofts herself
and who appears in a short epilogue.
Now, I admit that I very often find this strategy annoying. Just as I get accustomed to one narrator, he
or she vanishes and I have to familiarize myself with another one. In the wrong hands, the technique can make an
entire novel feel as awkward and alienating as those first few pages of even a
quite good novel—all explication and scene-setting and introduction of
characters without anything to really pull the reader in.
And a pretty bad earlier cover |
But
Lofts' hands are obviously the right ones.
She uses each new narrator to make revelations about Sorrel that the
previous narrator couldn't have known, so that the technique actually makes the
story more compulsive rather than less.
And Lofts eschews all the complexities of, say, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, in which each
narrator's style and rhythm of speaking is meticulously different from the
others. If I were to provide a generic
quote from each of Lofts' narrators, I could safely bet you couldn't tell one
from the other. And that might be judged
a weakness from a higher brow literary perspective, but is a huge strength if
the goal is readability and enjoyment.
The
first section is narrated by Louisa Kingaby (Cousin Lou). When I mentioned the book in my book sale
post, I quoted the beginning of her section as having made me want to read the
book. But I actually cut off the quote
too soon:
For nearly fifty years I had performed the tasks and carried out
the duties which fall to the lot of the unmarried and not-quite-independent
member of a large family. I had been present at births, and deathbeds, tended
numerous cases of sickness, and been often entrusted with the tactful breaking
of bad news. But I do not think I ever had a task less to my liking than that
of telling my cousin Josiah that his first-born was a daughter.
For
the ending of this paragraph introduces, right from the start, the crucial
theme of girls being of less value than boys.
In fact, Lou goes on soon after to ponder this puzzling valuation:
And I thought how strange men were. My father had not
welcomed me; yet it was I who stayed with him to the end and nursed him through
two apoplectic strokes and closed his eyes at the last. Men were indeed very
strange.
And
Lou, who has been, since childhood, more or less in love with Josiah—in whose
home she becomes a permanent fixture after Sorrel's birth—has a real charm all
her own. My only regret about the
multiple narrator strategy here is that it deprived me of the chance of
spending more time in Lou's head. And
Lofts too may have felt Lou to be a kindred spirit, as she has Lou muse, Room of One's Own style:
But although I have always been kept busy my mind has never
been so much occupied that I could not notice what went on around me. And maybe
because my own life has not been very eventful, I have tended to take a great interest
in other people's more exciting ones. (Sometimes I thought that if I had had
more time and more privacy when I was young I could have written a book like
Mrs. Radcliffe or Miss Fanny Burney.)
Lou
tells Sorel's story from her birth until just after her father's death. Together, they both outgrow their love for
the old man who treats Sorrel so poorly because she is a mere girl, and Lou's
steadfast devotion shifts to Sorel instead.
Norah Lofts |
The
second section, beginning just after Sorel has declared her intention of
running her father's business for herself, is narrated by Jamie Brooke, a young
clerk in her father's office. In this
section, there is romance of a sort, and Sorrel's exhilarating confrontation
with the tyrannical head clerk, Cobbitt, who fancies himself unofficially in
charge since there is only a wisp of a girl overseeing things. We also get Jamie's apt description of
Sorrel's personality (which perhaps fits the novel itself as well?):
I described a perfectly ordinary young girl whom circumstances
had placed in an unusual position; but as the days followed one another and
financial worries became so familiar to me that they no longer could absorb all
my attention, I became aware that Sorrel Kingaby was not a perfectly ordinary
young girl. She was like a box with which I used to play when I was small. It
was square and the sides were painted; and inside it there was another square
box with other pictures on the sides; and within that there was another, and
another, until the last cube was too small to have a lid and was like a dice,
solid, but with infinitesimal pictures on its tiny sides. And each box,
although only part of the whole plaything, was complete and perfect in itself.
The
third section, narrated by a rather surprisingly intellectual smuggler named Tom
Borthwick, shows us another, very different side of Sorrel, and the fourth,
narrated by the governess Sorrel hires to care for her younger sisters, powerfully
reveals the darker side of Sorrel's independence. All of the narrations are equally
compelling—even the last, for whose narrator few readers will find much
sympathy.
The
third narrator, Borthwick, is prone to what in later years would have been
called the blues, and the sense of impending doom that comes upon him now and
then not only plays eloquently into one of the main themes of the novel, but
likewise must have expressed what many people were feeling when the novel was written,
in the midst of the darkest times of the war, when Britain's fate was still very much up in the air. This passage might even be a sort of oblique reference to the war happening 150-odd years in the novel's future:
It was the thing that I called, in my mind, my darkness; it
was, I think, akin to the evil spirit that troubled Saul, the king of Israel;
but in my case sweet music, especially harp music would only have aggravated the
condition. […] In the hour of the evil spirit I saw myself, and other men, not
as trees, walking, but as motes, infinitesimally small, blowing through the
cold outer spaces of the universe, lost between star and star, exiled from all
comfort under the icy light of the moon . . . a lifetime less than a breath's
span, a person less than an ant. […] Above
all, I wanted to leave the moonlight, seek warmth and brightness, have a glass in
my hand, a pipe in my mouth, some cheerful voice in my ears, so that I might
forget the vision of a doomed human race, rushed along, like cattle to the
slaughter-house.
And this bleak vision is at the heart of The
Brittle Glass, as the short epilogue spells out. There, a fifth narrator, in the year 1937,
comes across Sorrel's grave, and then meets a schoolmistress who tells her a
bit more about Sorrel and mentions an old man in town who might know more. It turns out that the story we've read has
come from the old man's gossipy, rather cynical memories, but even as the schoolmistress mentions him,
she casts some doubt on his version of the story:
"Anyhow, I may be silly; but I prefer to keep my
illusions—or rather to depend upon my own imagination instead of old Middleditch's."
She spoke the name with rancour; I noted it with care. But I
said, soothingly, "After all, in a matter of this kind one guess is as
good as another, isn't it?"
So
that we are left, rather eloquently, musing along with the narrator about how
present reality will one day be irretrievably shrouded in the mists of time,
and wondering whether there might not be much more to Sorrel's story that could never be known:
After all, how much nearer, even with much documentary
evidence, can we come to understanding anyone of the myriad dead who have gone to
their graves, carrying their real secrets, of motive and essence and
personality, into the silence with them?
Oddly,
although even I, approaching this novel with a bit of a resistance to historical
fiction, ultimately found it to be a very powerful story, it does not seem to
be one of Lofts' most admired works. Several of her novels have been reprinted in the last few years and
remain in print, and more are available in ebook format. But The
Brittle Glass is not among them. How could this be?
I read a lot of NL when I was a teenager but I don't remember this one. It sounds fascinating. The books I remember best are the House trilogy, The Town House, The House at Old Vine & The House at Sunset is about one house in Suffolk over 500 years & the families who live there. She also wrote Jassy, a historical novel about a gypsy girl who wreaks havoc. It was made into a film with Margaret Lockwood & Patricia Roc in the 40s.
ReplyDeleteOh, thank you for the recommendations, Lyn. I usually have a resistance to sagas, but the trilogy seems to have more going on than that and sounds very intriguing. And anyway, a lot of my resistances seem to be breaking down lately--girls' school stories, historical novels, romance--so why not a saga spanning 500 years?!
DeleteSuch an intriguing review - thank you, Scott! Made me want to find out more about the author, so I looked her up on Wikipedia & saw there are plenty of her books available on Amazon. None in my library, unfortunately, and interlibrary loan is not free here. Phooey!
ReplyDeleteWill also await recommendations before succumbing to purchasing.
del, curlsnskirls.wordpress.com
Yes, Del, I do think her books can be found more easily than most of the authors I tend to write about. At least it's possible to track down her books, though it's too bad your local library doesn't have any. (I wouldn't want to make you homesick for the Bay Area by mentioning that SF public library has 32 of her titles...) :-)
DeleteAaaawwww!
Deletedel
That sounds deliciously intriguing, Scott. I never read Norah Lofts (another writer whose books filled the paperback shelves back when I was buying them all the time, quite cheap, even by 1970s standards.)
ReplyDeleteWell, Susan, if I could just work out the details of my time travel book shopping excursions, the 1970s would perhaps be a productive destination as well. I'll let you know when I've perfected my time machine!
DeleteI'd love to time travel with you, Scott. Another thing on my list of time travel destinations is to see wonderful plays and shows by legendary performers. Fred and Adele in 1920s London, anyone?
DeleteI have read a number of her books, but not all! Lofts was very prolific, and a great story teller. How Far to Bethlehem is a fascinating story of her take on the three wise men which I often read before Christmas. It's so original, or so it seems to me. And the first one of Loft's books I read was Bless This House which was my mother's book and followed the owners of a Suffolk house from its building in Tudor times until about the 50s when it was written. I just ordered a very inexpensive copy of Brittle Glass. You made it sound so interesting.
ReplyDeleteI hope you enjoy it, Kristi! I think you will. Bless This House sounds interesting, and it seems to be similar to the Town House trilogy, as if she had used to concept for a single novel and then decided to explore it in more depth in a trilogy? I'm also curious about her novels set in contemporary times, though it seems that fans are not as excited about those.
DeleteNorah Lofts is indeed a truly great story teller . If anyone wants to know read more , we have a Fans of Norah Lofts group on the Goodreads website . And we are doing a group read on Brittle Glass as we speak!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.goodreads.com/group/show/9961-fans-of-norah-lofts
Thanks for letting us know. Hope you're enjoying Brittle Glass as much as I did!
DeleteWe put a link to your blog and everyone really enjoyed your review and the comments.
Delete