twentieth century fiction

“Here they were, wrecked together on the edge of Europe as on an island and she was learning to keep her thoughts to herself.” (The Spoilt City, Olivia Manning)

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It was a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to us doing a buddy read for all three volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy this year. We started with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, and now onto the second instalment, The Spoilt City (1962).

It took me a while to get into The Great Fortune, but by the end I was whizzing through and couldn’t wait to start The Spoilt City. I’m clearly in the rhythm of Manning’s writing now because I sank right in and absolutely loved this second volume.

(What I decided I didn’t love was the omnibus edition I started with, so I’ve bought these Windmill Editions now and I’m much happier).

The city is Bucharest in 1940, and we follow still-fairly-recently married Guy and Harriet Pringle as the physical and social environment they are used to disintegrates around them.

“On the pavement the Guardist youths with their banners and pamphlets, were still trying to rouse revolt. Although a sense of revolt agitated the nerves like an electric storm that would not break, the city was lethargic, the palace dormant, its white blinds drawn down against the tedium of the afternoon.”

This volume is increasingly tense, the Nazi threat growing ever-closer. Guy is still teaching English at the university, but both students and the staff group are rapidly dwindling.

“With uncomplaining enthusiasm, Guy did much more than was expected of him; but he was not imposed upon. He did what he wanted to do and did it, Harriet believed, to keep reality at bay.”

Guy’s boss Inchcape is also determined to keep the Department open, even as dangers grow. This volume is more emotionally affecting than the first, I found this particularly true in a scene with the older single women of the department being forced to leave for their own safety, as well as Inchcape having to face his vulnerabilities to a shocking extent.

This forms the shifting and stressful background to the Pringles’ early marriage. Both Harriet and Guy have to acknowledge their profound differences in how they approach life and see things:

“It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.”

“He saw her muddled and lost in anarchy and a childish mysticism.”

Guy’s belief in communism gives him more certainty, a grounding as the ground constantly shifts beneath them. Still, their marriage seems underpinned by a great deal of love for each other, although the reader is not privy to any declarations.

My favourite character Yakimov is still racketing around, trying to sell his beloved Hispano-Suiza car even as no-one has money for fuel. He is still living with the Pringles and Harriet despairs.

“If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.”

Yaki behaves appallingly in the first part of the novel, before redeeming himself beautifully at the end, making his portrayal one of the most comedic, disturbing and complex in The Spoilt City. Apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, I really should learn more about this Fitzrovian dandy poet. Anthony Powell based X Trapnel on him in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he certainly seems a character…

What struck me most in this volume, apart from the evocation of physically crumbling environs, was the ambivalence, or perhaps resignation, of most of the people Harriet interacts with. As long as they are safe and their lives continue in a way that works for them, they don’t seem to particularly care who is in charge. This made me realise the oppositional Second World War narratives I’ve taken for granted until now; I am used to films and books where people are firmly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers, not indifferent between the two.

This is brought into sharp focus by Harriet’s English friend, Bella:

“Her skin apricot, her hair bleached by the sun, Bella was looking extremely handsome and seemed almost intoxicated by the night’s happenings.

‘How wonderful to have a strong man in power!’ she said. ‘Everyone is saying that Romania will regain her territory.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘Because Antonescu is a real dictator. He knows how to deal with Hitler and Musso. He’s one of them. I don’t mind betting, within three months, this country will be on its feet again.’”

Later they meet again, Bella delighting in all she can buy as prices tumble, when they run into each other under a newly erected swastika flag:

“Elated by her rising fortune, she looked up and smiled at the flag and the clear pale sky beyond it. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said. ‘so delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.’

She seemed aglitter with life, almost dancing in her new green lizard skin shoes.”

Astonishingly, it is only Guy who overtly acknowledges what is behind the flag, the only one who says “I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking of the concentration camps.”

Manning leaves spaces in her narrative so we assume Harriet is of a similar mind, although her primary worry is for the safety of Guy, vulnerable under the new regime because of his communist beliefs and willingness to teach Jewish students.

The Pringles are also at risk as they still have sweet Sacha Drucker in their flat, and early on we know they have been betrayed and are likely to be raided…

“Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.”

The Spoilt City is a novel which conveys the physical and human devastation wreaked by war for those not directly caught in conflict. It is deeply moving without being remotely sentimental, and feels entirely believable. I found myself completely caught up in the Pringles’ lives and even (shock horror!) warming to Guy. I’m impatient to read volume three, Friends and Heroes.

I wound up googling Hispano-Suiza cars as Yaki describes his so lovingly. I can’t drive and I’m entirely uninterested in cars, but even I can see this is a lovely machine:

“It occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living.” (Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune)

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It was JacquiWine’s enthusiasm for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy which caused me to add it to the TBR, and a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to me finally getting the first instalment read! I’m delighted that Marcie and I are doing a buddy read for all three volumes this year, starting with The Great Fortune (1960) in June.

I’d originally planned to get this read by good time starting in April, but life took over, then novellas, and I’ve ended up finishing it on 29 June – one day spare! It says something for Manning’s writing that even my terrible memory and total inability with names kept her pretty large cast of characters straight despite a gap of about 8 weeks or so…

Guy and Harriet Pringle are newly married. The book opens with their arrival in Bucharest, a new experience for Harriet, but Guy has been there a year, working for the British Council at the university. It is 1939 and the new war across Europe looms large.

“‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’

‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’

‘But who is he?’

‘lonescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’

‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’

‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’”

It’s a time of adjustment to a new life and each other, against a rapidly changing, unstable background. Harriet begins to realise they are not easily compatible, with Guy’s relentless sociability at odds with her need for intimacy:

“They had slipped into marriage as though there could be no other possibly resolution of such an encounter. Yet — supposing she had known him better? Supposing she had known him for a year and during that time observed him in all his other relationships? She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widespread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.”

The characterisation of these two young people is complex. Although Guy is constantly in company, this is motivated by his communist beliefs and a general generosity of spirit, rather than any particular interest or warmth regarding individuals.

“Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’

‘Naturally I’m interested.’

‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’

‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’

Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought.”

My experience of Guy was that he was one of the most irritating, infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His generosity paradoxically made him entirely selfish, as he seemed to have no real consideration for Harriet at all. She isn’t particularly likeable either, often xenophobic and begrudging with people. But as their relationship matures, she is more forgiving than me, recognising “a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness”.

Manning makes them both so real (apparently based on her and her husband) that it became of little consequence that I didn’t like them – I wanted to hear about their lives at this time. Guy does live by his ideals, so he is not a deliberately unkind person, just utterly oblivious. He has enough redeeming qualities for Harriet’s love to be understandable:

“We must help him, not because he’s a good person but because he needs help. You understand that.”

Through Guy, we meet a range of characters who have ended up in Bucharest at this particular moment. These include but are not limited to:

Sophie, a student Guy considering marrying in order for her to have a passport – in his usual way he is unconcerned regarding her being in love with him; Sacha is another of his students, part of an immensely rich family called the Druckers; Harriet makes friends with Bella, an English woman married to a Romanian, Nikko Niculescu; we meet staff at the university, and journalists at the English Bar. Manning handles her large cast deftly, and even the less prominent characters are sketched distinctly.

There is also my favourite character – in many ways equally irritating as Guy – Prince Yakimov, an Irish/Russian prince. Yakimov is perpetually sponging off his friends, promising an always due to arrive remittance, pleading with them to pity “poor Yaki”. He is preoccupied by fine food, and starving most of the time. His English is peppered with phrases that sound almost Wodehouseian. He is utterly ill-equipped to deal with life in any way whatsoever, and yet somehow he endures on his own terms:

“Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he would go to the Dâmbovița and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.”

The progress of the war is documented, but never heavy-handed. The characters stop by a publicly displayed map of Europe which shows the fall of Poland and the invasion of Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries. Through the journalists in the English bar, the Battle of Dunkirk is relayed.

As the risk to Harriet and Guy grows, he responds surprisingly by becoming entirely wrapped up in producing a performance of Troilus and Cressida. I found this an intriguing choice by Manning. One of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays, it is tonally deeply odd. A tragedy but filled with unpleasant characters, a comedy but in bad taste a lot of the time. Harriet observes that everyone seems to be playing themselves. Yaki is commended for his portrayal of Pandarus, but Pandarus is a pimp. The play ends with that character wishing venereal disease on the audience – yuck. I love Shakespeare but Troilus and Cressida tests that assertion more than any other of his works.

It is a play about the Trojan war, so in a way it shows again how young and naïve so many of the characters are, play-acting while a very real war grows ever-more threatening. It also adds to the general sense of uncertainty, with very little to secure your knowledge or hope upon.

“Guy came hurrying in behind them. […] His size gave her an illusion of security — for it was, she was coming to believe, no more than an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.”

This volume ends in June 1940, and so as readers we know that these characters still have so much conflict to live through.

I’ve only scratched the surface of The Great Fortune, but this post is already far too long! It took me a while to get back into this novel, before something clicked and I whizzed through the remainder. I’m really looking forward to carrying on the story with The Spoilt City.  

In 1987, the BBC made both trilogies into a seven-part series, which seems a lot to squeeze in. I think I might give it a try, once I’ve finished reading them all…

If anyone would like to join us for this buddy read, please do! We’ll be posting in The Spoilt City in August and Friends and Heroes in October.

“I always write with the Caribbean in mind.” (Merle Collins)

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It feels somewhat inevitable that having been searching for my final read for Around the World in 80 Books, it turned out not to be tricky to source at all, but a book that had been languishing in the TBR  for a while. Angel by Merle Collins (1987) explores politically turbulent years in Grenada through the life of the young titular character.

It opens with Angel in her mother Doodsie’s arms, as workers strike and set fire to the plantations.

“The men held their cutlasses firmly. Held up on Doodsie’s shoulder, Angel clung round her mother’s neck. Mother and child kept their eyes riveted on the fire, Angel wide-eyed, Doodsie suddenly very afraid as she saw the De Lisle plantation houses enveloped in flames, a burning glow in the red and sky.

Just under the hill from the crowd, Ma Ettie sat down in her house and secured the folds of her headtie.”

The strikers follow union boss Leader (based on Eric Gairy). Angel’s father Allan has great faith, but Doodsie is more sceptical. She was my favourite character – some attitudes of her generation but a fiercely intelligent, independent- spirited, hard-working woman, who does not have an easy life. Allan comes and goes, providing little money as it is spread between his children with other women. Meanwhile Doodsie raises her family and tries to enable the choices she has been denied.

“Doodsie looked across at her daughter as she combed her fingers through the doll’s blonde hair. She wondered what Angel would grow up to be. One thing if I have anything to do with it, she not going to have my kind of life. She thought of Simon, sleeping quietly inside. He looked so hurt if you ever shouted at him, you just had to shut up after a while. Angel, on the other hand, looked as though she wanted to find out how long you could go on shouting for. She wouldn’t take no for an answer when she decided she wanted something.”

As Angel grows up she is intelligent but somewhat unmotivated, passing her exams except for West Indian history, which she finds dull and not as interesting as British history. It is at university in Jamaica where she starts to think politically, both on an international level and a personal level when she stops ironing her hair.

“She remembered always that day during her first year at school, when one of the nuns who took a deep interesting her welfare told her she should ask her mother to have her hair ironed or straightened so that it would look decent. Angel had held her head down, her hands had fingered her tie, she had muttered some answer of assent, then slithered along the wall of the corridor around the corner to the notice board. She stood staring up at it through her tears, feeling untidy and stupid, rolling and unrolling the grey tie around her neck.”

Angel heads back to Grenada after she gets her degree, to teach. Grenada achieves independence from Britain, and the family are still divided over Leader, whose portrait Allan has on the wall, before Angel smashes it. Her younger brother Rupert is part of the revolution which overthrows Leader (based on the New Jewel Movement).

“‘Civil war is blood, Rupert.’

‘Which side you on, Angel?’

‘I not on no blasted side. Side talk is war talk.’

‘That is rubbish. That opportunist nonsense could only mean you not on the side of the people. Why you don take a stan? The ting that frighten me about you is dat you able to support everybody. You always balancin! That is pure opportunism! Dammit to hell, Angel! Follow you mind! Come down on one side!’”

Much of the novel is written in patois and I found this evocative and powerful, and straightforward to follow although there is also a useful glossary at the end for non-speakers.

The story finishes with the dramatic events of the US invasion, before shifting to symbolic scenes in Doodsie’s backyard, and with Angel at the Delicia river. It is a fitting end to a book that expertly balances the story of a Grenadian family alongside major national events, never losing sight of either but showing how they are completely interwoven.

To end, a song quoted several times in the novel:

Title quote from an interview on Caribbean Literary Heritage.

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” (Jean Cocteau)

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Once again, I completely failed to read I Am a Cat for the fab event Reading the Meow 2026 hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri. It’s just such a whopper! Next year I’m going to make a start in March 😊

I decided I’d see if I could find something shorter in the TBR in order to take part, and was hunting about in golden age crime. Mallika had also suggested looking for a short story, and so checking In the Teeth of Evidence by Dorothy L Sayers (1939) came up trumps, because the final story in the collection is The Cyprian Cat. My cheesy 1980s edition even has some Big Cats on the cover:

It’s a very short tale, only 13 pages in my edition. It takes the form of a monologue, with a man in serious trouble for seemingly having shot at a cat (there’s no animal cruelty in the story, despite his horrible plans) and speaking to his K.C as silent interlocutor. It opens:

“It’s extraordinarily decent of you to come along and see me like this, Harringay. Believe me, I do appreciate it. It isn’t every busy K.C. who’d do as much for such a hopeless sort of client. I only wish I could spin you a more workable kind of story, but honestly, I can only tell you exactly what I told Peabody. Of course, I can see he doesn’t believe a word of it, and I don’t blame him. He thinks I ought to be able to make up a more plausible tale than that—and I suppose I could, but where’s the use?”

He and his old schoolfriend Merridew both seemed to be following the bachelor life, until Merridew marries a woman fifteen years younger than him. She has never left the Norfolk village in which she was raised, but about a year after the nuptials, they all arrange to meet in Somerset.

Describing the train journey down, we learn of the narrator’s extreme aversion to cats:

“I found a horrible feeling creeping over me that there was a cat in the compartment somewhere. I’m one of those wretched people who can’t stand cats. I don’t mean just that I prefer dogs—I mean that the presence of a cat in the same room with me makes me feel like nothing on earth. I can’t describe it, but I believe quite a lot of people are affected that way. Something to do with electricity, or so they tell me. I’ve read that very often the dislike is mutual, but it isn’t so with me. The brutes seem to find me abominably fascinating—make a bee-line for my legs every time. It’s a funny sort of complaint, and it doesn’t make me at all popular with dear old ladies.”

He passes the time staring at the attractive young lady opposite him, who of course turns out to be Merridew’s new wife. And so they spend time together as planned, the peaceable atmosphere only spoilt by the titular feline, and others, at night:

“Every night the garden seemed to be haunted by them—the Cyprian cat that I had seen the first night of my stay, and a little ginger one and a horrible stinking black Tom were especially tiresome, and one night there was a terrified white kitten that mewed for an hour on end under my window. I flung boots and books at my visitors till I was heartily weary, but they seemed determined to make the inn garden their rendezvous. The nuisance grew worse from night to night; on one occasion I counted fifteen of them, sitting on their hinder-ends in a circle, while the Cyprian cat danced her shadow-dance among them, working in and out like a weaver’s shuttle.”

Sayers builds an increasingly tense atmosphere of oppressive summer heat and the narrator being driven to distraction by the nighttime caterwauling.

But how did he end up shooting a gun? And why is what happened so implausible? Well, you can read the story online here. Sayers leaves plenty unexplained in this unnerving tale, although I know what I think happened… Lord Peter Wimsey would never believe it!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.27

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For the second day running, a novella from when Simon and I went book shopping. Cathy commented on the post that I was in for a treat with Cal by Bernard MacLaverty (1983), and how right she was.

(I’m currently in a budget hotel for a work thing, hence the uplighting available 😀 )

I read Midwinter Break by this author a few months ago, which I really loved. Cal is a very different story but features the same closely observed characterisation and concise yet lyrical  style.

Cal is nineteen years old and lives outside Belfast with his father, after both his mother and older brother have died. His father Shamie works at the local abattoir, but Cal was unable to stomach such work and is unemployed. As the only Catholics in a Protestant area during the Troubles, Cal lives with the constant fear of a beating at best and what he believes more likely, being killed outright by Loyalists.

This fear led Cal’s father to get a gun for protection from Crilly, a bully who Cal grew up with, now part of what seems to be the IRA, although they’re not named in the book. For Cal, this means he owes Crilly, and the organisation he works for, a favour.

“Cal knew that in his father’s mind it was all a bit like the Westerns he so liked to watch on TV—that he had right on his side and it was the baddies who would die. He knew the old man felt safe with his notion and Cal did not want to disillusion him.

He knew that if somebody had marked you out it would all be over in a blinding flash and a bang before you could take your hands out of your pockets, and you would be bleeding into the carpet when you thought you were still standing up.”

Cal spies Marcella working at the local library. Older than him and a single mother, he finds her attractive, but there is a history between them which she seems oblivious to, but which causes Cal a great deal of distress.

He ends up working at her in-laws farm, and the two of them grow closer. Over all this hangs the threat of Crilly, his senior Skeffington, and Cal being pulled towards carrying out the violence he finds abhorrent, or being on the receiving end himself. The constant tension and oppression is palpable.

“Cal for the first time in years felt safe. No one knew he was in this pensioner’s house. He was sure he would sleep. If only he could get away from himself as well.”

Cal behaves in ways that are impossible to condone, but MacLaverty asks the reader to understand the pressures exerted on, and lack of choices available for, a man living in these circumstances who is still a teenager. I don’t want to say much more as Cal is tightly plotted and inevitably I would include spoilers…

Cal shows how political violence can permeate communities and entirely destroy people, both in an instant and by corroding over time. MacLaverty depicts this with a clear-sighted, measured tone, the tragedy in no way lessened for his determinedly non-sensational approach.

To end, a hilariously dreadful trailer for the film adaptation. The film itself may be very good, but what on earth they were thinking with this voiceover and music I cannot begin to guess:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.26

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Today a novella that I picked up when Simon and I went book shopping last month. The Play Room by Olivia Manning (1969) is an unnerving evocation of young womanhood with inherent hurt and dangers, in a brilliantly evoked 1960s small town setting.

Laura Fletcher is about to sit her O’Levels (Year 11) and is deeply unhappy at her girls school in the small town of Camperlea near Portsmouth. The other girls don’t like her, which is partly understandable given Laura’s tendency towards boastful lying to cover up how inadequate she feels. The teachers are not sympathetic. When Vicky Logan, an older, beautiful girl lends her a handkerchief, she earns Laura’s utter devotion.  

“Over the years, observant and admiring, Laura had noted her Vicky remained aloof from schoolroom pettiness so she seemed to Laura above human weakness.”

Vicky seems pretty aloof from everything, including her own life, happy to drift along:

“Everyone knew that should she choose to earn her living, she could at once become a film star or a model or something like that.”

I love that “something like that” – so wistful and naïve, so teenage.

Laura is desperate to be friends with Vicky but she is wrapped up in being Best Friends with a girl called Gilda. The reader realises that their friendship may be something more, but Laura remains oblivious.

“She imagined she knew everything but had to admit there was more to life than knowledge. Experience was what she needed.”

Laura’s leverage arrives through an experience she has while on holiday on the Isle of Wight with her brother. This event has dated badly and would not be written now. If you get past it, it serves as a plot point by giving Laura a true story for once and a way into Vicky and Gilda’s world.

Their world is one of motorbikes, dances and men, and Laura is out of her depth and simultaneously desperate to be part of it all. She hates where she lives and can’t wait to leave:

“She blamed her mother for it. She would, she felt, have been a totally different person had she not been born in this dreary town, in this dreary avenue and in a house perpetually fretted by the winds of anxiety.”

Her mother Mrs Fletcher is an intriguing character. She is highly anxious, controlling, self-pitying. She is dismissive to everyone. Yet although unlikable, I wondered about her – one of that generation of women who married immediately post-war, and then saw the world change beyond all recognition with women having choices barely thought of previously.

“Although she controlled everything, although she said ‘I have to take every responsibility,’ it was true that someone had to look after her. She felt too much; lived with too much difficulty; met every situation with nervous dread. Someone had to help her bear her ineptitude for life.”

To me, both she and Laura were united by their anger at their world and its limitations, although neither could see it. One of the rare scenes not from Laura’s point of view is when they shop together for a dress. Mrs Fletcher can see it is ugly, doesn’t suit her daughter, and how young and vulnerable she looks in trying to be older. Yet she knows that because of her way of behaving, nothing she can say will be given any weight by determined Laura. It is one of the most moving scenes in the book.

When Gilda goes to Malta for the summer, Laura sees her chance with Vicky. They start going to dances no longer chaperoned by the local vicar, and events soon spiral out of control. Vicky is drawn to a violent man and Laura is too young to know what to do, or even realise that anything needs to be done.

The Play Room shows how vulnerable young people are when they think they have all the answers but with no idea of what the world could ask of them. A darkness runs through the story; there is no nostalgia for school or young adulthood here. It captures the intensity of feeling in adolescence, but is not entirely without humour:

“Were she asked to die for Vicky she would, she decided, die. At least, she would give the proposition serious thought.”

I found The Play Room highly readable and evocative. I felt the holiday on the Isle of Wight is given too much space within such a short novel, but the bullying, isolated school days and Laura’s worship of an older girl she really doesn’t know at all was well realised. I hoped she would make it to London one day and not be too disappointed…

“Laura, discouraged, dropped down on the rug and shutting her eyes, saw herself walking in night-time Soho through a street a-dazzle with light, where nobody slept. There were discotheques and dance clubs and cafes and coffee bars and young men by the dozen: young men beyond dreams, with lean pliable bodies and hair curling on their shoulders, as beautiful as archangels, in clothes or colours. And she could imagine Vicky walking beside her! Everyone would look at them. Everyone.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.19

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The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (1984) was apparently hailed as one of four perfect short novels in the English language. If I was Helen Garner I would sigh with frustration at such accolades being on the jacket – how is any novel going to live up to that?  But it is excellently written, and in a nice W&N Essentials edition too.

The story revolves around Dexter and Athena, a happily married couple with two children, Arthur and Billy.

“They were friends. They lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls were cracking, its floor sloped and its doors hung loosely in their frames.”

Dexter meets an old friend Elizabeth, who has caring responsibilities she wishes she didn’t: her much younger, chaotic sister Vicki. Dexter is pleased to see her, although its unclear if it is Elizabeth herself he’s pleased to see, or what she represents:

“Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything.”

Elizabeth is living a very different life with her sort-of boyfriend Philip. It is the steadiness of what Dexter and Athena represent in contrast that draws Vicki from her sister and Philip, towards those with a more conventional set-up:

“She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm: Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it.”

But Athena and Dexter aren’t too good to be true. There are pressure points in any relationship and without malice, Vicki, Elizabeth and Philip start to force these open.

We follow Dexter and Athena into a more unstable world where the structures they have surrounded themselves with begin crumble. What I thought was a masterstroke was that Garner doesn’t portray this in a linear fashion. We jump forwards, there are gaps, not everything is spelled out. It stops what is in some ways a very ordinary story from becoming pedestrian, and it reflects the way the characters continue along their lives until something jolts them out of routine.

The characters are well realised without being cliches too. Athena is a loving homemaker, but she isn’t self-sacrificing. I found shocking this casual admission about her son Billy, who has an unspecified disability:

“I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.”

And Elizabeth, more freewheeling and self-focussed, surprises herself when Vicki moves out:

“She went home on the tram and was surprised to find a small lack in herself, a blankness where the unwelcome responsibility had been.”

Garner isn’t interested in what is easy. She is so skilled at presenting complex human beings while not seeming to take a view on them: they are as they are. I think I preferred The Spare Room of the two Garner’s I’ve read, but that is more to do with themes that I’m interested in rather than the novella itself. Either way, I’m keen to read more of the fiction and non-fiction by this skilled, clear-sighted writer.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.18

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Well, I didn’t read a comic novella to get over my Yonnondio trauma in the end, because my Wodehouse in the TBR was too long, and The Guardian published its list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time which had Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (1922) on it. I’d put this aside to read sometime this month and so I took the list as a nudge to move it up the pile.

(I’m not sure how much longer my old Granada paperbacks are going to last, they’re very cheap. But I’m sentimental about them because they were the editions my mother – an enormous Woolf fan – had when I was growing up.)

Jacob’s Room portrays Jacob Flanders from childhood at the start of the twentieth century through to young adulthood at the timeof the First World War. It isn’t a character study though, as Jacob is shown obliquely, in impressionistic fragments, mainly through women in his life. Time collapses and viewpoints shift back and forth.

One of the more extensive portraits we have as readers, after a childhood holiday in Cornwall, is from a woman on a train Jacob catches to Cambridge:

“But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he was in some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: “Let me” very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.”

This is a recurring theme throughout the novel: women find Jacob attractive, his shy reticence drawing them in. Yet Woolf also shows his youthful callowness. He is an intellectual snob, but with so little meaningful experience to draw upon:

“For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?”

Jacob is somewhat ambivalent towards women, although he has a sexual relationship with an artists’ model named Florinda. He seems indifferent to the attentions of Clara Durrant, someone more typically of his social circle:

““I like Jacob Flanders,” wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. “He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him, though he’s frightening because …” But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! “No, no, no,” she sighed, standing at the greenhouse door, “don’t break—don’t spoil”—what? Something infinitely wonderful.”

I love that detail, of Clara not wanting the recording of her feelings to spread beyond the confines of the allotted page. I feel like Woolf’s humour isn’t always given enough credit, and this also stood out to me as an example:

“Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor.”

Woolf’s portrayals of London are always so instantly recognisable, even 100 years on, but I must admit I’ve never noticed tortoises on Southampton Row.

I can imagine the enigma of Jacob at the centre of the novel could make for a frustrating read for some, but I thought it worked beautifully. Writing in 1922, Woolf was living among a generation that had seen countless young men cut down (foreshadowed with Jacob through his surname), and I thought she captured that loss so sensitively, the potential stopped short:

“And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go—oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a programme.”

I love how Woolf mixes the high-flown with the prosaic, in that passage where another artist’s model is reflecting on Jacob, and here too:

“But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

For me, reading Woolf means you have to sink into her work – she is immersive, and you have to give yourself over to the experience. This was her third novel and while I thought it not quite as strong as some of her later work, I still loved it.

Jacob’s Room makes brave choices in having the central character remain so enigmatic, but in doing so Woolf captures something of the unknown that endures between people, as well as the devastation of a specific generation of men.  

“But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.17

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Earlier this year I read Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle for the 1961 Club. I was so impressed I was encouraged to finally get Yonnondio: From the Thirties off the shelf for this month of novellas. Olsen started writing this during the Great Depression when she was only 19, but she put it aside to raise her family and later published it in 1974, although it remains unfinished.

I only write about books I recommend, and I do recommend Yonnondio because it brilliantly evokes the grinding poverty of itinerant workers in 1930s America. But good grief, it is bleak. Unrelentingly, grindingly bleak. Which is the whole point, but it did make it a bit of a slog at times, even for such a short book.

It opens with the Holbrook family living in Wyoming. The father Jim works in the mine, where the prospect of mine collapse/explosion looms large over the whole town. His wife Anna is raising their family of four children (more by the end) on no money, not helped by the fact that Jim drinks a lot of his wages.

“Mazie pushed her mind hard against things half known, not known. ‘I am Mazie Holbrook,’ she said softly. I am a-knowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell ghost stories. I know words and words. Tipple. Edjication. Bug dust. Supertendent. My poppa can lick any man in this here town. Sometimes the whistle blows and everyone starts a-running. Things come a-blowen my hair and it is soft, like the baby laughing.”

It is a terrifying event with Mazie which stops Jim going to the bars and the family move to South Dakota to work as tenant farmers. Here they achieve the nearest they have to happiness, with Jim working outdoors, the children enjoying school, and Mazie drawing the attention of their elderly neighbour who recognises her intelligence and lends her books.

“After a long while Anna would laugh, a strange mirthless laugh, and rise to go into the house. Then Jim, too, would follow, knocking the ashes out of his pipe onto the vine, giving a last broad look over the night and the earth. Sometimes seeing them sit so in the night, a sharp unhappiness would pierce the golden haze in Mazie’s heart; but the blur of days descending so swiftly would wash it out again.”

However, as they were warned, tenant farmers work themselves ragged to earn practically nothing and usually end up owing money. As this occurs, Mazie’s books are sold and the family move again to Omaha. Now they are in a city, near a slaughterhouse which we are repeatedly told, makes the whole area stink of vomit. The family really seem doomed now – the children hate school and all become ill, Anna has a miscarriage, Jim is drinking again.

Olsen brilliantly portrays the hopelessness of the Holbrook’s situation. All they want is to earn enough money to feed their family and live comfortably – not too much to ask. Anna is desperate for her children to increase their chances through education, but the moving around risks this. The casual domestic violence, illness and stress also incrementally destroys the children, even when they don’t fully understand it:

“Ben saw too – but in the confused, entangled way of a small child whose mind is a prism through which the light shatters into a thousand gleams and shadows that can never come whole. Say rather, a weight, an oppression dragged always in his chest; a darkening shadow hovered over his days in that in moments descended on pierced sharp claws on his heart. Only he did not know why or how – he but knew there was a darkening where there had been light, he but felt there was a weight where there had been a lightness.”

Where the novel finishes actually offers a glimmer of hope, but this wasn’t the intended ending. In Yonnondio, Olsen has written a powerful portrait of the failure of society to allow all its members the potential to thrive. She demonstrates how poverty degrades and brutalises, and how the biggest impact is inevitably felt by the most vulnerable. I’m glad I read it but I’m also hoping I have a comic novella somewhere on the shelves to help me recover, maybe some Wodehouse…

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.16

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Halfway through NADIM 2026! I’m frankly amazed, having only really decided to go ahead on 30 April. I’m still not sure I’ll finish as I’ve home renovations this week and two very busy work weeks coming up, but honestly I’m taking the halfway point as a win in itself!

The Faber Editions series seem to choose their titles impeccably, and Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, A Shutter of Snow (1930) is another powerful, haunting choice. (Or good book to take a snooze next to, according to my cat.)

Emily Holmes Coleman drew on her own experience to detail Marthe Gail’s post-partum psychosis, from when she is admitted to a residential mental health unit up until she feels well enough to return home again. It is a disorienting, visceral narrative that places the reader alongside Marthe as she struggles with reality in a setting where avoiding it seems an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Marthe’s admission to the ward is told in a confusion of images, jumbled sentences which jump rapidly between subject and object, baffling yet also evoking perfectly the despair and violence of her arrival.

“The keys jangled from the waists of the nurses. They rattled like silver dish pans and swung chanting high like death songs. They were brittle and ice cold and had faces of stagnant riders from the snow. They were proud, and deliciously ate their indifference.”

At some point in that passage I think the ‘they’ subject changes from the keys to the nurses, but Marthe is so completely displaced it is by no means certain.

Telling the story from Marthe’s point of view but in the third person – occasionally first person –  brilliantly conveys her rapidly shifting perspectives and slight detachment from what is happening. Trying to keep up with her means the reader struggles to keep track and maintain a viewpoint, just as Marthe does.

Here she is anticipating a visit from her seemingly supportive husband, but he does insist on her being silent/passive, which perhaps explains Marthe’s seeming ambivalence here:

“He was coming today. It would be some time before the red lights. He would come stalking in the door with his gentle hands and would smile at everything she said. He would look up from under his eyebrows and demand to know what she meant. He would have purple sandals and a crown of laurel. He would bring her a casket of roses and she would crush them on the floor. And there would be under his coat to the little snow-haired baby with clenched hands.”

That quick shift to violence consistently – yet unpredictably – occurs with Marthe. She will be calm and seemingly content, before suddenly spiralling and lashing out.

But she is subject to violence too, including state endorsed violence. There are numerous episodes of her being restrained, bound repeatedly in strips of cloth and blankets, attacked by other patients, and also forcibly medicated. The Shutter of Snow is a very difficult read, both structurally and in terms of subject matter.

But there is humour in the novel too, particularly in interactions with the medical professionals:

“Dr Brainerd said Marthe earnestly, just because I’ve got a toxic exhaustive psychosis is that any reason why I have to be treated like a dog?

Who told you you had a toxic exhaustive psychosis? said Dr Brainerd. You think I have anyway said Marthe, and someday you’ll be rather astonished when you find out what it’s all about. I don’t think I’ll lend your husband anymore books said Dr Brainerd.”

The lack of punctuation and speech marks there is indicative of the whole book, contributing to sense of an askew narrative without becoming entirely incomprehensible. The novel steadily becomes more coherent, reflecting Marthe’s gradual recovery.

The Shutter of Snow is a fully immersive read, where you sink into Marthe’s world of institutionalised reality, delusion, dream, fantasy. It is extraordinary in how it brings Marthe’s experience to the reader. Emily Holmes Coleman is a stunning writer and on the strength of this I wish she’d written more.

“The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.”