Books

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.8

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

Eve Out of Her Ruins – Ananda Devi (2006, transl. Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2016) 164 pages

I picked up Eve Out of Her Ruins as I hadn’t read any Mauritian literature before and I’m enjoying seeking out new-to-me authors as part of my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge.

The story is told from the point of view of four young people: Eve, Saad, Savita and Clélio who live in Troumaron, a cité geographically close to and societally far away from the capital Port-Louis. As Saad observes:

“Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighbourhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion.”

Saad runs with the gangs to not draw attention to himself, but he loves poetry ever since he discovered Rimbaud, and he dreams of being a writer and escaping the ghetto.

“Just as the island unfurled it’s blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head.”

He is in love with Eve, who learnt early on that although she had nothing, she still had something to sell. She has been trading her body to boys and then men, for school supplies and other things she needs, since she was a child. At 17, she is still a child, but a worn-out one.

“Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they’ve already laid claim to.”

“I think I look like lots of things — organic, or mineral, or strange and sloughed off, but I don’t look like a woman. Only a reflection of a woman. Only an echo of a woman. Only the deformed idea of a woman.”

Eve’s sex work is portrayed carefully. It’s not explicit but nor is it obfuscated. I thought this was responsible without being overly harrowing or voyeuristic.

Clélio likes to sing from the rooftops, but is bewildered at how to escape the cité when he is already known to the police. He pins his hopes on his elder brother who has escaped to France, while simultaneously recognising that his brother’s life may not be going well, and he is unlikely to return to collect Clélio as he promised.

“I am Clélio. Dirt poor bastard, swallower of everyone else is rusty nails. What can you do? Nobody changes just like that.”

Eve and her friend Savita are in love, and it is Savita who recognises that Eve is getting more and more closed off as she tries to protect herself from the impact of her sex work and the domestic violence her father metes out at home. It is also Savita who recognises that as they get older, the boys’ anger is growing and the girls are increasingly vulnerable.

Saad sees this too, but knows Eve won’t listen to him however desperately he tries to reach her. There is real tension in the narrative as the sense of imminent violent explosion grows.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is a tough read and a million miles away from the paradisical tourist resorts of Mauritius. It is not poverty porn though, or voyeuristic. The voices of the young people ring true and lack any self-pity. The reader is not asked to pity them, but recognise their resilience and feel the desperation of seeking a way out when the odds are against you.

“They tell me I’ll succeed. But success does not mean the same thing for everyone. It’s a slippery word. In my case, it simply means that locked doors could open just a bit and I could, if I sucked in my stomach, slip through and escape Troumaron.”

In the Author’s Preface, Devi explains “I loved them and wanted to find a way out for them. I couldn’t, not for everyone. So I have left a trail of crumbs for some of them to follow.” Hence, there is hope in Eve Out of Her Ruins, it is not relentlessly bleak. But neither is it unrealistic or sentimental. It definitely doesn’t promise a happy-ever-after for the youngsters of Troumaron.

“I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in the middle of the night, I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.7

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

Weather – Jenny Offill (2020) 201 pages

I have broken my self-imposed page limit for defining a novella (70-200 pages) by including Jenny Offill’s Weather, which breaches by one whole page. I regret nothing: I had really enjoyed her Dept. of Speculation when I read it for this project back in 2020 and was pleased to be picking her up again.

Lizzie is a college librarian, looked down upon by other librarians because she doesn’t have formal qualifications. She has a lovely husband Ben, and a son Eli. Her brother Henry, now sober, reappears and her mother rings occasionally causing tensions but nothing extraordinary. Still, family life can be exhausting:

“I’m too tired for any of it. The compromise is that we all eat ice cream and watch videos of goats screaming like women.”

Lizzie takes a job with her old college professor Sylvia, who hosts a podcast about climate change.

“Once I took Eli. We stood and looked at some kind of meadowland. He waited patiently until we could go back to the car.

Children cannot abide a vista, Sylvia said.”

Wading through Sylvia’s email correspondence is heavy-going “I’m really hoping all these people who write to Sylvia are crazy, not depressed.” and in the wake of ongoing environmental destruction and the election of a President whose second term we are now in, Lizzie starts to become a doomsday prepper.

“My book ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm. Lots and lots of books about Vichy France and the French Resistance and more books than any civilian could possibly need about spycraft and fascism. Luckily, there is a Jean Rhys novel in there and a book for Eli called How to Draw Robots. That’ll throw them off the scent.”

But while Weather is absolutely about anxiety and fear of what is happening now and what will happen in the future, Lizzie’s voice remains witty and self-deprecating:

“Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”

Like the Dept. of Speculation, Weather is written in a fragmentary style, with the focus primarily on the female narrator. We remain inside her head as she struggles to sustain family life, work, and the wider demands of living now. I thought Offill balanced all of this expertly.

The humour never detracted from the seriousness of the wider issues, but it also carefully portrayed Lizzie trying to find a way to live when the world – both big and small – seems overwhelming.

“My husband is reading the Stoics before breakfast. That can’t be good, can it?”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.6

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

Brian – Jeremy Cooper (2023) 180 pages

Brian by Jeremy Cooper is a book which I knew I would absolutely love. I’m always in the market for tales of loners finding their tribe and building tentative friendships, and Brian had the added bonus of being largely set at the British Film Institute (BFI) cinema on the South Bank. I’m not sure how long I’ve been a member of the BFI but I think it’s about 25 years. Like Brian, when I joined it was called the National Film Theatre (NFT) and it’s a place that has brought much joy over the years.

Brian works at Camden Council, enjoying the predictability of his self-devised filing system and trying to avoid socialising with his colleagues. He lunches every day at the same place with its friendly but unobtrusive manager Lorenzo, and heads home to his flat. He just about keeps his anxiety at bay, most of the time.

“Keep watchful. Stick to routine. Protect against surprise.”

We later learn of Brian’s early childhood trauma that has contributed to his way of living, without him being overly pathologized.

“Learn quick as lightning from your mistakes or die, his mother melodramatically threatened him as a boy. And meant it, he had come to understand.”

He changes his routine one day to attend a revival of a film he’d missed the first time round, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. This outing changes his life, as he finds the joy of the BFI programmes and how to not be in his flat, or entirely in his own company, in a way which isn’t overwhelming.

“Brian made the vital discovery that night that something he needed to be true proved to be so: that a nakedly emotional film on themes and feelings close to his own story did not necessarily shake alive his stifled memories of the past.

He was safe. The narratives of others were not his.”

In the foyer he notices a group of regulars chatting:

“Participation in the gathering of buffs appeared to be unconditional – the fact that they were all white males, no women, was more a matter of endemic social habit than the individual prejudice of the buffs, Brian felt, in recognition of his own narrow conventions.”

Cooper’s creation of the buffs is carefully balanced. They are enthusiasts, who welcome other enthusiasts. There is no gate-keeping of film, no declarations of what is a ‘good’ film. Any snobbery is side-stepped. As Brian discovers and develops an abiding love of mid-twentieth century Japanese film, he does so with feeling, without having to intellectualise it, although he always reflects and makes notes afterwards.

“Brian tended to experience film in the moment of watching, for what it meant to him right then, regardless of when it was made or set or how accurate in pretension it might or might not be.”

Time passes, and the BFI becomes another of Brian’s routines, but with the new contained within it: all the films to experience and explore. Alongside this, his relationships with the other buffs develop, albeit at snail’s pace:

“To Brian the most extraordinary occurrence during the first decade of his every-evening visit to the BFI was the incremental formation of what he had come to accept as friendship.”

Brian definitely had an extra resonance for me, describing a London I recognised, journeys I’ve undertaken and a particular place which has a special place in my heart. There were so many echoes, from grieving the closure of the Museum of the Moving Image to Brian being an inpatient at UCLH the same time as I worked there. But I hope my response won’t alienate anyone reading this post. It has such wide-ranging appeal beyond the specifics.

Brian is a beautifully tender novel about community, friendship, and passion. It shows the deep value of a life well-lived, when outwardly that life seems unremarkable, because it is quiet and deliberately demands so little of others. It is a novel about the value of art in our lives and the value of people in our lives, accepted on their own terms.

“Brian recognised for that his entire pre-BFI life he had been a mouse, a termite, shut in dark tunnels of his own creation. Not that he had now become a lion, of course not. More of a squirrel.”

There’s a lovely interview with Jeremy Cooper about writing Brian on the BFI website here.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.5

/ madamebibilophile / 24 Comments

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space – Dorthe Nors (2013, transl. Misha Hoekstra 2014) 89 pages

I really enjoyed Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal as the final novella when I first undertook this month-long challenge back in 2018. Since then I’ve read her short story collection Karate Chop, and was delighted to find Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in my beloved charity bookshop. I think it has been published in editions with Karate Chop, but this Pushkin Press edition was standalone.

This is definitely a novella where the style will alienate some readers. It’s written entirely in a series of short sentences.

“Minna walks around in bare feet.

The flat is full of notes.

Bach stands in the window.

Brahms stands on the coffee table.

The flat’s too small for a piano, but

A woman should have room for a flute.”

At first I wasn’t sure I could read a whole novella like this, but then I suddenly clicked with the rhythm and it seemed a lot less jarring.

Minna is a musician living in Copenhagen, trying to write a “paper sonata” and struggling to find a place to work. She is struggling more widely too: with ambivalence towards potential motherhood; with her tightly-wound sister; with her boyfriend who has just dumped her by text.

This spurs Minna to do some dumping of her own, as she unfriends people on social media.

“Minna eats a cracker.

Karin’s missive awaits.

Karin wants to be nasty.

Karin wants to upset her applecart, but

Minna’s cart has no apples.”

She ends up packing Ingmar Bergman’s Billeder as the director becomes almost a Greek chorus/silent interlocutor, when Minna heads for Bornholm and the sea.

The short sentences act as constant present-tense status updates, a commentary on our online living. Yet by piling on the banal observations, gradually a more subtle picture emerges between the sentences. Minna’s frustrations and vulnerabilities shine through.  It’s a brave approach which for me worked well, but I already knew I liked Nors’ observations, characterisation and humour.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is a reminder to look beyond what is immediate to a whole picture; one that is always changing in the present and is much more complex than the surface would have us believe.

“Minna’s broken heart dwells in the breast of an optimist.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.4

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

Burning Secret – Stefan Zweig (1913, transl. Anthea Bell 2008) 117 pages

Stefan Zweig is such an exquisitely tender writer. His precise, compassionate observations are deep with humane understanding. It makes him a perfect novella writer.

Burning Secret has a very simple structure. Edgar is twelve years old and recuperating from an illness in the spa town of Semmering. He is lonely and disregarded, bored and unnurtured.

“His face was not unattractive, but still unformed; The struggle between man and boy seemed only just about to begin, and his features were not yet kneaded into shape, no distinct lines had emerged, it was merely a face of mingled pallor and uncertainty.”

Unfortunately for Edgar, the Baron, an irredeemable cad and bounder, arrives in Semmering.

 “He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn’t really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that, if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.”

This vacuous young man plans on whiling away his time in a meaningless love affair, and his sights soon settle on Edgar’s mother. As she is initially resistant to his charms, he callously decides to leverage Edgar in order to win favour.

“The Baron easily won his confidence. Just half-an-hour, and he had that hot and restless heart in his hands. It is so extraordinarily easy to deceive children, unsuspecting creatures whose affections are so seldom sought.”

Poor Edgar. He falls hook, line and sinker.

“A great, unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait, and now it raced with outstretched arms towards the first person who seemed to deserve it. Edgar lay in the dark, happy and bewildered, he wanted to laugh and couldn’t help crying.”

For the Baron it is all a game. He has no feelings for Edgar or his mother, the latter only prey with which to amuse himself. He views her ruthlessly, identifying her snobbery and pretentions and knowing how to exploit these by emphasising his nobility. He gives no consideration to her marriage or vulnerabilities as a woman who will be judged much more harshly than he if they have an affair.

What he doesn’t reckon on is Edgar’s dawning, imperfect realisation, and the fury of a hurt child. What follows is a coming-of-age story where the lessons are learned through emotional brutality.

And yet, the resolution is hopeful, and without bitterness. It feels realistic and reflective, not undermining what has gone before but demonstrating human endurance too.

In less subtle hands Burning Secret could be sentimental and mawkish. With Stefan Zweig, it is emotionally devastating.

“He didn’t understand anything at all about life, not now he knew that the words which he thought had reality behind them were just bright bubbles, swelling with air and then bursting, leaving nothing behind.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.3

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

With or Without Angels – Douglas Bruton (2023) 107 pages

Having loved Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton when I read it in February for #ReadIndies, I was keen to try more by him. With or Without Angels is an intriguing novella, attempting to capture the process of creating art at the end of life.

Written in the third person but mainly from the point of view of “the old artist”, Bruton portrays Alan Smith’s memories and thoughts as he works on his final piece, The New World, which was a response to Giandomenico Tieplo’s Il Mondo Nuovo. (In the Afterword Bruton explains that Alan’s widow had read the novella and she encouraged publication, with permission for the art to be reproduced.)

The New World is a series of images and they are reproduced in the book, after the fictional prose passages which evoke the creation of them. So for the first one, a photograph taken on a trip to Tate Modern:

“Out on the street the air was wet and chill and shifting. It smelled of bus exhausts and damp wool and faintly of cigarettes. And his wife it smelled of, too. Something with flowers in her perfume. Patchouli maybe – a shrub of the mint family – something of wet soil or apples that are past ripe, the smell of a cork pulled from a bottle of strong red wine. It’s the last of the senses to go, smell. He had heard that somewhere and was comforted that when all else failed he would know his wife was at his side by her smell.”

The smell of patchouli is something that is returned to at different sections along with other recurring motifs. This was so clever; it evoked the layering of memory and movement back and forth in time as someone contemplates the past from a present where they know their future is limited. (Also, a special thank you to the woman who stood next to me on the tube and was wearing patchouli as I read this 😊)

Time collapses in on itself at various points for the artist, disorienting but without him losing sight of his work.

“Some things are so familiar that you expect them to be there even when they are not and cannot be. The blue hat had been eaten into holes by moths. But he is sure that he has seen it hanging on the last hook in the hall as recently as a week ago.”

Bruton never attempts to interpret the work or lay claim to an absolute meaning in The New World. He is too subtle for that, and part of what With or Without Angels explores is that there are no final answers to be gleaned from a work of art.

“It’s not that he fears the questions. He wants them to be asked. That’s part of the point. It’s the answers that he frets over. He has come to a time in his life where the answers are like Brighton’s running pebbles under his feet.”

There’s also no sentimentality in the artist nearing the end of his life. Instead it is a gentle, tender, compassionate portrait.

“The thing she did with her hair […] and how he felt when he saw her do that, somehow there was meaning and hope and love in that. The old artist does not tell anyone this, not even his wife, but maybe she knows.”

With or Without Angels captures so much in so few pages. It is a remarkable work which manages to explore enormous themes with such a light touch, without ever seeming superficial.

The New World link at the start of this post will take you to Alan Smith talking about the work.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.2

/ madamebibilophile / 10 Comments

Day two of NADIM and I’m delighted that Simon at Stuck in a Book will be reading a book a day for the month too!

The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski (1953) 99 pages

It’s been years since I read the very powerful Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and I kept meaning to get back to her. The Victorian Chaise-Longue is a short tale of domestic terror, and would appeal to anyone who is a fan of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, or The Yellow Wallpaper.

It opens with Melanie who has recently given birth, and is now recovering from tuberculosis, being patronised by her doctor and her husband.

“‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘Because you’ve managed to be a good obedient girl so far, we’ve been able to conquer what might have been a very nasty little flare up, and if you let yourself get perfectly well and we keep a steady eye on you, there’s no reason why anything of the sort should ever occur again.’”

And…

“‘How clever you are, darling,’ said Melanie adoringly. ‘You make me feel so silly compared with you.’

‘But I like you silly,’ said Guy, and so he does, thought Dr. Gregory, watching them. But Melanie isn’t the fool he thinks her, not by a long chalk, she’s simply the purely feminine creature who makes herself into anything her man wants her to be.”

So as you can see, the horror is there from page one 😀

They decide that Melanie could do with a change of view, and so she lies down on the titular furniture, which she had found in a junk shop before she became unwell. It’s heavy and ugly, but she had been taken by it; she had also experienced a memory which wasn’t hers when looking at it, which she quickly brushed aside.

When she wakes up, she is still on the chaise-longue, but in a different room and a different era, with a harsh woman who calls her Milly not Melly. At first she believes herself to be dreaming, but:

“It was real, that touch of flesh. There was no conceivable atmosphere of dream of which that touch of rough dry flesh could be a part.”

Melanie is trapped there, feeling even more unwell, cared for by the woman who turns out to be Milly’s sister Adelaide, and a stereotyped housemaid.

Milly is in some sort of disgrace, incurring her sister’s barely concealed wrath. As she tries to piece together what has happened, Melanie recognises parallels with her own life:

“Sin changes, you know, like fashion.”

I mentioned at the beginning Daphne du Maurier and the feminist classic by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Victorian Chaise Longue perhaps suffers by these comparisons. It’s not quite as horrifyingly unnerving as du Maurier’s stories, or as overt in its wider themes as The Yellow Wallpaper. But it is an engaging, quick read, which doesn’t offer trite answers to Melanie’s predicament or the wider issue of women’s bodies so often being constrained by forces more powerful than they are.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.1

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

After a break last year, I’ve decided to return to my novella a day project in May. I always try and give myself a head start of a few posts and I’ve not managed as many as I would have liked this year, so we’ll see how it goes… My TBR is ridiculous so if I can stick to this, it will hopefully help!

The Fell – Sarah Moss (2021) 180 pages

I wasn’t really in the market for a pandemic novel, but I was so impressed by the previous novellas I’d read by Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall and Summerwater (particularly the former) that I decided to give The Fell a try.

This novella is reminiscent of Summerwater, written just a year earlier, in its use of multiple viewpoints. There is no direct speech but the story progresses from the points of view of Kate, a furloughed waitress; her teenage son Matt; their elderly neighbour Alice; and local volunteer Rob.

Kate and Matt have been told to self-isolate in their cottage in the Peak District, having been exposed to someone with Covid-19 infection. Kate is really struggling, while her son is more stoical:

“I know, she said, I’m making a fuss, I just find this really hard, I knew I would. Not, he thought, as hard as getting sick, not as hard as Deepak’s dad who was in Intensive Care for three weeks or the grandparents of kids in his class who’ve died this year or his maths teacher who’s back at work but can’t get enough breath for sentence half of the time, compared to that doing the garden instead of going up the fells is actually quite manageable, so how about he games and she does yoga the garden and they hope neither of them starts with the fever and loss of taste and smell.”

But Kate breaks the isolation, risking spreading the disease, a £10,000 fine or imprisonment, in order to go for a walk on the fell. She doesn’t take her phone with her and she reasons she won’t see anyone up there anyway.

“Damp, not quite raining. Keep moving, get warm. The relief of it, being out, being alone, starting to warm up from her own effort, wind and sky in her lungs, raindrops on her face, weather.”

Alice, her neighbour who is classed as extremely vulnerable due to her cancer diagnosis, sees Kate go.

 “Self-isolating, one of those horrible new nonsensical phrases. Social distancing, whoever came up with that […] medical distance, they should call it, or why not just safe distance, and when did ‘distance’ become a verb? Language is also infected. Return, George Orwell, England has need of thee.”

Alice was my favourite character, baking biscuits and worrying about her weight, blasting out tunes to cheer herself up, and refusing any self-pity:

“More Springsteen, there’s a reason they don’t write protest anthems about well-off retired people feeling a bit sad.”

The pandemic means that as well as isolation and frailty, she also has to contend with Zoom calls with her daughter’s family:

“Sometimes Alice thinks she’d rather have a Radio 4 podcast than Susie with her dinner.”

Kate’s walk doesn’t go according to plan, and she ends up stranded with one, possibly two broken limbs. Rob and his team of volunteer Mountain Rescue therefore have to risk themselves coming together to try and find her, and Matt is old enough and astute enough to pick up the police’s hinting questions as they try and ascertain whether Kate is a suicide risk.

All this means Kate is not a sympathetic character, but her harsh self-judgement and realisation of the impact of what she has done portrays her as a flawed human who took a really bad decision. And now she is being haunted by a raven:

“Go away, Kate thinks, bugger off. Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God what if it’s both.”

Five years on from the time portrayed, and surely written very close to it for a publication date of 2021, The Fell has aged well. It captures a lot from the pandemic, and certainly reminded me about elements of daily life then which I had largely forgotten. However, it is not beholden to its pandemic setting. The characterisation is strong enough that it is a story of four people bound together psychologically by an extreme situation, while remaining entirely physically separated. It explores what survival means for different people, and the prices paid for endurance.

“You’d just sometimes rather have dark conviction than the appalling uncertainty of hope.”

“The Riviera isn’t just a sunny place for shady people” (W. Somerset Maugham)

/ madamebibilophile / 10 Comments

This is my final contribution to Kaggsy and Simon’s1952 Club which has been running all week. So far I’ve read two golden age mysteries for the club and I’m finishing with one too: Death on the Riviera by John Bude, in a pleasing British Library Crime Classics edition.

I read The Cheltenham Square Murder for the 1937 Club last year, and while I had enjoyed it, I didn’t think it was the strongest of Bude’s novels or a particularly perplexing mystery. This, I’m happy to report, was much stronger.

The story centres around the rich and privileged Nesta Hedderwick and her various assorted guests at her villa in the south of France.

“But for the nagging accusations of her weighing-machine life might have been perfect. She’d money; one of the loveliest villas in Menton; A large … collection of friends; splendid health; a sense of humour; and a virile capacity for enjoyment. Her husband, a successful but dyspeptic stockbroker, had died between the wars of ptomaine poisoning.”

Staying with Nesta are her niece Dilys; “smooth-faced bounder” Tony Shenton; Nesta’s companion Miss Pilligrew; beautiful Kitty; and a decidedly shifty artist:

“When Nesta had an artist living in the house she expected him to behave like one. Paul Latour certainly did his best to live up to the fin de siècle Bohemianism on which Nesta had directed her romantic ideas of the genre.”

Bude clearly has a lot of fun with Paul’s artistic swizz:

“A cod’s head capping the naked torso of a woman, balanced onto cactus leaves and garnished with the motif of lemons and spaghetti… Paul shrugged hopelessly.”

Although Dilys’ attitude to where she has found herself suggests Paul isn’t alone in his pretence:

“Just paste and cardboard and tinsel, like most of my aunt’s insufferable friends. Actually I find it rather boring. It gets that way after a time.”

So it seems the French Riviera is the perfect place for a counterfeiting operation, which is what brings DI Meredith and Acting-Sergeant Freddy Strang across La Manche, searching for Tony ‘Chalky’ Cobbett.

They work closely with Inspector Blampignon and refreshingly, the local police are shown to be entirely competent and pleasant to work with.

As the British and French police investigate the local forgers, Freddy runs into Dilys and they begin a very sweet romance, which brings the two threads smoothly together. When an acquaintance of the villa coterie goes missing, the police investigation widens.

One of my complaints with The Cheltenham Square Murder was that something completely and utterly obvious takes forever to be recognised by Meredith and I thought the same had happened here. Fortunately it turned out I’d fallen into exactly the assumption Bude had set up for the reader: at one point he has Meredith explain that when such an occurrence happens in mystery novels it always means the following…. a nice little meta joke with the reader which I appreciated 😊

Oddly, given the novel’s title, no-one is murdered until around page 160 of a 223 page novel. For my tastes, too long was spent on the counterfeiting and too little on people getting bumped off, but the investigation worked well and it was a steady police procedural without being plodding:

“He was visited by one of those revealing flashes of deduction that spring, not from any inspirational source, but from a clearly realised and logical appreciation of the facts.”

Death on the Riviera is well-paced and enjoyable, with enough characters for plenty of suspects without being completely baffling. The humour is gentle and light, and the setting beautifully evoked:

“It wouldn’t be easy, he realised, to take leave of this sunlit, sparkling coast with its terraced vineyards and olive groves, it palms and oleanders, it’s fantastic cacti, it’s mimosa-scented streets and impossibly blue seas. He thought of the Old Kent Road on a wet February night and shuddered.”

“Good authors don’t seem to do much good these days. Books have got so psychological.” (Laura Talbot, The Gentlewomen)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

This is a contribution to Kaggsy and Simon’s1952 Club, running all week. One of the many great things about the Club weeks is that they encourage me to raid the TBR and get to books which could have languished there forever. Today’s book is a perfect example: an author and a novel I knew nothing about but which I greatly enjoyed.

Laura Talbot was the pen-name of Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, and her knowledge of the land-owning classes informs The Gentlewomen throughout. It tells the story of Miss Roona Bolby, a single woman growing older who has to earn her living as a governess. She clings desperately to her family’s genteel background and colonialism while around her the world changes irrevocably.

“When she had been sent back to England she had been seven. She had been told so much since that memories which had been sharp had become blurred by that which she had been told. It was difficult now to sort her own from Sita’s and Mavis’s. India had not faded with the journey home; from then on it had grown, it had become as much a part of her own life as of her Mother’s and Sita’s and Mavis’s.”

Thus she will tell anyone – repeatedly and incessantly – that she was born in India, as she wears gold Indian bangles and uses an Indian silver brush set. She remains oblivious to the fact that her background is a matter of utter indifference to everybody.

At the beginning of the novel she leaves her shabby boarding house Hillstone in Birmingham, (filled with characters which could have made a great novel in itself!) and heads to the country seat of the Rushford family.

The Second World War is ongoing, and so the house is not as it once was. Lord Rushford is overseas, there are two Italian POWs and Land Girls have working on the estate, and my favourite character, straight-talking Reenie, has never been a kitchen maid before.

Miss Bolby has been employed to tutor to the various children from both parents’ first marriages, while Nanny Becca cares for the younger toddler Bella. Jessy, Barby, Louisa and Ruth dislike their tutor, and why wouldn’t they? She is completely devoid of any warmth towards them, won’t call them by the names they use, and seems a pretty dull teacher.

In Miss Bolby, Laura Talbot has not created a likable protagonist. She is so bound up in outdated societal structures, she entirely fails to respond to people as people. Her snobbery infects all her thoughts and actions:

“I always think it helpful to know from what milieu people come, especially in these days when one so frequently find the unexpected.”

The Introduction to my edition suggests that the portrait of Miss Bolby is without compassion, but I disagree. While she is petty, silly and resentful, we see how thwarted she is through her memories. Her mother used phrases like “rather deuxième” about those she deemed socially inferior, failing to recognise the crassness of such a phrase – one which Miss Bolby echoes later in the novel. She also wished to be a singer, which her mother prevented.

And so while she declined suitors in her youth as never good enough, it is really only she who suffered, and continues to do so. She was beautiful, but rejected the chances that this gave her, and now when roles and opportunities for women are still so circumscribed, she is losing her looks too. Her world is getting smaller and smaller, and she exacerbates this.

“Drawing-rooms and dining-rooms were as passages, her presence in them transitory: she had been forced to grope as a moth gropes before flying out into the night.”

When Miss Pickford arrives at Rushford, the reader is shown another way for someone in similar circumstances to live. The other gentlewoman of the title, Miss Pickford has little advantages in her favour, but she enjoys people and is interested in them, is entirely without Miss Bolby’s pettiness and relentless judgements, and has genuine skill in her work as secretary. The children warm to her and call her Picksie, and no-one seems to consider her an “old bag” – an epithet frequently associated with Miss Bolby.

As this disparate group rub along together, there is a threat to Miss Bolby’s fragile sense of worth, grounded as it is on meaningless external attributes rather than who she is as a person. Her sister Sita made a marriage to Arthur Atherton-Broadleigh and lives abroad, so Miss Bolby puts great store by the connection (and by constantly referring to it) despite little knowledge of the actual realities of the relationship. Unfortunately for her, there is someone who knows Arthur’s past very well…

At the same time her Indian bracelets go missing, and this additional pressure on her psyche means she starts to behave quite viciously. While there is never quite the psychological disintegration that occurs in William’s Wife or Wish Her Safe at Home, The Gentlewomen did remind me of these novels, with the portrayal of societal pressure and delusion for women who wanted so much more from life.

The war is far away physically, but the drudge of various privations and the frequent noise of aeroplanes bearing down to the local airbase add an atmosphere of bleak strain, which becomes almost Gothic as it turns out Rushford has been burned out from fire in many places, and sits in overgrown, unmanageable grounds.

“War was a lonely battle for the lonely, for those not urgently connected with it, and in her case a lonely battle for what?”

In case this sounds very heavy, I should say I disagree with the Introduction in another way, when it says Talbot had no humour.  I think she is easy to underestimate because she is not interested in drawing attention to her writing at all; there is no strong authorial voice. Her style is to present the characters, and leave judgement to the reader. Often Miss Bolby’s pretentious assertions go ignored by her interlocutors which speaks volumes.

And so I found there were various moments of humour, from the wonderful Reenie, to the neighbour Lady Archie who consistently baffles her devoted husband by acquiring modern slang from the Squadron-Leader at the RAF base. Needless to say, this doesn’t fit in Miss Bolby’s schema at all:

“She had wondered all evening about Lady Archie, and who Lady Archie was and why she used such phrases as ‘It seems to ring a bell’ and ‘Same here’, which one expected from a Mr Billings, but not from a woman such as Lady Archie.”

“ ‘Wizard!’ said Lady Archie. ‘But I’ll have to consult Hughie about the car.’”

The tension builds in The Gentlewoman towards a somewhat melodramatic climax, but while I felt this came close to clumsy, it was also a real page-turner. On the strength of this novel, I would definitely be interested in reading more by Laura Talbot. (And although I’m not usually bothered by writer’s biographies particularly, I’m also intrigued by her third marriage, which took place two years after she published this novel, to Patrick Hamilton. How on earth did that come about?!)

Sadly, ultimately Miss Bolby’s harshest judgements are in the fleeting ones she puts upon herself:

“A failure, who had not lived fully in any sphere – who had always lived up on the fringe.”