Book report: ELIZABETH ELIOT (1 of 2)

'As soon as you're born,' Alice said, 'they dress you and say it's a dear little girl, and when you die they talk about the corpse, and in between you lead this extraordinary life and pretend that things are important and are going to go on for ever.'

Now, if I say that this rather alarming statement from the eponymous Alice effectively sums up Alice (1950), the first of five novels written by Elizabeth Eliot—better known by the time of her death in 1991 for the non-fiction Heiresses and Coronets (1959, published in the U.K. as They All Married Well), about prominent Edwardian European/American marriages—then you may not believe me when I also say that it's one of the funniest, strangest, and most addictive novels I've read in a long time.

The delightfully morbid story of—well, very little in fact beyond the strange and often woeful domestic lives of Margaret, the narrator, and her friend Alice from their final year at boarding school in the late 1920s to their mid-20s or so with the Spanish Civil War in the background and global war on the horizon, Alice shares a family resemblance with several of my favorite novels, from Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead to Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworth's. And yet it's also completely its own thing.

The book was apparently a Book Society choice, not bad for a debut novel.

Alice and Margaret love nothing so much as imagining the pain and suffering of others, or even the pain and suffering that might be their own lot in the future. But their existential ponderings (and indeed there is a surprising amount of philosophical depth here, and an ongoing trope about fear as a primary motivator, which lends a somewhat eerie seriousness to the characters' otherwise often superficial and odd behavior) are both hilarious and tragic, witty and melancholy, a delicate balance that Eliot manages to maintain in a rather extraordinary way throughout. Even when imagining the labor of servants long retired or dead, their loopy imaginings are rather dark:

The next day Alice showed me over the house. We walked for miles up and down staircases and through deserted rooms. We paused in the front hall with its pillars and its white marble floor. Alice opened the shutters of one of the windows.

'It's lucky we don't use this as a hall now, isn't it?' she asked.

'Imagine if it had to be scrubbed every day. It would take hours. Nanny says that when she was a young girl housemaids used to get up at four in the morning. It's not surprising when one thinks what they had to do.'

We contemplated the floor, thinking with sympathy of the Victorian housemaids who had scrubbed it.

'Though perhaps it was the odd man,' Alice said more brightly, and for the sake of the housemaids we were glad.

In fact, in an ironic way, the servants come to symbolize freedom for Eliot's young women, trapped inside their regimented high-class lives:

Personally I never found anything about the servants squalid, but always most interesting. Besides, one learnt so much more about people when one was disagreeing with them, and compared with us the servants had unbelievably exciting lives. Their world was boundless, while ours was contained within such narrow limits.

…

But the servants! Anything might happen to them. They might go in a train to Woolwich and meet the love of their lives, or be murdered almost for the asking. Not that one wanted to be murdered exactly, but there was frustration in being denied the possibility.

…

Then another thing, the servants could give notice and a month later they would be living in a different house surrounded with quite different people, and the love of their lives lurking round the corner perhaps, or beside the bandstand on a summer evening.

Alice marries, unhappily, and faces many other adventures and hardships, involving Margaret in most of them, until she suddenly decides—with fabulous success—to become an actress. Other characters come and go, but one feels that the point is not so much the events themselves as the quirky ways in which Margaret and Alice handle and discuss the events. And a good deal of the morbidity of their thinking seems to stem in part from an underlying sense of radical instability in their world. The narrator's grandmother's maid, for example, fears that a boat they're travelling in will suddenly stop floating—"Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn't had suddenly altered." These are anxious characters who feel marooned in the world without any safe harbor—a tragic circumstance, no doubt, and one probably based in class changes in postwar Britain, but, in Eliot's hands, it's an absolutely hilarious one.

One case where the American cover
is definitely inferior to the British edition

She also has a wonderful flare with metaphor, which adds to the humor of her tale. Here's one of my favorite examples:

'Darling! and how do you feel?' Mrs. Norton, in her usual flowered evening dress, rushed at her daughter and kissed her. One was reminded of a black and white hen hurrying across a farmyard with its wings outstretched.

And then there's just a fair amount of giddy silliness, as in this one final quotation, which doesn't even require any setup or scene-setting:

Felix turned on the waiter, who still stood in the doorway.

'Who's responsible for this food, what?'

'It's sent up from the kitchens, sir.' Williams remained imperturbable, disinterested. One felt that had the kitchens chosen to send up nothing but potato peelings he would have served them with detachment and without comment.

I loved Alice so much that I had to find another of Eliot's books, and, rather astonishingly, it turned out that our local public library had a copy of her second novel, Henry, published later the same year as Alice.

And here's a case of the American edition
being superior (see below)

Henry has quite a lot of similarities to Alice—a first person narrator observing and admiring a problematic character (in this case, her brother), and making marvelous daft/brilliant observations of the events and people around them. I already mentioned Barbara Comyns and Rachel Ferguson among the authors Eliot has reminded me of. I don't know if Henry's tone was actually darker and more disturbing than Alice, or if I merely started to notice the subtexts a bit more, but while reading this one I found myself thinking of writers such as Shirley Jackson and J. D. Salinger, with perhaps a little Sylvia Plath thrown in (I wonder why I thought of American authors this time around?).

I made a note, too, that the wit in Henry reveals more uncomfortably familiar truths about love and dysfunctional families, and about what gets called love though it's really composed most of fear or power or weakness. What can be better than a hilariously entertaining novel that also makes you think and realize things about yourself?

Admittedly a terrible photo, but I think
the cover in general is a little bland

This exchange between Anne and her mother, after Anne has threatened to go out to work in order to gain her independence, makes relatively explicit the instability of the characters' social world:

I told her that I had done quite a lot of typing in the W.R.N.S., when I wasn't driving a lorry, and that I would learn shorthand in the evenings.

'The papers are full of advertisements for secretaries and junior typists. So I don't expect people will be as particular as they used to be.'

Mother said that standards were certainly going down, and that 'they' were forcing 'us' out of existence.

And my mother had looked mournfully round the drawing room. 'They' had prevented her renewing the faded chintz covers, and also, presumably, buying a new castor for one of the armchairs.

Here, I think, is an absolute truth about human relations placed into a tidy nutshell:

'I'm sure he's charming,' Gerald said politely.

I hoped that when he did meet him Gerald really would find that Henry was charming or, at any rate, interesting. Of course, Henry was a human being and human beings were always interesting.

People were quite different. They overcrowded the buses and they created queues.

And here is a memorable summing-up of a core principle of Plato's philosophy:

I heard the word, 'Plato,' and remembered that Plato had said that human souls had once been round and that at a given moment they had broken into two and spent the rest of their existence looking for their other half; like in a cotillion.

I'm giggling again just inserting the quote here, and you can bet I'm already planning to move on to Eliot's three other novels—Mrs. Martell (1953), Starter's Orders (1955), and Cecil (1962). In fact, I'll leave you with this evocative image of my Eliot-related interlibrary loan and purchasing excesses:

Book report: Winifred Peck

I finally got round to reading a book I've been meaning to read for about a year. Too many books, too little time, indeed!

As some of you will recall, I enthusiastically reviewed several of Winifred Peck's novels last year, beginning with The Warrielaw Jewel, the first of only two murder mysteries that Peck published. (With mystery writers being rediscovered and reprinted at a delightful pace in the past few years, it's shocking that no one has got round to these yet, but rest assured I'm doing everything I can to make it happen…) So, why it took me so long to read her other mystery, Arrest the Bishop? (1949), is a mystery even to me.

That earlier novel, as you may recall, was set in Edwardian Edinburgh, while Bishop surely makes some use of Peck's personal experience as the daughter of a bishop and the sister of not one, but two priests (one Catholic, one Anglican). The novel is perhaps not quite a true closed society novel, since it's set at the bishop's palace instead of in a monastery or other religious institution, but with the sometimes chaotic gathering of church figures gathered at the palace for an ordination, it comes close to being one. But because it takes place in a home, however atypical the home may be, the ecclesiastical mood is lightened now and then by domestic details and family drama as well as religious conflict and disruption.

In short, a blackmailing clergyman—who has already been paid off and silenced once a few years before—arrives at the bishop's palace on the eve of the ordination, where several of his blackmail victims (including the bishop himself) are conveniently gathered. That he doesn't remain alive for long after his arrival will surprise no one, but the mystery is worked out in classic Golden Age style and with charming, believable and sometimes hilarious characters. One of the candidates for ordination, Dick Marlin, gets pulled into helping the passionately anti-clergy local inspector, while also, as a long-time friend of the family, becoming involved in the conflicts and dramas surrounding the bishop's two daughters.

The bishop's palace itself proves a wonderfully evocative setting, a monstrosity from which multiple wings and new additions now branch off, resulting in hallways veering in all directions (and allowing, should one so desire, for easy and unexpected entries and exits). The palace itself is intriguing but add in that it's built next to the dramatic ruins of a medieval abbey, and the eerie stage is set:

Bobs lingered at the lattice. Yes, the snow had fallen and transformed the winter night. The moon fell on blanched lawns, and beyond them laid capricious fingers on the ruins of the Guest House and Infirmarium, visible from this side of the house. The walls lay dark and ominous but a white radiance lit up here a broken roof, there a fragile rose window and desolate turret stairway. Behind them the bare trees and shrubs stood like a ghostly concourse of those Carthusian monks who had paced the cloisters to the first Matins of Christmas long ago. There, beyond the frame of the luxurious rose-velvet curtains, far from the sparkling fire and table behind him, lay the true life of endurance, asceticism and world-denial, thought Bobs, fanciful for once.

As in The Warrielaw Jewel, too, and for that matter in some of her other novels, Peck effectively uses the technique of distancing her story in the past, but nevertheless making occasional references to the present. It's a bit more subdued here than in Warrielaw, in which the main character actually discusses the differences in her own perspective now compared to what it was then. Here, we never really learn who the narrator is (unless I overlooked it), but the technique still works pretty well. In this case, the story is set around Christmas of 1920, but Peck highlights, for example, the similarities or distinctions between that postwar period and the post-World War II period in which she was writing the novel.

Occasionally, this is rather subtle. For instance, surely there is a bit of Peck's post-World War II attitude in this passage about the post-World War I attitudes of the bishop's daughters:

Such a very carefully edited story of Judith's affairs had been given her by her parents that Sue, who knew all about it with the simple acceptance of a post-war youth which would never again confuse ignorance with innocence, sometimes forgot how little she was supposed to know. Victorian girls were not allowed to see or touch pitch for fear of defilement. Sue and her contemporaries had learnt to meet it and wash away the stains carefully afterwards.

I have to make my frequent disclaimer that the solution to the mystery here does not strike me as a particular ingenious one. I had more or less guessed the killer and the motive by the time I reached the big reveal. But, per my norm again, I wasn't bothered at all by that, as the cleverness of the puzzle always takes a back seat to the characters and writing for me, but hardcore fans of puzzle-focused mysteries (do any hardcore fans of puzzle-focused mysteries still read this blog, after all the times I have undoubtedly disappointed them?!) may not be impressed.

This is dangerously close now to being a proper review, but I've managed to keep it a bit shorter than my old norm. So I'll sign off for now and save some other recent reading for next time.

Book report: holiday reading (pre-, mid-, and post-) (part 3)

Okay, in this post I am going to get completely caught up with my recent reading or very grievously injure myself trying.

It's odd how I tend to veer wildly in my reading, but once I'm into or out of a genre, it takes a while to cycle back around. After obsessing over them for several months, I've been reading very few school stories in the past couple of months, and very little children's fiction in general. But, two exceptions to note:

I read St. Kelvern's Launches Out by CAROL ANN PEARCE not long ago, and found it completely enjoyable and amusing, but—either because of my particular mood (perhaps just not being in a school story frame of mind) or because of other distractions or some other deficiency on my part—I'm also finding it hard to recall now, apart from the difficulties of one character in deciding what career she'd like to pursue. 

Front flap blurb of St. Kelvern's Launches Out

But I did enjoy it at the time, and my memory is notoriously bad, plus I know this is a favorite of many school story fans, so bear all of that in mind and don't hate me for not falling instantly in love with it.

Then, here's one it took me an embarrassing amount of time to get to. I wrote about having acquired a copy of VIRGINIA PYE's The Prices Return I don't know how long ago. It had been recommended by Call Me Madam for my World War II Book List, as an appropriate addition to the Postwar section, and it certainly does belong on that list. I was even a bit surprised by the number of references—in what is very much a book for teenagers, I assume—to bombed out buildings, memories of blackouts and doodlebugs, and even one character having been "twice dug out after air rairs". In addition to which, the head of the family, Mr. Price, is, we are told, off in Germany helping with the refugee situation there.

Front flap of
The Prices Return

The postwar housing shortage is clearly delineated in Mrs. Price's difficulties in finding even a temporary abode near her new job in London. Moreover, rationing in part leads to the central adventure of the novel—the children's attempt to maintain a goat in the middle of London (indeed, at one point, accidentally finding themselves and the goat in the middle of Piccadilly Circus) while keeping it a secret from their mother. It's not a terribly plausible sub-plot, and it wore just a bit thin for me, but the characters and story are so cheerful and charming that I can't quibble much. I'm on the lookout for Pye's other wartime titles now, and I had forgotten, while reading the book, that she was Margaret Kennedy's sister.

Just before New Year's, I had another strange shift in interest (or shift in obsession?). It had, for whatever strange reason, been quite a while since I'd read a Virago, though I have a couple of shelves full of those wonderful little green paperbacks from the 1980s, and they probably went a long way toward launching me on my current expeditions into ever more obscure books and writers.

First, something made me pick up DOROTHY STRACHEY's one and only novel, Olivia (1949), published under the pseudonym Olivia as well (presumably indicating a considerable level of autobiographical content in the novel, if the title character and author are supposed to be one and the same). Strachey was the big sister of historian and Bloomsbury-ite Lytton Strachey and Freud translator James Strachey, not to mention the sister of Marjorie Strachey, who also published fiction, sister-in-law of Ray Strachey, who published novels and a prominent history of the suffragists, and aunt of novelist and Persephone author Julia Strachey. But despite all the prominent, scandalous nonconformity of her relatives, she chose to publish her (mildly) lesbian-themed novel under a pen name.

In fact, anyone who approached Olivia hoping for something scandalous must have been—even at the time it first appeared—rather disappointed. It's actually a well-written, serious exploration of an English schoolgirl's infatuation with an attractive headmistress at a French boarding school. It could practically be a girls' school story itself, for all of the titillation you'll find, except that the rollicking adventures and near-death experiences are absent and the crush and all its implications and torments are treated with respect and dignity. It's true that the headmistress and her partner in running the school have presumably been lovers in the past, though that relationship has now deteriorated and is tainted with jealousy and spite. But it's hard to imagine anyone getting their knickers in a twist over that. If Olivia isn't one of my favorites (if nothing else, it's just too short to be fully satisfying), it's still a quite interesting read, especially for anyone who enjoys school settings.

Holding the little green Virago edition of Olivia in my hands seems to have been an appealing experience, because I immediately proceeded to another of the unread Viragos languishing on my TBR shelves. And it was a great way to celebrate the New Year's that the first book I completed in 2016 was a new favorite. Does it subtract from that felicitousness that multiple kindred spirits—friends and fellow bloggers alike—have been telling me for years that I should read E. H. YOUNG in general and Miss Mole (1930) in particular?

Well, better late than never. And it's certainly a worthy addition to my imaginary "top shelf," where all of the books I love most are virtually kept. (In actual fact, those "top shelf" books that I own in physical copies are scattered throughout my bookcases at present—not the least reason for this being that one shelf probably isn't large enough to hold them all—not to mention those I have only as e-books.) 

At any rate, what a wonderful, odd, and, indeed, wonderfully odd novel Miss Mole is. It's the tale of a 40-ish spinster with a troubled past, who has drifted from post to post—sometimes a companion, sometimes a housekeeper—never staying for long because she possesses a bit too much dignity, a troubled relationship with the truth, and a tendency to speak her mind a bit too eloquently.

Wouldn't I love to have a copy of Miss Mole
in this original edition?

It's certainly "uncozy" and therefore right up my alley, and it's also, I found myself thinking, more "grown up" than most novels. Which brought to mind Virginia Woolf's famous declaration—about George Eliot's Middlemarch—that it's one of the few serious works of fiction written for grownups (i.e. presumably—though I hate to assume I know what Virginia means, ever—those readers who aren't looking merely for adventure or thrills, and aren't satisfied with romanticized, easy portrayals of the comedies, conflicts and tragedies of life). And if that's what Woolf meant, then she should certainly have read Miss Mole (though, now that I think of it, perhaps she did, and probably, just to spite me, she wrote something snarky about it, as she was so prone to do with her contemporaries).

[And of course, after I had already written that paragraph, a Google search for something completely different revealed by chance that Woolf had indeed been snarky about Miss Mole, which frankly makes me feel a bit snarky about Woolf herself, and nothing good can come of everybody being snarky, now can it? So I will move on.]

For me, the idea of grownup-ness stemmed from the fact that Miss Mole, with her unpredictable attitudes, morals, and philosophies, is so plainly not any kind of romantic heroine for a novel—not even any kind of heroine at all, for any kind of novelist with less vision and wisdom than E. H. Young. Any reasonably talented writer might have made Miss Mole an interesting supporting character, but to make her likeable—even lovable—as a main character seems to me an extraordinary achievement.

And she is interesting because she is completely convincingly damaged—even rather seriously damaged—by past experiences, and her position in regard to the world is always one of defensiveness and mistrust, interpreting everyone around her for the possible threat they could pose or the possible benefit or entertainment to be obtained from them. But this rather tense way of going through life is tempered by a surprising ability to take joy in the simple things that come her way—observing people on the street, taking a solitary walk, treasuring her few possessions—that makes us pull for her despite her occasional shadiness (which Young also doesn't hesitate to show us).

I found myself relating to Miss Mole quite a lot—sometimes in ways that made me do a bit of soul-searching about my own damage and my own sometimes paranoid approach to other people or strange situations. Which made the novel that much more satisfying. However clever they may be, stories with easy happy endings that solve everyone's problems, and characters who are pristine and undamaged apart from one easily-solved dilemma, can be quite fun to read, and some of them might belong on an imaginary "second shelf," but for me, a certain amount of realism about the fact that we all have our scars and ghosts from the past, and there's no such thing as a pure and simple happy ending (however lovely life may be overall, as indeed it is), seems to be required for a book to belong on my "top shelf."

And now I'm excited because there are ten more E. H. Young novels for me to explore (it will probably take me ages to work my way through them, what with everything else I want to be reading too, but I am excited nevertheless), and most of her books were either reprinted by Virago in the 1980s and so are fairly readily available or (in the case of the first four) are out of copyright in the U.S. and available for free online. I wonder, too: Young apparently also wrote two works of children's fiction—Caravan Island (1940) and River Holiday (1942). Has anyone sampled those?

But all of this leads to the usual bewildering question: why on earth are none of E. H. Young's novels in print, either in the U.K. or the U.S.?! Clearly, she belongs on the exclusive list of titles I would love to publish myself were that ever to be a possibility.

Well, that brings me up to date with just one intentional omission. There is one more lovely Virago that I've read recently, but I've just learned that the other of this author's two novels, the one which was not reprinted by Virago and is now rather rare, the one that is held by only one U.S. library apart from the Library of Congress, seems to be wending its merry way toward me via interlibrary loan. I am therefore going to wait and mention both of her novels together. I quite liked the latter one; what will I think of the former? And one more hint as to this author's identity: she has a much more famous sibling…

Book report: holiday reading (pre-, mid-, and post-) (part 2)

Can I keep my comments on the books in this post as concise as in my last post? What's more, can I actually get more or less caught up on telling you about what I've reading before I've already read ten more books? We shall see.

I think I can make fairly short work of some mysteries I read before and during the holidays. I started off by going back to the beginning of the wonderful Mrs. Malory series, by HAZEL HOLT, in honor of her passing in late November. I suspect I'll work my way gradually through the entire series again, and it was interesting to recall that in the first book, Mrs. Malory Investigates (1989, published in the UK as Gone Away?), Sheila is described as being in her 50s and still relatively fresh from the dual loss of her husband and mother. Holt seems to have allowed her creation to age gracefully along with her.

I sampled one of MABEL ESTHER ALLAN's late novels written under the pseudonym Priscilla Hagon. I came across a copy of Cruising to Danger (1966) and was imagining that perhaps its tale of a young heroine uncovering a dastardly plot on a Mediterranean cruise while acting as companion to a family with small children just might evoke some of Allan's best works about girls coming to maturity. It did, just a little, and was perfectly enjoyable, but it's certainly not on a par with Margaret Finds a Future or Swiss Holiday/The Vine-Clad Hill. Interesting to see Allan working in "thriller" mode, though, however mildly.

When I'm feeling really lazy, of course, I often turn to AGATHA CHRISTIE, and the holidays brought a re-reading of Sleeping Murder (1976, but probably written in the 1940s), the final Miss Marple mystery. It's one of my favorites, and as it happens probably one of the first books I remember buying. The battered old paperback—which I still have, though it's been supplemented by a lovely hardcover first edition as well—is from only a year or two after the book first appeared.

As I recall, my 9 or 10-year-old self had a wee bit of difficulty following the story, but that didn't stop me from finishing it and reading it a second time soon after. There's something very seductive about its themes of past experiences long forgotten that come back to haunt one in the present. This is one of the Christies whose murderer I always remember at once, but I can never recall the details, and the book is so well-written, and Miss Marple so charmingly and enjoyably present, that knowing whodunnit makes little difference.

I already mentioned that Andy and I spent a couple of days in Monterey after Christmas, and I visited a favorite bookstore there (one of the only surviving bookshops in town), Old Capitol Books. The shop leans a bit more on the American side than the British side in its selection of beautiful old books, but I managed to do quite enough damage anyway. I actually purchased a second copy of Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness, purely because this copy had a lovely dustjacket that my other one lacked (which of course I will share with you here). 

I also had Andy scrambling to look up Hilary March, whose 1966 novel, A Question of Love, was unknown to me but tantalizingly available. As it turns out, March was a pseudonym used (presumably) because of the novel's lesbian themes, but the author, Isobel Lalage Pulvertaft (and that's the real name, not a pseudonym!), had already published three earlier novels that qualify her for my Overwhelming List.

And while I was in a buying mood, I also picked up two mysteries—an Ian Rankin, the setting of which may be relevant to an upcoming trip (more on that later), and one by a favorite author, Patricia Moyes. Although I had (of course!) brought other books on our trip to read, I found myself diving into Moyes' Night Ferry to Death (1985) before falling asleep that night, and I had finished it by the time we left Monterey. I don’t know that it's a particularly outstanding mystery in terms of its plot, though Moyes is always quite good, but I loved it for the fact that Henry Tibbett, her protagonist, and his wife Emmy do some traveling in the novel (in this case to the Netherlands) and their holidays together are usually entertaining, plus their personal dynamic is always charming and enjoyable.

Finally, I mentioned previously my happy acquisition, at the last Friends of the San Francisco Public Library book sale, of an obscure little mystery called Murder at Calamity House (1947), by an author named Ann Cardwell, which turned out to be the pseudonym of Jean Makins Pawley, a Canadian author. Calamity is the second of only two books she published, both of them mysteries, and even within their own realm of fairly deep obscurity, Calamity is the lesser-known of the two (which makes me happy that it's the one I happened across).

When I picked it up at the book sale, I figured it would be more or less a throwaway. I even imagined just scanning the rather seductive cover and then donating it back (such things are possible when you're paying only $1 per book). But it turned out to be surprisingly interesting. It may not be as polished and smooth as some of my other favorite mystery writers, and it’s a fairly dark little tale, but I found it hard to put down. There's a surreal quality about the dysfunctional family residing at "Calamity House" and their cold, casual cruelty to one another, but the bizarreness of it all certainly held my interest.

1989 reprint of Crazy to Kill

In fact, I immediately did an Abe Books search to see if I could find Cardwell's one other, slightly better-known novel, Crazy to Kill (1941). I could (in a reprint edition from 1989, which seems to be pretty readily available) and I did. I have to say that it really is more enjoyable—and even more odd—than Calamity House. A mystery novel, gruesomely loaded with multiple corpses and methods of murder, set in a mental institution and narrated by a sixty-ish inmate named Agatha Lawson, who has been a resident for ten years now but is expecting to be released soon, is certainly not your run-of-the-mill whodunnit. At times, its humor and Agatha's charming voice make it seem like a cozy mystery that could almost have been written today. At other times, it seems just a bit too dark for that.

I found the solution not altogether surprising, but I had great fun getting to it, and it was reviewed at Mystery File back in 2011, where the reviewer also had positive things to say (I am also shamelessly swiping the cover art used for that review—hopefully without offending anyone). Since the 1989 reprint is not impossible to find, you might want to consider it if you're open to a rather offbeat, morbid read.

Obviously, I'll need a Part 3 of this catch-up post, but I am getting there!

Book report: holiday reading (pre-, mid-, and post-) (part 1)

Well, here goes—my first attempt at a reading catch-all post that (hopefully) won't be the length of a Dostoevsky novel—though there are quite a few books to mention…

I did a bit of reading before the holidays that I think I can actually sum up briefly. For example, I read RC SHERRIFF's Greengates (1936), newly reprinted by Persephone, which I had been looking forward to for months before it arrived. I have to report that I was just a bit underwhelmed, but this is probably because The Fortnight in September, his earlier novel about an ordinary family's quiet holiday by the seaside, is one of my all-time favorites. I may therefore have had unrealistically high hopes that Greengates, about a middle-aged couple coming to terms with the extra time they have together after the husband retires, would provide similar delights. If I had read Greengates first, I might have loved it—and how unfair for me to be disappointed that it's not another Fortnight. I wonder just how often one book or another is ruined simply because one has read another book first? Or, for that matter, because one hasn't read another book first. Has this happened to you?

On a similarly disappointing note, I was so excited to have tracked down a copy of WINIFRED DUKE's Death and His Sweetheart (1938), which was apparently a bestseller in its time and one of Duke's most successful and well-known novels (and I won't resist sharing the cover with you, as I think it's a rather nice one). But my original assumption that this was one of her mysteries turned out to be quite incorrect. It is, in fact, a ghost tale, set—as per Duke's norm—in a rather ominous Scottish village. There is a framing story set more or less in the present time, with the arrival of a new minister in the village, then a flashback to around the turn of the 19th century, when a previous minister and his wife seem to have scandalized the village and met their doom.

Book club advert from back of Duke's
Death and His Sweetheart

My problem with the novel—which, sadly, I chose not to finish reading—may have been a slight variant on my problem with the Sherriff. I had already read Duke's later novel, Dirge for a Dead Witch, which uses a very similar structure and setting, and that might well be the source of my slight "been there, done that" feeling when trying to get engrossed in Sweetheart. I'm certainly not giving up on Duke, however. There are some other titles which should be available via Interlibrary Loan, and I'm determined to find more of her mysteries, since The Dancing of the Fox was such an odd little pleasure. Let's hope that that one, her final work, wasn't the only really high point in her long and prolific career.

Then there was COMPTON MACKENZIE's Extraordinary Women (1928), which I had long meant to read because of its links to gay and lesbian literature and to modernism, but it took finding a lovely (and cheap) copy of the Hogarth Press edition to make me finally commit. It doesn't entirely fit the main topic of this blog, but I'm mentioning this rather over-the-top portrayal of a whole slew of eccentric lesbians staying on the Isle of Capri around the time of World War I because some of you (especially fans of an E. F. Benson type of comedy) might happen to enjoy it. It was also published the same year as Radclyffe Hall's scandalous The Well of Loneliness, and, interestingly, aroused no particular controversy with its subject matter, while Hall's book was famously the target of censorship and outrage. Was this because Mackenzie was straight while Hall was—definitively—not? Or was it because Hall's portrayal of lesbianism (or, more accurately in the language and understanding of today, a transgendered man) was deadly serious, while the romantic trials and tribulations of Mackenzie's lesbians are unquestionably played for laughs?

Whatever the reason, I approached the novel a bit ambivalently, expecting perhaps a condescending or mocking attitude (straight modernist men were rarely known for their tolerance), but I was surprised how even-handed the comedy actually was. The women portrayed certainly behave in ridiculous ways, but no more ridiculous than characters in numerous novels by gay and lesbian authors (see Carl Van Vechten's Parties or Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After, for example), and indeed it seems clear that Mackenzie's attitude is that love makes fools of everyone, straight and gay alike—perhaps particularly when they are too wealthy and spoiled for their own good. For that matter, many of the characters Mackenzie portrays are thinly veiled versions of real women, such as Romaine Brooks, Mimi Franchetti, and Radclyffe Hall herself, and from what biographers tell us of them, Mackenzie's portrayals might actually be rather restrained! At any rate, I found it all to be great fun.

Then, just before the wonderful holiday break, I finally, finally got round to reading two more JOSEPHINE TEY novels, The Singing Sands (1952), the final Alan Grant novel, and The Franchise Affair (1948), in which Grant also appears, though only in a supporting role. I enjoyed both, and was (as I have been the other two or three times I've read something of Tey's) bewildered at why I hadn't read them before. Tey has easily become one of my handful of absolute favorite mystery authors, and yet there are still a few of her books I have yet to read. Too many books, yada yada yada…

Of these two, Franchise was my favorite, and I'm also adding it to my World War II book list in the Postwar section, as it makes frequent references to the war and evokes a strong atmosphere of the immediate postwar period. But that's not the only reason I liked it. It's also interesting because the main character is a small town barrister trying to defend two women charged with a far-fetched kidnapping, and our beloved Alan Grant is actually on the other side of the fence (more or less—he does have his doubts). As much as I missed Grant's more frequent presence, and being privy to his ponderings, Tey's experiment worked for me. Neither of these books has unseated Daughter of Time or Miss Pym Disposes as my favorite Teys, but that standard is reached by very few books by any author, and these were still fascinating and unputdownable. Now what should I read next by Tey?

That's enough for now. I think I've actually succeeded in reining myself in a bit, have I not? But there's still more holiday reading to catch up on.