What I read on holiday (a book report, of sorts)

Well, sort of.

Really, it's just another rather short and scattered (possibly scatterbrained) Italy-related post before I get back to the real purpose of this blog.  Wrapping one's head around real life again after bopping around Tuscany in a cool Fiat convertible isn't as easy as it might at first appear...

One final, completely superfluous holiday pic of Venice, just because

A couple of you were nice enough to be curious about how all of my agonizing—for weeks before the trip—about reading material finally turned out, and since it turned out quite well I figured I might as well tell about it and share some thoughts on a few novels I wouldn't otherwise review in any depth (except perhaps the last, which not many people read and which was quite interesting, but alas, since I didn't have time to take good notes while engaged in the aforementioned bopping around Italy, this will have to do).

I started off, in all of my anxiety about a) flying in general, and b) flying for endless hours at a time, with what I figured would be a perfect comfort read.  From among my many unread Girls Gone By books, DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE's The Serendipity Shop had jumped out at me. I have an odd weakness for stories about young women starting businesses of their own, and when they're set in a lovely village in Scotland, they're even better.  Bruce's novel was no disappointment, and saw me through the waking hours of the flight to Venice with great charm and good fun (a dose of Ambien happily saw to it that I had a few non-waking hours as well).

After that, though, as I hinted in my last post, my Kindle started really paying for itself.  Although I also had in my bag a couple of Agatha Christies and a Stella Gibbons I've been meaning to read for ages, I made the switch to e-books and didn't look back for the rest of the trip.

I had loaded my Kindle down with ample choices, mostly titles I had been meaning to read for ages but somehow never had, particularly some mysteries I was and am embarrassed never to have gotten around to. First and foremost, how hard is it to believe that I had never read DOROTHY L. SAYERS' Gaudy Night? Shocking, eh? I recall starting it once, getting distracted, and then just never quite coming back around to it. But as it turned out (not entirely to my surprise), it was a riveting read and handily took me all the way to Tuscany.

I might still have to say, at risk of appalling some of you, that I still like The Nine Tailors just a bit better, for its haunting setting and meditations on life and death, but Sayers' insider's view of Oxford, the various types of women who went there, and the moral and ethical challenges of academic life, was endlessly fascinating. I broke in the highlighting function of my Kindle to the point where some sections of the novel were more yellow than white. If I had more time, I could share so many quotes here that I'd be accused of infringing copyright. But perhaps I won't.

Sayers left me with a hankering for more mystery, and I've been meaning to get back to JOSEPHINE TEY ever since The Daughter of Time became one of my five favorite mysteries of all time. Daughter was also on my Kindle, just in case I needed another ultra-comforting and absorbing re-read, but instead I turned to To Love and Be Wise, which has now become a favorite as well.

Tey, as many of you undoubtedly already know, is wonderfully elegant and sophisticated in her detective novels—much like the stage actress friend of Alan Grant who features prominently in To Love and Be Wise and whose instincts about character help him to solve the mystery. I sank right in to the book, progressing seamlessly from casually checking out the first few paragraphs to decide if it was really what I wanted to read, to having blissfully read the first fifty pages and finding it hard to tear myself away even for alluring sightseeing or a good night's sleep before another day of exploration.

The novel is concerned with the disappearance of a strikingly attractive and charismatic young man who has inserted himself into an artistic community before vanishing from a riverside, casting suspicions on all and sundry. If the solution to the puzzle was not entirely plausible or satisfying, it made little difference to my enjoyment overall.

There was, though, one little turn of phrase that had me scratching my head.  At one point, a character, telling what they had been doing at the time of the young man's disappearance, describes "watching a radio play." The turn of phrase is even used a second time, and it really jarred me. I wondered if it was a misprint (or mistranscription in my e-book, perhaps). Or did people actually watch their radios in these days? It seemed initially like an odd slip in verbiage that someone from the age of television and movies—in which we are indeed accustomed to watching our entertainment—might make anachronistically when writing about radio days. But then, as I thought more about it, I wondered if the key wasn't the word "play." People would certainly have been accustomed to watching stage plays, right? So perhaps the terminology just carried over to radio plays? In the end, I feel capable of convincing myself of either explanation. Anyone have any illumination to offer?

At any rate, the novel was riveting, and when I finished, I was yearning for the only other late Alan Grant mystery I hadn't previously read, The Singing Sands, but alas I didn't have it on my Kindle and had no Wi-Fi at the hotel where we were staying. Bummer.

So I took the opportunity to finally plunge into ETHEL LINA WHITE's The Wheel Spins, upon which Hitchcock based his classic film The Lady Vanishes (the book has sometimes been reprinted with the film's title), and which set the perfect tone for our train ride from Rome to Naples. No governesses disappeared on our train—or else I was merely too wrapped up in my novel to notice their plight (hmmm, now I wonder...)—but actually being on a European train while reading it (especially the rather old-fashioned train on which that particular trip was made) undoubtedly lent it an extra kick.

Our train looked just a bit
more modern than this one

Unlike Sayers and Tey, whose style makes their books feel like dishing with fascinating old friends, White felt a bit standoffish. Her style is more terse, a bit chilly at first, and so she took some warming up to. I notice that several Amazon customer reviews of the novel are ambivalent about it too. Ultimately, I thought White's style was appropriate for her story, which is about a young woman who is unquestionably terse and chilly at first, and who only gradually becomes more human and sympathetic as the story unfolds, but it still makes the book a bit hard to engage with at first.

Indeed, when he adapted the novel for his film, Hitchcock seems to have felt the need to revise the character of Iris, a spoiled, selfish rich girl, to make her more likeable (though even in the film I've always found her a bit irritating, truth be told). But in most ways, Hitch seems to have held true to the spirit of the novel, if not always to the letter. There is no dramatic tea bag revelation here, and the romantic interest—such as it is—is one of the two Brits that Hitch turned into comic relief. The charming musicologist character played by Michael Redgrave in the film is fully a Hitchcock creation, and in that area I have to say that I think Hitchcock improved on White, as the musicologist at least provides an instantly likable, if eccentric, character to play off of Iris' chilliness.

Hitch also made Miss Froy an international spy, while White's governess is merely the victim of circumstance.  In strange and troubled ways, Hitchcock was a kind of feminist, I've always thought (though such a statement requires a lot of qualification), often giving his female characters strong personalities and the ability to take the initiative (often from ineffectual men). His revision of Miss Froy was perhaps an example of that, and an improvement on White's governess.

But that's not to say the novel isn't well worth checking out on its own merits. While Hitchcock's Miss Froy (especially as portrayed by the incomparable Dame May Whitty) is far more likeable and enjoyable, White's governess is a fascinating misfit. White consistently presents her as a sort of stunted, middle-aged schoolgirl, who has refused to grow up and who perhaps uses her travels all over Europe as a means of avoiding mature relationships and responsibilities (of course the same could be said of James Bond and of many, many other male characters who are portrayed as heroic and admirable...):

As she listened to the gush of words behind her, Iris was again perplexed by the discrepancy between Miss Froy's personality and her appearance. It was as though a dryad were imprisoned within the tree-trunk of a withered spinster.

Later, when (slight spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the film version) Iris discovers Miss Froy's signature written in the window's steam, this odd childishness is stressed even more:

Iris stared at the name, hardly able to believe that her eyes were not playing her a trick. The tiny neat handwriting was round and unformed as that of a schoolgirl, and suggested the character of the little governess—half-prim adult, and half-arrested youth.

White certainly had an interest in psychology and perhaps psychoanalysis as well, and if one wanted to, I'll bet one could make a complicated—and probably tedious—analysis of Iris and her relationships with Miss Froy and the Baroness (who is retained in Hitchcock's movie as an imperious, vaguely threatening figure, but without as much detail as in the novel). Good mother figure and bad mother figure, perhaps? But never mind, one doesn't in fact want to make such an analysis.

I do think too that White's portrayal of Iris, the heroine (to use that term loosely), troubled as she is, is deeper and more realistic than Hitchcock's spunky-bad-girl-tamed-by-love. A shallow, utterly self-centered rich girl at the novel's beginning, Iris begins to open up after a frightening experience of getting lost on a mountainside makes her feel the vulnerability of her go-it-alone, screw-everyone-else attitude. When she meets Miss Froy, she actually finds her irritating, and when the governess first vanishes, Iris is pleased to be rid of her. It is only her resentment against the officious figure of the Baroness, and her need to assert her own sanity, that make her begin to resist the united front of other characters asserting that Miss Froy has never existed.

As much as anything, then, it's Iris' ego and pigheadedness, always put to selfish and frivolous use in the past, that saves Miss Froy's life, and this creates an interesting tension in her character. The trouble is, even after her change of heart, Iris is still not a particularly likeable character. I found her interesting, and the novel was a page-turner, but I have no trouble seeing why White has never really been wholeheartedly embraced by fans of the Golden Age of mysteries.

Of course, that's only my perspective, and when I got home and did a Google search, I discovered that Book Snob wrote about The Wheel Spins just last year, and felt a bit more enthusiastic overall than I did. Check out her review for a different perspective.

I'm also still interested in trying out While She Sleeps, a novel White wrote three years after Wheel, in which a young woman unlucky enough to be selected as the victim of a crime has a series of strokes of luck which protect her, though she perceives each stroke of luck as an exasperating annoyance. I'm game.

Well, that's my book report, and I didn't even have to resort to the fleshing out its length with phrases like "The book was very, very, very interesting and exciting and fun and enjoyable," as I sometimes had to do with such reports in my school years.

Oh! And in answer to a couple of you who asked: Believe it or not, I purchased nary a book while on my trip. In fact, there were only two occasions when I even looked at books for sale—once at a little street stand in Lucca which had a single shelf of well-worn English language books (alas, hopes of a gleeful discovery of some wonderful lost treasure were not fulfilled), and once at the large international bookstore at Termini station in Rome (with my tastes, new books are rarely exciting, so I spent most of my time examining the fun international covers of various Agatha Christie mysteries). Sad but true, not a single new acquisition on my trip.

Now (or soon, at least), back to work on my next Overwhelming List update and my next genre list.  Coming soon!